Crashland (4 page)

“Do we have to go?” Jesse asked.

“It's the safest option,” Sargent said. “There have been several attempts to enter HQ already. Personally, I don't want to sit around waiting for them to succeed. Do you two?”

Clair hadn't thought about it like that. Moving was probably her best option. Somewhere else she might be able to find a way to do all the things she had to do. If the PKs couldn't fix d-mat on their own, they would need her help convincing Q. Perhaps she could trade that help for leniency when it came to reactivating her friends—in which case that lawmaker, LM Kingdon, might come in handy.

“Okay,” she said, “I'm ready.”

Jesse grunted, but with some grace. “I guess I am too, then.”

He stood up and left his hair where it fell, covering his eyes. Her knees were stiff from sitting for too long, and her back ached. Moving would be good for that, too.

“I'll be with you every step of the way,” said Sargent as Clair walked out the doorway for only the second time in three hours. The first had been to go to the toilet. The hallway outside was boxy and nondescript. “We're not going by road, by the way, Jesse.”

So they had been listening. “How, then?”

“I can't say.”

“Helicopter?” asked Jesse, trailing behind them. “Subway?”

“I
really
can't say. It's the biggest secret on the planet at the moment,” said Sargent, guiding them ahead of her. “I wouldn't want to ruin the surprise.”

AT THE END
of the hallway was a large, windowless meeting room that contained twenty office chairs on wheels, scattered apparently at random, half of them occupied by people in orange jumpsuits like Jesse's and Clair's. Most of those people were handcuffed at their wrists and ankles. Clair's lenses supplied names. She recognized Ant Wallace's assistant, Catherine Lupoi, who in the flesh was a striking brunette with a defiant expression. There was a peacekeeper Clair remembered from her return to New York, a man called PK Drader, who had previously been assigned to Jesse but was now watching over the people in orange. Behind them in a corner on his own was a slender teen with wispy red hair, wearing a black Nehru suit done up to the neck. In a chair opposite him was a young woman in orange who Clair instantly recognized, although the text hovering above her head wasn't a name she knew. She was blond, willowy, and folded into herself like a trap, or a building on the verge of collapse.

Clair's lenses said “Xia Somerset.”

The face belonged to Tilly Kozlova.

The only way they could be different was if the wrong person was inside Tilly's body.

Clair stopped dead in the entranceway for an instant, then numbly let herself be led through the others to a chair next to Jesse. She was sitting in the same room as her childhood hero, and there was no avoiding the fact now that Tilly Kozlova had been an imposter all along. She was one of the Improved, a beautiful young shell that had been given to a dying musician—an old woman who wanted to live another life. She wasn't a dupe: a dupe was a temporary copy with someone else's mind jammed in, an arrangement that lasted only a few days. Dupes could be created over and over again, whereas the Improved stole lives singly and permanently. By a slow and methodical process, the original Tilly Kozlova had been scooped out of her own skull and thrown away like so many pumpkin seeds. Clair felt unclean, as though her love for the music Xia Somerset had made in Tilly Kozlova's body had tarnished her, made her somehow complicit in Wallace's dreadful scheme. She rubbed her hands together as if to wipe them clean.

Seeing this familiar face was a reminder of just how much mess was left in Wallace's wake.

“She turned herself in, you know. The first of the Improved to do so, right before the crash.”

The bump appeared at the top of her infield. She didn't recognize the name of the sender: Devin Bartelme. According to the profile that came with it, Devin Bartelme was ambiguous regarding his gender but preferred the male pronoun. He had no fixed address, which was a bit unusual but not entirely so. Some people didn't live anywhere permanently; they wandered from place to place as the mood took them, fabbing everything they needed on the other side of their latest d-mat jump. His profile contained no photo.

Another bump came, hard on the tail of the first.

“Five others also surrendered. The rest of the Improved are lying low, except for four who committed suicide. I'd like to credit them with guilty consciences, but maybe they're just afraid of what you'd do if you caught them.”

Clair raised her head slightly. She felt like she was being watched, but the clump of prisoners was staring anywhere but at her.

“Keep looking up,” said a third bump. Then: “Now, to your right. Hello. I'm Devin.”

The ginger teen near Tilly Kozlova lifted an eyebrow in greeting. He was so fine-featured she could easily have mistaken him for a girl, if not for his Adam's apple, which protruded prominently like the keel of a ship. The name supplied by her lenses matched the one that came with the bump.

“Who are you?” she bumped back, opening a chat.

“RADICAL.”

She rolled her eyes.

“That's a noun, not an adjective,” he said. “Strictly speaking, it's an acronym, like WHOLE and VIA. You've never heard of us?”

“No.”

The corners of his lips turned up slightly. “That's the answer I was hoping for. We like to hide in the noise.”

Clair searched the Air for anything called RADICAL. If there was a hit, it was deeply buried and she didn't see it.

“You just searched for us, didn't you?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “What are you doing here? You're not one of them or else you'd be cuffed.”

“Voluntary attaché. The PKs don't really want me here, but we have transparency laws for a reason, and RADICAL knows how to insist. It's our job to protect the interests of future humans.”

He had to be joking, surely. No one could really be that pompous.

“RADICAL used to stand for ‘Radical Assembly of Digitalists, Ideators, Cyborgs, And Longlifers',” he explained without prompting. “Note the way it contains its own name: that's supposed to be clever. Woo.”

“What does it stand for now?”

“Well, it became the ‘Radical Association for the Diligent and Intelligent Creation of Artificial Life', but it's still a moveable feast. Sometimes we're radicalized instead of just radical, depending on our mood. And sometimes it's control rather than just creation, depending on the circumstances.”

“What are the circumstances now?”

“Control, definitely,” he said. “The life of every human is at risk. We could all be dead within a year, and not because of killer duplicates and mind-rape and the crash and all that stuff you're worried about. We're seeing a much bigger picture. The entity's the problem. I'm here to figure out what it's doing and what needs to be done about it.”

“What entity?”

“You know: Q.”

She felt herself gape at him. She couldn't believe they were back here again. “Q is not the problem.”

“Isn't she? I'd like to talk to you about that.”

Clair was about to suggest that any discussion they had should be conducted in public so it didn't seem like they were sharing an illicit secret, when the door opened and PK Forest walked in, his face a businesslike mask.

Behind him, cuffed at the wrists and ankles, shuffled Clair's dupe.

Clair stood up. The dupe's sweeping gaze locked on her. They stared at each other for a long moment during which Clair didn't think at all. It was like looking into a mirror—but at the same time not
like
a mirror at all. This was no reflection, nor was it a recording in her infield. This was
her
, right down to the pores. A replica that would bleed blood identical to hers if she pricked it.

A wave of dizziness swept through her. She balled her fists and held her breath. No way was she going to throw up. Not with so many people watching. Not with
her
watching.

“Get. Out.” Jesse was on his feet too. “
She's
coming with us?”

Sargent nodded. “Is that a problem?”

“Are you kidding?”

Clair touched him on the shoulder, to reassure him but also to take reassurance from him.

“She's evidence,” Sargent said. “She has to come with us before she breaks down or dies or whatever dupes like her do. The more evidence the Consensus Court has, the quicker it can come to the decisions we need.”

Clair understood the necessity of that, but she couldn't bring herself to feel okay about it.

“I don't understand how you can even look at her . . . it . . . whatever she is,” said Jesse.

PK Forest pressed the dupe into a seat while Clair asked herself the same question. If the real Clair had died on the station as Wallace had intended, this other Clair would have gone back to her home and lived her remaining days in her place, a human cuckoo in her parents' nest. When she expired, her grieving parents would never have known the truth—that the real Clair had died much earlier without ever seeing them again.

Seeing the flesh-and-blood proof of that plan made Clair's pulse pound in her ears.

“Why do you do this?” she asked her other self, taking two cautious steps closer. “Why would you possibly
want
to?”

The dupe just stared up at her with her own eyes, her own hands curled in her lap, restraints fastened tightly around her own wrists. Clair couldn't see any evidence of a tremor, from nerves or anything else.

“Are they threatening you? Threatening your family? Do you do it
for fun
?”

Clair studied her own face, marveling at how different it looked from the one she imagined every day.

“No, it can't be fun, living like this. In and out of people's bodies all the time . . . Do you ever actually leave? Do you stay until you're discovered or the body breaks down? Do you know how many times this has happened to you?”

The dupe shook her thick brown curls.
I need a haircut
, Clair thought in a moment of dizzying displacement. And since when had she had that frown line between her eyes?

“I am nobody,” the dupe said, “but I remember Charlie.”

The dupe Clair had confronted in California had said
I am nobody
too, but that wasn't what struck her now. Charlie was the toy clown she had lost as a child, the day she realized d-mat wasn't magic after all. This dupe didn't just have her body.
The dupe had her memories, too
.

She fought a sudden urge to smash her own face against the wall.

“Keep her away,” she said to Forest.

“Of course,” he said.

“And don't let her say another word to me.”

“I would like to talk,” said the dupe.

“Shut up,”
she said. “While we're in the same room, you don't say
anything
. You don't even look at me. You make one wrong move and . . . I don't know what I'll do. Is that clear?”

The dupe nodded and, after a moment, lowered her eyes.

Clair realized she was shaking, and she carefully returned to her seat on legs that felt like straws, aware of everyone watching. Not just Devin Bartelme, but Tilly Kozlova as well.

We have methods of dealing with inconvenient duplications
, Forest had said. He hadn't elaborated, and now Clair wished he had.

“It's unbelievable,” said Jesse, sitting next to her and staring at the dupe with a look of disgust. “I can't believe they got away with it for so long.”

“Neither can I,” said Sargent. “And it won't be over until the last of the dupes is dealt with and all their patterns are erased.”

“How do we do that?”

“We have to find the source. We know it wasn't Wallace's secret station. That was destroyed, but the dupes kept coming. There's somewhere else, a cache we haven't found yet. The Improved don't know where it is and our dupe friend here says she doesn't know either.”

“As if,” said Jesse.

“It's possible—who can say where the patterns fabbers use are stored in the Air? Not me: you just ask and out they pop, although I'm sure someone knows, somewhere. Maybe it's the same with the dupes.”

“If they hack into the network and get d-mat working again, we'll really be in trouble. . . .”

“Oh yeah. We'll be swamped. But while they keep coming we'll know that cache exists, and there's hope for everyone they killed, directly or indirectly.”

While Jesse and Sargent talked, Clair concentrated on breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth. She thought about Libby and Zep. Chances were their patterns were stored in the same place as the dupes. There was hope.

Finally her hands steadied.

“Do you think the PKs staged that little pantomime to see what you would do? Or what the dupe might say?”

She ignored Devin's bump and concentrated on breathing.

“Okay, we are ready,” said PK Forest, shutting the door.

Clair's lenses went blank. She looked around, startled. She had thought they were waiting for a train or a truck or something, but Forest had said nothing about moving. Ready for what?

Suddenly—

chug

—the room shook as though gripped by a powerful fist, there was a double thump like a massive mechanical heartbeat, and a wave of yellow light swept from one end of the room to the other—

chug

—and then everything was exactly as it had been, except somehow, even though her lenses were still dark, Clair knew that they had moved.

The whole room must be a booth like Wallace's office.

D-mat wasn't supposed to be working. But this hadn't felt like d-mat. There had been no thinning of the air, no flash of white light or popping ears.