Duplicity (14 page)

“My attempts to obtain permission for your termination have been thus far denied,” she says, “but the Overseer will soon understand the logic of my request.” She emulates a sneer I'm fairly certain I taught her. “However, I have been authorized to use a pain simulant against you in order to stay on schedule. I have installed the necessary software into your cell. You will work your shift, or it will be activated. You will deliver clean code, or you will undergo sessions of it for each deliberate bug found. Do you understand?”

“What if I like pain?”

I'm not trying to be a hero. To feel something, anything, in here would be the best thing I can think of. Even the thought of her chopping off my hand doesn't trigger any sense of fear or anticipation. I have no heart to beat faster. No adrenaline.

Nothing, nothing.

JENA stares.

“Pain, by definition,” she says, “is physical, mental, or emotional suffering or torment. The Overseer has authorized the use of all three, but she does not believe physical pain is our best option, in your case. Your double has reported to us your affection for a certain Emma Jennings. This can go one of two ways. Work your shifts properly, and I will ensure your relationship with Emma remains in your favor. Refuse, and I will use your double to hurt her.”

I laugh. I'm used to losing people I care about, and this will be no different. I have no weaknesses. I have nothing to lose. Doesn't matter if I behave because one, JENA is a liar; two, it's highly doubtful Emma will stick around long enough for it to matter anyway; and three, I don't care.

I'm Brandon Eriks and I don't freaking care.

“That brunette pinup?” I say. “Do your worst. I can't add her v-card to my stack from here, so as far as I'm concerned, she's trash. In twenty years I'll want something younger.”

“Shall I have your double repeat that?”

A video screen materializes on the opposite wall, an Obran's eye view of Emma as they walk through the halls at school, hand in hand. I tell myself I don't feel anything. I can't, not without a heart, not without a conscience. I am a machine.

All gears and wires.

The creature Emma's falling for isn't me, anyway. I
want
JENA to end it. I want JENA to cut her free so she can go her way and find someone who isn't broken, who isn't lying to her, who can make her happy without making her cry.

On screen, Obran stops and turns Emma toward him. I feel something, just a little something, tug at my nonexistent chest.

Emma smiles and that tug pulls more.

“What?” she asks, from a distance that's galaxy-wide.

“Your emotional response,” JENA says, “conflicts with your words. Are you ready to work?”

“Screw you,” I say.

Except that's what Emma looked like the night I broke her heart. Before I broke it, I mean. Hopeful and happy, trusting me, so sure I felt the same and I—

I know what she'll look like when Obran repeats what I said. The way her face will fall. The way she'll move away from me as fast as possible. Only this time, she won't show up in my garage with an apology she doesn't owe me.

This is it if I let him.

This is how I'll free her.

“Emma, I have to ask you something,” Obran says on-screen. “We've been dating a few weeks now, right?”

“Yes,” Emma says, looking skeptical.

“There's really only one thing I want from you. I think it's time you paid up. Why haven't you—”

“STOP.”

I must have said that last word because JENA's looking at me, a victorious glint in her evil little eyes. My hand is on the screen where the picture has frozen. That tug from before is now a carjack ripping open my chest.

I can't.

I can't let Emma go.

“I'll work,” I say. “I'll work, just please don't—” I hate myself. I'm weak and I hate myself. “Please don't turn Emma against me.”

“Very well.”

Obran says, “Taken me hiking at Cheyenne Canyon?” and the clip disappears.

I swallow, though it feels like nothing, and pull up my task list.

I'm shaking when I start number one.

 

13. WIRED X505

FORTY HOURS,
fifty hours, seventy-five hours later, I lose track. JENA finally drops me in the game room for what she promises will be an eight-hour session, a reward for my conformity. I suspect the real reason is that I blacked out halfway through yesterday's list and could hardly put two words together when she woke me, let alone enough thought to open my coding windows.

The walls open out. I slump down and lay there on the cold tile, my arm over my eyes, and think about how much I hate conforming. And about the lawn at the Wisconsin house we lived in when I was five. How you could see the whole Milky Way on a clear night. How the crickets chirped, how the wind sounded through the bushes around the fence. I feel the breeze come up against my face and the grass soften beneath me. I breathe out and try to remember my life before the shit hit the fan.

“People have been on the moon, Mom,” I say in my five-year-old voice. It's one of the only times I remember sitting on Mom's lap.

“Have they?” Mom asks. “Did you learn that today in school?”

“Yup.”

“And what do you think? Do you want to visit the moon?”

I think my answer is crashing my toy jet into a plastic dump truck. The orange one.

“Did they offer you the job, honey?” Dad asks, sliding the kitchen door behind him as he joins us in the yard.

“Yes,” Mom says.

“You don't sound too happy. Isn't it what you wanted?”

Mom combs my hair down on the side that always sticks up. “It's a lot more travel than I thought.”

Dad sits in front of me and rescues a construction worker who's about to get run over.

“I thought that's what you loved about it,” he says. “A change of pace, a new company to consult for every couple of years. You've always wanted to get out of Wisconsin.”

“And away from my mother,” Mom says. They laugh about that, which makes me stop blowing up dump trucks and watch them. Grandma is over all the time, but her surprise visits are the best. She brings candies and bosses Mom around.

“I'll never smother you like that, Brandon,” Mom says, kissing my head and setting me onto the grass. “You're right, Matthew. This is the perfect chance for us to start fresh. I'm going to call Dale right now and accept.”

She kisses Dad and trots back inside. Dad pulls a brand-new silver airplane, still in its box, from behind his back.

“Whoa!” I shriek, because it's one of those ones from the commercials, the ones that actually fly and you can tell them with your voice to light up and take off and fire missiles—“Dad, cool!”

“Thought you'd like it, son,” he says as I rip the box open. “We're going to be flying on a real one like this in a month. Up in the sky. Right next to the moon. How do you like that?”

“A real one?” I say, probably in an octave only dogs can hear, because I'm that amazed that I—Brandon—I'm going to be flying. Next to the moon. “Will it fire missiles?”

“Naw, only the Air Force gets missile planes,” he says, helping me fit the batteries into the toy's controller. “But ours will take us to new places. You want to see new places, don't you, Brandon?”

I wonder if I can remember that plane well enough to create it.

I lower my arm. Open my eyes.

And deck Seb—whose lips have almost touched mine—full in the cheek. He shrieks and jerks back, but I've got at least five days of frustration saved up and I won't forgive him for ruining my first chance to relax. I jump on him and wrestle him into a headlock, and think again that the other hackers are crazy for giving up their bodies. There's nothing like the feel of him struggling under my arm, the burn of my muscles tightening around his neck.

I'm enjoying the shade of purple he's going when the cheater vanishes and floats away in disembodied laughter, then reappears against the fence on the other side. My Wisconsin house stands at my left, rectangular light ghosting through the windows onto the grass. Stars clutter the ceiling. They look endless, look
real
, and I forget about Seb and stare into them.

“Gosh, JENA must be riding you like a pony,” Seb says. “It's been a week since your hot little number came up on my monitor. And you just went from like, the Hulk to that dude from
The Notebook
.”

“It'll be that dude from
Silence of the Lambs
if you pull that crap on me again.”

“Ooh, I'd like to see that. I kind of have a thing for sociopaths.” Seb's avatar flickers, then appears four feet away, just out of striking distance. He shifts into the bodacious blonde from the ZR1 and my fists clench tighter. “Surely you can't hit a girl?”

“Blondes aren't really my thing,” I say. “And I think I could make an exception.”

Seb smiles and changes again, but not to his fedora-topped Backstreet Boy. The girl's golden tendrils darken to chocolate brown, her face softens, her too-tight dress warps into a plaid snap-up shirt and jeans. I take a sharp breath and back away.

“What about now?” Seb says, in Emma's voice.

“That's not funny. How do you know…?”

“Oh, I've been bored, so I tapped into JENA's memory database and found a sexy little recording she had with your name on it. Don't worry, it's only gone viral inside the prison. I can't access YouTube from here.”

“
What?
”

“I know! No Internet is really a bummer. I'm way behind on my blog.”

Seb/Emma takes a step closer. I edge away and feel that shaking coming on again.

“Change back,” I say.

“Why?”

“You're a freaking sicko, that's why. Change back.”

Emma's grin widens. “You really care for her. You do, because if she was someone you fabricated or a one-night stand it wouldn't bother you so much. Do you love her?” She appears right in front of me, peering up with amber eyes that make my chest ache. “Do you love me?”

“You? No. Her … it doesn't matter. I have eight hours in here, we should get to work on this mirror thing.”

“But I'm having so much fun,” Emma says, trailing her fingers up my arm.

Which is way more confusing than I should let it be. I know it's Seb, but seeing her … seeing her this close, and having anyone touch me, is like giving steak to a starving man. Seb/Emma smirks at the conflict in my eyes. I don't move away. Not when she drapes her arms around my neck, not when she presses her fake body against mine.

She's warm. She's so warm, and I remember what it was like to kiss her, I remember the curve of her back under my hands.

“It doesn't matter who you are in here, gorgeous,” she says. “Male, female, ugly, beautiful. Sometimes I wonder if I'd prefer to stay, but frankly, I hate working. I miss shopping for Pumas and I'm way behind on my Facebook stalking. Plus, I miss things like this…”

“Ugh, stop it!” I shove her away and shudder, wiping her touch off my neck and shaking it off my hand like spit. “Don't talk to me like that, don't impersonate Emma, and don't
touch
me! You're right, it doesn't matter who you are in here because in reality you could be anyone else, including a fifty-year-old pedophile!”

Seb gasps. “Kathy! How could you say such a thing?”

The stars dissolve. The lawn melds to black steel. Seb shifts to his normal avatar and adjusts his hat with a glare.

“I am
so not
a fifty-year-old pedophile. I'm eighteen, thank you very much, and I expect an apology.”

“I'm not apologizing, you tried to seduce me wearing the skin of someone … someone I know!”

The dark metal closes us inside a box no bigger than my usual workspace, and I get really claustrophobic. Just like my first day on the job, the only light comes from slits in the walls, small Z's of neon blue.

“Where are we now?” I ask, pulling my arms tight.

“The control server for the mirrors. And now you know as much as I do.”

“JENA won't find us?”

Seb laughs. “Won't find me. Won't find you, if you say you're sorry.”

“I'm
not
apologizing.”

“Five.”

“Seriously? You sound like my mom, why would I have to—”

“Four.”

“You started it, if you'd kept your hands to yourself—”

“Three.”

“There's going to be an asterisk by this apology—”

“Two.”

“All right, I'm sorry!”

Seb grins. “Not so hard, is it? Don't you feel better now?”

I would feel better if I could knock him into next week. I clench my teeth, push two fingers into the closest wall, and picture the darkness peeling back. Nothing happens. Maybe because I'm also picturing Seb's face peeling back. I exhale. I don't think about how close the walls are. I replay what I want to do over and over in my head, but the room starts spinning and the light fades and my hand slips—

Seb catches me, and this time I can't connect my brain to my arm to shove him off. JENA must be shutting me down. I fight against it, and instead of blacking out I plunge underwater, choke on a mouthful of liquid salt, and struggle against corpse-green waves that churn like molasses. Someone drags me by the collar onto a bank of dirt-swirled sand. I blink into a shapeless sun and glance around the tiny beach, at the single palm tree on the sand bar, and finally at Seb, who looks annoyed.

“That little slut! I know what she's doing,” he says. “JENA must think you can crack the mirrors. She's running you low so you don't have the energy to even think about it.”