Twinmaker (42 page)

“Jesse?”

“Stay away!” Jesse let go and stepped back from her, forming a triangle among the three of them. “Who are you?”

“It’s him, Jesse,” said Clair, hearing it in Dylan’s ordinary California accent and seeing his true self in the way he held himself, in his bewilderment and shock. “
Really
him this time.”

“Who else would I be?” Dylan said, his lined face twisting in hurt.

Jesse was speechless.

“You were captured in the street by people who work for Ant Wallace,” Clair said. Someone had to tell him. “They put you in a booth, a null jump, like they’re doing now.”

He looked down at his body, then back up at Clair and Jesse. “What have they done?”

“They duped you. Your dupes tried to kill us. We . . .” She remembered with pure visceral force shooting at him and seeing his corpse. “We managed to stay ahead of you . . . of them . . . for a while.”

“So we’re all zombies now?” He stared at her in horror.

“Don’t say that,” she said. “That’s not the way it is.”

He turned to his son. “Jesse, what are you doing here? What do they want?”

Jesse still didn’t speak. He was wrestling with all the doubts and decisions Clair had agonized over when Zep had appeared.

“They’re going to take you away again, Dad,” Jesse finally said. “They want something we can’t give them.”

Dylan was staring at Jesse, his face a mask of agony. Not because of the blow to his head. His psychic pain was palpable.

“How can I feel like this?” he said, openly weeping. “How can I feel anything at all? Was your mother right the whole time? Was I wrong not to let them bring her back?”

sssssss—

“Wait,” Jesse cried, reaching out to take his father’s arm, “wait!”

—pop

Jesse and his father vanished. Clair crouched into a ball and shook with frustration and despair. Nothing she said or did seemed to help anyone or change anything. Zep was dead . . . again. Clair had been duped. Jesse was being used against her. What cruelty had Mallory and Wallace prepared for her this time?

When she raised her head, she found that she was alone with Wallace. He looked saddened and puzzled, as a kindly uncle might by his niece’s errant behavior. She seriously thought that he was about to pick her up, pat her on the back, and set her down on her own two feet again.

She stood up on her own and backed as far away from him as she could.

“Tell us about Q,” he said. “That’s all you have to do.”

“And then what? You’ll put me
on ice
, too? Or erase me permanently?”

“You’re making my choices for me, Clair. If you’d only do as I ask, I’m sure we’d all get along.”

He came closer. She retreated.

“There’s no need to be frightened of me, Clair, or to mistrust me. I’m just trying to make the world a better place.”

“What?”

“You’ve seen what we can do. You’ve talked about it on your feed. I know you don’t think it’s all bad.”

“You’ll never convince me that what Mallory is doing is a good thing.”

“Mallory is a special case, true. I don’t love her for her unsubtlety.”

“Murder is
unsubtle
?”

He was herding her around the office, like a very patient old sheepdog with one skittish ewe.

“Improvement isn’t murder, Clair. It started as a way of
saving
lives—the lives of our greatest minds when they grow sick and old. We didn’t have Turner’s genes then, so how else were we to prolong their work? We couldn’t create new bodies out of nothing and set them loose in the world, since that would violate parity, the one rule we cannot break; the same with copying them. So why not use the bodies of young people living vacant, empty lives? Teenage minds are flexible; that’s why they’re so changeable, so perfect for our plan. You see, Improvement is like duping, only stronger, more subtle,
permanent
. In the right body—not just any will do—a transplanted personality has time to settle into place, rather than being dumped wholesale and left to break down, like the dupes do. Society is infinitely better off for it, I’m sure you’ll agree, as are the beneficiaries of the program. Ask Tilly Kozlova or Madison Chu if they would rather be dead. Ask Elisha Neimke if he thinks you’re being fair for judging me without taking this into account. Ask all of them. I know what they’ll tell you.”

Clair felt herself flinch at Tilly Kozlova’s name. She didn’t want to believe it. Her idol an old woman stealing the life of a girl like her? It couldn’t be true . . . but it did explain her preternatural talent blossoming apparently from nowhere. And it explained the other names too. Madison Chu was the young mathematician who had solved the Riemann hypothesis. And Clair thought Elisha Neimke might be the first Go champion to beat an AI in forty years—at the age of sixteen.

Getting smarter, younger
, her grandfather had grumbled, and for once he had had something important to say. But who listened to old people on the subject of
kids these days
? Clair certainly hadn’t. How many other brilliant minds had taken over innocent young people who had wished to be more than they were?

At least Turner’s genes would put a stop to Improvement. Why go to so much trouble when people could stay in their own bodies and be young forever? But that would mean people like Ant Wallace living forever too—and Clair didn’t trust him to give just anyone the secret. Improvement was given only to the geniuses he chose. A world ruled forever by people like him wouldn’t be worth living in at all. . . .

“No one uses d-mat against their will,” he was saying, as though that made a difference. “The same with Improvement. We do it to ourselves, Clair, and no one complains.”

“You’re lying,” she said. “Someone forced Dylan Linwood

into a booth so he could be duped. Your dupes killed innocent people, and so does Improvement.”

“Minor exceptions, all in the service of the greater good. Would you really have us give up d-mat like those fools in WHOLE say we should?”

She shook her head. “D-mat isn’t the problem. It’s people like you, people who abuse the system. The sooner you’re all in prison, the safer it’ll be for everyone else.”

“Is that really what you think?”

“Of course it is. I’m not so far gone that I don’t know who I am anymore.”

“Far gone . . . ?” He tilted his head. “Ah! I didn’t realize. You used Improvement too. Perhaps I should just wait, then. The answers will come to me in due course.”

“If I don’t kill myself first.”

“Yes, you might, just to spite me, if you are one of Mallory’s. She’s nothing if not persistent, once she fully comes into herself. Her death wish is a stain I could never remove, no matter how I tried. . . .”

His confident facade fell away, and Clair glimpsed something much more real and intimate. She remembered his activism on behalf of potential suicides. For the first time, Clair thought she was seeing the real man.

“Why is Mallory a special case?” she asked.

“Because she’s my wife,” he said. “I can’t let her go.”

She stared at him. “So you bring her back, over and over—”

“And she keeps taking herself away from me. She loves me, but in the end she always hates life more. Her last pattern was taken a week before . . . the first time . . . and it’s always the same. Do you understand me now, girl?”

Clair did, and it was like a coal in her heart. One week was exactly how long Gemma had given Libby to live before she committed suicide—which Libby would do, Clair now understood, not because there was something wrong with Improvement, but because Libby
had become Mallory
, exactly as she had been when Wallace had taken her last pattern. Improvement killed because Mallory wanted to die.

“Are you satisfied, Clair? Have I at last earned your cooperation?” Wallace’s expression twisted again, becoming very hard and cruel. “Tell me who Q is and what she can do. Who named her? Where did she come from? Most importantly, I need to know how she can be
controlled
.”

He lunged with great suddenness and speed and caught her arm in one strong hand. She tried to pull away, but he only wrenched her closer, as though punishing her for the glimpse of weakness she had elicited from him.

“If you do,” he said, “I’ll make everything go away. I’ll bring back Zep and Jesse’s father—Libby, too, if you like, before it’s too late. We can do that. It’s easy. Just say the word, and I’ll take Mallory out just as simply as I put her in. But if you don’t, I’ll destroy you. There’s too much at stake now to let you ruin it. And we won’t just kill you and your parents and Jesse, Clair. We’ll destroy the life you might have had.”

He wrenched her closer still.

“Remember that gun you got rid of in Copperopolis? It turned up in what you call the hangover, with your fingerprints still on it. Terrorists are such bad influences, aren’t they? And to think they helped you hide the bodies we have in the hangover too. Fancy that. How do you feel about spending the rest of your life in a penal colony? Do you want to grow old alone? You, not your dupe.
You.

“One simple concession could spare you all of this, Clair. One act of common sense. Just do what I want, and this will be over. All of it.”

His crushing fingers released her, and she jerked away with his voice ringing in her skull.

“I’m not guilty of anything,” she said. “Q aimed the pistol for me. I just pulled the trigger.”

“The pistol has an autotargeting system, Clair. Q turned it on.” He leaned in close again, and she couldn’t help but recoil from him. “I’m afraid you’ll have to do better than that. Don’t think of it as betraying her, if that’s what’s bothering you . . . although I hear you have some proficiency in that regard already.”

Clair balled her fists and crushed them into her eyes.

“Shut up!”

“Why, Clair? I’m the one offering you a way out of this mess.”

“Just leave me alone! I need space. I have to
think
.”

“About what? Surely there’s only one possible response.”

She raised her head and glared at him, hatred tracing fiery lines through her veins, giving her a strength she’d never suspected she had.

“If you destroy me, Q will destroy you,” she said, and the coldness in her voice was frightening even to her own ears. “That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? She knows my dupe isn’t me, and she’s looking for me right now. And she’s scared you. You don’t know what she’s capable of, and you’re worried that you’ll find out
big-time
if you don’t give me up soon. So you don’t get to order me around. Not now and not ever. Back off and let me figure out what
I
want before I agree to anything
you
want.”

“All right, all right,” he said, raising his hands in a mixture of placation and frustration. “I’ll give you ten minutes—in which time you’d better hope your little lapdog doesn’t do anything you’ll regret. You only get one second chance.”

HE STALKED OFF, all geniality gone. But at least the act was over. The doors opened ahead of him, and stayed open behind him. Clair took two steps toward them, then retreated as Mallory walked into the room.

Behind her, the doors shut with a definitive click. They were alone together.

“What are you doing here?” Clair asked.

“Don’t worry. I’m not here to talk.” The woman in Libby’s body leaned against the desk. “Consider me an incentive to make the right decision.”

“What happens if I don’t?”

Mallory hefted the pistol. “Remember Zep. I can bring him back and shoot him as many times as you like. It’s up to you.”

Clair folded her arms. She felt cold, but that had nothing to do with the temperature in the room. The strength she had had a moment ago evaporated in the face of Mallory, whose mind might even then be starting to overtake her own.

“How does it feel?” Clair asked. “How does it feel to destroy someone’s life?”

Mallory tipped back her head and laughed. The sound was shocking, coming from Libby’s mouth.

“You talk as though it’s never happened before,” the woman said. “We live in a cruel world, Clair Hill, full of victims. Our only choice is between standing in line or taking matters into your own hands. Which do you choose?”

Clair didn’t want to believe that there was nothing of Libby left in this woman who looked exactly like her. Improvement happened slowly, Wallace had said. It wasn’t like duping, where someone was shoved into place and left to founder. Mallory had crept through Libby like a cancer. There had to be some small part of Libby left, some fragment that might be able to help her escape.

“I remember the crashlander ball,” she said. “Do you? We made it happen together, you and I. We were the perfect team.”

“Sure I remember,” Mallory said, confirming Clair’s guess about duping and memories, “but I also remember my own life—the death camps, and my father being shot, and stealing food from other children just to stay alive. And worse, so don’t think you’re going to turn me by appealing to some fading echo of your shallow friend. She wanted this, remember? And now she’s got it. Do you think she’s glad? I can’t tell you, Clair, because she’s not in here anymore.”

“Stop it.”

“Just like your dupe isn’t you anymore either.”

“Stop it!”

Clair put her hands over her ears and ran into the privacy alcove, chased by Mallory’s mocking laughter.

Clair crouched in a corner and wept, thinking of Zep telling her about dead grandmothers and rape. They had been Mallory’s memories coming from Libby’s lips, but at least there had been some of Libby left then. It was gone now. Libby was gone, and soon Clair would be too, either erased completely or taken over by Mallory, if that was who she was infected with. It was inconceivable that there could be two versions of that terrible old soul at the same time, both in different bodies, but anything was possible in a world where people could be reduced to data—data that could be edited, copied, and erased as easily any other electronic file . . . in the hands of a madman.

Clair tried to bring back the anger that had enabled her to stand up to Wallace before. She forced herself to think through the fear and grief, to find something she could do. There had to be a way out of her situation. There
had
to be.