Hollowgirl

by Sean Williams

  “The truth,” said Clair with a heart full of lead. “There’s nothing else now.”

  [3 redux]

  * * *

  EVE BARTELME WAS Devin and Trevin’s mother. She was calling from Valkyrie Base, the underground bunker at the South Pole that Clair had visited with Jesse an eternity ago. Clearly, it had survived the chain reaction.

  “The benefit of being a long way from anywhere,” Eve explained, “plus certain contingencies we never thought we’d need. Building an outer shell of unfabbed material seemed extreme to some, but we’re glad of it now. That was what protected us from the unstable matter.”

  Clair tried to find the right words to explain what had happened to her sons, but Eve cut her off.

  “Not to worry. I have their resurrection files right here. We’ll bring them back when the booths are charged.”

  “You’ll . . . what?”

  “Bring them back. You don’t think I’d let them die by accident, do you? They’re young. They have a lot of work to do. I’ve invested too much to just toss them away.”

  “But you can’t do that.”

  “Why not? There are one hundred and fifty people on file. We need everyone we can get.”

  “It’s . . .”

  Clair stopped before she could make a fool of herself. Illegal, she’d been about to say, but RADICAL didn’t care about consensus any more than WHOLE did. Immoral wouldn’t fly either, because the members of RADICAL had their own moral vision for the future of the human race. They wanted to live forever, with the help of d-mat, and they weren’t going to let something as trifling as the law get in the way of that ambition.

  Besides, was it really so different from what Clair had in mind for everyone in the Yard, which was to bring them all back from raw data once they found a way to access them? She would be a hypocrite to deny any grieving mother what she planned to give herself.

  “It’s what?” Eve pressed.

  The truth was, though, that Eve didn’t seem to be grieving at all, just irritated by the inconvenience.

  “Nothing,” said Clair. Another truth was that she would be glad to have Devin and Trevin back. Whether they ought to be dead or not, whether they disagreed with her or not, they had been her friends, and an early death was not what they deserved.

  The truth was hard. It tore apart her promises and stomped all over her values. What were her values, compared to those of WHOLE and RADICAL? Somewhere in the middle, she guessed, where no one would agree with her.

  The storm howled and hammered outside, shaking the walls of the gymnasium so hard she feared it might collapse at any moment. Lightning flashed and thunder boomed almost continuously now, dancing around them in a deafening ballet, as though blind giants were fighting over earth’s last inhabitants.

  Ragnarok, she thought. She swore it wasn’t going to end this way.

  “So you’re Q,” Eve was saying. “All this time, you weren’t anywhere at all? You were just a person?”

  “I don’t think ‘just’ is the right word,” Q said.

  “You know what I mean. You shrank yourself down, squeezed yourself into someone else. How much did you have to jettison of your old self? How constrained are you now that the Air is completely gone? You must feel very different from how you used to.”

  Q shifted awkwardly in Kari’s body. “I am . . . uncomfortable with this interrogation. The issue is not what I am. It is the state of the world and what we are to do about it.”

  Clair wondered if Q was feeling vulnerable. RADICAL had made it clear in the past that they would be happier with Q erased. That would be a lot easier to accomplish now that the entirety of Q’s mind was contained within a single body.

  Or maybe Q was no longer a threat at all, if there was nothing for her to connect to . . . at the moment.

  “There’s nothing we can do until the atmosphere settles into some kind of equilibrium,” Eve said. “The storm won’t last forever. If you’re safe, stay where you are. If you’re not, find somewhere that is. If you can’t, well, it’s been nice talking to you.”

  “We’re okay here,” said Clair, unwilling to reveal too much until she knew more about Eve. “What about you? Will you be all right?”

  “Yes. We have power, although not nearly as much as we did when there were powersats. We can grow our own food, and ice is just water waiting to be filtered. We’ll keep this frequency open for you, and keep broadcasting across the others in the hope of finding more survivors.”

  Clair had been afraid to ask, but this was something she desperately needed to know.

  “Have you heard from anyone else?” she asked, thinking about the Yard.

  “No. It’s just us. We’ll let you know if that changes.”

  “Likewise,” Clair said, although what she could do about it was presently beyond her. She needed to think. She always needed to think. Just once she wished for a case of straight-up action, of doing rather than second-guessing. . . .

  The line went silent.

  “You’ll keep listening, please?” Clair asked the radio’s owner, who nodded, although she was obviously annoyed at how Q had treated the heirloom. “If you want to sleep, call us and we’ll take over.”

  “All right.” The woman snatched at Clair’s sleeve as she went to walk away. “Are they really dead . . . all those people?”

  “I think so.” This truth was too big for words, too big to fit inside her head for longer than a moment. When she tried to grasp it, to look hard at it and confront the reality, it wriggled like a snake and slithered away, leaving her feeling breathless and ill. She kept thinking about New York, about Manteca, about home. All gone.

  “We brought it on ourselves,” Clair said. “We deserve everything that happened to us.”

  “No, it was a mistake,” said Q. “None of us meant for it to go like this.”

  “But Nobody did. This wasn’t a meteor strike or a big volcano or a plague or whatever. This is something we made. It’s even worse than the Water Wars. We were so smart, and so, so stupid.”

  Q touched her shoulder. Clair flinched away. She was shaking. She could barely stand. She had to be alone. She couldn’t talk and think at the same time.

  Everything needed to change in order to accommodate the reality of her life. Instead of dying, like nearly everyone else had, she needed to be like a caterpillar in a pupa, rearranging its insides to make room for the thing it was going to become: Clair 7.0. As outside, so within.

  In a depopulated world, with no friends, family, or Jesse, she would have to find a way to survive on her own.

  “Let her go,” said Nelly to Q. “She’ll come back when she’s ready.”

  Clair found an empty corner of the gym and sat with a blanket over her head so no one could see her. She wished she could reach into the past for her childhood toy, Charlie, for comfort, but there was nothing, and no one, but hurt.

  When she slept, she dreamed of Jesse and woke reaching for him. The space between her arms felt as though it would never be full again.

  [8 redux]

  * * *

  MORNING CAME WITH a reduction in the storm’s fury and a discussion about seeing how the world looked now. Clair listened for a while to Nelly urging caution and Sandler Jones grandstanding before wearily pulling back the blanket and sitting up. She wanted to be part of any consensus that emerged, even if it was just about going for a walk.

  The gymnasium was filled with a wan, bluish light, all that was left of a wintry day filtered through dust-splattered windows. Clair was surprised to see Q sitting next to her, close enough to give her a slight fright but not close enough to touch. It was nowhere as good as it would have been to see her mother, but a small comfort nonetheless: the one and only friend she had left, even if Q had been hiding for days, testing her.

  Q’s head was resting on her knees and Clair assumed she was sleeping until she spoke softly.

  “For the good of the many, out of compassion for the world . . .”

  “W
hat?”

  Q shook her head, and sat up straight.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. Let’s talk about food. We need to eat. And then we should do as Sandler says. We can’t hide in here forever.”

  “I agree. What’s for breakfast?”

  “Stale granola bars. We’ll forage for more while we’re out there.”

  It was a short conversation. Q prepared to stand.

  “Wait. Did you hear from any other survivors?”

  A quick shake of the head. “Just RADICAL. But there are bound to be other people, stragglers here and there without means of communication. And don’t forget the moon, as Nelly said, and the other outposts. The last census put the total off-Earth population at almost fifty thousand. There’s a good chance OneMoon will lift the embargo too. Their gripe was with OneEarth, and since that’s gone now, I expect they will relent—but in exchange for annexing us, probably.”

  Clair nodded. Space politics was not something she had followed very closely. She did know, though, that formerly dependent colonies on the moon and Mars had reached separate consensuses in recent years, leading to cultural and traffic bans to stop Mother Earth from wooing its wayward citizens back into the fold.

  “I don’t want to live on the moon,” she said. “No matter how bad it is on Earth.”

  “It’s all moot,” said Q. “We have no d-mat network of any kind to get there, and RADICAL is constrained by resources. Powersat beams from lunar orbit will spread out too much to be any use to us here. When it comes to energy, d-mat is thirsty.”

  So was Clair, for water, but she wasn’t ready to get up just yet.

  “The people on the moon can see the Earth. Have they sent any images? Do we know what the Earth looks like now?”

  Q nodded and sent Clair’s lenses a selection of low-resolution files, the best the observers could relay via the sole remaining satellite. Clair just glanced at them. They showed the planet bathed in shining aqua aurorae—cold, but almost beautiful from afar—rippling outward from the point closest to Wallace’s deadly unstable-matter cache and then echoing from pole to pole like waves across a pond. Then the aurorae faded, and the earth was as gray as a stone. Every city in the world had gone dark.

  The most recent pictures showed electrical storms all over the planet. Where the storms had blown out, fires were burning. The oceans looked thick and dark, their usual cerulean hues erased. The world looked like she felt.

  “There are bound to be other survivors,” Q said again, as if by repeating it, she was likely to make it more true. Clair caught her fiddling with Kari Sargent’s commitment ring and knew what was going through her mind. “They’ll come out of hiding when they can, and if they can communicate they will. Even if they can’t communicate, we’ll find them eventually. OneMoon can begin repopulating satellites in a few days. All they have to do is send a breeder on a fabbed rocket to kick-start the process.”

  It was a long way from there to the world that was. Clair felt weighed down by the responsibility of getting there. Still, moping around was a sure way to get nothing done. She had to keep moving forward. One step, two steps . . .

  At the very least she should prepare some kind of public statement, something to let the survivors know what had happened and what hope remained—even if all she had to do to deliver it was stand up and talk loudly.

  She attempted to help Q to her feet. Kari Sargent was heavy enough to tip her over if she seriously tried.

  “Nothing from the other me, the one who went to the Yard?”

  Q shook her head. “I would tell you.”

  Clair tried not to feel too disappointed. Like some cruel physics experiment, she didn’t know if Jesse was alive or dead. It was dangerous to pin her hopes on something over which she had no control.

  “I know. But I had to ask.”

  [9 redux]

  * * *

  FED AND REHYDRATED, Clair joined the small group volunteering for the first expedition outside. The rain had slowed to a light patter on the roof, but she draped a blanket over her shoulder for shelter should that change, and also for warmth. The air coming through the cracks had turned cold again.

  Nelly was with them, and she pushed the doors open without ceremony.

  It was immediately clear that her stained surgical mask would not be required. The clouds were yellow, and the sunlight had a greenish tinge. Clair had expected endless gray dunes, but she saw something very different. For a start, although the ash wasn’t completely gone, it was now confined to those areas the torrential rain hadn’t washed clean. Q guessed that it consisted of nothing more dangerous than the most common elements jumbled up randomly, like the paints of a paint box mixed into a muddy nothingness, but Clair couldn’t help worrying about long-term toxicity. Just because they were no longer sucking it down with every breath didn’t mean they might not be dealing with its effects for years to come.

  The buildings of New Petersburg stood tall in the distance, surrounding the ruins of the muster like the teeth of an open mouth.

  “New Petersburg was built before d-mat,” said Q. “It was immune to the chain reaction.”

  “Shame about the rest.” Nelly kicked at a mound of shredded planks that had once been a small shed. “Look! It’s supposed to be wood, but you couldn’t make a toothpick out of this now.”

  “Fabbers were everywhere for a long time,” Clair said. “Unstable matter obviously spread. I wonder if Wallace expected it to be this bad. . . .”

  “Beyond a certain point,” Nelly said, “how do you tell the difference?”

  They walked to the water’s edge, where the Neva Straits lapped sluggishly against what remained of the pier, Clair’s feet alternately slipping and sticking in the mud with vile squelching sounds. Two boats had survived the blue dawn, sitting high in the ash-thickened sea. Above, an airship floated, having broken free during the storm but become entangled by its guy lines in the mast of one of the boats. Possessing the improbable shape of a giant head—that of Kipling Satoshige, a popular game show host from when Clair’s parents had been kids—it cast an incongruous smile across the ruined landscape, bobbing and swaying in the wind. The real Kipling Satoshige was almost certainly dead now, along with his audience. There wasn’t even an Air to carry his show anymore, just fleeting links between lenses. The gaping emptiness of Clair’s infield was another reminder that the world she knew wasn’t going to be rebuilt overnight.

  Eve Bartelme patched into the augs of the exploration party, via the old GPS satellite and the radio. Audio only.

  “The oceans are ash soup,” she said when Clair described the scene. “I’ll be amazed if a single fish survives. Luckily, we have thousands of species in our pattern banks. Once we get power back, we can think about restocking.”

  Clair knew something about rebuilding wildlife, thanks to her mother’s work. She wondered if any of Allison’s elephants had survived. Many of them had been genetically engineered “in pattern” before being born naturally in Northern Australia.

  “It’ll all need to be filtered,” she said.

  “Not unprecedented,” said Eve. “Think of the Water Wars. It’s exactly the same, except instead of taking carbon dioxide out of the air we’ll be taking that junk out of the water.”

  “There’s so much of it, though, and not all of it will have washed out to sea.”

  “I know. You should see it down here. Dome Fuji looks like it was sprayed with concrete.”

  “It’d be better to let stocks recover naturally,” said Nelly. “Some species must have survived, deep down.”

  “Maybe. If you want to fish for your dinner, though, you’ll need a very long line.”

  Clair thought of dolphins, albatrosses, and whales, three of her mother’s favorite species that had been on the brink of extinction for generations. Were they all dead now because of the mistake she had made?

  The expedition followed the shoreline to a road honeycombed with holes, where fabbed material had been in
advertently mixed in with natural. A brief squall sprang up, and Clair was dismayed to see flecks of gray in the droplets that landed in her upturned hand. How long until the sky was completely clear? She doubted anyone knew. Were there any meteorologists left?

  Nelly took them to the farms, and even before they arrived it was clear the plants and livestock hadn’t survived the night unscathed. Whole fields were flattened. Fire had burned a barn to the ground, killing three horses. The addition of two dozen survivors, who had taken shelter in a dairy shed, was a mixed blessing: more lives meant more mouths to feed, and it was unclear how long they would need to make their meager supplies last.

  Sandler Jones danced ahead of them, picking through the ruins and more often than not emerging with something useful. Not just food, but wet-weather gear, weapons, and paper books. He was a natural scavenger, unafraid of scouring even the most intimate hiding places. They packed what they could into rucksacks or stacked them in caches for collection later. Clair assumed he kept the very best items for himself.

  As they headed deeper into the muster, they started finding bodies. Clair didn’t want to look, but she knew she couldn’t shy away from the harsh reality of the dead. The number of corpses that had crumbled to dust far outweighed those she could see with her own eyes. Most of these people had died in the collapse of buildings, but a couple had been struck by lightning, and lay burned and twisted in the open. Some seemed to have just dropped midstep and expired where they fell.

  “What killed them?” she asked, mystified.

  “Pacemakers,” said Nelly. “Neural implants, drug shunts, artificial joints . . . Abstainers aren’t supposed to use anything that’s been fabbed, but sometimes it’s just easier to. Or there’s not enough time for one of our artisans to make what’s needed, particularly in a medical emergency.” She shrugged, perhaps thinking of Agnessa. “I understand the temptation, and the need, but these are the consequences.”