Hollowgirl

by Sean Williams

  So few survivors, Clair thought. The muster had seemed so big before the blue dawn. A large percentage of its inhabitants must have been converts to WHOLE, joining after a lifetime of using d-mat. Just once was enough, no matter how long ago.

  “How are we going to fab anything again without creating more unstable matter?” she asked Eve. “Fish, clean water, whatever. It’s never going to be safe.”

  “We’ve isolated the problem,” Eve said. “We’re redesigning our booths right now. This will never happen again.”

  “So you say,” said Nelly. “But what will be the next disaster? You can’t tell me this is the last time something will go wrong with d-mat.”

  “The problem wasn’t d-mat,” said Eve. “The problem was people.”

  “I don’t see how that makes us any safer. People will always be people.”

  “Don’t argue,” said Clair. “That’s the last thing we need right now.”

  Nelly and Eve fell silent, but she knew the matter wasn’t forgotten. It didn’t bode well that the two surviving groups on Earth had such opposing opinions on everything when it came to d-mat. The fact that neither group cared much for consensus wasn’t going to make it easy either. But what could she do? The Earth was her home. She wasn’t going to leave it. All she had to do was stay alive until the other version of her found a way out of the Yard, and everyone and everything else could follow.

  Or, Clair thought, she found a way in.

  It wasn’t in her nature to wait for anyone, even herself.

  She would feel better with a plan.

  [11 redux]

  * * *

  IT TOOK MANY emotionally exhausting hours to comb the muster for survivors. By the time they finished, the short winter day was dwindling to an end, and Clair trudged back to the gymnasium with the others, where a final head count was made.

  There were one hundred and seventeen people, thirty-five of them children under ten, over half of whom were now orphans. Clair wished there was some way to make them feel better, but she didn’t know what she could possibly say that would make a difference. It caused her near physical pain to hold a weeping young boy, knowing that all his loved ones were gone. She tried her best not to think of her own loved ones, but it was impossible not to. She wasn’t yet so hardened that she could relinquish her last hope of finding them again. At the same time, she wasn’t so foolish as to think it would be easy.

  Storm clouds were building again. Before night fell, an extension was added to the gym using materials reclaimed from the ruins and cobbled together with impressive skill and speed by the artisans in the crowd. Sandler Jones helped by taking lumber and tools where they were needed. Clair did the same.

  After a meal of stale bread and hard cheese, she collapsed exhausted onto a mattress retrieved from one of the dorms. The space was crowded with people. Children slowly settled against a backdrop of quiet but intense conversations. Clair felt accepted but avoided, along with Q. When Q took the mattress next to hers, Clair looked up from an inspection of her broken fingernails.

  “It’s been a long time now,” she said. “We still haven’t heard anything from the Yard.”

  “Time may move differently in there,” Q said. “Faster, slower. Who knows?”

  “Maybe it’s not moving at all. What if we’re all that’s left?” Clair could think of a dozen unhappy endings for the copy she’d sent into the Yard. They didn’t even know if she had made it, traveling along rapidly disintegrating cables as she had been at the time. Her pattern might have been lost the second it was sent. “I can’t just sit here waiting. We need to know for sure.”

  The more she thought about it, the more that became her priority.

  “I know the Air is dead and the cables are gone,” she said, “but could we use the radio to reach the servers?”

  “I’ve sent signals, but it’s not the right medium. Certainly not for getting people out. At its maximum rate, radio would take millions of times longer than the age of the universe just to send a single person.” Q rolled onto her side so she was facing Clair. “You’re in a bigger hurry than that, I guess.”

  A joke, Clair thought. Q or Kari? It wasn’t really a time for laughing, so she guessed the former.

  “What if we go to the Yard?” she asked. “Physically, I mean, to where the servers are buried. Would that help? Could we plug into them or something?”

  “Maybe.” Q hesitated, then said, “You do remember that it’s at the bottom of a pit drilled miles beneath a frozen lake . . . ?”

  “Yes, but if it’s our only shot, we’ll just have to give it a try.” The awesome improbability of such a venture helped push back some of the numbness that had gripped her since the blue dawn. It was no substitute for having Jesse beside her, but it was better than nothing. “How far is Lake Baikal from here?”

  “Six thousand miles, give or take. But there’s no direct route by road or rail. Hiking would take months and be very dangerous. Winter will be upon us in earnest soon.”

  “I know, I know.” Clair stewed for a long moment, considering her very short list of options. Stay where she was and wait for something that might never come. Pursue something that might go nowhere and could kill her in the process. Give up on everything to do with the Yard and move forward on her own.

  The latter was arguably most sensible . . . but the image of a giant floating head, equipped with an elegant black coif and toothy grin, wouldn’t leave her alone.

  “Chipmunk Underworld,” she said. “That was the name of Kipling Satoshige’s old game show. Mom used to love it.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Q.

  Clair shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. It might have popped or flown away already. And if it hasn’t, it’ll still be there in the morning. Let’s sleep on it and maybe I’ll come up with something less insane.”

  [14 redux]

  * * *

  SHE DIDN’T. WHEN she woke and stepped outside, the sky was a crisp, icy blue, utterly free of clouds. The only blemish was the giant floating head, still tangled by its guys down at the harbor. Looking at it closely, she could see that the balloon’s “collar,” which mimicked the real star’s unconventional dress sense, was actually a substantial gondola, with propellers and cunningly concealed windows. It wasn’t as big or as practical as Turner Goldsmith’s Skylifter, but it would do.

  “You can’t be serious.”

  She turned to see Sandler Jones standing behind her.

  “I was listening to you and the freaky peeker talking last night,” he said. “You’re not really going to fly in Kipling Satoshige all the way across the Russian Protectorate, are you?”

  She felt her chin pull in defensively. “Yes, unless you can think of something better.”

  “What, to hack into the Yard?” He grinned. “I heard Nelly talking about it. Eyes and ears always open, me. I thought your friend had already tried doing that.”

  She resigned herself to explaining. She would have to anyway, to everyone else left in the muster.

  When she had finished, he stared at her for a long moment, as though checking her out, and then laughed. “This is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard of. Sign me up.”

  “Don’t feel like you have to—”

  “But I want to, zombie girl. There’s nothing to do around here except dig graves and watch the plants die. Yours is the best show in town . . . in the whole world.”

  Clair couldn’t decide which thought was more disturbing: that he was right, or that he might be her only volunteer. Hopefully there would be more. Maybe he was playing nice because fate had thrown them together, but she knew what he really thought of her. Zombie girl wasn’t a joke to him any more than it had been for Dylan Linwood.

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  As she headed back to the gym to raise the plan with Nelly, she double-checked her infield to see if anything had arrived overnight. There was nothing from the Yard, just a single message bo
unced off the old GPS, relayed through the radio, and synced somehow to her lenses while she examined the floating head.

  “I leave you in charge,” Devin said, “and look what happens.”

  She hesitated, a watery feeling in her stomach, before sending a chat request.

  He answered immediately. There was audio but no image. “This is, uh, less than optimal,” he said. “I mean, I knew it could happen. Why else make the backups? But I never really thought it would, and certainly not like this. So don’t feel bad if you’re freaking out. I totally am.”

  The watery feeling subsided. Hearing Devin’s familiar voice was like time had rolled back a little, to a moment before everyone had died. She felt like if she closed her eyes and opened them again, she would be back in Agnessa’s bunker before the world ended. She fought that feeling, knowing no good would come of it.

  “Tell me how this works,” she said. “When was your pattern taken? How up-to-date are you?”

  “I come from the last time I used a RADICAL network,” he said, “which was on the seastead, after the dupes attacked. We were going to the muster. Everything after that I know secondhand.” He paused. “I don’t know what happened to my original, but I can guess.”

  Clair could tell that he was curious but at the same time reluctant to ask.

  “I can send you what my lenses caught.” She hadn’t been able to look at those images herself, but she would for him, if he wanted her to.

  “Let me think on it.” He fell silent.

  The empty chat was worse than what they were talking about. It made her feel like he was a stranger, when in fact he was exactly the same as he had ever been. She was the one who had changed. She had to let go of everyone she loved. How else could she bear the grief if the Yard turned out to be a dead end?

  “I’m glad you’re not dead,” she said, meaning it. If all else failed, she would have that much. “Trevin, too. He’s listening in, I presume?”

  “Actually, he’s still in storage. We’ll bring him back later. It’s taking us a long time to generate the power to use d-mat properly. Mom brought me out first, so you and I could talk things through. I’m the chatty one, remember.”

  He sounds uncomfortable, and no wonder, she thought. She might be dealing with the absence of Jesse, a boy she had known for two intense weeks, but he had been connected to his identical twin his entire life.

  “What’s there to chat about?” she said, hoping not to get caught in a conversation about who was or who wasn’t to blame.

  “The Yard, of course. You and Q sent copies of yourselves there—which was a brilliant idea, I must admit. And a bold move for someone who’d just become an Abstainer.”

  “Don’t start,” she said. “I’m Abstaining for good now.”

  “Got no choice, I guess.”

  “Not just that. Have you looked around, Devin? Have you seen what a mess we’re in?”

  “Yes, but you can’t blame d-mat for that.”

  Clair rubbed the bridge of her nose with one hand. “You sound like your mother.”

  “Ouch. Listen, let’s not get bogged down in an old argument. What is your plan? I bet you have one. You always seem to.”

  Taking that as a compliment, she told him what she’d come up with overnight: to hijack a giant balloon head and fly it to Lake Baikal, there to hack into the Yard and extract all the patterns it hopefully contained.

  She thought he’d laugh, as Sandler had, or suggest that it was more about being seen to do something, as though that would be enough to make amends. She worried about that sometimes.

  “Not a bad idea,” he said. “It’d be good to have someone on the ground. We’ve been trying to hack in from here, but it’s going to be tricky until the satellite breeder comes from the moon. There just isn’t enough bandwidth. And if the ways in have been physically severed . . . well, no amount of bandwidth will fix that.”

  “So you think it’s a good idea?”

  “Absolutely. Godspeed! When do you take off?”

  This was moving faster than she had expected. First of all, she needed a crew, which would require getting Nelly’s support. And then she needed food, and water, and power, and some means of navigating that didn’t involve the Air. There were probably a hundred things she hadn’t thought of, which would require discussion, planning, arguing . . . All together, it seemed very unlikely.

  But then she thought of Jesse, her mother, and her friends inside the Yard, maybe waiting for someone to rescue them, and her pulse quickened with more than just fear.

  “Tonight,” she said. Save the Yard, and save the world. “We’re leaving tonight.”

  [17 redux]

  * * *

  NELLY THOUGHT IT was a good idea too, and the call for volunteers raised seven more people apart from Sandler Jones, one of whom, Embeth, had experience flying old-fashioned air vehicles. She muttered something about hydraulics and, with the help of two deputies plus the two strongest survivors left in New Petersburg, drew the giant floating head down to Earth. A quick inspection of the gondola revealed it to be intact, with more than enough room for a small crew. The engines worked, and so did the various flaps and control surfaces on the bottom and top of the air sack. There was even a compass, which was crucial now that the Air no longer existed. All they had to do was load up and go.

  Clair cheered along with everyone else. It felt good to have achieved something, no matter how small.

  “I suppose you’re captain,” said Sandler, peering eagerly out all the windows in turn. “Does that make me vice captain?”

  “I don’t know that they have them on airships,” said Clair. “And anyway, Q is second in command if anyone is.”

  “The chaperone’s coming too? Shame.” He winked. “At least let me name it.”

  “That depends,” she said.

  “Don’t worry. It’s Satoshige. What else would it be?”

  He saluted with mock gusto and headed down the ramp to start lugging gear recovered from the muster. Clair shook her head, telling herself not to let him get a rise out of her. The day was already halfway done, and they had a lot left to do.

  “You know,” said Devin as the last of the supplies were loaded into the gondola, “there’s a chance RADICAL will be in the Yard. Not as we are now, since we pretty much stopped using ordinary d-mat years ago. But there are probably early versions lurking about somewhere, depending on when Wallace started creating his backups.”

  “Okay,” said Clair. She was standing at the back of the balloon, reporting on the movement of various control surfaces as Embeth fiddled with the levers and buttons. “What good does that do us?”

  “Well, if they are in there, and if they’re able to think and act in any meaningful way, they’ll have figured out what’s going on. They’ll be trying to get out. We might find them coming the other way.”

  “Would they help the other me if she found them?”

  “Probably, but she’ll be a stranger to them. She’d need a code word or phrase to prove she can be trusted.”

  “And that is?”

  “Hard to say. We’ve grown out of that phase, thank goodness, but I can dig around and see what might work.”

  “And then we still have to get it to her. . . .”

  “I’ve been thinking about that too.” Devin sounded brisk and cheerful. He always liked an intellectual problem, particularly one that posed no direct physical threat to his well-being. “Specifically, how the Yard could be structured. If there’s a simulation it’ll be layered, with sets of rules—like grammar—operating on data sourced from the Air—the copy of the Air that’s in there, I mean. The simulation could be incredibly detailed, exactly like the real thing, but it’s only as good as its data—just like a sentence is only as good as the words in it. Bad words make a bad sentence, even if the grammar is perfect. ‘Bad,’ in our case, means ‘good’: if we can insert the right words into the simulation from the outside, the grammar might do the hard work for us—of getting throug
h to your other self, I mean. Round peg into round hole, except instead of pegs we might try thoughts or knowledge of some kind, fired like homing missiles into your own mind. Assuming there’s a working simulation, of course.”

  “When will we know?” She made way for Q, who was putting Kari Sargent’s exceptional frame to good use, lugging box after box up the ramp.

  “I can’t say. That old satellite is just about useless.”

  “Can Q help?”

  “She has a bandwidth issue too, she says, but yes, she has some ideas.”

  Nelly came down to the harbor to check their progress. Clair belatedly waved a signal to one of the volunteers that the rear port flap was wiggling freely.

  “Looking good,” Nelly said. “You’re not going to be ready by sunset, but it won’t be long after.”

  Clair was nervous about what lay ahead. The last airship she had been on had fallen violently out of the sky, shot down by Wallace’s dupes. There was no sign that any of them had survived the blue dawn, but how would she survive without Jesse beside her?

  “I hope you don’t mind us leaving like this,” she said. “I’d stay and help, but—”

  “You are helping.” Nelly put one firm hand on Clair’s shoulder. “You’re taking that meathead somewhere else.” She nodded at Sandler, who was busy juggling potatoes rather than putting them inside the Satoshige. “When you’ve dug up the servers from that pit, maybe you can leave him down there.”

  “He’ll be okay.” Clair took comfort from the knowledge that the arrangement wasn’t permanent. “And we’ll be back before you know it.”

  “It’s a long way. You might find other survivors, somewhere more comfortable.”

  “What are you saying? That you don’t want me to come back?”

  “No. Just indicating you are under no obligation to.” Nelly smiled for the first time since Clair had met her. “You’re still the girl who killed d-mat. We’re not giving up on you just yet.”