Hollowgirl

by Sean Williams

  He stared at her a moment; then his eyes widened in recognition. “The last person who used those words betrayed us . . . but you . . . Clair said there’d be another version of you, a different version, and she was right.”

  Clair’s bald scalp crawled. “You saw Clair One?”

  “Is that what you call her? Yes, I saw her. I stopped her from running into the exit and killing us all.”

  “You found the exit?” asked Jesse.

  “Yes,” said Zep, still on his knees. He wiped his face and looked at Clair as though he couldn’t believe she was really there. “I know where it is. I can take you there anytime.”

  “But you can’t go, Clair,” said Evan. “It’s too dangerous. You must’ve seen the topological breaks and fractures in continuity when you and the other Clair were together. You call them glitches. Putting you anywhere near the exit would be cataclysmic for the entire simulation.”

  “The Yard,” said Kari. “That’s what it’s called. So where is Clair One now?”

  “She had to stay behind.”

  “We have to go back for her,” said Zep.

  “We can’t,” Evan snapped. He had obviously told Zep that many times already. “It’s too dangerous. She’ll find her own way. She’s disguised, remember?”

  “Disguised how?” asked Clair.

  “She looks like him.” Zep pointed accusingly at Nobody. “It was their idea. Nobody and Mallory. They wanted Clair to go into the exit. They wanted the world to end.”

  Everyone looked at Nobody, who shrugged. “I’ve never been one to leave something unfinished.”

  There was a moment’s silence, during which the horror of the situation sank in. Nobody had tricked Clair One in the Yard just as he had in the real world. And what was she doing now, alone?

  “We can’t just leave her there,” said Jesse. “Where is she?”

  “She’s in the heart of Wallace’s stronghold,” said Evan. “You’ll be dead in seconds if you blow her cover. We’re the only ones who made it out.”

  “But she’s on her own, helpless—”

  “Not helpless,” said Clair. “Not if she’s armed.”

  “I gave her a grenade,” said Dylan Linwood. “I told her to deliver it to the hollowmen.”

  Everyone stared at him now.

  “She wouldn’t,” Jesse said.

  Clair remembered Turner Goldsmith and her first plan to kill Ant Wallace.

  History repeats itself, she thought.

  “Maybe she already did,” Clair said.

  Jesse stared at her in horror.

  Something shifted in the Yard, so subtly that it took her a moment to notice how. She simply felt it, from the small hairs on her arms to the marrow of her bones. Then she noticed that the shadows had stopped moving, and she could no longer sense voices just below the threshold of hearing.

  The glitches had stopped.

  Which meant that there was now one fewer Clair Hill alive in the Yard.

  But that thought brought no relief, as it might once have. Now there was just futility, anger, and grief.

  Clair One was dead.

  “If there’s any justice,” said Kari in a cracked voice, “she took Ant Wallace with her.”

  A voice broke the silence that followed, coming over the prison’s internal speakers as well as all their augs.

  “She did not,” said Q, speaking through the sudden calm, her voice very adult and serious. “But her sacrifice has not been pointless. We now know the location of the exit, and I have already used that information to trace a packet sent from the people on the outside to the Clair before you. With that trace I can contact them in turn. This will create a new source of glitches, but I believe I can control them now that I know what the source is. Among the people on the outside is another Clair.”

  Another Clair? The whisper spread through the room.

  “Lose one, find another,” said Nobody.

  Clair wanted to snarl at him, but Q wasn’t done.

  “Clair One has also gained you valuable breathing room. I believe that the attacks on the prison will cease temporarily, following the strike on Wallace’s stronghold. Mallory Wei is dead. Many hollowmen have died, also. This is a major victory.”

  So why didn’t Clair feel like celebrating? Because Mallory Wei was a serial suicide—and maybe she was too? Or because everything had changed while at the same time staying horribly the same?

  “Wallace or Kingdon or whoever’s left,” said Dylan, “they won’t sit idle for long. We need to respond, and fast.”

  The room erupted into chaos as everyone began talking at once. Clair shrank back into her seat, knowing she should be paying attention, knowing she should be feeling satisfaction, but instead just feeling tired and filled with the certainty that there was another conversation she needed to have, right now.

  Accessing the prison’s interface, she found Libby and the others on the fringes, still looking for Clair One and Zep.

  “Meet me in the mess,” she bumped them. “There’s something you need to know.”

  Tash held Libby while she cried. Ronnie glared at Clair with hot, red eyes. Clair was sitting in front of them, feeling too many kinds of pain to classify. She hadn’t cried yet, and she wasn’t sure she was going to. Part of her felt numb inside, like it had been hurt too often.

  “This is all your fault,” Ronnie said.

  “It’s not.” Ronnie’s words didn’t hurt her, but she felt a strong need to defend herself. It was important they understand, even though she was struggling to understand it herself. “It’s not all her fault either. We’re the same person. Under similar circumstances, we made the same decisions. She was tricked just like I was. She made a mistake just like I did. She died . . . she sacrificed herself . . . hoping that it would make things better. We have to make sure she didn’t die for nothing.”

  “She didn’t trust you. Why should we?” Ronnie wasn’t going to make it easy, and Clair didn’t have the heart to blame her.

  “You either trust all of us or none of us,” she said. “You can’t have it both ways.”

  “Clair’s right,” said Zep. He was standing in the doorway. Clair hadn’t brought him with her, but he had obviously figured out what was going on and wanted to be part of it. He deserved that, she supposed, although it risked muddying things with an entirely different emotional crisis.

  He went to Libby and tried to put his arm around her too, but Libby pushed him away.

  “She told me to look after you,” he said. “Just before—”

  “Why?” Libby’s voice was snappy. She didn’t look at him. “Because she felt guilty? She already sent me a note to apologize. Wasn’t that enough?”

  Zep blushed, and Clair knew that she and Clair One had shared more than he wanted to let on.

  “Clair was never very good with the small stuff,” said Tash into Libby’s hair. “She’d walk through a picnic following a cloud, my mom would say.”

  “She walked practically to the other side of the continent to save her best friend,” Kari said. “Who cares what she stepped on along the way?”

  Clair’s throat felt hard and tight with emotion. Was the past tense really necessary? She felt as though she were hearing the eulogy at her own funeral, one where everyone said exactly what they really thought and, ghostlike, she had no right of reply.

  “She used me,” said Jesse, staring fixedly at the floor. He had avoided meeting her eyes since Evan’s arrival and had helped Kari carry Clair to the mess only sullenly.

  Clair reached for his hand but he pulled away.

  “I’m sorry,” said Zep, his expression as wretched as Clair had ever seen it. “I should’ve talked her out of it. But she took me by surprise. I was just running some laps around the hub and heard her talking. Then they jumped me, and . . .” He looked like he was about to cry. “She always seemed to know what she was doing.”

  “She thought so,” said Ronnie, then added what Clair supposed was a kind of concession: “S
he was usually right.”

  “I’m sorry too,” Clair said. “That’s all I can say.”

  “She gave her life so we could find a way out,” said Tash. “You don’t need to be sorry for anything.”

  They sat together in silence, each nursing their private thoughts, Clair realizing that it wasn’t just she who had changed. Her friends were different now too. They had been thrust into a situation not remotely of their making and forced to make do as best they could. And they were making do. They could hold their own in a world of terrorists and would-be dictators as easily as she could. Clair was sure there wasn’t one among them who wouldn’t do the same as she had for their friends and loved ones.

  “If we know the way out now,” said Ronnie, “why don’t we just go?”

  “It’s not as simple as that,” said Clair. “We don’t know if there’s a working booth on the outside. Without a booth, there’s nowhere to go to.”

  “And you can’t go anywhere,” said Zep. “Not through the exit.”

  “She can go last,” said Tash. “Once the Yard is empty, what does it matter if it’s destroyed?”

  “What if the exit is destroyed while she’s going through?” said Ronnie.

  “We need more information,” said Clair. “That’s why it’s good that there’s someone on the outside now.”

  This time the silence was shorter but more uncomfortable.

  “Another you,” said Libby. “How many are there? And is she as bald as a coot too?”

  “That’s it, I think,” Clair said, touching her scalp self-consciously. She hadn’t been brave enough to look in a mirror yet. “I don’t know what she looks like.”

  “That makes her Clair Three,” said Tash, rubbing her chin with the knuckle of her thumb. “I still don’t get how this is possible. How can one of you die but the rest still be alive?”

  “We’ve been through this,” said Ronnie. “Copy the atoms and you copy the person. Remember when we cloned those tomato plants in biology? Just because yours died didn’t mean the others died with it.”

  “People aren’t tomatoes,” said Tash hotly.

  “And neither’s Clair, but the principle’s the same.” Ronnie changed the subject. “When can we talk to her?” she asked Clair.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I am close to establishing contact,” said Q, making Clair jump. She hadn’t known Q was paying attention. It dismayed her to think that she had grown used to this new distance between them.

  “How long will it take?” she asked.

  “Perhaps ten minutes. I must make absolutely certain that Wallace will not detect the exchange.”

  “Let’s make the chat open at this end, so everyone can hear,” Clair said. That was the right thing to do. “We’ll go back to the hub. I think we need to be together for this.”

  Libby nodded. She understood. This was bigger than friendship, bigger than who belonged to what group. There was nothing bigger than the future of the human race itself.

  “Okay,” Libby said, “but first we’ve got to find you a hat.”

  [40]

  * * *

  Clair Three

  OPENING THE CONNECTION took closer to thirty minutes, nowhere near long enough for Clair to accept that it was real.

  Devin’s plan to contact her other self had actually worked.

  The signal was sporadic and suffered greatly from interference. Wallace was fighting them, she assumed, although Devin thought it might be a sync issue. Time did move oddly inside the Yard, it turned out: sometimes faster, sometimes slower, always unpredictably. Eve Bartelme thought the problem with the signal was something else entirely. She muttered dire warnings about an “entity” at work, which was what RADICAL called AIs like Q. Given that the only one they knew about was Q and she was helping them, Eve’s warnings were ignored as paranoid.

  Occasionally a blocky, low-res image got through, revealing a gathering of around fifteen people in a low-ceilinged, bunker-like space that Q told her was an underground prison. Clair recognized nearly all the faces. It was her own that looked like a stranger’s.

  Clair—Clair Two, she had been told to call her—was seated front and center. There was a blue-and-green checked beanie on her head. Clair was wearing a beanie too, to keep out the cold; hair kept straying past her ears to tickle the side of her face. There were no hairs straying onto Clair Two’s face, and her right shoulder and arm were bound tightly. No one had said anything about a Clair One, but it was easy to suspect the worst, judging by how everyone looked. They had made progress, but it had come at a cost.

  She understood that feeling well. Her heart had initially leaped to know that Jesse was alive. Then her heart had broken on seeing the way Clair Two looked at him, with a longing that matched her own.

  Hope for the best, plan for the worst.

  After days of dashed hopes, she was getting pretty good at the planning part. All part of being Clair 7.0, she told herself. The survivor, attempting to make amends. Alone.

  “Who’s the new guy, the one in red?” she asked during one of the downtimes. She was standing next to real-world Q in Kari Sargent’s body—who the other Q had suggested they call “Q-prime”—on the bridge of the Satoshige, a snow-dappled forest unfolding slowly beneath them. Embeth had reduced both altitude and speed to avoid a storm brewing ahead. Lightning flashed regularly, but Devin said it was likely to blow itself out soon, and with luck and its wind at their backs they would easily make up the time they had lost.

  “Evan Bartelme of RADICAL.” Kari Sargent’s lenses flickered as she scrolled through data the two Qs had squeezed out of the connection. “A relation, I assume.”

  “He’s Mom,” said Devin Bartelme from the South Pole.

  “Say what?” asked Sandler.

  “A very old version of mom.”

  “Shhh,” said Clair, “they’re back online again.”

  “We’re looking at images Zep brought back with him from the exit chamber,” said Dylan Linwood, his voice crackly with static.

  More grainy pictures appeared in Clair’s infield, of a massive space with curving glass windows. The size was all wrong, but something about the perspective rang a bell.

  “It’s Wallace’s office,” she realized. “Bigger than it should be, but that’s definitely the place.”

  Zep nodded. Clair was so glad to see him, along with all her friends. That they were alive was like the sun breaking through the gray clouds, however briefly. “Everything about the building is twisted, like it’s been magnified.”

  “They’re hacking the Yard on a grand scale in there,” said Ronnie. “It makes sense there’d be side effects.”

  “Could we do the same thing down here?” asked Jesse. “There aren’t many of us, but if we could magnify things somehow in our favor . . .”

  “The exit is the cause,” said the Q inside the Yard. She sounded almost perfunctory, as though dealing with more important things elsewhere. “Without an exit you will not achieve the same effect.”

  “Still, there must be something you can do along those lines,” said Clair. “You’re already ripping around the Yard. Who knows what else you can do if you put your minds to it?”

  “We’ll get a team on that,” said Dylan. It was disconcerting, seeing him without his red eye and lacking the malign intelligence of Nobody speaking through his mouth. “If the exit is in Wallace’s office, what else does that tell us?”

  Clair thought about the location of the doorway with respect to the office’s layout. Better to concentrate on that, she told herself, than what this awkward reunion meant for her. Save the world, and ignore the rest.

  “I think that door originally led to another small room,” she said. “There’s not much in there.”

  “Just a toilet,” said Jesse, “and a coffeemaker . . .”

  “And a fabber,” said Clair Two from inside the Yard. “A mirror.”

  Memories, Clair thought, that the three of them shared.

  �
�It was where I made the chip that got me into the space station,” said Q-prime. “The pattern of that chip is what my other self is using to make this connection.”

  The other Q didn’t deign to comment.

  “So why don’t we use it to come out there?” asked Zep.

  “We have booths,” said Devin, “but we’re up against the power problem again. Also, that chip or whatever is barely capable of carrying this conversation, let alone an entire person. “

  “We might need to physically access the servers,” said Q-prime, “to open the connection wider. That’s why we’re on the Satoshige.”

  “Presumably Wallace will have some way to open the exit,” said Ronnie. “He’s the one who’s blocking it.”

  “There’s no chance we can talk him around?” asked Clair. “I mean, I don’t really care what he does in there as long as he lets everyone else out.”

  “He won’t do that,” said Clair Two. “If we’re out there while he’s in here, there’s nothing to stop us from shutting down the Yard.”

  “We could do that anyway,” said Sandler. “Then see how he feels.”

  “He doesn’t respond well to threats,” said Libby. “You guys know that, right?”

  That was very true. Clair had only to look out the window at the ash-strewn Siberian landscape to appreciate how dangerous Wallace was when cornered. If he learned she was already on her way to Lake Baikal, who knew what he might do to the innocent people inside the Yard—such as her parents—to make her stop?

  “Start bringing in people he might use as hostages,” she said. “That’s what I’d do. Just to be safe.”

  “Agreed,” said Clair Two. Then she hesitated, as though choosing her words carefully. “You should know that we’ve captured Cameron Lee.”

  Clair felt a rush of heat sweep through her, but not good heat, which she could have used. The bridge of the Satoshige was perpetually drafty and the air outside bitterly cold. This heat was like a sickness.

  “What are you going to do with him?” she asked, and if she could hear the strain in her own voice, then so could Clair Two.