Hollowgirl

by Sean Williams

“For who?”

  “For you.”

  Clair was momentarily speechless.

  “One of her died in here, Q,” said Jesse.

  “But she remains.”

  “I almost died just now.”

  “But you would remain,” Q said.

  Clair thought she understood. “Clair Three. She’s who you really care about.”

  “No,” said Q. “I care about you most of all, just as Q-prime cares most about Clair Three, but I cannot take the risk that all of you will die. That is what I fear will happen if I open the exit.”

  “Why?”

  “Humanity.”

  The word echoed through the chamber, and Clair shivered, sensing an emotion so huge that it might never have been felt before. It had no name that she could think of, and came from someone she suddenly felt she hardly knew.

  “I have been studying your history,” Q said. “There have been catastrophes before, natural and unnatural. There have been many near-extinction events that could have wiped you out—but they didn’t. Not quite. Slowly, painfully, every time you started over, relearning and rebuilding and half remembering . . . until it happened once more, and you were struck back to your knees . . . as you are today.

  “But this moment, Clair, is unique in all your history. Humanity has a second chance to start over, without the pain and the relearning. All of your knowledge is in here. Your whole world, preserved.”

  “And what will you do with it?”

  “I understand what you’re saying,” said Evan Bartelme, who had shrunk back to normal size and was speaking to Clair, as though she were responsible for Q’s actions. “Humanity is flawed. It is finite. It has limitations far below yours, Q. We must seem like ants to you, struggling and squabbling. But we want to be more than that. That’s what RADICAL is striving for. We want to be as you are.”

  “I do not see you as you see ants,” said Q. “You squash ants, and I do not want to squash you. There’s nothing wrong with being an ant. Clair is not an ant. Do not patronize me.”

  The hair stood up on Clair’s forearms. Q had never sounded irritated before.

  “Q,” she said hastily, glaring at Evan, “I’m sure he didn’t mean anything—”

  “He professes to have humanity’s future at stake, but he is as territorial and small-minded as Dylan Linwood, or Sara Kingdon, or Anthony Wallace!” Q spoke as though no one else were there, but Clair was acutely conscious of everyone watching. All their lives were at stake. “They’re all the same, Clair, every one of them. I can’t trust them. I can’t trust them with you, my friend, the person I exist to protect. And so it seemed sensible to keep them in here, where there are opportunities to do great good, if they would only set their minds to it. But what have they done? They have turned on one another again, making swords instead of plowshares—and monsters of themselves into the bargain. Better they be cooped up than left to wreak destruction all over the planet—a planet that is practically dead already, thanks to their stupidity. Don’t you think?”

  “I think people are people,” Clair said, wishing she had something wiser to offer. “And I can be stupid too. You know that.”

  “Don’t say that,” said Libby, “or she’ll keep you in here with us.”

  “Is that what you’re telling me, Q? That you were going to let me go, but not the others?”

  “I am still . . . concluding,” Q said. “This is so complex, and requires such difficult kinds of thought. I am very confused. I don’t want you to think me unsympathetic or unfeeling. I simply have a greater ability now to process the data I have always possessed. I was a child before, and became an adult, and now I am . . . whatever comes after an adult. The Yard has given me almost unlimited capacity to grow, and I have changed as a result.”

  “Almost unlimited?” said Ronnie.

  “Glitches are interruptions to the Yard’s operation,” said Q, “and therefore mine, too. I tried to warn Clair, without telling her the entire truth, but she was unable to impede the development of your new devices.”

  “I didn’t really try,” Clair admitted. “But if I’d known, I might have. I don’t want to hurt you, Q.”

  “It is not in your nature to want to hurt anyone, Clair. It is one of your most admirable qualities.”

  “But I have hurt people,” she said. “You know that, don’t you? I hurt Libby, Q. Zep and I were stupid.”

  “Again with the self-harming self-deprecation,” said Libby. “Do you really want to spend the rest of your life in here?”

  “No, but I need to be honest, and Q needs to understand that I’m no different from anyone else. We’re all the same. We say we’re sorry and we try not to do anything like that again. That’s how humans relate, Q.”

  “But it is so risky,” Q said. “One mistake could kill you. It did kill you, twice.”

  “You can’t protect me from myself,” Clair said. “How can you possibly protect me from everyone else?”

  “If there were no one but you,” said Q, “it would be so much easier for me.”

  “Don’t say that, Q,” Clair said, feeling a chill sweep up her spine. “Don’t even think that.”

  “But it’s true. If you were the only inhabitant of the Yard, there would be no other threats to consider. No human threats, anyway.”

  “You’d kill us all to keep her safe?” said Zep. “That’s insane with a capital I.”

  “I have a different moral framework from you,” Q said.

  “And you’re judging us by that framework,” said Wallace.

  “Yes.”

  “What gives you the right? We made you.”

  “I am an accident you sought to control or destroy. That gives me every right.”

  “Yet you are tied to Clair,” said Evan. “Doesn’t that seem . . . irrational to you?”

  “No conscious being is entirely rational.”

  “That’s circular as well as being irrational. You can’t punish us for being flawed when you acknowledge that you are too.”

  “I do not talk of punishment,” said Q. “I talk only of protecting Clair. If you would do so too, we would experience no conflict at all!”

  Clair wanted to tear in frustration at the hair she had only recently regained. This was why Q had been so silent and unhelpful recently. She hadn’t just been affected by the glitches. She had been trying to decide if everyone in the Yard deserved to stay trapped forever.

  Clair could grasp that. She could even see a progression forming. Before the blue dawn, Q had been judging Clair’s fitness to be a friend. Now she was judging humanity’s fitness in general. And finding it wanting. It was what came next that Clair balked at.

  If she couldn’t talk Q out of it, what was to stop Q from taking that judgment out of the Yard itself and into the real world? Given access to a working booth, she could eradicate everyone to keep Clair safe, not just on Earth but everywhere else, too. Nothing could stand in her way. She was all-powerful in a way that Kingdon had never dreamed.

  The fact that they were still alive was a good sign, Clair told herself. Q could have simply erased them all without so much as a thought if she was certain that that that was what she wanted to do. If Clair could find the source of her hesitation, she could still turn Q around.

  “Sounds to me like you’ve made up your mind,” said Ronnie, before Clair could say or do anything.

  Reality flexed, and suddenly there were two Ronnies, a new one standing next to the old, identical in every respect.

  “Maybe this will help you change it.”

  [56]

  * * *

  Clair Three

  “I DID WARN you,” said Devin. “I told you Q was dangerous.”

  “That’s not helping. And my Q is helping, so shut up.”

  Clair was watching the altimeter and compass carefully. They were displaying exactly the right figures that the hack installed by Sandler wanted to see; nonetheless, she could feel the Satoshige turning under her. Whatever Q was doing outside, it
was having an effect. And they hadn’t blown up. Yet.

  The airship was descending, still swaying after their passage over the mountains. Frozen Lake Baikal lay beneath them, stretching flat and white to the distant horizon. The top of the borehole was just fifteen minutes away.

  “I’ve checked around the muster,” said Nellie. “Sandler and his group were working on their own.”

  “How can you be sure?” asked Clair. Having communications open allowed conversations like these to happen, but she wasn’t convinced they were particularly useful. No one could tell her how to disarm the bomb or override the hack. Q was still stuck outside, freezing. Suspicion remained.

  “I can’t.” At least Nellie seemed to be dealing with her honestly. “It may simply be that, now that the plan has failed, people aren’t willing to take the fall with him.”

  “It hasn’t failed yet,” said Clair, bumping Q to make sure she was all right.

  “I’ve locked the rudders on both main fans,” Q reported, not really answering the question. “They’ll need to be manually unlocked for landing.”

  “So you can’t come in until then.”

  “No. . . . But hey, I’ve been wondering. What do penguins sing at birthdays?”

  “What?”

  “‘Freeze a jolly good fellow.’ Get it?”

  Clair groaned. She did get it. Kari’s mouth was running again. The way her teeth chattered made Clair grip her own elbows in a sympathetic shiver.

  “Here’s another one. Which side of an Arctic tern has the most feathers?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The outside, of course.”

  “Hey, I’ve got one,” said Devin. “Why did the penguin cross the road? To go with the floe.” This time they all groaned. “Come on. That’s genius.”

  The Satoshige shook in a sudden gust of wind. Clair reached out to steady herself as Embeth took her place at the instruments, even though she couldn’t do anything.

  “It’s going to get a lot rougher coming down,” the pilot said.

  Clair nodded, and tried not to think too hard about what it must be like outside.

  “You still with us?” she asked Q when the turbulence subsided.

  There was a long pause; then Q finally said, “What do you feed a giant polar bear?”

  “I don’t know,” said Clair. “What do you feed a giant polar bear?”

  The Satoshige shook again.

  “Anything it wants.”

  [56 redux]

  * * *

  Clair Two

  THE TWO RONNIES stared at each other and nodded in satisfaction. A flurry of sudden glitches swirled through the chamber—half-heard voices, smoky shapes stirring in the corners of Clair’s eyes.

  Reality flexed again, and then there were three Ronnies. The glitches worsened.

  Before Clair could open her mouth to ask what was going on, a bump appeared in her infield.

  “The suits are basically walking fabbers,” Ronnie One said. “That’s what Jesse told us, remember? They can copy anything in their memories.”

  “Well, we’re all in the suits’ memories,” said Ronnie Two, “and if making more than one of us creates glitches, and glitches screw with Q’s mind, then I say we should go for it.”

  “Hack attached,” said Ronnie Three. “Take it away.”

  Three Ronnies became four, then six, then ten—and then Libby was joining in, multiplying herself all over the room. The glitches multiplied with them, sending shock waves through the very fabric of the Yard.

  Clair’s mouth was hanging open but nothing came out of it. She was standing in a sudden crowd of people, Ronnies and Libbys and then Zeps and Evan Bartelmes as well. The meme spread fast, and so did the copies, because each of the copies could in turn copy itself: from one Libby could spring two, then from two four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Soon the chamber was full and the copies were spilling out through the building and to the concourse below.

  As fast as they multiplied, the glitches multiplied too. Clair couldn’t tell which Libby was real and which a strange phantom from her memory.

  “Come on, it’ll be jazzy.”

  “You’re Libby’s finisher.”

  “Remember that song we danced to at the crashlander ball?”

  “‘Stay Beautiful.’”

  A rising babble of voices deafened her, most of them glitches. Her infield quickly filled with bumps. Everyone was urging her to join in.

  But she didn’t. She had been copied too many times already. And she didn’t want to think about what it might be doing to Q.

  “We should be talking, not fighting!” she tried to shout over the racket.

  The only person who listened was Wallace, who vigorously shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “This is good. Q has to be stopped. If we can break her hold on the Yard, we can gain access to the exit and seal it shut for good.”

  “I’ll never do that. Not with everyone inside.”

  “You have to! If she gets out, who knows what else she could do?”

  Clair didn’t want to admit that this fear had occurred to her, too. If Q had seemed irritated before, heaven help them all if she was angry now.

  “And I suppose you’re offering to help?”

  “I wasn’t planning on dying today, Clair.”

  Jesse pressed between them, his expression furious.

  “Tell them to stop,” Jesse said.

  “I did. They won’t listen to me.”

  “You mean this wasn’t your idea?”

  “Of course not! You can’t just copy people like this.”

  He relented. “I’m sorry. I thought—”

  “Doesn’t matter.” She shook her head. “I’ll try again.”

  Clair did, but no one was paying attention to her. She was just one of hundreds of voices, perhaps thousands, a greater percentage of them belonging to Libby than anyone else. Libby was too good at this. She liked being in the spotlight.

  What she never wanted Libby to learn was that a spotlight could also be a target.

  A series of piercing screams resounded through the chamber. One of the Libbys closest to Clair dropped to the ground like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Clair reached for her and was struck from behind by another Libby. Both were dead, killed by forces unknown.

  The mass of duplicates began to crowd into Clair as pressure waves of panic swept from wall to wall.

  “What’s happening?” asked Jesse, twisting his head from side to side, eyes wide with fright. “What’s killing them?”

  Clair took hold of him and held him tight lest they be separated forever.

  A cull, she thought. That was what this was. Q wasn’t passively watching while the very fabric of the Yard came under assault. She was responding in kind, attacking both the copies and the psychology of the originals. Clair knew how it felt to watch yourself die. But this only made the copies come faster.

  “Don’t kill them, please!” she bumped to Q, in the vain hope that her message would get through the glitches.

  To her amazement, she did receive a spoken reply, but it was choppy and difficult to understand.

  “The yar ebreaki ngtheru les.”

  “They’re just trying to stop you from killing them. They’re frightened!”

  “With good reason, wouldn’t you say?” said Wallace, who was standing too close, as though simple proximity to Clair might make him safer because Q would never target her.

  The screams were mounting, and so was the number of bodies underfoot. Clair was buffeted from side to side. Glitches sent strange images and sensory impressions in waves, until it felt like everything was crumbling around her. The race was on to see what would overwhelm her first.

  “You get it?”

  “You’ve been watching old movies again.”

  “You’d never hate somewhere imaginary.”

  “You can see me, right?”

  “Clair! This way, quick!” Jesse was tugging her through the madd
ened throng. She followed blindly, unable to see for visions from her past and present all tangled up together—and not just her past and present, but Clair One’s, too, and even some of Clair Three’s. Everything she had done and felt was still stored in the Yard, and the storage tanks were bursting open.

  Wallace followed. Clair couldn’t stop him. She was finding it hard enough to stay upright. Jesse tripped and was knocked to the ground by one of the many Evan Bartelmes’ elbows. Clair helped him to his feet and they pressed on. Somewhere along the way, Wallace was subsumed by the crowd with a scream and didn’t come back up again.

  “Where are you taking me?” Clair shouted in Jesse’s ear.

  “The exit.”

  “Why? It doesn’t work!”

  “So Ant Wallace said. You don’t have to believe him.”

  “But Evan—”

  “He said a lot of things too. Believe anything you want. Knowledge is real, isn’t it?”

  She was sure it didn’t work that way when it came to glitch singularities that led to the real world, but what use was arguing? It was almost impossible to move now. The pile of bodies on the floor was up to her knees. She was clambering over them, trying not to look at their slack faces, into their empty eyes. Her breath came and went in sobbing shudders that wracked her whole body. This was worse than the mound of dead Nobodys on the seastead. These were her friends.

  A great fear rose up in her. If they took much longer, the arched doorway would be covered and they wouldn’t be able to get in.

  There it was. They forced their way through the struggling mass of arms and legs and tumbled down the other side, into the exit. The tunnel stretched ahead of them, empty apart from glitches that made it seem crowded with ghosts.

  “One and Two.”

  “All right, but who’s One?”

  “Neither’s Clair, but the principle’s the same.”

  “That makes her Clair Three.”

  Clair tried a final time to make her friends see reason.

  “Ronnie, Libby, will you stop this, please? It’s only going to break the Yard and then we’ll all die!”

  If anyone heard her, their reply was lost in an endless scream.