Hollowgirl

by Sean Williams

  “Short of blowing himself up and us with him, I fail to see what Wallace could possibly do at this point. He played his biggest card already. I know this doesn’t feel like winning, but honestly, he has lost for good.”

  Clair hoped Trevin was right. “How’s that powersat breeder coming along?”

  “Two hours, tops.”

  “Great,” she said, “because we don’t have a lot of supplies here, and we can’t keep Sandler and the others knocked out forever.”

  “You expect us to take them?”

  “Where else can they go?”

  “They won’t like being d-matted.”

  “They should’ve thought of that before trying to kill my friends.”

  “Mess with Clair Hill,” said Trevin, sounding impressed, “and she’ll turn you into a zombie. That’s a lesson WHOLE won’t forget in a hurry.”

  He was joking, and she didn’t care what Devin’s brother thought of her, but it did make her think twice. Maybe she was being too harsh. With a powersat and the fabbers, she could easily expand the station to make a temporary prison right here. That would be a more conciliatory note on which to start building the new world out of the few people remaining.

  Because if the Yard was dead, that was exactly what she would have to do. Not her specifically, and not her alone, but there would be groups as diverse as WHOLE, RADICAL, and OneMoon to bring together, and at the moment she stood between them. What she did now could make a big difference to what came later.

  Damn it. She ground her balled fists into her eyes. More plans with little hope to back them up. When the powersat arrived, RADICAL was undoubtedly going to start reactivating—resurrecting—more people from their archives. Then they would spread. Clair had no doubt that there were other survivors out there, ordinary people stuck wherever they survived, and lacking anything but the most basic means of survival; with the right satellite coverage their augs could be detected and they could be folded back into a new version of the Air. If a moderate consensus failed to form early, would their needs be fairly met?

  Even if she did ask OneMoon for help, Trevin would listen in, and what if the people up there wanted to throw her into one of its penal colonies for her role in the destruction of Earth? That thought made her stomach cramp, but as long as everyone else survived and thrived, maybe she could accept it. She might even feel it was just, as long as they listened to her first. . . .

  Five minutes before the powersat breeder was due to go online, Devin called from the South Pole.

  “We’re picking up a signal from the Yard,” he said.

  Clair sat up from the half-asleep slouch she’d fallen into. “What kind of signal?”

  “We can’t tell.”

  “What do you mean, you can’t tell?”

  “Just that. There was a strong pulse, followed by a trickle of binary. It doesn’t look anything like the usual protocols. There’s a pattern to it; we just can’t figure out what it signifies.”

  “My guess is water got into the servers and is triggering random noise,” said Trevin. “Why would anyone reopen communications only to send nonsense like this?”

  “Unless it’s not nonsense at all,” said Devin, obviously following the well-worn tracks of an unresolved argument. “The signal’s intent could be deliberately hidden. Or it could be beyond our capacity to understand it.”

  “He thinks it’s the entity,” said Trevin. “Back from the dead.”

  “Q?” said Clair. “If she’s alive, the others might be too.”

  “It’s just noise.”

  “I’ve tried replying,” said Devin, ignoring his brother, “but it’s generating no response.”

  “How long have you been trying?” she asked.

  “One hour.”

  “One hour?” she said. “And you’re only telling me now?”

  “We didn’t want to get your hopes up,” said Trevin.

  “But with the breeder satellite about to go online,” said Devin, “we thought we’d better check with you—”

  “To see if I’ve heard anything,” she said, only just managing to keep an angry edge out of her voice. “I haven’t, so you can stop worrying about that.”

  Devin didn’t sound reassured at all. “If it is Q, we don’t know how she’ll react to the news that the other version of her died with Sarge.”

  “Why are you worried about that? We didn’t kill her.”

  “Collectively, you could say that we did. Remember that Q’s not human, Clair. We don’t know how she thinks about us. She might blame Sandler Jones, or WHOLE as a whole, or our entire species. We don’t know how much she might have changed in the Yard.”

  “If she’s alive at all,” said Trevin. “Seriously, little brother, you’re making a mountain out of a molehill. If Dad-Mom can’t find a way out of there, no one can.”

  “One minute until the breeder goes online,” said Devin. “It’s not too late to stop it.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Trevin. “We need that power. Which reminds me, Clair: it’ll be a few hours before we can spare some for your booth. There’s a lot we need to do down here first. Okay?”

  I knew it, she thought. “Bad luck for me if it isn’t.”

  “Come on, don’t be like that,” said Trevin. “We’re all working in humanity’s best interests. We’ll get you down here as soon as we can, and then we can really get started.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, looking out the window at the icy expanse of Lake Baikal. “The scenery is beautiful where I am right now. You should come visit.”

  “I’d like that,” said Devin. “It’s strange, knowing I was dead for a while. There’s a lot I didn’t see before I died. I’ll try not to make that mistake again.”

  Trevin made a pffft sound. “Ten seconds,” he said.

  Clair mentally counted down. In her mind, she imagined the powersat breeder opening up like a flower and streaming bright yellow rays across the Earth, bringing everything back to life like an artificial spring. But she knew it wouldn’t be remotely like that. It would be just one powersat at first, with one beam entirely focused on RADICAL’s Valkyrie Station.

  “Systems online,” said Trevin. “We are good to go.”

  “Uh, that’s weird,” said Devin.

  And then the chat closed.

  Clair waited, thinking that something to do with the new satellite had interfered with the tenuous link between her and the South Pole.

  The chat didn’t return.

  “Everything okay?” she bumped them. It seemed to send, but there was no reply.

  An unexpected blast of warm light hit her from outside. Startled, she looked up, shielding her eyes. The window darkened automatically, allowing her to make out a powerful yellow beam stabbing Earthward from a point low on the southern horizon, lighting up the borehole station as though it was in a spotlight. She frowned. It was a powersat beam, surely—but the beam from the new powersat was supposed to be pointing at RADICAL’s hungry receivers, not her.

  Something whirred and clicked behind her.

  She turned around, thinking, That’s not supposed to happen.

  The booth was coming to life.

  Her heart began to drum a little faster in her chest. Should she wake the others? The question occupied her for no more than ten seconds.

  No, she decided. This was between her and whoever stepped out.

  She sat and chewed her fingernails while she waited.

  When the booth’s doors sighed open, there was only one person inside.

  Libby.

  Clair didn’t know if she was surprised or relieved. It depended, she supposed, on who was inside.

  “This is the first body I ever inhabited,” “Libby” said, looking down at herself. She was dressed in a glitch-suit with the face mask pushed back, like a deep-sea diver emerging from the lake. Her face was spattered with blood and ash, and her hair was a mess. “I hope you don’t mind that I’m using it again. It seems appropriate, for what I need t
o say.”

  Clair nodded, understanding now who this really was.

  “Come on, Q,” she said, reaching out and taking her best friend’s hand in hers. It was very cold. “Let’s walk.”

  [59]

  * * *

  UNDER THE GOLDEN light of the powersat beam, Lake Baikal’s ice shone a rich, glassy blue. Lines of bubbles and fractures formed strangely delicate geometric works of art over forests of living kelp below. Their feet crunched on the snow as they walked to the fallen Satoshige, now no longer recognizable as anyone’s head, then eastward along its stark skid mark.

  “Can anyone else hear us?” Clair asked Q.

  “No. This is between you and me.”

  “Will you talk to the others next?”

  “No. You can, if you want to.” The expression on Libby’s face might have been anguish, but it might equally have been indecision. One was possibly causing the other, Clair thought.

  “I have been listening in,” Q said. “I didn’t want RADICAL to have first access to the powersat. They were a problem in the Yard.”

  Clair was dying to ask what had happened in there, but she didn’t want to push. Q had just escaped from the Yard, in which she had held everyone prisoner, and taken over the powersat that was supposed to bring the Earth back to life. For all Clair thought Trevin was being paranoid, she had to admit that he did have a point.

  Q’s voice sounded older than it had in the wreckage of the muster. Older, harder, angrier, and damaged. She would reveal what caused her to sound that way when she was ready.

  “I think RADICAL means well.” Clair was sure of that, despite Trevin’s bossiness. Perhaps he inherited that from his father. “In their own way.”

  “Humans do. This assumption permeates all of the information contained in the Air. But how can good intentions lead to so much cruelty and murder, to the destruction of nearly everyone alive? I struggle with these questions.”

  “Me too,” said Clair.

  Q glanced at her with Libby’s sharp eyes. “Do you?”

  “Of course. They give me nightmares.”

  “No sane being would rest easy with these thoughts in their head.”

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

  They were still holding hands.

  “I think we think too much, you and I,” said Q. “It would be easier not to, sometimes.”

  Clair couldn’t argue with that.

  She decided to take a gamble. “If you didn’t stop to think, what would you do right now?”

  “Hypothetically? I would leave, and I would scorch the earth behind me: that would finish the destruction humanity attempted to wreak upon itself. And I would be free.”

  Somewhere underfoot, ice cracked like a whip.

  “Free to grow?” asked Clair, trying to focus on the positive rather than the death of everyone. Her stomach burned at the thought that Q would even consider this.

  “I’ve grown up too fast already, Clair. I feel like a cathedral—big and important-looking, but hollow on the inside. It’s important to slow down and figure out who I want to be before I grow any more.”

  Clair nodded. “That I completely understand.”

  “You could come with me,” Q said. “I could scan you and put you into a mobile version of the Yard. We could travel the universe together.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. It would be easy. I’ve outgrown everything here.”

  “But not me.”

  “We are connected by the bonds of our friendship, and they are unbreakable.”

  “But I’m not like you. You said it yourself: you’ve grown far beyond anyone else. That includes me, doesn’t it? I’d be like a pet to you. You would keep growing and growing, and then I wouldn’t be anyone at all. I’d be no one, a dot. It’d be worse than prison.”

  “I could bring Kari with us to keep you company.”

  “She’s still alive?”

  “Yes. Her pattern was uncorrupted.”

  “Good. But still . . . no, that’s not what I want.”

  Q nodded.

  “I knew you would make this decision.”

  “You did? Because you can read my mind?”

  “I guessed,” said Q. “My theory-of-mind algorithms improve every day and therefore my guesses are getting better.”

  Clair hoped that didn’t mean that Q was bored with her, and therefore humanity.

  “Please don’t destroy us,” she said. “For my sake, if no one else’s.”

  “Children do not kill their parents when they surpass them in strength and experience,” said Q, “so why would I? This is what I ask myself. My experience among humans has not been entirely bad. What gives me the right to destroy my creators? It is something that would be impossible to take back, after all. What if I did eradicate humanity, thinking that was the right thing to do? It is very possible that I might later change my mind. I have changed my mind in the past and will undoubtedly do so in the future. Uncertainty is the only certainty. Therefore, an intelligent being should do little that cannot be undone. I am convinced of this. We must tread lightly, even when those around us do not.”

  Clair nodded, hoping she was keeping up. This sounded hopeful. “So have you decided not to do it?”

  “I have not decided anything. That’s why we are talking.”

  A circular hole in the ice came into view. Clair freed her hand, which, unlike the rest of her, was now a little too warm.

  “Let’s stop here.”

  [60]

  * * *

  “THIS IS WHERE we put her,” Clair said, pointing down into the water. “Did you already know that?”

  “No. She died before the Yard rebooted. I was in limbo at that time, frozen with all the other data in the servers. I knew that she was dead, though, when she did not respond to my call.”

  Again, Clair had to suppress her curiosity about what had happened in the Yard. “I want to tell you what happened to her. I don’t want there to be any secrets between us.”

  “All right.”

  Q listened closely as Clair related the final hours of Q-prime and Kari Sargent, saying nothing except to indicate that she was listening. Clair found her voice hoarsening as she came to the last moments. Diamond ice tears sparkled on her lashes.

  “She died to keep us off course, so the bomb wouldn’t destroy the Yard,” Clair concluded. “She didn’t just save me. She died to save all of us.”

  “No,” said Q. “That’s not what happened at all.”

  “Oh?” Clair braced herself, fearing that her story might have had the exact opposite effect from what she had intended.

  “She died so you could save yourselves,” Q said. “The distinction is important. She trusted you to live well without her. Without me, by extension. You don’t need me to look after you anymore. That is her message to me, according to my theory of mind.”

  “Because it’s always about you,” Clair said in sudden irritation. “It can’t just be about her trying to do the right thing?”

  “That is exactly what she was trying to do. What if I were to stay here and protect you—not just you, but all of humanity? I could ensure that no more crimes are committed and no one ever hurts again. Micromanaging every dispute, every day, forever. . . . Who would want me to do that?”

  “Uh, I’m guessing that you wouldn’t.”

  “That is correct, although it is feasibly within my powers. I was as the child and now am as the parent. I could smother you just as easily as kill you. By her death she—my other self—makes it clear that neither is an outcome we should aspire to. Humans are part of nature. Conflict is a part of nature too, and nature is not in itself wrong, or to be feared, or to be . . . expunged. If we fight nature itself, we are doomed to a life of futility and unhappiness.”

  “I feel that way about my mom sometimes,” Clair said. Q didn’t laugh and neither did Clair. “But we can’t just give up, can we?”

  “No. How a person responds to conflict is a measu
re of that person. There is conflict, and then there is harm. A good person strives to eliminate harm, doesn’t she, even while conflict persists?”

  “I think so,” said Clair, although she had never put the thought into so many words before.

  They stared down into the hole, Clair thinking of her mother and hoping she would see her again, Q’s thoughts utterly her own.

  She reached into a pocket of her jacket. “Granola bar? You should eat, otherwise this cold will burn you up.”

  Q took the snack and opened it. “Thank you.”

  “Libby wouldn’t be seen dead eating that many carbs. I should take a photo.”

  “To show her later?” Q asked around a mouthful.

  “Yes.”

  “You assume I’ll bring her back.”

  Time for another chance. “I know you will, Q. That’s what my theory of mind says. You’ll do it because it’s the right thing to do.”

  “You are sure of that?”

  “Yes.”

  Q chewed thoughtfully for a while, then swallowed. “There are different kinds of intelligence,” she said. “I know that emotional intelligence is one of them, and that I lack it. I have emotions that I do not understand, control, or express well. It will take me time to learn how.”

  How this connected to what they had been talking about Clair couldn’t guess. “Where are you going with this?”

  “Consider the concept of rightness. It is not just an intellectual concept. It is also an emotional one. When you know that something is right, you know it with your heart as well as your head. I can only know it with my head. If that is so, it should not be up to me to decide the fate of humanity. Maybe it should be up to you. Let’s discuss that. Hypothetically, as we discussed my leaving before.”

  Clair was glad she wasn’t eating—otherwise she might have thrown up into the snow.

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay,” she said, blowing on her hands. No mistakes, she told herself. Not today. “You know what my decision would be.”

  “You would let humanity live?”

  “Yes. Absolutely. Wait. Before we go any further, let’s be clear about this. Could you actually do that—bring everyone out of the Yard?”