Hollowgirl

by Sean Williams

  “Yes. I would co-opt RADICAL’s resources and begin building booths and powersats to handle the load of all the patterns I have recovered from the Yard. A staggered approach would be best. Infrastructure would be needed to accommodate all these people. You would have to put them somewhere.”

  Clair hadn’t thought that far ahead. Neither New Petersburg nor the South Pole would work, for symbolic reasons as well as practical. “Would it matter where?”

  “No. All you’d need is space for four million, three hundred and eleven thousand, nine hundred and thirteen people.”

  “Huh.” That was a lot of people, but at the same time heartbreakingly few compared to the population of Earth before the blue dawn.

  Q said, “Of course, that’s assuming you brought everyone out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you wouldn’t have to. . . .”

  For a moment Clair didn’t know what Q meant. Then she thought of Wallace, and Mallory, and LM Kingdon, and Nobody, and all the hollowmen. And then her mind reached out to the murderers and rapists and pedophiles and the other criminals accidentally scooped up in Wallace’s net. Out of four million people and change, there would arguably be many who didn’t deserve to come back.

  “Huh,” she said again.

  [61]

  * * *

  A SUDDEN SQUALL whipped snow up around them, making Clair blink.

  “You see the way it is,” said Q. “What would be your decision?”

  “I . . . don’t know. It’s too huge. You can’t ask me to make it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because, well, for starters, nothing like this should be up to just one person. We’d need the Consensus Court.”

  “You and I could form a consensus.”

  “That’s not how it works.”

  “OneEarth doesn’t exist right now. We can make any rules we like.”

  “Okay, then I’m too young to decide something like this.”

  “You are three hundred times older than me.”

  “But surely there’s someone more qualified. . . .”

  “In what way, Clair? Besides, there’s no one else I trust as much as you.”

  “And you wouldn’t try to talk me out of anything if I asked you to erase someone over someone else?”

  “I’d leave that side of things entirely up to you. This is a decision for only you to make.”

  Clair looked down into the hole where the other Q had been interred and thought about Nobody. If he were here right now, would she push him in? For all her fantasies of shooting him, she didn’t think she’d actually be able to. That would be too cold, too deliberate. But wasn’t leaving him in the Yard exactly the same thing? What gave her the right to make that kind of call?

  Q did, apparently.

  “Can you tell me who’s left alive?” Clair asked her.

  “Yes. I have all their names.”

  “I don’t want all of them. Just tell me . . . is Cameron Lee among them?”

  “Yes.”

  There went that hope. If he were already dead, she wouldn’t have had to decide whether or not to let him live.

  “What about Wallace? LM Kingdon?”

  “Both are dead.”

  “And the hollowmen?” She couldn’t be so lucky that Clair One had killed them all.

  “There are nine survivors. Leon Kress, Max Gillon, Koby—”

  “That’s okay. I don’t need their names.”

  She couldn’t judge complete strangers, could she? There might be any number of relatively innocent reasons why someone would work for Wallace and Kingdon. They could have been fooled into thinking the cause was good, or coerced by blackmail, or maybe they suffered from a mental illness. How could she condemn people like that to oblivion?

  Clair kicked a clod of ice into the hole and turned, unable to stand staring at it any longer. Retracing their footsteps toward the wreckage of the Satoshige, with Q matching her pace exactly, she thought harder than she ever had in her whole life.

  This was too much. Too much to process, too much responsibility, too much power for one person, no matter who they were. Wallace and Kingdon would probably have loved it. They would have taken the offer and run with it, uncomplicated by conscience. But Clair wasn’t like them. She didn’t want to become like them. Even in a world governed by consensus, some people had had too much personal influence. It had gone to their heads, and this was bound to go to hers too.

  There was another way of looking at it. Q was offering her the opportunity to restart the world better than it had been—and a world without Nobody alone would undoubtedly be better. She could Improve the world with one simple decision. So why shouldn’t she? Wouldn’t that make things easier in the long run?

  But trying to change things for the better was how everyone had gotten into this mess in the first place. Who was to say what effect saving or destroying even one monster might have on the future, and on her? How could she know what was just and what wasn’t?

  Unexpectedly, bringing the entire human race back from the dead was easier than deciding the fate of a single person.

  “I can’t choose,” said Clair as they passed the wreck of the Satoshige. “And I don’t want anyone to choose for me. I know not choosing is kind of like choosing because it lets some horrible people live, but it’s also the same as doing nothing. If the Yard was the real world, they’d be alive anyway.”

  “So you’ve made your decision? Hypothetically?”

  Clair took a second to check her conscience. Could she deal with knowing that Nobody was still in the world? That wasn’t an easy question to answer, but it was easier than the alternative. She didn’t think she could live with the knowledge that she had become a cold-blooded executioner.

  But could she live with the possibility that Q might not save everyone if she didn’t accept this responsibility?

  She decided she could. If she had to.

  “That would be my decision.”

  Q nodded Libby’s head. “I thought it would be.”

  They walked in silence for a moment. Clair didn’t dare say anything. She suspected that the conversation was rather less hypothetical than Q made out. If she hadn’t already said the wrong thing, she didn’t want to say it now.

  And she didn’t dare begin to hope, for fear of being disappointed again.

  “Very well,” said Q again. “I will do as you say.”

  “You’ll bring everyone back? Really?”

  “Yes. And might I suggest that from now on this conversation be continued at the South Pole? RADICAL should be part of the solution: they might actually volunteer their resources if you ask them. I say ‘you’ not ‘we’ because it is fitting, I think, for you to be the voice of our private consensus. If it appears that I have played too great a hand in your decision . . .”

  “I understand.”

  Clair’s head was spinning. Crazy as it seemed, she might have just saved the human race. Q was already moving on to simple practicalities. Clair was on much firmer ground with those, once she caught up mentally. She was good at planning.

  “And I agree completely,” she said. “Did you hear that they’ve gone back to calling you the entity?”

  “I heard.”

  “We don’t want to freak them out unnecessarily.”

  “Only when it’s necessary, I swear.” Q glanced at her. “And to stop them from interrupting, I switched off their power before I came here. Maybe it’s time to turn it back on.”

  “That’s probably a good idea.” Clair thought of the Bartelme family shivering in their tanklike habitats and felt mildly bad for them.

  Or had Q meant that as a joke? It was hard to tell, sometimes. Hopefully this entire conversation wasn’t meant as some kind of cruel trick.

  She would find out shortly. The borehole station was in view. Embeth and the others came out to meet her, anxious that communications had been shut off and she had disappeared. Clair didn’t know what to tell them, so she said
nothing. She still couldn’t entirely believe it herself.

  When Clair and Q stepped into the booth, they backed away.

  One last jump, she promised herself. Definitely, this time.

  The mirrored doors closed, but the machines didn’t start working immediately.

  “You know how I said that you and I could go exploring the universe?” Q said. “That’s what I think I’ll do next.”

  The thought of Q leaving provoked a pang of sadness, although Clair had expected it. “You won’t stick around to see what happens? It’s going to be quite a soap opera.”

  “I know, but I still need to grow up. It’s probably best if I do that somewhere else. The mistakes I make tend to kill people.”

  “What, the blue dawn? That was me. And so was killing d-mat.”

  “I don’t believe so, Clair. They were entirely my fault.”

  Clair laughed. It made her feel better to think that someone as smart as Q also had problems with self-blame.

  “Listen to us,” she said. “Let’s make a pact: no destroying the world. How hard can that be?”

  “All right,” Q said, opening Libby’s arms for a hug. “We say sorry and we move on,” she said. “That’s what people do.”

  Clair squeezed her back. Around them the machines hummed into life.

  sssssss—

  “Before I go,” said Q into her ear, “I have a present for you.”

  [57 redux]

  * * *

  Clair Two

  —KISSING AS THOUGH it were the first kiss in the universe, and the last and the greatest too, but the fabric of the Yard was turning to amber around them, making every breath a battle, a battle she was steadily losing. With all her strength she strained to keep ahold of him, but Jesse slipped away, and suddenly, with a lurch of her heart, she realized that she couldn’t see or feel him at all. Her thoughts were growing sluggish . . . like cold water slowly . . . freezing.

  “Enough,” said Q.

  —pop

  Suddenly she was standing in a booth. Her clothes were different, and she was being hugged by someone. Not Jesse. But that wasn’t the weirdest detail. Her mind was full of things that hadn’t been there before—things about the world around her, and about herself, as though a doorway had opened up in her mind, a doorway she had never known was there before. Suddenly she knew much more about herself—who she was and who she had been, but not about who she would be, in the future. There were limits to all gifts, even those from someone as remarkable as Q.

  Clair remembered Q saying, “I have a present for you,” but a second ago she had been a different Clair doing something completely different: Clair Two had been running with Jesse, honestly believing that her life was coming to an end. That feeling remained with her. At the same time she had been Clair Three, standing in the borehole station d-mat booth, embracing Q, and feeling a hope not unqualified by grief. Those two experiences and emotions mixed together like coffee and cream, forming a complex spiral of indescribable complexity.

  There was a third part of the pattern.

  A second ago Clair One had been dying, which was the strangest memory to hold entangled with the others. She had been lying on the floor of Wallace’s office with a grenade in her hand, realizing that Clair Two had been the same as her all along, bracing herself for a death that was unexpected but entirely of her own choosing.

  Now all three were stitched together in one incredible tapestry. Nothing had been lost; every moment was retained, even the ones that overlapped. When Clair One argued with Clair Two in the observatory, she remembered both sides. When Clair Three and Clair Two discussed the death of Clair One, she remembered both sides. All sides were the same and yet different. It was confusing and wondrous, a wonderful confusion of Clairs, of herself, of lives unlived and deaths undone, leaving her feeling a little bit older, a little bit broader, and a lot surer of herself.

  So many different experiences seen through the same eyes . . . but the eyes were constant, which was what mattered. And the feelings—determination, despair, hope, loss, triumph—were all hers. Perhaps it was time to stop worrying about who she was and start simply being herself.

  Not Clair 1.0 or Clair 7.0. Clair complete.

  Now that she was done, the rest of the world would soon follow. Libby, Zep, Tash, Ronnie, her mother . . . and Jesse, most important of all.

  “Clair, you’re shaking,” said Libby. “Are you all right?”

  She pulled back and stared into the face of her best friend, who, despite the confusion in her own eyes, was defiantly, brilliantly, amazingly her.

  Clair said, “Yes, now I will be.”

  [epilogue]

  * * *

  Clair Complete

  “HERE’S A NEW one,” Jesse said. “Still think I’m wrong?”

  Clair had called him fifteen minutes ago, knowing he’d be awake even though it was full night in New New Petersburg. She had been having a dream about lightning trying to get through the walls of her ultramax cell, but had successfully woken herself before screaming. Slowly and surely, she was learning to fight the nightmares.

  Stretching from one side of the bedroom to the other, the window next to Clair provided a perfect view over Daly Channel to San Bruno. Golden sunlight poured across the bed like honey. Jesse’s voice had been a comforting ebb and flow in her augs, very nearly lulling her back to sleep.

  Now this.

  She blinked on the media patch in her infield and watched the short video he had sent.

  “Everyone got out of the Yard, right?” a young woman was saying. She looked about fifteen, with long green hair and matching eyes. “That’s what they tell us. But it’s not true. There’s one guy they never let out. The worst terrorist of all, they say. But really they’re just jealous. He’s smarter than all of them combined, and he’s found a way to hack into the Air.

  “If you want to hear the truth, here’s what you do. Say his name three times inside a d-mat booth. The lights will flash and you’ll see him in the mirrors, clear as day. And you know what that means, right? You can’t hack a mirror unless it’s a simulation. So none of us got out. We’re all still in the Yard. Everything they tell you is a lie.

  “Remember this. Next time you’re in a booth, say his name three times: Cameron Lee.”

  Clair groaned and buried her head under a pillow.

  “It’s too early for this crap.”

  “Are you sure it’s crap?”

  “Of course,” she said. “If Nobody were alive, he wouldn’t be haunting d-mat booths. He’d be coming after me, and Kari would have caught him by now. If anyone can find him, she can.”

  “Forget Nobody,” said Jesse. “What about It’s all a lie? Could she be right?”

  “What, that we’re still in the Yard and only think this is real?”

  “Yeah, that.”

  “It’s just a story, Jesse.”

  “Yeah, but what if it isn’t?”

  She sighed, wishing she could go back to sleep.

  “I saw the ruins of the world with my own eyes,” she said. “I’m pretty certain it was real.”

  “Clair Three did, but then she went through a d-mat booth and could’ve ended up anywhere.”

  “Next you’re going to tell me they faked the moon landing.”

  “I’m not talking about ‘they.’ I’m talking about Q.”

  She had to admit that he had a point. People weren’t organized enough to fake something so big so well. But with Q, anything was possible.

  “On the assumption that it might be true,” Jesse went on, “I tried ripping home. It didn’t work.”

  A shame, she thought. The bed was empty without him. “That settles it, then.”

  “Not at all. Q might have fixed the rips and added a new rule to the Yard in order to stop anything like glitches from forming again. That fits with the hack, right?”

  She mulled this over. One of the first things people had discovered while rebuilding civilization was that the new d-mat
network didn’t work the same way it used to. A subtle but very powerful hack operated in every machine, new or old, to forbid the transmission of children under fifteen and all forms of duping or resurrection. It was as though someone or something had rewritten the laws of physics, making it impossible for anyone to abuse the system the way Ant Wallace had.

  Clair had no doubt who was behind it. No one who knew Q had a doubt.

  At first she’d thought it another gift, but recently she’d come around to thinking of it as a challenge. Crack this puzzle, Q was saying, and maybe you’ll be worth talking to. That certainly fit with the last message Q had sent her.

  Needless to say, RADICAL was working hard on the challenge, if such it was. They had a lot of people in storage they wanted to bring back, and until they managed it they would remain a minority voice in the emerging consensus that Devin liked to call “the radical whole.”

  Clair wondered if that was an unintended consequence of the hack, or something else Q had meant quite deliberately.

  “Maybe it is true,” she said. “Maybe we are living in a new improved simulation with Q watching us like a god. So what? I don’t see that we can do anything about it.”

  “True,” he said. “But if Nobody is alive, maybe he knows. He had to end up somewhere.”

  She slid the pillow away and stared, grimacing, out into the bright morning. There would be no more sleep this morning, and perhaps none tonight if she didn’t change the subject.

  “When are you coming home? I miss you.”

  “Day after tomorrow,” he said. “We’ve finished programming the fabbers and set them loose. The conversion rate isn’t as high as we’d like—one fish per thirty pounds of ash—but the breeders are actually more efficient than we expected. In two years, the ocean will be blue again.”

  He talked on, happily distracted. They worked in completely different spheres—he and his mom traveling the world, encouraging isolated Abstainers to help in the recovery efforts, she in San Francisco, where Kingdon’s coconspirators were facing trials. That meant they were apart a lot, but it was better that than breaking their own personal consensus: fabbing okay, d-mat definitely not. Between their example and the mysterious d-mat hack, Clair hoped the next generation would treat the technology surrounding them with more respect, even if it was occasionally inconvenient.