Twinmaker t-1

by Sean Williams

  He wasn’t. He was grinning.

  “Danger?” he said. “Like we’re on a picnic right now?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I do. And, you know, maybe this is a good thing, in a way. Maybe it wasn’t really you who shot the dupe back at the safe house.”

  “But what happens if they can’t reverse it? What if . . . ?”

  She hugged herself, thinking terrible thoughts.

  Five days had passed since Libby had used Improvement. Four days for Clair.

  “I’m so frightened,” she said, and burst into tears.

  “Hey,” he said, moving closer. “Hey, don’t. I’m sorry. This isn’t what I wanted. . . .”

  “What did you want? Why did you bring it up?”

  “I had to be sure. I had to know.”

  Clair put her face into her hands.

  “What if I had lied?” she asked through her sobs. “What would you have done?”

  “I don’t know, and you didn’t lie, so it doesn’t matter.” He awkwardly took her into his arms. “It’s okay. You’re going to be all right, I promise.”

  “How do you know? How do you know I won’t go crazy and kill everyone?”

  “I’ve lived with crazy people all my life,” he said, “and I don’t think you’re one of them.”

  She returned his hug, wishing she could stay right there all the way to New York.

  “I’m sorry you’re stuck with me,” he said into her hair. “I bet you wish—”

  She shut him up the only way she could: by kissing him. Only afterward did she think of her puffy eyes and snotty nose. Only afterward did she wonder at how easy it was, compared to Zep. She just put her hands on either side of his face and pulled his mouth to hers. Her lips parted without hesitation and his tongue sought hers, and she was surprised by how gentle it all was. His goatee tickled her. He smelled of engine grease and tasted faintly of mint. But when she closed her eyes, she saw only him in her mind, not the shadow of someone else, and there was no feeling of doing something wrong. Quite the opposite.

  Her heart began to race in an entirely ungentle way, and she didn’t want to believe it at first when she felt him pulling away.

  “What?” she asked, blinking at him.

  “I was just . . . no, forget it.”

  There was a questioning look in his eyes.

  “You’re wondering if that was really me?” she said.

  He blushed. “No. I mean, yes. I mean, I hope it was. I mean . . . Oh God, could I be stupider?”

  She dropped her eyes, feeling her face freeze. The same question occurred to her now, but directed at herself, not him. Just days ago, she had been mooning after Zep, and now here she was, practically throwing herself at another boy. What was she thinking? Was she thinking at all?

  “You’re not the stupid one,” she said, meaning every word. “I’m sorry.”

  Jesse made a sound that might have been a laugh, and somehow she managed the same in reply. It was either that or cry again.

  62

  RAY WHISTLED WHEN they emerged from the four-wheeler, but Clair ignored him, hating the treacherous heat in her cheeks. While Jesse went back to his engine, Clair cracked open the car door again in order to check the plan’s progress. Over two thousand people were watching now, most of them Abstainers. She had lost a lot of crashlanders. Not surprising, she thought. Nothing much was actually happening. Not in front of the drones, anyway. She considered telling the world that she herself had used Improvement and might be in the process of becoming someone else but decided that would only undercut her message. She had to be the girl taking on VIA, no one else.

  She might have lost some crashlanders, but she had gained some train hobbyists and also an entirely new following, one that made her feel uncomfortable. For every action, she knew, there was an equal and opposite reaction, and so for every supporter she gained an objector. They ranged from knee-jerk skeptics, who—like her—simply didn’t want to believe that anything could go wrong with the system everyone relied on, to rabid pontificators intent on eviscerating everything she espoused. Some of them were trolls, provoking arguments in the time-honored fashion of the antisocial, but the vitriol was intense regardless. She had to force herself to read it. Thankfully, Ronnie and Tash and a handful of other supporters were busy defending her, so she didn’t have to respond every time.

  The death threats bothered her most, as they were supposed to. It wasn’t just the nature of the messages—she had already been living under the threat of violence long enough for that to have lost some of its urgency. It was the way she was targeted personally, using data anyone could access: places she went, people she knew, timetables she followed in her normal life. Sometimes her family was mentioned as well, which couldn’t help but make her worry. She hadn’t thought they might be in any more danger too.

  She considered reporting the threats to the peacekeepers and decided in the end not to, not specifically. She put them up into the Air, for all to see. The threat of violence only added to the buzz. And if someone did try to kill her or someone she loved, the story would take even longer to go away. Her ghostly fame would linger.

  Cold comfort, she thought. Then she wondered if that was something she would ordinarily have thought, and thinking that threatened to send her down a slippery slope of self-doubt. She fought it off by remembering how it had felt to kiss Jesse. That had been all her, she was sure of it, as was the confusion she felt now. She wondered if he felt the same knot in the stomach, but didn’t have the opportunity to ask him. There were always people around; there was always something more important to think about. She sensed that he might be deliberately keeping himself busy, and she tried to do the same. They were in the middle of something far too important to muddle with feelings, after all.

  The train passed Pittsburgh and switched to a line that led through the Philadelphia Keys. Once, Turner said, the tracks had gone all the way to Atlantic City, but now that Atlantic City was under the Atlantic, the line stopped six miles earlier, at Pleasantville. There, they would meet the submarine.

  Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Pleasantville, Clair thought. They had once been abstract addresses attached to certain friends and entertainment possibilities, but soon she would have passed through all three of them and the spaces between. In a train car, in real time.

  “I need to send a coded signal to the submariners,” Turner said. “Can Q help me with that?”

  “If you give it to me,” Clair said, “I’ll bump it to Q.”

  He agreed.

  “The signal is ‘No one is coming to Lincoln Island.’ That’s all.” He recited the address, a string of characters that meant nothing to Clair.

  They cracked the door again, and Clair passed the message on. As they waited for a reply, she thought about the message and its connection to submarines. Captain Nemo was probably the most famous submariner in literature, and his name meant no one in Latin. Also, Lincoln Island was where he had died. She hoped that wasn’t a bad omen. On the other hand, nemo was also Greek for I give what is due. So maybe it evened out.

  Q declared that the signal had been delivered, and they shut the door again.

  Turner brewed hot chocolate over a fuel cell as they went over the details of the plan. There would be a short drive to the docks in Pleasantville, during which they would be vulnerable.

  “But nothing will happen, will, it?” Jesse asked. “No one will do anything with the world watching.”

  “Hope for the best,” said Clair, “plan for the worst.”

  “Spoken like a true soldier,” Turner said, opening a map of the Manhattan Isles and moving on to their underwater route along the Jersey peninsula. There were a number of possible landing points, including a seaport on Thirty-fourth Street and another in Brooklyn Heights.

  “The most direct way to get there,” said Gemma, “would be by the flooded subways. “Penn Plaza sits right on top of one of the old stations.”

  “It’ll be seale
d up, surely,” said Ray, “and not very public.”

  “But safer,” said Turner, looking to Clair.

  Clair didn’t want to be the one to decide. Jesse had thrown her with the possibility that her thoughts might not be entirely her own. What if Mallory or someone else was forcing her to make bad decisions, or worse: decisions that might lead them right into a trap? How could she tell the difference?

  “Direct is better,” said Gemma. “A parade might get us attention, but we’d also be more exposed. That makes me nervous.”

  Turner nodded, and with that decision made, the strategy meeting broke up.

  They went back to waiting in their own ways, Turner and Ray playing cards, Gemma sitting alone, Clair and Jesse lying on bedrolls that were still next to each other, although the physical distance between them had taken on a much greater significance now. Jesse settled into a comfortable position on his side, with his right hand under his left cheek. His hair draped like a curtain over his face. One green eye was barely visible, still open, looking at her.

  He whispered, “Was that ‘hope for the best’ line from . . . you know?”

  “No. Arabelle said it once.”

  He looked relieved but also puzzled. “She was never a soldier.”

  “I think she thought she was,” Clair said. “Every second of every day, WHOLE’s fighting the entire world.”

  “Who knows what it’ll look like when they’re done with it?”

  “As long as the dupes aren’t in it any longer, the world will automatically be a better place.”

  Clair felt him shift slightly so his toes touched hers. She resisted the impulse to roll over and fold herself against him. Slowly, his eyelid drooped shut, his breathing slowed, and he was asleep.

  She didn’t want to sleep. Her dreams bothered her. To keep herself awake, she thought about VIA, and the case she was going to make. Murder. Kidnapping. Identity theft. Conspiracy. All manner of information crimes. Mental rape.

  As long as these sound like crimes, she told herself, I’ll know I’m still me.

  63

  THE CAR SLOWED and shook as they passed through Philadelphia, waking Jesse. He was puffy eyed and sluggish, and Clair felt like he looked. They would be at the end of the line in less than an hour.

  It was night outside and the air was bracing. Clair said hello to Q, who had been busy organizing her messages and feeds into a comprehensible form. There were more than she had dared hope, divided between well-wishers and haters. The arguments between both groups were proceeding as well as could be expected, but Clair knew it could be better. Neurological data and insubstantial threats would only fuel the fire so long. She had to give something new to both groups, something that would raise the stakes for everyone.

  She spent fifteen minutes recording a speech about what the world might be like if Improvement were real. Suppose you could step into a booth and emerge looking like a supermodel or a famous actor? What if everyone wanted to look the same or like literally the same person? She could see positive uses for such technology—to fix people after grievous injuries, say, or for gender reassignment—but what about the pranks people might play on their friends? What about all the people who just wanted to be freaks for the sake of it? What about athletes like Zep who trained all their lives only to be beaten by someone who’d used Improvement to make themselves stronger overnight? What about parents who wanted their kids to grow up certain ways, whether the children wanted to or not? And what about criminals who might change everything about themselves—fingerprints, face, eye color, even their genes—in order to escape justice?

  “Imagine that world,” she told her viewers. “If Improvement isn’t stopped, that’s exactly what’s coming.”

  She sent the video to all her followers in the hope that it would be passed on, for good or ill. There were many other interesting things happening in the world, some of them drawing millions, perhaps even billions of viewers. This was small-fry, but it concerned everyone. And every keen glance counted.

  Clair asked about the dupes. Q reported that there had been no sign of them. Perhaps, Clair thought, that was because the people behind them were worried about showing their hand. Or maybe they knew about the bodies being held by the farmers: proof, if needed, that some of them had been copied. For that reason, it made sense for the dupes she knew of to go to ground. As Turner had said, though, she didn’t doubt there would be others. The dupes had been around for at least a year. That was long enough to accrue quite a catalog. Fat, thin, short, tall, old, and—she thought of Cashile with a wince—young.

  Clair exchanged messages with Ronnie and Tash and her parents, who had been hard at work in their own ways.

  “Is there anything else we can do?” Allison asked. “I could meet you at Pleasantville with a change of clothes—even come the rest of the way with you.”

  Clair looked down at her overalls and was momentarily tempted.

  “Thanks, Mom, but that’s okay.” She didn’t want to put her mother in any danger. “You’re claustrophobic, remember? You can’t even open your eyes in a d-mat booth. How would you cope with a submarine?”

  They laughed, albeit a little tearily. Clair found it hard to sign off.

  She leaned back against the rattling door of the car, contemplating the wisdom of trying to contact Libby, when a message arrived from an entirely unexpected source.

  The message was signed Catherine Lupoi, a name she didn’t recognize, but the address indicated that she worked for VIA.

  “Mr. Wallace is eager to meet with you to discuss your concerns,” the message said. “He will expect you tomorrow.”

  Clair had to think for a second before she remembered the name, and when she did, she couldn’t believe it.

  Ant Wallace was VIA’s head of operations. Q had told her that much about him, and a quick search through the Air uncovered a lot more. He had joined the organization as a volunteer twenty years earlier and risen quickly to the very top. He wasn’t an overt publicity seeker, but he was active in several public arenas, from urban planning to modern orchestral music. In particular, he was an advocate for increased research into the biochemical causes of depression and an occasional speaker at rallies urging the OneEarth administration to do more to inform the public on the issue. “Information, not medication,” he was most often quoted as saying. “Suicide is murder, not euthanasia, and we are all accessories.”

  Now he wanted to talk to Clair about Improvement.

  Triumphantly, Clair passed on the message to everyone in the car and then posted it to the Air. The response was immediate. Their numbers spiked as word spread: the head of VIA was meeting with a teenaged girl to talk about the possible consequences of Improvement. Perhaps he would take her grievances seriously. Perhaps he just wanted to dress her down in public. Either way, it was new and interesting.

  Clair’s number reached ten thousand, and the figure was still rising. She was really popping now.

  64

  PLEASANTVILLE HAD AN official population of zero. Literally everyone d-matted in and out from all points across the globe, be it to gamble, to serve, to maintain, or to protect. There were plenty of beds, but no one went to Pleasantville to sleep.

  Clair guessed the sick feeling in her stomach wasn’t so different from that of someone risking everything on a roulette wheel.

  Turner opened the door for the final time as they decelerated into the train station. It was dark outside, two hours before dawn on the sixth day since Clair had heard of Improvement, and a rich ocean smell washed over them like a heavy tide. The engine of their four-wheeler started with a snarl. As soon as the freight car was stationary, Ray maneuvered the vehicle smoothly across the gap between train and station and into the night air outside.

  Clair hung on to a roll bar as they accelerated along the gleaming side of the train. She waved to the drones watching them. There were six of them, not including Q’s, capturing the scene from every possible angle. Three peacekeepers stood between the
train and a dozen young men, who hooted and jeered as the four-wheeler sped by. Drawn by the controversy, and perhaps hoping to make a “spectacle” of themselves as well, they were obviously drunk, but that didn’t take the sting out of their taunts. One held a placard with an image of Clair’s face that started out normal but changed by stages to that of an old woman with missing teeth and a black eye: Improvement was the slogan. One of them threw a rock, but it missed by a large margin. The last Clair saw of him, he was being reprimanded by one of the PKs. At least, she hoped it was a reprimand.

  If I wasn’t me, she asked herself, would I care about this kind of thing? Would I be immune to what people said? Maybe I’d turn around and join them, throwing rocks at the loony Abstainers trying to make trouble for everyone.

  She didn’t want to cause trouble. She wanted the exact opposite.

  They pulled away from the station and into town. Clair had been to the glittering maelstrom of Las Vegas once, on a high school dare. Pleasantville had many of the same qualities: bright flashing lights; exaggerated extravagance, as though that mattered anymore in a world of plenty; old people dressed up like young people and smiling, always smiling. They couldn’t believe their luck, Clair’s grandfather liked to say. They’d survived the Water Wars, and now they were rich.

  On the radiant playground of Fire Road, signs flashed endlessly in every color. The New Showboat, Caesars, the Haven, the King, the Golden Egg. Once every block, she saw the familiar d-mat sign—two circles overlapping, worlds coming together in geometric harmony—an image Clair had never thought would ever make her feel so excluded.

  The four-wheeler approached the docklands from the west. They were mainly decorative, with the odd sailing or cruise vessel rocking undisturbed in a public marina. At the end of the marina, a crowd of thirty or more was waiting.

  This time the jeers were louder and more personal, delivered not by trolls but by protesters wearing masks that lent them all Clair’s features. It was eerie, and she did her best to ignore them as the four-wheeler pushed through their ranks, physically nudging people aside. They called her a fearmonger and agitator, and much worse. Fingers snatched at her. Someone spat. Jesse kicked at a man with Clair’s face who grabbed her hair from behind and tried to pull her from the flatbed. The man let go and fell back into the crowd, laughing. After that, Q’s drone dropped low over Clair and dive-bombed anyone who tried to get too close, whether they seemed physically threatening or not. Clair couldn’t decide if they were genuinely outraged or just wanting to be part of the show. Perhaps a bit of both.