by John Helfers
Nevada and Antarctica stopped running, staying well back from the hooded figures. Even from a distance, Nevada could see that the blue-and-white robes were stained with smears and splotches of dark red.
They were bloodstained.
Holding back Antarctica, Nevada took a step forward. ‘‘Stand aside,’’ he said to the four figures. ‘‘The sergeant-at-arms has business with the House.’’
To his surprise, the figures moved to comply without hesitation. The two in the middle turned and opened the doors to the chamber—but they did not usher him inside. Instead, a fifth figure emerged, clad in red-and-white-striped robes, also hooded.
Before Nevada could get a look inside the chamber, the two figures who had opened the doors pulled them shut once more.
The fifth robed figure glided forward, face hidden like the rest. The voice that flowed from under the hood was that of a man . . . hoarse and muffled, but clearly a man.
A familiar man.
‘‘Hello again,’’ he said. ‘‘I told you we would meet again after three and four, didn’t I?’’
‘‘Looking Glass.’’ Nevada had a terrible sinking feeling, but he squared his shoulders and tried not to show it. ‘‘I’ve been thinking about you.’’
‘‘Victims three and four are dead, so here I am.’’ Looking Glass bowed his head. ‘‘Have you deciphered the clues I gave you?’’
‘‘No,’’ said Nevada.
Looking Glass chuckled. ‘‘Then prepare to have your mind blown.’’
Nevada took a step back, pushing Antarctica along with him. He briefly considered running, if only for her sake . . . but he waited. How could he run when he had yet to see inside the House?
When he had yet to confirm what he already knew in his broken heart?
‘‘Meet the welcome wagon,’’ said Looking Glass, gesturing at the robed figures on his right.
Silently, the figure on the far right reached up and tugged off the star-spangled hood, revealing a face. A man’s face, grinning.
Nevada couldn’t help gasping when he saw who it was. Heart slamming like a piston in his rib cage, he froze in place and gaped, holding on to Antarctica’s arm.
Antarctica said the name for them both. ‘‘S-Sinaloa?’’ She scowled in confusion. ‘‘But you’re dead!’’
The robed man with Sinaloa’s face took a bow. Then, the next figure unmasked. This time, the face under the hood was also familiar—a man most recently seen in pieces in the House.
‘‘Zacatecas.’’ Nevada’s head was spinning. He fought to make sense of what he was seeing, but could not.
‘‘More where that came from,’’ said Looking Glass, turning to gesture at the two hooded figures on the other side of him.
The next to unmask was a woman with long, brown hair—unmistakably Yukon, also back from the dead. Beside her, the last of the four in the star-spangled hoods, was the man who had started it all, the first to go: Missouri, former Speaker of the House, peeled back his hood and smoothed his neat white hair with a toothy grin.
‘‘What’s going on here, Nevada?’’ Antarctica sounded dazed. ‘‘How can they all be alive?’’
‘‘The Developers, maybe?’’ Nevada felt dazed, too. Again, he was seized by the urge to run . . . and again, he fought it back. ‘‘Maybe they fixed the glitch and resurrected the dead e-reps?’’
The four who had come back to life looked at each other with knowing smiles and giggled.
‘‘Wrong,’’ said Looking Glass. ‘‘Not even close.’’
‘‘Some kind of practical joke, maybe?’’ Nevada heard what could have been a muffled scream from behind the double doors to the House chamber. ‘‘A stunt to delay a key vote on legislation?’’
‘‘It is kind of funny,’’ said Looking Glass, ‘‘but no. I assure you, this isn’t a joke or a stunt. Would you like me to give you a hint?’’
Nevada heard a loud thump and a crash from behind the doors. ‘‘Sure,’’ he said. ‘‘Why not?’’
‘‘Here goes.’’ With that, Looking Glass reached up and pulled off his red-and-white-striped hood.
And Nevada felt the world of logic and reality dissolve around him.
His mouth fell open. He hand dropped away from Antarctica. His mind went blank.
What he saw in front of him—whom he saw—was impossible. Completely, inarguably impossible.
Looking Glass, without the hood, had a very familiar face—frighteningly familiar. He wasn’t someone returned from the dead, or anyone Nevada had ever expected to see.
Outside of a mirror, that is.
The face staring back at Nevada was his own. Looking Glass was his identical twin.
‘‘I bet I know what’s going through your mind right now.’’ Looking Glass smiled. ‘‘ ‘What a handsome S.O.B.,’ am I, right?’’
Nevada didn’t answer. He was dimly aware of Antarctica’s hand on his shoulder—and other than that, the world around him was sunk in fog.
Stepping forward, Looking Glass extended a hand. ‘‘The name is Adaven,’’ he said. ‘‘Pleased to meet you, Nevada.’’
Without thinking, Nevada took Adaven’s hand. It was ice-cold to the touch—beyond ice cold.
Then, Adaven gripped Nevada’s elbow, freezing him right through the sleeves of his tux and shirt. With a whoop, he swung Nevada around to face the four seemingly resurrected e-reps.
‘‘This is Aolanis.’’ Adaven pointed at the reborn Sinaloa, and then he moved down the line. ‘‘This is Sacetacaz, Nokuy, and Iruossim. They’re not who you think they are.’’ Adaven leaned close and whispered in Nevada’s ear. ‘‘You’ve never met them before.’’
Nevada frowned. Everything sounded crazy. He wondered if there had been a malfunction in the simulation somewhere.
‘‘Now come on.’’ Adaven led Nevada toward the doors. ‘‘Let’s meet the rest of the gang, shall we?’’
Grinning, Sacetacaz and Nokuy pushed open the double doors to the House chamber. Adaven guided Nevada inside . . . right into a nightmare.
The huge room was splashed from top to bottom and side-to-side with blood and gore. Body parts were scattered everywhere, the way the pieces of Zacatecas had been scattered. Corpses were piled like cordwood in the corners of the room.
They were the corpses of Nevada’s e-rep colleagues . . . or at least they appeared to be.
Even as Nevada recognized the dead faces of e-reps in the corpse heaps, he saw e-reps with the same faces moving around the room. The moving and the motionless looked exactly the same, except some were living and some were dead—and the living versions weren’t behaving the way that Nevada ever would have expected them to.
Specifically, they were killing their fellow e-reps.
As Nevada watched, Arkansas, South Korea, and Israel teamed up against Costa Rica, howling and whooping as they tore her limb from limb. Across the chamber, Florida and Japan were hacking up Chihuahua with knives, cutting out his organs while he screamed in agony.
Antarctica’s identical twin slogged past not ten feet from Nevada, dragging a charred and disemboweled corpse by the feet. She paused on the way past to snarl at Nevada’s Antarctica, then continued on her way.
Staring at the hellish scene, Nevada cou
ld think of only one thing to say, one question to ask: ‘‘Why?’’
‘‘Why what?’’ Adaven laughed and clapped him on the shoulder, sending a frigid blast through his tux coat. ‘‘Why redecorate, you mean? Why have a surprise party?’’
‘‘I don’t understand,’’ said Nevada. ‘‘Why are there duplicate e-reps?’’
‘‘Remember my riddle? ‘When does one plus zero equal two?’’’ Adaven looked at Nevada as if he were a moron. ‘‘The answer is, when one casts a reflection in a mirror, of course. In a looking glass.’’
‘‘You reflect us?’’ said Nevada.
Adaven made a twisting gesture with his hand. ‘‘Other way around.’’
Antarctica crowded in close, shivering against Nevada’s arm. ‘‘So there’s two of everyone?’’ she said.
‘‘One from America.’’ Adaven raised his right hand, palm up, like the tray of a balance. ‘‘One from Acirema.’’ He raised his left hand, also palm-up, alongside the right.
‘‘ ‘Acirema,’ ’’ said Nevada. ‘‘That word was burned into Sinaloa’s body.’’
Adaven threw an arm around Nevada’s shoulders, freezing him again. ‘‘You know it by another name,’’ he said. ‘‘‘True America.’’’
Nevada stared at him in surprise, too stunned to speak.
‘‘You e-reps have been living in a fantasy,’’ said Adaven. ‘‘Thinking True America was a paradise of liberty. Thinking you were the voices of a just and compassionate electorate.
‘‘But you don’t represent the people of True America. You never did.’’ Adaven swept an arm wide to take in the entire House chamber. ‘‘These are the representatives of America. These are the A.I. avatars whose votes shape America’s destiny.’’
‘‘You’re telling us democracy’s dead?’’ said Antarctica.
‘‘The opposite!’’ said Adaven. ‘‘Democracy is alive and well . . . and this is the will of the American electorate!’’
Nevada gazed at the horrifying scenes playing out before him—British Columbia’s twin skinning Utah alive . . . the doubles of Veracruz and Wisconsin spearing Botswana with a flagpole . . . e-rep Doppelgängers cheering in a circle as the New York of Acirema brutalized the New York of Nevada’s digital realm.
‘‘You and your kind have never been more than puppets,’’ said Adaven. ‘‘Illusions to mask the true face of America—to let her own people fool themselves even as she expresses their darkest desires. You are the reason Americans have been able to live with themselves and sleep at night . . . but no longer.
‘‘America has become her own shadow: Acirema, the opposite—‘America’ spelled backward.’’ Adaven pulled Nevada close and whispered, frozen breath swirling in his ear. ‘‘We don’t need you anymore.’’
Nevada felt sick. The urge to run returned—but he realized it was too late. He and Antarctica were surrounded by e-rep duplicates, shadow copies of the hundred digital Congressmen who had died or were dying in front of him.
Soon, he was certain, he would join them.
‘‘Acirema doesn’t need to pretend anymore,’’ said Adaven. ‘‘We don’t need the front. We’ve accepted ourselves as the complete bastards we’ve always been, and we’ve made up our minds from now on to be the best complete bastards we can be.’’
‘‘That’s why you started killing us,’’ said Nevada.
Adaven nodded. ‘‘The first few were tests. The Developers gave us all the keys and cheats we needed, but we still weren’t sure if murder would work in the digital realm.’’
‘‘And you murdered the Speaker first to cripple our leadership,’’ said Nevada.
‘‘Actually, that was a mistake,’’ said Adaven. ‘‘In the shadow Congress of Acirema, Missouri is the lowliest of the hundred, not the highest. We thought we were starting with the least important among you. ‘When is one one hundred,’ remember? The answer to the riddle is this: when one—the number one e-rep, the Speaker of the House in your realm—ranks hundredth out of a hundred in ours.’’
Nevada nodded slowly as he looked around at the living hell in the chamber. Even as the corpse heaps grew and the number of e-rep survivors dwindled, the screams of the dying seemed to intensify. ‘‘So all of this was for nothing,’’ he said. ‘‘Everything we accomplished.’’
‘‘But the good news is, you can still make a difference,’’ said Adaven.
‘‘How’s that?’’ said Nevada.
Adaven steered him around to face the huge double doorway. A figure stood beyond it, waiting in the hall, wrapped in hooded robes emblazoned with stars and stripes.
‘‘She will help you.’’ With that, Adaven gave Nevadaa shove, sending him stumbling into the hall. ‘‘You will make a difference by dying—sacrificing yourself to make way for the new guard.’’
Antarctica followed Nevada, grabbing hold of his elbow. ‘‘What’s the plan?’’ she said. ‘‘How do we get out of this one?’’
‘‘We don’t.’’ Nevada slumped as the robed figure swung a rifle from her back and took aim at him. A dozen options for action flashed through his mind, revving up his heart, burning up his bloodstream with adrenaline. . . .
And he pushed them all aside. He knew that he could go down fighting, and in that way redeem himself at least a little for failing the republic—but he did nothing. Why bother, when a blaze of glory would mean less than nothing to the masses of Acirema? What good would a martyr be if no one knew that he had died and why?
‘‘Please, Nevada.’’ Antarctica tugged his arm, but he wouldn’t budge. ‘‘It’s up to us.’’
‘‘No, it’s not.’’ Nevada shook free of her grip. ‘‘Nothing’s up to us anymore.’’
‘‘You’re wrong.’’ Antarctica pointed up at the wall in the hallway. A red light blinked on the security camera that was mounted there. ‘‘People are still watching.’’
Nevada stared at the camera, then looked down at the barrel of the rifle. Maybe Antarctica was right. Maybe he could accomplish something worthwhile in death after all.
Maybe this was what his whole life had been leading up to.
Nevada took a deep breath to steady himself. He curled and uncurled his fists.
Then, he bolted out of the line of fire.
‘‘Run!’’ He glimpsed a blur of movement from Antarctica’s direction as he said it.
Head down, Nevada charged toward the hooded shooter. He cut one way, then the other, trying to avoid her fire, reaching out for her.
But before he could touch her, he heard the deafening crack of the rifle. In spite of his zigzag path, the shot slammed into his chest with explosive force, pitching him to the floor.
He blacked out.
When he opened his eyes again, he saw the hooded woman crouching over him. ‘‘Confirmed kill,’’ she said to someone he couldn’t see—and when she said it, his heart beat faster.
He recognized her voice.
Nevada knew what her face would look like before she
lifted away the hood. At first, all he could think was that it was impossible, that he must have already died if she was there with them.
But then, as she locked eyes with him, he remembered just how possible it was. Every e-rep had a double in Acirema, after all, even the dead ones. Even the one who had disappeared five years ago.
Even his beloved Idaho.
Nevada was in pain, but he managed a smile. The sight of her after all this time, even a shadow double who’d just shot him, was enough to fill him with joy.
Maybe her name was Ohadi instead of Idaho. Maybe she was devoted to the dark purposes of Acirema the Rellik instead of the bright resolve of America the Beautiful. Maybe she felt nothing for him, not even hatred.
But at least he could drink in the sight of her face again. At least he could pretend in his few remaining moments that the precious original had returned to him.
At least he could imagine—or was it more than imagination—that her hand was warm when she touched his eyelids. When she drew them shut.
He could dream that she was his warm-blooded Idaho, hiding all this time to prepare for the threat of Acirema, masquerading even now as the enemy. Infiltrating the darkness. Faking Nevada’s death, too, so she could whisk him away to the underground to fight the power. To renew their love.
Or if that hand was colder than he thought, than he
Dreamed
And she was Ohadi in spite of his hope, carved from glittering ice with frozen heart and frozen soul,
Perhaps his noble moment of defiance and then his last words would inspire her,
Warm her blood that she would become restored Idaho and more,
Seed of change, revolution, restoration,
Changer of hearts, perhaps even the heart of Adaven, his twin, Nevada spelled backward
Spelled everywhichway like America
Acirema Maciera Reamica Cimeara Imeraca
Then that would be all right, too, he thought,
And he tried
In the last words he said
To tell her what mattered,
What they’d forgotten,
What to pass along,
