“Sometimes you don’t know until you give it a try, Clair.”
“Sometimes . . . but not this time.”
He nodded without meeting her eyes. “Okay, Clair-bear. If that’s how you want it to be, that’s how it’ll be. I promise not to be a dick about it.”
“Do you really think you can manage that?”
“Oh, it’ll be tough, I know, but for you . . . anything.”
She managed a smile, although it hurt her to pretend to be anything other than torn up and miserable.
“Call me if she calls you,” Clair said.
“I will.”
He signed off, and she was alone.
Tomorrow, she told herself, everything would be different. Zep would talk to Libby, and Improvement would be revealed as nothing at all. The emotional storm would be rough, but she would weather it as she always did. And when life returned to normal, maybe she would let Ronnie take her out partying. She was sure there were guys out there who weren’t slimeballs or taken.
[12]
* * *
ZEP WAS HUGE, a giant monster smashing the dikes of Tokyo. Libby and Clair were the pilots of a massive robot sent to stop him, except they couldn’t agree on which way to go. The robot began to tear itself to pieces while the sea rushed in to engulf the city. instead of foam, the waves were topped with thousands of handwritten notes, all saying the same thing: Charlie X-ray Romeo Foxtrot . . .
Clair rarely dreamed, but when she did, it was memorable.
Her sleep was interrupted by a nagging flash that brought her out of deep unconsciousness in stages. Only slowly did she become aware that someone was calling her and that they were doing so through her most intimate and private channel, reserved solely for Libby.
“What?” she said, fumbling with her night-darkened lens interfaces. Behind the dark shutters of her eyelids, she imagined crises unnumbered. “Libby, what is it?”
“You called me,” came the reply. Libby sounded shockingly bright and breezy. There was no sign in her voice of migraine or fatigue. “I’m calling you back. There’s no drama.”
“Are you sure?” She checked the time. “It’s the middle of the night. I was asleep.”
“Well, I’ve been sleeping all day, and I’m tired of doing nothing. Lying around is a waste of the New Improved Me, right?”
“Let me see you,” said Clair, pulling herself up in bed onto her elbows and blinking the sleep from her eyes.
“Why?”
“Because I want to.” The last dregs of the dream disappeared, leaving a lingering sense of alarm.
“You want proof. That’s what you mean,” said Libby in a sharp tone. “Life is good, Clair. I’m beautiful. You’re not going to make me feel bad, no matter what you say.”
Libby appeared in a window in Clair’s vision like a translucent ghost. She was dressed in a tight-fitting white top and had styled her blond hair in a wave. Her complexion was impeccable. Clair could see nothing but clear white skin from hairline to jaw and a smile that was as sharp as her tone.
The birthmark certainly appeared to be gone . . . but appearances could be deceiving. Libby was touching up her lips in pink, and her eyeliner was blue, so there was definitely makeup in play. Could she have found a new shade that did the job more effectively than the last one? Would she really lie about such a thing just to save face?
“I don’t want to make you feel bad,” Clair said, wondering why Libby would even suggest such a thing.
“You may not want to, but that’s what you do. You talk about me behind my back, you think I’m crazy—”
“That’s not what I think—”
“You want to swoop in and solve all my problems. Well, I’m not your project, Clair. I have everything under control. It’s time you realized it and let me be who I am.”
Clair blinked back a sudden sting of tears. Was that really how Libby saw her? Interfering and controlling? Not helping or finishing, as Zep had put it? Libby had never said anything to indicate that she thought this way, not in all their long years together.
“That’s not what I mean to do, Libby. Honest. I love who you are. You don’t need to change anything or do anything for me to think you’re the best.”
“But you won’t let me change. That’s the problem.” Libby was fussing with her appearance as she talked, either ignoring or not noticing Clair’s attempts to make her look back at her. “You don’t believe in Improvement.”
“Well . . . it is a little hard to accept. . . .”
“Basically, you’re calling me a liar.”
“I’m not calling you anything, Libby!” Clair’s sense of hurt flared into frustration. Why was Libby trying to pick a fight with her in the middle of the night? Was it the Zep situation or another weird mood? “I’m just . . . just worried about you, that’s all.”
“Don’t be. I feel fine. Just look at me. I look fine, right?”
She pirouetted for Clair’s benefit, and Clair agreed that she did look good. It was hard to equate this Libby with the grainy figure she had glimpsed that morning. But what did that mean? Improvement either worked as promised or it was dangerous: those were the two choices Libby and Dylan Linwood were forcing on her. That it did nothing at all was a possibility that seemed to have evaporated over the course of the day, leaving her feeling stranded in the middle.
“Are you going to the ball?” Clair asked, trying to change the subject.
“That ended ages ago. No, I’m going to Zep’s.”
Clair made her face a mask, feeling as though she’d been punched in the guts. He was supposed to call, she thought.
“Well, have fun,” she managed to get out, although it felt like hauling heavy rocks out of her chest.
“Oh, I will. And I’ll think of you while I’m doing it.”
“What?”
“You could use a little fun in your life, Clair. Maybe you should try it. See what happens. You might be pleasantly surprised.”
“Are we still talking about . . . ?”
“Improvement, of course. Look what it’s done for me. Instead of lying there being critical, why not do something to better yourself? What are you afraid of?”
“I’m not afraid,” Clair said.
“Yes, you are. You’re afraid of being beautiful like me. You think I did the wrong thing, and now you’re trying to steal what belongs to me.”
Libby’s pale face stared directly at Clair, just for an instant, in naked challenge.
“That’s not what I’m doing,” Clair said. “That’s not what I think. . . . It’s confusing. . . .”
“I bet it is,” said Libby. “Instead of trying to fix my life, why don’t you concentrate on the mess you call your own?”
The window closed while Clair floundered, lost for something to say. For a moment, there were no words at all, just a seething roar in her ears. She could only stare into space while she tried to decide what she felt most: anger, guilt, jealousy, or grief. Was this the end of her friendship with Libby?
She fell onto the bed and ground the heels of her hands into her eyes, willing herself not to cry. She wanted to call back right away and apologize—but what for, exactly? For having a connection with Zep that didn’t include Libby? For not believing in Improvement? For trying to help?
She wasn’t going to apologize, she promised herself. And it wasn’t about Zep or anything obviously superficial and in the moment. If it had really been about a single kiss, maybe Clair would have let Libby have her time in the crisis spotlight, safe in the knowledge that it would blow over soon enough. She could live with that for the sake of eventual peace. It was what Libby had said about being Clair’s project that stung the most. Like it wasn’t just as often the other way around—Libby trying to drag her off to things Clair wasn’t interested in, safe in the knowledge that Clair would either enjoy it or make things work out when they didn’t. That was why they worked as friends when they were so patently different from each other—and now Libby didn’t want it to be tha
t way anymore. She wanted to break the central dynamic of their friendship, which was that it went both ways.
Clair could hear her own breathing echoing back to her from the confines of her room. It was fast, as though she had been running.
The story Clair had told Jesse earlier that day came back to her now. Food poisoning thanks to bad chicken had kept her out of school for a week. Her friends had sent her get-well messages through the Air, but that hadn’t been enough for Libby. She had brought around a pot of congee that she said was an old family recipe—fabbed a generation ago and perfect, Libby said, for settling a bad stomach. It had made Clair feel better, but not just because of the rice broth. Because Libby had known that Clair felt in need of more comfort than the Air could provide, and Libby had been there for her. She had felt, in that moment, that Libby would always be there, whenever Clair needed her.
It goes both ways, she thought again.
Libby might be acting hatefully toward her at the moment, but that didn’t mean they weren’t still friends. What if she was still looking out for Clair now? What if Libby, in her own way, genuinely thought she was giving Clair good advice?
[13]
* * *
CLAIR SAT UP and flicked her bedside lamp on. The light made her blink, but it echoed the sudden feeling in her mind that she was seeing the situation in an entirely new and important light.
Libby was one hundred percent certain that Improvement worked.
Dylan Linwood was one hundred and ten percent certain that anything to do with d-mat was evil and that Improvement was just one example of the system causing errors.
Both were asking Clair to believe them.
Who would Clair rather was right? Whom did she trust?
She didn’t even have to think about it. Not the madman who built bikes for a living and ate plants he grew in the dirt. Not the conspiracy nut who wished there was something seriously wrong with Libby so he could use her for evidence against the system he hated. Not the insecure father who put Clair down in order to look tall in front of his son.
There were two possibilities: Improvement was all in Libby’s mind, or the global network was broken.
Clair would rather discover that all of VIA’s safeguards were useless than that a man like Dylan Linwood was right.
It was the middle of the night in Maine, but that didn’t matter. It was day for half the world. Clair got out of bed, got dressed in yesterday’s clothes, and moved quietly through the apartment to the dining room, where she fabbed notepaper and a pen. Gone out, she wrote for her mother’s benefit. Will call. That way there was no chance of being talked out of it, should a bump wake Allison up.
On a second piece of paper she wrote, My nose is too big. Like, HUGE. Help! Then she added the code words and folded the piece of paper in four and slipped it under the elastic of her underwear, so it pressed against her hip.
She was going to make things right between her and Libby by proving Dylan Linwood wrong.
Clair left the apartment and headed up the hall. Clair had never had d-mat at home. She counted herself lucky that the apartment building she lived in had a booth on each level, opposite the fire stairs that led down to the sidewalks, which no one ever used. That meant she only had to worry about the weather at the other end of her journey.
For the immediate future, there would be no other end to worry about.
“Lucky Jump,” Clair told the booth as the door slid shut.
The lights flared. The air thinned.
sssssss-pop
Her face in the mirror was unchanged. Of course.
She didn’t wait for the door to open.
“Again.”
sssssss-pop
“Again.”
sssssss-pop
“Again . . . no, wait.”
The booth was still and silent around her. An infinite number of Clair Hills stood motionlessly, wondering if her haste was a little ill-considered.
There were in fact three possibilities she needed to think about. One, Improvement was Libby’s fantasy; two, Improvement was a global hack; or three, Improvement happened in a private network.
Everything everyone had told Clair constantly reinforced the certainty that Improvement, if it worked, couldn’t operate in the public domain. VIA’s network was absolutely secure. She could jump the normal way a million times without changing the polish on her toenails one iota.
So for Improvement to work, it had to be as Clair’s mother had said: it had to be by the third option. That meant the note would have to operate as a signal to someone watching, someone who would reroute her from the public network to another place entirely—kidnapping her, in effect, if only temporarily, before returning her to the public network. That could happen to her on the very next trip or on the hundredth. Maybe it had already happened without her noticing.
Her lenses instantly put that fear to rest. She was on Rhodes, not far from the rebuilt Colossus.
“Woodward and Main, Manteca,” she instructed the booth.
sssssss-pop
She checked her coordinates, as she should have been doing from the start. No deviation.
“Now back home, please.”
sssssss-pop
She checked again. No deviation.
She repeated the cycle three times without deviation.
That would do it, she decided. Bouncing back and forth between the two, checking every time, would ensure she was only ever where she expected to be.
And if she did deviate, she would know there was something to Improvement—the meme, if not the actual process of changing someone into a better person. Proof wouldn’t necessarily require any physical changes to her nose. If she wasn’t at either the Manteca station or Maine, she would know that someone had read her note and diverted her—proving Libby right and Dylan Linwood wrong. The existence of a private network meant only that VIA had made a mistake, not that the entire system was at fault.
Or nothing at all would happen, in which case she would know that Libby was going through a bad patch that time, honesty, and a lot of patience would heal.
The eleven jumps had passed quickly, but just shy of half an hour had passed in the real world. Another eighty jumps to go before she equaled Libby’s marathon effort. As a young girl, Clair had imagined what it would be like to spend all day jumping. If her parents had let her use a booth without them, she would have danced across the world as though wearing twelve-league boots. Once she had her solo license, the impulse had worn off. Transit lag was a pain. It made her feel tired in advance just thinking about it.
Squatting with her back against the mirrored wall, she instructed the booth to return her to Manteca. Some people talked about losing their train of thought when they jumped, seeing wild flashes of color or even experiencing vivid microdreams. She, however, felt nothing as the machines cycled around her, sucking up enough power to run an old-time country for a year.
Ten more cycles, which made over thirty jumps. No deviations, no change. Clair was getting bored. Using d-mat never really felt like going anywhere, but at least there was a change of scenery to look forward to. This was worse than running in circles. This was just an endless cycling of air in a human-sized vacuum flask. She and her reflections went back and forth, back and forth, with only the Air for company, and that was poor fodder.
Libby had cut Clair’s close-friend privileges, so Clair couldn’t tell where she was. Ronnie and Tash were asleep. Zep wasn’t an option. No one else knew what was going on except Jesse, and he was a total dead end.
She thought about leaving Ronnie and Tash a message: If you never hear from me again, you’ll know I’ve turned into a turnip or something. But this was between her and Libby; it wasn’t for anyone else to know about. And it certainly wasn’t a joke.
Ten more cycles and her ears were starting to hurt. After her fortieth jump, her right eardrum didn’t unpop, so she spent an awkward ten minutes walking around the booth in Manteca, waiting for her sinuses to clear. A sha
rp pain shot through that side of her head, and she stood still for a moment, waiting anxiously for it to go away.
It did, along with the blockage in her ear. She performed one more lap of the booth, for luck, and to prepare herself for resuming the tedious confinement within. How long until she decided that her theory about private networks was wrong? Part of her hoped that her nose would change, just to liven things up.
[14]
* * *
SSSSSSS-POP
After her seventieth jump, a new message appeared in her infield. Thinking it might be Ronnie or Tash saying good morning, she opened it without thinking.
It said: “‘Woman, I behold thee, flippant, vain, and full of fancies.’”
The words hung in bold sans serif over her on the reflecting surfaces of the booth. The message was unsigned, but there was a winking reply patch associated with the text. The address was hidden by some kind of anonymizing protocol. The name was simply a long string of lowercase q’s with an ellipsis in the middle, which indicated that the full text exceeded the field’s maximum character length.
qqqqq . . . qqqqq
If someone she knew had sent the message, they were going out of their way to keep their identity a secret. But the text resonated with her. It was something she had read recently in school. The lines were from a poem, but they had been misquoted.
Clair could have ignored it and taken the next jump, back to Manteca for what felt like the thousandth time.
Instead she sent a reply. She was bored and restless and wondering if she had done enough to prove that Libby was right yet. What did it hurt to send a few words through the Air?
“If you’re going to quote Keats,” she bumped back, “at least do it properly.”
Nothing happened for a while, and she began to wonder if it ever would.
Twinmaker Page 7
