“Welcome to the headquarters of the World Holistic Leadership,” the dark-haired young man told them. His cushion was slightly elevated, and his voice had a molasses quality. “My name is Turner. Gemma has told me all about your situation.”
“What is my situation?” Clair asked, finding her voice. She was still irritated by having waited so long. “Am I expected to join WHOLE to stay up here?”
“Our hospitality is unconditional. Anybody who knocks on our door will gain entry.”
“That’s all very well when your door is thousands of feet in the air.”
Turner smiled again. “Don’t think we’re debating whether to throw you out the window. I promise you we only do that to spies and dupes. Hardly ever to popular zombies like you, Clair.”
“‘Hardly ever’?”
His smile broadened. “Do we look like monsters, Clair?”
“I don’t know. Looks can be deceiving.”
“Indeed, they can be. That’s why you’re here, after all.”
She nodded. “How long have you known about Improvement and the dupes?”
“The former, almost five years,” he said. “The latter, less than one. It’s a new development aimed in part at us, we think.”
“You’re not sure?”
“It has obvious military applications. We suspect that members of the OneEarth administration are not who they seem.”
She shook her head, not wanting to go down that path.
“Have you told anyone about them?” she asked him.
“We try, of course. You’ve seen what happens to us when we do. The dupes are the defense mechanism of a corrupt system: Improvement is just one of many immoral practices the dupes exist to protect. Whether they act autonomously or at the instigation of secret masters we do not know.”
“Dad never said anything about this,” said Jesse.
“He didn’t know everything,” Turner explained. “WHOLE operates in cells, so when one is taken out, the others survive. Dylan was a valued member who struggled with his high public profile. He wanted to be more active; we tried to protect him from the consequences. What happened was truly regrettable.”
He offered his palms in a gesture of helplessness.
“He was duped,” said Clair, “so you blew him up. Very subtle.”
“My people acted swiftly and decisively to prevent any deaths that might have resulted from his impersonation,” Turner said. “I’m the first to admit that not every decision made in a theater of war is perfectly considered or perfectly rendered.”
Jesse was watching intently, almost desperately, as the true fate of his father was openly discussed at last.
“In order to be duped,” Jesse said, “you have to have a pattern, and that means going through d-mat. How did they manage that with Dad? He never used d-mat once, not in his entire life.”
“We think he was intercepted on the way home from your school,” Gemma said. Her arm had graduated to a sling; her shoulder was tightly bandaged. A pink painkiller patch stood out on the side of her neck. “They put him into a booth in one of the apartments nearby. There, he was sent on a null jump, meaning he was analyzed and rebuilt in the same booth, exactly as he had been. That’s how they got his pattern. And that’s why he’s injured every time he comes back. He resisted capture and was punished for it. The injuries he has received are built into the base pattern they’re using for his dupe.”
Jesse looked as though he wished he hadn’t asked.
“Do you know who he is?” asked Jesse. “The man . . . inside him?”
“No. But whoever he is and whoever he works for, they’re worse than murderers. Copying a pattern is legally considered kidnapping, erasing a pattern is murder, and damaging a pattern is the same as causing bodily harm. Putting a mind into someone else’s head—or even just altering a person, as Improvement is supposed to do—that lands you in a completely new category of crime. It’s a kind of mental rape.”
Clair thought of Q and stayed silent. Q had only taken over Libby briefly, and then restored her immediately afterward. That such supposedly impossible transformations could go both ways gave Clair hope of finding a cure for what Improvement had done to Libby in the first place. Duping and Improvement weren’t the same thing, but they both used d-mat to change people. Change could be reversed.
“What do the dupes want?” asked Jesse.
“The dupes or their masters, if they have them?” asked Turner. “They want what everyone in power wants, I suppose. Can you tell me the first steps in establishing a dictatorship?”
Jesse shook his head.
“I can. They are very simple. First you rob people of their individuality, and then you find a way to observe them completely. D-mat offers the perfect means to do both. Go through a booth, and everything you carry—everything you are, right down to the wiring of your brain—can be monitored without your knowledge. Tracking devices and bugs can be installed; information can be rewritten or written entirely from scratch. That is the world we live in. No regime ever before has had the power to manipulate people so easily. It’s unprecedented in human history. And no one fights it. People fed convenience and prosperity seem to accept that they live in a world without physical value. Who’s to say their minds haven’t been made up for them? Once you can build people atom by atom, rewiring brain cells is easy—which might explain what to me seems so inexplicable, why the world is teetering on the brink of a totalitarian dark age and no one but us complains. . . .”
Turner was speaking to Jesse and Clair, but his acolytes were nodding and murmuring in agreement. There was no room for doubt in the choir Turner was preaching to, wearing patched clothes and ferrying their food up from the ground below. Turner reinforced the belief that the hurt in their life wasn’t just random bad luck. His brand of alchemy was supremely palatable to people with no place in the world.
Clair understood that. Her friends, family, and future were under threat. She totally wanted to plug the aching void where her life had been with something concrete, something that shored up her strength. And there was a kind of strength to WHOLE. Against considerable odds, Gemma and Ray had escaped the dupes and reached their headquarters.
But that wasn’t enough. No one listened to Stainers. They were ostracized and ignored. They ostracized themselves, Clair thought. Tempting though it might be for some to hide on a cloud and mutter discontentedly, it wasn’t enough for Clair. It wouldn’t help Libby. It wouldn’t stop Improvement from happening to someone else. It wouldn’t save Clair if she, too, was at risk.
[46]
* * *
“I NEED YOUR help,” she said. “My friend used Improvement—”
“Gemma told us,” Turner interrupted her.
“So you know she doesn’t have much time,” she said firmly. “Whatever was done to her, there has to be a way to undo it. On the way here, Jesse and I talked about going to VIA and trying to get them to do something about it—”
“They won’t listen,” Turner said, shaking his head.
“They will if we make them. If we show them the body of the dupe, that’ll prove that something’s going on.”
“We didn’t find anything in the body’s lenses,” Ray said. “All the data has been erased.”
Clair hid her disappointment.
“We don’t need the data,” she improvised. “Dylan Linwood is officially still alive. The body proves that someone’s tampering with parity, doesn’t it? If there’s one of him walking around somewhere out there, and one of him dead here . . . how can VIA argue with that?”
“They can’t,” said Turner, “unless the dupes go to ground.”
“So we move quickly. We don’t give them time to get organized. Once VIA’s on our side, the people responsible won’t have a chance.”
“VIA isn’t the solution,” said Gemma. “It’s a bandage over the open wound of d-mat.”
“D-mat isn’t the problem,” Clair argued.
“It’s everyone’s problem, Cla
ir. You still haven’t noticed yet?”
“D-mat’s like a gun or a drone or a . . . a shoe. How it’s used is what matters.”
“This is not a fruitful argument to have now,” said Turner in a placating tone. “We don’t have to agree on anything except our common humanity.”
Clair was not going to be placated.
“I honestly can’t see anyone taking on a problem this big without help from somewhere,” she said. “Who else is there? The peacekeepers? The federal government? OneEarth? They all benefit from the status quo; they won’t want anything changed. VIA’s power hinges entirely on d-mat’s reliability. That’s why VIA exists at all. If d-mat is proved to be unreliable, VIA won’t have a leg to stand on. They’ll have to act to save themselves.”
“You can’t really think it’d be that easy,” said Gemma.
“No, but that’s not going to stop me,” she said, rising to her feet. She put on her firmest voice. The crowd listened to a young man with a square jaw, so maybe they’d listen to her, too.
“This is a war, and we’re vastly outnumbered, but that never stopped someone from being right. You understand that better than anyone. We can sit here arguing about the means all day—you want to tear the system down and start again, while I want the system to fix itself as it’s supposed to—but the ends we want to achieve are not all that different. We want people to be safe. We don’t want people to be altered in ways they shouldn’t. That’s what everyone wants. Can’t we find a way to do this together? No one ever changed the world acting alone.”
Jesse actually clapped, and in that moment she could’ve kissed him. But he was the only one, and after a few seconds he trailed off.
“Ah, the irony,” said Turner with smile. “I want to say that words are not enough, when all I have are words, too. Why don’t you give us a moment to think about what you’ve said? We’ll call you when we’re ready.”
“You’ve already made up your mind,” said Clair with a heavy feeling in her gut.
“Don’t be so sure. You’re asking us to help you, and that’s a big commitment, but you have a lot to offer us in return. We always need information and evidence, and you have provided both. You and Jesse and your friend Q. We don’t have to agree with each other to be useful to each other. . . . Jamila?”
The young woman with the mismatched irises stood and led Clair and Jesse down the spiral staircase, back to the D-shaped deck below. No one said anything as they left, but Clair and Jesse were tracked with every step.
Don’t give up hope, Clair told herself. He didn’t actually say no.
“You think Turner’s a good guy?” she asked Jamila before the woman went back to join the others.
“The best,” she said with shy smile.
“Isn’t he a little young to be in charge, though?”
“Age doesn’t come into it. All that matters is getting the job done.”
“The job being to get rid of d-mat, I suppose.”
The woman blinked as though Clair was asking a stupid question. “Of course.”
She vanished through the door and locked it behind her, leaving the prisoners with the cushions, the coffeemaker, the microwave, and the view.
Jesse headed for the miniature kitchen to pour himself some coffee. “Me,” he said, “I’m feeling slightly underwhelmed.”
Clair nodded. She was thinking about Dylan Linwood, whose fame as a transport artist, or whatever he had called himself, had put him in a good position to be a spokesperson for WHOLE, she would have thought. But the one time he had openly used that position to attack Improvement over the Air had seen him duped. The video he had made had been noted at the time, but how many viewers had been convinced by it? Within hours, his home had been destroyed, and he was missing, presumed crazier than ever.
What could unknown Clair Hill do that he hadn’t?
She returned to her cushion against the window and sat down, closing her eyes and accessing her lenses. She didn’t know how long she had before the meeting reconvened. But she resolved to use that time wisely.
“Are you there, Q?”
“I’m right there with you. Hey—that rhymes.”
“Where are you, exactly?”
“I appear to be in the Air. That’s where I came to myself, anyway, when we started talking. There’s lots of room for me in here, but it’s hard to describe where ‘here’ is, exactly. I’m surrounded by so much information . . . it’s scary sometimes. . . .”
Clair could accept this, but at the same time she couldn’t. It was difficult to imagine how someone could be alive without a body, let alone live in the Air, but if people could be d-matted anywhere in the world, why not into a virtual environment like the air? That made Q something like a ghost in a virtual library containing all of human history and knowledge. It would be hard to avoid getting lost in there and perhaps just as hard to find one small thing out of everything else.
“I need to know something,” she said. “Dylan Linwood attached some brain scans to the video of Principal Gordon’s office. Can you track down their source?”
“I can certainly try, Clair,” Q said. “Private medical data is difficult to access, but I’m sure I’ll find a way in eventually, if I dig long enough.”
“Thanks.”
“Is there anything else?”
“Too much, probably. What can you tell me about Turner Goldsmith? Young guy, a bit too smooth for his own good. Possibly WHOLE’s leader.”
“I have a peacekeeper warrant outstanding for one Turner Archibald Goldsmith, but he’s not young. He’s listed as eighty-two years old.”
“Well, that can’t be right. Maybe he’s the original’s grandson, using a family name.”
“His records show no offspring.”
“He stole the old guy’s identity?”
“That would explain the discrepancy. . . .”
Or someone was outright lying, Clair thought. The layers of deceit and misinformation seemed to get thicker every time she tried to roll them back.
“Finally, I need a way to get to New York without being spotted,” she said. “Do you think you can help me with that?”
“Of course, Clair. D-mat is out of the question . . .”
Q’s voice faded briefly into static, then returned.
“. . . alternate routes, depending on . . .”
“What was that, Q? I missed something.”
“. . . natural interference at your end. I’ll try . . .”
“You’re fading again. What?”
“. . . unusual readings . . .”
A vibration ran through the Skylifter, making the mugs and cups rattle.
Clair opened her eyes and saw Jesse with his hand against one wall, staring at her.
“Did you feel that?” he asked.
Sudden bright white light flared. The floor tipped beneath them, and Clair slid directly toward one of the windows.
[47]
* * *
SHE SKIDDED ACROSS the carpet, flailing ineffectually for anything solid to hang on to, but all her clutching hands found were cushions. The floor dropped again, and suddenly there wasn’t even carpet to slow her down. She was tumbling through empty air. Ahead of her was nothing but blue sky and an infinite cloudscape far, far below.
She hit the hardened plastic with a bone-jarring thud. There she stopped dead. An avalanche of cushions pummeled her from behind, followed by Jesse himself. She was glad for the cushions as his extra weight pressed her hard against the transparent boundary that was the only thing separating her from a very long fall straight down.
Light flared again. This time it was the sun sweeping across the sky. The Skylifter was spinning.
“What’s going on?”
Jesse said something but was muffled by the cushions. Q was silent. There was only static through her lenses.
The weight eased. A hand thrust down to her, and she gripped it tightly. She burst out of the cushions and stood next to Jesse with one foot on the window beneath h
er and the other on a wildly canted floor. She braced herself in case the Skylifter lurched again.
Another white flash. This time there was a bang. The air misted. Her ears popped. Suddenly, it was hard to breathe. She felt light in her stomach, as though they were losing altitude.
Her heart thumped loud and fast in her chest.
“We’re under attack,” Jesse said over a rising whistling noise.
“I thought we were safe here!”
“Apparently not.” He peered out the windows. “But I can’t see anyone out there. They must be firing at us from a distance.”
They tried the doors, climbing awkwardly up the sloping floor. Only the one leading to the bathroom was unlocked, and that Clair already knew was a dead end.
“Q?” Clair called. “I need you!”
No answer penetrated the static.
The floor lurched again. This time the white light didn’t fade. It blazed like a new sun in the sky, flickering occasionally but never entirely going out.
Clair shielded her dazzled eyes. Not being able to see the ground as it approached was a cold comfort. There had to be a way down to the airships docked below that she had seen earlier. Through a ventilation duct, perhaps . . . ?
Barely had she begun looking for air vents when the door to the upper deck suddenly opened, letting in a howling gale.
“Q!” she cried in relief.
But it was Jesse she saw flinching from sparks showering out of an open panel.
“How did you do that?”
“Killer with a screwdriver, remember?” He held up a bent metal knife. The door had only opened an inch, but that was enough for them to get their fingers through and slide it wider. The air was frigid on the other side. Light blazed down the spiral stairwell. There was no sign of anyone.
“The dome must have been breached,” Clair said, imagining people sucked out and falling and . . . She shook her head. Don’t think of that. “We have to go the other way.”
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