Twinmaker

by Williams, Sean

  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.

  Clair’s scalp was still stinging when they reached the pier. There were just two peacekeepers to press the crowd back as Turner brought the four-wheeler to a halt and they climbed out. The PKs said nothing to Clair and Clair said nothing to them. They had made their position clear: they were staying on the fence, neither helping nor hindering. If things got ugly in public she could count on them to intervene, but up to that point she was on her own.

  The sub floated low in the water, long and dark like a killer whale. A hatch opened on top, and two people emerged, a man and a woman both dressed in tight-fitting gray. The woman seemed unfazed by either the crowd or the drones. Clair wondered at the kinds of things she’d seen, the odd requests she’d fielded in the past. Odder than anything Clair could imagine, she bet.

  “We’re really doing this?” she asked.

  “Looks like it,” said Jesse.

  Clair shouldered her heavy pack and followed him to the ladder at the end of the pier. A skinny seaman—one of three who had emerged after the first two—helped her find her footing on the swaying surface of the submarine. There was no handrail. The sea’s mood was black and choppy, like the crowd.

  Turner was standing over the opening in the hull, guiding people through. Ray was coming last, carrying Libby’s body in his arms. Gemma had a heavy bag in one hand, one of the two that Clair had seen in the back of the four-wheeler. No one had explained what they were.

  Clair took off her backpack and lowered it down through the hatch into reaching hands. Then it was her turn. The drone deactivated its fans and was carried down after her.

  The submarine had a single cramped passageway running its entire length. Packs were piled into every available niche. Clair picked a spot at random and didn’t move, afraid to touch anything. The air was thick and close. She didn’t want to think of suffocation, but it was hard not to.

  Jesse squeezed in next to her.

  “Exciting, isn’t it?” he said.

  She gulped a half sob, half laugh.

  “Are you for real?”

  “No, seriously. This is terrific. I’ve always wanted to go underwater.”

  “You’ve never been diving?”

  “Not for an hour and a half,” he said. “And not without getting my clothes wet.”

  The hatch clanged shut above them, sounding an unimaginable distance away. All connections to the Air died.

  Clair noticed Jesse’s fingers twitching.

  “I’ve patched into the sub’s HUD,” he told her. “It has a cavitation hull, a magnetohydrodynamic drive system, and a miniature reactor so it can stay under for months. Officially, we stopped developing these things after d-mat came along, but this could be a knockoff of a military design, or even a genuine decommission. It’s hard to say.”

  “This you know about, not cars and stuff?”

  “No wheels, you see.” He grinned. “And the drive system has applications off the Earth, where I really want to go.”

  “You’re picturing yourself in a spaceship right now, aren’t you?”

  “If I am, what does that make me?”

  “A big nerd. The biggest imaginable.”

  His smile only broadened as a rising thrum filled the submarine.

  It was a shame, she thought, that d-mat had made spaceships obsolete, along with planes, trains, and everything else. He deserved to get what he wanted. So did she, but what she wanted seemed so much harder to obtain, even after Ant Wallace’s offer to meet with them. She wanted Libby back and the chance that there was someone else in her head permanently revoked. She wanted her world back again, exactly as it had been.

  Jesse’s eyes were moving, following the sub’s internal operations by sound alone. She groped until she found his hand and squeezed it in hers. He glanced at her briefly and smiled. Then the engine noise rose, the floor shifted beneath them, the sub descended, and they w
ere on their way.

  [65]

  * * *

  CLAIR COUNTED THE time as it passed. Sixty seconds per minute. Sixty minutes per hour. It was like meditation. Motion was hard to track underwater, but deep in a primal part of her, the part that had evolved with an innate sense of movement and momentum, she knew that she was being propelled ever nearer to her destination.

  When she wasn’t counting, she was thinking. And what she was thinking about were the two heavy bags Gemma had carried with her into the submarine. It was clear they contained supplies of some kind, but it wasn’t food, or else they would have been opened on the train. They clanked. She didn’t think it was bottles of cider to bribe Ant Wallace with.

  Fight, Turner had said.

  The more she thought about the bags, the more certain she was that she had made a grave tactical error.

  “Where’s Turner?” she asked Jesse in a whisper.

  “Forward, I think. Why?”

  “‘Direct action,’” she said, quoting the phrase that Jesse had asked Turner to clarify, back at the Farmhouse. “He never said what that meant. What if he’s using me as cover in order to get close to VIA and do something stupid?”

  “Like what?”

  She didn’t know, but those bags could hold a lot of guns, grenades, or god only knew what.

  “If he does do anything,” Jesse said, “VIA will never help us.”

  “I know, but perhaps that’s a small price to pay from Turner’s point of view.”

  Clair could see it all too easily. Turner, fighting a decades-long war against d-mat, had come out of hiding . . . for what? To help save a few lost girls? Was it more likely he was intending a suicide run that would strike right at the heart of his enemy—and destroy his mutated genes in the bargain?

  “Do you think Gemma knows?” asked Jesse.

  “If she does, she’s not talking.” Gemma seemed tense, but she always seemed tense. “She wouldn’t want to sabotage the plan, though. Improvement killed her son, remember?”

  Jesse nodded.

  Clair leaned out into the narrow corridor and saw Ray nearby.

  “Tell Turner to come back here,” she said. “I need to talk to him. It’s urgent.”

  Ray nodded, and a minute later the leader of WHOLE joined them.

  “What is it?”

  “Change of plan,” she said. “I want you to drop me and Jesse off early.”

  Both Turner and Jesse looked at her in surprise.

  “Why?” Turner asked.

  She kept her voice steady, even though inside her doubts were stirring. This was the right thing, wasn’t it? This wasn’t some other mind in hers, trying to sabotage the mission?

  She could only let the facts speak for themselves.

  “One,” she said, “we’re being too predictable. That makes it easier for the dupes if they decide to spring anything on us that might look like an accident. Also, it’s bad for ratings, me being down here instead of up there. Shaking things up will only keep people more interested.

  “Two, if we stay together like this, and we are intercepted, there goes our only shot. By splitting up, we double the odds in our favor. I’ll have the ratings, and you’ll have the body. Someone wants to stop us, they’ll have to take us both out.”

  Turner was nodding slowly.

  “Where?” he asked.

  “Brooklyn Heights is closest,” she said, “and the most photogenic. It’s also less obvious than the Thirty-fourth Street docks. I know it’s farther, but it’s not as if we have to walk or anything. We can fab something that will probably get us there quicker than you will through all those old tunnels.”

  “The two of you?” Turner asked. When both of them nodded, he said, “I’d feel happier if Ray went with you. Just in case.”

  “And you can keep the drone,” Clair conceded.

  He nodded again. They understood each other. Ray would keep an eye on Clair and Jesse, while Q kept an eye on Turner when the submarine surfaced under VIA. They might be temporarily on the same side, but that didn’t mean they trusted each other.

  “It’s a good plan,” he said. “I’ll go tell the pilot we’re changing course.”

  Jesse waited until he had gone before whispering, “Are you sure about this?”

  “Positive,” she said. “Ask yourself who’s going to look like more of a threat: a bunch of walk-ins from the sticks or a sub full of well-armed terrorists?”

  “You really think someone’s going to try something, even with everyone watching?”

  “I think there’s a chance, and I don’t want to be sitting in here waiting for the torpedoes to arrive.”

  Jesse looked around them and nodded grimly as though only now feeling the water pressing in on them.

  “Our job is to get there before Turner does,” she said. “We’ll never get a second chance.”

  The sub shifted underfoot.

  “We’re changing course,” Jesse said, fingers tapping rhythmically against his leg. “Surface in half an hour.”

  Clair closed her eyes and resumed counting.

  [66]

  * * *

  THEY SURFACED AT the Atlantic Avenue docks, emerging from the submarine double time and not lingering to say farewells. By the time Clair, Jesse, and Ray stepped onto dry land, the sub was gone. They took a moment to get their bearings under a gray morning sky, then headed off uphill for the War Memorial.

  Brooklyn Heights was connected by a restored bridge to the Manhattan archipelago. Clair checked her updates and news on the popularity front as she took her physical bearings. They had picked up people of a nautical bent, thanks to the submariners, and regained some of the crashlanders, thanks to Xandra Nantakarn throwing a party in Clair’s honor in an old underwater base. Counter-Improvement continued to spread, particularly in areas where the original Improvement message had been rife. Social commentators were beginning to notice, not the symptoms of Improvement itself but an upwelling of concern about them. One venerable columnist described Clair as an example of something he called the New Youth Movement: “Crashlander, Abstainer, fugitive, campaigner, all in an ordinary week. What next?”

  What next indeed, thought Clair. It all depended on whether she got to Wallace safely. And whether she was herself when she got there.

  “Let’s move,” she said. “We’ve got a hike ahead of us.”

  “This is nothing,” said Ray. “I walked the John Muir Trail once. Two hundred ten miles in sixteen days—that’s a hike.”

  “Even I think that’s crazy,” said Jesse. “Q, where do we go from the memorial?”

  “Manhattan Bridge,” she said.

  “Okay, then. ‘Lead on, Macduff.’”

  “‘I would the friends we miss were safe arrived,’” Q said.

  “What?”

  Clair said nothing as Q explained that she was also quoting—not misquoting, unlike Clair—from Macbeth. The words were too appropriate. She just walked up the hill as fast as she could, ignoring the way her shoes rubbed her heels and concentrating on what she had to do.

  Their unscheduled appearance in Brooklyn Heights caused a new spike of interest. Drones appeared as though from nowhere to chronicle their arrival. By the time they reached the memorial, they had accrued a small coterie of people who had d-matted in from all over the world to say hello, ask questions, challenge her assumptions, or ask her out. She responded to all of them as politely as she could, knowing it was the right thing to do in order to keep people watching. But she didn’t stop walking, and she kept one hand always under her overalls, tightly clutching her pistol.

  At the bridge she discovered that a well-wisher had fabbed them autostabilizing monocycles—an early Dylan Linwood design, as it happened—to save them making something of their own. Clair had Q hack into their operating system to make sure they weren’t booby-trapped, then accepted the gift. That prompted a run on similar devices, and Clair hurried off before she could gain an entourage that would only slow them down and potentiall
y put innocent people in danger. The world was watching; there was in theory no reason to feel nervous. But the city ahead was a minefield. There could be snipers in any window, and not just dupes. The hate mail and death threats in the comments of her posts were rising in tandem with her popularity.

  They formed a line and headed out, Clair first, then Jesse, then Ray, drones tagging along with them like balloons on a string. Vines hung from the suspension cables around them, and trees grew tall out of soil piled deep in the bridge’s lower levels. Ahead was the famous Manhattan skyline, as familiar to Clair as the gondolas that plied its crystalline waters. The buildings weren’t the tallest in the world, and they certainly weren’t the only ones to have suffered inundation, but their restoration had been a potent symbol for the generation following the Water Wars. Clair’s parents still talked about seeing the opening of the first walkways as kids.

  The sun was behind Clair now, and the electric motors of the monocycles were whisper quiet on the graceful arch over the river. There had once been another bridge, Clair knew, but its foundations had subsided as the water rose to swallow it, and it had been turned into a reef with great ceremony, a sacrifice to the drowned boroughs and the new world of d-mat.

  As they cruised over the central section of the bridge, Clair could see the elaborate marble arch on the other side. The entourage Clair had worried might impede her progress was awaiting them there.

  She cursed silently to herself, even as she flashed her best smile and waved. The Air might have made her famous, but d-mat enabled anyone with a passing interest to jump right into her path. At this rate, every road between Little Venice and VIA HQ would be full of gawkers.

  “Looks to me,” drawled Jesse, loud enough for the drones to hear, “like we’ve got ourselves a posse.”

  In as much time as it took for his words to flash through the Air and back again, the crowd cheered.