“Yes,” she said, pulling away. “No. Let’s just get back to the dorm. Nelly is right. The sooner we get out of here, the better.”
She folded her arms across her chest and hugged herself as she walked across the common area, trying to tamp down the fear and anger still coursing through her. The confrontation rattled her. This is what happens when I start to feel safe. She should have learned that lesson in Crystal City, or in Antarctica, or definitely on the seastead. What might have happened if no one had been there to help her? Sandler Jones and his thugs weren’t just letting off steam. They wanted to fight, or worse, and neither she nor Devin would have stood a chance against them. Running away might have been an option if Devin could run more than ten yards without gasping like a beached fish. She would never have left him behind.
Then there was her automatic reaction to wish for her pistol. Sandler and friends weren’t dupes. They weren’t even her enemies. They were people. Horrible people who hated her, but people nonetheless. Since when did she consider threatening someone real with lethal force a reasonable response? That wasn’t what she thought. It wasn’t what Allison Hill’s daughter should think.
She rubbed her hands where traces of Nobody’s dried blood remained, stuck deep in the lines of her palms and under her fingernails. She imagined it staining her, poisoning her in some horrible alchemical way. He had become her, briefly. Was she now in danger of becoming a dead-eyed killer like him?
Not now, she told herself firmly, and not ever.
[50]
* * *
BACK IN THE dorm, she went straight to work, effectively locking herself in her room and ignoring all distractions. Jesse kept asking if she was all right, but what could she say? She was as right as anyone would be under the circumstances. The sooner she found the source of the dupes, saved her friends, and stopped Wallace, the better. From there, it was just a matter of the PKs bringing d-mat online—and with Q’s loyalties as uncertain as her location, that was going to be entirely their problem.
Into the station map she dove again, tracing promising threads to their endpoints, the details of which she sent to Devin for cross-checking if they were virtual and to Agnessa if they were physical. Many of the virtual endpoints turned out to be dead ends, parts of the station’s infrastructure that no longer existed. Slowly, tentatively, she began to think of it as an outline of a forest, with a dense tangle of overlapping roots leading up through a dozen or so much thicker trunks to the canopy above. The canopy was the real world. If she could trace the trunks to where they connected at either end, in the roots or the branches, she hoped to find out where the dupes came from and where they emerged. Somewhere along that route could be Nobody’s name.
It felt like homework, but as it was homework that might save the world, she did her best.
Jesse wouldn’t leave her alone, so she set him to work browsing through the information Sargent had given her on the investigation into Wallace’s illegal activities. There was a lot of it, including the testimonies they had given in New York and those of dozens of other people who worked at VIA. There were interviews with Xia Somerset and the other Improved. There were autopsies of Mallory’s victims. There was a lineup of known dupes, including the ones involved in the kidnapping of Clair’s mother, who hadn’t been seen since. Last, there was a highly technical analysis of the circumstances that had led to the creation of Q and the breakdown of Quiddity.
Jesse went straight to that section.
“Does this make me a deputy too?” he bumped from the room next door.
“He is an Abstainer who can’t see through his hair,” she bumped back in her best voice-over voice. “She is a crashlander with the ugliest nose in the world. Together, they fight crime.”
“Heh. I see your nose perfectly well and won’t hear a bad word about it.”
She smiled and went back to work. Coming out of the station map, she turned her attention to the answers coming in from Devin. Some of the endpoints were easily identifiable, such as pattern archives relating to technical components likely used in the building of Wallace’s station. Others were more mysterious—virtual addresses that didn’t match up with the traces Sargent had made of Nobody’s and the other dupes’ appearances during the attack on the seastead. Clair searched meticulously through them, looking for the slightest hint of a connection, but saw nothing.
Some of the endpoints were physical locations that clustered in several densely populated areas, such as Ahmedabad, Lima, and Paris. Clair could see nothing about those places to explain what was so special about them. A scan of the PKs’ dupe data showed no unexpected increase in appearances there.
Maybe Agnessa could help. Clair sent that data on, with a note expressing her gratitude to Nelly for helping her with the thugs earlier.
The reply was brisk and to the point: “Common courtesy.”
“I’m looking through the VIA employee records,” Jesse bumped not long after, “to see if anyone’s gone missing in the last few years. My thought was that they could be dupes. One of them might even have been Nobody.”
“Good idea,” she said, only partially paying attention. Her head was full of links and trunks and the patterns they made.
“That’s what I thought, until it occurred to me that it wouldn’t work that way. If someone volunteers to be a dupe, they don’t have to disappear. They can leave their original behind and just work from their pattern.”
She pressed her hands to her face. “Derp.”
“Exactly. This is entirely crazy-making. Took me ages to think of it.”
“So we’ll never find Nobody that way. Damn.”
“There’s still hope. Nobody was one of the first dupes—is that what the Cashiles told you?”
“Yes.”
“That means that if he was employed by VIA, he started some years back. And given his general screwed-upness about death, his original might not be around anymore.”
“You think he killed himself?”
“I’d say there’s a chance,” Jesse said. “But there are a lot of VIA employees to check through. . . .”
They went back to work, separately wading through their respective mountains of information.
Then it was back into the map for another round of searching, punctuated by occasional bouts of pacing from one end of the room to the other, her limbs and eyelids heavy. Sargent brought her a cheese sandwich for lunch—just like Clair’s mother did when she was studying for exams, which made her feel a bit teary for a moment. Sargent explained that Forest was keeping watch, in case there were any other disturbances. Clair thanked her for the sandwich and the update, hustled her out the door, and kept working.
Jesse bumped her again as the afternoon crept on toward evening.
“Sorry to bother you. Got a second?”
She opened a chat. “Absolutely. My eyes are crossing.”
“Mine too. And I’m confused about something.”
“Is this about Agnessa?”
“No. I haven’t decided yet.”
“Okay. Good.” Clair let out a breath she hadn’t been aware of holding. She didn’t want to argue about their philosophical differences, but living in anxious anticipation of his decision was adding an extra layer of acid to that already churning inside her.
“Shoot,” she said as the silence between them stretched on a little too long.
“Right. Turns out Catherine Lupoi, Wallace’s PA, was quite obliging when the PKs brought her in. She guessed the password to Wallace’s profile and they’ve been snooping through it ever since. Most of it’s fairly bland, just in case anyone hacked in, I guess. There are some small encrypted files that the PKs think might be red herrings—in the hope we’ll waste our time on them, only to find a picture of Wallace’s butt crack or whatever.”
“Thanks. I didn’t want that picture in my mind.”
“Sorry. Anyway, there’s one particular file . . . I’ll send it to you so you can take a look.”
The file appeare
d in her infield, and Clair opened it, revealing nothing but a list of names in two columns. She scanned down them. A couple rang very faint bells.
“Who are they?” she asked.
“Dead lawmakers on the left,” Jesse said. “Living lawmakers on the right.”
Clair looked closer. One was Sara Kingdon.
“You don’t think . . .”
“I don’t know what I think. I’m just saying. If Wallace was using Improvement to put old geniuses in the bodies of young people, couldn’t he do the same thing to anyone? Wouldn’t it be one way of making sure you weren’t investigated too carefully—if the people who supported you never ever went away?”
It was like Jesse to be suspicious of anyone in authority, but that didn’t mean he was wrong. Clair looked up some of the other names in the Air. One had supported Kingdon’s proposal of a shoot-to-kill order for all suspected dupes. Another was actually leading a vigilante band in Texas, in defiance of calls for calm from the peacekeepers.
“These lawmakers aren’t pro-dupes, though. And they’re not young people either, like all the other Improved.”
“Maybe he did this batch years ago, before he made Nobody. Or maybe he worked out how to do it with older people, later. I don’t know about the rest. Could it be a cover?”
“What about the notes next to the names, the asterisks and question marks? Some of them don’t have any notes at all.”
“I don’t know,” he said again. “Maybe Wallace was recording favors he hadn’t called in yet.”
“Or maybe it was just an invite list to his birthday party,” she said. “I don’t want to defend the guy, but a list of names isn’t proof that half the lawmakers on Earth aren’t who they say they are. It’s not evidence of anything, really.”
He sighed. “I’ll keep looking.”
“Thanks, Jesse.”
“No problemo.”
She caught him before he could end the chat.
“Hey, when it’s time to eat later, do you want to join me?”
“Sounds suspiciously like a date.”
“Sure is. Also, I need someone to cook.”
He laughed. “I’ll cook, you do the dishes.”
There was that rule again. How anyone got anything done in the old days, she didn’t know.
[51]
* * *
OUTSIDE, THE SKY was steel gray and heavy with clouds. Lights had come on across the muster. The air was sharp with the promise of snow.
This time the mess hall was busy. They went as one group, led by Sargent, with Clair and Devin at the center. The redhead, Sandler Jones, was there, with his two sidekicks but minus the dog. He noted their entry, glared at them, but said nothing. Conversation and cutlery ceased for an instant, then resumed.
That settled one flock of butterflies in Clair’s stomach. Maybe the word from Agnessa had filtered through: the zombies were off-limits. Or maybe the thugs were biding their time waiting for a moment when there weren’t so many people around.
Jesse and Devin squabbled over who was going to cook what. Luckily, the kitchen was big enough for a dozen chefs, and there seemed to be no shortage of supplies. Clair sat between Forest and Sargent, feeling like a cross between a prisoner and a celebrity, wanting to be neither.
“Have you made any progress?” asked Forest.
Clair explained what she had been doing, and then Jesse did the same, from the kitchen. It was hard to define what counted as progress and what didn’t. It certainly didn’t seem like they were getting much closer to an answer, and time was ticking.
“Pay attention, Stainer boy,” said Devin. “These sausages aren’t going to cook themselves.”
“I have some data for you,” said Agnessa over Clair’s augs.
“Oh, good,” she said. “What did you find?”
“Something disturbing. Those links to real-world locations you asked me to look into? They are almost entirely where Abstainer artisans live and work.”
“Artisans? They make things?”
“Exactly. Things that can’t be traced, because they’re made by hand rather than in a fabber. Things that are completely unique.”
“What kind of things, exactly?”
“Tech stuff. Bespoke hardware, control systems, autonomous algorithms . . . along those lines. Jesse’s father had a lot to do with them in his art practice. They’re smart cookies and it wouldn’t be easy to fool them, but Wallace must have. They were working for him without knowing.”
Clair was nodding. To subvert VIA and its AIs Wallace must have needed all sorts of gear not readily available in pattern banks, and he wouldn’t have wanted it to be traced even if it were. So piece by piece, he had commissioned designs for the individual parts he needed to put his plan into effect, each seemingly innocent on its own, and farmed them out to be assembled by makers who would have been appalled if they knew what the machines were really for.
Abstainers had helped Wallace kill teenagers and wage war on the world. Everybody shared the terrible responsibility for his crimes.
“Will you give me the data?” Clair asked.
“We’re not proud of it, but we’re not keeping it a secret, either.”
A file came containing the map data, with names attached.
“They will be interviewed,” said Forest. “We should have seen this sooner.”
“I agree,” said Devin. “I might have an explanation for why you didn’t.”
“Go on,” said Clair.
“On the virtual side of that endpoint data, it was more complicated than I thought. There are a lot of masks and blinds, even some traps for anyone who doesn’t have the right authorization. I almost got caught a couple of times. Almost.”
“So what did you find?”
“Those high-bandwidth pathways—you call them ‘trunks’—they’re for two-way traffic.”
“Which is significant because . . . ?”
“Because if they were only for dupes going out, then the data would be going in that direction. You know, if you want a dupe in the Farmhouse, you pull one out of cold storage on the space station and beam the pattern where it needs to be. One-way. The fact that it’s going both ways suggests . . . well, it could mean a few things. That someone was using dupes to infiltrate Wallace’s operation, for instance. But that doesn’t seem likely, since he’s the one controlling the means of duplication. The more likely explanation is that someone from outside the operation was supplying the patterns for the dupes, rather than just using Wallace’s lackeys.”
“Why?” asked Clair.
“To have dupes of their own, I guess, with different experiences, different skills, maybe different loyalties, too.”
Clair remembered the Cashile on Ons Island talking about soldiers with identical blind spots. “Who could be doing that?”
“That’s the question. Those trunks are heavily guarded. I can only make inferences—I haven’t been able to get right into one of them and see exactly where it leads—”
“Just tell me,” she said.
“My best guess at the moment is that around thirty percent of the trunks connect to the PKs.”
Clair put her fists on her knees and leaned back slightly, acutely conscious of Forest and Sargent sitting on either side of her. “What does that mean?”
“It could mean that the PKs were working with Wallace all along. Or it means that someone inside the PKs was working with Wallace. Either way,” he said, raising a potato masher for emphasis, “it’s interesting.”
“I know nothing of this,” said Forest. “And I cannot imagine why it would be the case. We do not need secret squads to keep the peace.”
“That you know of, or that you’re admitting to,” said Devin. “I’ve had my suspicions for a while, as Clair knows. Someone has been leaking our movements to the dupes, just like someone gave the dupes access to the seastead.”
“Why the peacekeepers?” asked Sargent. “It could have been any number of people. RADICAL isn’t leakproof, as much as
you like to think you are.”
“Wallace got into a lot of systems,” said Jesse in a calming voice. “Why not the PKs as well?”
“Haven’t you got enough enemies already?” asked Agnessa.
“Oh god,” said Clair, thinking of something for the first time. “Charlie. Do you remember in the booth in New York, my dupe mentioning him? On the seastead Nobody knew about that, even though we were disconnected from the Air and my dupe had exploded. Someone in the New York booth must have told him.”
“One of us,” said Forest, looking around the table.
[52]
* * *
SOMBER SILENCE FELL as that thought sank in. It wasn’t as bad as Forest made it sound, Clair told herself. There had been other people in that booth too, including several Improved who might have found a way to get information back to the dupes later, before they were poisoned. It was just so compelling, given what they now knew about Wallace’s activities, past and present. He had used Abstainers to make his dream possible, so why not the PKs as well? Perhaps their indifference when she had been running to New York to meet him, or their diplomatic stance regarding the dupes before the seastead, hadn’t been so innocent after all. Perhaps their inability to find her mother was part of it too. Could those supposedly unknown dupes actually be part of the third faction?
She wasn’t sure where that left her now. In a camp of semihostile Abstainers guarded by PKs she couldn’t entirely trust. There was nowhere else to go, so she could only press on in the hope that, with the world watching, there would be no further surprises. As hopes went, it was a very faint one, given her life’s track record recently.
Jesse and Devin served up. The table ate in silence. Dinner might have been delicious under other circumstances, particularly the mashed potatoes, which were comfortably lumpy and fragrant with real butter, but the mood had turned sour. Clair forced down as much of the meal as she was able to and tried not to think about who at the table might have betrayed them.
Crashland Page 26
