“Wait, I get it,” said Jesse. “I can totally see how Wallace meant it to go. First he’d fake some kind of emergency—maybe a problem with d-mat—which he or one of his plants would fix. Sound familiar?”
“He steps in and saves the day,” said Agnessa, “and people are so grateful they vote in laws that make the Earth his playground?”
“Yes—and then there’s that list,” said Jesse, snapping his fingers. “His pet lawmakers! They’re the ones putting all the new measures forward.”
“But you can’t rule the world if you’re dead,” said Devin.
“Is he, though?”
“Actually,” said Clair, at last seeing the full extent of the thing she had been reaching for, “I think he really might be dead, and we’ve been too stupid to see it.”
[57]
* * *
ALL EYES TURNED to her.
“People don’t often call me stupid,” said Devin. “You’d better explain.”
“All right.” She looked down at her hands, trying to put her thoughts in the right order. “Our working theory has gone back to being that Wallace is still alive because of the dupes. He’s looking for revenge, taking over the world, whatever. But as you said, it’s not in his character to do all this in public. Also, if he was around, you’d think he’d have made a new version of Mallory by now . . . and she would’ve come after us for sure.”
“Right,” said Jesse. “You killed her, after all.”
Clair shied away from those memories.
“That’s not to say, though, that Wallace wasn’t part of the plan at some point,” she went on. “An integral part. He had his own operation—Improvement. I figure he was approached by someone who heard about it somehow, someone who wanted to create a secret army of dupes for themselves. Wallace made that possible, but it wasn’t his idea, and he wasn’t in control of them. Not absolutely. Maybe he had some dupes of his own—probably the prototypes, the earliest versions, Nobody—but the rest didn’t work for him. They were independent, a dupe squad that couldn’t be traced back to their masters. The people who have really been pulling the strings all this time.”
“Wallace was a pawn, just like the Cashiles said?” Devin asked. “Who for?”
What do the other dupes want? she had asked Nobody on the seastead.
The same thing they’ve always wanted.
“The people who really want to take over OneEarth,” she said. “Someone public, someone seen to be doing good, someone in a position to influence the Consensus Court . . .”
“The lawmakers on that list,” said Agnessa. “Is that what you’re suggesting?”
“Maybe some of them,” said Clair. “Maybe all of them. I don’t think even Wallace knew. That’s what the question marks and asterisks were for. He was trying to work it out for himself.”
“LM Kingdon is on the list,” said Jesse. “With an asterisk.”
“I know,” she said, remembering the woman’s easy but determined charm. “It fits, doesn’t it? She’s pushing for harsh measures against anyone suspected of being a dupe. How long until she starts accusing the people who disagree with her? How long until you don’t even have to be a dupe to get in trouble?”
“You think she’s really her?”
“I don’t know. And I don’t know how to find out. That’s the trouble with dupes. Unless they slip up or confess, there’s no test to see who’s who and who isn’t. That’s why this is so clever. People are suspicious of dupes, which means they’re suspicious of everyone. You can see exactly how it’ll happen, how paranoid everyone is going to get. How desperately in need of a bad guy. It’s almost like the real bad guys wanted Wallace to be discovered. . . .”
“Maybe they did,” said Devin, looking like he was starting to come around. “He takes the fall and they get everything they need to stage their coup. It’s all very convenient.”
“And maybe that’s why he wanted Q so badly,” Clair said. “He could see what was coming for him and was trying to avoid it.”
“But he failed and he’s dead now, leaving Nobody flailing about at a loose end.” Devin was ticking points off on his fingers. “The rest of the dupe squad don’t know what to do with Nobody. Maybe they don’t want to admit what’s going on to their masters. So they come to you, Clair, in the hope that you’ll do something about it. First they try to recruit you, then they warn you so you’ll warn us. There are at least two factions among the dupes, but only one of them is dangerous—not Nobody, although that’s what they’d like you to think. The Cashiles, who are helping the lawmakers take over the world. And that’s why there’s all this orbital hardware in play: they have friends in high places.”
“Hold it,” said Agnessa. “This is all very well as a theory, but I don’t buy it. You’ve let Turner’s wild ideas go to your heads. Forget the crazy dupes for a moment. The rest is never going to happen the way you say it will. People aren’t stupid. Random acts of terror don’t lead automatically to a totalitarian government.”
“Maybe not overnight,” said Jesse, “but if you can use Improvement to steal new bodies every generation or so, you can afford to play the long game.”
“Or,” said Clair, only then thinking of another plausible take, “the lawmakers could dupe voters to vote the right way for them.”
Devin’s eyebrows went up. “Whoa. You don’t think small, do you?”
“Is that possible?” asked Jesse. “I mean, could they really do something like that with no one noticing?”
Clair didn’t know. “Maybe if they duped whole families and friendship circles . . .”
“Whole towns,” said Devin. “Whole regions. Why not the whole world?”
“They can’t do anything while d-mat isn’t working,” said Agnessa, again playing devil’s advocate.
“That’s Q again,” said Clair. “Things weren’t supposed to go that way. Wallace died. The Nobody dupe freaked out. The lawmakers have done their best to take advantage of it, but really Q’s the monkey wrench in their works as well. That’s why everyone wants and fears her at the same time. She changes everything around her without even realizing she’s doing it.”
“I told you she was dangerous,” Devin said.
“But she saved us,” said Jesse. “Without her, where would we have been in fifty years? Kingdon and her buddies might have won and our kids would all be slaves. Now that we know, we can put a stop to it.”
“How?” asked Agnessa.
For a full minute, there was silence.
[58]
* * *
CLAIR’S MIND WAS crowded with sudden, new thoughts. She had come to Agnessa expecting to turn her back on d-mat, and here she was uncovering a plan to take over OneEarth from the inside. If that was what it really was. Just because it felt right to her didn’t mean that some lawmakers were really intending to mind-rape the world. They needed evidence. And they needed some kind of leverage before they could possibly take something this incendiary public. Her mother was still vulnerable. She was still vulnerable. What did she have on her side apart from a band of argumentative misfits hiding out in an abandoned city?
She had Clair’s Bears, she reminded herself, and there was a chance they might already have provided the information she needed. Calling up the file Ronnie had been trying to send her, she opened it up in a window of its own. It asked for a password, so she entered “Elevate,” the name of the song she and her friends had danced to at the crashlander ball. That didn’t work, so she tried “Silent P,” the artist who had sung it.
The file opened, revealing that Ronnie and Tash had whittled a mountain of data down to just three personnel profiles and two locations. The three profiles were of men. One of the locations was some kind of scientific installation in the Middle East, the other a borehole on the other side of Russia.
“We need access to the Air,” she said. “Is there any way to get that from in here?”
“If I drop the Faraday shield, we’ll be exposed,” said Agnessa. “But I have a landline, of
course, to maintain my telepresence outside. You can ask me and I’ll find you anything you need to know.”
Clair nodded. That would have to do.
“Here are two places you didn’t follow up on the endpoint data.” She sent the information. “I want to know what they are, who uses them, and what they use them for. And here are three names to search for, as well. They’re our potential Nobodies. Anything you can pull on them will be good.”
“So the plan is still the same,” said Devin. “Find the source of the dupes and shut it down. With or without Nobody’s help.”
“If we take out the dupes, the lawmakers will be toothless,” she said.
“There are still the PKs,” said Jesse.
“Until the law is changed, they can’t move against us,” she said.
“Unless we become a threat,” said Agnessa.
“That’s right.”
“The definition of ‘threat’ is very slippery these days.”
“I know,” said Clair.
“We have to handle this carefully,” said Devin. “If whoever’s behind this gets the slightest idea that we know what they’re doing, they’ll come down on us hard. And we know they have the means. The only thing keeping us alive right now, most likely, is that we keep banging on about Wallace, diverting attention from what’s really going on.”
Data flooded from Agnessa into Clair’s infield. The pit was in fact the Baikal Superdeep Borehole, the deepest artificial hole in the world, drilled twenty years ago at the bottom of a massive freshwater lake, then flooded and sealed to stop urban spelunkers from killing themselves when they reached the superheated bottom. It now served as a geothermal power supply for the national park responsible for its surrounds. No one had been inside for years, according to park rangers, although lat-jumpers like Tash did regularly drop in to see the lake.
The other location was a high-gain antenna on the tiny island of Mesaieed, just off the coast of Qatar. The island sported enormous sand dunes that drew tourists in droves, plus competitors in a popular endurance contest. Few people visited the antenna itself, but it was a major telemetry hub for the network of VIA satellites responsible for coordinating global d-mat traffic.
“Another connection to satellites,” said Devin. “I think we’re on to something here.”
“Can we hack in and see what the uplink is talking to?” Clair asked, telling herself not to get too excited too fast. It was hard, though: this looked very plausible. “I mean, d-mat has crashed, right? If that uplink is talking to anything, it has to be where the dupes come from.”
“I’ll ask Trevin to look into it,” Devin said.
“You’re linked to him even in here?” Jesse asked.
“I’m linked to him anywhere.” Devin lifted his left eyebrow. “Maybe it is telepathy.”
While Clair waited, she called up the personnel profiles of the three VIA employees Ronnie had flagged. Two were in their fifties, technicians who had worked on relay stations like the one in Mesaieed. The other was in his midtwenties, a security guard named Cameron Lee. Born in Manchester, schooled in Boston. In his photo he looked cocky and cheerful, with a shock of blond hair and lively blue eyes.
He was the one.
Cameron Lee was a young man who had his entire life ahead of him. Clair didn’t know how or why he had been recruited into the dupe program, but in this optimistic beginning she recognized the devastation of Nobody’s fall. A middle-aged man might endure it with more grace. Someone vibrant and full of hope had so much more to be bitter and twisted about.
Agnessa came through with extra information regarding the three candidates. The first of the older men had been gunned down in a bar fight a year ago. The second had died in a fall while hiking in the Rockies. Cameron Lee had contracted a form of motor neuron disease that was treatable but had led to him taking a desk job, five years after he was first employed by VIA. The disease wasn’t what had killed him, though. He had been beaten to death by an unknown assailant shortly after the crash of d-mat, beaten so badly, genetic records had been needed to identify his body.
“That’s him,” she said. “It has to be.”
“Are you sure?” asked Jesse.
“He was born in England,” said Devin. “That would explain the accent.”
“I’m sure of it,” she said. “Cameron Lee is Nobody. He was copied before he got sick, when Wallace first started experimenting.”
“So, are you going to call him on his promise? He said he’d give up if you told him his real name.”
“I know,” said Clair.
“But he’s the crazy dupe who has nothing to do with the others,” said Jesse. “How does that even help us?”
“And how are you going to contact him without letting anyone else know?” asked Devin.
Clair worried at the top of her nose with the thumb and forefinger of her right hand. Then she looked up.
“Jesse, you said there are people coming here every day?” He nodded. “I bet he’s already here. Agnessa, can you put the word out among your people to ask around?”
“Using the name?”
“No. Just ‘Nobody.’ If you can do it without the PKs hearing, all the better. We don’t want them freaking out and calling in the cavalry.”
“I will do so. But I’m certain you’re wrong. All our members are carefully vetted.”
“I bet they are, but Nobody is crazy enough to try something like this and experienced enough to get away with it. Short of all-out invading, it’s the only way he’d get close to me.”
“All right. I’ve got people asking.”
“That uplink,” interrupted Devin. “It’s quiet at the moment, but the traffic has been heavy recently. Freakishly heavy, in both directions. There’s some serious hardware in there.”
“Could it be where the dupes patterns are being kept?” Clair asked, not wanting to mention Q just yet. One possibility at a time.
“Unlikely. Somewhere on the ground is too easy to take out: a guy with a grenade could do it. Here’s a list of all the satellites it’s communicated with in the last week.”
A stream of meaningless names bumped into Clair’s infield, an apparently random combination of letters and numbers. As she scrolled down them, one stood out.
“V468,” she said. “That one comes up a lot. What’s it for?”
“Unspecified,” said Devin. “Same as Wallace’s little hideaway, except this one isn’t equipped with life support.”
“Who owns it?”
“It’s a OneEarth asset, loaned to VIA for reasons unspecified.”
Clair felt goose bumps rising on her arms.
“That has to be it, doesn’t it?” she said.
A knock resounded up the hallway from the external door of the L-shaped building, followed immediately by the sound of Nelly talking to someone. Clair thought she heard Sargent’s voice. The door closed. Footsteps came up the hall, two sets.
“Maria Gaudio to see you,” said Nelly. “Signed up with the contingent from Brussels this morning. Said you asked for her.”
She led a tiny brunette into the room. The woman was in her midthirties, dressed in drab khakis and high leather boots. There was a pink-dotted bandage under her right ear. Her eyes were so deep a brown they were almost black. Her gaze swept the room and locked on to Clair.
“Hello,” the woman said.
“Hello, Cameron Lee,” Clair said.
The woman smiled. There was no humor in that smile, just a thousand lives’ worth of self-loathing and pain.
Nobody.
[59]
* * *
“SO YOU FOUND him,” said the woman who was no longer herself. “You found me.”
“Not before you did,” said Jesse. “Why did you kill him—your original, the real Cameron Lee?”
“Because he condemned me to this life. It was his decision, and he deserved to suffer as I have suffered. I regret that he had just one life to give.”
“But he was sick,” said Clair
, “and you’re still him. Why not stop punishing yourself?”
“Perhaps I would, if I could find an alternative,” said Nobody. It was hard to think of him as him in the body of a woman. It was even harder to think of him as someone with a name. “Nobody” fit much better, so Clair decided to run with it, even if he wanted her to think of him the way he was.
“Death stops everything,” he said, “in the end.”
Just as it had stopped Maria Gaudio, Clair thought.
“You said you’d give up if I found out who you were,” she said. “Do you remember that?”
“I know that I intended to tell you that,” he said, “and that you took one of me captive on the seastead. I have acted on the assumption that you and he reached that arrangement. I speak for all of me.”
“Will you do what you said you’d do?” asked Devin.
Nobody nodded. “If that’s what you want.”
“Of course it’s what we want,” said Jesse. “I want you out of my father’s body—out of everyone’s bodies—”
“Not yet,” said Clair. “We’ve been trying to find the source of the dupes, and we think we finally have. If you really want to die, you’ll tell us if we’re right, because Cameron Lee’s pattern must be in there too. If we don’t erase him, he—you—will be brought back all over again.”
“This is true.” Nobody inclined the woman’s head, as though acknowledging a point well made—or perhaps a test successfully passed. “Tell me what you’ve found.”
Clair outlined what they knew about the satellite, V468, and the uplink in Qatar.
“Yes,” he said, nodding. “That would fit, wouldn’t it?”
“You’re not sure?” said Devin, still looking skeptical.
“I wasn’t privy to every detail of Wallace’s operation,” Nobody said. “I was just a hired thug, infinitely expendable.”
“So what do you know?” asked Agnessa. “What can you tell us that we haven’t already figured out?”
“Wallace’s repository is vaster than anyone realizes,” he said. “Not just the hollow men, but the Improved, too, and anyone connected to the Improved, and anyone connected to them in turn. The patterns number in the millions, perhaps tens of millions. Anyone who used d-mat could in theory be copied by Wallace and put in cold storage.”
Crashland Page 29
