Redux

by Sean Williams

  First published in 2015

  Copyright © Sean Williams 2015

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

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  Australia

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  A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the

  National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  eISBN 978 1 92526 790 7

  Cover and text design by Design Cherry

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  AVAILABLE NOW

  PRAISE FOR TWINMAKER

  1

  Jesse’s ears rang from the sound of gunshots in the close confines of Wallace’s office. Clair had emptied an entire clip into the wall, but the disguised booth was activating anyway. Blindly, stupidly, they had walked right into a trap.

  Ray, either braver or more stupid than anyone else, darted one arm into the shrinking gap between door and wall and tried to pull the sliding panel back, but the booth wasn’t slowing for anyone. Ray screamed as the metal mouth closed.

  There was a ghastly crunch, and then …

  ssss –

  The sound of the air being sucked out of the room – sinister, like a snake’s hiss.

  Clair prowled with her lenses alive, looking for a way out. That was exactly how Jesse had felt, metaphorically, just an hour ago when he had confessed his feelings for her with the entire world watching. Now, he didn’t care. He would say it all over again because he meant every word. He longed to kiss her for luck, but now wasn’t the time, even if he was about to die.

  – ssss –

  The thinning air was hurting his ears, which made Ray’s screams more bearable, but the entire situation more awful. How many seconds did they have left to stop the booth?

  Jesse backed up against the wall, reassured by its solidity.

  Then Clair was in front of him, looking like she wanted to weep. That was the worst possible sign. Maybe they weren’t getting out of this after all.

  ‘You always wanted to try d-mat,’ she said. There was a catch to her voice. She cared. ‘I’m sorry it had to be like this.’

  His throat was full. She was so beautiful.

  ‘At least we’re—’

  – pop

  ‘—together.’

  Jesse blinked. Clair was gone, just like that, and so was everyone else except for Ray, whose screams were suddenly loud again because the density of the air was back to normal. Jesse looked down and touched his shirt with both hands; Ray’s blood was warm and tacky against his fingertips.

  Around him, Wallace’s office was essentially unchanged, except that the bullet holes had disappeared. Had d-mat finished operating and yet they hadn’t gone anywhere? Was that even possible?

  Then he remembered what had happened to his father when Dylan Linwood had been duped. A null-jump: a journey that went nowhere simply to take someone’s pattern.

  But why would Wallace do that to Jesse?

  Ray was moaning now. It sounded like he was about to pass out.

  Save Ray now and worry about the rest later, Jesse told himself. He hurried to his father’s fallen friend and began tearing strips for a tourniquet.

  2

  When Ray was stable – unconscious but at least no longer bleeding – Jesse began looking for an escape route, undaunted by the fact that they had tried and failed before. Peeling back the carpet square by square he exposed the booth’s mirrored floor. Then he shifted the desk so he could check under it as well. There were no seams in the walls, floors or ceiling, except those around the windows and door, and they were sealed tight. Even with his ear pressed against the walls he could hear nothing but a faint hum. If WHOLE was still fighting out there – and Jesse hoped someone was still fighting out there – then they were doing it quietly.

  Jesse sat on his haunches next to Ray and reviewed everything that had happened since the trap had sprung.

  They had been null-jumped, which meant they had been turned into data and then turned back again. While they were data, they could have been stored somewhere for a while, at least until the fighting had stopped. But why bring them back now, and then just leave them here?

  Weirdest of all was how he felt. He was stuck in Wallace’s office with Ray, had no idea where Clair was and what was happening to her … but he was still himself. Every freckle was in the right place. Every hair. His mouth still tasted like the last thing he had eaten, a strip of dried fruit from the Farmhouse. His clothes still needed a wash.

  To all appearances, Jesse Linwood remained Jesse Linwood, even though everything he had been taught to believe said that this was wrong.

  D-mat took people apart and rebuilt them from nothing.

  D-mat killed people.

  So what was he doing here, then?

  There was a tiny antechamber, little more than a nook leading from the main office. It was there he had said those embarrassing (but true) things to Clair before the trap was sprung. He’d just stood up to check for any exits they might have missed when, utterly without warning, the floor shifted soundlessly underneath him, making him stagger.

  He gasped and put out a hand to steady himself against the desk. It felt like an earthquake. A quick one, finished almost as soon as it had begun.

  In New York?

  But that wasn’t the weirdest thing.

  Looking around he had the unnerving impression that the room had just become bigger. Certainly the carpet squares he had piled up into a mound were further away than they had been before, and the door to the nook now looked weirdly smaller, too. Were his eyes playing tricks on him or had d-mat damaged his brain?

  His head whipped around. With a hiss, the door had opened.

  3

  ‘Look at this mess,’ a woman said. She was short but she walked with long, confident strides as she entered the room, closely followed by a clutch of men and women who were hanging on her every word. ‘The Boss is on his way. If it’s not cleaned up before he gets here—’

  The woman noticed Jesse and Ray and stopped mid-step, causing a pile up behind her.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked Jesse. ‘What are you doing in here?’

  ‘Could it be him?’ asked one of her companions.

  The woman silenced them with a flick of one hand. Her gaze was hard and penetrating, like she could see right into Jesse’s soul.

  He was unable to breathe, let alone talk. ‘The Boss’ had to be Wallace. If this woman worked for him, then he was in big trouble.

  ‘He’s not Nobody,’ the woman concluded, as though that made perfect sense to her. ‘And neither’s his friend. They’re someone else entirely.’

  Jesse felt like a chick in the middle of a crocodile’s nest. Clair would have known what to do, but this time she wasn’
t with him.

  ‘I have no idea how I got in here,’ he said, the inadequacy of the lie so galling he could barely bring himself to utter it.

  The woman tilted her head, and against all expectations, relaxed.

  ‘Ah, you’re one of the Improved, of course,’ she said. ‘Wondering where the hell you are and why that pathetic attempt at a beard isn’t any bigger, I expect.’

  Jesse touched his goatee. ‘Uh, yeah.’ Now was not the time to defend his manhood. If she didn’t know who he was, he wasn’t going to tell her. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Just stay out of the way and you won’t get hurt.’ To one of her underlings, the woman said, ‘Seventeen, take him and the old guy down to sickbay, then get straight back here. We’ve better things to do than round up strays.’

  ‘Yes, Mallory,’ said a red-haired man who looked to be in his forties and had muscles like jackhammers. ‘Come on, help me get him up,’ he said to Jesse, who, if he had felt terrified before, was ready to melt into the floor now.

  Mallory. Jesse knew who she was. He had watched her commit suicide in Libby’s body rather than be interrogated by WHOLE. Clair feared that Mallory was taking over her body, thanks to Improvement. Mallory was also Ant Wallace’s wife.

  And she was letting Jesse go.

  ‘Kid?’ said the big guy, nudging Jesse’s ankle with the toe of one boot.

  ‘Uh, sure,’ Jesse said, hearing his voice coming out all reedy but unable to help it. ‘Thanks … Seventeen.’

  ‘Don’t sweat it. Let’s just get moving. Trust me, we don’t want to keep Mallory waiting.’

  Jesse glanced over his shoulder. Mallory was issuing orders to the rest of her minions without giving him a second thought. The carpet squares he had pulled up were going back down, except for those that had been splattered with Ray’s blood. Replacements were being called for, fresh from a fabber outside.

  Why didn’t they use the fabber in the nook?

  The question vanished from Jesse’s mind as the floor moved beneath him again and this time the room visibly expanded.

  Seventeen didn’t seem to notice or to care if he did. With Jesse’s help he flopped Ray over his shoulder like a long-limbed eel, where Ray hung unmoving as he was hauled out through the doors that had so grievously injured him. Jesse trailed after them, keeping Ray’s wounded arm aloft as best he could. The older man’s chest was still rising and falling. Hope remained that he would live long enough to receive medical attention.

  Beyond that Jesse didn’t dare to imagine.

  4

  Sickbay was two floors up. Part of the ceiling had caved in – during the battle for the building, Jesse assumed, when Q and WHOLE had attacked Wallace head-on. The redhead handed control of Ray over to a doctor in civilian clothes who was juggling several patients at once. The doctor took a cursory look at Ray’s wound and told Jesse to keep it elevated.

  ‘I’ll be with you as soon as I can.’

  Jesse swallowed and nodded. The doctor was wrist-deep in the guts of an injured woman. Looking directly at the woman’s terrible wound made Jesse feel faint.

  ‘Stay cool, kid,’ said Seventeen, heading for the door. ‘We’re all freaking out a little.’

  ‘Will you tell me what’s going on?’ Jesse asked before the redhead could go back to Mallory. He didn’t mind playing the ignoramus if, in the process, he learned something that might help them escape.

  ‘The Protocol was activated.’ At Jesse’s blank expression, Seventeen shrugged and said, ‘I heard Mallory say that on the way up. I hoped you might know what it meant. Guess they’ll tell us when they’re ready.’

  Then he was gone, and the doctor was taking Ray’s arm out of Jesse’s hands.

  ‘There’s nothing I can do for him now except cauterize the wound,’ he told Jesse. ‘You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to.’

  ‘I’ll stay. I want to make sure he’s okay.’

  ‘You know him?’ The doctor’s expression was more than idly curious, and Jesse thought hard. Had he said something to arouse the doctor’s suspicions?

  ‘No,’ Jesse said. ‘Never seen him before. But he tried to help me … before he was hurt in the fighting … and I don’t know anyone else here.’ The doctor kept staring at him, so he added, ‘Improvement. This isn’t how I was expecting things to go.’ He mimed a beard that stretched down his chest.

  That did it. ‘Understood. You’re not one of the enlisted. Well, that will be sorted out soon enough, I’m sure. The Boss doesn’t like loose ends.’

  Not significantly reassured, Jesse wanted to ask what the doctor meant by enlisted – he had a rising suspicion it was synonymous with duped – but instead he was nudged unceremoniously aside, and stayed out of the way while the doctor did his work.

  5

  As Jesse waited, doing his best to find something to look at that wasn’t spattered with blood, he noticed something that had escaped his attention earlier.

  When he and Clair had been trapped in the office, they had been completely cut off from the Air. Now he was out of the office, and the Air was back. That opened up a wealth of possibilities.

  His augs had always been a source of intense dissatisfaction to him, and as he tried to drill down through the random images and sounds currently muddying the Air he hated them more than ever. Captions and news feeds overlapped in his single lens, accompanied by a dizzying hubbub issuing from his earpiece. It was too much like the time he had tried a hallucinogenic drug with a couple of other Abstainer kids, and he almost dropped out of this attempt to connect as quickly as he had with those old friends. But then, just as he was tapping the letters c-a-n-c-e-l on his thigh, the chaos parted and he discerned something sensible from the mess.

  He was still in New York, his lenses told him. He’d assumed that, but at least now they weren’t trying to tell him he was in Russia as well. At first there were no bumps in his infield, or contacts nearby, but then, when his augs picked up Ray, connections to other people began to form. There were fewer than normal, and some of them seemed anomalous, like Aunt Arabelle. She had been taken by dupes days ago, so why was she showing up now?

  The person he was most eager to find was Clair, and it was hard to fight his instinctive desire to go looking for her straight away. He waited as patiently as he could, not wanting to draw attention to himself while he was still in the crocodile’s nest. Maybe once they were out of Wallace’s HQ – maybe off the island altogether – he could contact her directly …

  When finally her name appeared in the spreading network, he breathed a sigh of relief that the doctor didn’t appear notice. She was in Windham, Maine – her home town, he recalled. That was a good sign. He felt better knowing she was with her parents, although the mystery of how she had ended up there remained.

  Meanwhile the network was still spreading, the list of people he knew growing longer and ever more impossible …

  ‘I said, he’s all done.’

  Jesse blinked out of his thoughts. Through the virtual infield obscuring the vision of his left eye he saw the doctor tightening the last bandage over Ray’s wound.

  ‘Oh, thanks,’ Jesse managed, but he was genuinely grateful. Whether the doctor was a dupe or not, he had done something good that day. ‘Can he be moved?’

  ‘If he has to be. I’ll give you some patches – one to wake him, one for the pain. Make sure you keep him out of the action, though. He’s got to lay low for a day or two at least.’

  ‘Okay.’ Jesse took the patches and applied the first one to Ray’s throat, where Jesse could see the pulse, and the second to his good arm. Before the doctor could move on to another patient, Jesse said, ‘What happens next? Do you know?’

  ‘We wait for orders.’ The doctor shrugged. ‘Depends what put us in here, I guess.’

  ‘In the building?’

  ‘No, in here.’ The doctor was looking at him oddly again, but only briefly. ‘Right, Improvement. Find someone else to ask or wait for your friend here to wake up
so he can tell you. I’m busy.’

  With that the doctor turned away and began setting a broken leg. Jesse considered pressing him for an answer, but then Ray took a deep, gasping breath and his bloodshot eyes snapped open, taking in the room and its inhabitants with wide-lidded confusion.

  Before Ray could say anything, Jesse put a hand over his mouth and helped him to sit up.

  ‘Just stand,’ he told Ray. ‘Then try to walk. You can lean on me.’

  Ray glanced down at his bandaged arm, blanched, and nodded.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Jesse.

  6

  In here, the doctor had said. Jesse didn’t think he meant the building.

  The city?

  Ray couldn’t walk quickly, so they had plenty of time to listen in on people’s conversations, particularly in the elevator. His guess that these people were dupes was quickly confirmed. They referred to each other by number, and there was only one of each number. Some had been colleagues for a long time and yet they didn’t recognise each other. It was as if they had removed their masks at a costume ball and were seeing each other’s faces for the first time.

  Maybe it was exactly that, Jesse thought, only the masks the dupes normally wore were flesh and blood …

  One exchange in particular revealed more than the dupes would have intended, had they known Jesse was in their midst.

  ‘The Protocol was the measure of last resort. Mallory told me that once. If that’s true, why did the Boss use it?’

  ‘Dunno. Care to stick your head outside and find out?’

  ‘While I’ve only got the one? No thanks.’

  The dupes laughed and Jesse tried not to look studious. They were talking in riddles and he had to puzzle them out. What did outside mean? What did it mean that the dupes now had just one head?

  ‘One thing I’ll say,’ commented the first dupe as the elevator doors opened on the ground floor, ‘this shit is for real.’

  Jesse might have assumed the dupe meant the situation in general were the dupe not staring at his hand, turning it front to back as though he had never seen it before.