Strange New World

by Rachel Vincent

  Julienne nods.

  “What’s your favorite thing about cooking?” I’ve asked her this before, but got no answer.

  This time she seems to be thinking as she chews, her gaze aimed at the table between us. “I used to like trying something new. Making a substitution in the recipe.”

  That’s more than she’s ever said to me at once, and I have to hide my excitement. “Used to?”

  “It’s easier to just follow the recipe now,” she says. “I haven’t felt like experimenting in a long time.”

  “How long?”

  She cuts another bite as she thinks. “Since the training ward. Cooking was fun then.”

  “What changed?”

  Julienne’s empty fork hovers over her plate. “I don’t know. After graduation, I came here, and…nothing seemed to matter anymore.” She glances at her plate with a thoughtful frown. “I wonder how this would taste with pistachios in place of walnuts?”

  “Let’s find out! Tomorrow for breakfast, why don’t you bring something that you’ve altered. Or something you made up entirely.”

  Her eyes light up at the idea, and it bruises my heart to realize that after two long years of service to my family, I am just now truly meeting Julienne 20.

  * * *

  “Are you ready?” My mother taps the car window to mute the protesters as we drive past. There are more of them than ever this morning, but the signs have changed. Now the unemployed demonstrators are protesting clone citizenship, which, they seem convinced, would only add to competition in an already crowded job market.

  I can’t help feeling a little vindicated that they don’t like Dahlia-as-me any more than they like the real me.

  “I will never be ready for this,” I admit as I turn away from the window. I straighten the hem of my long-sleeved silk shirt.

  “But you have your answers memorized?” my mother presses.

  “Yes,” I tell her. We’ve been setting the stage for this all week, releasing previously unaired footage of me feeding the poor, reading to sick kids, and hammering in nails on homeless shelters under construction.

  The approach we’ve decided on is that Waverly Whitmore is a friend of those in need. All those in need. The new platform doesn’t change that—it expands upon my existing humanitarian interests.

  Which is why we’re doing this interview at the new homeless shelter, which I opened by cutting a ceremonial ribbon last month. Nearly two weeks before the meteorite named Dahlia 16 slammed into my world and destroyed everything I’d ever known.

  Our car pulls up to the shelter, a squat two-story building that houses dormitory-style sleeping quarters upstairs and common areas on the first floor. For once, there’s no crowd to mob me when the driver opens the door to let me out, and I understand why when I hear the wave of cheers echo from the side of the building.

  I can’t resist a smile, in spite of my interview anxiety.

  “I’ll be watching from here,” my mother says, holding up her tablet. Then the driver closes the door.

  With one security guard at my back, I follow the sidewalk around the building to the basketball court, where more cheers nearly drown out the sound of shoes slapping the pavement and the bounce of a ball.

  I laugh when I see Hennessy with his sleeves pushed up and his arms outstretched, guarding the basket while a kid who can’t be any older than twelve dribbles down the concrete court toward him, wiping sweat from his forehead with the back of one arm. He feints to the right, then moves left to take his shot. The ball soars over Hennessy’s head and swishes into the basket.

  The crowd cheers, and Hennessy laughs. Then he shakes the kid’s hand. “Rematch!” he declares, to another round of cheers. “Next time!”

  The kids love him. The cameras love him.

  I love him.

  I catch his gaze as he makes his way through the crowd, and his bodyguard tosses him a towel. Hennessy wipes sweat from his face, and as he gets to me, he leans in for a kiss.

  An appreciative cheer rises from the kids in the crowd, and even from some of the parents.

  We wave and call out greetings as we head into the building through a side door. “This one’s live?” Hennessy whispers low enough that the echo of my heels on the tile floor should drown him out from more than a couple of feet away.

  “Yes, but the questions were submitted in advance,” I tell him. “Most of them will be for me. You just have to look and sound supportive.”

  “That should be easy. I am supportive.”

  “And I love you for it.” Hennessy didn’t ask for any of this. But he hasn’t even flinched.

  Fifteen minutes later, we’re seated in folding metal chairs, squinting into soft, flattering three-point interview lighting with the shelter’s large, commercial kitchen—paid for by DigiCore—in the background. Hennessy no longer looks sweaty from his basketball game, and I’m wearing an apron over my silk shirt, because after the interview I’ll be serving dinner to the twenty-eight homeless families lucky enough to be sheltered here while they’re trying to get back on their feet.

  A boom mike positioned overhead will pick up everything we say, so there’s no need for individual microphones.

  As part of the negotiation for this interview, we requested Deena Philips as the interviewer, because she’s a friendly face who works for the very network that airs my show. Which means that she, the network, and I all have the same goal—to make us look good and avoid a ratings dip over Dahlia’s moment of unscripted lunacy.

  This is as safe as a live interview will ever get.

  Deena starts off soft and easy, asking us about the wedding preparations and about my dress, giving Hennessy and me a chance to gush and smile at each other. Then she moves into the main event, and I mentally check off each question as she asks it.

  “So, Waverly.” Deena turns in her chair to face me directly. I wish I could check the stats on my tablet, to see how many people are watching. “I’m sure I’m not the only one out there who’s curious about your new platform. Before last week, I’d never even heard the phrase, but as of this moment, a search of the words clone citizenship yields more than”—she glances at her tablet—“three point two million results, with very little actual information to be found. You’ve started something!” Her smile looks more nervous than sincere, which echoes the curious but wary responses I’ve been getting from my followers. “You’ve gotten people talking, but your announcement seems to have come out of nowhere. Can you tell us what led you to take on this particular issue?”

  I pause and give the camera a thoughtful look, as if I’m coming up with my response in real time. Hennessy takes my hand, a visible sign of encouragement that—according to the network’s behavior analysts—paints me in a sympathetic light. “Humanity.”

  Deena blinks into the camera aimed at her and cocks her head to the side. “Humanity?”

  “Yes.” I shift in my seat, getting comfortable as I launch into my answer. “Hennessy and I were born into good fortune, and we were taught to give back. We raise money. We build houses. We donate toys and clothes. And we come to places like this”—I gesture to the kitchen around me—“to give of our time. But in all that giving, and building, and raising, for orphans, and the homeless, and the jobless, we’ve been overlooking the largest disenfranchised population there is. Clones.”

  “You’re saying that clones are…what? Being denied basic rights?” Deena frowns. “But they’re provided with everything they need in exchange for their work.”

  “Yet I bet you’d have a hard time finding any citizen willing to work under the same terms. Clones don’t get time off. They can’t own property. They don’t earn wages. They can’t decide what to wear. They don’t get to choose what kind of work they do.”

  “They don’t even get to choose what to eat,” Hennessy adds.

  �
��Clones work alongside us every day, doing jobs many people aren’t willing to do for themselves, yet most of the time we don’t even notice they’re there,” I continue. “They’re practically invisible. They can’t speak up for themselves. So someone has to speak for them.”

  Hennessy squeezes my hand.

  Deena shifts in her seat and crosses her legs at the knee. She leans forward and glances at her notes. Then she sets her tablet in her lap and looks right at me.

  Uh-oh. She’s going off-script. I can see that before she even opens her mouth.

  “Ms. Whitmore, with all due respect, there’s a reason clones can’t speak for themselves. While many of them are obviously highly skilled in their service areas, they don’t operate on a cognitive level that would allow them to use most of the rights that come with citizenship. Not to mention the responsibilities. Clones are incapable of managing a bank account. Or operating a tablet. Or understanding political issues in order to cast a vote. Or making more than the basic daily decisions. Wouldn’t giving the rights and responsibilities of citizenship to a populace that isn’t capable of understanding them actually be doing them a disservice?”

  “No!” She’s veered from the questions we agreed on, but that’s given me an unexpected opening. Hennessy squeezes my hand again, but I’m too caught up in this to smile at him and appreciate his support for the camera. “They are capable. That’s what people don’t understand. Clones aren’t born staring at their feet. They don’t toddle around their nurseries in a mental fog. They’re normal until they get here. Until they start working for us. Until they start—” I nearly bite my own tongue to keep the rest of the words from forming. But I’ve already said too much.

  And now I realize that Hennessy wasn’t squeezing my hand in support. He was warning me to shut up.

  “Until they start what?” Deena asks.

  “Um…the details don’t matter.” I stare at the camera for a moment, grasping for a way to recover. “My point is that clones are capable of much more than we give them credit for.”

  Deena leans back in her chair. “Ms. Whitmore, I think the details do matter, and I suspect our viewers would agree. What makes you think clones are capable of operating on the same level as the rest of us?”

  Hennessy shifts uncomfortably beside me.

  “I…” I can’t tell her how I know what I know about clones. And if I lie, there will be millions of viewers waiting to dig up proof to discredit me.

  “Ms. Whitmore, you just told us that clones are born normal. That something happens to them to make them the way they are when they’re bought. That’s an extraordinary claim. I certainly hope you have evidence to back it up.”

  “I just…get that feeling sometimes, when I talk to them.”

  Deena’s eyebrows arch comically high. “Are you saying you carry on conversations with clones?” She laughs as if I’ve just told her I share my deepest secrets with the birds in the park. “Ms. Whitmore, is it possible that this whole thing was a publicity stunt? An artificial controversy intended to create higher ratings for your show, with the wedding episode coming up?”

  “No! I would never—” But that’s not true. I have participated in publicity stunts, but they were all orchestrated by Network 4. As a network employee, Deena Philips probably knows that. Which is how she knows I can’t entirely deny the accusation.

  She set a trap, probably to improve her own ratings, and I walked right into it.

  * * *

  “Dahlia?” my mother says when I sit next to her in the backseat of the car.

  I scowl at her.

  “Just checking.” My mother’s frown feels like ice as she holds up her tablet to show me a still shot from the interview. “Because you sounded like someone who’s never been on camera.”

  “I know! Deena went off-script, and I followed her.”

  “Right over a cliff. Waverly, I’m trying to save your life. That’d be a lot easier if you stop giving the Administrator reasons to have you killed. Let’s go!” my mother snaps at the driver, and the car begins to roll forward. I wish Hennessy were coming with us. But it’s his father’s birthday. This morning, I was worried about coming up with a believable excuse for missing the party, but now I’m pretty sure his dad would rather I stay away.

  “Do I even want to know about the optics?”

  “People seem to be buying the publicity stunt angle.”

  I groan. I resented being forced to go along with Dahlia’s announcement, but for the first time since I’d found out about my five thousand identicals, I’d felt like I was doing the right thing. Even if it wasn’t my idea. But if no one takes the new platform seriously…

  “Consider yourself lucky,” my mother snaps. “If that’s the public consensus, the Administrator might not feel threatened enough to back out of our agreement.”

  “Do I have any other option?”

  She drops her tablet onto her lap and turns away from me to stare out the window. “Let’s just say that leaking a story about your complete mental breakdown is starting to look like a viable option.”

  On my wall screen, Trigger looks up at the camera again, and I wonder if he knows I can see him. That Lorna is letting me watch him as a constant reminder of what she’ll do if I don’t cooperate.

  My tablet beeps with a message from Waverly asking—no, telling me to come to her room for another prep session. I slide the tablet back into my pocket without replying. I’ll go. I have no choice. But I’m going to take my time, to remind her that I am not a servant.

  In his basement cell, Trigger begins a set of sit-ups with his toes anchored beneath the bathroom door. He’s been given a change of clothes, but he’s only wearing the exercise shorts, and even through the low-quality security feed I can see sweat building up on his chest and shoulders as he exercises.

  His physique is…pleasing. I miss feeling the firm breadth of his back beneath my palms when I hug him. I miss his hand in mine. I miss the way he used to smile at me over our lunch trays. But as miserable as I am here alone, it must be much worse for him.

  His cell has no window. He hasn’t seen daylight in nearly a week, nor has he spoken to another human being, except for the clones assigned to slide his meal tray through a slot in his door. And they’re not allowed to reply, no matter what he says or does.

  I wish there were something I could do for him. But even if I knew how to open his door—even if I could sneak him out and run away with him—Lorna would only take her fury out on my identicals.

  I hate her.

  When I knock, Waverly opens her door, and I find her staring at the wall screen. It’s covered in a grid of twelve windows, each showing a headline or an article about the “ratings stunt” Waverly Whitmore was accused of pulling during an interview yesterday.

  “What’s a stunt?” I ask as the door whispers closed behind me.

  “That means everyone thinks your announcement at the engagement party was insincere. That it was only intended to draw more viewers to the wedding episode of my show.”

  “They think I was lying?”

  “No, they think I was lying. Well, saying something I didn’t really mean, anyway. But forget about that.” She swipes the windows closed, leaving the screen transparent. “Today, I think we both need a little fun.”

  I frown. Waverly’s been angry with me all week, snapping at me in every prep session and kicking me out so she can eat meals alone in her room, even though I’m not allowed to eat with Trigger now. I don’t understand why she’s suddenly being so nice. “I thought we were going to prepare for the bridal shower.”

  She tilts her head to the left. “You’re saying that can’t be fun?”

  I nod, but that only makes her laugh.

  “Shopping always makes me feel better. You’re going to love this.”

  By now, I know that shopping means buying th
ings with credits, but I’ve never done it, because I don’t have any credits.

  Waverly pulls open one of her drawers. “Dressing room,” she says in a commanding tone, and a new box opens on her wall screen. “One hundred percent.”

  The box grows to take up the entire wall, and it’s like looking through a window into another place. Into a room with thick white carpet and cloth-covered walls embroidered with intricate, repeating patterns, in several rich shades of gold and red. On the left stands a rolling rack, from which hangs a series of shirts, pants, and dresses.

  Waverly returns from her dresser carrying a tiny black leotard. “Here. Go put this on.”

  “What is it?” I take the garment from her. It feels…slick. And thicker than I expected. “It’s too small.”

  “It’s a VirtuFit. Sensors in the screen get your measurements from it, and the screen will show you what you look like with the clothes on.”

  I can only frown, waiting for her words to make sense.

  “Just go change.” She points to the closet. “You’ll see.”

  I open the closet door, and though I was in here once before, I was too nervous to really process what I saw. Now that I have time, I can only stare around the space in amazement. Unlike the narrow cupboard where my roommates and I hung our workforce uniforms, this is an entire room lined in rods packed with hanging clothes.

  Beneath the clothes, in little cubes lined up three high all the way across the room, are hundreds of pairs of shoes. Some of them are rubber-soled athletic shoes in an assortment of bright colors. Some are flat-soled sandals, and yet others have heels higher than anything I’ve worn since I got here. The heels of one pair are carved into tiny silver statues of a lady. The thick, wedge-shaped soles of another are little cages with vine-wrapped golden bars imprisoning a tiny, beautiful, snow-white bird. Another pair is shaped like a set of bananas, with the peels folded back to make room for feet, where the fruit should be.