“I’m you,” she said, staring right at her double. The other Clair wasn’t exactly the same: her hair was shorter; her face was clean. “I’m not a dupe.”
“What’s a dupe?” asked Tash.
The question took her by surprise. “A copy of a person with someone else’s mind inside. Don’t you remember?”
“That’s just an urban myth,” said Ronnie, her eyebrows meeting in a frown behind the frame of her glasses, “like Improvement.”
“Improvement isn’t a myth,” said Clair and Libby at the same time.
They looked at each other, then away.
Clair began to understand then. Libby was wearing a silver dress with white tights and red boots. The other Clair was wearing blue plaid and a navy headband. Zep had on a red checked shirt and tight blue jeans. Tash and Ronnie had dressed in their best party gear too. Clair knew these outfits. They had worn them to the ball. But it wasn’t only their clothes that dated back two weeks or more.
“You’ve just used Improvement, haven’t you?” she said to Libby. “That’s when you were copied, and everyone else with you, because you used Improvement on the way to the ball. I remember you telling us about it there.”
“Telling us about what?” asked the other Clair.
“I didn’t tell anyone anything,” said Libby. She was flushed now, a carnation pink that was anything but delicate.
“You did, only it wasn’t this version of you.” Clair wished there was an easy way to explain, and someone else to do it for her, since she doubted they would take her word for it.
Then she remembered that there was someone else.
“Q? Can you help me out here? Are you listening?”
“I am listening, Clair,” said Q. By the way the others reacted, Clair knew that they were hearing the voice too. No more asking for permission to open chats; Q was much cleverer now that she knew what she was.
“My name is Q,” she said, her tone more measured than when she talked to Clair. “I am not human, but I am Clair’s friend and I want to help her help you. I will explain what has happened, and afterward I will answer your questions as best as I can.”
“Wait,” said the other Clair, who Clair was beginning to think of as Clair 1.0: the Clair she had been before the crashlander ball. “First tell me why there’s a copy of me but not of anyone else.”
“It’s not deliberate,” Clair said. “That’s just how it worked out.”
“Why?” A flash of anxiety crossed her double’s face. “What did I do to deserve this?”
Again, a flash of unwarranted but irrepressible shame. “Q will explain, if you let her.”
“I want to hear it from you.”
Clair tightened her lips. They had the same genes. They were equally stubborn. If Clair 1.0 wanted to force the issue, Clair 6.0 was happy to push back, but what was the point?
“I’m not the copy,” she said bluntly. “You are. You’re a backup saved when Libby used Improvement, the same as everyone else here.” She hesitated, then pressed on, knowing that this would be as hard for them to hear as it was for her to say. “The reason why there’s only one of them is because their originals are dead.”
That provoked another shocked reaction, more of disbelief than anything else.
“I’m not a copy,” said Tash.
“And neither am I,” said Clair 1.0, narrowing her eyes. “I’m me and I’m real, and if this is some kind of stupid crashlander hazing, then screw you and whoever’s behind it. We don’t want to belong to your clique anymore.”
Clair understood. They didn’t trust this new Clair, and looking at it from their point of view, who could blame them?
“It’s hard to explain,” she said in a softer tone. “I made a mistake. I made lots of mistakes. If you just let Q talk, she’ll tell you all about it.”
“But first,” said Q, “a correction. Not all of you are dead. It is quite likely that Tash has survived, outside.”
“Well, that’s a huge relief to the rest of us,” said Zep.
“Outside where?” asked Libby.
“What’s inside?” asked Ronnie.
At least, thought Clair, they had moved on to different questions.
[3]
* * *
Q LAID IT out in a way that probably seemed matter-of-fact to her.
“The Improvement meme was designed by Ant Wallace to select candidates from the broader population, specifically young adults between fifteen and twenty years of age . . .”
Clair thought of it as a net designed to catch a particular sort of person, one willing to try an impossible meme to illegally make themselves better. Using his powers as head of VIA, the regulatory body in charge of keeping d-mat safe, Wallace created Improvement in order to find new bodies for geniuses considered too valuable to die. It was later misused by lawmakers who wanted to create a secret army of illegal dupes to take over the world.
“Once Improvement found a suitable candidate,” Q said, “their pattern was modified before being put back into the world, containing a different mind. Sometimes people who hadn’t used Improvement were copied. Those secondary patterns were stored in the Yard for future retrieval, to be used as blackmail. Those secondary patterns are you.”
Clair had personally seen Zep and Jesse’s father used this way, in Ant Wallace’s space station. She had never thought to consider when, exactly, those patterns had been taken. The answer wasn’t hard to work out now. Libby knew about Improvement but Clair 1.0 didn’t. That put them in a narrow window of time just before the crashlander ball.
If Clair had any doubts about the timing of the copies, all she had to do was look at the way Clair 1.0 and Zep kept shooting glances at each other. They never stood too close but they never strayed too far away, either.
That feeling . . . of being entranced and entrapped at the same time . . . Clair 6.0 remembered it well.
Now, though, it came with a yawning sensation deep in her gut. She couldn’t go looking for Jesse right now, she told herself. She had to do this first.
Clair fabbed a parka while Q brought the others up to speed, encouraging her occasionally to skip parts of the story in order to keep it simple. If her friends knew the world was a wasteland of ash, they might just give up hope on the spot.
“So Ant Wallace, the man in charge of keeping d-mat safe for everyone, tried to take over the world,” said Ronnie. She, too, had fabbed a parka and was holding it closed around her throat with one long-fingered hand. Real.
“That wasn’t entirely Wallace,” said Kari. “He was working for the lawmakers. Ex-lawmakers, I should say. LM Kingdon was arrested right before the end, when her conspiracy was exposed. She’ll be in here too, I expect. She’ll still be trying to take over, and Wallace will still be helping her. Clair and I are committed to keeping the peace by stopping them as soon as we can.”
“Who says you’re actually a peacekeeper?” asked Tash. “You don’t look like one.”
Kari glanced down at her filthy armor. “Extenuating circumstances.”
“You could just be saying that,” said Clair 1.0, with a suspicious look at Clair 6.0. “You could both be dupes.”
“I’m not a dupe,” Clair snapped, irritated by the accusation.
“Just saying it doesn’t help.”
“If I were a dupe there would be someone else inside me. Someone who isn’t you.”
“Are you me, though? You don’t even look like me. You look . . .”
“Older,” said Tash.
“Harder,” said Ronnie.
“Angrier,” said Zep.
“Damaged,” said Libby.
“Exactly.” Clair 1.0 came right up to Clair 6.0 and folded her arms. “So prove it. Prove you’re me.”
Clair fought the urge to curl into a ball again. She knew she had changed. Like Kari, she was dirty, tired, and desperate, wearing clothes that didn’t belong to her. She was covered in the ashes of friends this other version of her had never met. But could she really have chan
ged so much?
She knew she hadn’t.
Clair leaned in close and whispered into Clair 1.0’s ear so no one else would hear.
“I know how you feel about Zep,” she said, grabbing at Clair 1.0’s arm when she tried to pull away. “I kissed him. That was my first mistake.”
Clair 1.0 wrenched out of her grip, glancing at Libby and then back at her. There was guilt in her eyes as well as acceptance, alarm, and something that might have been jealousy.
“Do you believe me now?”
“I can’t believe that there are two of you,” said Tash. She had a lock of bright blue hair wrapped around one finger and was pulling it tight, like she did when she was worried. “Isn’t that supposed to be impossible?”
“You make copies of things in a fabber,” said Ronnie. “Why not people in a booth?”
“But people aren’t just the stuff they’re made of.”
“Who says?” said Zep. “Otherwise d-mat wouldn’t work, and the Stainers would be right.”
He mimed a zombie attack that Tash batted away.
“If I were a dupe,” Clair declared, “there’s no way I’d just appear to you like this. I’d try to replace my other me, not argue with her in front of you.”
Libby was watching both Clairs closely, as though trying to figure out what had passed between them a moment ago.
“How do you know I’m not a dupe?” she asked.
Because you’re not a psychotic bitch with a death wish named Mallory, she almost said.
“Your birthmark,” Clair said. “It’s still there.”
Libby’s hand came up to touch her cheek, where the purplish blotch was faintly visible under her foundation.
“Right,” she said with a decisive nod. “That’s what I asked Improvement to change. Did it work?”
“Yes. It disappeared.”
“But there’s no such thing as a free lunch,” said Ronnie. “We’re getting that.”
“And now none of us is really real, apparently,” said Zep. “How does that work?”
“This simulation we occupy is accurate to the highest degree,” said Q. “If you had the right instruments, you could see the faintest stars or the tiniest particles known to humanity. The Yard’s reality is not built on matter—it is built on information—but the way it is perceived remains the same. There’s a word for this: ‘qualia.’ That’s a name as well, interestingly. . . .”
“I’m getting a headache,” said Tash.”
“Q does that to you sometimes,” said Kari.
“The Yard has been active ever since Ant Wallace’s unstable-matter bomb went off,” Q went on, ignoring them. “When that trap was triggered—”
By Jesse, Clair thought with a snap in her heart so painful she was amazed the others didn’t hear it.
“—the Yard . . . woke. Before, it was inert. There was no anything. Then an emergency protocol resurrected the backup of Ant Wallace, and of course Wallace needed an environment in which to exist. I am still analyzing the way the Yard did that—what makes it work, and possibly who—and I believe that I am close to an answer. . . .”
She wandered off into silence again, the third time Clair had noticed Q’s attention drift. Clair hoped it wasn’t something they should be worried about.
“Sounds like the entire world needs rescuing, inside and outside the Yard,” said Ronnie.
“We are the rescue party,” said Clair, wishing it weren’t true. “What you see is what you get.”
[4]
* * *
“WELL, THE FIRST thing we have to do,” said Libby, pushing forward, “is to decide what to call you two. Clair One and Clair Two? Clair A and Clair B?”
“One and Two,” said Ronnie.
“All right, but who’s One?”
“You can be,” Clair told the other version of herself. She was already thinking of her as Clair 1.0 anyway. “It doesn’t matter to me.”
“How can it not matter to you?” Clair One asked. “This is all so wrong.”
Once it would have bothered Clair to be one of two. But, unexpectedly, talking to Clair One didn’t make her feel uncomfortable. It wasn’t a fundamental attack on her. It was just confusing, and there were more important things to worry about.
“The first thing I want to do,” she said, “is get out of the Yard before someone finds us.”
“Can’t we just use d-mat, like the way you came in?” Zep asked Clair.
“What do you say, Q?” Clair asked, remembering the experiment she had thought of trying earlier. “Can we do that?”
“Impossible,” said Q. “The network is completely degraded now. The data would vanish if I tried to send you to a booth outside—if there is one.”
So much for that, Clair thought.
“You should also know,” Q said, “that just being here, Clair, you and I are causing . . . disturbances . . . you because of the break in parity, me because I’m me.”
“What kind of disturbances?”
“Causality errors, topological defects, continuity strains . . . It’s hard to explain. But it is likely our presence has been noted.”
That was an ominous thought. Wallace would do everything in his power to hunt her down if he knew she was there. She had already killed him once.
“We need to get somewhere else,” Clair said, “somewhere safe, inside the Yard. Somewhere we can think about how to escape.”
“We could go back to my place,” said Ronnie. “My olds have guns.”
“Too dangerous,” said Kari. “It’s the obvious thing to do, too easy to anticipate.”
“I agree,” said Clair One. “But there’s no point rushing off anywhere until we know where Wallace is. I mean, he could have a hideout anywhere.”
“Q can help—”
“Q’s not all-powerful, or you wouldn’t be in here with us,” said Clair One.
“So how do we do this?” asked Tash. “Where do we even start?”
“One step at a time,” said Ronnie.
Clair was grateful for Ronnie’s calming, levelheaded approach. She had always been the practical, science-y one among her friends.
“You’re good at this,” whispered Jesse’s voice in her ear. “You’ve missed your true calling.”
Clair startled out of her thoughts, her heart leaping with the hope that he had found them.
She looked behind her, but there was no one there.
“What is it?” asked Kari, noticing again.
Clair shook her head. She was certain she hadn’t imagined it. But what could she say? If she tried to tell anyone that she was hearing voices, they would laugh at her for glitching. But if she didn’t . . . What if this was like Devin and Trevin’s whispering to each other, or if it had something to do with the disturbances to the Yard Q had mentioned?
“It’s not safe here,” she said. “Let’s go.”
“Why go anywhere until we know what we’re doing?” asked Clair One.
“You have no idea what we’re dealing with.”
“What do any of us know? Running might take us right to them.”
“She has a point, Two,” said Zep.
Of course you’d agree with her, Clair wanted to say. But she was too worried to patiently explain it to them. Her mind was full of horrible images: dupes coming at her without care for their own disposable lives; Nobody—the worst of them—identical in appearance to Jesse’s father. How could she convince someone who had never seen dupes in action that they should run while they had the chance?
Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a booth activating. Clair left the others to see what was going on. The door she had emerged from was shut. The other doors were shutting too.
“Shit,” she said. “Q, are you there? Can you tell who that is?”
Q’s reply came immediately. “Four people, their names protected by peacekeeper protocols. I can’t tell you who they are without drawing attention to myself.”
Lawmakers and peacekeepers had worked with
Wallace in the real world. Anyone could be traveling under those protocols.
“I told you. We have to get out of here,” she said, turning back to the others. “Now.”
“Whoa,” said Zep, raising his hands. “Is that necessary?”
Clair looked down and discovered that her pistol was in her hand. She didn’t remember drawing it. Covering her surprise with a brusque nod, she said, “It might well be. Ronnie, check the floor plans of this place. I remember reading about an elevator somewhere, the last time I was here. If it’s working, we can take it to the bottom of the mountain. There might be other booths there. Q, is there anything you can do to delay their arrival?”
“Nothing that won’t alert them to my presence.”
“Don’t do that. You’re our only advantage.” Clair worried at her brow with her free hand, jiggling her right heel on the spot, wanting to run but not knowing how to.
“Ronnie, how are you coming along with those floor plans?” asked Kari.
“Got them. The elevator is locked, but maybe Q can deal with that?”
“I can.”
“Great,” said Clair, relieved that they would finally be moving. “Let’s go. Which way?”
“Wait up!” Clair One stood in their way. “What if I told you it wasn’t Wallace or anyone who worked for him? Would that make you slow down a second?”
“Yes,” said Kari, “but how could you possibly know who it is?”
“They’re using peacekeeper protocols because they’re PKs,” Clair One said, her chin raised. “I know that because I called them.”
[5]
* * *
“YOU DID WHAT?” asked Clair.
“This is all too weird,” Clair One said, “and you just expect us to take your word for it. I want a second opinion. That’s not unreasonable.”
Clair had to bite the inside of her lip to curb an impulse to scream. No, it wasn’t unreasonable at all, which only made her frustration even worse. She knew exactly why Clair One had made that call, because the first thing she herself had tried to do on being confronted with WHOLE and Jesse’s father’s death was call the PKs. She couldn’t blame Clair One for doing what she, too, would have done.
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