Hollowgirl

by Sean Williams

  Clair felt profoundly moved by that sentiment. If her hope of digging up the Yard came to nothing, there was somewhere she belonged. Like Devin, that was an unexpected treasure, out of the ashes. It would make losing Jesse and everyone else, if it came to that, almost bearable.

  [21 redux]

  * * *

  THE SUN HAD long set when the Satoshige lifted off. Clair stood next to Embeth, the airship pilot, thinking about her latest speech to the world as the ground receded to black and they swayed generally eastward across the empty city. Ahead, by moonlight, the landscape was flat and heavily wooded. Occasional pockets of ash stood out like snowdrifts or small frozen lakes. Clair felt chilly, even though she was wearing cold-weather gear retrieved from the ruins, with her hair tucked into a woolen cap and her hands in leather gloves that looked handmade. There were no lights below apart from those of the muster, falling steadily behind.

  Did she really believe that this journey was the answer, as she had told everyone else, standing on a box so she could see over all their heads? Was there honestly any chance of bouncing back from here, of bringing the Earth back from the brink of destruction? For all of Eve’s talk of cleansing the oceans and remaking the fish, how likely was it really that the world of old would ever return?

  In her darkest moments she imagined an entirely new creature emerging from the ashes, something alien and strange and possibly better, spawned from the death of humanity and feeding on its remains. What that creature would be like, she couldn’t imagine.

  She had to hope. It was all she had.

  But at the same time she had to be prepared.

  Hope for the best, Aunt Arabelle had told her once, plan for the worst.

  She was so far deep into “the worst” that it was hard to imagine going any further. But she could, she knew. She had never shied away from anything before, no matter how horrible.

  “We’re tracking you,” said Devin, his voice coming over old-fashioned speakers in the gondola. There was a dish on top of the air sack linking the airship to the old GPS satellite. It was useless for actual navigation: that was Clair and Q’s job, following landmarks they would check off along the way, located by old-fashioned eyesight. “I can tell you if you’re pointing the wrong way, which you’re not right now. Next stop, a place called Velsk.”

  “Never heard of it,” said Sandler from where he was peering over Embeth’s shoulder. He wasn’t allowed to touch the controls, but that hadn’t stopped him from getting close enough to make Clair nervous.

  Clair would have liked to fly over Omsk, since Zep had joked about it once, but sadly they would be flying too far north. “What about the other satellite, the one from the moon? When will that get here?”

  “The breeder is still two days away, at least,” Devin said. “I’ve had a thought about what to do until then, using my grammar idea from earlier. We’re going to take everything that’s happened to you and bundle it up in an easily compressible form—not everything, of course, only what’s important. . . .”

  Devin’s voice suddenly skidded and blurred like a bad recording, and there was pain unlike anything Clair had felt before. She wanted to scream, but she was unable to move. She was trapped in her body while events seemed to be passing with unnatural rapidity, like dreaming in fast-forward, someone else at the controls. The Satoshige zoomed across the Earth like an improbable rocket and Clair felt giddy . . . and strangely as though she could hear Jesse’s voice—but that wasn’t possible, was it? He was in the Yard, she hoped, and she was still thousands of miles away. How fast could a giant floating head go, anyway? Or was she already in the Yard and the balloon was just a dream? A dream being rammed into her mind . . . ?

  “. . . got a solid lock on what appears to be a legacy I/O channel,” Trevin was saying over the radio link to the Satoshige. Now that both twins had been restored from their resurrection files, they were making twice as much progress on hacking into the Yard. But twice zero, as Sandler liked to say, was still zero.

  The view through the Satoshige’s forward windows was of a wrinkled, wintery landscape. They were thirty-six hours and some considerable distance from the muster, following the snaking trail of the Podkamennaya Tunguska River eastward, not far from where a meteorite had exploded long ago. That morning they had seen a rising column of smoke to the north that might have been from a campfire. Deviating to take a look, they had found it to be just the smoldering wreckage of some unidentifiable machine. Another Abstainer’s craft, perhaps, destroyed for reasons unknown.

  Clair had taken it as more than just a disappointment. It was a warning not to take anything for granted. There was a huge distance yet to traverse to the Yard’s physical location, and the difficulty of getting inside it remained. If they couldn’t hack in from a distance, they would have to find a way to do it physically, at the bottom of the world’s deepest pit. And if they couldn’t do that . . .

  The people she was with right now were going to be her only company for a very long time.

  Trevin was still talking. “Decrypting the protocols and encoding your data is going to take us some time. It would help if you edited the file into something more manageable. . . .”

  The world slewed and shifted again, as though she was luging out of control down a steep hillside. How could Trevin be alive? The pain had returned with him, worse than ever. It felt like her right shoulder was on fire and her chest was being crushed by a tree trunk. Every nerve was screaming. Why?

  Because she had been shot. This memory returned to her, bright and clear. She still couldn’t move, but her mind was beginning to work again. She had been shot . . . but how could she think that she was on an airship over Russia as well?

  “It’s inevitable that you’ll cause feedback,” said Q with Kari’s voice. Half the crew of the Satoshige were huddled around an electric heater eating canned food, while the other half slept through the long winter night, their third since leaving the muster. Embeth had trained a deputy pilot, who now handled the controls. “How bad this feedback will be, we can’t predict. It may be causing problems already, and maybe that’s why we’re having so much trouble getting through. The simulation has sealed itself in order to conduct repairs. It’s healing, or trying to. The best solution would be to erase the discrepancies, but it won’t be allowed to do that. Preserving all patterns is the Yard’s prime directive. Anything else would be impossible.”

  “You talk about them as though they’re alive,” Sandler Jones said.

  “Won’t they be?” Clair asked him, her voice sounding loud in her ears. She was worried she might be catching a cold. “If they look like us, act like us, feel like us—who are we to say they’re not us?”

  He slapped himself on the chest. “Zombie girl, look around you. With this crew, that’s one argument you’re never going to win.”

  The signal slewed again.

  Signal. Why had she thought that?

  “I don’t think the transmission is getting through. Are you sure it’s working?”

  The weak winter sun hung dead ahead, just kissing the horizon over the humped backs of a row of grim-looking hills. Sandler had been agitating to touch down and hunt for meat. Clair wouldn’t let him. Their supplies were dropping fast, consumed quickly in the cold, but they weren’t starving yet.

  While Sandler had slept at the end of his last shift, one of the other crew members had told Clair that Sandler’s parents had been isolationists who had died from a disease contracted from a wild animal they’d killed and eaten. It had taken a doctor so long to reach their home that Sandler had almost died too. He had been a small child, the crew member said. Being alone with the bodies of his parents had done something funny to his head.

  Clair doubted it was that simple. More likely Sandler didn’t want to believe that his parents had died for nothing, and was trying to prove that their way of life still had meaning. She could understand that.

  Sympathizing was harder, particularly after their argument that morning. She
had wanted to throw out some spare parts to reduce weight, and he had stubbornly resisted for reasons she still couldn’t understand. In the end she had just given up. One fight at a time. She didn’t have the energy to take on everyone.

  “Let me try,” said Devin after yet another fruitless attempt by Q to find a way into the Yard that wouldn’t involve digging down through miles of ice. She told herself not to get her hopes up. “If I can refine the signal, I might just get through. . . .”

  Clair had heard Devin’s words before, under different circumstances, and now she was hearing them again. Or maybe she hadn’t heard them either time, just imagined them twice. The pain was rolling in and out like electric waves against a raw nerve shoreline. She was having trouble keeping up with everything. Had she been shot in the Satoshige or somewhere else? Was Jesse dead or not—because if he was, why was he talking? Or was that Devin again?

  “. . . connecting somewhere. Let’s kill the feed and see what happens next.”

  Clair agreed, unable to imagine what the version of herself in the Yard must be feeling. If she was feeling anything at all.

  Strangeness settled over her. She really was seeing everything twice at the same time—the real thing plus an overlay of exactly the same thing provided by her lenses. Or maybe there were two of her.

  But there are, she told herself. Me and Clair One. We’re in an ultramax prison, under attack by the hollowmen, and I’ve just been shot . . . possibly by Clair One.

  The calmness with which she thought that astonished her. She remembered the paleness of Kari’s skin against the blood—her own blood—and the worried look on Jesse’s face. She thought about dark tunnels and out-of-body experiences. Was that what she was having? Was that why the feeling of seeing everything twice persisted?

  Suddenly it stopped, and her thoughts seemed to crystallize as though a block had been removed. She remembered Zep talking in Harmony about how having two Clairs might cause the Yard to glitch.

  “You’re updating her,” he had said, pointing from Clair Two to Clair One.

  What if they weren’t the only sources of confusing data? What if there was data coming from somewhere else?

  The blue dawn.

  The muster.

  The airship.

  Round peg into round hole, she remembered Devin saying . . . like homing missiles into your own mind.

  What if these memories, of the muster and the Satoshige, were coming from the outside?

  [28]

  * * *

  Clair Three

  “ALL RIGHT, LET’S call it quits,” said Trevin. “No use beating a dead horse.”

  “We don’t know what it’s done, if anything,” said Q.

  “Let’s just give the packet time to find its mark,” said Devin, “and see what happens.”

  Clair stared gloomily out a porthole at the slate gray of a distant lake. It wasn’t their destination, but Devin said it was a sign they were making good progress. He said that about everything.

  The sun was setting on the third day of the Satoshige’s epic journey. All the landmarks were starting to blur into one. All the arguments sounded the same.

  “How much time until we give up for good?” she asked, wringing her hands to make them warm.

  “As long as it takes,” said Eve Bartelme. “Waiting, one conquers the world.”

  [28 redux]

  * * *

  Clair One

  CLAIR JERKED AWAKE from a very strange dream about giant flying heads and a boy with patchwork skin. She sat up, chasing echoes of a voice she couldn’t quite hear through the hard-edged spaces of the prison. She could have sworn someone was calling her name.

  Shaking her head, she dismissed the feeling. Flying heads? When Clair remembered her dreams they were always slightly epic, but not half as epic as reality had turned out.

  She was lying in a shadowed office alcove on a standard prison mattress. According to her lenses, four hours had passed since she had laid her head down in the hope of getting some rest, more than twelve since the hollowmen had first attacked the prison. She noted the time with a twinge of anxiety. Anything could happen in four hours.

  The light falling on the floor in front of her was an unexpected shade of purple.

  She sat up, trying not to disturb the person on the mattress next to her, some girl from WHOLE who Clair had only glimpsed once in a glitch but who acted as though Clair should know her. Her eyes were different colors, a peculiarity she blamed on d-mat. Once, Clair would have been skeptical. Now, not so much. . . .

  Peering out of the alcove, she discovered that the source of the purple glow was a lamp on a tripod pointed at the ceiling above her head. There were other colored lamps scattered across the hub: green, orange, yellow, blue, arranged apparently at random. The main lights were off. A dozen people sat around a cluster of tables in the center of the hub, bathed in an odd mix of hues. The old lady in the wheelchair was there, along with Dylan Linwood and some other members of WHOLE. They talked in whispers while people slept around them. She saw Libby’s pure white locks spilling across a rolled-up jacket, the blue splash of Tash’s hair, Ronnie’s glasses folded up neatly on the floor next to her, and Zep sprawled half on and half off his bed, bare feet twitching as though he was running in his dreams. Seeing him provoked a guilty pang. I kissed him. That was my first mistake. Add that to the list of things she needed to deal with, when she had the chance. Why should she take the blame for something Clair Two did?

  Shots rang out in the distance, and her head jerked up. The movement caught Dylan Linwood’s eye. He waved her over. She stood and did as he suggested, trying not to worry about what was happening elsewhere, yet. There was no sign of Sargent or Jesse. The latter worried her more than it should have. She wasn’t his Clair, after all, and Clair Two’s relationship with him wasn’t hers. . . .

  “They’re still coming,” Dylan said, in a whisper so as not to disturb the sleepers. “We think they’re testing their links to this place, training so they can come at us whenever they want. We’re spread thin, but so far we’re holding them off.”

  That was good, Clair thought. She still worried about being locked in, but perhaps it wasn’t as bad as she had originally feared. They hadn’t been overwhelmed . . . yet.

  “We should seal off the lower levels,” she said, visualizing what needed to be done with an ease and clarity that wasn’t something learned, “barricade the unused rooms—”

  “Already under way. You want to help? We can use volunteers.”

  “Sure,” she said. The quickness of his suggestion, though, gave her pause. Ever since Clair Two had appeared she had felt superfluous in her own life, pushed out by a copy of herself who kept so many secrets she felt like a stranger. She wasn’t going to be easily brushed off now, not by a terrorist who was a temporary ally at best. “Tell me about the lights first.”

  “In a moment,” said Arabelle, referring to something Clair couldn’t see, presumably coming over her lenses. “Two to go, and then we’re clear,” she said to Dylan.

  Clair accessed the interface and dipped into a steady stream of images and data pouring in from all over the prison. There was no immediate sign of the hollowmen—that was what “clear” had meant, Clair assumed—but there was a lot of activity, and still a swathe of dead patches where cameras had been taken out by the attacking forces. Barriers were indeed being welded up all over the administration level; concrete was pouring in a flood into the closed-circuit booths. Kari Sargent, it turned out, was watching over a makeshift hospital where Jesse sat attentively next to a particular bed, a bed Clair’s gaze skated over deliberately without seeing. She wasn’t ready to face that. Another room contained rows of bodies zipped up in black bags.

  Everywhere, in every view, was a splash of vibrant color.

  “The lights were Ray’s idea,” said Dylan, when the crisis was past. “Kingdon wants to shut us down before we can even think about fighting back. If the hollowmen are using memories to get in he
re, then making the prison look different should mess up their reference images.”

  “Has it worked?” she asked, acknowledging to herself that it was a good plan.

  “It’s slowed them down. We think. It’s hard to tell. We don’t know how many of their attempts are failing.”

  Another good point. “How many have we taken out?”

  “Thirty,” said Arabelle. “All ages and types. No duplication, so that’s holding. The supply can’t be inexhaustible.”

  “I suspect that some of them aren’t hollowmen at all,” said Dylan. “They’re probably ordinary people, thinking they’re doing the right thing.”

  Clair nodded. She could see how that would work. Everyone said that Lawmaker Kingdon was the big bad, and Clair had no reason to doubt that. Wallace had created the Yard for himself and his friends as a catch-all for anyone he thought might be valuable in the future. Now all the stored patterns were awake, some kind of government was required, and Kingdon wasn’t going to let the unruly masses make decisions she might not agree with. She was way too ambitious for that.

  The unruly masses had their uses. All Kingdon had to do was tell everyone in the Yard who she thought the real bad guys were, and call for volunteers to replace the PKs. There were lots of angry and confused parents in the Yard, after all, and it did look bad—a terrorist cell holing up together in defiance of the law. WHOLE had no chance of winning the popularity war. It was even odds, Clair thought, whether they would hold their own in a war of attrition.

  Dylan and the others were old, tired, and stressed. It was good that WHOLE would let her help, if Dylan’s offer was genuine. They needed her. She was young, able-bodied, and refreshed. And she had ideas. Good ideas. They would be easier to put into action now that Clair Two was out of the picture.

  Again, via her lenses, she glanced at the hospital. There was a lot of black, which she guessed was actually brown seen through colored light. Dried blood everywhere, some of it hers.