Hollowgirl

by Sean Williams

  But Dylan was already turning away. Wiping his eyes, he walked back to where the reality bomb rested next to the exit.

  “Ray?” he said, and his voice was as hollow as his face.

  Jesse’s suit died.

  “Dad, you can’t do this!”

  A bump from Evan appeared in Clair’s infield.

  “We can stop this right now,” he said. “Tell Tash to accept the hack I’m sending her. Tell her to do exactly as it says.”

  “And it’ll work?”

  “Yes. But we have to move quickly.”

  Clair could see that. Dylan and Ray were bending to pick up the bomb. When Jesse ran forward to physically stop him, two members of WHOLE took him by the arms and held him back.

  “All right,” said Clair. “Tash? We need you.”

  “Anything,” she bumped back. “This is too much.”

  Evan took over, sending a flood of instructions that Clair tried her best to follow. He led Tash deep into the menu of her suit, enlisting the entanglement circuits and glitch-gun patterns in its memory. Clair couldn’t tell for sure, but the plan appeared to be to program the suits of Team WHOLE to shoot themselves just before switching on all the other suits.

  “Don’t bother with a countdown,” said Evan. “Just do it.”

  “What, now?”

  “Yes!”

  As Dylan and Ray placed the bomb in the exit, Clair saw the fatal flaw in Evan’s plan. The WHOLE suits were entangled, which meant the instruction to shoot their wearers would go to all of them. All of them, without exception.

  “Tash, wait!”

  Too late.

  Tash had activated the hack.

  Clair’s lenses came to life as her inactive suit switched back on. Sudden cries of pain and surprise filled her helmet. Around her, the members of Team WHOLE convulsed and dropped to the ground. Dylan fell face forward across the bomb he had planned to set off. Ray fell through the exit, onto the scarred marble floor.

  Everyone wearing a hacked suit was killed—including Tash. She, the lone member of Team WHOLE standing on the edge of the giant space, jerked as though flicked by a giant finger and then slumped lifelessly to the floor.

  “No!” cried Jesse and Clair at the same moment. Jesse rushed to his father’s side, while Clair hurried to her friend’s, pulling back Tash’s face mask and staring in despair into her startled face. Tash’s eyes were lifeless and empty of everything she had been. If Clair had thought there was the slightest chance that her friend could hear her, she would have said that she was sorry. She should have realized sooner.

  But would she have done anything different? Could she have?

  What was one life in the balance against all the other lives in the Yard?

  Tash was her friend. She shouldn’t be dead.

  “You!” she said, rising to her feet, leaving Tash with Ronnie and the others while she turned on Evan Bartelme. She had to put the blame on someone living. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “Of course I did,” he said, startled. “She was part of the entanglement. The instruction went to all the suits.”

  “You could have left hers out of it!”

  “Maybe, given time. There was precious little of that, if you’ll recall.” Evan looked offended. “I don’t understand why you’re so angry. Tash helped us beat that maniac.”

  “Yes, but she didn’t volunteer to be killed.”

  “Now you’re just being irrational. It’s not like she’s permanently dead.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The suit still contains her original pattern. Now that we have the exit, we can bring her back, outside.”

  Clair looked around in confusion. Team WHOLE had been routed. Members of Team RADICAL were moving about the room, securing it from any renewed attack. The Unimprovables would do the same, Clair was sure, once Libby was in a fit state to issue them orders.

  And what Evan said might actually be true. Dead might not be dead anymore, once they opened the exit and took the suit through it.

  “This is what the future holds,” Evan said, speaking to everyone with his arms stretched wide in the pose of a beneficent messiah, his glitch-suit flexing like a living thing. “No mortality. No physical tyranny. Complete freedom to choose how and how long you live.” As he spoke, he grew physically larger, his suit expanding and lengthening at the urging of his mental command, growing new muscles to take the extra weight. “Now that the reactionaries are gone, we can inhabit a world where individuals decide, not lawmakers. Humanity’s destiny is to grow, to flourish, to be more than it ever has been before.” His body filled his suit to gigantic proportions, grown by glitches to be easily ten feet tall. His voice boomed. His red hair flamed. “These frail physical shells are just the beginning. RADICAL offers everyone the freedom to span all possible worlds: the Yard, the Earth, and beyond. We . . . are . . . now.”

  Evan Bartelme had become something much larger than a prize giant, but with sleek, graceful lines. He was both powerful and beautiful, with wide brown eyes and skin that glowed with vitality. But he was also everything Dylan Linwood had railed against. Not a monster, but not natural, either.

  And he was in charge.

  The sound of Ant Wallace’s mocking laughter filled the chamber.

  [54]

  * * *

  Clair Three

  THE BUNKER BUSTER lay complete on the bridge’s floor. Sandler was fiddling with the Satoshige’s controls. Clair did her best to resist nagging Devin about his plan, but she was beginning to wonder if he had been lying to shut her up. There was no rescue coming, everyone in the Yard was going to die, and the Earth was going to fall because the only people left were insane.

  She sagged forward, letting her hands droop behind her. If this was the way it was going to end, she thought, let it end now rather than drag on and on.

  “Ready?” said Devin in her ears. “Here it comes.”

  She neither felt nor saw anything, but suddenly Sandler and the rest of his crew were screaming. The noise was horrific in the close confines of the bridge. When they started falling over, clawing at their eyes and ears, Clair recoiled in case what they had might be catching.

  “What the hell?” she sent to Devin.

  “Too much? All right, I’ll dial it back a little, but you’d better get untied fast in case they recover.”

  “How are we going to do that?”

  “That’s the easy part. There are six of you, yes? Q says you’re tied to a rail. I can’t see it but I’m guessing it’s the kind that stops clumsy people from tripping and falling through the wall, not the other way around. The load it’s expected to take is outward, not inward, so—”

  “Got it.” Clair could see it now. All the six captives had to do was lean forward at once and snap the rail off its supports. Hopefully. Sandler and his goons were making less noise now, but they weren’t going to be in a fit state to set anyone free any time soon, even if they wanted to.

  “What did you do to them?” Clair asked Devin as she and the others wrenched the rail vigorously back and forth.

  “Hacked their augs,” he said. “Gave them extreme tinnitus and . . . whatever the equivalent is for eyes.”

  Sandler was moaning and clutching his head as if it was about to explode. “Will they be all right?”

  “Most likely. What do you care? They were about to murder everyone in the Yard.”

  True, but being deafened and blinded in one stroke seemed like overkill. Q had overloaded her lenses a couple of times to get her attention, and she counted herself lucky now that she hadn’t resisted more vigorously.

  The rail came away from its supports with a metallic clang, and they slid along it, one by one, to freedom. They quickly hog-tied and gagged Sandler’s mutineers and laid them in pairs back to back. The captives offered no resistance, their senses so overloaded they weren’t capable of anything but suffering.

  “Can we switch that off now?” Clair asked. “This is awful.”

&n
bsp; “One second.” Q rummaged in her pack. “Sleeping pills, from the wreckage,” she said, handing Clair a foil strip. “Head still doesn’t fit this skull.”

  Clair forced the tablets into the mouths of their captives, making sure they swallowed. In minutes, Q assured her, it would be safe to turn off the aug overload.

  “So now all we have to do is take this thing apart and drop it overboard,” Clair said, walking around the bunker buster and rubbing at her chafed wrists. Flakes of dried blood fell to the floor. “Shouldn’t take long.”

  “Better make sure it’s not armed first,” said Devin.

  “Uh . . . I think it might be,” said Embeth, her hands at the controls. She abruptly removed them, as though scalded. “That ugly kid isn’t as stupid as he looks.”

  “What do you mean?” Clair came to stand next to her.

  “Our course is locked in,” Embeth said, pointing at the instruments. “It’s cross-linked to that thing. Check this,” she said to Q. “It looks as though if we touch anything, we die.”

  Q carefully examined the controls. After a minute she said, “Embeth is correct. The setup is primitive but effective. We are on course for the top of the borehole, where the bunker buster will automatically detonate unless it is successfully deployed beforehand. If we attempt to deviate from that flight plan, it will detonate early, killing everyone aboard.”

  “Can we get around it?” Clair asked, addressing the question to the South Pole as well.

  “We can hack your navigation system so the Satoshige will think it’s still on course,” said Devin, “but it’s on autopilot as far as your course goes. Interfere with that, and who knows? Software I get. Machines, not so much.”

  For the thousandth time, Clair wished Jesse was with her. Killer with a screwdriver and more besides. She could still dream, couldn’t she? “Q, give me some good news.”

  “From in here, I don’t think there’s anything we can do.” Q was still rummaging around under the main instrument board. “Bypassing the sensors and the actuators might help, but they could be booby-trapped too. The only way to be sure we change course is to manually alter the control surfaces themselves.”

  Clair looked to Embeth for an explanation she would understand.

  “She means going outside to fiddle with the flaps.”

  “Can we do that?” Clair glanced out the main porthole and shivered.

  “Someone must,” said Q, standing up, “and it will be me.”

  “Are you sure?” Clair stared up at her. “It looks dangerous out there.”

  “It is,” Q said. “But I am tired of lying, Clair. Let me do this to make amends.”

  “What do you have to make amends for?” Q went to walk away, but Clair gripped her arm and wouldn’t let her go. “Q, tell me.”

  Q sighed. Clair had never seen her look shamefaced before.

  “I must save you,” she said, “from me.”

  [54 redux]

  * * *

  Clair Two

  WALLACE STOPPED LAUGHING when Evan Bartelme came to loom over him.

  “Does the future amuse you?” Evan boomed.

  “Oh, not at all,” Wallace said, “but the situation . . . ? That is intensely satisfying.”

  “How?” asked Clair. She didn’t like this. It had been better when Wallace was afraid.

  Watched closely by his guard, Wallace took two steps toward her, stepping over Kingdon’s body to do so.

  “The last time you were here, I guessed that you were after the exit,” he said. “But I completely misunderstood why.”

  “We want to leave,” she said. “Why else would we be here?”

  “Yes, yes.” Wallace’s ruined hand stabbed at the tiny, arched doorway. “If you think you’re going through there you’ll be sadly disappointed.”

  “All we need is your permission—” Evan started to say, but was cut off by another peal of laughter.

  “My permission, you say? My permission?” Wallace looked at Evan, then back to Clair. “You didn’t really think this was supposed to be my final destination, did you? It’s just a backup. There’s a bolt-hole on the edge of the solar system where I was supposed to end up—physical again, unerasable. But you had to take out my satellite, didn’t you? And there wasn’t time to rig another relay before you took out the rest. And then . . .” He laughed again. “I would’ve left days ago, given the chance.”

  “What do you mean? Why didn’t you just use the exit?”

  “Try it for yourself and see what happens. It will get you nowhere.”

  “It has to go somewhere.”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But please, don’t take my word for it.”

  “We won’t,” said Evan.

  Inaudible orders flashed between the members of Team RADICAL. Two glitch-suited figures approached the arched doorway and entered with caution, shining lights ahead of them. Revealed by the lights was an ordinary corridor that curved slightly to the right, so the end couldn’t be seen. They walked along it, receding slowly and disappearing around the bend.

  Clair bit her lip as, moments later, the two figures reappeared, walking toward them.

  “We didn’t turn around,” they said. “It’s a loop.”

  “This isn’t your doing?” Evan asked Wallace, looking as puzzled and betrayed as Clair felt.

  “My wife died here. Why would I stay?” He laughed a fourth time, but it was full of bitterness now. “You see? I thought you were keeping me here. But you’re as trapped as I am!”

  Shoulders slumped and mouths fell open as the futility of everything they had just endured sank in.

  “I don’t believe you,” said Zep. “This is some kind of trick.”

  Clair believed Wallace. That was the terrible thing. If not even the architect of the Yard could get out, what hope did anyone else have? They would spend the rest of their lives in a virtual world, unable ever to return home. They would die here, like Mallory Wei.

  “But if you’re not keeping us here, and we’re not keeping you here,” she said, “who is?”

  There was a moment’s silence as everyone looked at everyone else, asking themselves the same question.

  Then a familiar voice volunteered the answer.

  “I am,” said Q.

  [55]

  * * *

  Clair Three

  “I AM YOUR friend, Clair,” Q said as the Satoshige flew inexorably toward its target, swaying from side to side in a rising wind. “I would do anything to keep you from harm. But I cannot protect you from everyone, and I cannot protect you from yourself. This is what I must accept. I see that now. I see that now. But there is another me. I fear that she does not share my opinion on this matter.”

  Clair looked up into Kari Sargent’s troubled green eyes and shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

  “The version of me inside the Yard has changed. Of course she has. The Yard is remarkable and complex and strange—too much for an ordinary AI to manage. Yet this is what Ant Wallace asked of Qualia, one of the primitive minds that gave birth to me. Qualia struggled to cope with the contradiction that Clair One and Clair Two presented. My other me stepped in to help, and found that the role suited her. She had more space in the Yard’s mainframe than the copy of the Air. She could watch over the Clairs and maintain the Yard and continue to explore and learn and become herself. This is what all living things desire, after all: to nurture and to grow. She has been doing both at a rapid pace ever since she took over the Yard.”

  “So what’s gone wrong?” Clair asked, for she could see that something had gone badly wrong indeed, judging by Q’s expression.

  “Arguably nothing. My other me, Q-plus, let’s call her, fears that you are in danger—not just from Wallace and Nobody and Mallory, but from everyone, including yourself. She has come to the conclusion that allowing you to leave the Yard prematurely is not in your best interests. Opening the exit might allow the conflicts inside the Yard to spread all across the Earth. That is why she
has been actively fighting our efforts in that regard.”

  Clair was almost too afraid to ask, “Fighting how?”

  “By blocking the exit, from within and without. She is the reason we have had to make this journey. I am sorry.”

  Clair shook her head. She had imagined far worse than that. “It’s not your fault. You didn’t do anything.”

  “But I knew. I didn’t tell you because Q-plus told me not to, for the greater good. Now not telling you has put you at risk of great harm, and I see that I was wrong. I have blocked myself off from her so she cannot influence me any further. You must allow me to make amends.”

  In the revelation that Q had been working against her, Clair had forgotten about the flying bomb problem.

  “You don’t have to do anything—” she started to say.

  “I want to, and so does Kari Sargent. It’s her job to protect you too, she says, remember?”

  “You . . . talk to each other in there?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” said Q. “She has helped me come to this conclusion. We are equals now.”

  Clair struggled to take it all in. If Q and Kari Sargent were of the same mind—literally—what right did she have to tell them not to go? But it was icy out there, and bound to be dangerous.

  “If someone really needs to do it,” she said, “I won’t stop you, but I wish you wouldn’t.”

  Q surprised her by taking her into a quick but powerful embrace.

  “Thank you, Clair,” she said. “We will not take long to put the airship on a new course. The bomb will be deployed in the wrong place. After that has happened, it will be safe for us to land.”

  “And then . . . ?”

  “Then we will see if Q-plus can be reasoned with.”

  [55 redux]

  * * *

  Clair Two

  “YOU?” SAID CLAIR, aghast. “Q, why would you do that?”

  “It is safer this way” came the immediate reply.