Duplicity

by N. K. Traver

  Country singers. There are country singers on my walls.

  “I think I’m in love,” Seb says, fixated on preppy Obran, who’s typing away on my laptop in a red polo and jeans, hair spiked like some boy band star. “You clean up nice. Unlike you, I’m a sucker for blonds.”

  “I am not blond! It’s brown. Maybe light brown. Who cares? And what did I tell you about the L word?”

  “I bet he says the L word.”

  “Look, we need to—”

  A knock to the left. Obran lifts his head. Mom lets herself in and I feel a flare of anger before I remind myself I don’t care.

  “Hi, honey,” she says.

  Honey. Like she calls me that all the time. Obran smiles, but I can tell it’s my fake one.

  “Are you feeling all right?” Mom asks.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “You look tired.”

  “I’m good, Mom. Some tests are coming up, been studying a lot.”

  He goes back to typing. Mom fidgets, glances at her phone, and clears her throat. “Your father and I were thinking … well, we’d like to take you to dinner.”

  Dinner?

  “I’ve got a test to study for tonight,” Obran says. “How about tomorrow?”

  Mom winces like he’s thrown something at her, then forces a smile. “Okay. We’ll make that work. Where would you … what do you like to eat?”

  “I could go for Italian. Johnny Carino’s?”

  “It’s a date.” Mom stands there a moment longer, then backs out and has almost closed the door when her face pokes around the side. “Thank you, by the way, for cleaning Dad’s office today. I’ve been trying to get to it for a week and a half.” The door closes. Swings back open. “Oh, and Brandon?”

  Obran turns, unsmiling.

  “If you’d like, you may invite Amy to come with us.”

  “Emma?”

  “Yes, I’m sorry. Emma. I owe her … I owe her somewhat of an apology.”

  “Okay.”

  The room wavers because I’m losing it. That woman is not my mother. She’s never admitted to being wrong, she’s never apologized, she’s never taken me to dinner. I’ve tried behaving. They ignored me more that month than ever before. What could they possibly like better about Obran?

  Maybe I do belong here.

  “Why?” I say.

  “Why what?” Seb asks.

  “Why does he get to go to dinner?”

  I’m thinking not even Seb can answer that mystery when he says, “Not that it’s any of my business, but have you ever done something for your mom without being asked?”

  “That shouldn’t matter. It’s cleaning, it’s just stuff. Stuff piled in places it’s not supposed to be. If you put it away, someone pulls it back out. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  Seb’s quiet a minute. “There’s definitely something wrong with your mom,” he says, “and this is a guess, really. But I think she appreciates that you’re—I mean, he’s—doing things for her she doesn’t have time to do.”

  I whirl to glare at him, but he’s in the code layer, out of sight. I glare at the mirror instead.

  “Why should I?” I say. “They’d never do that for me. Won’t even do things I ask for.”

  “Um, it’s funny to say, considering they’re your parents … but sometimes if you want things to change, you have to set the example.”

  “Thanks, Gandhi. Can we just focus on getting out, please?”

  Seb shuts up. I push all that crap down and let it simmer in my chest and use it for fuel. Press into that dream state where nothing’s real. Where nothing can hurt me. The liquid blue silhouettes dissolve into numbers and commands, darting like miniature trains around the edges of the shadow furniture.

  I will take back my life.

  I will fix it without Obran’s help.

  The shadow form of my dresser stands two feet away, its edges lined with blue and green sevens. I think of the angel figurine, of how I normally don’t have to touch anything at my workstation to make it do anything, and I imagine the dresser sliding over to block the door. It obeys. I grin, and a voice in my head asks if I’d like to connect to the target.

  I almost lose the room again saying yes.

  “Yesss, Brans,” Seb says. “Whatever you’re doing, keep going.”

  We’ve cracked it. Get on the mirror server, picture the room in reverse. If your double’s on the other side, you can connect to him. Of course. That’s what Obran had to do any time he changed me, and now it’s my turn … my turn to change him.

  I have arms again. And legs. My body updates to match Obran’s current appearance, everything from his preppy hair to that awful polo. I grab what I know is a pen off the desk, even though to me it’s a line of fives and eights. The pen disappears from the real world. Like when Obran vanished my piercings.

  I feel like a monster and it feels good.

  Obran jerks his head at the sound of the pen. He stares at the desk where it used to be, wide-eyed, then slowly turns his head to the mirror.

  “Ooh, Kathy, I found something,” Seb says, somewhere overhead. “‘Target in range.’ Wonder what this does.”

  It must open the visual connection between the mirror server and the real world, because Obran’s face contorts and his gaze snaps to the pen in my hand. He overturns his chair in his rush to get up and promptly falls, yelping, when I dig the pen into my arm and start drawing. I designed both my tattoos, but it doesn’t seem to matter that I have no clue how to put them on myself. My memory re-creates them in detailed perfection, shading and correcting the lines.

  “See how you like it, jerk,” I grumble, finishing the tail of the smallest scorpion.

  “Ooh, I don’t like this,” Seb says, sounding distant. “He’ll report to JENA, he might’ve already, and she can take control of him whenever she wants—”

  “Then block him, Seb. You’ve got control of the connections.”

  “Oh, right.”

  Obran gasps and stumbles toward the mirror. I hope replacing tattoos is as painful as having them ripped off, or even better—as having your muscles ground to sloppy joe consistency by zombie dogs. I finish the claws of a large scorpion on my forearm and start another. Blood trickles off Obran’s arm.

  “You,” Obran says through gritted teeth, bracing himself on the bed frame. “JENA will delete you for this!”

  I laugh. “She has to catch me first.”

  “I found something interesting,” Seb says, singsong. Obran’s eyes flutter. He loses his grip on the bed and collapses to the floor. I stop doodling.

  “What did you just do to him?” I ask.

  “I found a log file with recent commands sent to your double. At the same time every night, ’round nine or ten o’clock, JENA sends out that command. I’d say it puts you to sleeps.”

  I finish the scorpions and toss the pen aside.

  Seb materializes near me, arms crossed. “It can’t be that hard to make the actual switch. It’s just a command, like everything else.” His eyes dart to my left. “Where are you? I couldn’t detect you in the code layer, but I can hear you. And obviously you’re not visible, so…”

  “You can’t see me?”

  It looks like I can reach out and touch him. He disappears again.

  “Nopes,” he says. “You’re making me nervous, Bran Bran, and I freak out when I get nervous.”

  “Seb, I’m in the code layer. I think. That is, everything looks like numbers but I’m in Obran’s—I mean, my real world body. I’m actually not sure … how to get back.” I try to picture the room made of shadows instead of numbered lights, but that’s like trying to find the image in a stereogram after your eyes have unfocused. Now that I’ve seen it in this view, I can’t remember what it looked like before.

  “Must be automatic when it’s your double on the other side of the mirror,” Seb says, not sounding entirely convinced.

  “I can’t pull up any logs,” I say. “Wait…”

  A blue light blink
s in the corner of the mirror screen, one I hadn’t noticed until Obran passed out. I reach for it. Five blank boxes appear in front of me.

  ACCESS CODE, reads the text above the boxes.

  “Got something,” I say.

  “I still can’t see you,” Seb says.

  “It’s asking me for a password.” I trace an “F” in the first box and an “I” in the second. “Fifty” would fit, but I don’t want to get locked out trying the wrong word, so erase them with my palm. “Is there a log file for swap passwords? Should be five letters long.”

  “I’m looking,” Seb says.

  A bright yellow light flashes through the room like a bomb. The boxes stay, but the flash happens again, and the mirror flickers. Like someone’s trying to get in.

  “I think we’re running out of time,” I say.

  “Try 384GF.”

  I trace the letters in. They flash red, then disappear. “Nope.”

  “4EN46?”

  Another flash of red. Seb calls out a few more numbers, but I’m thinking about the encryption key I have to use every day when I code for JENA, the one that converts numbers to letters. My ID, “Fifty,” encrypted would be—

  “I’m going to try 69672,” I say.

  The blocks flash green and disappear.

  Red light blazes through the room.

  “UNAUTHORIZED TRANSACTION,” booms JENA overhead. The shadow room distorts like a bad TV picture, shifting between lines of red numbers and theater-room silhouettes.

  “Too late, JENA,” Seb cackles.

  Which is the exact moment I realize we didn’t plan for one of us to swap without the other.

  A siren blares and a knife-sharp jolt of electricity racks my body, much worse than The Trade, twisting and bending me in ways I wasn’t meant to move. The code in the walls blurs. Speeds by like headlights on the night freeway. Thins out and explodes into nothingness, then hurls me on my back into a blinding room and I sit up and retch. My skin’s hot enough to sweat, but it’s the feel of rough carpet under my hands, the taste of battery-sour vomit in my mouth, that quickens my pulse. My real pulse, coursing through my temples, pushing blood down my fresh tattoo.

  My stomach (my real stomach) doesn’t like it when I sit up, but I ignore it and wipe my bloody arm on my polo.

  I’m in my room. In it. I pull myself up using the frame of my bed, and the metal’s cold under my palm. The game room can replicate sensation, but it’s nothing to this—to touching real things and knowing they’re real, to looking at my room and knowing JENA can’t snatch me out of it. I’m … free? But this feels like the classroom “dream” I had when I leaked back, which means I could still wake to “session start” at any time.

  I spin to the mirror.

  “Seb?”

  My reflection gazes back, wide-eyed.

  “Seb, if you’re there, I can’t see you.”

  No change. I move for the dresser and fight back a wave of dizziness. Feels like JENA’s shutting me down, but I tell myself I’m free, and I fight it and slump against the heavy wood. I remove each drawer slowly, every one feeling like it’s three hundred pounds, and finally, finally push the dresser away from the door. I don’t bother putting the drawers back. I stumble to the bed and fall into it, and for the first time in weeks …

  I sleep.

  17. COLLATERAL DAMAGE

  “YOU GETTING UP, son? It’s noon.”

  I open my eyes to the dark. I can’t call up my coding windows. Something’s wrapped tight around me, and I freak and a flurry of navy-black sheets assaults me before I wrestle out of them, almost fall off the side of the bed, and jerk my head against the headboard. Dad blinks at me from the doorway, squinting behind his glasses.

  “You don’t have school today, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he says. “It’s Saturday.” He points at my chest. “Is that blood?”

  I rub my head and look down at my shirt, at the wine-dark stains crusted into the fabric and smeared on my arm. I feel like I’ve been dropped down an elevator shaft, but I feel, and suddenly I’m laughing.

  “I think I’m sick,” I manage to say, and gag back my next laugh to keep down the bile.

  “I can see that.” Dad looks at the carpet at the end of my bed. “I’ll clean this up, but keep the trash can close. And what did … have you run out of cover-up for your tattoos? Are they getting infected? Because we’ll pay for you to remove them, if that’s what you want.”

  “No, Dad. But thank you for talking to me today.”

  He hesitates, then retreats into the hall. I swallow another surge of nausea and grab my phone off my desk. I want to text Emma, but I think of Seb and my promise, and I think of Jax joking about Duplicity. I pull up my e-mail. My encrypted account, that I’m really hoping Obran hasn’t trashed.

  He hasn’t. There are three unread messages from Jax, the first two asking if I’ve got Socials for him yet, the third threatening our partnership will be over if I don’t get in contact soon. Damn. I’ll have to call him. I switch over to messaging as Dad returns with a roll of paper towels and a spray bottle of Resolve, and send a text to Emma. CAN YOU COME OVER?

  “Dad, are you working today?”

  Stupid question, I know, but that’s hardly the point. I need proof this is real, that weeks more haven’t passed and everything I saw in the mirror actually happened.

  “Yes,” Dad says. “I’d planned to work through lunch so we could go out tonight, but if you’re not well enough—”

  “I’m feeling better. I can go. It’s just a stomach bug.”

  Dad gives me a funny, and oddly genuine, smile. “Okay, son. Then we’ll count on it.”

  Emma’s reply chirps on-screen: Shopping w/Sam. I can come after?

  The bed sinks next to me. Takes me a minute to figure out Dad isn’t leaning across it to clean something, he’s actually sitting. Sitting and looking at me. I’m not really sure what to do so I just watch him like he might drop those vomit-soaked paper towels in my lap.

  “I know it’s been a rough few years, Brandon,” he says. “I know we’ve said things’ll change and they haven’t. I’m sorry about that. Sometimes despite your best intentions, life takes you its own way.” He looks around my room that’s not quite my room anymore. “Just want you to know I appreciate what you’ve been doing to help us out lately. You’re a good kid, you know, when you put your head to it.”

  “Okay, Dad,” I say, because it’s getting weird and I don’t want to look at those towels anymore.

  “Okay.”

  He smiles, nods, grabs his bottle of Resolve and thankfully leaves the room. I’m not sure what just happened, but I’m still thinking about it when I send another text to Emma:

  Obran’s gone.

  Her reply comes within ten seconds. Be there in 45.

  The sun off the mirror catches my eye. I get up and turn it to the wall. If Obran opens a connection, he won’t be able to see me. Then I wonder if he doesn’t need to see me to make the swap. I put the mirror in the closet and close it.

  I pace my room, catching whiffs of puke from my shirt, until I can’t stand it anymore and I rummage under the bed for a wrinkled T-shirt and some jeans. I bundle everything together and choose my parent’s bathroom—where the shower’s out of view of the mirror—to clean myself up and scrub the blood from my tattoo. The water is heaven, but I don’t have time to enjoy it. I’m out in five minutes and back in my room, thinking about Seb.

  I power my laptop on and off at least five times, thinking I can’t get to him from here, and then maybe I can, but then JENA might find me … would she delete him? Has she already? I don’t like owing him like this, and a strong part of me wants to forget him, to pretend none of that ever happened and move on like I always have. Alone.

  That’s the smarter choice.

  But I think of Mom, talking about me like I’m a lost cause, and Emma defending me. I want to be worth defending.

  I have to get him out.

  It’s risky cal
ling Jax from my cell phone—that’s how you get caught by the Feds—but I don’t have time to e-mail back and forth. If JENA swaps me again, I need someone on the outside to know what’s going on. Someone who has the resources to take the Project down if he had the right information.

  Jax answers on the fourth ring. “Pizza Hut. Takeout or delivery?”

  “Jax. It’s Fisher.” The hacker name he knows me by. I know, it sounded cooler when I made it up.

  “You’ve been quiet, Fish.”

  “I know. Ran into some trouble.”

  Silence.

  “Not the Feds,” I say. “The Project.”

  He bursts out laughing. I’ve never heard Jax laugh, and I’m not sure I ever want to again.

  “Are you stoned right now, kid? You drunk-dialing me?”

  “It’s real, Jax. Look up Vivien Meng—”

  “Hey, call me when you’re sober.”

  Click.

  I really saw that going better.

  I’m about to call him back when my phone chirps. I’m here, come outside.… Screw Jax, I’ll have to try him later. I need time to think how I’m going to convince him it’s real anyway. I drop the phone in my pocket and take the stairs two at a time.

  “What time are we going to dinner?” I call as I pass the glass doors of Dad’s office. I wait the usual twenty seconds, before Dad swivels his chair and drops the papers he was holding.

  “Oh, going back to yourself, I see,” he says, sighing at my Alice in Chains shirt. He bends to retrieve his work. “Don’t forget the list Mom left on the counter. We’re leaving here at six, but be back by five, please.”

  “Sure.” List? I detour through the kitchen, grab my jacket off the coatrack, and pluck a white notecard off the counter. Toilet paper, sponges, air filter refills, and at least twenty other things I make a habit of avoiding. I make a face and stuff it in my pocket.

  “Bye, Dad,” I say, stepping out the front door.

  I guess I was expecting things to have changed more than they did, but he doesn’t answer.

  Whatever.

  Emma waits against her gold Camry in the driveway, typing something on her cell screen. And I wonder, not for the first time, how I ever convinced her to let me within ten feet of her. It’s not just the delicious little outfit she has on—knee-high boots over tight jeans, V-neck blouse straining against a green and white sweater vest—that reminds me how far I’ve overreached, but the smile that lights her face when she sees me, like I’ve done anything that could make her happy. She pockets her phone and scans my outfit, lingering on my scorpions tat.