Twinmaker t-1

by Sean Williams

  Ray checked the door for the hundredth time.

  “Guys,” he said, “I can hear something out there.”

  Clair and Jesse were at his side in an instant.

  Ray was on his hands and knees, with his right ear pressed hard against the right-hand panel.

  “Sounds like hammering,” he said, “or gunfire. I can’t tell which.”

  Clair crouched next to him and listened, the door coolly metallic against her skin.

  For some seconds all she could hear was the beating of her heart. Slowly a less familiar sound rose to prominence: a distant, percussive thudding that lacked the regularity of a machine. Its source wasn’t nearby, but as she listened, she thought it might be getting louder.

  Clair ran back to her chair and picked up her empty coffee mug. She raised it above her head and banged it against the door, shouting, “Hey! You have to let me talk to someone! Open the door—please!”

  She was picturing Turner and Gemma, armed to the teeth like Ray had been, blasting their way up through the building. Could they possibly be fighting all of VIA on their own, plus the peacekeepers who would automatically come to VIA’s defense? It seemed impossible, unless . . .

  Q.

  Suddenly she could see it playing out in her mind. If the sub had done nothing more than trip an alarm by docking in the underwater station, triggering the shutdown and an accidental imprisonment of Clair and her friends, Q wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between that and Clair being held captive. And she wouldn’t take it lying down.

  Clair suspected Q herself didn’t know exactly what her capabilities were. She lived in the Air; she had access to the entire accumulated knowledge of humanity. Clair wondered if VIA was in the process of finding out exactly what those capabilities were.

  And the world was watching. How many people were going to be hurt now? How bad was it going to make the Counter-Improvement cause look?

  70

  SHE BANGED AT the door again and again.

  “Hey, answer me!”

  The mug shattered, and she recoiled, blinking ceramic flecks from her eyes.

  The pounding was definitely louder.

  “Clair, look.”

  Jesse was pointing at the door. Her coffee mug had left deep scratches in the paint. Beneath was a shiny surface that looked like metal at first glance, except it was too reflective. It did more than gleam. It was so shiny, it looked like a shard of perfect mirror.

  Clair leaned closer, puzzled.

  Why go to the trouble of making the doors out of mirror and then painting over them? Why use it as a door at all?

  What if it wasn’t just a door?

  Clair stood up and turned a quick full circle, taking in the space around her. The windows were sealed tight: the shutters were painted too. The ceilings were unbroken, and they were also painted. Using a sharp sliver of broken mug, she worried at a carpet seam until it came up: more mirror.

  The room wasn’t a room. It was a giant d-mat booth.

  “Clair?”

  She barely heard Ray trying to get her attention. Why build an office inside a booth? She could think of one reason: so Wallace could move from meeting to meeting without leaving his desk. VIA was a global company and its executive director no doubt a man in demand. People could come to him or he could go to them. Maybe he liked doing the latter without even getting out of his chair. Maybe this was his management style, to be the guy who dropped in rather than the guy who summoned from afar.

  Clair could accept that.

  But why lock them inside it? Was it a coincidence or something more sinister?

  “Clair? Can you feel it?”

  She blinked. The hammering was audible now and getting noticeably louder by the second. Occasionally, the floor shook. It sounded like a full-on war out there. A completely unnecessary war caused by VIA locking Clair in. Wallace couldn’t have provoked Q more effectively if he’d tried. Or Turner. Capturing Ray, one of WHOLE’s own, would give Turner the perfect excuse for “direct action.”

  With that thought, the missing piece fell into place.

  “Oh no,” she said.

  “What?” Jesse was watching her.

  “I’ve figured it out.”

  “Figured what out?”

  “It’s Turner. That’s what this is about.”

  “Why Turner? How?”

  “The dupes steal someone’s body. What if they steal someone’s memories as well? That means they’d know where Turner was the moment they duped Arabelle—but they couldn’t take him from the Skylifter because it was too public. So they shot it down and sent in the dupes.” It all made horrible, blinding sense to her now. “That didn’t work, but they didn’t try again because they didn’t need to—all thanks to me!”

  “Why,” asked Jesse. “What have you done?”

  She hated the wariness in his eyes.

  “Nothing,” she said, “except ignore Gemma, because she was right. She was absolutely right!”

  It was getting hard to talk over the hammering of guns.

  “They’re just outside,” Ray said, backing away from the door.

  “Don’t let them in,” Clair said in rising desperation. “They have to stay outside!”

  But the double door was already sliding open, as it had to for the plan to work. Q had to be fooled into thinking she’d unlocked the door herself. It couldn’t be damaged by explosives. The space within the room had to be resealable.

  “Clair!” The cry came from the drone, which was the first through the gap. Q’s triumph was palpable. “You’re alive!”

  “Not for much longer if you don’t do as I say,” she said, running to the first actual person into the room—Gemma, singed and smelling like century-old slime. She wrenched the pistol from Gemma’s hand and emptied the clip into the walls.

  “Get out!” she yelled. “Get out now!”

  Jesse and Ray dived as bullet after bullet ricocheted around them. Then Clair’s finger was wrenching the trigger to no avail, the pistol making nothing but a click-clicking sound. Empty.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Gemma asked her, eyes wide with fury.

  Clair ignored her. She turned to get another weapon and found Turner right behind her, raising his hands in placation as though she were the crazy one, and he hadn’t put them all in danger just by stepping into the booth.

  “You can’t be here,” she said, pushing him to the door. “This is what they want. Your secret—your life—”

  Dawning understanding transformed Turner’s expression into one of panic. The d-mat booth was a trap, and Clair was the bait. Q had led Turner right into it—Turner, with his immortality genes, just waiting to be scanned and dissected. Everything else was incidental.

  She seemed to think much faster than reality was moving. Turner—door—now. Her body weighed tons. She willed it to move more quickly, screaming at herself for being so slow. Turner was even slower and heavier than she was. She grabbed his shoulder and her muscles burned. He was a mountain that took an age to move an inch.

  Even as she strained, she wondered: How had VIA known?

  The door was already closing. Ray slipped one arm into the gap and tried to pull it back, but the door wasn’t staying open for anyone now that Turner was inside. Ray screamed as the metal mouth closed on him. Blood sprayed. There was a terrible crunching sound.

  The d-mat process started the very instant the room was sealed. Clair’s wild shots had damaged nothing, changed nothing.

  ssss—

  The room was much bigger than a normal booth and contained much more air. That gave her more time—but to do what? Jesse stared at her in hopes of an explanation. Turner was bent over Ray, pale-faced. Only Gemma seemed calm, fatalistically resigned.

  —ssss—

  “Q, can you stop this?”

  “This booth isn’t connected to the public domain. It’s a private network, and I don’t know how to access it.”

  “Well, find out fast!�
�

  “I’m sorry, Clair. I did the wrong thing again. I didn’t realize—”

  —ssss—

  Clair’s ears were stinging. Jesse was backed up against the wall, red from neck to thigh with Ray’s blood. She felt the air grow Himalaya thin as she pushed past her would-be rescuers in order to be near him.

  “You always wanted to try d-mat,” she said. “I’m sorry it had to be like this.”

  He swallowed.

  “At least we’re—”

  —pop

  71

  CLAIR BLINKED. THE room was the same, right down to the scratches on the walls. The light was the same. The air smelled the same. Except for the pop of her ears, she wouldn’t have believed she had gone anywhere.

  But there was no Jesse. No WHOLE. No blood. No empty gun in her hand. She stared around her in shock.

  The pattern had been altered in transit. Everything but her and the room’s furniture and decorations had been edited from the space contained within the mirrored walls. What had happened to the data she couldn’t guess. Saved elsewhere? Erased? She hoped with all her heart it wasn’t the latter.

  She took a hesitant step and noticed something that was new—a weird giddying sensation, as though the floor were moving under her in ways she couldn’t consciously determine.

  The doors to the office opened, and two people walked in. One looked exactly like Libby, except for two very important things: her birthmark was missing, and so was the light in her eyes. She was like the room around them, with everything that made her special edited out. She held a steel-gray pistol in her right hand.

  The other person was Ant Wallace. Of course it was, she thought. It had to be him. He looked exactly like his picture in the Air: round faced, in his fifties or so, with an open expression and care lines around his eyes. Perhaps a little shorter than Clair had expected, he was jacketless, in shirtsleeves and silk tie, with charcoal suit pants and patent leather shoes. His right hand was outstretched in welcome.

  She backed away, confused and scared at the same time.

  “No?” he said, raising the hand in imploration, then lowering it. “Understandable, perhaps. Your plan to shame VIA into action would have been a good one, had I not been behind Improvement all along.”

  The doors closed, giving Clair the barest glimpse of what lay outside. Another corridor, but not the one she had come through before. She was definitely in a different place. Wherever she was, there was no access to the Air: her lenses were completely blank.

  “And the dupes as well?”

  “They’re aspects of the same thing, as I think you’re beginning to appreciate.”

  The woman in Libby’s body came closer and pointed the gun so the barrel was only a hand’s span away from Clair’s head. She was wearing a simple black dress in a heavy fabric, some kind of wool weave, perhaps, with a black suit jacket over the top and black leather shoes with a low heel. Her blond hair was pulled back to expose her neck. She wore no jewelry and looked classy and cool, a decade older than the girl Clair knew.

  “You don’t frighten me, Mallory,” Clair said, forcing herself not to flinch. She met the woman’s cold stare and searched it for any sign of recognition. Surely there was some hint of Libby left, some shred of Clair’s best friend who still remembered who she had been, remembered her. “I know you won’t kill me.”

  The woman holding the gun frowned. The barrel dipped slightly.

  “How do you know my name?”

  “From the Farmhouse, of course,” said Wallace with affable authority. “She’s resourceful.” He moved around behind the desk and sat casually in the chair. “That’s why we want to reward her, not punish her. Isn’t that right?”

  “Reward me for what?”

  “For bringing Turner Goldsmith to me. Without you and your plan, he would’ve gone to ground, and we would’ve lost him again. For all our assertions to the contrary, mistakes do happen, and we don’t always learn from them. The error that allowed Turner Goldsmith to live so long is one such, but now that he’s safely uploaded and awaiting analysis, we can make up for lost time. His genes are going to be very useful indeed. I will live young, well, and long enough to do everything I want. Isn’t that all anyone desires?”

  Wallace glanced at Mallory in Libby’s body. A microexpression that might have been a frown flashed across his features. “Well, maybe not everyone. But the point is valid. You’ve helped give me what I want, and I think it’s time we returned the favor.”

  The d-mat booth came to life around them again. Clair put her arms around herself and held on tight, afraid of what might be changed this time.

  sssssss-pop

  Zeppelin Barker was in the room, not three yards from her.

  Her heart jolted.

  Solid, blond, and tanned, dressed in track pants, sneakers, and a vest sporting the school colors. No bullet wound. Living, breathing, real. She could smell him.

  He was already reacting in puzzlement to an environment he hadn’t expected, adopting a wary crouch and looking around until he saw her.

  “Clair? What’s going on?”

  Clair didn’t know what to tell him. There were just the two of them in the room now. Wallace and Mallory—it seemed simplest to call her that—were gone. The faint sense of giddiness remained, so Clair guessed that she and the room had been d-matted nowhere this time—a null jump, Arabelle had called it. The pattern had been edited again en route.

  But . . . Zep?

  “What are you doing here?” she asked him. “Where did you come from?”

  “The dorm. Remember? That Abstainer freak sending the feed from Gordon the Gorgon’s office? Don’t tell me I missed the end of it. . . .”

  He looked around again as though trying to match his last memory with this new moment. Clair was struggling to do the same thing. If the last thing he remembered was leaving the dorm to come join her at school, that meant he was a copy taken from the last time he had used d-mat. The original Zep had gone on to get shot, while an echo of him—this version of him—had survived in storage somewhere. And now he was alive again, missing the last hours of his life and the last few days of Clair’s, but otherwise exactly as he had been.

  “Clair? What’s going on?”

  He went to approach her, but she instinctively pulled away. There was always a chance it wasn’t really him. . . .

  “What did we talk about the last time we saw each other?”

  “Libby, of course. Why?”

  She shook her head. That was a stupid question. Mallory was in Libby’s head now; she could have known and could have briefed him.

  “What’s my least favorite city?”

  “Omsk.”

  He came closer, as though to touch her, and she shied away again, even though she knew now that he was really him.

  “Clair, what’s wrong with you? You’re starting to freak me out.”

  He wasn’t the only one feeling that way. Wallace and Mallory obviously knew about her and Zep and what had happened to him in Manteca. They were offering to undo the harm that had been done—and they could deliver, too, with access to his archived pattern, wherever it had been saved. Since Zep wasn’t legally dead, he could walk back into his life as though nothing had happened. Maybe Wallace thought the two of them could even pick up where they had left off, if they wanted to. Without Libby.

  That was the deal. All she had to do to accept it, presumably, was to back down from her Counter-Improvement campaign.

  If she took the deal, however, Wallace would win. Libby would disappear, possibly forever, Q would never get her body back . . . and what would happen to WHOLE and the others? What would happen to Jesse? She couldn’t just rewind the last few days and forget they had ever happened.

  She clenched her fists. Clair Larhonda Hill wasn’t so easily bought.

  “It’s not going to work,” she shouted at the walls and ceiling. “Do you hear me? You can’t buy my silence so easily!”

  The doors opened.
/>   “Libby!” Zep cried. “Thank God. We’ve been so—”

  “Worried? Why? I’m beautiful, remember?”

  The pistol was still in her hand. She raised it, this time pointing at Zep.

  “Libby, wait . . . if this is about Clair—”

  “Clair, Clair, Clair,” she said. “It’s always about Clair.”

  The gun cracked, and Zep fell to the floor, shot through the heart.

  72

  “NO!”

  Clair was at Zep’s side in an instant. Before the life entirely left his eyes, he seemed to see her through a veil of hurt and puzzlement. His lips moved, but no sound emerged from them. Then he was gone. Again.

  Clair knelt in the expanding pool of his blood, buried her head into his ruined chest, and would have wept but for Mallory’s hand in her hair, pulling her up and away from the body.

  “It’s not your silence we want.”

  Mallory pushed her back to the ground, away from Zep’s body.

  “Leave me alone.” Clair scrabbled backward until her spine was pressed hard against a wall. Revulsion threatened to subsume her. Zep had died twice, and both times it had been because of her.

  “Shall I bring him back again? One time if you do as we ask. Many times if you don’t.”

  “You have Turner. What do you need me for?”

  “Ant wants something else from you—and what Ant Wallace wants, Ant Wallace gets.”

  “Now, now, there’s no need to be unpleasant about it. . . .” Wallace had entered the room without Clair noticing. He stood over Zep’s body and adjusted the cuffs of his shirt.

  “Here’s the story,” he said. “I’m on my way to see you, as per your request, when an attack on the building triggers an emergency lockdown. You are isolated for your own protection, as am I, until security and peacekeepers foil the attack, at which point you and I are released. In response to the inevitable media uproar provoked by your followers, we hold a video conference. Gemma Mallapur confesses that you were used by WHOLE as a cover for an attack on the very heart of VIA. Once WHOLE’s terroristic aspirations are revealed, you renounce all your accusations of me and my organization. You are taken away for questioning but are not expected to be charged. The end. Any questions?”