“One simple concession could spare you all of this, Clair. One act of common sense. Just do what I want, and this will be over. All of it.”
His crushing fingers released her, and she jerked away with his voice ringing in her skull.
“I’m not guilty of anything,” she said. “Q aimed the pistol for me. I just pulled the trigger.”
“The pistol has an autotargeting system, Clair. Q turned it on.” He leaned in close again, and she couldn’t help but recoil from him. “I’m afraid you’ll have to do better than that. Don’t think of it as betraying her, if that’s what’s bothering you . . . although I hear you have some proficiency in that regard already.”
Clair balled her fists and crushed them into her eyes.
“Shut up!”
“Why, Clair? I’m the one offering you a way out of this mess.”
“Just leave me alone! I need space. I have to think.”
“About what? Surely there’s only one possible response.”
She raised her head and glared at him, hatred tracing fiery lines through her veins, giving her a strength she’d never suspected she had.
“If you destroy me, Q will destroy you,” she said, and the coldness in her voice was frightening even to her own ears. “That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? She knows my dupe isn’t me, and she’s looking for me right now. And she’s scared you. You don’t know what she’s capable of, and you’re worried that you’ll find out big-time if you don’t give me up soon. So you don’t get to order me around. Not now and not ever. Back off and let me figure out what I want before I agree to anything you want.”
“All right, all right,” he said, raising his hands in a mixture of placation and frustration. “I’ll give you ten minutes—in which time you’d better hope your little lapdog doesn’t do anything you’ll regret. You only get one second chance.”
74
HE STALKED OFF, all geniality gone. But at least the act was over. The doors opened ahead of him, and stayed open behind him. Clair took two steps toward them, then retreated as Mallory walked into the room.
Behind her, the doors shut with a definitive click. They were alone together.
“What are you doing here?” Clair asked.
“Don’t worry. I’m not here to talk.” The woman in Libby’s body leaned against the desk. “Consider me an incentive to make the right decision.”
“What happens if I don’t?”
Mallory hefted the pistol. “Remember Zep. I can bring him back and shoot him as many times as you like. It’s up to you.”
Clair folded her arms. She felt cold, but that had nothing to do with the temperature in the room. The strength she had had a moment ago evaporated in the face of Mallory, whose mind might even then be starting to overtake her own.
“How does it feel?” Clair asked. “How does it feel to destroy someone’s life?”
Mallory tipped back her head and laughed. The sound was shocking, coming from Libby’s mouth.
“You talk as though it’s never happened before,” the woman said. “We live in a cruel world, Clair Hill, full of victims. Our only choice is between standing in line or taking matters into your own hands. Which do you choose?”
Clair didn’t want to believe that there was nothing of Libby left in this woman who looked exactly like her. Improvement happened slowly, Wallace had said. It wasn’t like duping, where someone was shoved into place and left to founder. Mallory had crept through Libby like a cancer. There had to be some small part of Libby left, some fragment that might be able to help her escape.
“I remember the crashlander ball,” she said. “Do you? We made it happen together, you and I. We were the perfect team.”
“Sure I remember,” Mallory said, confirming Clair’s guess about duping and memories, “but I also remember my own life—the death camps, and my father being shot, and stealing food from other children just to stay alive. And worse, so don’t think you’re going to turn me by appealing to some fading echo of your shallow friend. She wanted this, remember? And now she’s got it. Do you think she’s glad? I can’t tell you, Clair, because she’s not in here anymore.”
“Stop it.”
“Just like your dupe isn’t you anymore either.”
“Stop it!”
Clair put her hands over her ears and ran into the privacy alcove, chased by Mallory’s mocking laughter.
Clair crouched in a corner and wept, thinking of Zep telling her about dead grandmothers and rape. They had been Mallory’s memories coming from Libby’s lips, but at least there had been some of Libby left then. It was gone now. Libby was gone, and soon Clair would be too, either erased completely or taken over by Mallory, if that was who she was infected with. It was inconceivable that there could be two versions of that terrible old soul at the same time, both in different bodies, but anything was possible in a world where people could be reduced to data—data that could be edited, copied, and erased as easily any other electronic file . . . in the hands of a madman.
Clair tried to bring back the anger that had enabled her to stand up to Wallace before. She forced herself to think through the fear and grief, to find something she could do. There had to be a way out of her situation. There had to be.
She didn’t pin much hope on Wallace keeping his promises. He could erase her with a gesture and leave her dupe to cover up her disappearance . . . until the dupe herself died. Or the dupe himself. Clair put her hands over face, not wanting to think about that.
She became aware of a faint sound, a whirring that tickled the edge of her hearing. She raised her head, frowning. It wasn’t coming from the office. It was coming from much closer, inside the alcove. She knew that sound, although she didn’t recognize it immediately. Until recently she had heard it every day of her life. It prompted a sense memory of Jesse frowning into a steaming mug of coffee.
The fabber.
She stood up and stared at the small, boxy machine. She didn’t dare do anything more than that in case Mallory heard her. Neither of them had entered anything into its menu, which left only one possibility.
One crack is all it takes. One line of code to widen the crack.
Q had found her.
75
HOPE RETURNED IN a flood, tempered with a fear that someone would notice before the fabber fully processed its data. Clair didn’t know what it was making, but she could guess.
One custom chip built from scratch in a booth. One transmitter to widen the bandwidth.
The fabber opened with a chirpy ping. Inside was something small and angular, about the size her little finger. She reached in and picked it up.
“Clair?” Mallory asked. Clair could hear the woman’s light footsteps approaching.
A simple menu appeared in her lenses. It gave her two options: connect or disconnect. She chose the former. A status update appeared that said locating, with a pulsing dot indicating some kind of activity. Locating her, Clair presumed. Wallace’s private network could have taken her anywhere. Until the transmitter connected with Q, Clair remained on her own.
Clair tucked the transmitter behind her back as Mallory stepped into the cubicle.
“I still have a couple of minutes,” Clair told her.
“Show me what you just fabbed.” Mallory punctuated the order with a twitch of her pistol’s barrel.
“I can’t,” said Clair. “I drank it.”
She gestured at the empty coffee mug Jesse had left in the alcove, thankful for once that he didn’t have the habits of a normal person. Anyone else would have recycled it in the fabber without a thought.
Mallory gestured with the pistol again. She didn’t look convinced.
Locating, said the status update.
Clair stepped through the entranceway, back into the office.
“Stop there.” Mallory backed into the alcove, keeping the pistol aimed at her, and touched the mug with her free hand.
“It’s cold.”
“That’s how I like it.”
Mallory put both hands on the pistol grip and herded Clair back into the office.
Clair obeyed, wondering why Q was taking so long to find her. How far from New York was she?
“Hold out your arms,” Mallory said. “Wider.”
The transmitter was tucked into the waist of Clair’s pants. If Mallory searched her, she was bound to find it.
“I want to talk to Wallace,” she said. Anything to distract her.
“Not until I’m sure it’s safe. Legs apart.”
“You think I’m going to attack him with coffee?”
Signal found.
“Clair! Can you hear me? Is it really you?”
The voice came clearly through her ear-rings. Q sounded relieved, excited, and very close.
“Yes!” Clair bumped back. She didn’t dare mouth the words as she normally would. Mallory was too close, running her hands along and under her arms. Even from behind she might notice. “Really!”
“Oh! I was so worried. I knew that dupe wasn’t you. Do you know where you are?”
“Private d-mat booth. Can you see it?”
“Yes. I have access to all the station’s systems.”
“Activate it. Change the pattern. Get rid of Libby.”
“Send her somewhere else?”
“Don’t care. Before she finds the transmitter!”
Mallory was checking her legs, moving upward. Clair was out of time.
Hoping it was impossible for someone to perform a body search while simultaneously holding a gun, Clair chopped her right elbow downward as hard as she could, striking Mallory on the side of the skull.
Mallory fell backward with a cry. Clair staggered a step too, clutching her elbow. She had never done anything like that before. She was amazed by how much it hurt.
There wasn’t time to worry about the pain. Mallory was fumbling at her pocket for the pistol. Clair braced herself and kicked as soon as the gun came up to point at her. The pistol shot out of Mallory’s hand and skittered across the room. Clair lunged for it with her left hand, wishing she’d had the forethought to elbow Mallory with that arm. She was right-handed.
Mallory came after her but not quickly enough. Clair was on her feet, holding the gun. There was no need for an autotargeting system this time. From that distance, even with her left hand, Clair could have shot Mallory with her eyes closed.
Mallory froze.
“You won’t.”
Clair looked into Libby’s face and saw nothing but Mallory.
“Try me.”
Mallory straightened.
“All right, then. Go on, do it.”
ssss—
The air was thinning around them as Q activated the booth.
—ssss—
“Do it, Clair! Do it!”
—pop
Clair blinked. Apart from an afterimage of Libby’s desperate, pleading face in her retinas, Mallory was gone.
76
CLAIR SAGGED TO the floor and let the pistol fall limply from her hand. There was no one to point it at now. She was alone.
But not really alone. Q was in her ears, asking her if she was okay.
“I’m fine,” she said, holding her right arm close to her chest and stomach. She wondered if her elbow was broken. It certainly felt like it.
“We need to find Jesse and the others. Wallace has put them in a hangover somewhere. If you’ve hacked in, you might be able to see them.”
“Someone’s fighting me,” said Q, “but I can hold them off while you look around. Here’s the station map.”
Clair’s lenses flared with data. It was like staring into the sun. The station, as Q had called it, was a turbulent ocean of information that seemed largely concerned with maintaining the station itself. There was an extensive menu called Environment, and another called Attitude Control. Uplinks and Downlinks confused her for a moment, until she realized exactly what was going on.
“A space station?” she said. “We’re in space?”
“In a centrifugal habitat in geocentric orbit, to be exact.”
“If only Jesse knew!”
She forced herself to concentrate. There was a menu called D-mat, which covered transit control, fabber requests, and what looked like complicated duping processes. There were several extremely large caches, any one of which might have been the hangover she was looking for. Luckily, files were recorded by name and date of birth. She searched on Jesse, and found him almost instantly—his frozen pattern, anyway, data waiting to be brought back to life. His middle name was Andrew.
“Got him,” she said. “How do I bring him back?”
Q walked her through a simple series of menu options. “Select Reconstitution: full. Select Destination: . . . where do you want him to go?”
“Uh, back where we came from, I guess. But not VIA HQ. Somewhere nearby. Is it safe there?”
“Peacekeepers have the area sealed off. I may have caused . . . a small amount of mess.”
Clair didn’t doubt it. She could only imagine what lengths Q had gone to in order to find her.
“We’ll worry about that later.”
They sent Jesse on his way, safely out of Wallace’s grasp. Clair found the others and did the same. All except Gemma: she wasn’t rescuing a traitor.
When she reached Turner, she hesitated briefly, then moved on. She would decide what to do with him when she found the others: Dylan Linwood and the other dupes. Libby. Zep.
She searched all the caches by name, but their patterns weren’t listed. There must be another cache somewhere off station.
“We’re running out of time,” said Q. Her voice was strained. Clair wondered what forces were being arrayed against her. Just keeping Wallace out of the room must be causing her an immense effort.
“I haven’t searched for you, yet, Q. What’s your real name?”
“Uh . . . I don’t remember, and there isn’t time for me to try. I’m okay out here. I don’t need a body. Please hurry, Clair.”
“All right . . . for now. I just need to figure out what to do with Turner. How do I get Turner’s pattern out of the station without bringing him out of a booth?”
“You mean . . . erase him?”
Clair forced herself to confront the decision head-on, without couching it in terms that made it any less horrible.
“I guess you could put it that way.”
“It’s not possible, Clair. You can’t use d-mat to erase someone. That would mean breaking parity—making one of someone into zero of someone. It’s not allowed. Even in a private network like this one, it would still be wrong.”
“But we have to do it. Don’t think of it as killing him. In his mind, he’s already dead. He’s a zombie. It’s what he’d want, Q.”
“Why, Clair?”
“His genes are too dangerous to leave in Wallace’s hands. The safest thing is to get rid of them entirely. We have to do it . . . for him and for everyone else. Don’t you see?”
Q didn’t respond.
“Q? Did you hear me?”
“Sorry, Clair. I . . . uh, I have a message for you from Ant Wallace.”
There was something odd about Q’s voice. Clair had never heard her sound defeated before.
“You have five minutes, Clair,” said Wallace over the intercom, “or I’m opening an airlock. If you don’t give me what I want, you’ll suffocate.”
“Shut him off,” Clair said. “Does he think I’m stupid? I’ll be gone long before then.”
“There’s something we didn’t think of, Clair,” said Q. “I can’t send you back to Earth.”
“Why not?”
“The rest of Wallace’s private network has been shut down. I can only bring you back through the public network.”
“So?”
“That too will cause a parity violation,” Q said. “There’s already one of you on the Earth, remember? Your dupe . . .”
Clair stared blankly into her lenses, not seeing the dataverse that was Wallace’s station, not seeing the
text of the message he had sent, thinking only of how he had trapped her. He was using her as a hostage.
“Can’t we just hack into the airlock controls instead?”
“Wallace has grenades rigged to blow the airlock. I can’t stop an explosion.”
“Wouldn’t that kill him, too?”
“Almost certainly, but I guess he doesn’t think he’ll have to go through with it. He’s sure the threat will be enough. We won’t break parity. We can’t.”
“But he can’t win,” Claire said, imagining the air being sucked out into space, leaving her gasping and dying. “There has to be a way around this.”
“There isn’t,” said Q. “I’m trying really hard to think of something, but I can’t. If we don’t give him what he wants, you’ll die.”
“I can’t give him you, Q. You don’t want to work for a monster like him. He made you like this!”
“What else can I do, Clair?”
“Can’t we break parity just this once, for me and Turner?”
“We . . . can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I . . . I don’t know.”
“You don’t know how to do it, or you don’t know why we can’t?”
Q didn’t answer.
Clair had heard that kind of hesitation before, when Q was talking about her life and the weird existence she had in the hangover—particularly when she hit the edges of her memory, as she had with her name a moment ago. But what could be causing that block now? What was it about Q that made her unable to attack the system itself?
Wallace’s countdown was continuing. Just four minutes remained. Whatever Q was sticking on, Clair would have to talk her around it.
“You said that creating a parity violation would mean breaking one of the AIs,” she said. “Couldn’t the system run on just one AI?”
That got Q talking again.
“Maybe, but it wouldn’t be safe.”
“Which one would be broken? The conductor or the driver of the bus?”
“The driver, Quiddity. Without him, errors of any kind wouldn’t be spotted. There would be—”
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