School was crowded. A multilingual sea of kids navigated channels that curved organically between buildings four, five, and six stories high. Juniors, like Clair and Libby, were on the other side of the campus, near the gym. Clair leaned toward the practical arts—writing, music composition, and editing—with a smattering of history and soft sciences that most of her friends found boring. She didn’t know what she would do with the combination, but she figured she had time to decide. It wasn’t like money was an issue as it had been in her grandfather’s day, when fabbers hadn’t existed to make anything anyone wanted, and people had had to have jobs just to eat.
“You kids are getting smarter, younger every year,” he liked to complain, “but you never actually do anything with those smarts of yours.”
“That’s not true,” Clair’s mother had responded the last time. “What about that kid who solved the Riemann hypothesis a month ago?”
“There you go, Clair,” he had grumbled. “Why can’t you be more like him?”
“Her, Grandpa,” Clair had corrected him. “Anyway, I don’t like math.”
“Finding the right vocation is like finding the right spouse,” Allison had said with a smile. “Better to have none than the wrong one.”
Like friends, Clair thought now. And boyfriends.
Libby wasn’t at the classroom when Clair arrived, didn’t turn up with everyone else, and remained silent as they took their seats and the teacher started talking about survivor narratives of the Water Wars. When Clair checked Libby’s public profile, it listed her location as school, but that was likely to be a fake for her parents’ sake, the same as it was when she went out partying.
“She sent me something last night.” Ronnie bumped Clair. “It was weird. Hang on—I’ll show you.”
A forwarded message appeared in Clair’s infield, which had changed to greens and grays to match the New Manteca campus. Bumps kept coming in about the crashlander ball. Another time she might have been pleased by her newfound notoriety, but not today.
Clair fixed on the message from Ronnie and blinked her left eyelid.
“It worked” was all Libby had said, about two hours after the party. “Now I’m beautiful!”
“I think she was talking about Improvement,” Ronnie said. “Check her transit data.”
Like Ronnie and Tash, Clair had close-friend privileges to Libby’s profile, which told her where Libby went and who with. Useful when Libby was running late, now it told Clair exactly where she had been the day before. There was a string of seventeen rapid jumps in the evening, when Clair and Libby had been looking for the crashlander ball, but there was also a long series of Lucky Jumps in the afternoon and another after Libby had said good night. Clair quickly tallied them up. Ninety jumps in one day. At two minutes a jump, that totaled around three hours’ lag.
Tash whistled. “No wonder she had a migraine!”
“What did she mean about being beautiful?” Clair asked Ronnie. “It can’t have worked, right?”
“Impossible,” said Ronnie. “That’s why she bumped me, I think.”
“She wants you to believe because she really wants to believe . . . ?”
“Maybe she convinced herself the birthmark was actually fading,” said Tash. “She must have been ultralagged.”
“So then she crashes,” said Clair. “And what does she wake up to . . . ?”
“Bumps about you and Zep,” said Ronnie with characteristic bluntness.
“And of course the birthmark’s still there, which makes her embarrassed as well as angry.”
Clair was satisfied that they had her best friend’s mood mapped out but decidedly unsatisfied by what that left her with. She was unable to do anything until Libby responded, and she found it impossible to concentrate as a result. Her right foot hooked around her left ankle and jiggled restlessly. Not turning up for school wasn’t especially unusual; everyone skipped now and again, even Clair. But not like this, without an explanation, a single word . . . that wasn’t Libby’s style. She was a broadcaster, not a brooder.
“Clair? Clair, are you paying attention?”
She blinked and refocused. The teacher was talking to her, and the entire class was staring.
“I’m sorry,” she said, gathering up her backpack and avoiding the eyes of her friends. “I’m not feeling well.”
That was a lie, but staying would be a waste of time. There was no faking out a live teacher. That was the whole point of school, Clair’s mom said. Anyone could cheat by copying answers from the Air; school was for learning how to cheat people.
[6]
* * *
Outside, Clair felt crushed by the silence. Ronnie and Tash sent bumps after her to see if she was okay. Had she heard something? Clair said she hadn’t and that she’d be coming back to class soon. What else could she do? She wasn’t sure that going anywhere would do any good. She just needed to think.
A chat request appeared in her infield.
Libby.
Before Clair could wink on it, the patch disappeared.
She thought, just for a second, about letting it go. Libby wasn’t normally so hesitant. If she really wanted to talk to Clair, she’d call back when she was sure of it.
But that didn’t fix anything now, Clair told herself. If best friends couldn’t talk through their issues, who could?
She responded with a request of her own, and it sat there for thirty seconds before anything happened. Then a window opened onto Libby’s bedroom. The shades were down, so if it was sunny outside in Sweden-somewhere, Clair couldn’t tell. Inside, the room was dark and grainy. Libby was a pale shape curled half beneath the covers. She was lying on her side with her head under a pillow.
“Why can’t I see you?” Libby said in a gravelly voice.
“I’m walking outside at school. Why aren’t you here?”
“Slept in. Mad headache.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you answer my bumps?”
“Turned everything off. It was all too much.”
“What was?”
“Spam . . . strange messages . . .”
“What kind of messages? About the ball?”
“Just strange . . . Improvement stuff. I deleted everything.”
“Oh,” said Clair, feeling as though she’d dodged a bullet. If Libby had emptied her infield and switched off her feed, that meant she couldn’t possibly have seen the news. But she would eventually. “Listen—”
“Can’t talk long. Got to sleep some more.” Libby rolled over, pushing the pillow to one side. “Don’t want to waste this golden opportunity, before Mom gets home.”
“I need to talk to you when you’re feeling better.”
“I am feeling better,” Libby said with a sigh. “Slightly. Talk about what?”
“It’s just . . . the party. It didn’t end well. There was some confusion . . .”
“You’re telling me. I think I drunk-bumped Zep at one point when I got home. Did he say anything to you?”
“No. Why would he?” He had done the right thing and stayed away. Or was it the cowardly thing? Clair couldn’t decide. “I hope you feel better about all that today. There’s really no reason—”
“To worry about him being a cheating toad? Sure there is. He was cheating when he hitched up with me.” She laughed, then clutched her head. “Ouch.”
Clair chickened out. It felt almost cruel, raising the subject when Libby was feeling so bad. “I didn’t think you drank that much last night.”
“Neither did I. This is the worst migraine I’ve ever had. Comes and goes at weird times—just when I think it’s done, it crashes back in. . . .”
“Do you need anything? I can probably get permission to come over—”
“You need to stay in school and study for both of us. I’ll learn by osmosis. Maybe we could make it a permanent arrangement.”
Libby grinned up at Clair via the camera pinned to the wall beside her bed. It was Clair’s first good look at her.
Libby’s hair was pulled up in a nighttime knot. Her smile was wide and bright, but there were bags under her eyes, and her skin looked even whiter than usual—like the thin, fragile layer of ice riming the dome of the Sphinx Observatory.
“Stay beautiful,” Clair said.
Libby raised herself onto one elbow, smile falling away. Her face ballooned bigger still in the window.
“You can see me, right?” She winced. “Ouch,” she said again. “Crashing. Bye.”
The window closed. Clair stared through the space it had been, not looking at the campus around her, not looking at anything, really, but the negative image of Libby as it faded from her retina.
Clair had seen Libby. What she hadn’t seen was Libby’s birthmark.
She bumped Ronnie. Clair knew what she would say but she needed to hear it again.
“Are you absolutely sure Improvement won’t work?”
“Positive. Don’t waste your time. And think of the Magic Mayflies. You don’t want to piss them off, do you?”
Clair smiled despite herself. “The Magic Mayflies” referred to a story Ronnie’s mom had told them when they were kids to explain how d-mat worked. You stepped into a booth and dissolved into a kind of pollen made entirely of light, which the Mayflies gathered and carried through the air to where you wanted to go. So if you used d-mat too much, the magic might run out, leaving you stranded.
But Ronnie’s mom had come from a different generation—just one removed from the Water Wars, when power had been short and d-mat not something to be taken for granted, when the seas had been rising and fresh water becoming more scarce every year. Hundreds of millions of people had died of starvation and disease until d-mat had literally turned the tides, stripping the world of its poisons and feeding the billions by reorganizing the atoms, turning the bad into good. Now, with powersats high above the Earth beaming down limitless power and all the excess carbon dioxide sucked out of the air, there was no need for fairy stories. It wasn’t Magic Mayflies at the heart of d-mat but everyday machines that analyzed travelers right down to the smallest particle, transmitting the data that made them them to their destination through the Air and rebuilding them exactly where they wanted to be, exactly as they had been before they left.
VIA existed to make sure that critical word exactly didn’t go anywhere. The Virtual-transport Infrastructure Authority was a global body established to ensure the one hundred percent safe operation of d-mat. Two artificial intelligences oversaw VIA in turn, so no human errors could creep in. And it worked so comprehensively and constantly that the world’s network of d-mat booths reported the lowest rate of data loss out of all of humanity’s media. Everyone knew that the amount of human lost in a decade of d-mat was equivalent to a toenail clipping, total.
Of course, people told stories about criminals hacking the system. Dramas regularly featured duplicated jewels, disintegrated wills, cloned lovers, and the like. Every child listened breathlessly to tales about swapped bodies and shrunken heads, people flipped right-to-left or turned entirely inside out, scientists mixed up with insects, and worse. Clair herself had relished such stories even as she zigzagged across the globe, enjoying as everyone did the freedom to go anywhere she wanted at any time she wanted, safe in the knowledge that VIA and its AIs would simply never let anything bad happen to her. She would always be her at the other end.
So Improvement couldn’t work, she told herself, just like Ronnie said. The image of Libby had been poor, and she had probably been wearing makeup from the night before—not unlikely, given she’d been lagged by ninety jumps on top of her migraine. Maybe Libby had been only half awake and had mistaken a darkened glimpse in a mirror for the reality she desired.
Improvement couldn’t work. So why was Libby acting as though it had?
Let it go, Clair told herself as she walked to class. You’re worrying about the wrong thing. Libby may not be angry at you now, but she’s obviously fragile, and her calm mood’s not going to last forever. Like everything else, the Zep situation is bound never to improve on its own.
But whether she was running from reality or not, the question wouldn’t leave her. Instead of going back to her classroom, she went to the library. It wouldn’t hurt to ask, would it? Just in case.
Calling up a query window in her lenses, she asked the Air, “Does Improvement work?”
“Yes” came the immediate reply, along with “No,” “Maybe,” and “Are you joking? This is what we use the sum of all human knowledge for?”
[7]
* * *
CLAIR CLEARLY WASN’T the first to ask.
The library was noisy as always, full of students pretending to study. Clair had permission to enter the quieter rare editions wing, the only part of the library that held actual books. It was her favorite place at school, partly for the smell, mostly for the sense of isolation and peace. The rare editions wing was like a museum: outside normal time and private, best of all.
Putting on a live recording of her favorite Poulenc piano music, performed by her favorite pianist, Tilly Kozlova, Clair sent out crawlers and trawlers to scour the Air for more detailed answers to the Improvement question. Then she settled back to randomly skim the news reports, blogs, and media archives they found. There were countless discussions about what people would change given the chance, which only made her more certain that it couldn’t possibly work, because if it did, why wasn’t everyone impossibly tall, ripped, and well endowed?
The official word was that it was an urban myth, perpetuated by unknown pranksters through closely connected friendship networks. It didn’t go everywhere at once, saturating the system with a flood of impossible wishes, but there was no rhyme or reason to the way it did spread either. It came and went with all the apparent randomness of something genuinely spontaneous. A fantasy from the collective unconscious, perhaps—or a warning from the superego of what might happen if VIA’s safeguards were ever relaxed.
VIA dismissed it. Peacekeepers thought it harmless. Countless testimonies as to its lack of efficacy went a long way toward convincing Clair that Ronnie was right. Improvement simply didn’t work.
Buried amid the torrent of information dredged up by her search, however, was one emphatic but mysterious dissenting voice.
The message was light on hyperbole and unfortunately light on details as well. It had been written three years earlier and consisted of a warning from a woman whose public profile had been defaced. Instead of name and contact details, the fields displayed a single word, repeated over and over again.
Stainer. Stainer. Stainer.
Abstainers were what the minority of people who didn’t use d-mat called themselves. They didn’t use d-mat because they thought it was immoral or something like that—Clair didn’t know the details, but everyone she knew called them Stainers, after George Staines, their founder, and the idea that giving up d-mat would bring back all the pollution humanity had finally gotten rid of. They were regarded as crazy by pretty much everyone. Hence the defacement and worse.
Stainers didn’t claim to be sane. They claimed to be right.
“Improvement killed my child” was all the woman’s warning said.
Clair worried at her fingernail, thinking of Libby’s ghostly image crashing to black.
Feeling faintly foolish but knowing her grandmother’s genes wouldn’t let the thought go until she had pursued it to the very end, she scoured her contacts until she found the name of the only Stainer in her grade and asked if they could talk.
Jesse Linwood was a junior like her, and they shared Modern History on Tuesdays, but that was where their similarities ended. Jesse’s other subjects were focused on math and engineering. They never hung out.
It wasn’t personal. Their paths simply never crossed. He didn’t come on excursions if they involved d-mat—which they always did—or eat at the refectory, where the food was always fabbed. Libby called him the Lurker because he sometimes popped up in school social media but rarely said anything. That cou
ld have been the fault of his augs, which were embarrassingly ancient. His audio came through an actual earring clipped to his earlobe, instead of a tiny tube tucked neatly into the aural canal like everyone else had. He had only one visible contact lens, which he switched from eye to eye as though it irritated him. Clair took for granted the fact that she could type using menus in her lenses or just mouth the words she wanted to say, but Jesse audibly whispered when talking in a chat, and when he was bumping someone or accessing his menus, his fingers visibly twitched. Sometimes his augs broke down, leaving him deaf and dumb to the Air until he fixed them. It drove the teachers crazy.
He never proselytized like some Abstainers did, but people knew who he was all the same. His clothes were obviously not fabbed fresh each morning—sometimes they were patched or even dirty—and he carried a leather satchel that looked a hundred years old. He had other nicknames, some them undeserved. Clair was pretty sure he wasn’t actually a terrorist, like the members of the World Holistic Leadership. WHOLE was always issuing manifestos and sending viruses through the d-mat network. Cold viruses, not computer ones.
After a delay of some minutes, Jesse replied, “I think you’ve got the wrong number.”
“The wrong what?” she bumped back.
“Number. Address. Telephones, you know?”
She’d read of telephones in old stories but had never seen one.
“They used numbers, not names?”
There was another delay before he bumped back. She imagined his fingers twitching away, wherever he was, and was too impatient to wait for a reply.
“It’s Clair Hill, from Modern History.”
“I know who you are. You’ve never texted me before.”
Another old word, but she knew what this one meant. “I want to ask you something about d-mat.”
“I don’t know anything about d-mat.”
“What happens when d-mat goes wrong, I mean.”
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