This time the pause was longer.
“I thought it might’ve been about this morning.”
She frowned. “What about this morning?”
“You were at the station. I saw you.”
“I didn’t see you. What were you doing there?”
The pause dragged on so long, she thought he might not reply at all.
“Doesn’t matter,” he finally said. “What do you want to know?”
The delays between bumps were maddening.
“It would be easier to actually talk than do it like this.”
“Sure, but not now. My audio’s on the fritz, and I have a prac after lunch. Meet me at the gate after last period?”
Clair was reluctant. People might see.
Then she felt bad for feeling that way. So what if people saw them together? Besides, there was a chance Libby would get better as the day progressed, and Clair wouldn’t have to go through with it.
“All right,” she bumped back. “Thanks.”
“No probs. See you.”
Clair leaned back in her chair and rubbed her eyes. She didn’t want to leave the library, but she had done all she could, for now. And she had some explaining to do. Ronnie would tell her she was overreacting; Tash would go into a worry spiral. Both would make her feel worse. Neither would change her mind.
“Improvement killed my child,” she thought, and then tried her best not to think it again.
“On my way,” she bumped Tash.
“We were beginning to wonder what you were up to,” Tash bumped back.
“And who with,” Ronnie added.
Gathering up her backpack, Clair resigned herself to explanations on several fronts at once.
[8]
* * *
MIDWAY THROUGH THE afternoon, Libby’s caption changed from Disturb at own risk to SiCkO, with a crocodile biting a zebra on the rump. Clair took that as a clear sign that Libby wasn’t feeling better, meaning that Clair had to go through with her meeting with Jesse Linwood. She was already regretting and feeling slightly embarrassed about contacting him. Jesse was so far out of her social circle, he might as well have come from another planet.
Ronnie and Tash waved her off at the end of school, peppering her with provocative bumps.
“Retro is in,” said Tash, “but not that retro.”
Clair walked on, telling herself to be glad they weren’t giving her a hard time about Zep. She had been determinedly honest with them over what had happened at the party. She knew she had done the wrong thing. Forgiveness was optional. She would understand if they reserved their sympathy for Libby.
“I just want to know,” Ronnie had said, “what’re you doing poaching that slimeball when there are eligible bachelors all over campus. You know you can do better, right?”
“He may be a slimeball,” said Tash, “but at least he has taste.”
“I don’t think Zep’s really a slimeball,” Clair started to say.
“Oh no!” cried Ronnie, putting the back of one hand to her forehead. “This can’t be happening!”
“. . . any more than I’m a poacher,” Clair concluded firmly. “It just happened. It won’t happen again.”
They hadn’t sounded convinced.
“Come lat-jumping with me this weekend,” Tash said. “We’re taking the thirtieth. That’ll give you something else to think about.”
“Or come party with me,” said Ronnie. “Plenty more slimeballs where he came from.”
“Pass,” Clair said. She wasn’t interested in circumnavigating the globe latitude by latitude or in available men. “But thanks. I’m glad you’re still talking to me.”
“Just don’t run off with the Stainer, or else we’ll have to communicate by smoke signals. . . .”
Jesse Linwood was waiting for her by the gate, slouched in a way that belied his gangly height, with shaggy brown hair covering his eyes. He was wearing tatty blue jeans and a yellow T-shirt with a blocky logo she didn’t recognize—it looked like an upside-down flowerpot, only bright red. The legendary satchel was on the ground at his feet, slumping listlessly like something melting in the sun. In one hand he held a paperback novel that was so dog-eared, it should probably have been in a museum.
She didn’t catch the title. When he saw her, he put his weight on both feet and stood straighter, slipping the book into his back pocket.
“Hey, Clair,” he said.
“Uh, hey.” She wasn’t quite sure what to say next. Already they’d spoken more words to each other in one day than they had in all their years at school together.
“Shall we go?” he asked her.
“Where?”
“I’ll walk with you to the station. That’s where you’re headed, right?”
At her alarmed expression, he laughed.
“Okay, that sounded weird. I’m not stalking you or anything, honest. I just walk past the station on the way to school, and sometimes I see you.”
“Me and lots of other people.”
“I guess.” He picked up his satchel and indicated the gate. “Yes?”
She shrugged. “Sure. Anywhere’s fine.”
Conscious of the occasional odd look from her fellow students, she set off with him down the road to the station. His legs were long, so his stride far outclassed hers, but he let her set the pace. They walked a dozen steps in silence, Clair feeling foolish but committed now, Jesse concentrating to all appearances on the tips of his sneakers. He was either growing a very slight goatee or he hadn’t gotten around to shaving his chin for a few days. She tried not to stare at it, but with his eyes hidden behind his hair, it was hard to avoid.
“So . . . ,” she said. “This is about a friend. I’m worried that . . . actually, I don’t know what I’m worried about. There’s this d-mat meme going around. Have you heard of Improvement?”
He shook his head. “I’m not really the target audience.”
“Yeah, right. Anyway, my friend d-matted ninety times yesterday and she’s convinced Improvement worked—changed her—although it can’t possibly have, and I’m worried about her because she’s behaving a little oddly.”
“Oddly how?”
Clair shrugged, remembering the fleeting conversation that morning. “Mood swings, headache . . . I know it doesn’t sound like much, but I can tell it’s not normal.”
“What’s Improvement supposed to do?”
“It’s like a chain letter. You receive a message. It tells you that you can be prettier, smarter, taller, whatever. You write a code on a piece of paper and list all the things you’d like to have changed. You take the note with you through d-mat, under your clothes, and supposedly it happens. Do it enough times, the meme says, and you’ll be . . . Improved.”
“Just like that?” he said.
She shared his skepticism. The idea was absurd, a fairy tale, just as Ronnie kept telling her. “I didn’t say it was real. Just that this is why she did it.”
“What’s the code?”
She called up the original message and sent it to him.
Charlie X-ray Romeo Foxtrot
Whiskey Uniform Hotel Bravo
Oscar Echo
Tango Kilo
Alfa Papa Juliet Zulu
“Does it mean anything?” she asked.
“If I had to guess I’d say it’s supposed to act as a kind of signal to the system, alerting it to the presence of someone who wants to be Improved. The system reads the note, takes on board what the bearer wants, and manipulates their pattern to make it happen.”
“I thought that was impossible.”
“If you believe VIA. But maybe if you fiddled the books bit by bit . . . tiny alterations that supposedly don’t affect the hash sum of the entire transmission . . . maybe that’s how you’d get away with it.”
Clair nodded warily, even though she didn’t know what a hash sum was. She was surprised he was taking it so seriously. “So it could actually work?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, t
he note isn’t a thing once it enters the Air. It’s just data, a string of ones and zeros like everything else. Sure, some patterns are scanned for explosives or specific DNA—but no one’s looking for letters on a piece of paper. That’d be like trying to use a microscope to take a picture of the galaxy.”
“So it wouldn’t work?”
“Then there’s the whole idea of Improvement itself. How does the system know what to change in order to make people the way they’ve asked to become? It’s not a plastic surgeon or a genetic engineer. It’s just a means of moving data around. It’s not designed for anything else.”
“So it’s a scam after all.”
“Can you imagine how illegal it would be if it wasn’t? I mean, you’d have to get past both of VIA’s AIs every time someone used it—and there’s no program or anything to go with the note, so it’d have to be done manually. If you were caught, you’d be locked up for the rest of your life.”
“Jesse, just tell me: Will it work or not?”
He shrugged. “Beats me. I’m not as good with this stuff as Dad is. He’s the expert.”
They walked in silence for a minute, Clair fighting a sense of disappointment and frustration. All she wanted was to know for certain, either way.
“It was Libby, wasn’t it?” Jesse said out of nowhere. “Liberty Zeist?”
“What, you stalk her, too?” Clair said a little more sharply than she intended.
“No. I just guessed. She wasn’t at school today.” He shrugged, making his satchel bounce against his shoulder. “Besides, the only people who would consider using Improvement are those who are already beautiful but don’t appreciate it. Chasing the impossible dream, you know? Libby’s one of those.”
Clair couldn’t tell if he was insulting Libby or just trying to be weird now.
“Don’t tell me you’re not tempted,” she said.
“Me? Hardly. Have you forgotten what I am?”
“An Abstainer, yeah . . . so what were you doing at the station this morning?”
He glanced at her sideways.
“Being hassled by the PKs. For no reason. You really didn’t see me?”
She remembered a disturbance and seeing a peacekeeper’s helmet above the crowd.
“That was you?”
“A return performance in Civil Harassment 101. The starring role, in fact. It was written for me.”
“You must have been doing something.”
“Don’t you start,” he said, brushing his hair off his face and staring at her with a resentful expression. “You think I was trying to plant a bomb? For my friends in WHOLE? Because all Stainers are terrorists? That’s right, I keep forgetting. If you’re not with the herd, then you’re against it.”
His hot gaze returned to his sneakers.
“I was just curious,” he said in a cooler tone. “There’s no law against that, is there?”
“So you really have never—”
“No, not ever. I suggested it once, and my dad threatened to kick me out on the street. Said he didn’t want what I’d come back as rattling around the house—because it wouldn’t be me, not in his eyes.”
“What do you mean?”
“He thinks anyone who uses d-mat dies inside. You know, it takes you apart, destroys you, and what it rebuilds is just a good copy, not the real thing. Soulless. Empty. Hollow.”
“For real?”
“Yes. He calls people like you zombies.”
That was a horrible thought—someone thinking she wasn’t real when she knew without question that she absolutely was.
“Do you call us that too?”
“I think the soul question is one thing d-mat has finally put to rest. Thank God.”
A softer glance accompanied this small joke, as though he was embarrassed for his snappy tone a moment ago. Or embarrassed for his father. She couldn’t tell.
The double-circles sign for the station was coming into view through the palms ahead. Her window of opportunity was about to close, and she hadn’t really learned anything.
“You said your dad knows more about ‘this stuff’ than you do.”
He nodded. “He lives to pick holes in it.”
“Maybe I should talk to him.”
“You don’t really want to do that.”
“Why not?”
“He’s . . . difficult.”
“I don’t mind.”
She didn’t know if Jesse had heard anything about the Zep crisis and wasn’t about to explain her fear that Improvement might be making Libby’s emotional state worse.
“All right,” he said, “but don’t tell me I didn’t warn you.”
“Thanks. So . . . will you introduce me so we can chat?”
“He doesn’t do that. You’ll have to come home with me. That’s where he works. We live just around the corner.”
“Oh,” she said, realizing only then what she’d gotten herself into. “Of course. You’d have to.” How else would he get to school—fly?
Jesse picked up his pace. They passed the station and turned left up Main Street, into unknown territory.
[9]
* * *
JESSE LIVED IN a terrace apartment on a broad and overgrown thoroughfare with well-worn sidewalks and bike paths shaded by eucalyptus branches and clumps of sighing bamboo. Unlike many of the developments around Sacramento Bay, it looked lived-in. Someone had planted daisies that bobbed and winked in the pale November sun. There were dog turds on the path. Clair could hear kids calling a couple of houses along.
“Have you been here long?” Clair asked Jesse, thinking of her sterile apartment block and the empty sidewalks below.
“I’ve lived here all my life.”
“Really?”
“Kinda hard to move around if you don’t use d-mat.”
“Yeah, I guess.” Clair had moved more times than she could count. Each time her family had relocated, they had recycled almost everything they owned and fabbed replacements at the other end. Friends were equally easy to visit from anywhere.
“Abstainers tend to stick together,” he said, turning an old-fashioned key in the lock and kicking the stiff door open with the side of one foot. “It’s us against the world, 24-7.”
His satchel dropped with a thud in the hallway as he waved her ahead of him into a house like no other she had seen before.
The ground floor was one unbroken space, with living area and kitchen overlapping in a series of worn couches, scratched tables, and scuffed counter surfaces. Two ceiling fans swirled lazily overhead, circulating the warm air. Clair took it in, feeling as though her eyes were bugging out of her head. There was a stove, a fridge, and a trash can. There were framed sketches that showed signs of fading next to real bookcases holding antique photos and dusty trinkets. The rugs beneath her feet were tatty around the edges. Through the wall-to-wall windows at the far end of the space, she saw vegetable gardens neatly arranged in rows and a big green shed.
“That’s where Dad works,” said Jesse, indicating the shed. “I’ll take you out there in a sec. Let me just get this going first.”
The surprises kept on coming. Clair watched in amazement as Jesse chopped leaves of some kind, grated a carrot, sliced an onion and three large, dark mushrooms, and mixed it all into a bowl with five broken eggs and some grated cheese. Actual ingredients, not something built in a fabber. She dreaded to think how much they cost. For most people, physical goods were free, like access to the Air, but for Abstainers like Jesse and his father, that wouldn’t be the case. Time cost money, and vegetables took time to grow. Weeks, even.
Jesse added green herbs and ground pepper, then poured the mixture out into a low transparent dish. He opened the oven, releasing a blast of dry heat, and slid the dish inside.
“What?” he said. “Never seen anyone cook before?”
She shook her head. “Only in old movies or for fun.”
“It’s not hard,” he said. “That’ll be ready in forty-five minutes or so. You’re welcome to sta
y for dinner, if you like.”
She shook her head again, but there was no denying her curiosity. “You don’t eat meat?”
“No, and you’ve probably never met any vegetarians before either. Not now that eating meat is a victimless crime, right?”
He grinned at her discomfort, and she sensed that he was enjoying her awkwardness.
“Well, my mother won’t eat chicken,” she said. “There was a corrupt pattern once, or perhaps a copy of meat that had gone off. Either way, I got really sick, and she’s never recovered from it. Telling her I’ve eaten some is a sure way to make her freak.”
“Same with Dad, but with a whole lot more than chicken.”
“Has he always been a Stainer?” Clair asked him.
“Body and soul. Look.” He pointed at one corner of the living room, where hung a photo of a jowly, gray-haired man standing proudly against a white marble background. “Good old George has been watching over me as long as I can remember.”
Clair didn’t know much about the founder of the Abstainer movement. George Staines’ unassuming features hadn’t earned him a following during his lifetime. That had been the product of his political writings, his philosophies, and his death from a rare form of cancer caused, some claimed, by the technology he despised.
“We have meetings here once a week,” Jesse was saying as he chopped more vegetables into a salad. “I tend to stay upstairs in my room for those. After the hundredth time, ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’ stops being ironic.”
She laughed, but he didn’t, and then she felt embarrassed. Maybe he hadn’t meant it as a joke.
She looked around for something else to talk about. The only thing remotely normal was a Psychotic Ultramine poster in the stairwell, cycling through recent images of the band.
“You live here alone with your dad?”
“Yes.”
“What happened to your mom?”
“She died,” he said. “When I was very young, so I barely remember her now. When I picture her, it’s from photos and old video files.”
There were no safe topics of conversation.
“There.” Jesse finished laying out two settings on the dining table. Blue Willow patterned plates came from a cupboard, utensils from a drawer, chipped and scuffed by long use. He wiped his hands on his jeans and brushed his bangs back from his eyes. They immediately fell back down again.
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