Turner pressed a button, and the door slid shut behind them with a metallic boom.
Lights came on inside, and presumably some kind of air circulation system too. Clair felt a puff of wind against her cheek.
The train accelerated, turning steadily to the right. Clair found it hard to stand, even with Jesse as a crutch.
“I suggest we all get some sleep,” said Turner, flipping open his backpack and pulling out his bedroll. No one had rested since the dupes had woken them all up in the middle of the night. “We’ve got hours to kill until we get there.”
There was a pair of chemical toilets at the far end of the car. Clair used one, then found an empty spot on the back of the four-wheeler and tried to rest. The rocking of the car beneath her was less soothing than she had imagined it would be. Jesse lay down next to her, bundled up tightly in a sleeping bag so little more than his nose was visible. She wanted to ask how he was doing but didn’t want to disturb him. Maybe she was the only one finding it hard to settle.
Libby’s body was just yards away, wrapped tightly in plastic. Or was it Mallory’s body, since that was the name of the last person to inhabit it? A rose by any name, she thought. A mind in any body . . .
She did drop off eventually and woke with her breath stopped in her throat as though someone were choking her. The interior of the car was lit only by power LEDs and static displays, a meaningless constellation of yellows, reds, greens, and blues. Jesse had moved closer in his sleep, but his face was as hidden as ever. Clair sat up and pushed herself away from him. Her head was pounding. She felt trapped. She wanted to leap out of the car and onto solid earth. She wasn’t used to things moving, shifting, turning the way they did in the world Jesse and the others inhabited.
Now you’re free, Gemma had said. Free to be herself, but she didn’t feel free. She wanted everything to be still, just for a moment, so the person she had been could catch up to her, if it wasn’t already too late for that.
“God, I hope it’s not,” she breathed.
“Deceitful as it is,” said a soft voice out of the dark, “hope at least leads us to the end of our lives by an agreeable route.”
She looked around. Two dark eyes were staring at her out of the gloom. They belonged to Turner.
“Is that a quote?”
“More or less. Someone French, I think.”
He unfurled himself from his sleeping bag and came to sit nearer her.
“You can’t sleep either,” he said.
“It’s not that. I mean, I was asleep, but . . .” She hesitated, not entirely sure which particular anxiety was dominating her thoughts at that moment. “I’m afraid I might’ve talked you all into something really stupid.”
“This plan of yours?” He smiled. “If I worried about every stupid thing I’ve done, I’d never sleep again.”
His unlined, youthful face gave him away. “You’re not the worrying kind,” she said. “I can tell that just by looking at you.”
“Appearances . . .” He stopped as Ray snuffled and rolled over, then continued in a softer tone, “. . . are deceitful, like hope.”
“Apparently. Everyone tells me you’re eighty years old.”
“That’s not true,” he said.
“Obviously.”
“I’m eighty-three next month.”
She stared at him with aching migraine eyes. “Fine. Whatever.”
“I’m not lying,” he said. “People come to WHOLE for a variety of reasons. They are harmed, or someone they love is harmed. Some people just know: they look at the people around them and the situation in the world at large, and they know that there’s something very rotten in the state of d-mat.”
He sighed. “I’m not like them. D-mat never harmed anyone I love, my family, anyone I ever cared about, yet I have lost them all forever. They might as well be dead, because I am dead to all of them now. I faked my death to spare them what happened to me.”
“What was it?” she asked. “Some kind of disease?”
“Quite the opposite. I am as healthy as a thirty-year-old man and have been for many decades. D-mat twisted my body and made it into a disguise. Everything about me is wrong. My very existence is a lie and a curse—a curse that many, unfortunately, would kill to possess.”
“D-mat gave you eternal youth?”
“D-mat mutated me. It’s frozen me, set me apart from the world. When my condition started to show, I had no choice but to abandon my life. I can never go back, or people will ask questions. I can’t move on, can’t ever be normal. God help me if I tried to have children. What horrors might they inherit from me? What mutations might I visit upon them in turn? That is the vilest thing of all.”
“Haven’t you had your genome sequenced, diagnosed—?”
“No.” He shook his head in absolute denial. “Once it’s out there, once someone learns what I am, the secret could not be contained, and then we’d be back where we were fifty years ago, overpopulated, poisoning the planet with our filth. Really, I should wear gloves and shave my head, or lock myself in a bubble, or kill myself to stop my genes from escaping—but I am human to that extent at least. I want to be part of the world and make a change for the better, while I can.”
A horrid thought struck her. “Jamila had a crush on you, and she was, what, twenty-five?”
He inclined his head. “Grossly inappropriate, but very flattering for a guy who remembers the birth of the Air. I didn’t do anything about it, I swear.”
[60]
* * *
THE CAR KNOCKED from side to side with the irregularities in the tracks. Clair struggled to accept that a man who looked barely older than her had actually lived longer than her grandfather.
“You’re ancient enough to remember the Water Wars,” she said.
“Vividly. I was conscripted to fight in Brazil. Terrible times. We had rationing back then, and martial law. We were right on the brink of disaster. Difficult to imagine now, isn’t it? There were death camps in Brazil, Bangladesh, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Senegal, and Cambodia. . . . The United States was lucky on the whole. We lost only Florida, and no one complained about that.”
It was an old joke, long stripped of humor, and for the first time she accepted that he might be even older than the joke was.
“D-mat saved the world,” she said. “Why do you hate it so much?”
“I didn’t always,” he told her. “Before the wars I worked for the consortium that brought it into being. Not working on the technology itself but on the control software. I was an AI engineer, commercially and with the joint forces. We called ourselves ‘wranglers,’ as with cattle. AIs were strange new things with their own rules, their own surprising twists and turns. It took a certain kind of person to tame them. The concern was that they would break out and take over the world. That was before we had a better idea of what intelligence was. We imagined these huge, planet-sized minds gobbling up every piece of knowledge we had and thinking thoughts that would destroy us all. Now we know that we can train either big minds that are dumb across the board or small minds that are supersmart at only one or two things. What we were afraid of just can’t exist in the Air. That’s why robots never really got off the ground. The AIs we have today are vigilant, tireless, and thorough, but they’re great at missing the obvious. They’re not alive. Consciousness is complexity, Clair, and the only way we’ve found to make that is the old-fashioned way.” He smiled. “We’re all too good at breeding small, dumb minds. Nowhere near smart enough to build our own successors.”
“Were you good at it?” she asked. “Taming AIs, I mean?”
“Not really. That’s how I ended up wrangling people instead. I do remember the AIs we built for VIA, though. They were the big, dumb kind: patient, plodding, tireless, no initiative at all.”
“Could you hack into them?”
“No. And I’ve tried, believe me.” He stared into space for a second. “We named them for philosophical concepts concerning the nature of things. Different concepts
because they handle different roles in the d-mat process. One AI is all about numbers and atoms—the essential math that leads to a thing being what it is. The other is about the subjective quality of the final object: whether it’s still the same or not, even though every physical piece comprising it has changed at the most basic level. WHOLE champions the second problem, while VIA thinks only of the first. It’s amazing the system hasn’t cracked completely open with those two very different minds at its heart.”
“What would happen to the bus,” she said, “if the conductor and the driver had an argument?”
“Chaos, of course.” He glanced at her with eyebrows raised. “You could describe the AIs that way. Who gave you that analogy?”
“Q. She was telling me how she and the dupes do what they do without the AIs in VIA noticing.”
“She’s more or less right about their roles, if a little simplistic.”
“I don’t think she’s old enough to know much about philosophy.”
“That’s probably true of you, too, Clair. But don’t worry. When you’re an old coot like me, you’ll have plenty of time to catch up. Philosophy is all I seem to think about these days.”
I hope I look half as good as you do while I’m doing it, she thought.
“I read somewhere once,” she said, “that every time we think of a memory, we erase it from our mind and rewrite it again. Like every time we use d-mat.”
“You’re going to say and we still know who we are.”
She nodded.
“Can you tell me what happened at your tenth birthday party, Clair? How it felt the second time you kissed someone? What you had for breakfast ten days ago?”
She shook her head, even though she remembered vividly, would always remember, the second time she had kissed Zep. Her ordinary life before then felt infinitely distant.
“Now, imagine that those missing memories are actually pieces of your brain or your heart or your eyes. Is thinking that you know who you are still reassuring?”
“But we lose bits of ourselves every day anyway. Skin, eyelashes, fingernails—and no one cares. Aren’t all the cells in our body replaced every seven years?”
“Tissue we shed that way is dead tissue. If we chopped working cells from your muscles or brain, don’t you think you’d notice?”
“What about that line they always quote about the toenail—the total amount of human lost every decade?”
“What about Jesse’s mother? She disappeared, and she’s bigger than a toenail.”
“Yes, but—”
“It’s all about what you measure. Define human. Define missing. Hell, define toenail. Lies, damned lies, and statistics—the devil’s always in the details. D-mat started as nothing more than a new way of moving matter around, and look what happened. It saved the world, Clair, but might yet destroy us all. No one saw that coming, even those of us who were there at the beginning.”
She didn’t know how to respond to that, except by concentrating on something much smaller than the entire world’s problems.
“I’d like to check up on Q,” she said. “Do you know how to open the door?”
He nodded. “I’ll show you.”
They got up and tiptoed through the car so they didn’t wake the others. Turner showed her the code, and the door opened a crack, letting in light and cool, whipping wind. There were grumbled complaints. Clair ignored them.
“All quiet up there, Q?” she asked.
“Nothing to report. It’s all pretty dull, actually.”
“That’s what I want to hear.”
Her infield was full again—overflowing. Ronnie and Tash had been busy emailing school friends and striking up conversations about what Clair was doing. Ronnie called it “stimulating debate,” but Tash preferred “starting arguments”; Clair didn’t care as long as her name was used each time, helping her overall presence in the Air pop a little bit more. Some of her classmates had decided that she was playing hooky and off on an adventure in order to avoid an exam later that month. She was satisfied with that, too. It all added up.
Her mother and Oz, meanwhile, were nagging relatives and work colleagues to ask if they knew about Improvement. Had anyone heard of it? Did anyone have kids who had tried it? Both her parents were cautious in keeping the questions open rather than closed, which reflected their own ambivalence, Clair assumed. She was sure they would rather she gave up and came home, but given that she clearly wasn’t about to, their only option was to understand her concerns more clearly. And if there was something to it, then they would be informed.
Clair sent out the same formal reply to people she didn’t know and posted updates to the Air in various media.
There was one message from VIA, which she hadn’t expected. Her plan had been in operation for only a few hours, and already someone had noticed! All the message consisted of, however, was an impersonal set of instructions on how to formally register a complaint.
Clair refused to be bothered by the apparent rejection. She posted the message to the Air and created a new caption to accompany it: a video of a melting ice cream, played normally first, then reversed so the scoop appeared to be pouring back into the cone. Then she asked Q to disengage the drone from its magnetic perch and bring it alongside the train, pushing its fans to the limit so it could catch a glimpse of her through the car door. She was a shadow hidden in shadows. That was how she appeared to anyone watching her at that moment. She barely recognized herself.
Clair forced herself into the light and opened the door a fraction wider. As the drone’s cameras watched, she smiled and gave a defiant thumbs-up. According to the stats on her profile one thousand, two hundred thirteen people watched her do it, her parents among them.
Hi, Mom, she thought. Look at me, seeing the world.
There actually wasn’t that much to see, though. Just old farmland to the horizon, left to go to seed.
She shut the door. The train chattered on.
“I’m going back to sleep now,” Turner told her. “Thank you for keeping me company. It has been agreeable, as some old French guy might have put it. I like your energy. It gives me hope to fight alongside someone young like you.”
He went back to his empty bedroll, and she sat on her own for a few minutes longer, staring at her cracked and dirty fingernails. Agreeable wasn’t the word she would have used, and fight bothered her even more.
[61]
* * *
CLAIR OPENED THE door again as they passed through Chicago. Kids ran alongside the train as it rolled by, like something from an old movie. Her heart warmed at the thought of Abstainers all along their path loyally responding to Turner’s call. Then it occurred to her that without d-mat in their lives, there was probably nothing for them to do. To the children waving at her, stuck in the same place day in and day out, Clair’s expedition might have all the cachet of a real, live circus.
After Chicago, Clair lay on her sleeping bag, not sleeping but not entirely awake, either. She was thinking about ways to improve her statistics, to maintain interest before the spotlight moved on. She had no idea how people stayed famous all their lives, particularly the ones who never seemed to actually do anything. At a certain point, she supposed, fame became something bigger than the person possessing it. It could even live on after the person died, like a ghost—or perhaps more like Q did in the Air, still vital in its own way, changing and evolving with the times. Clair never wanted to experience anything like that. Once Improvement and the dupes were dealt with, she wanted to go back to being a nobody again. Except maybe for the odd crashlander party or two.
Clair got up and used the toilet. When she came out, Jesse was leaning into the open hood of the four-wheeler to see what lay inside. He looked long and thin in a uniform designed for stockier men.
“Dad tried to teach me about engines like these,” he said. “I wasn’t interested.”
“I thought you studied exactly this kind of thing at school.”
“Only if I had to. An
ything with wheels bored me out of my skull unless I was riding it and going fast. I wish I’d paid closer attention now.”
She watched him, thinking fondly, Killer with a screwdriver. They hadn’t got on well at first, but she felt that she understood him better now. He had kept her going while they were running from the dupes, and he had backed her plan long before anyone else had. She was sure she wouldn’t have had the guts to go ahead with it if Zep had been there. Zep had been fun to be with, but he wasn’t as pragmatic as Jesse. Jesse, she was sure, would have thrown the rope rather than thrown himself off the observatory.
“Are you okay?”
She blinked, not realizing that she had been staring.
“Fine,” she said, then added, more honestly, “Tired. Nervous.”
“That’s all?”
She frowned. “Why?”
He straightened and glanced at the others.
“Let’s talk,” he said. “In private.”
“Okay. Where?”
“Here.”
He opened the door of the four-wheeler and waved her inside. She slipped across the front seats, and he followed her, shutting the door softly behind them.
Jesse braced himself with one hand on the steering wheel, facing her.
“What’s up?”
“I just want to ask you,” he said, “if you used Improvement.”
She stared at him for a long moment, the lightness that had been in her stomach turning to lead. He was looking right at her, and she was looking right back at him, but weirdly she felt as though she were shrinking into her body, vanishing behind her eyes into a tiny point that peered out at him through layers of dirty glass.
“Clair?”
She snapped back to normal.
“Yes,” she said. “How did you know?”
“I rewatched the video of Dad in Gordon the Gorgon’s office,” he said. “Last night, while I was trying to sleep. She asked if you knew someone who had used Improvement, and you hesitated before saying that yes, you did. There was something in your face—I don’t know what it was, exactly. Like you felt guilty, and not just because of Libby. It came and went so fast, I didn’t notice it before. I can see it now, though, when I watch the video again.”
Twinmaker Page 28