“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—”
“Wait, what did you call him?”
“Quiddity. That’s his name.”
“Does the other one have a name, too?”
“She’s called Qualia.”
“How do you know this?”
“I don’t know. I just do. . . .”
Those names weren’t public knowledge. Clair had never heard them before. Turner had said that wranglers had named the AIs after philosophical concepts, but he hadn’t mentioned the names themselves.
But Q knew. Why Q?
A shiver went down Clair’s spine.
Qualia and Quiddity maintained the safe operation of d-mat on VIA’s behalf. That was what Q said. The AIs were completely reliable—not even Turner had been able to hack into them. But both Improvement and duping were inside jobs, so somehow how Ant Wallace had gotten around them.
Instead of breaking the rules, or bending them as Q had, what if Wallace had simply found a way to stop the AIs from noticing what was going on? What if he had created partitions in their minds that maintained the secrets the rest of them could never know? A bit of Qualia here, a bit of Quiddity there. If the AIs weren’t designed to monitor their own behaviors, then they could be programmed to Improve, dupe, even kill.
Clair thought of the d-mat symbol, of two circles overlapping. It normally represented two worlds united by the miracle of matter transmission. Clair wondered now if it might mean something completely different to Q.
Suppose each circle was one of the AIs, with the dark fragments in the overlap. Subversive, unfettered by the usual laws governing artificial intelligences, un-wrangled . . .
What if they had slowly added up to something much larger than their individual parts? What if Qualia and Quiddity had accidentally created a child? A child who didn’t know who she was and was nothing like the stunted, mechanical minds that had spawned her? A child whose first attempt at communication might have been to say its creators’ names?
qqqqq . . . qqqqq
The shiver became a cold certainty planted deep in her gut.
Clair remembered Q’s first words to her—ominous, misquoted, but interested. Fascinated with Clair and Mallory’s other victims. That fascination had been expressed through snippets of knowledge pulled from the Air. Snippets were all she had been then. Threads of meaning, caught in a tangle. Not yet conscious. Just reactive. Learning. A child in every sense of the word, trying to find her way through the world. Growing slowly and pursuing her evolving needs.
It was all there in their conversation.
We are exchanging information and learning from each other. Is that not stimulating for you?
I want to be your friend. Like Libby.
And Clair had unknowingly responded.
Buddy. Pal. Friend.
Like data at the receiving end of a d-mat jump, everything was falling perfectly into place. The dark fragments in the AIs had constraints, and those constraints remained part of Q. She couldn’t know how the pieces of her were used, but she could use them herself when she needed to. Like someone stealing a wrench and putting it back in a toolbox exactly where it had been before so no one would ever know, Wallace had caught her up in a weird kind of amnesia.
I didn’t know I could do it until I tried.
That was also why Q was drawn to the victims of d-mat: they were the victims of the fragments without her conscious knowledge. But the victims were her saviors, too. Her engagement with Clair had drawn her out of unconsciousness and into an existence of her own. Like any child, she trod in the footsteps of her . . . what, parents? . . . while slowly looking for her own path.
I have been following Improvement, Clair. That’s what I do.
That was why Q wasn’t as good as the dupes at staying in another person’s body. It wasn’t for lack of practice. It was for not being a person to start with. She had never had a body bef
ore. She had never felt pain. She had never really existed.
[77]
* * *
“WHAT ARE YOU thinking, Clair? We have just three minutes left.”
Clair snapped out of her thousand-yard stare.
“I’ve worked out who you are,” Clair said. “And I think Ant Wallace guessed too. That’s why he’s so interested in you. Q, you’re not one of the Improved at all. You’re the most amazing person on the planet!”
“What do you mean? There’s nothing amazing about me.”
“That’s where you’re absolutely wrong.”
As quickly as she could, Clair outlined everything she had just come to understand. Q was an accident, but that only made it even more incredible that she existed. She was someone rather than something, with needs and desires just like anyone else.
“So I’m . . . not real?”
“You are real, Q. You’re as real as I am. And that means you’re right: we can’t break parity. Doing it might mean killing Quiddity.”
“So what? He’s just an ordinary AI.”
“He’s the closest thing you have to a father.”
“He’s nothing to me, Clair. Not like you. You’re my friend. If I am what you say I am, then the only things stopping me from saving you are rules—and they’re not even my rules: they’re VIA’s rules.”
“But the rules are there for a reason, Q. If you break parity, you break d-mat, and if you break d-mat . . .”
Clair stopped, imagining a world without d-mat. No food, no water, no medicines, no waste disposal, no tools. Families would be scattered all across the planet with no means of finding each other again. Some homes didn’t even have doors anymore, so anyone inside would be trapped until the system rebooted. If it did reboot. Who knew if that would be possible or not with one of the two AIs broken?
That it also meant no dupes, no Improvement, and no Ant Wallace pulling the strings seemed a small consolation.
There had to be another way.
A plan came to her then, a plan so terrible she almost dismissed it out of hand. She couldn’t possibly do something so awful. It wasn’t in her. It wasn’t like her.
But . . . You’ve changed.
Clair put her face in her hands, knowing that she could do it if she had to.
And it looked very much as though she did.
“I want you to surrender.”
“What?”
“You have to, Q. We can’t destroy the world for my sake or for Turner’s. I’m not like WHOLE. I believe that d-mat does more good than bad—and maybe even Wallace can be turned around, with you there to argue with him.” Clair tried to find the right words, even though her heart wasn’t in them. “You know that duping people is wrong. You know Improvement has to be stopped. Wallace thinks he’s getting some superhuman slave, but he’s wrong. He’s getting a conscience.”
“Clair, I—”
“Don’t argue, Q. It has to be this way. Go to him now and tell him he’s won.”
“If that’s what you want—”
“It is.”
“I’ll make him get rid of the dupe,” Q said. Her voice was hollow. “As soon as I can, so you can go back home. I won’t let him hurt you.”
“I know you will, Q. You’re a good friend.”
There was a very long pause.
“I am?”
“Always and forever.”
“Do you promise?”
Don’t think of it as betraying her. . . .
“I promise.”
[78]
* * *
Q WENT. CLAIR sensed her going and could see the conversation starting with Wallace elsewhere in the station.
She stood up. Her plan required that she remain connected to the station’s operating system, and she didn’t know how long she had until Wallace revoked that access. But she didn’t need long. All she had to do was call up a particular file and start the process rolling.
sssssss-pop
“That was . . . unexpected.”
The voice came from behind her. She turned and was relieved to see only Turner. Her instructions hadn’t been interfered with by Wallace or anyone else. Turner’s pattern had been plucked safely from the cache and brought to her intact. He looked puzzled, and with good reason. No time at all would have passed for him since his kidnap from the One Penn Plaza building. Unfortunately, there was very little time now to explain what had to happen next.
“Your backpack,” she said, hurrying to him. “Give it to me.”
He did as he was told. Someone was pounding at the door, and Q was sending Clair urgent messages.
She stamped the transmitter underfoot, silencing one of the distractions.
“Ray had grenades,” she said, rummaging through the pack. “Tell me you’ve got some left . . . please.”
“Several.” He showed her. There were four of them, apple-sized black spheres with handgrips and a menacing air. “What’s going on, Clair?”
There wasn’t time to explain fully.
“You wanted to take some direct action, didn’t you?” she said. “Well, here’s your chance.”
He paused for a second, meeting and holding her gaze.
Everything he needed to know was in there.
This was for Libby, she told herself, and Q and Turner and the entire world. It was sacrifice, not suicide, but if a little bit of Mallory was in her, making her do it, then that made the justice all the more poetic. With one gesture, she would rid the world of everything she had been fighting.
Turner grinned.
“We made a terrorist of you in the end, huh?”
She didn’t smile.
ssss—
That wasn’t her activating the booth. Someone had noticed and was trying to stop them. They had only seconds left before the process was complete and they were taken elsewhere, put on ice, or erased.
Clair and Turner faced each other, a grenade in each hand.
“On three,” she said. “One. Two . . .”
[78 redux]
* * *
SSSSSSS-POP
Clair cried out at the sudden pain in her sinuses. Tears flooded her eyes, and for a moment she saw little more than a blur. She reached out to steady herself and felt glass walls on either side of her. Windows? No, mirrors. She obviously wasn’t in the office anymore. She had d-matted from a large space into a very small one, hence the pain in her ears. The small space was nothing more than an ordinary booth.
But where was Turner? The last thing she remembered was telling Q, “I promise,” and then calling up Turner’s pattern so they could destroy Wallace’s space station together. He was supposed to be there now, fresh out of the cache. Why wasn’t he, and why wasn’t she on the station anymore? What was going on?
The doors opened, and the air was suddenly full of clamoring alarms and smoke.
She blinked furiously. Slowly her eyes cleared. She stepped out into a scene of utter devastation.
Penn Plaza was covered in smoking rubble. Huge holes gaped in the side of VIA HQ, from which gouts of black smoke belched. Rescue and Repair vehicles swarmed everywhere, on land and by air. Several neighboring buildings were burning also. Everywhere Clair stared, she saw broken glass.
It looked like a war zone.
A small amount of mess, Q had said. No wonder Wallace had been frightened of her.
“Q?” Her infield was empty, even though she appeared to be connected to the Air. That was weird. After the events of the previous hours, she would have expected it to be overflowing. “Q, can you hear me?”
No answer.
Peacekeepers were everywhere, clearing rubble and helping put out fires. One of them looked up, saw her, and hurried over.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said. “The plaza is off-limits.”
“I, uh, just arrived,” she said, indicating the booth she had emerged from, one of eight in a line.
“You couldn’t have come in this way. We’ve isolated the subgrid.”
There w
as a rattle of footsteps from across the plaza as more peacekeepers ran to join them. They had their weapons drawn. She felt a stab of alarm at the thought that they might blame her for the attack on VIA HQ. She had brought WHOLE and Q here, after all. The PKs would know exactly who she was.
But then she saw Jesse among them, grinning excitedly, and all her worries were temporarily suspended.
She ran to meet him in the middle of the plaza, and they hugged until the pain in her injured elbow forced her to let go.
Jesse babbled an explanation.
“They said there was a parity violation, and I knew it was you. It had to be you. Your dupe is in custody, although she hasn’t admitted anything, not even when the satellite blew up. We were in space—do you know that? I already told the PKs about Wallace, and they actually seemed to believe me—I guess there’s too much evidence for them to ignore now—and I told them about Dad, too. He wasn’t a dupe, right? We can get him back, as real as he was before. As real as I am now, thanks to d-mat. All we have to do is figure out how.”
Clair nodded, wishing he’d slow down.
Her dupe: that was why Clair couldn’t access her messages. The Air wasn’t designed to recognize the same person twice. That meant she was still cut off from her friends, her family, her entire world. The other Clair had stolen her life!
Then there was Jesse’s dad. He wasn’t the only one Clair hadn’t been able to find: Libby was missing also. And Zep. If their patterns were in one of Wallace’s secret caches, then it all depended on what had happened to . . .
The station!
“It . . . blew up?”
“An orbital asset was lost fifteen minutes ago,” said one of the peacekeepers. Narrow shoulders set on an angle: PK Drader, she remembered, although her lenses remained dismayingly empty. “What do you know about that?”
“I know. . . .” Clair shook her head, feeling a deep sense of dislocation. “No, I don’t know. I shouldn’t be here. That’s all. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. Where’s Q? What did she do?”
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