Crashland

by Sean Williams

  She opened the chat and peered into a new window that opened in her infield.

  There was Libby, seen through someone’s lenses, looking exactly as Clair remembered, skinny and vibrant in sweatpants and halter, birthmark and all, standing on a bed and singing something—a jitter-punk song that had been big a few months back, “Pinch Me” by the Ponies. Seeing Libby again was like a physical shock to her entire system: not jealous Libby or Libby the dupe, but Libby, her best friend, who was generous with rice broth when needed, constantly late, and compulsively fashionable, and whose favorite aromatic oil was vanilla. Clair could smell that perfume now, as though Libby were in the room with her. It made the muscles around her eyes tighten as though she might cry. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out of it.

  Libby was dancing with great enthusiasm to her own singing, mocking the lead Pony’s distinctive hip roll, while in the background someone laughed hugely and without restraint. Clair knew that laugh. It was Zep. When he came into view to sing the chorus, Clair’s pulse knocked hard in her throat. His voice was terrible, which only made it funnier, and sadder, and more heartbreaking.

  A second laugh joined in. It was Clair’s own.

  And suddenly she remembered this moment, from before everything had gone wrong. It had been after school a month ago, while they were supposed to be studying. The room was Libby’s bedroom, and the recording had been taken from Clair’s augs. She didn’t remember saving it, but she must have. She didn’t remember that shirt Zep was wearing either.

  The recording must have been lifted from her profile by the dupe.

  But why send it to Clair now? Why use Libby’s profile to do it?

  Clair considered closing the chat, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away. Those had been happier times in every way, hanging out at each other’s places or jumping all over the world, watching as Zep competed in various contests, crashing Libby’s cliques, strolling through Clair’s favorite art galleries and making fun of the old-fashioned hairstyles. Clair had gotten along well with both Libby and Zep, and the trio had become duos at various times without jealousy or competitiveness, at least until the whole having-a-crush-on-Zep problem had surfaced. The reason it had taken her by surprise was precisely because of how content they had been. It was like a bomb had fallen out of a clear sky and blown her happy world to smithereens.

  She wondered if she was kidding herself. Perhaps even then the cracks had been forming, too slowly and too subtly for her to notice but there nonetheless. People didn’t contemplate cheating with their best friend’s boyfriend if the friendship was healthy.

  Or was that too harsh a way of looking at it? Being attracted to people was normal. Handling it badly, that was the problem.

  Whichever way she looked at it, she felt awful.

  In the recording, Zep and Libby finished their duet with a theatrical ta-da! and collapsed laughing onto the bed. The Clair taking the recording looked away, and caught sight of herself in Libby’s bedroom mirror. She wasn’t smiling. Staring at her reflection, she took one step closer to the mirror, then another.

  Clair couldn’t take her eyes away from this image of herself. There was something off about it. Her hair had been shorter than that back then, she was sure. Her stare was too intense, her isolation from the others too keenly felt. Surely, they would have noticed and said something?

  The giggling stopped when she was so close to the mirror that her image filled the entire window.

  The Clair in the recording turned around. Her friends were standing right behind her.

  “You know what we want,” said Zep.

  “Don’t wait too long,” said Libby.

  The recording flipped to black, and she gaped in shock at the void where her friends had been.

  “Clair? Clair?”

  Someone was calling her. She shook her head and the drone interface came back into focus. The voice belonged to PK Beck.

  “Yes, what?” There was a tremor in her voice, and no wonder. One of her private memories had just been turned against her, leaving her shaken and upset.

  “I asked you to take control of 462441A and check out that arm. Can you do that?”

  “Yes, yes,” she said, even as she wondered why the dupes had come after her this way. Would they really have gone to the trouble of staging a reenactment? It could have been the original recording, edited.

  But there was Zep’s shirt. Why would they edit that too?

  “Clair, are you all right?

  She forced herself to concentrate. There were dupes in Crystal City, alive and dangerous and looking for her. That trumped dupes somewhere else, messing with her head. Both might be different prongs of the same attack, but she couldn’t deal with everything at once. And she couldn’t curl into a ball, no matter how much she wanted to. She owed it to the real Zep and Libby to keep going.

  “I’m here—462441A, got it.”

  Her drone was flying a close circle over Oswald Park, every sensor pointing straight down, rotating so lasers only blinded half at a time. She brought it out of its holding pattern and into a broad loop that would take it over the stand of bushes. Devin was wrong and Jesse was right. This was much more than a game.

  As the drone passed over the bushes, something moved. The drone dipped to zoom in more closely. The leaves parted, giving Clair a brief glimpse of a face. It was one of the members of WHOLE she had met on the Skylifter, which meant that it was a dupe. Before she could say anything, there was a piercing flash of light and heat. The drone twisted away too late. It died with a sharp, cracking sound. Clair felt a secondhand shock as she was wrenched out of its feed and thrust back into her body. She clutched the armrests of her chair for balance.

  “I’d say that was something,” Devin conceded.

  “Okay, we have an active engagement.” PK Beck’s voice took on a sharper edge. Clair saw new tags joining their corner of the network. “One asset down. Location Oswald North-East. Moving new eyes into position.”

  Clair sought another drone and found it already controlled by Jesse. He was bringing it fast between the buildings, sparing no battery life. As the park came into view, she saw two figures detach themselves from the bushes and run across the open grass, heading for the trees. They were hard to see—green textures rippled across active camouflage suits that covered them from head to toe—but infrared made them out clearly. One of them was a child.

  Clair thought of Cashile, the young boy she had met the night Zep died in Manteca. Cashile had been with his mother, Theo, in the camouflaged vehicle that had swept Clair away from the dupes. He had talked to her, distracted her from her loss. Then the dupes had caught both him and Theo, and Clair was sure now that it was Theo’s face she had seen through the leaves a moment ago. Her mouth went dry.

  “We have targets,” said PK Beck without hesitation. “Returning fire.”

  “Wait,” she said. “Shouldn’t we try to talk to them?”

  “Let’s give them an incentive first.”

  Gunfire stitched the earth in a curved line closing in on the running dupes.

  The small one fell.

  Clair flinched. Jesse took the drone upward a split second before she could, instinctively recoiling from the violence. As they gained altitude, several camouflaged figures broke from cover on the other side of Oswald Park and strafed their drone and the others converging on the scene. One drone went down, spinning wildly and shooting sparks, but Jesse’s escaped unscathed thanks to giddy-making swoops he made as it ascended. The sound of popping guns grew fainter.

  An altitude alarm sounded. They had hit some kind of airspace restriction, a jurisdiction relic, she assumed, since there weren’t any planes anymore. Jesse took the drone in a circle, scoping out the fringes of the park, looking for more dupes and providing valuable intel for the gun emplacements.

  The PKs returned fire. This time Clair saw where it came from: an emplacement on a nearby building. Another dupe went down, then another. She wanted to look away, but she had
to face it if she could. She was part of this. This was what it meant to fight the dupes the PK way.

  The remaining dupes kept firing, now at the PK emplacements. More lasers flashed from a different location in Crystal City. PK Beck called for more reinforcements.

  “How many of them are there, do you think?” asked Jesse over the interface.

  Her chest felt hollow. “I don’t know. Maybe no one knows.”

  “How many do we have to kill before they stop coming for you?”

  Clair took another deep breath. She seemed to be having trouble getting air, as though she were with the drone in rarefied atmosphere, rather than in the barracks.

  “They’ll stop if I give them Q,” she said aloud. “They just sent me a message telling me that.”

  In the real world, Jesse turned in his seat to look at her. His hair, now mostly dry, flopped back in front of his eyes. “Seriously?”

  “How?” asked Forest. “What exactly did they say?”

  She explained the gist of the message.

  “Did you save the video?” asked Sargent.

  “No,” she said. “I was so surprised, and then all this started. . . .”

  Drones and dupes were still duking it out in Oswald Park.

  “So they want Q too,” said Devin. “Not surprising, given Wallace and everything. But it’s interesting that they’re using psychological warfare on top of the terror tactics we’ve already seen. Maybe we’re underestimating them.”

  “Are you going to do as they ask?” asked Sargent, leaning over Clair’s couch like a watchful giant, not smiling now.

  “I can’t,” said Clair. “I have no idea where Q is, and if I did I wouldn’t give her to them. I didn’t last time. Why would I now?”

  “What I don’t understand,” said Jesse, “is why your dupe tried to kill you before. When she blew up, I mean. Why do that if they want you to tell them where Q is?”

  “Maybe they changed their minds,” said Devin. “They’re leaderless, making this up as they go along. Wallace did try to kill Clair before he realized about Q. Maybe some of the dupes didn’t get the new orders and are stuck in their old missions.”

  Clair nodded. That made sense to her, although it wouldn’t make the dupes any easier to stop if there were now two batches of them. What if their goals differed on more fronts than just her?

  “Keep that channel open,” said Forest, his expression one of studied severity. “Record anything else that arrives. If you allow us, we will try to trace the source.”

  “Okay.” She was sure that Q could have done it in a flash.

  “One of our techs will send through a permission request.”

  “Meanwhile,” said Devin, “round one goes to Clair’s Bears.”

  Clair only noticed then that the siren had fallen silent. She turned her attention back to the PK interface. The grounds below Jesse’s drone were littered with corpses.

  “We tried to capture one,” said PK Beck. “He took himself out before we could get anywhere near him.”

  Clair’s eyes were drawn to the small body splayed out far below the drone. Her gut knotted. She forced herself to look somewhere else. It didn’t seem as though the PKs had tried very hard to capture a dupe, but she knew firsthand the lengths the dupes would go to rather than be interrogated. Mallory had shot herself in the head, her own dupe had exploded . . .

  She turned the drone’s sensors to the horizon and rotated it in a slow circle, reminding herself of what was good and right in the world. The dupes in Crystal City were gone, so now she could focus on Q. The sky was blue. The beltways where roads had once been were green. Washington’s monuments and memorials, much grander than she had made out to Jesse, had been perfectly preserved from the seas and stood in marble defiance against the elements. The Great Alexandria Barrage—

  If she’d looked an instant later she would’ve missed it. Light flashed on the top of the distant wall, and at first she thought it was another laser. But the drone’s vision was unimpaired. A string of rippling flashes stretched silently from the center of the barrage outward in both directions, throwing up clouds of what looked like smoke into the air. Fireworks? On a day like this? Clair knew that couldn’t be the case, but her mind resisted the alternative.

  With a grace that spoke of scale and distance combined, the barrage burst in the middle and began to peel apart, setting free the ocean’s pent-up deluge. Foamy white water spilled over the crumbling wall, still in perfect silence. The catastrophe was so far away that the sound had yet to reach her.

  “Oh crap,” she said through the interface and aloud at the same time. “I think we’re in trouble.”

  There was silence for a second as the sight sank in. Then a new siren began to wail.

  “We have to get to higher ground,” said Jesse, sitting upright in his couch and pulling back his hood-HUD in one swift movement.

  “No arguments here,” said Devin, practically leaping to his feet. His expression was shocked.

  Monuments, thought Clair. Kids on excursions. The hairs stood up on the back of her arms.

  When the sound hit, it was a deep-throated thunder that didn’t end.

  “I’m checking the Net One cages,” said Sargent. “It’s going to be close.”

  “How close?” asked Clair, itching to flee from what was bearing down on them. Every cell in her body was screaming at her to run.

  “We will need to move quickly,” said Forest, his lenses dancing with data. An understatement, Clair assumed, since he wasn’t actually answering the question.

  One by one, they hurried ahead of him out of the telepresence room.

  “Five minutes before the water hits,” Devin finally said, jogging alongside Clair, “depending on the lay of the land. The top of the building might be safer in the short term.”

  “We’ll be sitting ducks up there,” said Clair.

  “That could be why the dupes did this, to flush us out,” said Sargent, urging them rapidly through the corridors. Her stride was so long it was hard to keep up. Jesse, who was almost as tall, took Clair’s hand and hurried her along. Devin fell behind.

  Clair said, “I saw explosions just before the barrage collapsed, right after their attack failed. It was like they were waiting for me to look.”

  “You think this could be specifically directed at you?” Sargent said.

  “I guess,” she said, hoping that somewhere nearby evacuation plans were being put into rapid effect, not just for them but for everyone else in the flood’s path.

  “How does anyone know we’re here at all?” asked Jesse. “That’s the thing that gets me.”

  “The shadow road obviously isn’t as secure as you thought.” Devin glanced at Forest as though for a reaction, then added, “Or you’ve got a leak. A spy.”

  “He won’t give anything away.” Clair bumped him, making several typos as she ran and not bothering to correct them. “His face doesn’t work.”

  “His fate . . . ? Oh, face, right. Damn. I wondered why I wasn’t getting anything off him. Do you think Sarge could run any faster?”

  Devin wasn’t much taller than Clair, and he didn’t have the benefit of someone to pull him along. The only person slower than him was Forest himself, who ran like a man long used to d-mat.

  They rounded a corner and arrived at the cage they had taken to the barracks. There a tech was abandoning her work on the peeled-back silver floor.

  “No good,” she said, downing tools and looking worriedly at the arrivals. “One and Three are still cycling. They’ll be at least six minutes.”

  “The water will be here in four,” said Devin.

  “We’re going to have to find another way out,” said Clair.

  “Thank you, Captain Obvious, but there isn’t one.”

  “I say we go up top anyway,” said Jesse. “Maybe we can hold them off long enough for rescue to arrive.”

  “What kind of rescue are you expecting, exactly?” asked Devin with naked scorn. “Emergency servi
ces normally use d-mat. The big rigs they use to get people off buildings come in pieces or through industrial booths. Unless there’s something nearby, we’re stuck indefinitely.”

  “You’re the one who suggested going up to the roof,” snapped Jesse.

  “Yes, but that idea was shot down, as surely as we would be.”

  “Well, I’d rather be shot than drowned.”

  “Take it easy, you two,” said Sargent. That did the opposite of calming anyone.

  “There must be another way,” said the tech, kicking helplessly at the ruined floor.

  “It seems insane,” said Clair in frustration, “to be stuck in a building full of d-mat booths and we can’t go anywhere.”

  Devin snapped his fingers.

  “That’s it,” he said. His lenses flashed. “Yes, being an observer sucks if it means you die. Three minutes left. We might just make it. Best to be on the safe side and start heading upward. Now. Quickly, quickly. Up we go.”

  He ushered them back along the hallway, to the nearest stairwell, where they began a hurried ascent.

  “The roof after all?” said Jesse.

  “No, but don’t ask me to explain. I don’t want to get your hopes up. Besides, you won’t like it.” Devin hauled himself around another flight of steps. “Is there any particular reason you people don’t use elevators?” He wheezed.

  “Most people d-mat in and out,” said Forest, red-faced. “Official policy is we need the exercise.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Devin panted. “The same as everyone else.”

  [11]

  * * *

  CLAIR GLANCED AT the drone interface as she ran. Water was foaming along the path of the Potomac, bursting its banks and spreading through the suburbs of Washington with frightening speed, demolishing everything in its path. Already it was halfway to the barracks. She didn’t want to think about the possibility that once again she had brought death to people simply by existing.