Crashland

by Sean Williams

  “I’m not sure we should settle on that now. Let’s get through this part first, and then discuss the possibilities. As I say, it’s going to be tricky. And, Jesse . . . you’re really going to hate it. It’ll involve dozens of jumps, maybe hundreds. So I think we should split up again.” Clair went to protest, but Devin kept talking right over her. “Jesse, you and Forest can either stay here or go directly to the rendezvous point, taking your chances either way. The rendezvous point is a seastead, one we built and run ourselves, stationed in the Arctic Ocean. You should be safe there, since it’s Clair they’re after, not you. When she comes out of the Maze, we’ll all be together again, I promise, and then the fun will really begin.”

  Clair and Jesse looked at each other. She could tell from his expression that he was torn, and so was she. She was sure he would agree to leave the Antarctic via d-mat—after all, what were the alternatives?—but multiple jumps all over the world . . . she couldn’t ask him to do that.

  “What happens if you get lost in the Maze?” she asked, looking for weaknesses in Devin’s plan.

  “It’s not that kind of scenario,” said Devin. “Not really. Blame lazy nomenclature. It’s more like Whac-A-Mole, but with thousands of holes and only one mole.”

  “Whac-a-what?” asked Clair.

  “An old game,” said Jesse. “Not a very good one.”

  “If Clair goes, I go too,” said Sargent.

  “Yes, I presumed you’d want to,” said Devin. “Does that mean we’re decided?”

  “I want to know more about the seastead,” said Jesse.

  “You will when you get there. Can I just remind everyone that time is of the essence? We’re keeping an eye out for more falling rocks, but they’re small and fast and could be coming from any direction except down. You wouldn’t want to be cycling in a booth when one of them hit you.”

  “All right.” Clair turned to Jesse. “Will you be okay with this?”

  “There’s not much I’m okay with at the moment,” he said, making a face. “But if it really does get the dupes off your back for a while, I’m all for it.”

  Clair likewise didn’t see that she had an alternative. No one else had put any other suggestions on the table. She certainly didn’t have one.

  “All right, I’m in your hands, again,” she told Devin. “When do we begin?”

  “Now, if you’re ready.”

  “Not quite.”

  Acutely conscious of everyone watching, Clair stepped close to Jesse and reached up to kiss him. His right hand wrapped around her and touched the small of her back, sending a shiver up her spine. Another promise. To hell with the dupes, she thought, and RADICAL and everyone else who wouldn’t let her get on with her life.

  They parted. Clair took one last look around and shivered again. A swirl of icy spray was rising up from the crater, white against the cold blue sky. She was glad she wasn’t going out into the actual weather.

  “All done?” asked Devin. “Good. This’ll be soaking up a lot of our bandwidth, so be patient if things go slightly weird along the way. I guarantee it’ll all work out okay in the end . . . for most upbeat definitions of ‘work out,’ ‘okay,’ and ‘end.’”

  “O-kay,” said Jesse. “Thanks heaps for that.”

  mmmmm

  Clair didn’t know what to expect, but she braced herself as the booth hummed around her.

  mMMMm

  The humming peaked for a second, and then Jesse and Forest were gone. They vanished in midbreath as though they had never existed.

  mMMMm

  Now Devin and Sargent were standing in the tank with her. Or Clair was standing with them. There had been no sense of movement to a new location, or at least not of arriving. The booth was still working hard around them, analyzing and building, analyzing and building—

  Destroying and re-creating, she tried not to think. That was the Stainer line: every time someone went through a booth they were killed and a copy of them emerged somewhere else, identical but soulless. Who was to say that copy was really identical? Who was to say that the Clair in this booth wasn’t just a pale shade of a girl who died years earlier, and hadn’t realized it yet?

  She was to say, she told herself. She knew who she was, and no one had the right to tell her otherwise. She’d never entertained any doubts on that score before meeting Jesse and the dupes.

  mMMMm

  Suddenly the view was gone. The tank walls had contracted around the three of them without any sense of motion at all. She, Devin, and Sargent were standing in a smaller version of the Valkyrie Station tank, constructed to the same scale but barely higher than Sargent’s head. Clair felt a mirrored surface directly at her back, and saw nothing but reflections to infinity.

  Nothing, that was, except a single number: 418, painted in red against the reflections. Her lenses said Albuquerque.

  mMMMm

  The number clicked to 588, her lenses to Qarshi.

  They were moving. They were in the Maze.

  [18]

  * * *

  “SO HOW DOES this work, exactly?” asked Clair. Her skin tingled and there was a light feeling in her stomach, as though she was falling. Apart from that, there was no sensation at all.

  mMMMm

  “Promise me you won’t freak out,” Devin said.

  “Uh, no, I can’t promise you anything like that.”

  “All right. Just remember, then: it’s something that happens to you anyway, so you’ve got no reason to be worried.”

  mMMMm

  The number said 274, her lenses Port Lincoln.

  “The first d-mat booths needed days to cycle a single lab rat, which obviously wasn’t practical,” Devin explained. “It took lots of very clever engineers to shave the time down to anything remotely sensible, using a number of very clever shortcuts. One of the algorithms they use is called . . .”

  mMMMm

  “. . . well, what it’s called isn’t important. What it does is get ‘you’ up and running slightly ahead of the physical version of you.”

  “I have no idea what that means,” Clair said.

  “It means you think you’ve arrived before you actually have. Or, to put it another way . . .”

  mMMMm

  “. . . consciousness lags behind sensory input—like hitting a tennis ball, when your arm starts to move before you consciously tell it to. This is normal. The algorithm we’re using right now just takes it further. It models the parts of you that haven’t arrived yet, and puts it all together while the data catches up so everything appears to function normally.”

  Clair found this hard to imagine. “I think I’m alive, but I’m not really.”

  “Not entirely, no. Part of you is simulated. The messiest, most complicated part . . .”

  mMMMm

  “. . . the brain, mainly.”

  That did freak Clair out a little, the thought that she could be present and not present at the same time, like some weird physics experiment. Ronnie had tried to educate her once about a cat that was both alive and dead, and she was getting a similar tense feeling at the back of her neck trying to swallow this thought too.

  “So how does all this relate to the Maze?” asked Sargent.

  mMMMm

  “In here, everything overlaps,” said Devin. “Departure, transmission, arrival . . . all of it. We’re not data ghosts or anything weird like that, but we do spend about half our time being simulated in transit rather than as physical beings. If we’re not physical, how can someone track us?”

  “Or attack us.” Sargent nodded approvingly.

  “Unless they hack us,” said Clair. Their conversation was beginning to sound like a sinister Dr. Seuss book.

  mMMMm

  994 read the number in the mirror. Clair’s lenses told her Surabaya.

  The constant humming and throbbing was making her feel dizzy. Clair couldn’t help but wonder how much of her was real at that moment. Or this moment, she thought, as the humming peaked again.

&n
bsp; mMMMm

  It seemed to her that the reflections were shimmering, particularly the ones farthest away, at the very edges of visibility. Or maybe her eyes were blurry from staring too much. Despite the infinities they revealed, the mirrors seemed very close, almost claustrophobically so. The air inside the miniature tank was dry and smelled of static electricity.

  “How long do we stay in here?” she asked.

  “Until they’re ready at the other end,” said Devin. “Don’t forget, time is passing much faster on the outside.”

  That was something Clair hadn’t considered. Each jump in an ordinary booth seemed to last a second or two, but came at a cost to the traveler of a couple of minutes in the outside world, the time it took the machines to work. How much lag had they accrued so far?

  mMMMm

  Clair blinked. Devin and Sargent were flickering, and their reflections danced too as though in a heat haze. The booth quivered. Clair put a hand to her forehead, wondering if it was just her.

  mMMMm

  This time something weird had definitely happened. Sargent’s reflections still stretched to infinity, but she herself, the real Sargent, was gone.

  Devin had done it again.

  “We don’t have much time,” he said, turning to Clair. “I need to ask you if you trust the others.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Someone gave away our location in Crystal City, New York, and Valkyrie Station. It’s the only way the dupes could have found us. I trust my people—what about yours?”

  mMMMm

  Sargent flickered back into view, then out again.

  “Quick. We can explain this away as a glitch, but not if it goes on too long. Tell me about Jesse and the PKs. Would they betray you?”

  She didn’t think about the question at all. Peacekeepers were peacekeepers. They didn’t side with dupes. And Jesse betraying her was unimaginable. “Of course not!”

  “Just because they’re PKs? Just because he’s your boyfriend? Someone did this, Clair. We have to know who or you’ll never be safe.”

  “It can’t be one of them . . . can it?”

  mMMMm

  Sargent was back, alarmed at first but clearly relieved when she saw Clair.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Phasing error,” said Devin. “Happens sometimes. Hope you guys didn’t experience any discomfort.”

  “I’m okay,” said Clair, wondering now if there was indeed a chance that either of the PKs was secretly working for the dupes. Or, more significantly, was a dupe. Forest was secretive by nature, thanks to his disability: that either ruled him out or made him a more likely suspect; Clair couldn’t decide. And Sargent . . . had she been nice to Clair in New York simply to make Clair less suspicious? The PK had seemed more distant and edgy since then, but perhaps that was to be expected under the circumstances. Babysitting someone being endlessly hunted by dupes might do that to a person.

  mMMMm

  What if Devin was raising these suspicions simply to deflect them from himself?

  853. La Plata.

  Her hands were shaking. She tried to keep them still, but they quivered in time with the reflections in the mirrors, as though reality itself was being shaken apart. She wondered what would happen if they stayed in the Maze much longer, but was afraid to ask. Was there a risk that their patterns would merge, like Jesse had been afraid of in New York? She’d heard an urban myth once about lovers who had sworn never to be separated, and had only ever gone into booths together. One trip, the machines made their wish come true, turning them into a single person with—depending on which version of the myth was being told—various numbers of arms and legs, but always two mouths, both of them screaming.

  mMMMm

  Clair didn’t want to be blended with Sargent or Devin—a fear that took on a new edge when she realized that she could hear the whispers again. She squinted her eyes and tried to concentrate on the sound.

  Are you sure it’s not just random drift?

  Definitely interference.

  Well, do something about it, T. Don’t just sit there fishing!

  Clair was about to ask the others if they could hear the whispers too when the rise and fall of the humming suddenly changed.

  mMmMm

  The pulses came faster, and the numbers in the mirror ticked over so quickly they seemed to blur. Or was that her eyes again? 276, 474, 317, 655. Clair put a hand to her forehead, disoriented.

  One of her own reflections turned to look at her.

  mMmMm

  Devin and Sargent were flickering in and out of her vision again. 427, 517, 118, 853. She was moving through the Maze too quickly to tell where she was in the real world. The Air was draggy, with patches frozen and metadata skewing wildly.

  Still the reflection was looking at her, even when Clair deliberately glanced away.

  mMmMm

  The reflection’s lips moved, but Clair wasn’t speaking. It wasn’t her. It had to be—

  A dupe.

  Clair reached out to take Devin’s arm. She had to warn him. She opened her mouth to speak, but no voice came out. Her lips moved as soundlessly as those of her reflection.

  The Maze had been hacked.

  This is bad, said the whisper, as though it could read her mind. This is very, very bad.

  MMMMM

  The hum was deafening The numbers said 658, 274, 857, 658, 658, 481, 658, 658, 658, 658, 658, 658. Clair put her hands over her ears, but nothing could keep the noise out. Her eyelids had no substance. Her hands were light as air, as though if she pressed too hard they might pass through each other and she would dissolve into nothing.

  [19]

  * * *

  MMmmm—

  Suddenly it all stopped. Silence fell and the reflections steadied and went back to normal. Clair’s hand felt solid again. The number said 432. Clair’s lenses told her that she was on a tiny island called Ons, near Spain. Sargent leaned against one wall, the fingers of her right hand touching her temple. The reflection of Clair’s dupe was gone, if dupe it had been. She started to mention it to Devin, but he was already talking.

  “That was close,” said Devin. He looked a little too relieved for Clair’s liking, as though “close” might be a massive understatement. “They caught us in a loop of some kind, but we managed to—”

  Watch out!

  The whispered shout came a split second before an enormous bang sent Clair reeling. With tremendous force, one side of the miniature tank tore right off, shredding the mirrored surface into a million tiny shards that stung Clair in a dozen places. Bright light streamed into the shattered tank, temporarily blinding her.

  Someone fell heavily against her, collapsing to the ground at her feet. It was Sargent, blood pouring out of her in a crimson flood. Clair dropped down beside her and tried to find the source, but there were too many of them, penetrating deeply into every weak point in the PK body armor.

  Sargent’s jade-green eyes stared up at Clair as she tried helplessly to stem the flow, pressing at random spots in the hope of doing something positive. Words gulped from the PK’s throat, none of them audible. One hand reached up to Clair’s face, but it fell away before touching her.

  “No,” Clair hissed. This couldn’t be happening. “Don’t . . . you can’t—!”

  “She’s finished,” said Devin in a higher pitch than usual. “For the record, I do care about that . . . but we need to move. Now.”

  He was peering anxiously at the hole in the side of the ruined tank. There was no sound apart from the ringing in Clair’s ears and the glassy fragments crunching under her knees.

  “We can’t just leave her,” Clair said, hating him a little for suggesting it.

  “You know we have to. And we can’t carry her. The booth was sabotaged. There could be dozens, hundreds, thousands of dupes converging on our location right now.”

  He was right, but that didn’t make her feel better about it at all. Besides, he had his own problems. He was
bleeding from wounds to his face and right arm, and maybe more she couldn’t see under his armor. For the first time since she had known him, he looked young and scared.

  Shaped charge, said a whisper. Only one was meant to survive.

  No one’s perfect, T. There’s still time.

  Whatever the whispers were, they were telling the truth. Sargent had been standing between Clair and the epicenter of the blast and taken the larger force of it. If she hadn’t been so big, Devin might have caught even more than he had. The dupes couldn’t get one of their own into the Maze, but they could do the next best thing: sabotage the booth and kill the people with her, leaving Clair unharmed, but isolated and immobile. This time, at least, they wanted her alive.

  “We need a plan,” she told Devin even as she still tried futilely to help Sargent. “We can’t just run away at random. Is there another booth on this island?”

  He nodded. “The nearest is in the lighthouse on the other side. It’s about six hundred yards northwest. It’s currently . . . not in our hands.”

  “Which means?”

  “The dupes are hacking into the system, just like we did in Crystal City. It there aren’t already some here now, there will be very soon.”

  Two on their way, said the whisper.

  “Just two of them, though,” said Devin with forced cheerfulness. “We can handle two, right?”

  “Wait—that voice is talking to you?” she said, staring at him in surprise. The revelation put all thought of dupes taking over d-mat from her mind. “I’ve been assuming it was the dupes.”

  “It’s not the dupes.” He shook his head. “Later.”

  “Promise?”

  “Yes.”

  Clair still had the pistol Devin had given her in its holster. His hands were empty.

  “Take this,” she said, offering it to him.

  He waved it away. “Never use them. Too dangerous.”

  “Isn’t that the idea?”

  “Well, you should feel free. Just don’t shoot me in the process.”

  “Don’t give me a reason to,” she said, wishing he didn’t have to be so patronizing, “and I’ll try to resist.”