Crashland

by Sean Williams

  Clair had to do the same.

  “That bike’s the last thing you have left,” she said, feeling a tug of sympathy for Jesse. “It had better still be there or . . .”

  He laughed. “You can’t fix everything, Clair. That way lies insanity.”

  She blushed. “Sorry.”

  “Besides, I’m not completely penniless. I own the patterns Dad created. It’s not like I’m going to starve or anything.”

  “No one starves anymore,” she said. “Except for you, when you’re sticking to your principles. Or are you being metaphorical?”

  “Abstainers do sometimes starve, if the weather turns bad, if crops fail, if there’s no one nearby to help out. . . . It probably sounds utterly barbaric to you, but it does happen.”

  “Please tell me you don’t want to live like that,” she said.

  “No . . . but I really don’t want to put that fake stuff inside me either,” he said, looking at her in a way that made it very clear that his feelings about Devin’s injuries hadn’t been erased. “If I had to choose . . . I mean, if what Devin just did is . . . ah, hell. Just don’t make me choose. That’s all I ask.”

  “Are you having second thoughts again?” she asked. It took more courage than expected. She didn’t want this to be something they kept coming back to, even though they always seemed to.

  “Hell no.”

  His face came out from under his bangs, and she took the opportunity to kiss it, enjoying the increasingly familiar taste of his lips and the feel of his long body against hers. They were on a giant metal ship in the middle of an icy ocean, vast forces were gathering around them, but there was still time for this. For them. If she didn’t have Jesse, she wondered how she would cope.

  “Clair,” said a voice.

  They pulled apart. It was Sargent, hurrying across the landing toward them. “Something’s come up, Clair. Something important.”

  It must have been important to make Sargent abandon the pretense of following her unnoticed.

  “What is it?” Clair asked, feeling more than a twinge of alarm. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s your mother,” said the PK, coming to a grim-faced halt in front of her. “She’s been kidnapped.”

  [27]

  * * *

  FIVE MINUTES LATER, in a glass bubble Devin called the crow’s nest at the top of the giant vessel, Clair barely managed to sit through the official debrief. It was hard to listen without interrupting constantly. She was angry at the PKs for letting it happen. She was angry at her mother, too, for putting herself in danger. She was most angry at herself, although it was hard to see what she could have done. Maybe if she hadn’t given the dupes a chance to act, if she hadn’t relaxed . . .

  “Your mother was contacted by this person at five p.m. yesterday,” said Forest, sending her an image of a woman Clair had never seen before. The woman was dressed in a PK uniform. “She was advised that you would meet her outside the safe house at six p.m. and accompany her to a more secure location. At five forty-five p.m. your mother’s escort was relieved and replaced by these people.” Two more images, also unfamiliar. “At five fifty p.m. your mother was removed from protective custody and taken to the rendezvous two blocks away.” Clair saw an image of an ordinary house. There was PK tape across the door, which chilled her. “By the time reinforcements arrived on the scene, she was gone. The people she went with have disappeared. All attempts to trace them have failed.”

  Clair imagined PKs running from the other side of town, unable to d-mat like they normally would, and the image was almost comical—except it wasn’t funny at all. Her mother was gone.

  Jesse was watching her with white lips. At least he understood how she must be feeling.

  “They must have been dupes,” she said in a voice that sounded horribly even and sensible—nothing like how she felt inside. Just when she thought she had escaped the dupes for a little while, back they came with something even more horrible. “Mom had no reason to think they weren’t real, so she did everything they said.”

  “She must have realized in the house, when they forced her into the booth, right?” Jesse looked worse than she felt, no doubt thinking of what had happened to his father. “Why didn’t she call for help?”

  “It’s likely no one forced her to do anything,” said Sargent. “If her daughter was there . . . or someone who looked exactly like her daughter, at least . . . why wouldn’t she go with them?”

  Clair wanted to fold forward across the table and wrap her head in her hands. Only the thought of how it would look stopped her. Devin and Trevin were there, leaning against the glass wall on either side of the door like protective statues. She didn’t want them to think her weak. But she was weak, wasn’t she, if she had let her mother down this badly?

  “We have heard nothing, no demands or threats,” said Forest, and for once she was grateful for his blank face. He wasn’t patronizing her with something fake, something intended to be sympathetic or soothing. “I feel confident assuming that their demands haven’t changed. If you tell them where Q is, your mother will be returned. Meanwhile, your mother’s biometric data has been added to the list of known or suspected dupes. We have no recorded sightings yet.”

  Clair nodded, not wanting to think too hard about that. Her mother the dupe. What if the next time Clair saw Allison Hill she was really an assassin?

  Part of her was momentarily glad Q was still missing. She didn’t like to wonder which way she would have chosen, had she been asked to choose between her mother and her friend. . . .

  “Facial recognition,” Trevin said to Forest with a sneer. “Surely you can come up with something better than that to find the dupes.”

  “What else do you suggest?” said Sargent. “It’s very difficult to trace the dupes back to their source because they come and go at random. Drones are therefore our first line of defense. Once dupes are visually identified, deputies deal with them on the ground.”

  “Posses, you mean,” said Devin. “How many innocent lives have been lost due to mistakes or vendettas?”

  “Casualties are unavoidable,” said Forest. “While the vast majority of our forces remain immobilized—”

  “As they seem likely to be forever.” Trevin’s sneer was unwavering. Clair wished he would stop picking at the PKs and concentrate on finding a way to get her mother back, or at least finding Q so they would have more options. She was sure Q could find Allison in a second. “Are you ever going to get d-mat working again?”

  “We’ve isolated the reason why the system won’t reboot,” said Sargent. “The AI called Quiddity isn’t alive after all. It’s not functioning, not viable—dead, in other words. We’re vetting former VIA technicians to jerry-rig a new overseer algorithm. We’re also looking at ways to keep unauthorized users permanently out of the system—dupes and the general public alike.” She glared back at Trevin. “Be warned: this includes RADICAL. If we have to pull the power on you, we will.”

  That surprised both twins.

  “Shut off the powersats?” said Devin. “Are you serious? You know what that will do.”

  “Yes,” she said in a tone that shocked Clair with its ferocity. “Everything will really stop then. No fabbers, no Air—all of it grinding to a dead halt. Next time you feel like complaining that life is tough, think about that first.”

  Three meals, Clair thought, staring at Sargent in disbelief. Turning off the powersats would be the end—not just of her mother but of everyone. That possibility jolted her out of her anxious self-recriminations. The dupes were striking at the very heart of her, yes, and it was time she struck back. But not like this. There had to be another way to destroy the dupes that didn’t mean destroying the world with them. . . .

  Forest’s face flicked from one expression to another, as though trying out several to see which fit best. When it settled, it was one Clair had seen before, in New York: stern, with a hint of warning.

  “Our imaginations are running away with us,”
he said. “Let us instead ask what the dupes hope to achieve by kidnapping Clair’s mother. What is it they want?”

  “They might be trying to flush Clair back out into the open,” said Sargent. “The videos they sent obviously didn’t coerce her and their approach on the island didn’t convince her, so maybe now they’re trying to force her.”

  “Because of Q?” asked Jesse. “Do we really think she’s still out there?”

  “We’ve searched every byte of the Air,” said Devin, “every server, every line of code in existence. There’s no sign of her.”

  “We have searched too,” said Forest. “If she still lives, she is well hidden.”

  “Very well hidden,” said Sargent.

  “That doesn’t mean she’s dead, though,” said Clair.

  “That’s true,” said Devin, “in which case you’re our only hope. And the dupes’ only hope too.”

  “I’m amazed,” said Trevin, “that anyone’s still laboring under the illusion that Clair knows anything about anything.”

  “I know this,” said Clair, stung by the sharpness of his dismissal. “I know we don’t know where Mom is, or Wallace, or what the dupes really want. Maybe it is all about Q, but what will they do with her if they get her? Put Wallace back in power by making more and more of them until they take over the world? We have to find a way to stop them. If you want to sit here and argue about who knows what, that’s just fine, but don’t single me out, all right? You’re just as much in the dark as I am.”

  Trevin retreated with the corners of his lips pulled down. Devin was smiling, as though he liked seeing his older brother put in his place.

  “You’re right, Clair,” Devin said. “We have to stop the dupes, but what do they even want? Mayhem and murder is about as high as they’re reaching at the moment. They’re not storming castles or plastering manifestos. Sometimes it seems more like an infection than a coordinated attack.”

  “A disease,” said Sargent. “That’s a good analogy.”

  “I’d describe the potential collapse of civilization as something slightly more serious than a head cold,” said Trevin.

  “The collapse of your civilization, you mean,” said Jesse. “The idea that someone can copy you and move into your head . . . Who in their right mind would use d-mat after that gets out?”

  “You don’t seriously think the Abstainers are going to emerge on top of this, do you?” said Trevin, eyebrows almost comically high.

  “They were fighting back long before you.”

  “Nobody’s going to be on top of anything if we keep snapping at each other,” said Clair, sticking her fingers into her curls and gripping her skull. She was sick of the endless arguing. “It’s not helping Mom. . . . It’s not helping anyone.”

  [28]

  * * *

  JESSE PUT A hand on her shoulder, to comfort her, Clair presumed, but it would take more than that.

  “Sterling work, peacekeepers,” said Trevin. “If you can’t save one woman, how do you expect to save the world?”

  Clair stared out of the crow’s nest’s glassy sphere along the broad, hulking mass of the seastead. The words she had just said still rang in her ears.

  Nobody’s coming out on top of anything if we keep arguing.

  Nobody’s coming out on top. . . .

  “Whatever the dupes are doing,” she said, “they’re doing it while we stand around fighting each other.”

  Sargent tilted her head to one side. “You think the kidnapping of your mother is a diversion?”

  “Maybe,” she said, even though it felt like a betrayal to suggest that her mother wasn’t important. Allison Hill was very important indeed, to Clair, but to the rest of the world she was just one more person in trouble. “Maybe not. Either way, we have to do something to stop them.”

  “Like what?” asked Jesse.

  Clair didn’t have an immediate answer, although the need for one burned inside her. Was all-out war really the best option? In all likelihood it had started already. She might not want to accept it, but the dupes would keep chipping away at her life until they destroyed everything she loved. When that failed, they would destroy her, too. She couldn’t just stand around and let that happen. She wouldn’t.

  Clair would kill them all, every last dupe, every single hollow man and hollow woman, if that was what it took to bring her mother home. Behind cold anxiety, fury had begun to blaze, flaming hot and building fast.

  Jesse was still talking. “We can’t fight them because they’re everywhere. We can’t track them because we can’t predict when they’ll appear. We can’t cut them off at the head because we’re not sure if they even have a head. We can’t ask them what they want because they’re not talking.”

  “I for one am not surrendering to a dupe,” said Devin. “Better dead than someone else in your head.”

  “What if it was your mother at stake?” Sargent asked.

  “Leave our mother out of it,” said Devin, tight-lipped. “She has nothing to do with this.”

  The debate raged among those tasked with coming to a strategic consensus. What on earth could bring peacekeepers, Abstainers, and RADICAL to any kind of agreement? Clair despaired of ever finding a solution . . . but there was something in her mind, some thought she needed to extract. She could feel it wriggling and gnawing at her, like a worm in an apple.

  That metaphor made her think of Mallory gnawing her way into Libby’s mind . . . and all the other Improved . . . and how uselessly she had marched into VIA HQ expecting to save them, handing herself and Turner to Wallace practically on a platter in the process. . . .

  The worm swallowed itself and morphed into a lightbulb.

  She had an idea.

  “I know how we can fight them,” she said, not caring who she cut off.

  “Do tell,” said Trevin.

  “Well, we can’t take on a whole world of dupes, not now that they’ve hacked into the VIA network. No one’s crazy enough to think that, I hope. So what we do instead is lead them into a trap.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll send them a message, telling them we want to talk. That’ll imply I know something. They’ll be suspicious, of course, but the only way for them to find out is to make contact. And if we cut ourselves off from the Air, the only way to do that is to come here.”

  “Here?” said Trevin.

  “Why not? It’s away from cities, full of soldiers with guns, easily defended. That’s why you’re out here, isn’t it? So we use that to our advantage.” Clair folded her arms. “Unless you’re afraid.”

  Trevin bristled. “We’re not afraid of a few dupes. But to what end? What do we gain from it?”

  “We flush them out. Not just them, but their source, where they come from. Somewhere there has to be a server containing their original patterns, the ones they keep copying over and over again. If we can trick them into duping themselves here, we can track them—track their data right back to its source. And when we have that source, we erase it. Then we can get on with finding Mom, finding Q. Once the dupes are dead and their source is gone, they’ll never come back, ever.”

  The angry flame in her heart burned brighter at that thought, which shocked her at the same time as it energized her. These weren’t people, she told herself, but dupes, greedy ghosts stealing bodies in exchange for immortality. Hollow indeed, empty of all conscience and morals.

  And they had attacked her and the people she loved. If Clair could threaten them in return, maybe they would give Allison back.

  “Hang on,” said Devin. “You’ve missed something. How are you going to lead them here? It’s all hypothetical until you figure out a way to do that.”

  Here some of her confidence crumbled slightly, not because she wasn’t sure of her plan, but because of what it might mean to her. “I’ll have to offer something personal, so they can be sure it’s not you guys talking. I’ll have to wrap the bait in something completely honest, like telling the world my side of what’s been going on, a
s I did before. If I do it just the right way, all everyone here has to do is be ready for them. Will you be?”

  Devin and Trevin looked at Forest and Sargent.

  “How about it, peacekeepers?” asked Trevin. “Are you going to commit?”

  “We need to confer,” said Forest. “This course of action will undoubtedly put lives at risk. It is not simply a matter of agreeing or disagreeing with something we personally feel is right.”

  “But you won’t stop us, will you?” said Clair, suddenly afraid of what might happen if the PKs decided that it was in the world’s best interest to halt the war between the dupes and RADICAL before it had even begun. . . .

  Sargent shifted awkwardly on her seat.

  “We will confer,” was all Forest said again.

  “Yes, you do that,” said Devin. “Sooner rather than later, so we’ll know exactly who we can rely on.”

  “Perhaps we should take a break,” said Clair. “I’ll start on my thing while everyone else does theirs.”

  “Do I have a thing?” asked Jesse.

  That stumped her for a second.

  “Talk to WHOLE,” she said. “Find out who’s in charge now that Turner is gone. You never know when that will come in handy. Maybe they can work with the PKs, tracking down the dupes like they did in New York. Okay?”

  No one looked excited by that idea, but it was all she had. Maybe if terrorists and peacekeepers could get over their differences, there was hope for her and Jesse in the long run.

  “Okay,” Jesse said with a shrug. “Let’s get this war on the road.”

  The group disbanded, Clair and Jesse heading back to their cabin to commence work on their particular tasks, she already dreading the lie she was going to have to tell.

  [29]

  * * *

  I AM THE real Clair Hill, she wrote, and I am telling you the truth.

  From there it got harder. In the hours following the meeting, she went backward and forward through the text of her announcement, trying to find exactly the right words for what she needed to say. She felt like she was going in circles, making no progress at all in defining either of the things in the opening sentence—the truth or Clair Hill.