Crashland

by Sean Williams

  “Don’t joke about this.”

  “Not joking, Clair. I’m in no hurry to die. But that’s the trouble with world-changing events. Individual opinions don’t matter. When it comes to war, we’re lemmings. One lemming always has to go over the cliff first.”

  “Are you threatening me or cracking a joke?”

  “Neither. T’s the funny one.”

  “Your brother is even more of a dick than you are.”

  “Listening right now,” came Trevin’s voice over the chat. She was learning to differentiate them. “Parapsychic twin-link, remember? Always on.”

  Clair didn’t care. She had reached an empty weapons hold and stood there for a moment, thinking of the plan as they’d left it. Perhaps there was some way to make it less risky.

  “We should shut down the booths,” she said. “All of them. Physically disconnect them, if possible. That way the dupes won’t sneak up on us.”

  “Not even one?” asked Devin. “How will they get here, then?”

  “They’ll find a way.” She was sure of that. The dupes had shown themselves to be endlessly resourceful. “Let’s make them earn it.”

  “All right,” he said. Via the chat she could see him nodding in approval. “I like that.”

  She did too. Maybe it would limit the fighting to just a handful of dupes. On the flip side, without the seastead’s booths in operation, there would be no escape until it was over. They would be stuck for good or ill while the gambit played out, after which she and her mother and the rest of the world would be safe, or they wouldn’t.

  The message was the only plan she had. There was no point delaying. Still, she gave herself one more minute in case inspiration struck, then when it didn’t sent Devin the draft.

  Two minutes later he responded, “Nice. That’ll do the trick.”

  “Do you think he’ll get it?”

  “Nobody? He’ll get it for sure. He wanted to talk to you in New York, before he tried to kill you, and how many times has he come after you since? He’ll know it’s a trap, but he’ll come anyway. He thinks he can afford to. He is legion.”

  She shivered.

  “Don’t worry,” Devin said. “You have powerful enemies, and powerful friends, too. I’m not talking about LM Kingdon. If anyone’s going to beat these guys, it’ll be us.”

  She still wasn’t entirely sure what RADICAL was getting out of this. The chance to take the credit for putting the dupes out of action, perhaps.

  “With the PKs,” she reminded him.

  “I remain uncertain that they’re entirely our friends. They haven’t been eager to line up and be counted, that’s for sure.”

  “It’s their job to stop wars, not fight them,” she said.

  “Particularly wars that aren’t in their best interest.”

  “Do you mean what happened to Sargent on the island? According to PK Forest, any kind of reactivation is completely impossible.”

  “And I bet he’s killer at poker. What I mean is that Sargent has personal reasons for resurrection to become the norm.”

  “What reasons?”

  “Her girlfriend’s pattern was lost in the crash. Did you not know about that?”

  Clair forced herself not to react to his tone. That particular piece of information would explain why Sargent had grilled Clair so passionately about Zep during her interrogation in New York. But why had she never mentioned it? There had been lots of opportunities.

  “So we’re all the same,” she said, feeling a new kind of weariness. “No one apart from Forest cares about the consensus. Why are we even bothering to fight this war? Why don’t we just all shake hands and get on with copying whoever we want?”

  “No one wants there to be no laws at all,” Devin said. “It may not matter if Sargent was resurrected and everyone pretends nothing happened, but it does matter if we erase death from the equation entirely. That changes humanity as a whole in ways we’re probably not ready for. RADICAL stands for giving individuals the right to choose what happens to them—and in that sense we’re like WHOLE, rather than the dupes. We don’t want dupes bossing us around any more than we want AIs. Which is why I feel sorriest for Jesse in all this. He’s made it clear he doesn’t want to use d-mat, but we keep dragging him through anyway. I’d be a lot angrier about that if I were him.”

  Clair was surprised to hear Devin express sympathy for Jesse, and it made her like him a little, and RADICAL, too, although she felt slightly unnerved by their willingness to go to war over matters of principle. Who thought that way? Who lived their life always looking ahead, planning for things that could go wrong? Who would fight for the right to ask questions?

  Perhaps that was the most important battle to fight of all, she thought, remembering Devin’s comment about lemmings. She might be a lemming, teetering on the edge of the proverbial cliff, but did that mean she was a soldier lemming, or a terrorist lemming, or something else entirely?

  “So when the PKs are ready,” she said, “we send the message. Then what?”

  “The PKs are coming through now,” Trevin said. “We’ll leak your location when the message goes out, so the dupes will know exactly where you are and who you’re with.”

  She nodded, although the imminence of conflict made her quail.

  “Keep me out of your twin thing,” she said. “Am I almost there yet?”

  “Not far,” Devin promised her. “Wait, you mean the staging area?”

  “Yes.”

  “In that case, you’ve still got a ways to go. Turn right up here and I’ll show you the rest of the way.”

  [31]

  * * *

  IN THE STAGING area, numerous blue-and-white-armored PKs were already stepping from the booths and assembling in rows. Clair stood in the middle of the space for a moment, feeling not unpleasantly lost in the hustle and bustle. Much easier, she reflected, to be a cog in a giant machine than the person with her finger on the GO button.

  “Hey, Clair,” said a voice, making her jump.

  PK Drader was standing behind her with his helmet resting on his hip.

  “What’re you doing here?” she asked.

  “Got sick of doing prisoner transport and came to see some real action,” he said. He hadn’t shaved since New York, and his face looked swarthy with the beginnings of a beard. “Before I joined the PKs I studied economics. I know, right? No wonder I never managed to keep a girlfriend. Eventually I realized that my true calling was to stamp out bad guys—but it’s kinda hard to do that when all the action’s taking place on the other side of the world. So here I am, ready for anything.”

  “You volunteered to come here?”

  “Of course.” He grinned. “All it takes for evil to win is good people doing nothing. Is that how the saying goes? You feel that way too, I imagine. You’re obviously not standing around watching as the bad guys ruin everything for everyone else.”

  Clair supposed that was true. She was a volunteer, in that she could have been doing any number of other things, hiding in protective custody being one of them. This felt better, looking at what she was doing this way, rather than as an attempt to fix the mistakes she had made in the past.

  All the same, Clair found PK Drader’s eagerness unsettling. It was almost as though he was trying too hard to prove his readiness for battle.

  “What happened to Tilly? I mean, Xia?”

  “They got to her. I don’t know how.” He looked down at his feet. “I put her and the others safely into custody in HQ, but last night someone hacked the system and put poison in their food. Gone, every one of them. But it’s okay,” he said, watching her face fall and misunderstanding why. “When we find the person responsible, they’re going to be up against the wall for sure.”

  Clair wasn’t worried about who had done it. She was just sickened by more pointless deaths. The Improved had done terrible things, but they remained people. And it was even worse than that: by law Tilly Kozlova was now officially dead. She had joined the ranks of Libby and
all the others, more victims no one seemed to be fighting for, except her.

  “On the bright side,” Drader said, his grin returning, “we’re making progress tracking the dupes. Here, take a look.”

  A patch popped up in her infield, requesting permission to install a new interface. She allowed it, and the familiar PK colors unfolded in a new window.

  “See? We’ve been fabbing drones in record numbers and updating algorithms as fast as we can. Now we can track anyone, duplicate or dead, all across the globe—and the crash has actually helped us by freeing up data channels we couldn’t access before. It’s a gold rush on dupes, and we’re cashing in.”

  The interface was a sea of colors that confused Clair until she zoomed in close on a random location. The sea resolved into dozens of individual points, some yellow, some blue, some red, all across the rainbow except for green. Selecting one of the dots told her the name of the pattern—Jamila Murray, in this case—and its exact location. A sentence or two outlined its activities and the steps taken to deal with it.

  She zoomed back out. The globe was crawling with dupes, like ants invading a termite colony.

  Clair wondered if her mother was with one of those multicolored dots, or if she had become one of them, but was afraid to ask.

  There was also a button that changed the view to show only green dots, which represented peacekeepers. It was hard to tell which group outnumbered which, green or multicolored. They looked about evenly matched.

  A bright cluster of green was forming near Greenland, and Clair told herself to take comfort in that.

  “Get something to eat, Clair. You look done in. Promise me?”

  She assured him she would.

  “See you in the trenches,” PK Drader said before returning to his preparations.

  Clair felt a strong urge to salute. She resisted.

  Retracing her steps to a mess hall she had passed earlier, Clair sat at a table on her own, making some final tweaks to the message. She had until all the PKs were aboard before it needed to be sent. She planned to use every moment she had to perfect it.

  Sargent came into the mess, dressed in heavy armor with a helmet clipped to her side. She went straight to the fabbers, muttered impatiently until the machine accepted her instructions. Only when she reached in and took out the tray did she see Clair. Without asking, she walked over to the table and sat opposite her.

  “You look terrible,” Clair said, and Sargent did: pale and stressed, with heavy bags under her eyes. “Are you all right?”

  “Just hungry and tired. It caught up with me.”

  “I can see that. Don’t talk. Just eat.”

  Sargent nodded and did as PK Drader had told Clair to do, tackling the array of food on her tray as though it was a challenge and damned if she was going to quit. Most of the vegetables were raw, as was the egg in a glass to one side. There was some sushi, a sliver of rare steak in black bean sauce, and a bowl of blackberries topped with a dollop of yogurt. Sargent worked through it in no particular order, wielding her spoon in her left hand while Clair watched, warily fascinated. Who ate like this? PKs, maybe. She had never seen one eat before.

  “You should go into RADICAL’s machine,” Clair half joked. “The one that fixes you up without your having to see a surgeon. I’m sure that would make you feel better.”

  “Not allowed,” Sargent said around a mouthful of steak and blackberries. “The Inspector wouldn’t approve.”

  “I know. That’s what I thought, but . . . even in a war?” Clair wanted to ask her outright about being reactivated, but couldn’t bring herself to.

  “Never,” Sargent said. “Why? Do you want to do it? I could look the other way. . . .”

  “No,” said Clair. “I’m just . . . that is . . . I don’t know. Devin told me about your girlfriend, and I guess I understand what that feels like . . . sort of.”

  When you come back from the dead but someone you care about can’t.

  Sargent stared at Clair with her spoon hovering unmoving over her plate, a bean sprout protruding from the corner of her mouth. Clair couldn’t read her expression.

  “Billie was a good person,” Sargent said slowly, staring at the ring on her wedding finger as though seeing it afresh. “She shouldn’t have died.”

  Clair nodded.

  “That’s why you disagree with the Inspector.”

  “Yes,” said Sargent. Her eyes grew very full, as though they were made of glass.

  Then she seemed to collect herself. Clearing her throat and tucking the bean into her mouth with her right hand, she said, “But the Inspector could be right. Even if we did make reactivation legal, who gets to make a decision like that—to bring someone back from the dead or not? You? Me? The Consensus Court? I’m not sure we’re grown up enough to make that call. Do you?”

  “I don’t know.” Sargent was looking at her now, and Clair felt bad for intruding on the woman’s grief. It had made Sargent babble, “I’m sorry. It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it. . . .”

  Sargent shook her head firmly.

  “Some things are more important than the people we love.” The spoon swooped in for another load. “That’s what I try to tell myself.”

  Clair hoped she never had to choose between her job and her mother, or Libby, or anyone else she was trying to save. It was an unbearable thought.

  She was almost glad when a bump came from Devin.

  “Everything’s ready. We want to send the message now.”

  “Wait,” she sent back. “Here’s the latest version.”

  She had added a section asking people for help finding Ant Wallace. If he was still alive, as Xia suggested, and if he could be tracked down and stopped a second time, then maybe the dupes could be turned back. Maybe he could even be reasoned with. Maybe the Improved who remained could be un-Improved, as Xia had hoped.

  No one is entirely evil, she had written. Not me, not Ant Wallace. I sacrificed myself to try to stop him, and my friend Q brought me back. I’m not saying that was the right thing to do, but it has given me a chance to understand that what I did was wrong. Everyone deserves a second chance. Wallace tried to give me one, in his own way, but I took that possibility away from him. For that, and for many other things, I am sorry.

  She didn’t think her confession would make Wallace turn himself in. She just hoped Q would be listening and that she would understand that Clair was talking to her as well as the rest of the world. At the same time, Clair dreaded what her mother would think upon reading it, if she was able to. Clair was publicly discussing being dead by her own hand, and a murderer to boot.

  “All good,” said Devin. “Come up to the crow’s nest and we’ll send the message off together.”

  Something similar must have reached Sargent at the same time, because she grunted, nodded, shoveled one last spoonful into her mouth, and said to Clair, “Right. Are you ready?”

  “Are you?”

  “Too bad if I’m not,” Sargent said, pushing back with both hands on the table. “There’s no getting out of it now.”

  She flashed a nervous smile that Clair returned. At least someone else wasn’t looking forward to the fight.

  [32]

  * * *

  THEY PICKED UP Jesse on the way. He was bleary-eyed and startled, having been woken only moments before by PK Drader. She and Sargent found the two of them scrabbling around behind the mattress in search of the audio component of Jesse’s augs, which had slipped out while he slept.

  “Chill,” said PK Drader in response to her anxiety that they might be late. “They won’t start without you. You’re the star of the show.”

  Clair didn’t respond. If he was trying to make her feel better, he was going about it completely the wrong way.

  Forest was pacing back and forth in full armor in the crow’s nest with Devin and Trevin.

  “RADICAL is ready,” said Trevin. If it had ever seemed odd to Clair that an adolescent spoke for the entire crew of the massive seastea
d, his confident tone dispelled any remaining shreds of doubt. RADICAL trusted the twins, so she supposed she should too. “Post the message now, Clair. We’ll lift our firewalls long enough to give you access to your profile.”

  “Any news on Mom?”

  “None,” said Forest. “I will advise you the very moment—”

  “Yeah, I know.” She couldn’t help hoping, though. Inhaling deeply, she held the decision in her mind a moment longer. “All right. Let’s go.”

  The view through her lenses shifted, taking on her usual wallpaper shapes and textures, and suddenly her infield was flooded with all the bumps and grabs she had been avoiding since coming to the seastead.

  “Where are you now? Come home! Your fault! Fix this! Who is this? Is it true? Tell me everything! Don’t lie!”

  The anxieties of the entire world were pouring through her lenses in one tangled flood, mirroring and adding to her own. When she had concocted her original plan in the Farmhouse, days before the crash, she had dreamed of a few thousand followers. Now they numbered in the tens of millions and “Clair Hill” was a meme, not a person. The thought of it terrified her just as much as the dupes. If the behemoth turned on her, she could be in more danger from her fans than from anyone else. And what about the PKs? Would they continue to protect her if her meme became a threat to peace?

  “Clair? Are you going to post?” That was Devin, one voice among millions. “You’re visible now. The seastead is vulnerable. We have to close the firewalls.”

  She wished they would. Her news grabs contained a thousand calamities in a thousand places, some natural, some not. There were fires and other catastrophes that Rescue and Repair couldn’t get to. There were criminals in makeshift jails and empty hospitals far from scenes of accidents. Small enclaves were forming where PKs couldn’t reach, ruled over by opportunistic tyrants who declared this the End of Days. Pitched battles were being waged between communities where long-held differences had bubbled over into conflict. The stats for rapes, murders, and other violent crimes were way up. Healthy communities banded together, but even in those places it was becoming difficult. A lot of people hadn’t left their homes since the crash, like Ronnie. While they had fabbers, what reason did they have to leave?