Twinmaker

44

SHE WOKE WITH a fright an unknown time later. Someone was calling her name.

“Clair? Can you hear me?”

She sat up and stared wildly about her. The voice was coming from the tubes in her ears. She knew who it was, but where she was and why only slowly returned to her.

“Clair? Are you all right?”

She was on the Skylifter with Jesse, abandoned by WHOLE while Turner Goldsmith remained aloof in his roost above. But she had been dreaming of Zep and Dylan Linwood’s battered faces, over and over, and of her own face too, reflected in the walls of a d-mat booth, growing more and more monstrous until the versions of her at the edge of visibility looked barely human.

I’m beautiful, a voice had told her. I’m in heaven, and I’m so beautiful.

The images took some effort to dispel, and no wonder, she thought. She had been hunted halfway across California. She had seen people shot and killed. She lived in a world where people could take someone out of one body and put them back in another one, over and over. Nightmares were the least of her problems.

Meanwhile, the voice in her ears was still calling her name.

This voice belonged to Q.

“Yes, yes, I’m all right.” Clair sat up and put the middle fingers of her right hand against a stabbing pain between her eyes. “How did you get through to me? The Skylifter is jammed, isn’t it?”

“I can get anywhere that isn’t Faraday shielded. The first thing I did was hack the habitat’s firewalls by bypassing its usual routers and—”

“Okay, spare me the details. I failed IT in school, as you probably know. Give me a second to get my act together.”

She looked around, blinking. She and Jesse were still the only people in the big semicircle. He was snoring softly, undisturbed by either her rude awakening or bad dreams of his own. There was no way to tell how long she had been asleep.

Her eyes were drawn to the view, to the perfect blue dome above and the endless sheet of white far below. The cloudscape was alien and strange. There were valleys and trenches, wide plains, and the occasional towering hill.

She automatically went to access her lens menus, to see where she was, but of course the Air wasn’t available, and that frustrated her, made her feel more trapped than did locked doors and silence.

Clair stood on wobbly legs and crossed in stockinged feet to the miniature kitchen. She supposed she should at least try to refuel in the hope of making her brain work. In the freezer, she found several single-serve portions of precooked lentil stew, and she fiddled with the microwave controls until she worked out how to set it to defrost. She felt distant from herself, not entirely there, but awake enough to solve that puzzle. While it whirred and rattled—an antique like the Skylifter itself—she filled a bottle of water and drank deeply from it, tasting metal strongly against her tongue. Her mouth was furry and dry.

The stew was boiling hot in patches, crunchy cold in others. It satisfied a need and nothing else. The details of the dreams faded as she ate and talked to Q. If Turner Goldsmith was going to ignore her, she’d get what answers she could from elsewhere.

“Okay,” she said, mouthing the words but not speaking them aloud out of respect for Jesse’s ongoing slumber. “Let’s start with Dylan Linwood. Tell me how someone can copy him when he’s supposed to be dead in Manteca. Doesn’t that raise a . . . what did you call it?”

“Parity violation alarm.”

“Right, one of those.”

“Parity hasn’t been broken because Dylan Linwood isn’t listed as dead.”

“What?”

Q patched a series of windows into her lenses. The Linwood home in Manteca, peacekeepers combing through the rubble. The results of detailed forensic studies. A news feeder intoning, “First responders describe the scene as a bomb site, provoking speculation that the reclusive fad artist destroyed his workshop in order to go even farther underground. No bodies have been found. His son, Jesse Linwood, has not been located for comment.”

“Is someone trying to cover this up,” Clair asked, “or just clean up as they go?”

“I believe it’s the latter,” said Q. “Municipal reports list no bodies found at the safe house, either. Spent casings, evidence of gunfire, traces of spilled blood—but no actual bodies.”

“No bodies at all. Does that mean Zep isn’t listed as dead either?”

“He is not, Clair, and neither are the members of WHOLE intercepted en route to the airship.”

“What about Libby?”

“I have located Libby in Italy. Her caption is unchanged.”

I’m beautiful.

Clair shook her head to shed the last lingering memory of the dream.

“Any mention of me?” she asked. “Am I still wanted by the peacekeepers?”

“You’ve been officially listed as a missing person. Your parents are calling it a kidnapping. It’s causing a lot of buzz in the wake of the video Dylan Linwood posted.”

Clair couldn’t imagine what her parents were going through, and it made her throat close up to think of them. Better, she told herself, to move forward in the hope of getting safely back to them.

“Okay, so Jesse’s dad isn’t a parity violation because he’s not listed as dead. But someone’s still copying him as fast as people can kill him. Like you did to Libby. She’s still very much alive, according to you, and yet you created another one of her in Copperopolis. How did you do that? Did you use a private network. Why did you do it?”

“I’ll tell you. I don’t want there to be any secrets between us.”

“Good. If I can understand how you do this, maybe we can understand the dupes a little better.”

“That was my original intention, Clair,” said Q, adopting the more grown-up voice she used when explaining. “The thing about d-mat is that it does build a new person from scratch every time someone goes through it, and in theory you could duplicate yourself as many times as you wanted from the pattern created. What’s stopping you is the consensus that this would be ethically unacceptable. It’s therefore illegal, and VIA takes this law very seriously. Their AIs were designed with this primary purpose in mind.”

“The train driver and the conductor. Parity violation. I’m with you so far.”

A new image appeared in Clair’s lenses, a flowchart that looked horribly complicated.

“While it may seem as though I broke parity by having two versions of Libby in the world at once, that wasn’t what happened at all. The real Libby had just stepped into a booth to go from New York to London. She was, therefore, officially in transit. What I did was simply divert the transfer of her pattern for a minute or two by briefly blindsiding the bus driver AI. I built a version of Libby in Copperopolis from the pattern I diverted, then once I was done with it, I uploaded the original pattern and sent it back on its way. No alarms sounded because there was technically only ever one of her in existence at a time, as a person or as a pattern. Nothing was copied. Libby appeared to arrive in London exactly as planned. The diversion doesn’t appear in her history. If she noticed anything odd at all, she probably assumed she had been held up by a data jam. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

Q sounded very pleased with herself, and Clair did agree that hacking the global network like that couldn’t have been easy to accomplish. The moral ramifications, though, were enormous.

“But that wasn’t all you did,” she said. “You put yourself into her.”

“I did. Between New York and Copperopolis, I altered the definitions the conductor AI used to check that the Libby who arrived was the Libby who left. I superimposed a new neural map over hers, modeled on mine, being careful to save hers in the process. It’s complicated, and I’m not very good at it, obviously; I barely made it back into the booth before the shakes took over. Then, between Copperopolis and London, I returned Libby to exactly the state she was in before, perfectly unharmed. That’s it.”

“That’s it?”

“I maintained parity and didn’t hurt anyone,” Q said with a hint of defensiveness and pride. “There was no reason for any kind of alarm. I didn’t know I could do it until I tried. I was surprised by how easy it turned out to be.”

Clair rubbed the ridge of bone behind her right ear. Q was confessing to an ability that seemed magical. Dangerously magical, enabling someone to change the very identity of a person without changing their face. Like someone watching an actual magic trick, Clair couldn’t help but look for loopholes in order to make it comprehensible. And therefore stoppable.

“Let me see if I’ve got this straight. It’s all about fooling the AIs, not actually breaking them. Changing the definitions. That’s how you got the dupe off my tail that time. . . .”

“Yes, not by changing you but by redefining your pattern so you appeared to be someone else, someone who happened to be in transit at that exact time.”

Clair was finding this head spinning, but she was determined to get it all. “And that’s how there can be so many different versions of the Dylan Linwood dupes without breaking parity. It’s like respawning when you die in a computer game. The conductor AI will have no qualms about reproducing his original pattern because from its point of view, no laws are being broken. There’s just one of him at a time, even if there is someone else inside him. The AI doesn’t know any different.”

“Correct. Note that this can only happen under highly specific circumstances. Otherwise, the usual rules always apply.”

“But you and the dupes can both do it. Maybe you have the same backgrounds. Could they be someone you know, Q?”

Q didn’t respond immediately. When she did speak, her voice was subdued.

“There’s something I haven’t told you, Clair.”

“What is it? What now?”

“I’m frightened to say it because you might not believe me, but I have to tell you. I think it might be important.”

“Q, whatever it is, please just tell me.”

“I don’t know who I am,” Q told her, “or where I came from.”

Clair didn’t know what to say in reply to that. It was so strange and improbable that there seemed no way to pick it apart.

“You have amnesia?”

“No,” said Q. “I have memories. But before a certain point they don’t belong to me. They don’t feel like experiences I had. It’s like . . .” She hesitated. “It’s like being in a house, and you can explore the house and get to know it really well, but how you got to the house is a mystery. All you have is a map. You don’t know what it’s really like outside.”

Clair was silent.

“The house is me,” said Q.

“Yeah, I get that.”

“And the first memory that feels like mine is from when we met. You said to me, ‘If you’re going to quote Keats, at least do it properly.’”

“That’s right, I did.”

“I don’t know why I got it wrong.”

“You said you were Improving it.”

“But I knew what the original was. Why would I change it? I don’t understand why I would do that.” A note of frustration entered Q’s voice. “This is what I mean by some memories not feeling like mine. I don’t know who I was before you. I just know I wasn’t . . . me.”

Clair cast about for explanations, ignoring nothing, even if it seemed ridiculous. She came up with just one.

“Could you be one of the Improved? Maybe your brain was damaged, like Jesse said, and you’ve forgotten who you were. Rather than committing suicide, you’ve been trying to find people like you and trying to make contact when you do.”

“I do have memories of reaching out to other girls and boys. Your friend Libby was one of them. You were the one who answered back. You’re the only one who listened.”

“So maybe getting the quote mixed up was a cry for help, but none of them recognized it for what it was. I mean, I didn’t either, but at least I knew the words were wrong.”

“Only you, Clair.”

“Good old Keats,” she said, attempting lightness even though she felt nothing but confused and wary. “I knew he’d come in handy one day.”

“‘The poetry of the earth is never dead,’” Q quoted.

“Do you know where you are?” asked Clair. “Is there anyone else with you?”

“That’s something else I don’t understand. If I am one of the Improved, why don’t I have a body?”