Twinmaker

51

THE HALL WAS full of people when she returned and even noisier than before. Turner was there too, and Gemma and Ray. No others.

“Is that all?” Clair remembered the people she had addressed on the Skylifter. It was horrible to think they were now all gone.

Arcady handed her a pewter mug filled to the brim with a foaming golden liquid.

“Devil’s Lake is the finest cider we’ve ever made,” he said, raising the mug he held in his other hand. “Here’s to fallen friends.”

Clair felt as though she’d slipped into in a depressing dream about agricultural Vikings, but she clinked mugs with him and took a sip of the cider. It was sweet and warming, like a memory of fireworks. She took a larger gulp and closed her eyes.

To Dancer, Cashile, and Theo, she thought. To Zep, and to all the others who died because of the dupes. Hell, even to Dylan Linwood.

“To life,” Arcady added, “and the hard business of living it.”

She opened her eyes, nodded hopelessly . . . and there was Jesse, approaching from the fringes of the crowd, looking disoriented by the noise and the people but otherwise uninjured. The relief she felt was almost as potent as the cider.

He hugged her with shining eyes, and she hugged him back. Even through the grime and blood came a smell that she recognized, musky and natural and all him. She didn’t know when his scent had become so familiar to her, but she was glad to have it in her nostrils again.

“Hey,” he said into the top of her head. “It’s good to see you too.”

“I was worried,” she admitted. “Are you all right?”

“I banged my head when we came down. Luckily, I’ve got a thick skull. You?”

“Hungry,” she said, painfully aware of the fact now that she knew he was okay. “Go take a shower, then try some of the local cider. It’s to die for.”

He grinned and hurried off with his farmer guide. Clair watched him go, more glad to see him than she could say—and Turner and Ray and Gemma, too, even if they were terrorists and outlaws.

“Are you two . . . ?” Arcady was watching her over the lip of his mug.

“What? Hardly,” she said, remembering Jesse telling the dupe that she would never be his girlfriend.

“Good. Lots of nice farm lads here. And farm girls.”

He winked, and she felt herself blush right up into the roots of her curly hair.

Dinner consisted of something that looked like a big sheep roasted on a spit. The members of WHOLE stuck to baked vegetables, cheese, and salad. Clair did the same, wary of meat that had been recently alive, not fabbed like food was in the normal world.

The cider served with the meal was smokier than the first brew, with a different name: Sweet Briar Lake. Arcady told her that it was made from pears rather than apples. Someone played an old upright piano, and Arcady sang “When Irish Eyes are Smiling” at the top of his lungs:

There’s a tear in your eye and I’m wondering why

For it never should be there at all.

Clair was reminded of Q’s misquotes of old poems and the conversation they had had in the Skylifter before the meeting with Turner. Clair had barely thought of it since, caught up in events as she had been. But she hadn’t forgotten it.

If I am one of the Improved, why don’t I have a body?

On a drug farm in the middle of nowhere, fuzzy-headed from exhaustion and homemade cider, what had seemed mad hours ago began to make a kind of sense.

Jesse joined her, looking fresh and clean in his own set of sturdy overalls, still wearing his old burned orange T-shirt underneath. Gemma was standing to one side, looking cynical and wary, drinking water, not cider. Her bandage had been changed and the burns to her skin thoroughly salved. She had lost her painkiller patch. Clair waved for her to come over and join them. It was time for more of the answers Clair had hoped to get in the Skylifter.

“What’s the relationship between Improvement and the dupes?” Clair asked.

“The latter protect the former,” said Gemma. “You know how it works. Do anything to suggest Improvement is anything other than a harmless meme, and they’ll come after you.”

“Is that all?”

“Well, duping takes someone out of their body and puts someone else in. You can’t do that without altering the brain, which is exactly what we’ve seen in autopsies of people who have used Improvement. Remember those dead girls?”

“Brain damage,” said Clair. “Are you saying the damage wasn’t random?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. Improvement does the same thing as duping . . . only differently. Dupes rarely last longer than a day or two, for instance, while Improvement takes a week. We think that neither duping nor Improvement is permanent, but maybe that’s because we only see the times when it goes wrong. I told you earlier that not everyone who uses Improvement is affected, and that’s true. What if there are people out there right now who are in fact different on the inside, successfully transformed, but we wouldn’t know unless they said so? And why would they?”

They were coming back around to Turner’s paranoid conspiracy theory, in which world leaders were puppets controlled by VIA dupes. Clair cut Gemma off before she could get there.

“Why didn’t you tell me any of this back at Escalon?”

“You wouldn’t have believed me.”

That was true enough. Clair still didn’t entirely believe it now.

“So Libby’s not herself anymore? That’s what you think?”

“It’s not like duping; it doesn’t happen right away. But she’s got the symptoms, which means the process is under way. If she’s not already someone else by now, she will be soon.”

“Who? Is it the same person every time?”

“I don’t know. My son never told me his name.”

Clair stared at her for a long moment, reminded of Gemma’s past. Sam, she’d called him, the child she’d lost to Improvement. The note Clair had found had been written three years ago.

“Was that why you joined WHOLE?” Jesse asked. “I remember seeing you at meetings, but you never said what happened.”

“Yes.” Gemma didn’t flinch from the question. “I had Abstainer friends. Your father was one of them. Like a lot of people, I didn’t want to think about what goes on inside the booths until something went wrong. What happened to Sam confirmed a lot of things for me. WHOLE is my family now.”

“Did your son . . . ,” Clair started to say, then caught herself. “Did the person inside Sam . . . tell you anything at all?”

“Nothing useful. Do you want to know how he killed himself?”

Clair shook her head. She didn’t need to think of Libby suffering the same fate any more than she already was.

“Good,” Gemma said. “All you need to know is that dupes and Improvement are connected. And without d-mat, neither would happen.”

“But if we bring down d-mat, I’ll never get Libby back.”

“Do you really think it’s possible to save her?” asked Jesse.

“That’s the thing I think I’ve worked out. Listen.” Clair leaned over the table, closer to both of them. “There are rules to how d-mat operates. There can’t be two of a particular person at one time, for instance. Things have to even out. So what happens to minds that are pushed out by the dupes? Where do they go?”

“They’re erased,” Gemma said.

Clair shook her head. “No. Data can neither be created nor destroyed, Q says. If you can’t erase the data, that means those minds are still out there somewhere—and so’s Libby. Her original pattern contains everything she was, right down to the atom. Everything she is. All we have to do is find it, and we can put her back the way she was before the brain damage. Before Improvement.”

Gemma was listening, but she was looking deeply skeptical at the same time, and Clair realized that she was talking to the wrong person. To Gemma, minds and bodies were much more than just data, even though people had been zipping around the world for two generations without any apparent loss of soul.

Fortunately, Jesse looked interested, and Arcady was listening too.

“Our private net does everything two, three times over,” he put in. “It’s the only way to weed out errors. Our safety net is basically a big memory dump. We zap something and we keep its data in limbo until we’re absolutely certain it’s come out the other side okay. We call this limbo the hangover. Obviously, our net is different from the one VIA monitors, but I’m betting that part of it works the same.”

Clair was nodding. “Yes! The hangover. That has to be where she is. Not deleted, because important stuff like this can’t be destroyed. Saved. Brilliant!”

She clinked glasses with Jesse and considered the ramifications of this new understanding.

“That means we need VIA more than ever,” she said. “They’ll naturally have access to their own data. They’ll be able to pull out what’s in their hangover and put Libby back the way she ought to be.”

“How long since she used Improvement?” Gemma asked.

“Four days, now.”

“There might still be time. If she’s lucky.”

“What about Q?” asked Jesse. “Could she break in and get Libby out?”

“Break into VIA?” said Clair. “That’d probably take an army of hackers. Or an actual army.”

It was an interesting question, though. She thought of Q, kicked out of her body and accidentally booting up in deep storage somewhere, now struggling to put her mind back together. If the effects of Improvement could easily be reversed, Q would have simply d-matted herself in Copperopolis or earlier. But creating a new body out of nothing would have entailed causing a parity alarm and breaking one of the AIs, while permanently stealing someone else’s body would make her as bad as the dupes.

Surviving in the Air was a long way from being actually alive. Clair didn’t want to consign Libby to the same fate.

But she could guess now why Q had chosen Libby’s pattern in Copperopolis. They were the same, connected by Improvement and the secrets that had destroyed both their lives. . . .

Several places down the table, Turner was also paying close attention.

“Winning the battle isn’t enough,” he said. “The war’s the thing.”

“Exactly,” said Clair. “This isn’t just about rescuing Libby and Q. We have to stop it happening to anyone else. I know we don’t see eye to eye on everything, but surely we all accept this. Right?”

Gemma conceded a nod. Turner didn’t budge.

“We don’t know how many hundreds or thousands of people have used Improvement,” he said. “Are you going to save them all?”

“I think we have to.” Clair hadn’t told anyone about using Improvement herself; that knowledge had died with Zep, and she didn’t think just then was the right time to bring it up. Not if it’d make them think she was no longer herself. “It’s a huge job, which is why we need each other—and we need VIA, too. It’s too big. We can’t do it without their help.”

“She’s right,” said Jesse.

Gemma pulled a sour face. “Even if VIA would listen to us, which they won’t, the body we captured went down with the Skylifter.”

“There’ll be others,” Turner said. “You can be sure of that.”

Clair drained her glass and reached for another, trying to quash the thought that the task she was setting herself might be too big. How was she going to save Libby, let alone anyone else, when Libby herself had told her to butt out?

“Go easy,” said Arcady. “This is a special brew, remember?”

The way he said special made her wonder what else was in it apart from alcohol. That led her back to the peacekeepers, and she asked what would happen if they came to investigate the crash.

“You mean with our operation here?” said Arcady. “This is all legit, up to a point. Selling untested drugs is illegal, but that happens off the land. Sometimes the PKs bug us anyway, and we’ve installed things like a geothermal sink for when they cap our power or whatever. Really, the only problem we have is from cowboys trying to steal our seeds.”

“So we’re completely safe here?”

“Our booths are private,” said Arcady, “there are no comms in or out, and we have deadly serious automated security systems all around our borders. You’re lucky you didn’t come in that way, let me tell you.”

With a broad grin and grease in his beard, he sang another folk song:

Oh, I ran to the rock to hide my face,

The rock cried out, “No hiding place,

No hiding place down here. . . .”

Then someone started playing a tune Clair knew, the first music she had recognized since unplugging from her libraries in the Air. It wasn’t one of her favorites, and the pianist was no Tilly Kozlova, but despite her misgivings, Clair was caught up in it like a spark in an updraft. Not everything was gloom and doom and threats and danger. She drank another glass of cider as a toast to that sentiment.

Someone else gave Jesse a hat and he tucked his hair up out of sight. He had a forehead! She could see his eyes! He was good-looking when his hair wasn’t in the way. His eyes were green, which Clair hadn’t noticed before.

Instead of laughing along with him, Clair felt a sudden, irrational urge to weep, and she knew then that it was time to call it a night. So much had happened. She could barely contain her emotions, let alone control them.

She eased away from the others and explained to Arcady what she wanted—a bed, a cushion, a quiet corner, anything.

“Of course. This way.”

He took her to a separate wing of the Farmhouse, where rows of bunks filled a long, segregated dormitory. Several of them were occupied. Under the distant tinkling of the piano, she could hear the light snores of women.

Beds had been set aside for her and Gemma. Clair slipped out of her sneakers and overalls and fell onto the nearest, retaining barely enough energy to wish Arcady good night and to roll herself into the blanket. He brushed the hair back from her forehead like her mother used to and left her to sleep. She didn’t hear the door close behind him.