Twinmaker

6

Outside, Clair felt crushed by the silence. Ronnie and Tash sent bumps after her to see if she was okay. Had she heard something? Clair said she hadn’t and that she’d be coming back to class soon. What else could she do? She wasn’t sure that going anywhere would do any good. She just needed to think.

A chat request appeared in her infield.

Libby.

Before Clair could wink on it, the patch disappeared.

She thought, just for a second, about letting it go. Libby wasn’t normally so hesitant. If she really wanted to talk to Clair, she’d call back when she was sure of it.

But that didn’t fix anything now, Clair told herself. If best friends couldn’t talk through their issues, who could?

She responded with a request of her own, and it sat there for thirty seconds before anything happened. Then a window opened onto Libby’s bedroom. The shades were down, so if it was sunny outside in Sweden-somewhere, Clair couldn’t tell. Inside, the room was dark and grainy. Libby was a pale shape curled half beneath the covers. She was lying on her side with her head under a pillow.

“Why can’t I see you?” Libby said in a gravelly voice.

“I’m walking outside at school. Why aren’t you here?”

“Slept in. Mad headache.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you answer my bumps?”

“Turned everything off. It was all too much.”

“What was?”

“Spam . . . strange messages . . .”

“What kind of messages? About the ball?”

“Just strange . . . Improvement stuff. I deleted everything.”

“Oh,” said Clair, feeling as though she’d dodged a bullet. If Libby had emptied her infield and switched off her feed, that meant she couldn’t possibly have seen the news. But she would eventually. “Listen—”

“Can’t talk long. Got to sleep some more.” Libby rolled over, pushing the pillow to one side. “Don’t want to waste this golden opportunity, before Mom gets home.”

“I need to talk to you when you’re feeling better.”

“I am feeling better,” Libby said with a sigh. “Slightly. Talk about what?”

“It’s just . . . the party. It didn’t end well. There was some confusion . . .”

“You’re telling me. I think I drunk-bumped Zep at one point when I got home. Did he say anything to you?”

“No. Why would he?” He had done the right thing and stayed away. Or was it the cowardly thing? Clair couldn’t decide. “I hope you feel better about all that today. There’s really no reason—”

“To worry about him being a cheating toad? Sure there is. He was cheating when he hitched up with me.” She laughed, then clutched her head. “Ouch.”

Clair chickened out. It felt almost cruel, raising the subject when Libby was feeling so bad. “I didn’t think you drank that much last night.”

“Neither did I. This is the worst migraine I’ve ever had. Comes and goes at weird times—just when I think it’s done, it crashes back in. . . .”

“Do you need anything? I can probably get permission to come over—”

“You need to stay in school and study for both of us. I’ll learn by osmosis. Maybe we could make it a permanent arrangement.”

Libby grinned up at Clair via the camera pinned to the wall beside her bed. It was Clair’s first good look at her. Libby’s hair was pulled up in a nighttime knot. Her smile was wide and bright, but there were bags under her eyes, and her skin looked even whiter than usual—like the thin, fragile layer of ice riming the dome of the Sphinx Observatory.

“Stay beautiful,” Clair said.

Libby raised herself onto one elbow, smile falling away. Her face ballooned bigger still in the window.

“You can see me, right?” She winced. “Ouch,” she said again. “Crashing. Bye.”

The window closed. Clair stared through the space it had been, not looking at the campus around her, not looking at anything, really, but the negative image of Libby as it faded from her retina.

Clair had seen Libby. What she hadn’t seen was Libby’s birthmark.

She bumped Ronnie. Clair knew what she would say but she needed to hear it again.

“Are you absolutely sure Improvement won’t work?”

“Positive. Don’t waste your time. And think of the Magic Mayflies. You don’t want to piss them off, do you?”

Clair smiled despite herself. “The Magic Mayflies” referred to a story Ronnie’s mom had told them when they were kids to explain how d-mat worked. You stepped into a booth and dissolved into a kind of pollen made entirely of light, which the Mayflies gathered and carried through the air to where you wanted to go. So if you used d-mat too much, the magic might run out, leaving you stranded.

But Ronnie’s mom had come from a different generation—just one removed from the Water Wars, when power had been short and d-mat not something to be taken for granted, when the seas had been rising and fresh water becoming more scarce every year. Hundreds of millions of people had died of starvation and disease until d-mat had literally turned the tides, stripping the world of its poisons and feeding the billions by reorganizing the atoms, turning the bad into good. Now, with powersats high above the Earth beaming down limitless power and all the excess carbon dioxide sucked out of the air, there was no need for fairy stories. It wasn’t Magic Mayflies at the heart of d-mat but everyday machines that analyzed travelers right down to the smallest particle, transmitting the data that made them them to their destination through the Air and rebuilding them exactly where they wanted to be, exactly as they had been before they left.

VIA existed to make sure that critical word exactly didn’t go anywhere. The Virtual-transport Infrastructure Authority was a global body established to ensure the one hundred percent safe operation of d-mat. Two artificial intelligences oversaw VIA in turn, so no human errors could creep in. And it worked so comprehensively and constantly that the world’s network of d-mat booths reported the lowest rate of data loss out of all of humanity’s media. Everyone knew that the amount of human lost in a decade of d-mat was equivalent to a toenail clipping, total.

Of course, people told stories about criminals hacking the system. Dramas regularly featured duplicated jewels, disintegrated wills, cloned lovers, and the like. Every child listened breathlessly to tales about swapped bodies and shrunken heads, people flipped right-to-left or turned entirely inside out, scientists mixed up with insects, and worse. Clair herself had relished such stories even as she zigzagged across the globe, enjoying as everyone did the freedom to go anywhere she wanted at any time she wanted, safe in the knowledge that VIA and its AIs would simply never let anything bad happen to her. She would always be her at the other end.

So Improvement couldn’t work, she told herself, just like Ronnie said. The image of Libby had been poor, and she had probably been wearing makeup from the night before—not unlikely, given she’d been lagged by ninety jumps on top of her migraine. Maybe Libby had been only half awake and had mistaken a darkened glimpse in a mirror for the reality she desired.

Improvement couldn’t work. So why was Libby acting as though it had?

Let it go, Clair told herself as she walked to class. You’re worrying about the wrong thing. Libby may not be angry at you now, but she’s obviously fragile, and her calm mood’s not going to last forever. Like everything else, the Zep situation is bound never to improve on its own.

But whether she was running from reality or not, the question wouldn’t leave her. Instead of going back to her classroom, she went to the library. It wouldn’t hurt to ask, would it? Just in case.

Calling up a query window in her lenses, she asked the Air, “Does Improvement work?”

“Yes” came the immediate reply, along with “No,” “Maybe,” and “Are you joking? This is what we use the sum of all human knowledge for?”