Twinmaker

73

SSSSSSS-POP

Gemma and Wallace disappeared in another null jump, and there Jesse was, spattered with Ray’s blood and caught midsentence.

“—together . . . Wait, what?”

He saw Libby’s face and started in fright even before Mallory stepped away from Clair and pointed the pistol at him.

“Don’t!” Clair cried, placing herself directly in front of the muzzle. “Please don’t hurt him. I’ve told you everything I know. Q is one of the lost girls, like Libby. She woke in the hangover and latched onto me when I used Improvement. She’s been helping me, and I’ve tried to help her, too. She deserves to know who she is, who she was, before Improvement.”

“Clair, what’s happening?” asked Jesse, standing up behind her. “Are you all right? Where’s Ray, Gemma, Turner . . . everyone?”

“They’re gone forever,” Mallory said, “unless your girlfriend tells us the truth.”

“Why would I lie?” Clair said, determined to keep herself between Mallory and him. She couldn’t bear to think of Jesse dead, not now that she had him back.

“Q is some Little Orphan Annie who latched onto you at random?” Mallory shook Libby’s head. “I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m careful,” she said. “I don’t leave leftovers.”

In the face of Mallory’s ruthlessness, Clair believed her, but at the same time she couldn’t believe her. There had to be hope for Libby, just as there was hope for Q. There had to be hope for Clair as well.

“Well, this time you made a mistake,” Jesse insisted, coming forward to stand next to Clair.

“I don’t make mistakes either,” Mallory said, her lenses flickering, “but Ant does. I think he’s too generous. This is your last offer.”

The air thinned around them again. Clair took Jesse’s hand and held it so tightly, she hoped, that not even d-mat could tear them apart.

sssssss-pop

When the machines stopped, Mallory was gone, and Dylan Linwood had taken her place.

Jesse’s father staggered backward and clutched his temple. Bruised. Fresh from his kidnapping. He looked up at them, blinking, left eye filling with blood.

“Jesse?”

“Stay away!” Jesse let go and stepped back from her, forming a triangle among the three of them. “Who are you?”

“It’s him, Jesse,” said Clair, hearing it in Dylan’s ordinary California accent and seeing his true self in the way he held himself, in his bewilderment and shock. “Really him this time.”

“Who else would I be?” Dylan said, his lined face twisting in hurt.

Jesse was speechless.

“You were captured in the street by people who work for Ant Wallace,” Clair said. Someone had to tell him. “They put you in a booth, a null jump, like they’re doing now.”

He looked down at his body, then back up at Clair and Jesse. “What have they done?”

“They duped you. Your dupes tried to kill us. We . . .” She remembered with pure visceral force shooting at him and seeing his corpse. “We managed to stay ahead of you . . . of them . . . for a while.”

“So we’re all zombies now?” He stared at her in horror.

“Don’t say that,” she said. “That’s not the way it is.”

He turned to his son. “Jesse, what are you doing here? What do they want?”

Jesse still didn’t speak. He was wrestling with all the doubts and decisions Clair had agonized over when Zep had appeared.

“They’re going to take you away again, Dad,” Jesse finally said. “They want something we can’t give them.”

Dylan was staring at Jesse, his face a mask of agony. Not because of the blow to his head. His psychic pain was palpable.

“How can I feel like this?” he said, openly weeping. “How can I feel anything at all? Was your mother right the whole time? Was I wrong not to let them bring her back?”

sssssss—

“Wait,” Jesse cried, reaching out to take his father’s arm, “wait!”

—pop

Jesse and his father vanished. Clair crouched into a ball and shook with frustration and despair. Nothing she said or did seemed to help anyone or change anything. Zep was dead . . . again. Clair had been duped. Jesse was being used against her. What cruelty had Mallory and Wallace prepared for her this time?

When she raised her head, she found that she was alone with Wallace. He looked saddened and puzzled, as a kindly uncle might by his niece’s errant behavior. She seriously thought that he was about to pick her up, pat her on the back, and set her down on her own two feet again.

She stood up on her own and backed as far away from him as she could.

“Tell us about Q,” he said. “That’s all you have to do.”

“And then what? You’ll put me on ice, too? Or erase me permanently?”

“You’re making my choices for me, Clair. If you’d only do as I ask, I’m sure we’d all get along.”

He came closer. She retreated.

“There’s no need to be frightened of me, Clair, or to mistrust me. I’m just trying to make the world a better place.”

“What?”

“You’ve seen what we can do. You’ve talked about it on your feed. I know you don’t think it’s all bad.”

“You’ll never convince me that what Mallory is doing is a good thing.”

“Mallory is a special case, true. I don’t love her for her unsubtlety.”

“Murder is unsubtle?”

He was herding her around the office, like a very patient old sheepdog with one skittish ewe.

“Improvement isn’t murder, Clair. It started as a way of saving lives—the lives of our greatest minds when they grow sick and old. We didn’t have Turner’s genes then, so how else were we to prolong their work? We couldn’t create new bodies out of nothing and set them loose in the world, since that would violate parity, the one rule we cannot break; the same with copying them. So why not use the bodies of young people living vacant, empty lives? Teenage minds are flexible; that’s why they’re so changeable, so perfect for our plan. You see, Improvement is like duping, only stronger, more subtle, permanent. In the right body—not just any will do—a transplanted personality has time to settle into place, rather than being dumped wholesale and left to break down, like the dupes do. Society is infinitely better off for it, I’m sure you’ll agree, as are the beneficiaries of the program. Ask Tilly Kozlova or Madison Chu if they would rather be dead. Ask Elisha Neimke if he thinks you’re being fair for judging me without taking this into account. Ask all of them. I know what they’ll tell you.”

Clair felt herself flinch at Tilly Kozlova’s name. She didn’t want to believe it. Her idol an old woman stealing the life of a girl like her? It couldn’t be true . . . but it did explain her preternatural talent blossoming apparently from nowhere. And it explained the other names too. Madison Chu was the young mathematician who had solved the Riemann hypothesis. And Clair thought Elisha Neimke might be the first Go champion to beat an AI in forty years—at the age of sixteen.

Getting smarter, younger, her grandfather had grumbled, and for once he had had something important to say. But who listened to old people on the subject of kids these days? Clair certainly hadn’t. How many other brilliant minds had taken over innocent young people who had wished to be more than they were?

At least Turner’s genes would put a stop to Improvement. Why go to so much trouble when people could stay in their own bodies and be young forever? But that would mean people like Ant Wallace living forever too—and Clair didn’t trust him to give just anyone the secret. Improvement was given only to the geniuses he chose. A world ruled forever by people like him wouldn’t be worth living in at all. . . .

“No one uses d-mat against their will,” he was saying, as though that made a difference. “The same with Improvement. We do it to ourselves, Clair, and no one complains.”

“You’re lying,” she said. “Someone forced Dylan Linwood

into a booth so he could be duped. Your dupes killed innocent people, and so does Improvement.”

“Minor exceptions, all in the service of the greater good. Would you really have us give up d-mat like those fools in WHOLE say we should?”

She shook her head. “D-mat isn’t the problem. It’s people like you, people who abuse the system. The sooner you’re all in prison, the safer it’ll be for everyone else.”

“Is that really what you think?”

“Of course it is. I’m not so far gone that I don’t know who I am anymore.”

“Far gone . . . ?” He tilted his head. “Ah! I didn’t realize. You used Improvement too. Perhaps I should just wait, then. The answers will come to me in due course.”

“If I don’t kill myself first.”

“Yes, you might, just to spite me, if you are one of Mallory’s. She’s nothing if not persistent, once she fully comes into herself. Her death wish is a stain I could never remove, no matter how I tried. . . .”

His confident facade fell away, and Clair glimpsed something much more real and intimate. She remembered his activism on behalf of potential suicides. For the first time, Clair thought she was seeing the real man.

“Why is Mallory a special case?” she asked.

“Because she’s my wife,” he said. “I can’t let her go.”

She stared at him. “So you bring her back, over and over—”

“And she keeps taking herself away from me. She loves me, but in the end she always hates life more. Her last pattern was taken a week before . . . the first time . . . and it’s always the same. Do you understand me now, girl?”

Clair did, and it was like a coal in her heart. One week was exactly how long Gemma had given Libby to live before she committed suicide—which Libby would do, Clair now understood, not because there was something wrong with Improvement, but because Libby had become Mallory, exactly as she had been when Wallace had taken her last pattern. Improvement killed because Mallory wanted to die.

“Are you satisfied, Clair? Have I at last earned your cooperation?” Wallace’s expression twisted again, becoming very hard and cruel. “Tell me who Q is and what she can do. Who named her? Where did she come from? Most importantly, I need to know how she can be controlled.”

He lunged with great suddenness and speed and caught her arm in one strong hand. She tried to pull away, but he only wrenched her closer, as though punishing her for the glimpse of weakness she had elicited from him.

“If you do,” he said, “I’ll make everything go away. I’ll bring back Zep and Jesse’s father—Libby, too, if you like, before it’s too late. We can do that. It’s easy. Just say the word, and I’ll take Mallory out just as simply as I put her in. But if you don’t, I’ll destroy you. There’s too much at stake now to let you ruin it. And we won’t just kill you and your parents and Jesse, Clair. We’ll destroy the life you might have had.”

He wrenched her closer still.

“Remember that gun you got rid of in Copperopolis? It turned up in what you call the hangover, with your fingerprints still on it. Terrorists are such bad influences, aren’t they? And to think they helped you hide the bodies we have in the hangover too. Fancy that. How do you feel about spending the rest of your life in a penal colony? Do you want to grow old alone? You, not your dupe. You.

“One simple concession could spare you all of this, Clair. One act of common sense. Just do what I want, and this will be over. All of it.”

His crushing fingers released her, and she jerked away with his voice ringing in her skull.

“I’m not guilty of anything,” she said. “Q aimed the pistol for me. I just pulled the trigger.”

“The pistol has an autotargeting system, Clair. Q turned it on.” He leaned in close again, and she couldn’t help but recoil from him. “I’m afraid you’ll have to do better than that. Don’t think of it as betraying her, if that’s what’s bothering you . . . although I hear you have some proficiency in that regard already.”

Clair balled her fists and crushed them into her eyes.

“Shut up!”

“Why, Clair? I’m the one offering you a way out of this mess.”

“Just leave me alone! I need space. I have to think.”

“About what? Surely there’s only one possible response.”

She raised her head and glared at him, hatred tracing fiery lines through her veins, giving her a strength she’d never suspected she had.

“If you destroy me, Q will destroy you,” she said, and the coldness in her voice was frightening even to her own ears. “That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? She knows my dupe isn’t me, and she’s looking for me right now. And she’s scared you. You don’t know what she’s capable of, and you’re worried that you’ll find out big-time if you don’t give me up soon. So you don’t get to order me around. Not now and not ever. Back off and let me figure out what I want before I agree to anything you want.”

“All right, all right,” he said, raising his hands in a mixture of placation and frustration. “I’ll give you ten minutes—in which time you’d better hope your little lapdog doesn’t do anything you’ll regret. You only get one second chance.”