10
THE SHED WAS larger than it had looked from the apartment. At some point, the Linwoods had absorbed the backyards of both their neighbors, creating a spacious environment for Jesse’s father to work and store materials. Jesse knocked on the door and opened it without waiting for a reply. It was dark inside. Clair’s eyes took a moment to adjust. The shed was crammed to the ceiling with tools and equipment: antique 3D printers, skeletal landsurfer frames, Air-free processor cores, and other shapes Clair couldn’t identify. Cogs and chains hung from nails everywhere she looked, as though she were inside a giant clock. If there was any order to the maelstrom of parts, it was invisible to her.
Jesse’s father occupied a relatively clear space in the center, surrounded by a cone of yellow light projecting down from the ceiling. He wore a jeweler’s glass over one eye, a red-check shirt, canvas shorts, and open-toed sandals. Through the glass he peered at an angular chip extracted from a mess of wires and circuit boards to his left.
“This is Clair Hill from school,” Jesse said, approaching via a zigzag path through the clutter.
“What does she want?” Jesse’s father glanced up at them. His magnified eye seemed impossibly blue.
“I’d like to ask you a question, Mr. Linwood,” she said, stepping gingerly for fear of knocking something over. “I’m sorry to interrupt your work.”
“Call me Dylan.” He reached up and took the eyepiece away. “Go on.”
“I’m worried about a friend of mine,” she said. “She’s been using Improvement.”
“She has, has she? And did it work?”
“No. . . . I mean, it wasn’t clear.”
“Well, I don’t see what I can do about that.”
“You can tell me not to worry about her. You can tell me it can’t possibly be real.”
He stood up, revealing himself to be much shorter than Jesse. Dylan Linwood was lean, with wild gray hair and deep facial lines. He too hadn’t shaved for several days. His skin was spotted with grease. He looked like an ordinary man concentrated into a much smaller space.
“The system is governed by AIs,” he said in a lecturing tone, “and the AIs are governed by protocols. Who writes the protocols? People do. So if the Improvement code causes a shift in the protocols . . . . well, a thing imagined is a thing halfway done. What’s to stop someone trying to make it work? Nothing. So the very existence of Improvement proves that someone, somewhere, at least thought about it, and that thought alone is dangerous, in the memetic sense.”
“The what sense?” asked Clair.
“You know, memes—things that reproduce ideas, like genes reproduce traits. A new idea is a mutant meme, and the idea spread by Improvement is that people deserve to be Improved by means other than hard work and merit. By just clicking their fingers and wishing. These are dangerous thoughts if sufficient people share them.”
“Memes come and go,” said Jesse. He was slouched against a bench with his arms folded, closely observing the conversation. “Won’t this one do the same?”
“Don’t underestimate the power of a seductive idea, son. Bad enough that people are using d-mat to get around. What happens if their patterns start being interfered with en masse? That’d be a monstrous crime perpetrated on the entire human race.”
“Yes, but it’s
“Libby thinks it is,” said Clair.
The way Dylan looked at her made her feel as though she was still under the magnifying stare of his eyepiece.
“Do you have a copy of this particular message?” he asked Clair.
“Give me your address and I’ll send it to you.”
“Send it to Jesse, and he can send it to me. I like to keep my connections to a minimum.”
Jesse’s father sat back in front of his 3D monitor and began typing hard on a manual keyboard.
“You were right to come here,” he told her as the message flashed up in front of him. “I’m sure the truth’s out there, but it’ll be buried under a snow job of misinformation and noise. Fortunately for you, I have colleagues who track this kind of thing. We share information in a private database. I’m looking into that right now.”
Clair wondered who exactly “we” were. Ordinary Abstainers or someone more organized and active in their opposition to d-mat?
“If there is something to Improvement,” he said, skimming through data too quickly to follow, “it’s not what it’s advertised to be. No one believes it’s making people taller or more beautiful or whatever. What I can tell you is that there are different strains of the letter, as with viruses. Some are the real thing, some are bad copies, and some are fakes. Apparently, this is one of the real ones. You can tell by the irregular number of lines in each stanza of the message: three-four-five-two.”
“What do you it mean that it’s ‘real’?” asked Jesse. “If it doesn’t do anything, what difference does that make?”
“I didn’t say it didn’t do anything. I said it didn’t work as advertised. My best theory is that someone tried to get it to work but succeeded only in interfering with the system, causing random errors to people’s patterns.”
Clair nodded. That made a scary kind of sense. “What could we do about that?”
“Well, first we need evidence of anything at all out of the ordinary, something that will prove the need to take action. Evidence of real harm, not just vague concerns.”
“Libby said she’s received some weird messages.”
“Do you have copies of them?”
Clair shook her head. “She deleted them.”
Dylan looked up at her, then back at the screen. With a flick of one fingertip, he cleared the data and turned to face Clair.
“Of course she did. So at the moment we have nothing—just a theory and a note that according to the Air and the peacekeepers doesn’t mean a thing.”
“You could ask Libby to save any other messages she gets,” Jesse suggested. “If we had them, maybe the peacekeepers would listen.”
Dylan dismissed that thought as casually as he had dismissed the data on the screen,
“The peacekeepers take VIA’s so-called safeguards for granted. They can’t afford to do otherwise. If they thought for a second that someone had made d-mat unsafe, the world would come crumbling down around them. It would take something definite, something completely undeniable, to bring that about.”
Clair studied him, beginning to suspect that his motives weren’t at all the same as hers. “When you talked about taking action—”
“I wasn’t talking about peacekeepers.”
“So—”
“People should stop using d-mat, Clair. Errors caused by this kind of interference are nothing compared to the many accidental errors that go unnoticed every day. Have you ever worried about that?”
He had taken a step closer. She backed the same distance away. “I’m not here to talk about me. I came to you for Libby’s sake.”
“What do I care about another zombie girl? Her fate was sealed the moment she first stepped through a d-mat booth. Nothing you can do now will bring her back.”
Clair didn’t know how to respond to that, short of being unspeakably rude. If Libby was dead to him, so was Clair, and no amount of arguing would change that.
“Dad—” said Jesse.
“It’s all right,” Clair said. “I’ll go now. It’s getting late, and this . . . isn’t helping.”
She turned and headed for the garden, not caring that she knocked over a stack of cogs and gears as she went. Dylan watched her go with a cold expression.
The aroma of baking food hit her as she entered the apartment. Clair concentrated on finding her bag and
