Twinmaker

public network. That could happen to her on the very next trip or on the hundredth. Maybe it had already happened without her noticing.

Her lenses instantly put that fear to rest. She was on Rhodes, not far from the rebuilt Colossus.

“Woodward and Main, Manteca,” she instructed the booth.

sssssss-pop

She checked her coordinates, as she should have been doing from the start. No deviation.

“Now back home, please.”

sssssss-pop

She checked again. No deviation.

She repeated the cycle three times without deviation.

That would do it, she decided. Bouncing back and forth between the two, checking every time, would ensure she was only ever where she expected to be.

And if she did deviate, she would know there was something to Improvement—the meme, if not the actual process of changing someone into a better person. Proof wouldn’t necessarily require any physical changes to her nose. If she wasn’t at either the Manteca station or Maine, she would know that someone had read her note and diverted her—proving Libby right and Dylan Linwood wrong. The existence of a private network meant only that VIA had made a mistake, not that the entire system was at fault.

Or nothing at all would happen, in which case she would know that Libby was going through a bad patch that time, honesty, and a lot of patience would heal.

The eleven jumps had passed quickly, but just shy of half an hour had passed in the real world. Another eighty jumps to go before she equaled Libby’s marathon effort. As a young girl, Clair had imagined what it would be like to spend all day jumping. If her parents had let her use a booth without them, she would have danced across the world as though wearing twelve-league boots. Once she had her solo license, the impulse had worn off. Transit lag was a pain. It made her feel tired in advance just thinking about it.

Squatting with her back against the mirrored wall, she instructed the booth to return her to Manteca. Some people talked about losing their train of thought when they jumped, seeing wild flashes of color or even experiencing vivid microdreams. She, however, felt nothing as the machines cycled around her, sucking up enough power to run an old-time country for a year.

Ten more cycles, which made over thirty jumps. No deviations, no change. Clair was getting bored. Using d-mat never really felt like going anywhere, but at least there was a change of scenery to look forward to. This was worse than running in circles. This was just an endless cycling of air in a human-sized vacuum flask. She and her reflections went back and forth, back and forth, with only the Air for company, and that was poor fodder.

Libby had cut Clair’s close-friend privileges, so Clair couldn’t tell where she was. Ronnie and Tash were asleep. Zep wasn’t an option. No one else knew what was going on except Jesse, and he was a total dead end.

She thought about leaving Ronnie and Tash a message: If you never hear from me again, you’ll know I’ve turned into a turnip or something. But this was between her and Libby; it wasn’t for anyone else to know about. And it certainly wasn’t a joke.

Ten more cycles and her ears were starting to hurt. After her fortieth jump, her right eardrum didn’t unpop, so she spent an awkward ten minutes walking around the booth in Manteca, waiting for her sinuses to clear. A sharp pain shot through that side of her head, and she stood still for a moment, waiting anxiously for it to go away.

It did, along with the blockage in her ear. She performed one more lap of the booth, for luck, and to prepare herself for resuming the tedious confinement within. How long until she decided that her theory about private networks was wrong? Part of her hoped that her nose would change, just to liven things up.

14

SSSSSSS-POP

After her seventieth jump, a new message appeared in her infield. Thinking it might be Ronnie or Tash saying good morning, she opened it without thinking.

It said: “‘Woman, I behold thee, flippant, vain, and full of fancies.’”

The words hung in bold sans serif over her on the reflecting surfaces of the booth. The message was unsigned, but there was a winking reply patch associated with the text. The address was hidden by some kind of anonymizing protocol. The name was simply a long string of lowercase q’s with an ellipsis in the middle, which indicated that the full text exceeded the field’s maximum character length.

qqqqq . . . qqqqq

If someone she knew had sent the message, they were going out of their way to keep their identity a secret. But the text resonated with her. It was something she had read recently in school. The lines were from a poem, but they had been misquoted.

Clair could have ignored it and taken the next jump, back to Manteca for what felt like the thousandth time.

Instead she sent a reply. She was bored and restless and wondering if she had done enough to prove that Libby was right yet. What did it hurt to send a few words through the Air?

“If you’re going to quote Keats,” she bumped back, “at least do it properly.”

Nothing happened for a while, and she began to wonder if it ever would.

Then a new bump appeared from the same address.

“I Improved it.”

Clair felt gooseflesh rise up on her forearms. She folded her arms tightly across her chest.

There was no way anyone could see her in the booth, but she knew, suddenly, that she was being watched.

“Who are you?” she sent. “What do you want?”

The reply came in the form of another misquote.

“‘Your eyes are drunk with beauty your heart will never see.’”

Clair searched the Air for the source. It was from someone called George W. Russell. She didn’t know him from her writing class, but someone remembered him—or misremembered him, rather. The original line ran, “Our hearts are drunk with a beauty our eyes could never see.”

Whatever was going on, Clair decided to fight fire with fire.

“‘No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly,’” she sent. “That’s Oscar Wilde, and I didn’t need to twist his words to make my point. It’s all about beholding, right, so why does anything need to be changed at all?”

Another bump arrived.

“‘That which does not change is not alive.’” Clair didn’t realize it was another quote until the source of the words added, “Sturgeon, exactly. The irony is mine.”

Clair was determined not to let her uneasiness show, whether she was talking to some random troll who had spotted her movements or a creep connected to Improvement somehow. If he wanted to chat, why not let him? Words couldn’t hurt anyone.

“Are we going to talk properly,” she bumped back, “or just sit here all day slinging quotes at each other?”

An incoming call patch began to flash.

She took a deep breath. This was it.

“Who are you, and what do you want?”

But the voice at the other end of the call was a familiar one.

“Clair?” said Zep. “Quit screwing around. I need you.”