Twinmaker

“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?”

7

CLAIR CLEARLY WASN’T the first to ask.

The library was noisy as always, full of students pretending to study. Clair had permission to enter the quieter rare editions wing, the only part of the library that held actual books. It was her favorite place at school, partly for the smell, mostly for the sense of isolation and peace. The rare editions wing was like a museum: outside normal time and private, best of all.

Putting on a live recording of her favorite Poulenc piano music, performed by her favorite pianist, Tilly Kozlova, Clair sent out crawlers and trawlers to scour the Air for more detailed answers to the Improvement question. Then she settled back to randomly skim the news reports, blogs, and media archives they found. There were countless discussions about what people would change given the chance, which only made her more certain that it couldn’t possibly work, because if it did, why wasn’t everyone impossibly tall, ripped, and well endowed?

The official word was that it was an urban myth, perpetuated by unknown pranksters through closely connected friendship networks. It didn’t go everywhere at once, saturating the system with a flood of impossible wishes, but there was no rhyme or reason to the way it did spread either. It came and went with all the apparent randomness of something genuinely spontaneous. A fantasy from the collective unconscious, perhaps—or a warning from the superego of what might happen if VIA’s safeguards were ever relaxed.

VIA dismissed it. Peacekeepers thought it harmless. Countless testimonies as to its lack of efficacy went a long way toward convincing Clair that Ronnie was right. Improvement simply didn’t work.

Buried amid the torrent of information dredged up by her search, however, was one emphatic but mysterious dissenting voice.

The message was light on hyperbole and unfortunately light on details as well. It had been written three years earlier and consisted of a warning from a woman whose public profile had been defaced. Instead of name and contact details, the fields displayed a single word, repeated over and over again.

Stainer. Stainer. Stainer.

Abstainers were what the minority of people who didn’t use d-mat called themselves. They didn’t use d-mat because they thought it was immoral or something like that—Clair didn’t know the details, but everyone she knew