This time the door stayed shut.
“Saving me from what? From Improvement?”
“Your name is Rebecca Watts-Veldhoen,” was all the voice said.
“Your name is Shun Fay Anderson Wong.”
Clair’s reflection looked bloodless and desperate—the same hair, the same nose, but the fright in her eyes was new.
Claire could be anywhere. Would she step out of the booth twenty-five years later with two left feet and her heart on the wrong side of her chest? Would she lose her name and be stuck, unable to convince anyone of who she really was? Would she end up like Libby, beautiful, with a new nose and proud of it . . . or brain damaged and delusional?
Clair wished she could sit down with her best friend and find out was really going on. One proper conversation would be enough. At the very least, one good look at her cheek. . . .
The earpiece was gone. Her lenses and ear-rings were back. She winked on the call patch blinking in her infield.
“Your name is Clair Hill, and you are safe.”
26
THE DOOR OPENED. Clair stepped shakily from the booth and looked around. Dusk was thickening in the California sky. She smelled the sea. Definitely Manteca again. There was the same mix of tourists and commuters. The same summery twilight sky, even in November. She had come full circle.
There was no Dylan Linwood, and no one from WHOLE, either.
She thought she might weep with relief. But she couldn’t afford to let herself. It wasn’t over yet.
“What did you do to me?” she asked over the open call to “q.”
“I cut all the connections between you and the rest of the world. Then I made you look like someone else— not physically but semantically, so anyone searching for you through the Air wouldn’t see you. Now I’ve built you a mask to hide behind. All your identifiers are temporarily scrambled—name, address, preferences, history— everything that makes you look like you. The disguise will allow you to interface with the Air without being discovered, but I advise against contacting anyone you are closely associated with. That may draw attention to the mask, and therefore to who you really are.”
There were five benches arranged in a pentagon around the base of a broad-trunked tree. She took a seat, bouncing her right leg compulsively up and down as she tried to watch every direction at once, half expecting Dylan Linwood to leap out of a booth and attack her again, no matter what “q” said.
“Are you saying I can’t call my parents? Or Zep? Or anyone?”
“No, Clair. You can, but I
“Did the peacekeepers come?”
“Yes.”
“Does that mean they’re
“I do not know, Clair.”
“Can I at least go see Mom and Oz?”
“You should avoid using d-mat for the foreseeable future.”
“A search is currently under way for you. I can hide your identity from the Air, but there’s no hiding your DNA from VIA. All transits will be red flagged.”
Clair wiped sweaty palms on her skirt. Slowly it was sinking in that “q” had indeed gotten Dylan Linwood off her tail. But at what cost? By isolating her from everything and everyone she knew. And only by
Whoever “q” was, she had just done everything Improvement said it did. The implications were immense. On top of the possibilities that Improvement might be causing brain damage and Dylan Linwood was trying to kill her, it was too much. Clair wanted nothing more than to bury her head in the sand until it all went away. Clearly that wasn’t possible. The best she could do was hope to understand it one piece at a time. Starting with the piece that had nothing to do with murder or anyone apparently coming back from the dead. . . .
“You changed my pattern,” she said. “How did you do that?”
“As long as I maintain parity and don’t hurt anyone,” the voice said, “I can do a lot of things.”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘parity.’ Doesn’t changing someone set off an alarm?”
“Material objects come under far less scrutiny than people, which makes them much easier to reroute or create from scratch. That’s all a fabber does, after all, and fabbers are allowed to do it as often as you ask them to, because you only ever use them to make
“Like you did with my name?”
“Something like that,” “q” said. “When a pattern is taken by a d-mat booth, two very important things happen. First, it’s checked against databases containing prohibited compounds, genetic records, and so on. Most people are licensed to carry most things through d-mat, but suicide bombers shouldn’t be allowed to, and neither should young kids trying to run away from home. If the database doesn’t reveal anything like that, the transfer is given a conditional green light. This phase of the process is handled by one of the two AIs VIA uses to keep the system running safely.
“Now, if you think of the first AI as the conductor of a bus—”
“A what?”
“An outmoded mass-transport vehicle.”
“Like a train?”
“Kind of. If the first AI, the conductor, is the one that checks your ticket as you get on and off the bus, then that makes the second AI the driver of the bus. Its job is to get you safely to your destination without being duplicated or erased or sent to a booth that doesn’t exist.
“These two AIs, conductor and driver, are bound by a principle similar to the laws of physics: that in a d- mat booth, unlike a fabber, matter can neither be created nor destroyed. Even though both happen at opposite ends during the jump, it has to
Clair was about as vague regarding physics as she was buses. It was a struggle to keep up with what “q” was telling her.
“What happens when it doesn’t?”
“That’s called a
“Which obviously hasn’t happened, or we’d have noticed,” Clair said. “How did you work this out?”
“It’s right there in the algorithms, if you know where to look.”
“Do you know who else might be doing it?”
“No, Clair. I’m sorry.”
