Twinmaker

up and pushed herself away from him. Her head was pounding. She felt trapped. She wanted to leap out of the car and onto solid earth. She wasn’t used to things moving, shifting, turning the way they did in the world Jesse and the others inhabited.

Now you’re free, Gemma had said. Free to be herself, but she didn’t feel free. She wanted everything to be still, just for a moment, so the person she had been could catch up to her, if it wasn’t already too late for that.

“God, I hope it’s not,” she breathed.

“Deceitful as it is,” said a soft voice out of the dark, “hope at least leads us to the end of our lives by an agreeable route.”

She looked around. Two dark eyes were staring at her out of the gloom. They belonged to Turner.

“Is that a quote?”

“More or less. Someone French, I think.”

He unfurled himself from his sleeping bag and came to sit nearer her.

“You can’t sleep either,” he said.

“It’s not that. I mean, I was asleep, but . . .” She hesitated, not entirely sure which particular anxiety was dominating her thoughts at that moment. “I’m afraid I might’ve talked you all into something really stupid.”

“This plan of yours?” He smiled. “If I worried about every stupid thing I’ve done, I’d never sleep again.”

His unlined, youthful face gave him away. “You’re not the worrying kind,” she said. “I can tell that just by looking at you.”

“Appearances . . .” He stopped as Ray snuffled and rolled over, then continued in a softer tone, “. . . are deceitful, like hope.”

“Apparently. Everyone tells me you’re eighty years old.”

“That’s not true,” he said.

“Obviously.”

“I’m eighty-three next month.”

She stared at him with aching migraine eyes. “Fine. Whatever.”

“I’m not lying,” he said. “People come to WHOLE for a variety of reasons. They are harmed, or someone they love is harmed. Some people just know: they look at the people around them and the situation in the world at large, and they know that there’s something very rotten in the state of d-mat.”

He sighed. “I’m not like them. D-mat never harmed anyone I love, my family, anyone I ever cared about, yet I have lost them all forever. They might as well be dead, because I am dead to all of them now. I faked my death to spare them what happened to me.”

“What was it?” she asked. “Some kind of disease?”

“Quite the opposite. I am as healthy as a thirty-year-old man and have been for many decades. D-mat twisted my body and made it into a disguise. Everything about me is wrong. My very existence is a lie and a curse—a curse that many, unfortunately, would kill to possess.”

“D-mat gave you eternal youth?”

“D-mat mutated me. It’s frozen me, set me apart from the world. When my condition started to show, I had no choice but to abandon my life. I can never go back, or people will ask questions. I can’t move on, can’t ever be normal. God help me if I tried to have children. What horrors might they inherit from me? What mutations might I visit upon them in turn? That is the vilest thing of all.”

“Haven’t you had your genome sequenced, diagnosed—?”

“No.” He shook his head in absolute denial. “Once it’s out there, once someone learns what I am, the secret could not be contained, and then we’d be back where we were fifty years ago, overpopulated, poisoning the planet with our filth. Really, I should wear gloves and shave my head, or lock myself in a bubble, or kill myself to stop my genes from escaping—but I am human to that extent at least. I want to be part of the world and make a change for the better, while I can.”

A horrid thought struck her. “Jamila had a crush on you, and she was, what, twenty-five?”

He inclined his head. “Grossly inappropriate, but very flattering for a guy who remembers the birth of the Air. I didn’t do anything about it, I swear.”

60

THE CAR KNOCKED from side to side with the irregularities in the tracks. Clair struggled to accept that a man who looked barely older than her had actually lived longer than her grandfather.

“You’re ancient enough to remember the Water Wars,” she said.

“Vividly. I was conscripted to fight in Brazil. Terrible times. We had rationing back then, and martial law. We were right on the brink of disaster. Difficult to imagine now, isn’t it? There were death camps in Brazil, Bangladesh, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Senegal, and Cambodia. . . . The United States was lucky on the whole. We lost only Florida, and no one complained about that.”

It was an old joke, long stripped of humor, and for the first time she accepted that he might be even older than the joke was.

“D-mat saved the world,” she said. “Why do you hate it so much?”

“I didn’t always,” he told her. “Before the wars I worked for the consortium that brought it into being. Not working on the technology itself but on the control software. I was an AI engineer, commercially and with the joint forces. We called ourselves ‘wranglers,’ as with cattle. AIs were strange new things with their own rules, their own surprising twists and turns. It took a certain kind of person to tame them. The concern was that they would break out and take over the world. That was before we had a better idea of what intelligence was. We imagined these huge, planet-sized minds gobbling up every piece of knowledge we had and thinking thoughts that would destroy us all. Now we know that we can train either big minds that are dumb across the board or small minds that are supersmart at only one or two things. What we were afraid of just can’t exist in the Air. That’s why robots never really got off the ground. The AIs we have today are vigilant, tireless, and thorough, but they’re great at missing the obvious. They’re not alive. Consciousness is complexity, Clair, and the only way we’ve found to make that is the old-fashioned way.” He smiled. “We’re all too good at breeding small, dumb minds. Nowhere near smart enough to build our own successors.”

“Were you good at it?” she asked. “Taming AIs, I mean?”

“Not really. That’s how I ended up wrangling people instead. I do remember the AIs we built for VIA, though. They were the big, dumb kind: patient, plodding, tireless, no initiative at all.”

“Could you hack into them?”

“No. And I’ve tried, believe me.” He stared into space for a second. “We named them for philosophical concepts concerning the nature of things. Different concepts because they handle different roles in the d-mat process. One AI is all about numbers and atoms—the essential math that leads to a thing being what it is. The other is about the subjective quality of the final object: whether it’s still the same or not, even though every physical piece comprising it has changed at the most basic level. WHOLE champions the second problem, while VIA thinks only of the first. It’s amazing the system hasn’t cracked completely open with those two very different minds at its heart.”

“What would happen to the bus,” she said, “if the conductor and the driver had an argument?”

“Chaos, of course.” He glanced at her with eyebrows raised. “You could describe the AIs that way. Who gave you that analogy?”

“Q. She was telling me how she and the dupes do what they do without the AIs in VIA noticing.”

“She’s more or less right about their roles, if a little simplistic.”

“I don’t think she’s old enough to know much about philosophy.”

“That’s probably true of you, too, Clair. But don’t worry. When you’re an old coot like me, you’ll have plenty of time to catch up. Philosophy is all I seem to think about these days.”

I hope I look half as good as you do while I’m doing it, she thought.

“I read somewhere once,” she said, “that every time we think of a memory, we erase it from our mind and