Twinmaker

rewrite it again. Like every time we use d-mat.”

“You’re going to say and we still know who we are.”

She nodded.

“Can you tell me what happened at your tenth birthday party, Clair? How it felt the second time you kissed someone? What you had for breakfast ten days ago?”

She shook her head, even though she remembered vividly, would always remember, the second time she had kissed Zep. Her ordinary life before then felt infinitely distant.

“Now, imagine that those missing memories are actually pieces of your brain or your heart or your eyes. Is thinking that you know who you are still reassuring?”

“But we lose bits of ourselves every day anyway. Skin, eyelashes, fingernails—and no one cares. Aren’t all the cells in our body replaced every seven years?”

“Tissue we shed that way is dead tissue. If we chopped working cells from your muscles or brain, don’t you think you’d notice?”

“What about that line they always quote about the toenail—the total amount of human lost every decade?”

“What about Jesse’s mother? She disappeared, and she’s bigger than a toenail.”

“Yes, but—”

“It’s all about what you measure. Define human. Define missing. Hell, define toenail. Lies, damned lies, and statistics —the devil’s always in the details. D-mat started as nothing more than a new way of moving matter around, and look what happened. It saved the world, Clair, but might yet destroy us all. No one saw that coming, even those of us who were there at the beginning.”

She didn’t know how to respond to that, except by concentrating on something much smaller than the entire world’s problems.

“I’d like to check up on Q,” she said. “Do you know how to open the door?”

He nodded. “I’ll show you.”

They got up and tiptoed through the car so they didn’t wake the others. Turner showed her the code, and the door opened a crack, letting in light and cool, whipping wind. There were grumbled complaints. Clair ignored them.

“All quiet up there, Q?” she asked.

“Nothing to report. It’s all pretty dull, actually.”

“That’s what I want to hear.”

Her infield was full again—overflowing. Ronnie and Tash had been busy emailing school friends and striking up conversations about what Clair was doing. Ronnie called it “stimulating debate,” but Tash preferred “starting arguments”; Clair didn’t care as long as her name was used each time, helping her overall presence in the Air pop a little bit more. Some of her classmates had decided that she was playing hooky and off on an adventure in order to avoid an exam later that month. She was satisfied with that, too. It all added up.

Her mother and Oz, meanwhile, were nagging relatives and work colleagues to ask if they knew about Improvement. Had anyone heard of it? Did anyone have kids who had tried it? Both her parents were cautious in keeping the questions open rather than closed, which reflected their own ambivalence, Clair assumed. She was sure they would rather she gave up and came home, but given that she clearly wasn’t about to, their only option was to understand her concerns more clearly. And if there was something to it, then they would be informed.

Clair sent out the same formal reply to people she didn’t know and posted updates to the Air in various media.

There was one message from VIA, which she hadn’t expected. Her plan had been in operation for only a few hours, and already someone had noticed! All the message consisted of, however, was an impersonal set of instructions on how to formally register a complaint.

Clair refused to be bothered by the apparent rejection. She posted the message to the Air and created a new caption to accompany it: a video of a melting ice cream, played normally first, then reversed so the scoop appeared to be pouring back into the cone. Then she asked Q to disengage the drone from its magnetic perch and bring it alongside the train, pushing its fans to the limit so it could catch a glimpse of her through the car door. She was a shadow hidden in shadows. That was how she appeared to anyone watching her at that moment. She barely recognized herself.

Clair forced herself into the light and opened the door a fraction wider. As the drone’s cameras watched, she smiled and gave a defiant thumbs-up. According to the stats on her profile one thousand, two hundred thirteen people watched her do it, her parents among them.

Hi, Mom, she thought. Look at me, seeing the world.

There actually wasn’t that much to see, though. Just old farmland to the horizon, left to go to seed.

She shut the door. The train chattered on.

“I’m going back to sleep now,” Turner told her. “Thank you for keeping me company. It has been agreeable, as some old French guy might have put it. I like your energy. It gives me hope to fight alongside someone young like you.”

He went back to his empty bedroll, and she sat on her own for a few minutes longer, staring at her cracked and dirty fingernails. Agreeable wasn’t the word she would have used, and fight bothered her even more.

61

CLAIR OPENED THE door again as they passed through Chicago. Kids ran alongside the train as it rolled by, like something from an old movie. Her heart warmed at the thought of Abstainers all along their path loyally responding to Turner’s call. Then it occurred to her that without d-mat in their lives, there was probably nothing for them to do. To the children waving at her, stuck in the same place day in and day out, Clair’s expedition might have all the cachet of a real, live circus.

After Chicago, Clair lay on her sleeping bag, not sleeping but not entirely awake, either. She was thinking about ways to improve her statistics, to maintain interest before the spotlight moved on. She had no idea how people stayed famous all their lives, particularly the ones who never seemed to actually do anything. At a certain point, she supposed, fame became something bigger than the person possessing it. It could even live on after the person died, like a ghost—or perhaps more like Q did in the Air, still vital in its own way, changing and evolving with the times. Clair never wanted to experience anything like that. Once Improvement and the dupes were dealt with, she wanted to go back to being a nobody again. Except maybe for the odd crashlander party or two.

Clair got up and used the toilet. When she came out, Jesse was leaning into the open hood of the four- wheeler to see what lay inside. He looked long and thin in a uniform designed for stockier men.

“Dad tried to teach me about engines like these,” he said. “I wasn’t interested.”

“I thought you studied exactly this kind of thing at school.”

“Only if I had to. Anything with wheels bored me out of my skull unless I was riding it and going fast. I wish I’d paid closer attention now.”

She watched him, thinking fondly, Killer with a screwdriver. They hadn’t got on well at first, but she felt that she understood him better now. He had kept her going while they were running from the dupes, and he had backed her plan long before anyone else had. She was sure she wouldn’t have had the guts to go ahead with it if Zep had been there. Zep had been fun to be with, but he wasn’t as pragmatic as Jesse. Jesse, she was sure, would have thrown the rope rather than thrown himself off the observatory.

“Are you okay?”

She blinked, not realizing that she had been staring.

“Fine,” she said, then added, more honestly, “Tired. Nervous.”

“That’s all?”