Twinmaker

Q didn’t respond.

“Q? Did you hear me?”

“Sorry, Clair. I . . . uh, I have a message for you from Ant Wallace.”

There was something odd about Q’s voice. Clair had never heard her sound defeated before.

“You have five minutes, Clair,” said Wallace over the intercom, “or I’m opening an airlock. If you don’t give me what I want, you’ll suffocate.”

“Shut him off,” Clair said. “Does he think I’m stupid? I’ll be gone long before then.”

“There’s something we didn’t think of, Clair,” said Q. “I can’t send you back to Earth.”

“Why not?”

“The rest of Wallace’s private network has been shut down. I can only bring you back through the public network.”

“So?”

“That too will cause a parity violation,” Q said. “There’s already one of you on the Earth, remember? Your dupe . . .”

Clair stared blankly into her lenses, not seeing the dataverse that was Wallace’s station, not seeing the text of the message he had sent, thinking only of how he had trapped her. He was using her as a hostage.

“Can’t we just hack into the airlock controls instead?”

“Wallace has grenades rigged to blow the airlock. I can’t stop an explosion.”

“Wouldn’t that kill him, too?”

“Almost certainly, but I guess he doesn’t think he’ll have to go through with it. He’s sure the threat will be enough. We won’t break parity. We can’t.”

“But he can’t win,” Claire said, imagining the air being sucked out into space, leaving her gasping and dying. “There has to be a way around this.”

“There isn’t,” said Q. “I’m trying really hard to think of something, but I can’t. If we don’t give him what he wants, you’ll die.”

“I can’t give him you, Q. You don’t want to work for a monster like him. He made you like this!”

“What else can I do, Clair?”

“Can’t we break parity just this once, for me and Turner?”

“We . . . can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I . . . I don’t know.”

“You don’t know how to do it, or you don’t know why we can’t?”

Q didn’t answer.

Clair had heard that kind of hesitation before, when Q was talking about her life and the weird existence she had in the hangover—particularly when she hit the edges of her memory, as she had with her name a moment ago. But what could be causing that block now? What was it about Q that made her unable to attack the system itself?

Wallace’s countdown was continuing. Just four minutes remained. Whatever Q was sticking on, Clair would have to talk her around it.

“You said that creating a parity violation would mean breaking one of the AIs,” she said. “Couldn’t the system run on just one AI?”

That got Q talking again.

“Maybe, but it wouldn’t be safe.”

“Which one would be broken? The conductor or the driver of the bus?”

“The driver, Quiddity. Without him, errors of any kind wouldn’t be spotted. There would be—”

“Wait, what did you call him?”

“Quiddity. That’s his name.”

“Does the other one have a name, too?”

“She’s called Qualia.”

“How do you know this?”

“I don’t know. I just do. . . .”

Those names weren’t public knowledge. Clair had never heard them before. Turner had said that wranglers had named the AIs after philosophical concepts, but he hadn’t mentioned the names themselves.

But Q knew. Why Q?

A shiver went down Clair’s spine.

Qualia and Quiddity maintained the safe operation of d-mat on VIA’s behalf. That was what Q said. The AIs were completely reliable—not even Turner had been able to hack into them. But both Improvement and duping were inside jobs, so somehow how Ant Wallace had gotten around them.

Instead of breaking the rules, or bending them as Q had, what if Wallace had simply found a way to stop the AIs from noticing what was going on? What if he had created partitions in their minds that maintained the secrets the rest of them could never know? A bit of Qualia here, a bit of Quiddity there. If the AIs weren’t designed to monitor their own behaviors, then they could be programmed to Improve, dupe, even kill.

Clair thought of the d-mat symbol, of two circles overlapping. It normally represented two worlds united by the miracle of matter transmission. Clair wondered now if it might mean something completely different to Q.

Suppose each circle was one of the AIs, with the dark fragments in the overlap. Subversive, unfettered by the usual laws governing artificial intelligences, un-wrangled . . .

What if they had slowly added up to something much larger than their individual parts? What if Qualia and Quiddity had accidentally created a child? A child who didn’t know who she was and was nothing like the stunted, mechanical minds that had spawned her? A child whose first attempt at communication might have been to say its creators’ names?

qqqqq . . . qqqqq

The shiver became a cold certainty planted deep in her gut.

Clair remembered Q’s first words to her—ominous, misquoted, but interested. Fascinated with Clair and Mallory’s other victims. That fascination had been expressed through snippets of knowledge pulled from the Air. Snippets were all she had been then. Threads of meaning, caught in a tangle. Not yet conscious. Just reactive. Learning. A child in every sense of the word, trying to find her way through the world. Growing slowly and pursuing her evolving needs.

It was all there in their conversation.

We are exchanging information and learning from each other. Is that not stimulating for you?

I want to be your friend. Like Libby.

And Clair had unknowingly responded.

Buddy. Pal. Friend.

Like data at the receiving end of a d-mat jump, everything was falling perfectly into place. The dark fragments in the AIs had constraints, and those constraints remained part of Q. She couldn’t know how the pieces of her were used, but she could use them herself when she needed to. Like someone stealing a wrench and putting it back in a toolbox exactly where it had been before so no one would ever know, Wallace had caught her up in a weird kind of amnesia.

I didn’t know I could do it until I tried.

That was also why Q was drawn to the victims of d-mat: they were the victims of the fragments without her conscious knowledge. But the victims were her saviors, too. Her engagement with Clair had drawn her out of unconsciousness and into an existence of her own. Like any child, she trod in the footsteps of her . . . what, parents? . . . while slowly looking for her own path.

I have been following Improvement, Clair. That’s what I do.

That was why Q wasn’t as good as the dupes at staying in another person’s body.