Twinmaker

78 redux

SSSSSSS-POP

Clair cried out at the sudden pain in her sinuses. Tears flooded her eyes, and for a moment she saw little more than a blur. She reached out to steady herself and felt glass walls on either side of her. Windows? No, mirrors. She obviously wasn’t in the office anymore. She had d-matted from a large space into a very small one, hence the pain in her ears. The small space was nothing more than an ordinary booth.

But where was Turner? The last thing she remembered was telling Q, “I promise,” and then calling up Turner’s pattern so they could destroy Wallace’s space station together. He was supposed to be there now, fresh out of the cache. Why wasn’t he, and why wasn’t she on the station anymore? What was going on?

The doors opened, and the air was suddenly full of clamoring alarms and smoke.

She blinked furiously. Slowly her eyes cleared. She stepped out into a scene of utter devastation.

Penn Plaza was covered in smoking rubble. Huge holes gaped in the side of VIA HQ, from which gouts of black smoke belched. Rescue and Repair vehicles swarmed everywhere, on land and by air. Several neighboring buildings were burning also. Everywhere Clair stared, she saw broken glass.

It looked like a war zone.

A small amount of mess, Q had said. No wonder Wallace had been frightened of her.

“Q?” Her infield was empty, even though she appeared to be connected to the Air. That was weird. After the events of the previous hours, she would have expected it to be overflowing. “Q, can you hear me?”

No answer.

Peacekeepers were everywhere, clearing rubble and helping put out fires. One of them looked up, saw her, and hurried over.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said. “The plaza is off-limits.”

“I, uh, just arrived,” she said, indicating the booth she had emerged from, one of eight in a line.

“You couldn’t have come in this way. We’ve isolated the subgrid.”

There was a rattle of footsteps from across the plaza as more peacekeepers ran to join them. They had their weapons drawn. She felt a stab of alarm at the thought that they might blame her for the attack on VIA HQ. She had brought WHOLE and Q here, after all. The PKs would know exactly who she was.

But then she saw Jesse among them, grinning excitedly, and all her worries were temporarily suspended.

She ran to meet him in the middle of the plaza, and they hugged until the pain in her injured elbow forced her to let go.

Jesse babbled an explanation.

“They said there was a parity violation, and I knew it was you. It had to be you. Your dupe is in custody, although she hasn’t admitted anything, not even when the satellite blew up. We were in space—do you know that? I already told the PKs about Wallace, and they actually seemed to believe me—I guess there’s too much evidence for them to ignore now—and I told them about Dad, too. He wasn’t a dupe, right? We can get him back, as real as he was before. As real as I am now, thanks to d-mat. All we have to do is figure out how.”

Clair nodded, wishing he’d slow down.

Her dupe: that was why Clair couldn’t access her messages. The Air wasn’t designed to recognize the same person twice. That meant she was still cut off from her friends, her family, her entire world. The other Clair had stolen her life!

Then there was Jesse’s dad. He wasn’t the only one Clair hadn’t been able to find: Libby was missing also. And Zep. If their patterns were in one of Wallace’s secret caches, then it all depended on what had happened to . . .

The station!

“It . . . blew up?”

“An orbital asset was lost fifteen minutes ago,” said one of the peacekeepers. Narrow shoulders set on an angle: PK Drader, she remembered, although her lenses remained dismayingly empty. “What do you know about that?”

“I know. . . .” Clair shook her head, feeling a deep sense of dislocation. “No, I don’t know. I shouldn’t be here. That’s all. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. Where’s Q? What did she do?”

“Beats me,” said Jesse. “But listen. This is the best thing of all. Angela Kadri—head of security, remember?—she’s been helping the PKs. They accessed the Improvement files. They know who, how many, why, all of it. And you’re not in there, Clair. You’re not one of them. You weren’t selected!”

She gaped at him, finding this news the hardest somehow to accept.

“I wasn’t Improved?”

“No. You’ve been you the whole time!”

The right body, Wallace had said. Not just any will do.

“But . . . how do you explain the way I’ve been feeling, the things I’ve done?”

“All you.”

“Shooting the dupe, destroying your bike . . . everything?”

“Saving our lives? All you, Clair.”

She couldn’t believe it.

You don’t know what you’re capable of until you try.

Clair was certain that killing herself for the sake of her friends wasn’t what her mother had had in mind.

But if the station was gone, that meant her plan had worked. Turner was gone too, physically blown up and erased—since his pattern had been cached in secret on the station—and so Wallace and Mallory had been blown up with him. The threat was over. Improvement and the dupes were finished.

Jesse hugged her, and for a moment she didn’t care that he was hurting her arm again.

“Uh, Jesse . . . ,” she said, looking over his shoulder.

“Yes?”

“What’s going on now?”

Jesse let go of her, brushed the bangs from his eyes, and looked around them.

The peacekeepers’ weapons were still raised. More than that: they were all pointed at her.

“We have a developing situation,” said PK Drader. “D-mat is on the verge of crashing. We have multiple shutdowns and jams. People are missing. We think the parity violation is the cause. You, Clair.”

“I can explain,” she said, pulling away from Jesse and raising her hands. She remembered the plan with perfect clarity: it had been hers, and it had been flawless, but it hadn’t ended the way it was supposed to, with her blown up along with the station, a glitch safely erased. “Q must have broken the rules in order to bring me back. She restored me from the last pattern available, the last d-mat jump I took before . . . what I did up there.”

“And Q is . . . ?”

“She’s the child of Qualia and Quiddity, the AIs.”

“She’s what now?” asked Jesse, wide-eyed.

“And you asked this Q to crash the system?” PK Drader’s face was hidden behind his visor, but his voice was grim.

“No. It was her decision. She did it to save me. But whatever’s going wrong with the system can be fixed, right?”

“Where is Q?” the peacekeeper asked. “We need to talk to her before the system collapses completely.”

“Shouldn’t you be talking to someone in VIA?” asked Jesse.

“VIA’s mandate is currently under review by the OneEarth administration.”