Crashland
Authors: Sean Williams
I saw a planet running out of days.
I saw a president with hands upraised.
I saw a clock that was very good at chess.
I saw a computer in a fine silken dress.
I saw a priest dancing a jig.
I saw a pop star with the heart of a pig.
I saw a surgeon choking on gas.
I saw a soldier in a tube made of glass.
I saw the infinite even though it was naught.
I saw the mind that thought this thought.
Folk Poem, c. 2036
[1]
THE DAY THE
world ended, Clair Hill was sitting at a table in a tiny interview room opposite two uniformed peacekeepers, one of whom was the tallest woman she had ever met. With short blond hair and a friendly, open expression, PK Sargent's first order of business was to offer Clair a cup of coffee and summon a medic to look at her bruised elbow. The injury was minor but the memory of how she had gotten it was one of several running on rapid repeat through Clair's mind. There was nothing the medic could do about those.
The other peacekeeper, PK Forest, conducted the interrogation. In contrast to Sargent, who looked at most ten years older than Clair, Forest was a small man in his fifties, with narrow shoulders and thinning black hair. There was something wrong with his face. It jumped from expression to expression almost entirely without transition, one moment frowning, the next with eyebrows raised in disbelief. A second later he would tug his lips down as though profoundly saddened by something Clair had said.
She tried to look Forest in the eyes, not wanting to give the impression that she was hiding anything, but there was something wrong with them, too. They didn't track. They flicked from place to place with tiny, discrete movements.
Flick . . . flick . . . flick
. She forced herself to focus on the bridge of his nose instead, where his eyebrows almost met, and tried to concentrate.
His questions were relentless.
“I'm sorry you think I'm repeating myself”â
flick
â“but it's vital we know precisely what happened in the space station. You were a captive, yes?”
“Yes.”
“A prisoner, you say, of this man?”
An image of Ant Wallace appeared in the default PK-blue wallpaper of her lenses. The man who had until recently been in charge of d-mat looked just as ordinary and trustworthy as he always had, but it was a mask that meant nothing now. Clair had seen the man behind it, the man who had drawn her into a trap and threatened to kill her friends and destroy her life if she didn't give him what he wanted. He had forced her to desperate ends that even now she could barely believe.
Apart from that image, her infield was empty, a blank window in her field of vision that would normally be filled with bumps, news feeds, and chat requests. She was still completely disconnected from the Air, and no one would tell her when that was going to change.
“Yes,” she said, adding for the tenth time, “Ant Wallace took me prisoner.”
“Was this person also present?”
The photo of Wallace was replaced by another image, this time of a woman Clair didn't know. Thick, black hair, Asian heritage like Forest.
“I don't think so,” Clair said. “No, wait . . . is that Mallory Wei?”
“It is.”
Flick
. “How did you know?”
“Something about the eyes.” Mallory was Ant Wallace's wife, forced to cycle endlessly through the final stages of suicidal depression because Wallace couldn't bear to let her go. Her mask wasn't as complete as her husband's. Mallory's eyes held depths of empty despair.
“She was inside Libby's body. I never saw her real face.”
“Liberty Zeist was also present?” Forest asked.
“No, just her body. I've told you a thousand times! Improvement put Mallory in Libby's head. It
killed
her, just like it killed everyone else who was Improved. Why aren't you doing something about that? Why are you asking me all these questions instead of trying to stop the dupes?”
Flick
.
“We
are
trying to stop them, Clair,” said Forest with an earnest expression she had seen before and didn't trust. There wasn't a single thing about him that didn't scream
fake
to her. “Every peacekeeper has been mobilized to deal with the situation. But what is the situation? It is not just the failure of d-mat. It is the failure of the Virtual-transport Infrastructure Authority to oversee d-mat. And it is the failure of Ant Wallace to oversee VIA, in turn. He broke the most fundamental law he was obliged to upholdâthat no one could ever be killed or injured by d-mat. How was this allowed to happen? We must understand what occurred, and you are at the center of this process, Clair. It is my job to ask the questions that will help me understand
you
.”
“I'm just here to pretty the place up,” said Sargent. A joke, but Clair didn't smile.
She looked down at her hands where they rested on the lap of her orange prison jumpsuit. She didn't know that it was actually a prison jumpsuit, but it was so baggy and characterless and tight around the wrists and ankles that she felt like a prisoner inside it. Her clothes and shoes had been taken away for forensic analysis when she had arrived at the peacekeepers' New York office, not far from Penn Plaza. Her skin and hair had been sampled for chemical and biological traces. Then Forest and Sargent had turned up and started on her. No one had threatened her; she wasn't in handcuffs. But it was clear that she couldn't leave. Not once had she been allowed to talk to anyone else, in person or via the Air. It was just her and them in a room that was effectively a cell, with plastic walls, floors, ceiling, and fixtures, like they hosed it down after every session. The air itself was sterile.
“I'm not at the center of this,” she said.
“Who is, then, if not you?”
“You
know
who. It's Q.”
Flick
.
“Who is Q?”
She wanted to rip out her hair. “Qualia and Quiddity? The AIs who were supposed to keep d-mat safe? Wallace did something to them so he could make Improvement work, and that led to Q. I don't know how. But that's who she is. She thought she was real, and she
is
real, but she's not really . . .”
“Human?” Forest said.
“Define âhuman,'” said Sargent.
“Not like us, whatever she is,” Clair said. “I'm worried about her.”
“Because of what happened in the station?”
“Yes.” Clair dreaded the thought of the interrogation looping back on itself again.
You say you lied to Q. You said you'd always be her friend, and then you betrayed her, but she saved you anyway. She brought you back from the dead, breaking parity and the laws of d-mat to do it. Why?
“Are you going to charge me with murder?” she asked, clearing her infield to wipe Mallory's real face from her mind. She and Turner Goldsmith, leader of the activist group WHOLE, had used grenades to blow up the station and everyone in it, including themselves.
“Why?” Forest asked her. “Do you think you are the same Clair Hill as the one who died in the station?”
“I
am
the same Clair Hill.”
“Not exactly the same, and not legally the same. You are a copy made from the same pattern as that other version of you, taken the last time you went through d-mat.”
“But I think I'm the same. Doesn't that mean I'm the same?”
“That's for the Consensus Court to decide,” said Sargent. “Then there's the
other
Clair Hill we have in custody at the moment. Is she you as well?”
“Of course not! She's a dupe, not a copyâthe person inside her isn't me.”
“But how do we tell you apart if you're both claiming to be Clair Hill?”
“I don't know. Ask a lawmaker! Speaking of which, when are you going to let me talk to one?”
“Just as soon as someone makes the decision that you officially exist,” said Forest. He leaned a fraction closer, his expression not threatening but not reassuring, either. His eyes held a challenge.
Clair put her head in her hands. It hurt, and not just because of the harsh white lights that had been glaring down at her for hours. Her thoughts kept coming back to the same problems, over and over again, and they were no less harrowing and exhausting than the interview. Wallace had stolen her best friend's mind. He had threatened her mother. He had to go. But there had been other people on the space station when it had blown upâhis partners in crime, his minionsâand she couldn't forget them. She couldn't forget what she had done. She couldn't stop accusing herself of being even worse things than Forest and Sargent were implying.
Murderer. Terrorist. Dupe.
The words made her feel sick inside.
Is that who I am now? Is Clair 3.0 some kind of monster?
“I just want to go home,” she said through her fingers. “I want to talk to my parents. I want to see Jesse. I want . . .”
I want to know that Ant Wallace is dead and what I did wasn't for nothing
.
“I just want d-mat to start working again,” said Sargent. “The rest I can deal with, once that's fixed.”
Clair raised her head.
Great,
she thought. Another thing on her conscience.
“If I don't exist,” she said, “how can I possibly help you with anything?”
Flick
.
Forest smiled.
“Good point, Clair. Excuse me. I will be back in a moment.”
He stood briskly and walked to the door. It opened for him and he was gone without a backward glance.
THE DOOR CLICKED
shut.
“Where did he go?”
“I don't know,” Sargent said. “Maybe to stretch his legs. He likes to walk when he thinks, and it's a bit cramped in here. You've probably noticed.”