Crashland (32 page)

There was no point waking Jesse either, because his augs were old and no doubt his software was, too. Clair's were the latest available.

Under the most accessible layer, the one responsible for her wallpapers, infield, and personal data, she found a line that looked promising. There was a whole directory dedicated to data received and transmitted. Somewhere in there might be the file or files she was looking for: the files containing the map of Wallace's network. But without knowing what it was called, she could only look for files with the right time and date stamp, and there were a lot of them. Her dupe had been active then, and he had had access to her public profile at that time too. . . .

That thought almost sent her reeling. Her dupe. Was that why Nobody had attacked her in New York? Had he hoped that by blowing up he could damage her lenses and maybe get rid of this data? Clair remembered the sliver of bone sticking out of Sargent's tear duct. If the peacekeeper hadn't come between her and the second blast, as she had on Ons Island, that could easily have been her.

Clair copied the entire directory to another location, where it couldn't be erased by some automatic update or cleanup, and began checking files at random.

An hour later, she had found the files but was forced to admit she couldn't search through them on her own. Her dreams of mazes and lines hadn't begun to capture the complexity of what Wallace had constructed in his orbital hideout, which Q had allowed her access to. There were countless views of structure she had barely glanced at in the moment. Those people she had rescued, like Jesse, had been searchable, but others hadn't been, and admiring the scenery had been a low priority.

Now she could begin to guess where some of those lines on the map went, but there was still so much she didn't know. A large number of the threads led from the space station to VIA, of course, since the Virtual-transport Infrastructure Authority was intimately connected with Improvement and duping. Other threads may have led to other branches of OneEarth, but having only the map and lacking the actual connections it was impossible to tell for sure. She needed someone who understood networked systems and VIA in particular better than she did.

What she really needed, she thought, was a private investigator working solely for her, so she could be sure the information wouldn't get into the hands of anyone compromised by the dupes. But there was no way she could afford to pay for someone's time like that.

She would have to be her own investigator, with the assistance of the people around her . . . in the hope that she could find and erase the dupes before they got to her, or killed her mother, or did any number of horrible things that she didn't want to begin to imagine.

“Is anyone awake?” She bumped the others, knowing Jesse wasn't but ready to physically nudge him if no one else responded.

“I'm on lookout duty,” said Sargent. “What's up?”

Clair was about to open a chat and tell her what she had found, but thought better of it. The PKs had had access to her public profile; they would know what data was in there, even if they didn't know what it meant. If she told them, they could pursue the solution on their own and—if Forest had his way—erase Libby and Zep and all the others without consulting anyone, along with the dupes.

She couldn't allow that to happen. Hopefully the RADICAL firewalls now on her lenses would prove too much for the PKs. With luck—and she felt bad for thinking this, but for once something horrible might actually work in her favor—dupes elsewhere would keep the PKs too busy to poke their noses into her affairs. According to the PK patch that still tracked them, the world was crawling with them.

“Can I have access to everything you've got on Wallace and VIA?” she bumped back.

“Of course,” Sargent said. “It's public record.”

“All of it?”

“Everything verifiable.”

Clair did open a chat then, and chose her words carefully. “I want the unverified stuff too. Whatever it is the dupes think I know, Wallace's PA might know too. Or the Improved. Their statements could be full of clues.”

“There's a lot of material.”

“We have time.”

“All right. Are you open to being deputized? It's the easiest way for me to give you access.”

Clair thought this over for a second. “Does that mean I'm committed to being a PK?”

“No. Just promising to use the information responsibly.”

“Of course,” she said. “You trust me, don't you?”

“I'm happy to vouch for you,” Sargent said after a short pause. That didn't really answer the question, but it would do.

“Thanks.” Clair closed the chat, satisfied that this would supply some of her needs, and knowing there was still some way to go.

“Wake up,” she bumped Devin. “Wake up. Wake up. Wake up. Wake up!”

“Gah. Stop it. What do you want?”

She opened a new chat. “I'm going to dig around in the information the PKs found when they were hunting for the source of the dupes. Will you help with the technical stuff? I have no idea how networks like these fit together.”

“Sure.” He sounded sleepy. “Send it on through. Trevin can look at the data if I'm zonked. He sees everything I see, and he hasn't given up on us yet.”

“Great, thanks. Glad your big brother's good for something.”

“Again,” said Trevin over the chat, “right here—”

She closed the chat, satisfied that RADICAL could help her on that particular front. It still wasn't enough, though. There was one more piece of the puzzle she needed help with.

She used her lenses to find a link to the WHOLE muster and followed the trail from there to Agnessa.

“I need something from you,” Clair said.

A chat request came instantly. She accepted it.

“And what might that be now?” the leader of WHOLE asked.

Her voice sounded rich and full in Clair's ears. Clair imagined her drifting invisibly from camera to camera. Even if Agnessa hadn't been a hard-line Abstainer, the Improvement meme might not have tempted her with full health. What she had now was something like being a ghost, or a god.

“I don't think the source of the dupes is going to be in the Air, since no one's found it yet. It has to be something real, something that can be disconnected from everything else when it needs to be. It's likely to be hidden, perhaps a long way from civilization. Would you be willing to help me find it?”

“Lots of room for secrets in a desert,” Agnessa said, “or on the ocean floor. Sure, we'll help. We're good at exploring the spaces between. That's where we live.”

“Thanks. I'll be in touch again soon.”

“Have you spoken to Jesse?”

“Yes,” she said, and ended the chat, wondering if Agnessa had a camera on her. Her lenses didn't indicate any kind of physical surveillance, but they were in WHOLE territory now, where a different kind of law was in operation. She would have to remember that, moving forward, and not just for fooling around: here, the watcher could stay hidden from the watched. Here, an unknown god ruled.

SLOWLY, A GRAY
washed-out light crept under the door and Clair decided it was time to get up. Slipping her arm out from under Jesse without disturbing him and shaking out fiery pins and needles, she pulled on her baggy pants and buttoned up her too-tight shirt over her undersuit. Easing from the room with her breath held, she headed across the common area to the toilet block, where she cleaned her teeth and washed her face and tried to get her hair under control. Maybe it
was
time to cut it, she thought. A new do for the new Clair: Clair 5.0, who had survived the nightmare and was fighting back.

She smiled sadly, thinking of Libby. It was easy to imagine that worrying about her hair while the world fell apart was something her best friend might have done—but who knew how Libby would have changed had their roles been reversed? Libby wasn't a pushover; she was resourceful and strong in her own way, just like Clair had flaws and weaknesses that were entirely her own. Libby wouldn't be holding her former world at arm's length while she sorted out the situation with the dupes in private. She would find a way to do it so everyone could see and marvel at her brilliance. Clair had tried doing that, and had only made things worse. Maybe Libby 2.0 would have already saved the world.

But Clair wasn't going to give up, and that meant facing certain realities. She couldn't hide under a rock forever—not least because she had to be prepared if someone lifted the rock and exposed her to the truth. She had to know what it was she was trying to save.

Sitting on the steps outside their demountable, breathing in the crisp, wintry air and watching the airships bob and sway above her, she opened the icon containing the real world and peered inside.

The first thing that struck her was that it wasn't as bad as she had feared. People weren't starving; most of the fires were out; ways had been found to get people in dire need of medical care to doctors and hospitals, or vice versa. Long-outdated vehicles had been fabbed back into existence, including cars, helicopters, catamarans, and other forms of personal transport. What had once been employed for recreation or out of curiosity was now finding genuine use in a world deprived of the mobility everyone had been accustomed to.

Tash had attained the edge of the forest and was rehydrating. Ronnie had finally gone out her front door, and was talking to emergency workers in her local town hall. Clair glanced at the first of the messages piled up in her infield. They were as angry as she had feared, but at least her friends were safe. Better alive and angry than the alternative.

The crashlanders in the cave were all dead, even Xandra Nantakarn, suffocated by a cloud of carbon monoxide that had risen up over them while they slept. There was still no quick and reliable way to travel long distances, as several serious accidents had demonstrated beyond any doubt. Dupe attacks were still occurring, just as randomly as before. The Consensus Court was full of petitions for emergency measures, some of them shockingly extreme in their nature, from locking up people on the slightest evidence they might be dupes to executing anyone who broke the d-mat embargo. LM Kingdon was speechifying again.

“We must be both calm and resolute in the face of this creeping menace,” she proclaimed. “We must not panic. We must not give in. We must stand together against every abomination, and never shy from what must be done. We must do everything to preserve the human race from those who would destroy us from within.”

Oz was watching the speech, just like she was, from the town hall in Windham with the other deputies. His angry but silent approval spoke volumes. The dupes had stolen his wife. He wasn't going to take that lying down.

This time Kingdon didn't send Clair a message, maybe because of Clair's new association with WHOLE. Clair felt uncomfortable watching the latest speech. It wasn't that she disagreed in principle with the plan to exterminate the dupes, but there was something disturbing about the logic behind the call to arms. In Clair's mind it wasn't the human race versus the dupes: it was right versus wrong. There was a difference. Once the lawmakers and peacekeepers started dividing people up into different types, regardless of what they had done, couldn't people then get away with anything just as long as they belonged to the right type? She hoped that was just rabble-rousing rhetoric, not a return to the ways of the past.

The disastrous end to the fight on the seastead had probably contributed to Kingdon's case. The entire vessel had been destroyed by missiles dropped from orbit, thankfully long after the last survivor had escaped. Clair wondered if that was the Cashiles firing on the Linwoods, as someone might insecticide-bomb a nest of ants. Either way, it demonstrated a capacity for extreme violence that some feared might be unleashed elsewhere at any moment. That potential for violence only encouraged violence in return.

“Not really Wallace's style, is it?” Devin bumped her.

“What do you mean?” she bumped back, unsurprised that he was watching what she was watching.

“Taking out the seastead. Too big, too showy. He was a lurking-in-the-shadows kind of guy, because that's how you get things done. This is more leaping-into-the-spotlight-and-throwing-a-punch after the fight is over. Posturing, you know?”

She did know.

“So we're safe here for now,” she said over a chat. “From him, anyway.”

“That, and at least one of the factions among the dupes still has access to some serious orbital hardware. I didn't connect the dots before because I had other things to worry about, but look at what we've seen so far. There was Wallace's space station hideaway to start with, and now the missiles and the powersat Nobody used for his attack on the seastead. Someone's either got incredible hacking skills . . . or I don't know what's going on. An invasion from OneMoon, maybe.”

The only conclusion Clair could come to was that breakfast was long overdue. And possibly dinner and lunch from the previous day as well.

“Does it worry RADICAL, losing the seastead?” she asked him. “Do you wish you hadn't become involved?”

“Matter we can replace. People we can't. I have to admit that I'm not regarded as the golden boy I was a couple of days ago, but you know how it is. You've got to go with what you believe is right. And more survived than you might think. Our soldiers were testing suits that act as mobile booths when they're sealed. Take a hit and the armor will . . . uh . . . do what's needed to keep you alive. The results were encouraging.”

His hesitation puzzled her until she realized what he was talking about: the d-mat suits weren't just for moving people around from place to place in the middle of battle—which in itself was pretty amazing—but they could also heal people who had been injured. RADICAL wasn't ready to make that capacity known just yet.