Twinmaker (5 page)

Like friends
, Clair thought now.
And boyfriends.

Libby wasn’t at the classroom when Clair arrived, didn’t turn up with everyone else, and remained silent as they took their seats and the teacher started talking about survivor narratives of the Water Wars. When Clair checked Libby’s public profile, it listed her location as school, but that was likely to be a fake for her parents’ sake, the same as it was when she went out partying.

“She sent me something last night.” Ronnie bumped Clair. “It was weird. Hang on—I’ll show you.”

A forwarded message appeared in Clair’s infield, which had changed to greens and grays to match the New Manteca campus. Bumps kept coming in about the crashlander ball. Another time she might have been pleased by her newfound notoriety, but not today.

Clair fixed on the message from Ronnie and blinked her left eyelid.

“It worked” was all Libby had said, about two hours after the party. “Now I’m beautiful!”

“I think she was talking about Improvement,” Ronnie said. “Check her transit data.”

Like Ronnie and Tash, Clair had close-friend privileges to Libby’s profile, which told her where Libby went and who with. Useful when Libby was running late, now it told Clair exactly where she had been the day before. There was a string of seventeen rapid jumps in the evening, when Clair and Libby had been looking for the crashlander ball, but there was also a long series of Lucky Jumps in the afternoon and another after Libby had said good night. Clair quickly tallied them up. Ninety jumps in one day. At two minutes a jump, that totaled around three hours’ lag.

Tash whistled. “No wonder she had a migraine!”

“What did she mean about being beautiful?” Clair asked Ronnie. “It can’t have worked, right?”

“Impossible,” said Ronnie. “That’s why she bumped me, I
think.”

“She wants you to believe because she really wants to believe . . . ?”

“Maybe she convinced herself the birthmark was actually fading,” said Tash. “She must have been ultralagged.”

“So then she crashes,” said Clair. “And what does she wake up to . . . ?”

“Bumps about you and Zep,” said Ronnie with characteristic bluntness.

“And of course the birthmark’s still there, which makes her embarrassed as well as angry.”

Clair was satisfied that they had her best friend’s mood mapped out but decidedly unsatisfied by what that left her with. She was unable to
do
anything until Libby responded, and she found it impossible to concentrate as a result. Her right foot hooked around her left ankle and jiggled restlessly. Not turning up for school wasn’t especially unusual; everyone skipped now and again, even Clair. But not like this, without an explanation, a single word . . . that wasn’t Libby’s style. She was a broadcaster, not a brooder.

“Clair? Clair, are you paying attention?”

She blinked and refocused. The teacher was talking to her, and the entire class was staring.

“I’m sorry,” she said, gathering up her backpack and avoiding the eyes of her friends. “I’m not feeling well.”

That was a lie, but staying would be a waste of time. There was
no faking out a live teacher. That was the whole point of school, Clair’s mom said. Anyone could cheat by copying answers from the Air; school was for learning how to cheat
people
.

Outside, Clair felt crushed by the silence. Ronnie and Tash sent bumps after her to see if she was okay. Had she heard something? Clair said she hadn’t and that she’d be coming back to class soon. What else could she do? She wasn’t sure that going anywhere would do any good. She just needed to
think
.

A chat request appeared in her infield.

Libby.

Before Clair could wink on it, the patch disappeared.

She thought, just for a second, about letting it go. Libby wasn’t normally so hesitant. If she really wanted to talk to Clair, she’d call back when she was sure of it.

But that didn’t fix anything now, Clair told herself. If best friends couldn’t talk through their issues, who could?

She responded with a request of her own, and it sat there for thirty seconds before anything happened. Then a window opened onto Libby’s bedroom. The shades were down, so if it was sunny outside in Sweden-somewhere, Clair couldn’t tell. Inside, the room was dark and grainy. Libby was a pale shape curled half
beneath the covers. She was lying on her side with her head under a pillow.

“Why can’t I see you?” Libby said in a gravelly voice.

“I’m walking outside at school. Why aren’t you here?”

“Slept in. Mad headache.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you answer my bumps?”

“Turned everything off. It was all too much.”

“What was?”

“Spam . . . strange messages . . .”

“What kind of messages? About the ball?”

“Just strange . . . Improvement stuff. I deleted everything.”

“Oh,” said Clair, feeling as though she’d dodged a bullet. If Libby had emptied her infield and switched off her feed, that meant she couldn’t possibly have seen the news. But she would eventually. “Listen—”

“Can’t talk long. Got to sleep some more.” Libby rolled over, pushing the pillow to one side. “Don’t want to waste this golden opportunity, before Mom gets home.”

“I need to talk to you when you’re feeling better.”

“I am feeling better,” Libby said with a sigh. “Slightly. Talk about what?”

“It’s just . . . the party. It didn’t end well. There was some confusion . . .”

“You’re telling me. I think I drunk-bumped Zep at one point when I got home. Did he say anything to you?”

“No. Why would he?” He had done the right thing and stayed
away. Or was it the cowardly thing? Clair couldn’t decide. “I hope you feel better about all that today. There’s really no reason—”

“To worry about him being a cheating toad? Sure there is. He was cheating when he hitched up with me.” She laughed, then clutched her head. “Ouch.”

Clair chickened out. It felt almost cruel, raising the subject when Libby was feeling so bad. “I didn’t think you drank that much last night.”

“Neither did I. This is the worst migraine I’ve ever had. Comes and goes at weird times—just when I think it’s done, it crashes back in. . . .”

“Do you need anything? I can probably get permission to come over—”

“You need to stay in school and study for both of us. I’ll learn by osmosis. Maybe we could make it a permanent arrangement.”

Libby grinned up at Clair via the camera pinned to the wall beside her bed. It was Clair’s first good look at her. Libby’s hair was pulled up in a nighttime knot. Her smile was wide and bright, but there were bags under her eyes, and her skin looked even whiter than usual—like the thin, fragile layer of ice riming the dome of the Sphinx Observatory.

“Stay beautiful,” Clair said.

Libby raised herself onto one elbow, smile falling away. Her face ballooned bigger still in the window.

“You can
see
me, right?” She winced. “Ouch,” she said again.
“Crashing. Bye.”

The window closed. Clair stared through the space it had been, not looking at the campus around her, not looking at anything, really, but the negative image of Libby as it faded from her retina.

Clair
had
seen Libby. What she hadn’t seen was Libby’s birthmark.

She bumped Ronnie. Clair knew what she would say but she needed to hear it again.

“Are you absolutely sure Improvement won’t work?”

“Positive. Don’t waste your time. And think of the Magic Mayflies. You don’t want to piss them off, do you?”

Clair smiled despite herself. “The Magic Mayflies” referred to a story Ronnie’s mom had told them when they were kids to explain how d-mat worked. You stepped into a booth and dissolved into a kind of pollen made entirely of light, which the Mayflies gathered and carried through the air to where you wanted to go. So if you used d-mat too much, the magic might run out, leaving you stranded.

But Ronnie’s mom had come from a different generation—just one removed from the Water Wars, when power had been short and d-mat not something to be taken for granted, when the seas had been rising and fresh water becoming more scarce every year. Hundreds of millions of people had died of starvation and disease until d-mat had literally turned the tides, stripping the world of its poisons and feeding the billions by reorganizing the atoms, turn
ing the bad into good. Now, with powersats high above the Earth beaming down limitless power and all the excess carbon dioxide sucked out of the air, there was no need for fairy stories. It wasn’t Magic Mayflies at the heart of d-mat but everyday machines that analyzed travelers right down to the smallest particle, transmitting the data that made them
them
to their destination through the Air and rebuilding them exactly where they wanted to be, exactly as they had been before they left.

VIA existed to make sure that critical word
exactly
didn’t go anywhere. The Virtual-transport Infrastructure Authority was a global body established to ensure the one hundred percent safe operation of d-mat. Two artificial intelligences oversaw VIA in turn, so no human errors could creep in. And it worked so comprehensively and constantly that the world’s network of d-mat booths reported the lowest rate of data loss out of all of humanity’s media. Everyone knew that the amount of
human
lost in a decade of d-mat was equivalent to a toenail clipping, total.

Of course, people told stories about criminals hacking the system. Dramas regularly featured duplicated jewels, disintegrated wills, cloned lovers, and the like. Every child listened breathlessly to tales about swapped bodies and shrunken heads, people flipped right-to-left or turned entirely inside out, scientists mixed up with insects, and worse. Clair herself had relished such stories even as she zigzagged across the globe, enjoying as everyone did the freedom to go anywhere she wanted at any time she wanted, safe
in the knowledge that VIA and its AIs would simply never let anything bad happen to her. She would always
be
her at the other end.

So Improvement couldn’t work, she told herself, just like Ronnie said. The image of Libby had been poor, and she had probably been wearing makeup from the night before—not unlikely, given she’d been lagged by ninety jumps on top of her migraine. Maybe Libby had been only half awake and had mistaken a darkened glimpse in a mirror for the reality she desired.

Improvement couldn’t work. So why was Libby acting as though it had?

Let it go
, Clair told herself as she walked to class.
You’re worrying about the wrong thing. Libby may not be angry at you
now
, but she’s obviously fragile, and her calm mood’s not going to last forever. Like everything else, the Zep situation is bound never to improve on its own.

But whether she was running from reality or not, the question wouldn’t leave her. Instead of going back to her classroom, she went to the library. It wouldn’t hurt to ask, would it? Just in case.

Calling up a query window in her lenses, she asked the Air, “Does Improvement work?”

“Yes” came the immediate reply, along with “No,” “Maybe,” and “Are you joking? This is what we use the sum of all human knowledge for?”

CLAIR CLEARLY WASN’T the first to ask.

The library was noisy as always, full of students pretending to study. Clair had permission to enter the quieter rare editions wing, the only part of the library that held actual books. It was her favorite place at school, partly for the smell, mostly for the sense of isolation and peace. The rare editions wing was like a museum: outside normal time and private, best of all.

Putting on a live recording of her favorite Poulenc piano music, performed by her favorite pianist, Tilly Kozlova, Clair sent out crawlers and trawlers to scour the Air for more detailed answers to the Improvement question. Then she settled back to randomly skim the news reports, blogs, and media archives they found. There were countless discussions about what people
would
change given the chance, which only made her more certain that it couldn’t possibly work, because if it did, why wasn’t everyone impossibly tall, ripped, and well endowed?

The official word was that it was an urban myth, perpetuated by unknown pranksters through closely connected friendship networks. It didn’t go everywhere at once, saturating the system with a flood of impossible wishes, but there was no rhyme or reason to
the way it did spread either. It came and went with all the apparent randomness of something genuinely spontaneous. A fantasy from the collective unconscious, perhaps—or a warning from the superego of what might happen if VIA’s safeguards were ever relaxed.

VIA dismissed it. Peacekeepers thought it harmless. Countless testimonies as to its lack of efficacy went a long way toward convincing Clair that Ronnie was right. Improvement simply didn’t work.

Buried amid the torrent of information dredged up by her search, however, was one emphatic but mysterious dissenting voice.

The message was light on hyperbole and unfortunately light on details as well. It had been written three years earlier and consisted of a warning from a woman whose public profile had been defaced. Instead of name and contact details, the fields displayed a single word, repeated over and over again.

Stainer. Stainer. Stainer.

Abstainers were what the minority of people who didn’t use d-mat called themselves. They didn’t use d-mat because they thought it was immoral or something like that—Clair didn’t know the details, but everyone she knew called them Stainers, after George Staines, their founder, and the idea that giving up d-mat would bring back all the pollution humanity had finally gotten rid of. They were regarded as crazy by pretty much everyone. Hence the defacement and worse.

Stainers didn’t claim to be sane. They claimed to be right.

“Improvement killed my child” was all the woman’s warning said.

Clair worried at her fingernail, thinking of Libby’s ghostly image crashing to black.

Feeling faintly foolish but knowing her grandmother’s genes wouldn’t let the thought go until she had pursued it to the very end, she scoured her contacts until she found the name of the only Stainer in her grade and asked if they could talk.