Twinmaker

45

CLAIR OPENED HER mouth to say, Because someone else is using it.

Then a noise came from behind her. She swiveled on the spot to find the internal door opening.

“I have to go,” Clair sent quickly to Q. “Don’t worry. We’ll work this out. I’m sure of it.”

Clair stood up as the woman with the mismatched eyes stuck her head through the door.

“They want you to come up now.”

“Okay,” said Clair.

“Both of us?” asked Jesse, unfolding and rubbing his eyes.

The woman nodded. “Turner’s waiting.”

Her head retreated, and the door shut behind her. This time, the lock didn’t click.

“About time,” said Clair, hiding a twinge of excitement behind justified resentment.

Jesse tugged his shoes on and handed Clair hers. They weren’t squelchy anymore, but they remained uncomfortably damp.

“This is it,” she said unnecessarily.

Jesse stood up and glanced about him, as though looking for his shoes, then saw them on his feet, where he had put them seconds ago. “All right. After you.”

“No, you first,” she said. “They’re your people.”

“Only by association.” One sleep-encrusted eye peered at her through his bangs. “Besides, you’re awake.”

She granted him that point.

The door took them to a spiral staircase that coiled to the floor above them. Jesse followed Clair at a respectful distance, but even so, her muddy sneakers came close to braining him a couple of times. When they reached the top, they found themselves standing under a transparent dome through which the sun shone brightly in a pale-blue sky. Around them were the members of WHOLE, Gemma and Ray among them, sitting cross-legged and staring at the new arrivals.

“Take a seat, Clair and Jesse.”

The invitation came from a man much younger than Clair had expected, dressed in cotton pants and a long-sleeved shirt. He looked to be in his twenties, with short-cut black hair and the squarest jaw Clair had ever seen. His eyes were so dark brown they looked almost black.

“Sit anywhere,” he added. “We don’t stand on protocol here. Pardon the pun.”

His white teeth flashed at her.

The nearest spare cushion was by the window, yellow stitched flowers on red corduroy, obviously handmade. Clair sat, feeling uncomfortable. Jesse perched himself on a bright-blue bolster halfway around the circle.

“Welcome to the headquarters of the World Holistic Leadership,” the dark-haired young man told them. His cushion was slightly elevated, and his voice had a molasses quality. “My name is Turner. Gemma has told me all about your situation.”

“What is my situation?” Clair asked, finding her voice. She was still irritated by having waited so long. “Am I expected to join WHOLE to stay up here?”

“Our hospitality is unconditional. Anybody who knocks on our door will gain entry.”

“That’s all very well when your door is thousands of feet in the air.”

Turner smiled again. “Don’t think we’re debating whether to throw you out the window. I promise you we only do that to spies and dupes. Hardly ever to popular zombies like you, Clair.”

“‘Hardly ever’?”

His smile broadened. “Do we look like monsters, Clair?”

“I don’t know. Looks can be deceiving.”

“Indeed, they can be. That’s why you’re here, after all.”

She nodded. “How long have you known about Improvement and the dupes?”

“The former, almost five years,” he said. “The latter, less than one. It’s a new development aimed in part at us, we think.”

“You’re not sure?”

“It has obvious military applications. We suspect that members of the OneEarth administration are not who they seem.”

She shook her head, not wanting to go down that path.

“Have you told anyone about them?” she asked him.

“We try, of course. You’ve seen what happens to us when we do. The dupes are the defense mechanism of a corrupt system: Improvement is just one of many immoral practices the dupes exist to protect. Whether they act autonomously or at the instigation of secret masters we do not know.”

“Dad never said anything about this,” said Jesse.

“He didn’t know everything,” Turner explained. “WHOLE operates in cells, so when one is taken out, the others survive. Dylan was a valued member who struggled with his high public profile. He wanted to be more active; we tried to protect him from the consequences. What happened was truly regrettable.”

He offered his palms in a gesture of helplessness.

“He was duped,” said Clair, “so you blew him up. Very subtle.”

“My people acted swiftly and decisively to prevent any deaths that might have resulted from his impersonation,” Turner said. “I’m the first to admit that not every decision made in a theater of war is perfectly considered or perfectly rendered.”

Jesse was watching intently, almost desperately, as the true fate of his father was openly discussed at last.

“In order to be duped,” Jesse said, “you have to have a pattern, and that means going through d-mat. How did they manage that with Dad? He never used d-mat once, not in his entire life.”

“We think he was intercepted on the way home from your school,” Gemma said. Her arm had graduated to a sling; her shoulder was tightly bandaged. A pink painkiller patch stood out on the side of her neck. “They put him into a booth in one of the apartments nearby. There, he was sent on a null jump, meaning he was analyzed and rebuilt in the same booth, exactly as he had been. That’s how they got his pattern. And that’s why he’s injured every time he comes back. He resisted capture and was punished for it. The injuries he has received are built into the base pattern they’re using for his dupe.”

Jesse looked as though he wished he hadn’t asked.

“Do you know who he is?” asked Jesse. “The man . . . inside him?”

“No. But whoever he is and whoever he works for, they’re worse than murderers. Copying a pattern is legally considered kidnapping, erasing a pattern is murder, and damaging a pattern is the same as causing bodily harm. Putting a mind into someone else’s head—or even just altering a person, as Improvement is supposed to do—that lands you in a completely new category of crime. It’s a kind of mental rape.”

Clair thought of Q and stayed silent. Q had only taken over Libby briefly, and then restored her immediately afterward. That such supposedly impossible transformations could go both ways gave Clair hope of finding a cure for what Improvement had done to Libby in the first place. Duping and Improvement weren’t the same thing, but they both used d-mat to change people. Change could be reversed.

“What do the dupes want?” asked Jesse.

“The dupes or their masters, if they have them?” asked Turner. “They want what everyone in power wants, I suppose. Can you tell me the first steps in establishing a dictatorship?”

Jesse shook his head.

“I can. They are very simple. First you rob people of their individuality, and then you find a way to observe them completely. D-mat offers the perfect means to do both. Go through a booth, and everything you carry—everything you are, right down to the wiring of your brain—can be monitored without your knowledge. Tracking devices and bugs can be installed; information can be rewritten or written entirely from scratch. That is the world we live in. No regime ever before has had the power to manipulate people so easily. It’s unprecedented in human history. And no one fights it. People fed convenience and prosperity seem to accept that they live in a world without physical value. Who’s to say their minds haven’t been made up for them? Once you can build people atom by atom, rewiring brain cells is easy—which might explain what to me seems so inexplicable, why the world is teetering on the brink of a totalitarian dark age and no one but us complains. . . .”

Turner was speaking to Jesse and Clair, but his acolytes were nodding and murmuring in agreement. There was no room for doubt in the choir Turner was preaching to, wearing patched clothes and ferrying their food up from the ground below. Turner reinforced the belief that the hurt in their life wasn’t just random bad luck. His brand of alchemy was supremely palatable to people with no place in the world.

Clair understood that. Her friends, family, and future were under threat. She totally wanted to plug the aching void where her life had been with something concrete, something that shored up her strength. And there was a kind of strength to WHOLE. Against considerable odds, Gemma and Ray had escaped the dupes and reached their headquarters.

But that wasn’t enough. No one listened to Stainers. They were ostracized and ignored. They ostracized themselves, Clair thought. Tempting though it might be for some to hide on a cloud and mutter discontentedly, it wasn’t enough for Clair. It wouldn’t help Libby. It wouldn’t stop Improvement from happening to someone else. It wouldn’t save Clair if she, too, was at risk.