Twinmaker

13

CLAIR SAT UP and flicked her bedside lamp on. The light made her blink, but it echoed the sudden feeling in her mind that she was seeing the situation in an entirely new and important light.

Libby was one hundred percent certain that Improvement worked.

Dylan Linwood was one hundred and ten percent certain that anything to do with d-mat was evil and that Improvement was just one example of the system causing errors.

Both were asking Clair to believe them.

Who would Clair rather was right? Whom did she trust?

She didn’t even have to think about it. Not the madman who built bikes for a living and ate plants he grew in the dirt. Not the conspiracy nut who wished there was something seriously wrong with Libby so he could use her for evidence against the system he hated. Not the insecure father who put Clair down in order to look tall in front of his son.

There were two possibilities: Improvement was all in Libby’s mind, or the global network was broken.

Clair would rather discover that all of VIA’s safeguards were useless than that a man like Dylan Linwood was right.

It was the middle of the night in Maine, but that didn’t matter. It was day for half the world. Clair got out of bed, got dressed in yesterday’s clothes, and moved quietly through the apartment to the dining room, where she fabbed notepaper and a pen. Gone out, she wrote for her mother’s benefit. Will call. That way there was no chance of being talked out of it, should a bump wake Allison up.

On a second piece of paper she wrote, My nose is too big. Like, HUGE. Help! Then she added the code words and folded the piece of paper in four and slipped it under the elastic of her underwear, so it pressed against her hip.

She was going to make things right between her and Libby by proving Dylan Linwood wrong.

Clair left the apartment and headed up the hall. Clair had never had d-mat at home. She counted herself lucky that the apartment building she lived in had a booth on each level, opposite the fire stairs that led down to the sidewalks, which no one ever used. That meant she only had to worry about the weather at the other end of her journey.

For the immediate future, there would be no other end to worry about.

“Lucky Jump,” Clair told the booth as the door slid shut.

The lights flared. The air thinned.

sssssss-pop

Her face in the mirror was unchanged. Of course.

She didn’t wait for the door to open.

“Again.”

sssssss-pop

“Again.”

sssssss-pop

“Again . . . no, wait.”

The booth was still and silent around her. An infinite number of Clair Hills stood motionlessly, wondering if her haste was a little ill-considered.

There were in fact three possibilities she needed to think about. One, Improvement was Libby’s fantasy; two, Improvement was a global hack; or three, Improvement happened in a private network.

Everything everyone had told Clair constantly reinforced the certainty that Improvement, if it worked, couldn’t operate in the public domain. VIA’s network was absolutely secure. She could jump the normal way a million times without changing the polish on her toenails one iota.

So for Improvement to work, it had to be as Clair’s mother had said: it had to be by the third option. That meant the note would have to operate as a signal to someone watching, someone who would reroute her from the public network to another place entirely—kidnapping her, in effect, if only temporarily, before returning her to the public network. That could happen to her on the very next trip or on the hundredth. Maybe it had already happened without her noticing.

Her lenses instantly put that fear to rest. She was on Rhodes, not far from the rebuilt Colossus.

“Woodward and Main, Manteca,” she instructed the booth.

sssssss-pop

She checked her coordinates, as she should have been doing from the start. No deviation.

“Now back home, please.”

sssssss-pop

She checked again. No deviation.

She repeated the cycle three times without deviation.

That would do it, she decided. Bouncing back and forth between the two, checking every time, would ensure she was only ever where she expected to be.

And if she did deviate, she would know there was something to Improvement—the meme, if not the actual process of changing someone into a better person. Proof wouldn’t necessarily require any physical changes to her nose. If she wasn’t at either the Manteca station or Maine, she would know that someone had read her note and diverted her—proving Libby right and Dylan Linwood wrong. The existence of a private network meant only that VIA had made a mistake, not that the entire system was at fault.

Or nothing at all would happen, in which case she would know that Libby was going through a bad patch that time, honesty, and a lot of patience would heal.

The eleven jumps had passed quickly, but just shy of half an hour had passed in the real world. Another eighty jumps to go before she equaled Libby’s marathon effort. As a young girl, Clair had imagined what it would be like to spend all day jumping. If her parents had let her use a booth without them, she would have danced across the world as though wearing twelve-league boots. Once she had her solo license, the impulse had worn off. Transit lag was a pain. It made her feel tired in advance just thinking about it.

Squatting with her back against the mirrored wall, she instructed the booth to return her to Manteca. Some people talked about losing their train of thought when they jumped, seeing wild flashes of color or even experiencing vivid microdreams. She, however, felt nothing as the machines cycled around her, sucking up enough power to run an old-time country for a year.

Ten more cycles, which made over thirty jumps. No deviations, no change. Clair was getting bored. Using d-mat never really felt like going anywhere, but at least there was a change of scenery to look forward to. This was worse than running in circles. This was just an endless cycling of air in a human-sized vacuum flask. She and her reflections went back and forth, back and forth, with only the Air for company, and that was poor fodder.

Libby had cut Clair’s close-friend privileges, so Clair couldn’t tell where she was. Ronnie and Tash were asleep. Zep wasn’t an option. No one else knew what was going on except Jesse, and he was a total dead end.

She thought about leaving Ronnie and Tash a message: If you never hear from me again, you’ll know I’ve turned into a turnip or something. But this was between her and Libby; it wasn’t for anyone else to know about. And it certainly wasn’t a joke.

Ten more cycles and her ears were starting to hurt. After her fortieth jump, her right eardrum didn’t unpop, so she spent an awkward ten minutes walking around the booth in Manteca, waiting for her sinuses to clear. A sharp pain shot through that side of her head, and she stood still for a moment, waiting anxiously for it to go away.

It did, along with the blockage in her ear. She performed one more lap of the booth, for luck, and to prepare herself for resuming the tedious confinement within. How long until she decided that her theory about private networks was wrong? Part of her hoped that her nose would change, just to liven things up.