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 hadnt and that shed be coming back to class soon. What else could she do? She wasnt 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 wasnt normally so hesitant. If she really wanted to talk to Clair, shed call back when she was sure of it.
But that didnt fix anything now, Clair told herself. If best friends couldnt 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 Libbys bedroom. The shades were down, so if it was sunny outside in Sweden-somewhere, Clair couldnt 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 cant I see you? Libby said in a gravelly voice.
Im walking outside at school. Why arent you here?
Slept in. Mad headache.
Why didnt you tell me? Why didnt 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 shed dodged a bullet. If Libby had emptied her infield and switched off her feed, that meant she couldnt possibly have seen the news. But she would eventually. Listen
Cant talk long. Got to sleep some more. Libby rolled over, pushing the pillow to one side. Dont want to waste this golden opportunity, before Mom gets home.
I need to talk to you when youre feeling better.
I am feeling better, Libby said with a sigh. Slightly. Talk about what?
Its just . . . the party. It didnt end well. There was some confusion . . .
Youre 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 couldnt decide. I hope you feel better about all that today. Theres 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 didnt think you drank that much last night.
Neither did I. This is the worst migraine Ive ever had. Comes and goes at weird timesjust when I think its 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. Ill 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 Clairs first good look at her. Libbys 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 usuallike 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 hadnt seen was Libbys birthmark.
She bumped Ronnie. Clair knew what she would say but she needed to hear it again.
Are you absolutely sure Improvement wont work?
Positive. Dont waste your time. And think of the Magic Mayflies. You dont want to piss them off, do you?
Clair smiled despite herself. The Magic Mayflies referred to a story Ronnies 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 Ronnies mom had come from a different generationjust 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, turning 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 wasnt 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 didnt 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 worlds network of d-mat booths reported the lowest rate of data loss out of all of humanitys 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 couldnt 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 beforenot unlikely, given shed 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 couldnt work. So why was Libby acting as though it had?
Let it go, Clair told herself as she walked to class. Youre worrying about the wrong thing. Libby may not be angry at you now, but shes obviously fragile, and her calm moods 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 wouldnt leave her. Instead of going back to her classroom, she went to the library. It wouldnt 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?
7
CLAIR CLEARLY WASNT 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 couldnt possibly work, because if it did, why wasnt 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 didnt 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, perhapsor a warning from the superego of what might happen if VIAs 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 didnt 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 didnt use d-mat called themselves. They didnt use d-mat because they thought it was immoral or something like thatClair didnt 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 didnt claim to be sane. They claimed to be right.
Improvement killed my child was all the womans warning said.
Clair worried at her fingernail, thinking of Libbys ghostly image crashing to black.
Feeling faintly foolish but knowing her grandmothers genes wouldnt 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.
Jesse Linwood was a junior like her, and they shared Modern History on Tuesdays, but that was where their similarities ended. Jesses other subjects were focused on math and engineering. They never hung out.
It wasnt personal. Their paths simply never crossed. He didnt come on excursions if they involved d-matwhich they always didor eat at the refectory, where the food was always fabbed. Libby called him the Lurker because he sometimes popped up in school social media but rarely said anything. That could have been the fault of his augs, which were embarrassingly ancient. His audio came through an actual earring clipped to his earlobe, instead of a tiny tube tucked neatly into the aural canal like everyone else had. He had only one visible contact lens, which he switched from eye to eye as though it irritated him. Clair took for granted the fact that she could type using menus in her lenses or just mouth the words she wanted to say, but Jesse audibly whispered when talking in a chat, and when he was bumping someone or accessing his menus, his fingers visibly twitched. Sometimes his augs broke down, leaving him deaf and dumb to the Air until he fixed them. It drove the teachers crazy.
He never proselytized like some Abstainers did, but people knew who he was all the same. His clothes were obviously not fabbed fresh each morningsometimes they were patched or even dirtyand he carried a leather satchel that looked a hundred years old. He had other nicknames, some them undeserved. Clair was pretty sure he wasnt actually a terrorist, like the members of the World Holistic Leadership. WHOLE was always issuing manifestos and sending viruses through the d-mat network. Cold viruses, not computer ones.
After a delay of some minutes, Jesse replied, I think youve got the wrong number.
The wrong what? she bumped back.
Number. Address. Telephones, you know?
Shed read of telephones in old stories but had never seen one.
They used numbers, not names?
There was another delay before he bumped back. She imagined his fingers twitching away, wherever he was, and was too impatient to wait for a reply.
Its Clair Hill, from Modern History.
I know who you are. Youve never texted me before.
Another old word, but she knew what this one meant. I want to ask you something about d-mat.
I dont know anything about d-mat.
What happens when d-mat goes wrong, I mean.
This time the pause was longer.
I thought it mightve been about this morning.
She frowned. What about this morning?
You were at the station. I saw you.
I didnt see you. What were you doing there?
The pause dragged on so long, she thought he might not reply at all.
Doesnt matter, he finally said. What do you want to know?
The delays between bumps were maddening.
It would be easier to actually talk than do it like this.
Sure, but not now. My audios on the fritz, and I have a prac after lunch. Meet me at the gate after last period?
Clair was reluctant. People might see.
Then she felt bad for feeling that way. So what if people saw them together? Besides, there was a chance Libby would get better as the day progressed, and Clair wouldnt have to go through with it.
All right, she bumped back. Thanks.
No probs. See you.
Clair leaned back in her chair and rubbed her eyes. She didnt want to leave the library, but she had done all she could, for now. And she had some explaining to do. Ronnie would tell her she was overreacting; Tash would go into a worry spiral. Both would make her feel worse. Neither would change her mind.
Improvement killed my child, she thought, and then tried her best not to think it again.
On my way, she bumped Tash.
We were beginning to wonder what you were up to, Tash bumped back.
And who with, Ronnie added.
Gathering up her backpack, Clair resigned herself to explanations on several fronts at once.
8
MIDWAY THROUGH THE afternoon, Libbys caption changed from Disturb at own risk to SiCkO, with a crocodile biting a zebra on the rump. Clair took that as a clear sign that Libby wasnt feeling better, meaning that Clair had to go through with her meeting with Jesse Linwood. She was already regretting and feeling slightly embarrassed about contacting him. Jesse was so far out of her social circle, he might as well have come from another planet.
Ronnie and Tash waved her off at the end of school, peppering her with provocative bumps.
Retro is in, said Tash, but not that retro.
Clair walked on, telling herself to be glad they werent giving her a hard time about Zep. She had been determinedly honest with them over what had happened at the party. She knew she had done the wrong thing. Forgiveness was optional. She would understand if they reserved their sympathy for Libby.
I just want to know, Ronnie had said, whatre you doing poaching that slimeball when there are eligible bachelors all over campus. You know you can do better, right?
He may be a slimeball, said Tash, but at least he has taste.
I dont think Zeps really a slimeball, Clair started to say.
Oh no! cried Ronnie, putting the back of one hand to her forehead. This cant be happening!
. . . any more than Im a poacher, Clair concluded firmly. It just happened. It wont happen again.
They hadnt sounded convinced.
Come lat-jumping with me this weekend, Tash said. Were taking the thirtieth. Thatll give you something else to think about.
Or come party with me, said Ronnie. Plenty more slimeballs where he came from.
Pass, Clair said. She wasnt interested in circumnavigating the globe latitude by latitude or in available men. But thanks. Im glad youre still talking to me.
Just dont run off with the Stainer, or else well have to communicate by smoke signals. . . .
Jesse Linwood was waiting for her by the gate, slouched in a way that belied his gangly height, with shaggy brown hair covering his eyes. He was wearing tatty blue jeans and a yellow T-shirt with a blocky logo she didnt recognizeit looked like an upside-down flowerpot, only bright red. The legendary satchel was on the ground at his feet, slumping listlessly like something melting in the sun. In one hand he held a paperback novel that was so dog-eared, it should probably have been in a museum.
She didnt catch the title. When he saw her, he put his weight on both feet and stood straighter, slipping the book into his back pocket.
Hey, Clair, he said.
Uh, hey. She wasnt quite sure what to say next. Already theyd spoken more words to each other in one day than they had in all their years at school together.
Shall we go? he asked her.
Where?
Ill walk with you to the station. Thats where youre headed, right?
At her alarmed expression, he laughed.
Okay, that sounded weird. Im not stalking you or anything, honest. I just walk past the station on the way to school, and sometimes I see you.
Me and lots of other people.
I guess. He picked up his satchel and indicated the gate. Yes?
She shrugged. Sure. Anywheres fine.
Conscious of the occasional odd look from her fellow students, she set off with him down the road to the station. His legs were long, so his stride far outclassed hers, but he let her set the pace. They walked a dozen steps in silence, Clair feeling foolish but committed now, Jesse concentrating to all appearances on the tips of his sneakers. He was either growing a very slight goatee or he hadnt gotten around to shaving his chin for a few days. She tried not to stare at it, but with his eyes hidden behind his hair, it was hard to avoid.
So . . . , she said. This is about a friend. Im worried that . . . actually, I dont know what Im worried about. Theres this d-mat meme going around. Have you heard of Improvement?
He shook his head. Im not really the target audience.
Yeah, right. Anyway, my friend d-matted ninety times yesterday and shes convinced Improvement workedchanged heralthough it cant possibly have, and Im worried about her because shes behaving a little oddly.
Oddly how?
Clair shrugged, remembering the fleeting conversation that morning. Mood swings, headache . . . I know it doesnt sound like much, but I can tell its not normal.
Whats Improvement supposed to do?
Its like a chain letter. You receive a message. It tells you that you can be prettier, smarter, taller, whatever. You write a code on a piece of paper and list all the things youd like to have changed. You take the note with you through d-mat, under your clothes, and supposedly it happens. Do it enough times, the meme says, and youll be . . . Improved.
Just like that? he said.
She shared his skepticism. The idea was absurd, a fairy tale, just as Ronnie kept telling her. I didnt say it was real. Just that this is why she did it.
Whats the code?
She called up the original message and sent it to him.
Charlie X-ray Romeo Foxtrot
Whiskey Uniform Hotel Bravo
Oscar Echo
Tango Kilo
Alfa Papa Juliet Zulu
Does it mean anything? she asked.
If I had to guess Id say its supposed to act as a kind of signal to the system, alerting it to the presence of someone who wants to be Improved. The system reads the note, takes on board what the bearer wants, and manipulates their pattern to make it happen.
I thought that was impossible.
If you believe VIA. But maybe if you fiddled the books bit by bit . . . tiny alterations that supposedly dont affect the hash sum of the entire transmission . . . maybe thats how youd get away with it.
Clair nodded warily, even though she didnt know what a hash sum was. She was surprised he was taking it so seriously. So it could actually work?
I dont know, he said. I mean, the note isnt a thing once it enters the Air. Its just data, a string of ones and zeros like everything else. Sure, some patterns are scanned for explosives or specific DNAbut no ones looking for letters on a piece of paper. Thatd be like trying to use a microscope to take a picture of the galaxy.
So it wouldnt work?
Then theres the whole idea of Improvement itself. How does the system know what to change in order to make people the way theyve asked to become? Its not a plastic surgeon or a genetic engineer. Its just a means of moving data around. Its not designed for anything else.
So its a scam after all.
Can you imagine how illegal it would be if it wasnt? I mean, youd have to get past both of VIAs AIs every time someone used itand theres no program or anything to go with the note, so itd have to be done manually. If you were caught, youd be locked up for the rest of your life.
Jesse, just tell me: Will it work or not?
He shrugged. Beats me. Im not as good with this stuff as Dad is. Hes the expert.
They walked in silence for a minute, Clair fighting a sense of disappointment and frustration. All she wanted was to know for certain, either way.
It was Libby, wasnt it? Jesse said out of nowhere. Liberty Zeist?
What, you stalk her, too? Clair said a little more sharply than she intended.
No. I just guessed. She wasnt at school today. He shrugged, making his satchel bounce against his shoulder. Besides, the only people who would consider using Improvement are those who are already beautiful but dont appreciate it. Chasing the impossible dream, you know? Libbys one of those.
Clair couldnt tell if he was insulting Libby or just trying to be weird now.
Dont tell me youre not tempted, she said.
Me? Hardly. Have you forgotten what I am?
An Abstainer, yeah . . . so what were you doing at the station this morning?
He glanced at her sideways.
Being hassled by the PKs. For no reason. You really didnt see me?
She remembered a disturbance and seeing a peacekeepers helmet above the crowd.
That was you?
A return performance in Civil Harassment 101. The starring role, in fact. It was written for me.
You must have been doing something.
Dont you start, he said, brushing his hair off his face and staring at her with a resentful expression. You think I was trying to plant a bomb? For my friends in WHOLE? Because all Stainers are terrorists? Thats right, I keep forgetting. If youre not with the herd, then youre against it.
His hot gaze returned to his sneakers.
I was just curious, he said in a cooler tone. Theres no law against that, is there?
So you really have never
No, not ever. I suggested it once, and my dad threatened to kick me out on the street. Said he didnt want what Id come back as rattling around the housebecause it wouldnt be me, not in his eyes.
What do you mean?
He thinks anyone who uses d-mat dies inside. You know, it takes you apart, destroys you, and what it rebuilds is just a good copy, not the real thing. Soulless. Empty. Hollow.
For real?
Yes. He calls people like you zombies.
That was a horrible thoughtsomeone thinking she wasnt real when she knew without question that she absolutely was.
Do you call us that too?
I think the soul question is one thing d-mat has finally put to rest. Thank God.
A softer glance accompanied this small joke, as though he was embarrassed for his snappy tone a moment ago. Or embarrassed for his father. She couldnt tell.
The double-circles sign for the station was coming into view through the palms ahead. Her window of opportunity was about to close, and she hadnt really learned anything.
You said your dad knows more about this stuff than you do.
He nodded. He lives to pick holes in it.
Maybe I should talk to him.
You dont really want to do that.
Why not?
Hes . . . difficult.
I dont mind.
She didnt know if Jesse had heard anything about the Zep crisis and wasnt about to explain her fear that Improvement might be making Libbys emotional state worse.
All right, he said, but dont tell me I didnt warn you.
Thanks. So . . . will you introduce me so we can chat?
He doesnt do that. Youll have to come home with me. Thats where he works. We live just around the corner.
Oh, she said, realizing only then what shed gotten herself into. Of course. Youd have to. How else would he get to schoolfly?
Jesse picked up his pace. They passed the station and turned left up Main Street, into unknown territory.
9
JESSE LIVED IN a terrace apartment on a broad and overgrown thoroughfare with well-worn sidewalks and bike paths shaded by eucalyptus branches and clumps of sighing bamboo. Unlike many of the developments around Sacramento Bay, it looked lived-in. Someone had planted daisies that bobbed and winked in the pale November sun. There were dog turds on the path. Clair could hear kids calling a couple of houses along.
Have you been here long? Clair asked Jesse, thinking of her sterile apartment block and the empty sidewalks below.
Ive lived here all my life.
Really?
Kinda hard to move around if you dont use d-mat.
Yeah, I guess. Clair had moved more times than she could count. Each time her family had relocated, they had recycled almost everything they owned and fabbed replacements at the other end. Friends were equally easy to visit from anywhere.
Abstainers tend to stick together, he said, turning an old-fashioned key in the lock and kicking the stiff door open with the side of one foot. Its us against the world, 24-7.
His satchel dropped with a thud in the hallway as he waved her ahead of him into a house like no other she had seen before.
The ground floor was one unbroken space, with living area and kitchen overlapping in a series of worn couches, scratched tables, and scuffed counter surfaces. Two ceiling fans swirled lazily overhead, circulating the warm air. Clair took it in, feeling as though her eyes were bugging out of her head. There was a stove, a fridge, and a trash can. There were framed sketches that showed signs of fading next to real bookcases holding antique photos and dusty trinkets. The rugs beneath her feet were tatty around the edges. Through the wall-to-wall windows at the far end of the space, she saw vegetable gardens neatly arranged in rows and a big green shed.