Cassie respected Beth’s grief with her silence. Leo had already said everything that could be said, including that the body on the gurney cart might not have belonged to Beth’s father. Beth had retreated into a sullen, steely indifference. “I don’t want to talk about it.” So no one talked.
Once they crossed the state border Leo left the Interstate for secondary roads where, he said, they were less likely to be followed. Outside Medina, Ohio, he stopped at another gas station so they could top off the tank and use the toilets. Cassie and Beth took turns at the ladies’ room, wordlessly. Back at the car Thomas complained that he was hungry. Cassie went into the convenience store and bought him a chocolate bar (Hershey’s with almonds) plus one for herself and a bottle of orange juice to share, along with an activity book she imagined might keep him busy. Puzzles, mazes, connect-the-dots. He looked at it with disdain. “Are we going home now?”
“No. You know that.”
“So where do we sleep?”
“We’ll stop at a motel, I guess. Soon.”
As the sun drifted toward the horizon Leo switched on the vehicle’s anemic heater. Lodi, Mount Gilead, Cardington: All these little towns, Cassie thought. Here a main street, a hardware store, a Chinese restaurant announcing itself with a neon dragon. Here a neatly whitewashed church with a wooden steeple. Here the last of the season’s dry leaves, wind-delivered to curbs and windowsills.
Small houses leaked yellow light from curtained windows. These were the homes of people who had never seen past the skin of the world and never would. Once, Cassie thought, she had been one of them. This was the world from which she had been banished: warm as a winter blanket, seen and abandoned in the same moment. She loved it with an exile’s love. It ran past the car in fading colors. She was tempted to wave good-bye.
4
RURAL VERMONT
ONCE THE SIM WAS INCAPACITATED—THE 300-KV shock pistol was spectacularly effective—Ethan dragged the creature down to the cellar of the farm house.
What ever he did here, he would have to do quickly. The sim had come unarmed and begging for a conversation, and it might be important to find out why. But he couldn’t waste time. Obviously, the hypercolony knew where to find him. Which meant his sabbatical at the farm house had come to an end, and every second he lingered here put him at risk.
In the meantime his cameras and trip wires and automatic alarms continued to survey the property for intruders. Ethan bound the unconscious simulacrum to a heavy chair with duct tape, then went upstairs to consider his options.
He retrieved the sim’s jacket and shirt from the front porch and examined them. Both items bore midprice store-brand labels and could have been purchased anywhere in the country. There was a wallet in the sim’s jacket pocket—that was unusual.
The assassins of 2007 hadn’t carried identification, which was part of the reason local and federal investigations had failed to learn anything useful about them. (The fact that the few sims who were killed in the attacks had left radically unconventional corpses might also have had something to do with it.) Ethan opened the wallet cautiously.
He pulled out a hundred and fifty dollars in tens and twenties and a raft of cards, including two major credit cards, a Social Security card and a driver’s license. The documents had all been issued in the name of Winston C. Bayliss. The address on the driver’s license was 22 Major Street, Montmorency, Pennsylvania, and the laminated photograph resembled the face on the thing in the cellar.
Interesting. The simulacra were in most ways a mystery. None of the surviving members of the Correspondence Society had been able to determine how they faked their human appearance or to what extent they had infiltrated conventional human society. So how did an artificially-created monstrosity come to possess a Social Security number? Had it stolen the identity of a real (presumably now deceased) Winston Bayliss? Or were the cards simply forgeries?
How was he supposed to picture this? An inhuman monster living a quiet life in a small Pennsylvania town, waiting for the right moment to strike? Or, even more absurdly, an inhuman monster churning out fake ID on a clandestine printing press? And why had Bayliss (call him that for now) carried these documents to the farmhouse, knowing they might fall into Ethan’s hands?
But those were only footnotes to the larger question: Why had Bayliss shown up, unarmed and apparently defenseless?
It’s chilly out here, the creature had said. May I come in and speak to you?
And it had said something else:
You know what I am.
“Yeah, I know what you are.” Living alone had given Ethan the habit of thinking out loud. His voice bounced between the walls of the farm house kitchen. “And I know it’s no use listening to you.”
No use at all, because—if Ethan’s research and the conjectures of the Correspondence Society were correct—it wouldn’t be “Winston Bayliss” who did the talking. It would be the hypercolony itself, using Winston as its puppet. And the hypercolony would lie. More precisely, it would say what ever advanced its interests. The distinction between truth and falsehood was irrelevant to the hypercolony, perhaps even imperceptible to it. It generated human language solely for the purpose of manipulating human behavior.
Would Ethan discover anything useful by listening to it talk?
He guessed there was only one way to find out.
“What are you doing with that pistol, Professor Iverson?” the simulacrum asked.
It was awake again. The creature was still securely bound to the chair, wearing nothing but its underwear and taut ribbons of duct tape. Its head was immobilized, but it managed to dart sidelong glances at Ethan and at the revolver Ethan wanted it to see. The creature looked convincingly like a frightened, slightly pudgy Caucasian man shivering in the cool air of the cellar.
Ethan didn’t answer its question. His first order of business was to make absolutely sure that what he had here was one of the green-on-the-inside men, not some misguided or demented human being. He aimed the pistol at a point between the knee and the ankle of the creature’s left leg.
“Wait,” Bayliss said. “You don’t need to do that.”
Ethan pulled the trigger. The detonation was painfully loud in the enclosed space of the cellar. The bullet passed through Bayliss’s leg and cratered into the floor beneath him. Ethan ignored the ringing in his ears and assessed the results. Bright red blood gushed from the wound, along with a slower pulse of green viscous material. A sliver of bone showed through the damaged tissue, pale and moist.
After the gunshot, Bayliss’s expression became impassive and thoughtful. Ethan knelt and wrapped the wound with more duct tape to staunch the bleeding, wrinkling his nose at the rotting-flower stink of the green matter.
“That wasn’t necessary,” Bayliss said.
On the contrary. Now Ethan knew for sure what he was dealing with. “You said you wanted to tell me something.”
The simulacrum hesitated as if considering its answer, but Ethan put that down as theater: these creatures lied with gestures as easily as with words. “We have a common interest, Professor Iverson. It’s complicated—”
Ethan put the barrel of the pistol to the creature’s head. “Just speak.”
“You know what I am. I’m the same sort of thing that killed so many of your colleagues seven years ago. But I represent a different interest.”
“That makes no sense.”
“Most of what the Correspondence Society conjectured is true. The radio-reflective layer around the Earth is an active, living entity—that was a clever deduction and a correct one. It constitutes the body of what you call the hypercolony. The hypercolony is a living thing, another correct conjecture. But like any living thing, the hypercolony is mortal. It’s also subject to infection and predation. I represent an autonomous parasitical network that has infected the hypercolony and is struggling to control it. My interests are inimical to the hypercolony’s interests. I believe you’re capable of understanding that. That’s why I came to you unarmed and alone.”