“Just like that?” he said.
She shared his skepticism. The idea was absurd, a fairy tale, just as Ronnie kept telling her. “I didn’t say it was real. Just that this is why she did it.”
“What’s 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 I’d say it’s 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 don’t affect the hash sum of the entire transmission . . . maybe that’s how you’d get away with it.”
Clair nodded warily, even though she didn’t know what a hash sum was. She was surprised he was taking it so seriously. “So it could actually work?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, the note isn’t a thing once it enters the Air. It’s just data, a string of ones and zeros like everything else. Sure, some patterns are scanned for explosives or specific DNA—but no one’s looking for letters on a piece of paper. That’d be like trying to use a microscope to take a picture of the galaxy.”
“So it wouldn’t work?”
“Then there’s the whole idea of Improvement itself. How does the system know what to change in order to make people the way they’ve asked to become? It’s not a plastic surgeon or a genetic engineer. It’s just a means of moving data around. It’s not designed for anything else.”
“So it’s a scam after all.”
“Can you imagine how illegal it would be if it wasn’t? I mean, you’d have to get past both of VIA’s AIs every time someone used it—and there’s no program or anything to go with the note, so it’d have to be done manually. If you were caught, you’d be locked up for the rest of your life.”
“Jesse, just tell me: Will it work or not?”
He shrugged. “Beats me. I’m not as good with this stuff as Dad is. He’s 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, wasn’t 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 wasn’t 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 don’t appreciate it. Chasing the impossible dream, you know? Libby’s one of those.”
Clair couldn’t tell if he was insulting Libby or just trying to be weird now.
“Don’t tell me you’re 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 didn’t see me?”
She remembered a disturbance and seeing a peacekeeper’s 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.”
“Don’t 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? That’s right, I keep forgetting. If you’re not with the herd, then you’re against it.”
His hot gaze returned to his sneakers.
“I was just curious,” he said in a cooler tone. “There’s 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 didn’t want what I’d come back as rattling around the house—because it wouldn’t 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 thought—someone thinking she wasn’t 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 couldn’t 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 hadn’t 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 don’t really want to do that.”
“Why not?”
“He’s . . . difficult.”
“I don’t mind.”
She didn’t know if Jesse had heard anything about the Zep crisis and wasn’t about to explain her fear that Improvement might be making Libby’s emotional state worse.
“All right,” he said, “but don’t tell me I didn’t warn you.”
“Thanks. So . . . will you introduce me so we can chat?”
“He doesn’t do that. You’ll have to come home with me. That’s where he works. We live just around the corner.”
“Oh,” she said, realizing only then what she’d gotten herself into. “Of course. You’d have to.” How else would he get to school—fly?
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.
“I’ve lived here all my life.”
“Really?”
“Kinda hard to move around if you don’t 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. “It’s 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.