“Don’t underestimate the power of a seductive idea, son. Bad enough that people are using d-mat to get around. What happens if their patterns start being interfered with en masse? That’d be a monstrous crime perpetrated on the entire human race.”
“Yes, but it’s not happening, is it?”
“Libby thinks it is,” said Clair.
The way Dylan looked at her made her feel as though she was still under the magnifying stare of his eyepiece.
“Do you have a copy of this particular message?” he asked Clair.
“Give me your address and I’ll send it to you.”
“Send it to Jesse, and he can send it to me. I like to keep my connections to a minimum.”
Jesse’s father sat back in front of his 3D monitor and began typing hard on a manual keyboard.
“You were right to come here,” he told her as the message flashed up in front of him. “I’m sure the truth’s out there, but it’ll be buried under a snow job of misinformation and noise. Fortunately for you, I have colleagues who track this kind of thing. We share information in a private database. I’m looking into that right now.”
Clair wondered who exactly “we” were. Ordinary Abstainers or someone more organized and active in their opposition to d-mat?
“If there is something to Improvement,” he said, skimming through data too quickly to follow, “it’s not what it’s advertised to be. No one believes it’s making people taller or more beautiful or whatever. What I can tell you is that there are different strains of the letter, as with viruses. Some are the real thing, some are bad copies, and some are fakes. Apparently, this is one of the real ones. You can tell by the irregular number of lines in each stanza of the message: three-four-five-two.”
“What do you it mean that it’s ‘real’?” asked Jesse. “If it doesn’t do anything, what difference does that make?”
“I didn’t say it didn’t do anything. I said it didn’t work as advertised. My best theory is that someone tried to get it to work but succeeded only in interfering with the system, causing random errors to people’s patterns.”
Clair nodded. That made a scary kind of sense. “What could we do about that?”
“Well, first we need evidence of anything at all out of the ordinary, something that will prove the need to take action. Evidence of real harm, not just vague concerns.”
“Libby said she’s received some weird messages.”
“Do you have copies of them?”
Clair shook her head. “She deleted them.”
Dylan looked up at her, then back at the screen. With a flick of one fingertip, he cleared the data and turned to face Clair.
“Of course she did. So at the moment we have nothing—just a theory and a note that according to the Air and the peacekeepers doesn’t mean a thing.”
“You could ask Libby to save any other messages she gets,” Jesse suggested. “If we had them, maybe the peacekeepers would listen.”
Dylan dismissed that thought as casually as he had dismissed the data on the screen,
“The peacekeepers take VIA’s so-called safeguards for granted. They can’t afford to do otherwise. If they thought for a second that someone had made d-mat unsafe, the world would come crumbling down around them. It would take something definite, something completely undeniable, to bring that about.”
Clair studied him, beginning to suspect that his motives weren’t at all the same as hers. “When you talked about taking action—”
“I wasn’t talking about peacekeepers.”
“So—”
“People should stop using d-mat, Clair. Errors caused by this kind of interference are nothing compared to the many accidental errors that go unnoticed every day. Have you ever worried about that?”
He had taken a step closer. She backed the same distance away. “I’m not here to talk about me. I came to you for Libby’s sake.”
“What do I care about another zombie girl? Her fate was sealed the moment she first stepped through a d-mat booth. Nothing you can do now will bring her back.”
Clair didn’t know how to respond to that, short of being unspeakably rude. If Libby was dead to him, so was Clair, and no amount of arguing would change that.
“Dad—” said Jesse.
“It’s all right,” Clair said. “I’ll go now. It’s getting late, and this . . . isn’t helping.”
She turned and headed for the garden, not caring that she knocked over a stack of cogs and gears as she went. Dylan watched her go with a cold expression.
The aroma of baking food hit her as she entered the apartment. Clair concentrated on finding her bag and getting out of there.
Jesse followed, his face a mask of anxiety.
“I’m sorry, Clair,” he said at the door.
“Don’t be. It’s not your fault.” Clair had invaded Jesse’s world in search of answers, and now her head was full of Stainers and dead mothers and d-mat conspiracies.
“You remember the way to the station? It’s a safe neighborhood, but I’m happy to walk you if you feel uncomfortable.”
“No need for that.”
“Hey,” he said as she headed for the road, “next time bring Libby along. Dad can browbeat her in person. He might even convert her. That’d look great for him at the meetings.”
Clair glanced back at him and was brought up momentarily by the stricken expression on his face. She wondered how many kids from school ever came to visit him. She might have been the first in years. How, in his mind, had he imagined it playing out?
He looked lonely.
“Miracles happen,” Clair said, not stopping, “but not that big a miracle.”
11
CLAIR WENT HOME, angry at Dylan Linwood and at herself for imagining that he would help her. He didn’t owe her anything. He and Jesse might as well really exist in a different world from her. By refusing to use d-mat and fabbers, Jesse Linwood existed farther away than Libby, who lived thousands of miles around the bulge of the Earth.
She could see it from their eyes now, and she was embarrassed on her own behalf. To them it must have seemed deeply patronizing, the way she had barged into their lives, seeking answers to questions that didn’t matter to them in the slightest. She lived in a world of instantaneous plenty, and she was worried about a friend’s bad mood? No wonder Dylan Linwood had responded by trying to prop himself up as someone with secret knowledge and influence far beyond her own. His theory about Improvement causing random errors was imaginary, no doubt, but it was all he had to retaliate with. That and feeding her anxieties. She had enough of those without him adding to them.
When she reached the station, she gave the booth directions and closed her eyes, grateful for her ordinary life. One moment Manteca, the next Maine. Hissing, the door opened on cooler air and a barrage of silence.
Her mother was in the living room. She nabbed Clair before she could escape to her room.
“Come sit with me awhile,” Allison said. “I feel I haven’t seen you in person for ages. How’s school? What’s the latest gossip?”
The crisis among Clair, Libby, and Zep surely counted as gossip, but Clair was loath to go into that with her mother.
“School is the same,” she said, stretching out on her back along the couch. “There’s this new clique . . . the crashlanders. Libby and I got in.”
“Well, that’s great.” Allison didn’t ask for details. “As long as it doesn’t interfere with your study . . .”
“It won’t, Mom. What about you? Where have you been working this week?”
“Northern Australia. We’ve got two self-sufficient herds now, and we’re working on a third.”