Clair’s number reached ten thousand, and the figure was still rising. She was really popping now.
64
PLEASANTVILLE HAD AN official population of zero. Literally everyone d-matted in and out from all points across the globe, be it to gamble, to serve, to maintain, or to protect. There were plenty of beds, but no one went to Pleasantville to sleep.
Clair guessed the sick feeling in her stomach wasn’t so different from that of someone risking everything on a roulette wheel.
Turner opened the door for the final time as they decelerated into the train station. It was dark outside, two hours before dawn on the sixth day since Clair had heard of Improvement, and a rich ocean smell washed over them like a heavy tide. The engine of their four-wheeler started with a snarl. As soon as the freight car was stationary, Ray maneuvered the vehicle smoothly across the gap between train and station and into the night air outside.
Clair hung on to a roll bar as they accelerated along the gleaming side of the train. She waved to the drones watching them. There were six of them, not including Q’s, capturing the scene from every possible angle. Three peacekeepers stood between the train and a dozen young men, who hooted and jeered as the four-wheeler sped by. Drawn by the controversy, and perhaps hoping to make a “spectacle” of themselves as well, they were obviously drunk, but that didn’t take the sting out of their taunts. One held a placard with an image of Clair’s face that started out normal but changed by stages to that of an old woman with missing teeth and a black eye: Improvement was the slogan. One of them threw a rock, but it missed by a large margin. The last Clair saw of him, he was being reprimanded by one of the PKs. At least, she hoped it was a reprimand.
If I wasn’t me, she asked herself, would I care about this kind of thing? Would I be immune to what people said? Maybe I’d turn around and join them, throwing rocks at the loony Abstainers trying to make trouble for everyone.
She didn’t want to cause trouble. She wanted the exact opposite.
They pulled away from the station and into town. Clair had been to the glittering maelstrom of Las Vegas once, on a high school dare. Pleasantville had many of the same qualities: bright flashing lights; exaggerated extravagance, as though that mattered anymore in a world of plenty; old people dressed up like young people and smiling, always smiling. They couldn’t believe their luck, Clair’s grandfather liked to say. They’d survived the Water Wars, and now they were rich.
On the radiant playground of Fire Road, signs flashed endlessly in every color. The New Showboat, Caesars, the Haven, the King, the Golden Egg. Once every block, she saw the familiar d-mat sign—two circles overlapping, worlds coming together in geometric harmony—an image Clair had never thought would ever make her feel so excluded.
The four-wheeler approached the docklands from the west. They were mainly decorative, with the odd sailing or cruise vessel rocking undisturbed in a public marina. At the end of the marina, a crowd of thirty or more was waiting.
This time the jeers were louder and more personal, delivered not by trolls but by protesters wearing masks that lent them all Clair’s features. It was eerie, and she did her best to ignore them as the four-wheeler pushed through their ranks, physically nudging people aside. They called her a fearmonger and agitator, and much worse. Fingers snatched at her. Someone spat. Jesse kicked at a man with Clair’s face who grabbed her hair from behind and tried to pull her from the flatbed. The man let go and fell back into the crowd, laughing. After that, Q’s drone dropped low over Clair and dive-bombed anyone who tried to get too close, whether they seemed physically threatening or not. Clair couldn’t decide if they were genuinely outraged or just wanting to be part of the show. Perhaps a bit of both.
Clair’s scalp was still stinging when they reached the pier. There were just two peacekeepers to press the crowd back as Turner brought the four-wheeler to a halt and they climbed out. The PKs said nothing to Clair and Clair said nothing to them. They had made their position clear: they were staying on the fence, neither helping nor hindering. If things got ugly in public she could count on them to intervene, but up to that point she was on her own.
The sub floated low in the water, long and dark like a killer whale. A hatch opened on top, and two people emerged, a man and a woman both dressed in tight-fitting gray. The woman seemed unfazed by either the crowd or the drones. Clair wondered at the kinds of things she’d seen, the odd requests she’d fielded in the past. Odder than anything Clair could imagine, she bet.
“We’re really doing this?” she asked.
“Looks like it,” said Jesse.
Clair shouldered her heavy pack and followed him to the ladder at the end of the pier. A skinny seaman—one of three who had emerged after the first two—helped her find her footing on the swaying surface of the submarine. There was no handrail. The sea’s mood was black and choppy, like the crowd.
Turner was standing over the opening in the hull, guiding people through. Ray was coming last, carrying Libby’s body in his arms. Gemma had a heavy bag in one hand, one of the two that Clair had seen in the back of the four-wheeler. No one had explained what they were.
Clair took off her backpack and lowered it down through the hatch into reaching hands. Then it was her turn. The drone deactivated its fans and was carried down after her.
The submarine had a single cramped passageway running its entire length. Packs were piled into every available niche. Clair picked a spot at random and didn’t move, afraid to touch anything. The air was thick and close. She didn’t want to think of suffocation, but it was hard not to.
Jesse squeezed in next to her.
“Exciting, isn’t it?” he said.
She gulped a half sob, half laugh.
“Are you for real?”
“No, seriously. This is terrific. I’ve always wanted to go underwater.”
“You’ve never been diving?”
“Not for an hour and a half,” he said. “And not without getting my clothes wet.”
The hatch clanged shut above them, sounding an unimaginable distance away. All connections to the Air died.
Clair noticed Jesse’s fingers twitching.
“I’ve patched into the sub’s HUD,” he told her. “It has a cavitation hull, a magnetohydrodynamic drive system, and a miniature reactor so it can stay under for months. Officially, we stopped developing these things after d-mat came along, but this could be a knockoff of a military design, or even a genuine decommission. It’s hard to say.”
“This you know about, not cars and stuff?”
“No wheels, you see.” He grinned. “And the drive system has applications off the Earth, where I really want to go.”
“You’re picturing yourself in a spaceship right now, aren’t you?”
“If I am, what does that make me?”
“A big nerd. The biggest imaginable.”
His smile only broadened as a rising thrum filled the submarine.
It was a shame, she thought, that d-mat had made spaceships obsolete, along with planes, trains, and everything else. He deserved to get what he wanted. So did she, but what she wanted seemed so much harder to obtain, even after Ant Wallace’s offer to meet with them. She wanted Libby back and the chance that there was someone else in her head permanently revoked. She wanted her world back again, exactly as it had been.