When she raised her head, she found that she was alone with Wallace. He looked saddened and puzzled, as a kindly uncle might by his niece’s errant behavior. She seriously thought that he was about to pick her up, pat her on the back, and set her down on her own two feet again.
She stood up on her own and backed as far away from him as she could.
“Tell us about Q,” he said. “That’s all you have to do.”
“And then what? You’ll put me on ice, too? Or erase me permanently?”
“You’re making my choices for me, Clair. If you’d only do as I ask, I’m sure we’d all get along.”
He came closer. She retreated.
“There’s no need to be frightened of me, Clair, or to mistrust me. I’m just trying to make the world a better place.”
“What?”
“You’ve seen what we can do. You’ve talked about it on your feed. I know you don’t think it’s all bad.”
“You’ll never convince me that what Mallory is doing is a good thing.”
“Mallory is a special case, true. I don’t love her for her unsubtlety.”
“Murder is unsubtle?”
He was herding her around the office, like a very patient old sheepdog with one skittish ewe.
“Improvement isn’t murder, Clair. It started as a way of saving lives—the lives of our greatest minds when they grow sick and old. We didn’t have Turner’s genes then, so how else were we to prolong their work? We couldn’t create new bodies out of nothing and set them loose in the world, since that would violate parity, the one rule we cannot break; the same with copying them. So why not use the bodies of young people living vacant, empty lives? Teenage minds are flexible; that’s why they’re so changeable, so perfect for our plan. You see, Improvement is like duping, only stronger, more subtle, permanent. In the right body—not just any will do—a transplanted personality has time to settle into place, rather than being dumped wholesale and left to break down, like the dupes do. Society is infinitely better off for it, I’m sure you’ll agree, as are the beneficiaries of the program. Ask Tilly Kozlova or Madison Chu if they would rather be dead. Ask Elisha Neimke if he thinks you’re being fair for judging me without taking this into account. Ask all of them. I know what they’ll tell you.”
Clair felt herself flinch at Tilly Kozlova’s name. She didn’t want to believe it. Her idol an old woman stealing the life of a girl like her? It couldn’t be true . . . but it did explain her preternatural talent blossoming apparently from nowhere. And it explained the other names too. Madison Chu was the young mathematician who had solved the Riemann hypothesis. And Clair thought Elisha Neimke might be the first Go champion to beat an AI in forty years—at the age of sixteen.
Getting smarter, younger, her grandfather had grumbled, and for once he had had something important to say. But who listened to old people on the subject of kids these days? Clair certainly hadn’t. How many other brilliant minds had taken over innocent young people who had wished to be more than they were?
At least Turner’s genes would put a stop to Improvement. Why go to so much trouble when people could stay in their own bodies and be young forever? But that would mean people like Ant Wallace living forever too—and Clair didn’t trust him to give just anyone the secret. Improvement was given only to the geniuses he chose. A world ruled forever by people like him wouldn’t be worth living in at all. . . .
“No one uses d-mat against their will,” he was saying, as though that made a difference. “The same with Improvement. We do it to ourselves, Clair, and no one complains.”
“You’re lying,” she said. “Someone forced Dylan Linwood
into a booth so he could be duped. Your dupes killed innocent people, and so does Improvement.”
“Minor exceptions, all in the service of the greater good. Would you really have us give up d-mat like those fools in WHOLE say we should?”
She shook her head. “D-mat isn’t the problem. It’s people like you, people who abuse the system. The sooner you’re all in prison, the safer it’ll be for everyone else.”
“Is that really what you think?”
“Of course it is. I’m not so far gone that I don’t know who I am anymore.”
“Far gone . . . ?” He tilted his head. “Ah! I didn’t realize. You used Improvement too. Perhaps I should just wait, then. The answers will come to me in due course.”
“If I don’t kill myself first.”
“Yes, you might, just to spite me, if you are one of Mallory’s. She’s nothing if not persistent, once she fully comes into herself. Her death wish is a stain I could never remove, no matter how I tried. . . .”
His confident facade fell away, and Clair glimpsed something much more real and intimate. She remembered his activism on behalf of potential suicides. For the first time, Clair thought she was seeing the real man.
“Why is Mallory a special case?” she asked.
“Because she’s my wife,” he said. “I can’t let her go.”
She stared at him. “So you bring her back, over and over—”
“And she keeps taking herself away from me. She loves me, but in the end she always hates life more. Her last pattern was taken a week before . . . the first time . . . and it’s always the same. Do you understand me now, girl?”
Clair did, and it was like a coal in her heart. One week was exactly how long Gemma had given Libby to live before she committed suicide—which Libby would do, Clair now understood, not because there was something wrong with Improvement, but because Libby had become Mallory, exactly as she had been when Wallace had taken her last pattern. Improvement killed because Mallory wanted to die.
“Are you satisfied, Clair? Have I at last earned your cooperation?” Wallace’s expression twisted again, becoming very hard and cruel. “Tell me who Q is and what she can do. Who named her? Where did she come from? Most importantly, I need to know how she can be controlled.”
He lunged with great suddenness and speed and caught her arm in one strong hand. She tried to pull away, but he only wrenched her closer, as though punishing her for the glimpse of weakness she had elicited from him.
“If you do,” he said, “I’ll make everything go away. I’ll bring back Zep and Jesse’s father—Libby, too, if you like, before it’s too late. We can do that. It’s easy. Just say the word, and I’ll take Mallory out just as simply as I put her in. But if you don’t, I’ll destroy you. There’s too much at stake now to let you ruin it. And we won’t just kill you and your parents and Jesse, Clair. We’ll destroy the life you might have had.”
He wrenched her closer still.
“Remember that gun you got rid of in Copperopolis? It turned up in what you call the hangover, with your fingerprints still on it. Terrorists are such bad influences, aren’t they? And to think they helped you hide the bodies we have in the hangover too. Fancy that. How do you feel about spending the rest of your life in a penal colony? Do you want to grow old alone? You, not your dupe. You.
“One simple concession could spare you all of this, Clair. One act of common sense. Just do what I want, and this will be over. All of it.”
His crushing fingers released her, and she jerked away with his voice ringing in her skull.
“I’m not guilty of anything,” she said. “Q aimed the pistol for me. I just pulled the trigger.”
“The pistol has an autotargeting system, Clair. Q turned it on.” He leaned in close again, and she couldn’t help but recoil from him. “I’m afraid you’ll have to do better than that. Don’t think of it as betraying her, if that’s what’s bothering you . . . although I hear you have some proficiency in that regard already.”