But Ronnie’s mom had come from a different generation—just one removed from the Water Wars, when power had been short and d-mat not something to be taken for granted, when the seas had been rising and fresh water becoming more scarce every year. Hundreds of millions of people had died of starvation and disease until d-mat had literally turned the tides, stripping the world of its poisons and feeding the billions by reorganizing the atoms, turning the bad into good. Now, with powersats high above the Earth beaming down limitless power and all the excess carbon dioxide sucked out of the air, there was no need for fairy stories. It wasn’t Magic Mayflies at the heart of d-mat but everyday machines that analyzed travelers right down to the smallest particle, transmitting the data that made them them to their destination through the Air and rebuilding them exactly where they wanted to be, exactly as they had been before they left.
VIA existed to make sure that critical word exactly didn’t go anywhere. The Virtual-transport Infrastructure Authority was a global body established to ensure the one hundred percent safe operation of d-mat. Two artificial intelligences oversaw VIA in turn, so no human errors could creep in. And it worked so comprehensively and constantly that the world’s network of d-mat booths reported the lowest rate of data loss out of all of humanity’s media. Everyone knew that the amount of human lost in a decade of d-mat was equivalent to a toenail clipping, total.
Of course, people told stories about criminals hacking the system. Dramas regularly featured duplicated jewels, disintegrated wills, cloned lovers, and the like. Every child listened breathlessly to tales about swapped bodies and shrunken heads, people flipped right-to-left or turned entirely inside out, scientists mixed up with insects, and worse. Clair herself had relished such stories even as she zigzagged across the globe, enjoying as everyone did the freedom to go anywhere she wanted at any time she wanted, safe in the knowledge that VIA and its AIs would simply never let anything bad happen to her. She would always be her at the other end.
So Improvement couldn’t work, she told herself, just like Ronnie said. The image of Libby had been poor, and she had probably been wearing makeup from the night before—not unlikely, given she’d been lagged by ninety jumps on top of her migraine. Maybe Libby had been only half awake and had mistaken a darkened glimpse in a mirror for the reality she desired.
Improvement couldn’t work. So why was Libby acting as though it had?
Let it go, Clair told herself as she walked to class. You’re worrying about the wrong thing. Libby may not be angry at you now, but she’s obviously fragile, and her calm mood’s not going to last forever. Like everything else, the Zep situation is bound never to improve on its own.
But whether she was running from reality or not, the question wouldn’t leave her. Instead of going back to her classroom, she went to the library. It wouldn’t hurt to ask, would it? Just in case.
Calling up a query window in her lenses, she asked the Air, “Does Improvement work?”
“Yes” came the immediate reply, along with “No,” “Maybe,” and “Are you joking? This is what we use the sum of all human knowledge for?”
7
CLAIR CLEARLY WASN’T the first to ask.
The library was noisy as always, full of students pretending to study. Clair had permission to enter the quieter rare editions wing, the only part of the library that held actual books. It was her favorite place at school, partly for the smell, mostly for the sense of isolation and peace. The rare editions wing was like a museum: outside normal time and private, best of all.
Putting on a live recording of her favorite Poulenc piano music, performed by her favorite pianist, Tilly Kozlova, Clair sent out crawlers and trawlers to scour the Air for more detailed answers to the Improvement question. Then she settled back to randomly skim the news reports, blogs, and media archives they found. There were countless discussions about what people would change given the chance, which only made her more certain that it couldn’t possibly work, because if it did, why wasn’t everyone impossibly tall, ripped, and well endowed?
The official word was that it was an urban myth, perpetuated by unknown pranksters through closely connected friendship networks. It didn’t go everywhere at once, saturating the system with a flood of impossible wishes, but there was no rhyme or reason to the way it did spread either. It came and went with all the apparent randomness of something genuinely spontaneous. A fantasy from the collective unconscious, perhaps—or a warning from the superego of what might happen if VIA’s safeguards were ever relaxed.
VIA dismissed it. Peacekeepers thought it harmless. Countless testimonies as to its lack of efficacy went a long way toward convincing Clair that Ronnie was right. Improvement simply didn’t work.
Buried amid the torrent of information dredged up by her search, however, was one emphatic but mysterious dissenting voice.
The message was light on hyperbole and unfortunately light on details as well. It had been written three years earlier and consisted of a warning from a woman whose public profile had been defaced. Instead of name and contact details, the fields displayed a single word, repeated over and over again.
Stainer. Stainer. Stainer.
Abstainers were what the minority of people who didn’t use d-mat called themselves. They didn’t use d-mat because they thought it was immoral or something like that—Clair didn’t know the details, but everyone she knew called them Stainers, after George Staines, their founder, and the idea that giving up d-mat would bring back all the pollution humanity had finally gotten rid of. They were regarded as crazy by pretty much everyone. Hence the defacement and worse.
Stainers didn’t claim to be sane. They claimed to be right.
“Improvement killed my child” was all the woman’s warning said.
Clair worried at her fingernail, thinking of Libby’s ghostly image crashing to black.
Feeling faintly foolish but knowing her grandmother’s genes wouldn’t let the thought go until she had pursued it to the very end, she scoured her contacts until she found the name of the only Stainer in her grade and asked if they could talk.
Jesse Linwood was a junior like her, and they shared Modern History on Tuesdays, but that was where their similarities ended. Jesse’s other subjects were focused on math and engineering. They never hung out.
It wasn’t personal. Their paths simply never crossed. He didn’t come on excursions if they involved d-mat—which they always did—or eat at the refectory, where the food was always fabbed. Libby called him the Lurker because he sometimes popped up in school social media but rarely said anything. That could have been the fault of his augs, which were embarrassingly ancient. His audio came through an actual earring clipped to his earlobe, instead of a tiny tube tucked neatly into the aural canal like everyone else had. He had only one visible contact lens, which he switched from eye to eye as though it irritated him. Clair took for granted the fact that she could type using menus in her lenses or just mouth the words she wanted to say, but Jesse audibly whispered when talking in a chat, and when he was bumping someone or accessing his menus, his fingers visibly twitched. Sometimes his augs broke down, leaving him deaf and dumb to the Air until he fixed them. It drove the teachers crazy.