There were five benches arranged in a pentagon around the base of a broad-trunked tree. She took a seat, bouncing her right leg compulsively up and down as she tried to watch every direction at once, half expecting Dylan Linwood to leap out of a booth and attack her again, no matter what “q” said.
“Are you saying I can’t call my parents? Or Zep? Or anyone?”
“No, Clair. You can, but I strongly advise against it. I can tell you that your parents are in no danger, if that helps. Their injuries are superficial. They are of no value to your enemies now that you have escaped the trap they set for you.”
“Did the peacekeepers come?”
“Yes.”
“Does that mean they’re not my enemies?”
“I do not know, Clair.”
“Can I at least go see Mom and Oz?”
“You should avoid using d-mat for the foreseeable future.”
“What?”
“A search is currently under way for you. I can hide your identity from the Air, but there’s no hiding your DNA from VIA. All transits will be red flagged.”
Clair wiped sweaty palms on her skirt. Slowly it was sinking in that “q” had indeed gotten Dylan Linwood off her tail. But at what cost? By isolating her from everything and everyone she knew. And only by changing her pattern . . . reaching into it and editing out her lenses and ear-rings . . . in a way that was supposed to be utterly impossible.
Whoever “q” was, she had just done everything Improvement said it did. The implications were immense. On top of the possibilities that Improvement might be causing brain damage and Dylan Linwood was trying to kill her, it was too much. Clair wanted nothing more than to bury her head in the sand until it all went away. Clearly that wasn’t possible. The best she could do was hope to understand it one piece at a time. Starting with the piece that had nothing to do with murder or anyone apparently coming back from the dead. . . .
“You changed my pattern,” she said. “How did you do that?”
“As long as I maintain parity and don’t hurt anyone,” the voice said, “I can do a lot of things.”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘parity.’ Doesn’t changing someone set off an alarm?”
“Material objects come under far less scrutiny than people, which makes them much easier to reroute or create from scratch. That’s all a fabber does, after all, and fabbers are allowed to do it as often as you ask them to, because you only ever use them to make things. The difference is a legal one: People are alive and shouldn’t be duplicated or altered like hats or chocolate bars can be. The trick I used was to change a person’s tag from alive to material so I could alter your pattern—your lenses and your ear-rings, specifically—and then change it back before anyone spotted it happening.”
“Like you did with my name?”
“Something like that,” “q” said. “When a pattern is taken by a d-mat booth, two very important things happen. First, it’s checked against databases containing prohibited compounds, genetic records, and so on. Most people are licensed to carry most things through d-mat, but suicide bombers shouldn’t be allowed to, and neither should young kids trying to run away from home. If the database doesn’t reveal anything like that, the transfer is given a conditional green light. This phase of the process is handled by one of the two AIs VIA uses to keep the system running safely.
“Now, if you think of the first AI as the conductor of a bus—”
“A what?”
“An outmoded mass-transport vehicle.”
“Like a train?”
“Kind of. If the first AI, the conductor, is the one that checks your ticket as you get on and off the bus, then that makes the second AI the driver of the bus. Its job is to get you safely to your destination without being duplicated or erased or sent to a booth that doesn’t exist.
“These two AIs, conductor and driver, are bound by a principle similar to the laws of physics: that in a d-mat booth, unlike a fabber, matter can neither be created nor destroyed. Even though both happen at opposite ends during the jump, it has to look as though it didn’t.”
Clair was about as vague regarding physics as she was buses. It was a struggle to keep up with what “q” was telling her.
“What happens when it doesn’t?”
“That’s called a parity violation, Clair. Equilibrium hasn’t been maintained, and an alarm does sound. It’s the number one alarm in VIA. It can’t be ignored, and you can’t turn it off, because it means that at least one of the AIs is broken. The only way to fix things quickly is to crash the entire system, reboot it again, and hope the break isn’t permanent.”
“Which obviously hasn’t happened, or we’d have noticed,” Clair said. “How did you work this out?”
“It’s right there in the algorithms, if you know where to look.”
“Do you know who else might be doing it?”
“No, Clair. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. If anything, I should thank you for what you did back there. I was completely out of ideas. It was clever of you to figure it out.” She paused before adding, with all the parental firmness she could muster, just in case the owner of the voice was a child, “But please don’t spring something like that on me again. If you’re going to muck around with my pattern, you have to warn me in advance. You have to ask my permission.”
“I promise I will, Clair. I’m sorry.”
“No, really, don’t apologize. Just, well . . . I don’t know. Hopefully there won’t ever be a next time.”
Her mind reeled at the implications of what “q” had told her, but there were greater issues calling for her attention. She looked around, still worried about people creeping up on her while she was distracted. She knew this station. It was four blocks away from school, putting her northwest of the WHOLE safe house.
“Why did you bring me here?” she asked. “You could have sent me anywhere you wanted. What’s so special about Manteca?”
“You have to go back for your friend Zeppelin Barker: that is what you said in South Africa. You can’t just leave him behind. And this is where he is.”
Clair almost laughed even as she was reminded of the predicament Zep was in. “You know who those people are, right? The ones who are holding him prisoner?”
“I do not. Their identities are obscured, even when they are connected to the Air.”
“That’s because they’re WHOLE, and they eat people like me and Zep for breakfast. At the very least, you could’ve given me a gun before sending me back in there.”
“I could if you wanted me to.”
Clair rubbed her brow with the knuckles of both hands. She had been joking about the gun, but not about Zep. Rescuing him was critical, if she could only find the energy to get moving again. She felt like every vein in her body was full of mud.
“What I’d like more than anything is a cup of coffee.”
“Go to the third booth on the right.”
She forced her weary legs into motion and jumped to the front of the queue.
“Sorry,” she said to the commuters whose journeys she was briefly interrupting. “I’m expecting something.”
The door opened, revealing a plastic box big enough to hold a large melon. It had an identity patch addressed to Carolyn Edge. Clair pressed her right palm against the patch until it flashed green and unsealed. Then she took the box back to the bench and eased the lid open.