Duplicity (20 page)

“Even you know I've been gone. Obran, the guy in the preppy clothes, is not me. Project Duplicity is real, and they hunt real hackers, and when they find them, they make a duplicate of the hacker's personality, fix it to their liking, and swap them out. Their families never know they went missing, and in the meantime, we have to work for them. You don't even get a trial. I was supposed to be there twenty years. You remember I told you about Obran, and in the bathroom—”

“Hold on. You're telling me you broke the law enough to get arrested, got sucked into
The Matrix
, then broke out nineteen years early? And somehow this still has to do with mirrors?”

“I could go into the technical details, but I don't think that'll help. Short answer, yes.”

“You can't think of any other reason why this Obran exists? How he swaps with you?”

“I…”—Where is she going with this?—“I don't need to think of any other reasons, because I know that's what happened. I only got out because one of the other guys in the prison, Seb, helped me—”

“Brandon, stop!” We do. She lets go of my hand. “This can't be healthy. You have a great imagination, but, I mean, are you listening to yourself?”

She doesn't believe me. I don't know what I expected but it wasn't this.

“Think about this,” she says. “You've moved around a lot since you were little. Your parents haven't ever made time for you. Then we meet, and your initial reaction is to push me away because it isn't safe to be close to someone you might lose. Don't you think it's weird that after the night I told you I liked you, this guy named Obran starts changing you? And you've treated him like an entirely different person, and he
is
an entirely different person, but he's still you. You switching into a skin that's more comfortable being around me until the real you decides I'm safe.”

I swallow. “N-No, I know it seems like that, but it's a lot more complicated. I have no clue what Obran's been doing the last few months, but I know everything that happened in the prison.”

“And it's common for those in your situation to do that. To separate yourself so completely that Obran's memories and your own don't cross paths. Necessary, even, to protect yourself. I mean, have you thought about it?”

I'm not sure if the possibility of her being right or her sounding like Ginger terrifies me more. But I couldn't … make all this up, could I? I think of Obran in the car mirrors, in the gym, in my room. I remember Seb with his quirky smile and his ridiculous hat, and the zombie dogs and JENA's red eyes and wonder how far the human mind will go to compartmentalize.

But my hand rubs my right arm where the gears and wires used to be. She can't explain that away. Or how I'd know the details of a certain private phone conversation.

“I'm not a project,” I say.

“What?” The color drains from Emma's face. “Why would you say that?”

“In the prison, Seb and I were playing around with the mirrors, to figure out if they were the key to getting back. You can visit different rooms that way. So for a test, I pictured your room. You happened to be there, on the phone, talking to Sam. This would've been after Obran ate dinner with your family.”

“Did you … did you hack my phone?”

“No, Emma. You're not listening.” We're close to the park and I keep going. I don't have time for her to not understand. “I promise I'm telling the truth. I saw you in the mirror. Project Duplicity breaks every law of privacy in the book, and the mirrors are how they track their targets and make replica personalities like Obran. You remember when the angel fell off your dresser? That was me, trying to figure out what the heck to do.”

She jogs to catch up with me and says nothing for a few steps.

“I want to believe you,” she says, “but what you're saying, it's impossible. What I'm saying…”

“Then how do I know about a conversation you had with the door closed?”

“I-I don't know, maybe you're stalking me.”

“I don't
need
to stalk you, you're my girlfriend.”

“Okay, but—”

Good. Now she's thinking about it as she should, except she won't find a logical reason why I know what I know, why her angel fell off her dresser.

“Humor me, will you?” I say. “If Project Duplicity's real, then someone's created a machine that can replace people in society, so perfectly that friends and family don't believe it when someone tells them. They have control of all our mirrors. Think of what they could do with that kind of power. Replace athletes, celebrities, presidents…”

Emma takes my hand again and sighs. Humoring me. “Okay, so let's say it's real, then what does it matter now? You're free. Stop hacking and enjoy life.”

“I can't.” I squeeze her hand. “I left someone behind.”

Something's wrong. Really wrong, like we're being followed, like we're being watched. I glance over my shoulder, but only the houses along the street look back at us, and no one's on the strip of lawn we've walked into the park. Two men in suits chat on a bench on the path ahead. They're watching us.

Of course they're watching us. We're the only other people in the park.

Emma sighs. “Does that mean you're going to leave me with Obran again?”

“I don't know. I don't want to but I might have to.”

The men stand, laughing and buttoning their overcoats.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” Emma asks.

“Stay away from Obran when you know he's in control and don't listen to anything he says. They can make him do whatever they want. When I was there, they were using you to—”

The men walk toward us. I don't panic, I don't, because there's no way JENA could find me this fast and unless they whip out a pocket mirror, they have nothing that scares me. I've got my knife. I've taken down jocks bigger than them.

“Using me to what?” Emma asks.

“Brandon Eriks?” calls the first man.

“Shit,” I say. “Emma,
run
.”

We do, but we're so far from the street, and there aren't any cars to wave down and we run and they—I check over my shoulder—they follow, and Emma asks if they're cops and I tell her I don't know and we've only pounded twenty steps out when I hear a click and something stings the back of my neck.

The world drips like it's behind paint thinner.

My body stops and jerks Emma to a halt, too.

“Using you to control him,” Obran says through my mouth, and the last thing I see is one of the suits pulling Emma's arms behind her back.

 

18. WAIT, WHO'S THE BAD GUY?

“CURSING IS NOT
going to do you any good,” JENA says cheerfully, skipping around my work cell. “Although you
are
helping me expand my ‘banned words' list. In the future, those words will come out silent if anyone tries to say them.”

I seethe, but having exhausted every filthy word and creative combination I can think of, I can only cross my arms and hope she'll explode into bits if I think about it hard enough. She doesn't.

They have Emma.

And it's my fault.

“You should be thanking me.” JENA stops her maddening circles and begins drawing algorithms on the cement with a glow-in-the-dark jumbo crayon. “If it was up to the Overseer, you would be deleted already. I argued to extend your life. You are powerless without Thirty-Nine, and for the time being, more valuable alive than dead.”

I think about her stupid crayon cracking in half or splattering color all over her handiwork, but neither happens.

JENA chuckles. “You think I would allow you to make changes, after what you have done? I consider you a virus. Your commands must go through me now, and that one, is certainly denied.”

“At least leave Emma out of this. She doesn't—”

“She has everything to do with this. She is the only motivator you respond to, and we know from your last transcript that you told her about the Project. We are prepared. As we speak, she sits in one of our secure locations, awaiting her own duplicate to finish processing.”

“
What?
”

“No one in the real world, outside company staff, is allowed to know about the Project. If you had not told her, this would not be a problem. The only viable option at this point is a swap.”

A swap.

They're going to
swap
Emma.

I stare, like the useless thing I am, and try to think my way out of it, but my brain won't work. I've ruined Emma's life.
I've ruined Emma's life
. I think of when I tried to push her away and when the selfish part of me decided to keep her. This is what I get for reaching out. This is what I get for wanting something I have no business having.

“But she doesn't believe me,” I say. “She thinks I have some kind of identity disorder, she thinks I'm making you up! She's innocent, you can't swap her, she doesn't deserve this.”

“Regardless, it must be done. Lucky for us, her duplicate will not require character adjustments. The swap can happen in the next twenty-four hours. The process usually takes weeks.”

I should have let her go. Why didn't I just let her go?

“Don't hurt her,” I say. “I'll do whatever you want. I'll stay here for life, just please don't swap her.”

JENA pauses on one of her algorithms, changes to a red crayon, and begins another. “Then we understand each other. You will assist me in locating Target Thirty-Nine.”

“Fine.”

“You will assist me in writing tighter security measures to prevent future leaks.”

“Okay.”

“You will be immediately deleted if you refuse any of these agreements.”

Like that's a threat. Like I care at all what they do with me. The only possible usefulness I have left depends on when they swap out Emma.

Unless I can hack JENA before that.

“Your developers are pretty incompetent if they need
my
help to find someone in
their
system,” I say.

The crayon vanishes. JENA turns brown eyes to me that flush green. “Are you suggesting my application team is incapable of supporting the operations of this prison?”

“I'd say it's already been proven. I got out, and you can't find Seb.”

Click, click, click
echoes off the walls. JENA tilts her head in a very human way, and though her expression remains neutral as always, something like curiosity flickers in her eyes. Her irises change color again, this time to gold.

“You do possess an extraordinary adaption rate,” she says, “much like Thirty-Nine. My creators spent ten years building me and still failed to account for the vulnerabilities the two of you exploited in two months' time. Now I know why.” A screen to my left flashes to life, showing Obran's view of Emma sitting in a chair in a white room, looking anxious. He must have gone with the men in suits to ensure she cooperates. “If you have taught me nothing else, Target Fifty, it is the power of human emotion. Your desperation to reach freedom you believe you deserve and to protect those important to you produces far more impressive results than programmers under a date-driven deadline. You will not make mistakes, because you cannot afford to.”

The room panels in on itself, like one of those mechanical billboards shifting to the next ad. She's moved me to the code layer. Centipedes of flashing numbers replace the cement prison, lining all four corners. Blackness fills the screens between. My body melts into shadow.

“Though I do not fully understand the concept behind money,” JENA says, invisible, “I do understand numbers. I know, for instance, that it would cost the corporation eight hundred to a thousand dollars per developer per day to hunt Thirty-Nine. During that time, the developer may take several breaks or leave early for a family event. Your labor is free, and I have your undivided attention.”

I sigh as JENA pulls up a new screen for me, something that looks like a cross between a two-dimensional maze game and a bowl of radioactive spaghetti.

“You're an evil little girl, JENA,” I say.

“Session start,” comes her reply.

*   *   *

“I need more access than this,” I say for the eightieth time, as the screen flashes red again.

“Declined,” JENA says, but the screen unlocks and a new maze of spaghetti pulses green and blue.

“This would go a lot faster if you raised my clearance,” I grumble.

“Speed is not my top priority.”

But it's mine. JENA won't tell me when she's planned Emma's swap, so I have to assume it's soon. A source of infinite frustration since I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing and there are a million places for a program like Seb to hide. I know he has access to the mirror server, the game server, and the holding cells, at the very least. JENA's let me in to a hundred other servers, all but the replication computers where they're making a copy of Emma. I've tried to convince her that's where Seb's hiding, but she seems to think her security there is unbreakable.

The screen flashes red again.

“JENA, seriously—”

“That is not a lock I put in place.”

I stare at the lines on the screen, at a section of spaghetti that's gone red. It's easy as that. A few hours shoveling through code and—

I think of Seb telling me he trusts me.

I don't let myself think about what they'll do when they get him out. I can't care about two people. Emma is all that matters.

“Thank you, Target Fifty,” JENA says. “I will take over from here. You may enjoy a short break in the meantime.”

The coding windows fade to cement. Video screens float along the walls, soundless, all clips from before and after my capture, and one—one that I bring up bigger than the others—with the white room and Emma in her chair like a prisoner waiting to be interrogated. The eyes I'm looking through are Obran's. I turn on the audio.