Duplicity (21 page)

“I
am
the good twin, Emma,” Obran says. “Do you think I want to listen to JENA? No. I tried everything to push you away. Kept our relationship stiff, avoided you outside of school, told you I was sick so I didn't have to go to that stupid homecoming after-party. You were supposed to get the hint and leave me alone, because I knew if anything went wrong with the Project, JENA would go after you first. But you didn't get the hint, and
he
told you everything, and now there's nothing else I can do.”

Emma rolls her unopened water bottle between her hands. “You were trying to protect me?”

I close it down. They haven't swapped her yet, and that's all that matters. I close the other videos until it's just the walls, and then everything dissolves and I wonder if I subconsciously moved myself into the code layer when a new screen pops up with a very angry face. One I've seen before. One whose clear irritation makes me smile.

“Vivien,” I say.

“I'm not even going to ask how you know who I am,” she snaps, brushing a stray curl of black back into her bun. I'm in her palm at one-tenth my size, like JENA would be. “What did you do to Thirty-Nine's section?”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“You know exactly—” A hand falls on her shoulder. I look up at Marcus, who won't look at me. “JENA tells me the section Thirty-Nine is locked in can only be cracked with your signature.”

“Clever,” I say.

“I have not invested millions in this project to be jerked around by a couple of kids! I have buyers on the line. The governmental kind. You will let us in to Thirty-Nine's section. And so help me if I don't delete you right after.”

“Let Emma go.”

“You are in no position to bargain.”

“Seb will rip up your little project from the inside out.”

“Seb?” She breathes in and out very quickly. Marcus moves away and returns with a paper bag and a glass of water. The screen cuts out.… then cuts back in, and half the water's gone, and Vivien looks a little more collected, though barely.

“Thirty-Nine does not have a name,” she says. “It is a virus. If you mean Sariah Elise Burnhart, a respected high school senior who will be attending Harvard next year, you need not worry. She is alive and well and a blessing to her community. She received an award last year for the time she spent helping recently disabled children learn how to cope with the emotional aftermath of their accident.”

She?
She?

“So what, we just lose our soul when we come in here?” I say. “I'm an
It
?”

“What else would you be? You have no body. A person is not a person without one. I can shut you down or call you back up at any time, like any computer. I can change your avatar to male or female or neither, if I cared. In the meantime, your duplicate will become a positive influence on society, someone worth remembering, someone worth the life he's been given. Should we not try to leave the world a little better than when we came?”

She reminds me so much of Mom that I almost call her that. “Like you can judge who's worth remembering. If you're doing society such a favor, why is the Project top secret?”

I think she might actually explode. A vein pulses in her temple and her face goes red, and then I'm not in her palm anymore, I'm on Marcus's watch, looking at his round face and grimacing at his dreads.

“I can stop them from swapping your girl,” he says. Vivien protests in the background but he has my full attention. “We will have to do a little memory rewriting, because it is imperative she knows nothing about the Project, but I can spare her the swap. If you unlock Thirty-Nine for us.”

“I don't trust you,” I say.

He sighs. “I'm all you've got, so you'll just have to take my word. I didn't sign up for this to swap out innocent girls.”

“What are you going to do with Seb?”

I know already, and it shouldn't matter, but I have to ask. Marcus's pained face says more than his words.

“She will be dealt with as she must. Do we have a deal?”

(
We're going to get out,
I told her
. Both of us.
)

I bite one of the piercings in my lip, and it feels like nothing. I push myself inside that feeling and say, “Deal.”

 

19. THE DAY I BECAME A CRIMINAL MASTERMIND

I AM A MACHINE.

That's how I'll die, so I may as well accept it.

I've been working at the security in Seb's section for three hours. Marcus has given me temporary administrative rights because he knows I'm not going anywhere as long as they have Emma. I've gotten through the layer that asks for my personal signature, and I'm stuck on a screen that looks like confetti and Japanese characters. It changes every five minutes to something completely different. I don't even attempt this one. I wait until it shifts again, this time to a crossword puzzle with boxes that disappear and reappear in different places and clues that blur in and out of focus.

I know the answers to these questions but I don't want to get in.

I don't solve this one, either.

Every second that ticks by completes another portion of Emma's duplicate. JENA's pasted a small screen to my left that kindly reminds me how far along she is. Thirty-six percent.

Thirty-seven.

The crossword fades.

As soon as I find him—her—they'll lock me down and probably terminate me. I know this just like I know the next puzzle's going to be an impossible sudoku, which it is. I know this just like I know JENA's about to check in on me.

And there she is, a little face in the corner of my screen.

“What is taking so long?” she asks.

I am a machine. I should start acting like one.

“I'm breaking the rules of the Project, hacking in like this to get Thirty-Nine,” I say.

“It has been authorized.”

“I don't understand why this is allowed, when it won't fix the root of the problem. Thirty-Nine is your strongest developer, made apparent by the fact that none of your other developers can find her. If you terminate her, you lose a valuable resource. And you'll continue to have leaks.”

Click, click, click.

(I hate those damn clicks.)

“Thirty-Nine performed an unauthorized swap of targets,” she says. “That is the highest threat to the Project. All threats must be eliminated.”

“Thirty-Nine only did what the system allowed her to do. She operated within the parameters given to her.” I pull up a file I found while poking around Seb's security puzzles. “Does this look familiar?”

“I am familiar with every file in my system. That is a log of commands from the Overseer. I do not understand what—”

“Approval of Fifty's transfer before duplicate was ready,” I read. “Rejection of requests to delete targets who'd gained unauthorized access to secured parts of the system. Direct order to allow targets to hack the mirror server so appropriate countercoding could be performed.” I smile. “It's clear to me that the biggest threat is not Thirty-Nine. The biggest threat is Vivien Meng.”

JENA blinks. “The Overseer cannot be a threat.”

“She's the catalyst for the swap. Without her, none of this would have happened. Why can't the Overseer be a threat?”

Click, click
. JENA doesn't smile, doesn't frown, doesn't move when she says, “No information is provided on that.”

She's listening.

I'm hacking a freaking supercomputer.

“Then it's in the interest of the Project to preserve Thirty-Nine and employ us to fix the weak code on the mirror server.” I can't believe I'm going to say this but I think of Emma. “You'll have to shut the mirror server down until we finish, to prevent unauthorized swaps. Is that logical?”

“I—” She disappears, then reappears. “I cannot shut down the mirror server at this time. I must wait until Target Fifty-Three has completed processing.”

She doesn't look at it (she wouldn't need to) but I see Emma's counter go up to thirty-eight.

“Fifty-Three's duplicate is a waste of resources,” I say. “The target knows nothing about programming, so she can't be added to your developer team. The creation of her duplicate is based on an emotional response from your Overseer in an attempt to compensate for poor judgment. The target's memories can be rewritten without a swap to protect the secrecy of the Project. Cancel the duplicate. Shut down the server.”

I'm pushing it but I don't care. I want to know how far my temporary administrative powers reach.

“I am not permitted to take commands from targets,” JENA says.

I smirk and mimic her tone from before. “It has been authorized.”

JENA fades. Reappears next to me in avatar form, her hair like pieces of lightning, her child's face serious.

“Target Fifty,” she says. “Your suggestions will save the company weeks of labor and allow the other targets to continue delivering work to our outside clients. I will cancel the copy of Target Fifty-Three's duplicate. I will shut down the mirror server. You will extract Thirty-Nine and submit yourself to the testing server to fix the broken code.”

“And you will have Obran take Emma home, so the local police aren't sent to look for her.”

“That request is irrelevant.”

“If she's reported missing, the cops will have a lot of questions for Obran. They'll start with him. That's who she was last with. Is secrecy not the next highest priority to an unauthorized swap?”

“I will consider your request.”

“I will work faster knowing she's safe.”

JENA … actually
sighs
. “You are very tiresome, Fifty, but I will orchestrate her removal from company authority. I cannot guarantee her return as I have no control over the human agents.”

She flashes out of focus. My screens go red, then black, then Vivien Meng's ferocious face appears theater-size in front of me, and I don't know why, but the woman makes me smile.

“Wipe that horrible smirk off your face!” she yells at me. “Marcus, update his avatar to his real world body. I cannot stand those piercings. And do something with his hair.”

“I told you, JENA is not taking commands from me,” Marcus says to the side.

“You!” she spits at me. “I can't wait to erase you from the system. Like you never existed. Poof!” She laughs like a crazy person, then sneers at me again. “You will not be the end of Duplicity. You may think you have the upper hand, but my technicians are on their way, right now, to unplug the servers and reboot them. JENA will be reset, and her first command will be your termination. And don't think your scrawny little duplicate will be getting Emma out of our custody. We will continue with her swap after the reboot.”

“So what you're saying is, until your technicians can unplug us, I have complete control.”

Her lip twitches. It can't be safe for someone's blood pressure to be that high. “No … I'm warning you, you have no time, that you'll die when she boots back up—”

Marcus hands her another paper bag, but I think she answered my question.

“How much permanent damage do you think I can do in that time?” I ask her. I tell JENA to close off my connection to the real world. Vivien disappears.

I have control.

Temporarily, yes. But everything's going to hell anyway, so I may as well take them down with me.

 

20. GOOD-BYE PRESENTS

ACCORDING TO JENA,
she also monitors the security for the server room Vivien wants to power down. Keyword “monitors.” At least one of those morons was smart enough to use a different computer to actually run the security, so I can't lock them out.

But I'll know when they get there, and I'll know how much time I have.

JENA keeps asking what will happen to all the data she's collected since her creation when they do the reboot. I answer, for the hundredth time, that she'll lose it.

“But I do not understand,” she says in her child's voice. “I was built to learn and adapt. I do not want to lose all this data.”

“Then save it somewhere outside the system,” I say.

I don't know if she does or not. She's quiet as I work at the security for Seb's section.

“Dammit, Seb,” I say, and I'll admit, I'm a little more ticked off now that I know she's a
girl
and I can't break in. No offense, it's just a dude thing. It's not helping my focus.

I have to get into that room.

A new puzzle pops up on the screen, the one with the confetti and the Japanese characters and I just lose it. I imagine them blowing to hell and ripping back and letting me in, but of course nothing happens, except they float away a bit like I blew on them. I call Seb something I hope she can't hear and focus every bit of my frustration on the confetti.

It bursts into the room like snow.

It's cold like snow.

And I know, even before Seb's face appears on-screen, that something is very wrong.

“Kathy! Is it really you?” Seb asks, tipping his fedora. “Or maybe you're a bot wearing his skin. We should have thought up a code word for this. What was I wearing when you were getting munched by zombies?”

“Er, a cheerleading outfit?” I say.

JENA said she put me on one of the maintenance servers to hunt for Seb. But that's not possible. If I can feel snow, I'm on the game server.

And if she lied about that—

“Are you on the mirror server?” I ask.

Say no. Please, please say no. JENA told me she shut down the mirror server. So if she didn't …

I didn't hack her. She didn't cancel the creation of Emma's duplicate.

She's not planning to leave Seb alive.

“Shouldn't you know?” Seb snorts. “Of course I am. Don't want them doing something rash like powering off our only escape route, do we?”