Duplicity Page 8

  The Trade.

  The light comes from the real bathroom on the other side of the mirror, where Emma and I—Emma and Obran—are still against the door, listening. I’m watching my life on the biggest YouTube screen in the world.

  “Is he there?” Emma asks, her voice echoing like I’m underwater.

  Obran releases her and looks around the bathroom like a kid at Disney World. He touches the counter. Feels the grout between the tiles. Pats his clothes and curls his fingers through his hair. He smiles at me, and I stand there, stupid, too shocked to move and thinking this can’t be real, thinking I’ll wake up any minute in last night’s clothes, coming off a bad high but no worse for wear—

  “No,” Obran says in my voice. “I think you’ve cured me. Sorry if I freaked you out. I won’t mention him again.”

  Emma looks at the tile he’d touched and puts a hand on his cheek. “I think you might want to see a doctor. Really. You’re boiling up.”

  “Yeah, I think I will.” Obran reaches around her for the door. “We should probably get out of here before my dad comes back.”

  That gets me moving. I jump on the dark counter and slam a fist into glass that feels like plastic cloth. It ripples when I strike it, leaving a spidery void in the picture. Obran lets Emma out and smirks at me.

  “Game over, hacker,” he whispers.

  The light goes out. The door closes. Everything around me vanishes, including the counter I’m sitting on, and then blazing white erupts overhead and this time my eyes don’t need time to adjust.

  The first thing I notice: my ink’s back. Scorpions on my left arm, gears on my right. I study my leather wristband, my faded jeans, my Rage tee. I reach for my ears, my face. Click my tongue against my teeth. All twenty-one piercings in place.

  The second thing I notice: there’s no door in this room. It’s a ten-by-ten cube with absolutely no furnishings and no windows. Steel cages protect two rectangular fluorescents above, whose gleam reflects dull against the cement floors, the cement walls. No light switch, no mirror. I can think of only two places that would have rooms like this.

  An asylum.

  Or a prison.

  I hear Jax ask, You worried the Project’s gonna snatch you up?

  Oh shit.

  The one thing I didn’t search, the one thing I didn’t even think about because it’s just an online urban legend—

  A woman in a maroon suit appears across from me. Literally, out of thin air. Chin-length hair, raven dark. Egyptian makeup and rich caramel skin. Mid-twenties, maybe older. Nice legs, but looks like she might cut me for saying so. She doesn’t fidget, doesn’t smile, barely inclines her head to look at me.

  “Mr. Eriks. I am Wendy.” She sounds like every commercial ever voiced by a woman. “Do you know where you are?”

  “Frickin’ high on something,” I grumble.

  “Incorrect. You are in the assimilation cellblock. You have been incarcerated for identity theft, tax evasion, bank fraud, wire fraud, credit card fraud, and conspiracy to commit these, all of which are federal offenses. Do you understand?”

  The only thing I can choke out is, “I want my lawyer.”

  “Your request is denied. You have been found guilty and will serve your sentence of twenty years. Do you understand?”

  No. No, absolutely not. The Project isn’t real. It’s a joke. A stupid hacker joke.

  Wendy stares at me way longer than normal, waiting. She still hasn’t moved from her original position, hands clasped in front of her. I don’t even think I’ve seen her shoulders rise to breathe.

  “I detect you don’t believe any of this is real,” she says. “Your reaction is typical of new assimilates. Disappointing.”

  “Disappointing?”

  “Yes. Disappointing: adjective. Failing to fulfill one’s expectations or—”

  “I know what it means.”

  She still hasn’t blinked. “Mr. Eriks, inducting an inmate is an immense waste of memory, so I will be blunt. You are now a part of Project Duplicity, a private, worldwide movement to remove dangerous hackers from society and repurpose them. Like a fledgling serial killer, your Internet crimes have escalated over the past year, from petty software cracks to identity theft and resale. It is Duplicity’s responsibility to prevent future damage. Our supercomputer, JENA, found you on the network and has been tracking your activities. She created a digital replica of your personality from your information on Facebook, Twitter, and your iPhone, as well as natural observations of your behavior by way of mirrors, the technical details of which are classified. She then made moral adjustments to your replica to ensure that while you serve your sentence, your double performs as an upstanding, contributing part of society. In the real world, JENA is overriding your personality with the one she created, enabling her to separate your mental signature from your body and upload you into this digital prison. It is not a physical place you can be rescued from, and you will serve your sentence of twenty years whether or not you understand or agree with the terms of your incarceration.”

  Even though I’m pretty sure I don’t have a throat anymore, I feel something choke me.

  The Project is supposed to be Internet superstition. You know, like when you get those e-mail chain letters and if you don’t forward them to twelve million people, your best friend will get cancer, your girlfriend will set your house on fire, and someone will run over your dog. No one in his right mind would actually fear getting pulled out of his body and installed on a disk.

  And I don’t know why but that makes me snicker.

  “Is this amusing?” Wendy asks.

  “It’s impossible,” I say.

  “Yet here you are. Now if there’s—”

  “Don’t I at least get a toilet?”

  I swear Wendy rolls her eyes.

  “You’re a program now, Mr. Eriks,” she says, like this is an easy thing to absorb. “Your current image, what you can see and touch, is entirely self-projected. As a human, you cannot imagine being without a body. In time you may find, like the other hackers, that you do not need it.”

  I study the ink on my arm. If it’s not real, I should be able to—one of the scorpions crawls farther out of the scar on my wrist.

  I might consider it a victory if it didn’t remind me how royally screwed I am.

  “This is how Obran changed me?” I ask.

  “Obran?” Her eyes click. That’s the only way I can describe it, like an old-fashioned camera, complete with the noise. “You mean your duplicate. Those details are classified. But I can tell you there is a distinctive barrier between your Self in the Project here, and your Self in the real world. Changing one Self from the other location is very carefully monitored.”

  “No one seemed to be monitoring while Obran changed me the past three days,” I grumble. “He actually skinned me. And what was the point of that, anyway, if JENA was just going to swap us out?”

  “JENA allows her creations to play with their future hosts before the exchange. It gives the Overseer a chance to observe the duplicate’s behavior and ensure he is responding to JENA’s commands appropriately. If Obran seemed cruel, it’s because you are.”

  I can’t really say anything to that.

  “If there are no further questions—”

  “Don’t I get a trial or something?”

  “My debrief is finished. JENA will be in shortly.”

  Wendy disappears, leaving me with the concrete. Concrete that feels like nothing when I lean against it, not cold or rough or hard, just numb.

  I look at the gears and wires on my arm. I remember telling myself I was too good to get caught.

  I think twenty years is a long freaking time.

  I guess I should have expected this. Haven’t I learned that no one takes an interest in you until you do something bad? Now I’m stuck here, wherever this is, while Obran lives my life. While he cleans up my grades and squeaks me into a community college. While he fixes my broken relationships, or tries to, though
I doubt he cares if he fails because what does a computer care about? And in twenty years, when I’m a thirty-seven-year-old dinosaur, I’ll wake up married to a woman I don’t know with kids I don’t want and a job I can’t quit.

  Or.

  Or I’ll wake up alone, in a one-bedroom apartment with a box of leftover pizza, a hangover, and a phone with only two numbers in the contact list: my psychiatrist and my boss.

  I don’t know which is worse.

  “Didn’t you want this?” I ask the walls.

  I laugh, laugh until it sounds like a sob, like the pathetic, simpering coward I am. All flash and no guts. And no one can hear me, and no one cares, which is really no different than …

  Emma’s hand on my arm. Emma looking at me like I’m someone she can see, not someone in the way, like I’m someone worth saving.

  I think I really have gone soft.

  I also think whoever decided to store hackers in a computer is a moron.

  10. I AM NOT SLOW

  CONTRARY TO WENDY’S PROMISE, JENA is not in shortly.

  I circle, glaring at the blank walls, hoping they’ll collapse to give me something new to look at. None of this is real, right? If I’m really inside a computer, this isn’t concrete or brick. Nothing physical to break through. Nothing physical. I poke the walls, I push them. I even figure out how to walk up one after I convince myself there’s no gravity, but seeing the lights sideways instead of overhead kind of wigs me out.

  I do not panic.

  I do not make a desperate promise to The Man Upstairs that I’ll never fight with Mom again if He wakes me up.

  I go at it with my fists. And my feet. And my shoulder. I don’t get so much as an interesting indent to stare at. Can’t tire myself out, either. Adrenaline, apparently, is nonexistent here. Neither can I break bones I don’t have or work out this supernova boiling up inside me.

  “JENA!”

  My voice echoes back, metallic. I wait. Nothing. I sink another fist into the wall and imagine it splitting and caving under the force, slitting a rift I can peel like fruit rind and—

  The entire wall glows blue.

  I pull back my hand. The concrete dulls. I look around, verify no random women have popped up in my cell, and place my palm against the cement-plastic. Think of waking up in twenty years looking like a creepy car salesman who drives a van without windows.

  The wall explodes. The whole room explodes—ashy shards zing over my head, roar past my ears, plunge through me without tearing a scrap of my T-shirt. I duck like that’ll make any difference and freak when a nasty piece sticks in my arm; except it doesn’t hurt, and I remember it’s not real, and it disappears, and I’m fine.

  This shit’s really messing with my head.

  The pieces freeze in midair. I don’t know if I told them to freeze or if they decided to on their own. All I know is that beyond the lumps of cotton debris it’s endless black, like there’s nothing else here, like I could walk forever and never go anywhere.

  I wonder if I broke it.

  It can’t be that easy.

  I pluck a suspended clump out of the air and gloat a little, thinking maybe it is that easy when you’re Brandon Eriks, when a girl flickers to life outside the freeze-frame explosion.

  I think she’s a girl, anyway. She’s young, no older than eight, and there’s nothing weird about her cotton dress except that it’s glowing white. It’s the copper and gray swirls in her skin that creep me out and her navy-blue hair that floats around her face like she’s swimming, glimmering now and then with silver electricity.

  But mostly it’s her red eyes.

  “Took you long enough,” she says in a bratty voice. “I am unimpressed. By far, you are the slowest hacker to break out of your cell since the Project opened. It seems I have overestimated you.”

  Slowest?

  “That … was a test?” I ask, feeling even slower.

  “One you almost failed. All hackers must escape the assimilation block before they are permitted to work on the Project. Some are out before Wendy has a chance to debrief them. You took five times as long. The only reason I am not transferring you back this second and giving you to the Feds is your exit strategy.” She appears next to me, jabs a few pieces of cement, and sends them rolling into space. “This is interesting. Was imagining a door too simple?”

  “You’re JENA?”

  She gives me a very sassy look, considering she’s a program. “Expecting someone else?”

  “No, but—” I scowl. “I am not slow. I can hack a MySQL database in under—” Wow, I am slow. I shut my mouth and JENA cocks her head.

  “Are you really bragging about that, in here?” Her laugh is a compilation of five kids’ voices and it crawls under my skin. “You work for me now. Each day you will spend seven to ten hours in the development cloud, fixing defects and writing software for my employers. If you behave yourself, I will plug you into the game room after hours. Otherwise you will return to isolation. You will also go into mandatory shutdown once per day for a period of eight hours, to allow your physical brain to rest. This will coordinate with your double’s sleep schedule.”

  The floating debris disappears, and I’m standing on neon green shag carpet in the middle of a tiny steel room where the light comes from slits in the metal. JENA’s now a voice in the ceiling, high and innocent.

  “This is your workstation. You have five minutes to begin. If you fail this time, I will have your double check himself into the police station and swap you back out. You know what happens to pretty little boys at real jails, don’t you?”

  I don’t like the word “pretty” and that’s the most I want to think about her last sentence. I stare at the walls, looking for anything that would clue me in to what the hell I’m supposed to do, but all I hear in my head is JENA telling me how slow I am.

  I’m this close to losing it.

  Focus. I don’t need a physical computer because I’m inside one. But I probably need a keyboard or something to interact with the machine. I imagine my desk at home, laptop booted and ready. No change. I imagine a keyboard and screen emerging from the wall. Again, nothing.

  I haven’t been this tripped out since I got my first tattoo.

  I swallow. Set my hand against the wall and run my fingers over the glowing cuts in it. I hate that nothing feels right in here—there’s no change in texture, no bump when I go over a slit—but what I can feel reminds me of the mirror I punched after Obran’s trade. I think of the cement room and picture the metal peeling back.

  The silver scatters away like bats. The walls of the room become pale blue screens, and I get excited about that until I notice there’s no start menu, no icons to click on. How am I supposed to start working if I don’t know what program to open?

  JENA laughs somewhere above me.

  “Four minutes,” she sings. “And not surprisingly, you’re taking too long.”

  I think about what happens to pretty boys in jail and bite my cheek, though all I feel in my mouth is pressure, not pain. I picture a black window popping up on the screen. Four rectangles darken the walls, identical boxes on each screen, taking up most of the picture. Help, I think, and paragraphs of text scroll down the windows in alien green to match the carpet, commands on the left and definitions on the right. Or so I assumed. As I actually read them I see phrases like “don’t drop the soap” and “jailbait” before they scroll out of sight.

  “Three minutes,” JENA says.

  I take my hand off the wall. The black windows close.

  She’s screwing with me.

  Of course text commands won’t work. I’m inside the computer, I should be able to talk directly to it. But I have no idea what I’m doing. I don’t—

  New windows open in the corner of each wall, displaying the rearview mirror of my Corolla. Obran drops into the driver’s seat. Fires up the engine. Pulls out of the driveway and heads south, which will eventually land him at Parker PD. Stupid machine. If she’s the computer, I should be a
ble to control her, not the other way around. I grit my teeth.

  “JENA, open the program for me. Now.”

  “Bossy, bossy,” comes the reply.

  The Obran video remains, but four new windows pop up next to it, each displaying a different game. Bejeweled, Need for Speed, Plants vs. Zombies, Pac-Man 3000. They cycle through other games, too, and other programs: Word, PowerPoint, an Internet browser, and one smaller window that flashes, two minutes.

  I’ve never spent more than thirty seconds getting a machine to do what I want and it’s driving me nuclear. I think of the screens blasting apart and ripping down the center like paper. Of some futuristic plug floating in the darkness behind the walls that I can tear out of its socket, and then I’d be the eyes behind the wheel of the Corolla, and jerk the car around—

  The screens flutter. The picture distorts. In the Corolla mirror, Obran signals, cuts someone off, and makes a U-turn.

  “Enough!” JENA screeches, so loud the screens ripple. “I am not your toy. I am decreasing your security access, and you will remain in quarantine until the need arises for it to change.”

  I snicker. “I thought I was slow.”

  “You are. One minute left.”

  Obran makes another U-turn. I sigh and close my eyes, thinking about how it reacts to my emotions, and how I really don’t want to work for her. Maybe that’s my problem. Maybe I need to want to work.

  JENA starts a thirty-second countdown.

  I want to work. I make myself think it, because the alternative is being someone’s jail pet, and I’d rather do my twenty in here. I want to work.

  I make myself believe it.

  JENA’s at “Ten, nine…” when I open my eyes to a transparent box on the screen, blank except for a slender cursor in the top left. The window on the right displays an in-box of tasks with numbers, file names, and descriptions of each assignment. The first item expands when I look at it. I memorize the file name, then turn back to the transparent window. Code flashes into existence, lines of text and numbers and variables.