Duplicity (11 page)

“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 able 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.

I think how she manipulated me into this and I almost lose the screens.

“Good boy,” JENA says, appearing with her weird blue hair in the opposite corner. “The Overseer will be pleased.”

For now
, I think.

For now.

 

11. THE KID IN THE FEDORA

IT'S RINSE AND REPEAT
the next four days. Or at least the next four shifts. I have no way to track time, I only know that once I tire of coding, JENA shuts me down, claiming Obran's energy levels have gone critical. The routine is maddening. No breaks for food or bathroom since I don't need them, and being “shut down” means a dreamless, black stretch of time that does nothing to relax me. I almost wish Mom would stomp through the screens with another Principal Myer lecture.

During one of the shifts I start fantasizing about Emma, which results in immediate blackout when images of her room flicker over my coding windows. But seriously, at this point I'd fantasize about anything—chocolate chip cookies, the rumble of the Z, how it feels to walk or touch things; hell, being hungry or thirsty or sick. Just
being
.

I'm ready for a throw-down when JENA wakes me on day five.

“Shift start,” she says in her creepy little girl's voice, as the screens flicker to life around my prison. I glare at the ceiling and wonder how the other hackers could ever choose to go without a body when it can convey such useful messages, like both my middle fingers are doing right now.

“Screw you,” I say.

“Not an option. You will start your shift.”

She opens my in-box for me, twelve new tasks to build a higher-security checkout process for some big shot online auction site. I close it and darken the screens.

“No. I will
not
.”

A pause, then JENA appears, a tiny, glowing monster in the small space.

“Then you understand I have no choice,” she says.

The movie screen with Obran returns from the viewpoint of my bedroom mirror. Obran rises from my desk, pretty boy hair all gelled, and heads for the door. The ache to dive through the image and cling to my bedframe and yell for Dad is like thirst. Maybe if I'm fast enough, I can get through before JENA stops me. I bolt for the screen. The picture vanishes when I reach the wall.

“Yes,” I say, clenching my fist against the plastic where my bedpost used to be. “I understand.”