Blackout

  “Who says she speaks for the rest of us?” The words sounded alien even as they left my mouth. George, please, forgive me, I thought. “I mean, come on, man. It was nice of you to let the science dudes grow me a replacement, but you could have just sent a card. She’s a clone. She’s not a real person. She doesn’t get to be the one who gets the real people dead.”

  The man from the CDC paused, an uncertain look crossing his face.

  I decided to press what little advantage I had. “I’m not going to pretend we’re happy about this bullshit. I mean, dude, you killed Alaric’s parents. That’s pretty crappy, and it doesn’t make us feel like playing nice. But that doesn’t mean she speaks for the rest of us. You know she’s not a perfect copy of my sister. You built a broken Georgia. Maybe you could’ve done a better job if she hadn’t managed to get away from you—that happens a lot, doesn’t it? Clones, mosquitoes, reporters. You’ve been running the country for like twenty years. Shouldn’t you be better at this by now?”

  “That’s quite enough, son,” said President Ryman. Turning to the man from the CDC, he said, “Put the pen down. They’re willing to listen to what we have to say. Isn’t that what we brought them here for? To sway them to the right way of thinking?”

  I could see George out of the corner of my eye. She had her face turned toward me, jaw slack in the way that told me she was staring behind the dark lenses of her sunglasses. I was briefly, terribly grateful she’d chosen to keep wearing them. I wouldn’t have been able to keep smiling if I’d been able to see her eyes.

  She believes every word you’re saying, whispered my internal George, sounding pleased and disappointed at the same time, like she couldn’t decide which was better. I bet she’s said those same things to herself every day since she woke up. Not good enough. Not Georgia enough. Not real. And now you’ve confirmed it. Think she’ll ever forgive you?

  That seemed like a less pressing question at the moment than whether I was ever going to be able to forgive myself. We had to survive before I could find out one way or the other.

  George sniffled before saying, in a small voice, “If I’m not going to be a part of this decision, can I please go lie down? My head hurts. I don’t understand what’s going on.” She sounded utterly pathetic. I had to bite back a sigh of relief.

  Georgia’s migraines were the one thing that ever got the Masons to let her out of public appearances when we were kids. Her eyes meant that sometimes, migraines just happened, and the best thing for her to do was lie in a nice dark place and wait for them to go away. I used to wonder why the Masons never noticed that she always seemed to have a migraine when we were supposed to go to the government orphanage where she was adopted—lucky her, she was found within driving distance of Berkeley. The Masons had to go all the way to Southern California to get me.

  As far as I knew, she never once visited that orphanage. And if she was claiming a migraine now, she was faking it. She was playing along.

  Slowly, the man from the CDC said, “If he feels we built him a, as he says, ‘broken George,’ he won’t mind if I shoot her right now. We can always make him a better one.”

  I froze, every nerve I had screaming two contradictory commands—save her, save her, don’t let her die again warring with no, you can’t, you’ll all die if you try, and you can choose that for you, but you can’t choose it for Becks and Alaric. I had to let him pull the trigger. I couldn’t let him. As soon as he started to tense his fingers I’d jump for him, and whatever came after that would be anybody’s guess. I knew that, even as the sanest part of me was telling me it was the worst thing I could possibly do. Becks and Alaric knew it, too. They glanced my way, uncertainty in their eyes. I was the boss. I was the one they counted on to keep them safe. And that wasn’t going to stop me from getting them both killed.

  Rescue came from an unexpected quarter. Steve cleared his throat before saying, with professional calm, “If your hand so much as twitches, sir, I will be forced to shoot you. Intentionally beginning an outbreak in the presence of the president is considered an act of treason. Intent to commit an act of treason authorizes me to take whatever steps are necessary to prevent that act from being carried out.”

  “Now,” said President Ryman again. “Your point is made. He didn’t stop you. They’ll listen to us. Put the pen down.”

  “Fine.” Looking disgusted, the man from the CDC slid the pen back into the pocket of his lab coat. “You say the clone has no part in your decision making process. Prove it. Agree to distribute the news on our behalf.”

  “Please, can I go lie down?” whispered George.

  I knew she was faking. The pain in her voice was still enough to make me want to put my arms around her and never let go, men from the CDC and Secret Service agents and government conspiracies be damned.

  “You treat all your science projects this badly?” asked Becks.

  “Of course not,” said President Ryman. “Rick, take her somewhere. Calm her down, give her a glass of water, whatever it takes to settle her. We’ll decide what’s to be done with her when we finish sorting things out here.”

  “Yes, Mr. President,” said Rick. He moved quickly, taking George’s elbow before I could formulate a protest. “Come with me. I’ll see if we can’t find you something to make you feel a little better.” If it had been anyone other than Rick, I would have stepped in. I wouldn’t have had a choice. But it was Rick, and he used to be one of us, and so I didn’t say anything. Steve followed after him, a hulking, defensive presence. He’d keep her safe if Rick couldn’t.

  George sniffled and let herself be led away. She didn’t look back at me. Not once.

  See? whispered the George in my mind. She believed every word you said.

  “Shut up,” I muttered, and grimaced, waiting to see what effect that would have on the already questionably stable nameless doctor from the CDC.

  He didn’t appear to have heard me. Instead, he watched as Rick led George away, waiting until they were out of sight before turning back to me. “My apologies if I seemed somewhat aggressive before,” he said finally. “Had things gone as originally planned, this is the point where we would be presenting her to you—not this clone, perhaps, but one that was not, as you put it, ‘defective.’ She would be a gift, given in good faith, to show you that working with us is the right thing to do.”

  I wanted to tell him that if he’d reached the point where giving other people away like party favors was “the right thing to do,” he was too crazy for me to want to work with him—and I know from crazy. I wanted to tell him they shouldn’t have worked so hard to make a person when they cloned my sister, because an empty shell and excuses about brain damage would have been an awful lot easier for them to control. I didn’t say any of those things. I guess I never went all the way crazy after all.

  Instead, I did what I do best, and went on the attack. “If you wanted us to get this far, why did your men try to kill us in Seattle?” I asked. “I mean, not exactly ‘hi, let’s be besties’ behavior, you know?”

  “That was an unfortunate misunderstanding,” said the doctor.

  “A surprising number of your misunderstandings involve bullets and body counts,” said Alaric. He was glowering. If I were the man from the CDC, I would’ve been considering a fatal accident for Alaric as a simple matter of self-preservation.

  “There are automated security protocols that go into effect whenever we have reason to suspect industrial espionage—and it does happen, especially in a place like the CDC. Our discoveries are often quite lucrative. The theft of subject 7c was enough to activate those protocols.”

  “Subject 7c?” I asked blankly.

  “Georgia,” said Becks.

  Once again, I weighed the merits of punching someone, and regretfully decided I couldn’t afford the fallout. “Do those automated security protocols usually include pre-bugging our shoes? Because your dudes only found us by following the bugs we already had on us.”

  The doctor looked uncomfo
rtable. “It is sometimes necessary to protect our investments through extra-legal channels. We had an… agreement… with certain elements of the local underground that, were they approached about an infiltration of our facility, they would ensure we could apprehend those responsible.”

  “And by doing it after a crime was committed, you avoided getting in trouble for working with the ‘local underground,’ ” said Alaric, with grudging respect. “Slick. Stupid, but slick. Why bother screwing around? Why not just stop them from getting inside in the first place?”

  For once, I had the answer the Newsie didn’t. “Because a few break-ins keep everybody believing the CDC is at risk, and we never look too hard at the budget for security upgrades and growing new people in big tanks. All of which loops us back around to the thing we’re not talking about here. Why did you clone Georgia? There are way cheaper ways to convince us that you’re the good guys. And yeah, I know, I said ‘leverage’ earlier, and I meant it, only again, way cheaper ways to do it. You could have threatened my parents, my team…”

  “But we couldn’t get to your team if we couldn’t get to you, and we knew that was a risk as far back as the campaign trail,” said the doctor calmly. President Ryman looked away. “She wasn’t the only one we were prepared to resurrect, although her death meant she was the best candidate. We were able to extract her brain almost immediately, and get to work while the Kellis-Amberlee virus was still working in her system. It’s a fascinating behavior, considering how little of the brain the virus actually requires—” He must have seen the storm warnings in our faces, because he changed topics in the middle of the stream, saying, “She was to be leverage, as you’ve indicated, but she was also going to help us be sure you were getting the information we needed you to have.”

  “Manipulate the old media during the Rising, manipulate the new media to keep the world from finding out how much of this you engineered,” said Becks. “How did you get the rest of the world to go along with it?”

  “I’m not Tate,” said the doctor acidly. “I don’t need to convince you that I’m in the right. I’m here to present you with a choice. Work for us. Help us to shape the next twenty years. Or never leave this building again. It’s up to you.”

  I looked at Becks and Alaric. They looked back at me. None of us said anything. I don’t think any of us knew what to say.

  Finally, Alaric asked, “You promise the mosquitoes are going to die on their own?”

  “You have my word as a scientist.”

  I somehow managed not to snort.

  Alaric continued. “And none of us are being charged with any crimes?”

  “The reverse. Once we’ve worked things out to our mutual satisfaction, we’ll announce that you’ve been added to the list of bloggers with White House press access. The only reason you weren’t added before was out of respect for your loss.” The doctor smiled. The expression seemed alien on his face. “I think you’ll find that we can be very reasonable when you follow the rules and behave like rational people.”

  “And George?” I asked.

  “You can keep her, if you can keep her in line and out of sight.”

  “My sister?” asked Alaric.

  “Will be returned to your custody as soon as possible. She was fortunate to escape Florida.”

  Becks didn’t say anything. Her family was more likely to be supporting the CDC than at risk from their actions.

  “Well?” asked the doctor.

  I opened my mouth, not quite sure what was going to come out of it.

  “We’ll do it,” I said.

  “Good,” said the doctor. “I hoped you’d see sense. Welcome to the CDC.”

  You know what? Fuck it. Just fuck it. The Rising didn’t manage to wipe out the human race, it just made us turn into even bigger assholes than we were before. Hear that, mad science? You failed. You were supposed to kill us all, and instead you turned us into monsters.

  Fuck it.

  —From Adaptive Immunities, the blog of Shaun Mason, August 7, 2041. Unpublished.

  Testing. This is a test post to check formatting and be sure the files are uploading correctly. Test test test.

  Is this thing on?

  —From Living Dead Girl, the blog of Georgia Mason II, August 7, 2041. Unpublished.

  GEORGIA: Thirty-seven

  Steve was a constant, silent presence behind us as Rick steered me down the hall. It was weirdly like being back on the campaign trail, only I wasn’t carrying a gun, Rick wasn’t carrying a cat, and I was no longer sure who the good guys were.

  On second thought, it was nothing at all like being back on the campaign trail.

  The hall ended at a door that looked like real oak. Rick let go of me to press his palm flat against the testing panel next to the door. A small red light clicked on above it, oscillating rapidly between red and green before settling on green. It remained lit for less than five seconds. Then it clicked off, and the door clicked open.

  “I’m going to be waiting for you on the other side,” said Rick. “Do you trust Steve?”

  It was an interesting question. If Ryman was no longer one of the good guys, I wasn’t sure I trusted anyone. But of the people I didn’t trust, Steve was one of the ones I distrusted the least. “We’ll be fine,” I said.

  “I’ll see you in a moment,” said Rick, and opened the door. Part of me wondered what kind of awesome security procedures they’d have in place to prevent people from following each other through—always a risk, no matter how much the people who design the airlock systems try to keep it from happening. Some airlocks will gas you if you try to go through without getting a blood test. Somehow I doubted they’d use something that crude on a door that might be opened by the President of the United States. The rest of me understood that playing with the security system was something too stupid for Shaun to do, and that meant it was absolutely too dumb for me.

  The door closed behind Rick, the little red light making another brief appearance before shutting itself politely off. “Cute,” I said, stepping forward to press my hand against the testing plate. Needles bit into the skin at the point where each of my fingers joined my palm. That was an unusual spot for a test array. I took a small, startled breath, finally pulling away as the light turned green and clicked off. “That’s my cue.”

  “I’ll be right through,” said Steve. He smiled encouragingly when I looked back at him, and I held that image firmly in my mind as I stepped through the door to whatever was waiting on the other side. Steve wouldn’t have smiled while he sent me to my death. I might be a clone, and Ryman might be corrupt, but some things about a person’s essential nature never change.

  The door opened on a narrow hallway that looked like it was constructed hundreds of years before the Rising and never substantially redecorated. Rick was waiting. A relieved smile spread across his face when he saw me. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come.”

  “What, you thought I’d go back to the nice man in the lab coat who was about to have me recycled?” I dropped the pretense of having a migraine, straightening and looking at him flatly. “You could have warned me what we were walking into.”

  “No. I couldn’t have.” The door swung open as Steve joined us in the hall. Rick switched his attention from me to Steve, asking, “Anyone following us?”

  “Not that I saw,” rumbled Steve. I raised an eyebrow. He explained, “This is one of the tunnels built during the Cold War, in case we needed to evacuate the capital. They probably wouldn’t have been any use in a nuclear strike—a nuke’s a pretty damn big deal—but there’s one thing they do manage, quite nicely.”

  I nodded slowly, catching his meaning. “We’re underground. No wireless transmission.”

  “We sweep this hall hourly for bugs. For the moment, we’re in the clear.” Steve looked past me to Rick. “You can proceed, Mr. Vice President.”

  “Thank you, Steve.” Rick sighed, beginning to walk. “It really is good to see you.”

  “Most people just s
end flowers. Raising the dead is a little extreme.” I matched my steps to his, watching him as we walked. “What’s going on, Rick? What’s really going on?”

  “I meant it when I said that, if it had been up to me, I would have simply handed you over to Shaun as soon as you woke up enough to know yourself.” A muscle in Rick’s jaw twitched as he continued. “I will go to my grave knowing that I have been responsible for your death more than twenty times. Each time one of the clones of the original Georgia Mason was decanted I told myself, ‘That’s it. No more. If she’s not real, we find another way.’ But each time, I couldn’t think of another way, and we needed you. I needed you.”

  “Why?”

  “Same reason those people back there were hoping you’d play nicely with the other children—people associate your face with the truth. If you tell them a lie they want to believe, they won’t question it.”

  “And the government can keep on killing people like me. People like your wife. God, Rick, is that really what you want?”

  “No. That’s what they want.” Rick stopped at an unsecured door, pushing it open. Gregory was sitting at a terminal on the other side, with Dr. Shoji looking over his shoulder. I couldn’t even be surprised. Rick kept talking: “I want you to tell the world the truth. I want you to blow it all to hell. People believe you. People believe in you, because of the way you died. They’ll believe the truth even if they don’t want to, as long as they’re hearing it from you.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “Hello, Georgia,” said Gregory, looking up from the screen. “It’s good to see you again.”

  “It was touch and go for a while there, but I pulled through,” I said. “How about you?”