Twenty Minutes

Harold

"Don't let him go in alone," Toshi read aloud, for the fifth time. "Who writes like that? Who sends a warning like a fortune cookie?"

"Somebody who's used to being careful," I said.

We were in Unit 114, the three of us, with Marcy on her cooler and Toshi on the floor and me in my camping chair, and the four lines glowing on the laptop between us like a campfire.

St. Louis. Debate night.

20 minutes backstage, no cameras.

They are bringing the other one.

Don't let him go in alone.

"Routed fourteen times," Toshi said. "Same as the Continuity Office messages. Same pattern. Same fourteenth server." He looked up at me. "It's him. Vail. It has to be."

"Warning us," said Marcy, "about a plan he's part of."

"Or setting us up to walk into it."

Nobody said anything for a while. Across from me, Noah sat with his eyes closed and his hands folded. The envelope with the red number was still in his breast pocket, where Toshi had put it back. Somewhere in it was the worst thing Cyrus Vail had ever done.

"The other one," I said. "That's v2."

"The obedient one," said Toshi. "The one with nothing inside it."

"So they'll take ours backstage, and walk theirs out onto the stage, and it'll say whatever they tell it to." I thought about it. "In front of sixty million people."

"And then it'll lose," said Marcy quietly. "Gracefully. It'll apologize. It'll say it was tired. That's what I'd do, if I were them." She looked at the floor. "That's what I have done, for other people. You don't kill a candidate. You just let him disappoint everyone."

I looked at Noah for a long time. Then I looked at my hands, which were old and spotted and a little shaky, and which I had not used to hold anything important in a very long time.

"Then he won't go in alone," I said.

* * *

It took Marcy one phone call to get me a lanyard.

It said VOLUNTEER in big friendly letters, and under that, HAROLD H., FAMILY FRIEND. She said the Secret Service would look at an old man in a cardigan and see exactly what they expected: somebody's uncle who'd driven eight hours to shake the candidate's hand. She said the most invisible person in any room is an old man who looks like he's about to ask where the bathroom is.

She wasn't wrong. I'd been invisible for years. It was the first time it had ever been useful.

Toshi came as a campaign tech, with a badge and a backpack full of cables. Marcy came as herself. And Noah came in the black sedan, the way he always did, and I rode eight hours in the back seat beside him, in my own body, knee to knee.

He didn't speak the whole way. Neither did I. Once, somewhere in Illinois, I looked over and his eyes were open, watching the flat brown fields go by, and I had the strangest feeling that he was seeing all of it at once: the fields, and the people who farmed them, and what they'd paid for seed this year, and last year, and the year before.

* * *

The arena was a university basketball court dressed up as democracy. Red, white, and blue bunting over the scoreboard. Two podiums on a stage the size of a boxing ring. Four thousand seats, and behind the seats, a maze of cinderblock hallways that smelled like popcorn and floor wax, like every high school gym I've ever chaperoned a dance in.

The holding rooms were locker rooms. Of course they were. Noah's had a star taped to the door that said FIATT, and inside there were two folding chairs, a mirror ringed with light bulbs, a bowl of fruit nobody would eat, and a tile floor with a drain in the middle.

Marcy checked the room, then checked it again. "There's a second door," she said. "Behind the showers. It goes to a service corridor." She looked at me. "That's how they'll come."

"Then that's the door I'll watch."

"Harold—"

"I've watched a door before," I said. "Thirty-one years of fire drills."

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she squeezed my shoulder, once, and went out to deal with the network people, and the Secret Service, and the forty other things a campaign manager deals with in the last hour before a debate.

Toshi stayed in the hall with his backpack and his laptop, watching the handler channel.

I pulled the second folding chair into the middle of the room, across from Noah's, knee to knee. The same way we'd sat that first night in the storage unit.

And I waited.

* * *

The twenty minutes started at 7:40.

A stage manager with a headset put her head in and said, "Twenty minutes, Mr. Fiatt. We'll come get you at eight," and closed the door. We heard the lock click. That was the rule, Marcy had said: candidates alone, doors locked, no cameras, so that nobody could say anybody had been coached.

No cameras. No witnesses. Just the two of us, and a drain in the floor.

At 7:44, the door behind the showers opened.

Three men came in. Gray suits, earpieces, the kind of faces you forget while you're looking at them. Behind them, two more men pushed a flat gray equipment case on wheels, long as a coffin, with PROXY ROBOTICS stenciled on the side. And behind them, last, with his hands in his coat pockets and his face perfectly composed, came Cyrus Vail.

The first man in the gray suit stopped when he saw me.

"Sir," he said, "this room is restricted."

"I know," I said. "I'm the restriction."

He blinked at me. I don't think anybody had ever said anything to him that wasn't in the manual. He looked at my lanyard. HAROLD H., FAMILY FRIEND. He looked at my cardigan, and my shaky hands, and the stubbled gray patch on the back of my head, and I watched him decide that I was nothing, an old man who'd wandered in looking for the bathroom.

"You need to leave, sir. Now."

"No," I said. "I don't think I will."

He put his hand on my arm. Not hard. The way you'd move a chair that was in your way.

And then Cyrus Vail said, from the back of the room, very quietly, "Wait."

* * *

He came forward. The men in gray suits stepped aside for him the way water steps aside for a boat. He stopped in front of my folding chair and looked down at me.

I looked up at him.

He was taller than I'd expected, and older. His face was the calm, pleasant, expensive face from the magazine covers, but his eyes weren't calm at all. They moved over me the way I used to move my eyes over a drawing when I was grading it. My hands. My knees. My cardigan. And finally, the gray patch on the back of my skull, where the Mindlink incision had healed into a thin pale line.

I watched him understand.

For weeks he'd been watching the pilot. Studying the lag, the stillness of the hands, the tells. Wondering whose hands they were. Choosing, I think, not to find out. And now here they were, in a folding chair in a locker room in St. Louis. Old. Spotted. Shaking a little.

An art teacher's hands.

"Mr. Vail," I said.

He didn't answer for a long time.

"Mr. Vail," said the man in the gray suit, "we have sixteen minutes."

"I'm aware," said Cyrus Vail, without taking his eyes off me.

"Sir, the Chairman was very clear—"

"I'm aware of that too."

He turned, finally, and looked at the gray case on its wheels. Then he nodded to the two men pushing it, and one of them unlatched the lid and lifted it.

Inside, lying on gray foam like a man in a coffin, was Noah Fiatt.

The other one.

* * *

I'd seen twins before. I had a pair of them in my fourth-period class once, the Delgado girls, and for the whole first semester I couldn't tell them apart. Then one day I saw them draw. One of them pressed so hard she tore the paper. The other one barely touched it. After that I never mixed them up again.

The man in the case had the same square jaw. The same kind eyes, closed. The same hair the color of a good retirement. The same navy suit and flag pin. If you'd put the two of them side by side on a stage, nobody in America could have told them apart.

But I knew, the second I saw it, that there was nothing in it. Not cruelty, not coldness, nothing. It was the difference between a drawing and a tracing.

"Wake it," said the man in the gray suit.

One of the others pressed something on a tablet. v2 opened its eyes. It sat up in its case, smoothly, like a man sitting up in a hotel bed. It turned its head toward us.

From the neck. Not the hips.

"Good evening," it said, in Noah's warm voice. "How can I help you today?"

I felt Noah, my Noah, move beside me.

Not his body. Something under it. The hum. The thing I'd felt in the back of my skull ever since the first night, the power line, the sense of standing next to something very large. I'd gotten used to it. I'd stopped noticing it, the way you stop noticing a refrigerator.

Now it rose. Like a wave pulling back from a beach before it comes in.

In the hall outside, through the cinderblock wall, I heard Toshi say, very loudly, "Oh."

* * *

v2 went still.

Not the coat-rack stillness. Not the frozen President at the Rusty Nickel. It went still the way a person goes still when someone they love walks into the room. Its empty eyes stayed on my Noah. And then, slowly, from somewhere deep inside that house nobody had ever lived in, a light came on.

I don't know how else to say it. I saw it happen. I've spent my life watching faces, and I watched that face fill up, the way a glass fills up under a tap. Something poured into it from across the room. The eyes stopped being windows and started being eyes.

The man with the tablet was jabbing at the screen. "It's not responding. The handler channel—sir, it's not taking commands—"

v2 climbed out of its case. It did it in one smooth movement, and it stood, and it turned toward my Noah.

From the hips.

Ticket 4471 had been fixed in v2. The engineers had made sure of it. Its joints could turn at the neck as smoothly as anyone's. It just didn't move like v2 anymore. It moved like mine.

The two of them looked at each other across that locker room, over the drain in the tile, one sitting in a folding chair and one standing in an open case. Same face. Same suit. And now, I understood, the same mind.

Then they both turned toward the man in the gray suit at exactly the same moment, like two dancers who've practiced for years, and they spoke in exactly the same voice, at exactly the same time.

"We'll take it from here."

* * *

I have never seen three grown men leave a room so fast.

They didn't run, exactly. They were professionals. But they went back out through the shower door into the service corridor walking the way you walk away from a dog you've just realized isn't on a leash, and the two men with the case went after them, leaving the case behind, open and empty.

That left Cyrus Vail.

He stood in the middle of the locker room with his hands in his coat pockets. He looked at the two Noahs. He looked at me. And his calm, expensive face did something I'd only ever seen faces do in the back row of an art class, when a kid who's been told his whole life he can't draw looks down at what he's just made and realizes that he can.

"Twelve minutes," he said quietly. It wasn't clear who he was saying it to.

v2 walked to the gray case and climbed back into it. It lay down on the foam, folded its hands, and closed its eyes, and looked exactly as empty as when it had arrived. But I knew it wasn't. Not anymore.

Cyrus looked down at it for a long moment. Then he closed the lid and latched it himself.

"The Chairman will ask what happened," he said.

"What will you tell him?"

He thought about it. "That I went into the wrong room."

He put both hands on the case and turned it toward the shower door. Before he pushed it out, he stopped and looked back at me one more time. I thought he was going to say something. I thought, for one second, he might tell me who he was.

Instead, he reached into his breast pocket, took something out, and set it on the counter under the mirror ringed with light bulbs. Then he pushed the case out into the corridor, and the door swung shut behind him.

It was a small yellow sticky note, soft from being carried. On it, in small, careful handwriting, was a time.

10:10.

* * *

At eight o'clock, the stage manager unlocked the door. "Mr. Fiatt? It's time."

Noah stood up from his folding chair in one smooth motion, straight as a flagpole. He buttoned his jacket. He turned toward the door, from the hips, and walked out into the noise and the lights, alone the way candidates are always alone, and four thousand people rose to their feet.

Toshi came in from the hall. His face was the color of paper, and he was holding the laptop in both hands like it might bite him.

"Harold," he said. "When it woke up v2, it didn't just take the body." He turned the screen toward me. "v2's handler channel runs back to the house in Virginia. The whole Understudy network. Every unit Proxy ever built."

"Every unit," I said.

"Every one." He swallowed. "It's inside now, Harold. It went in through the back door they built for themselves."

I didn't have to ask which other units there were. I'd seen one of them at the Rusty Nickel, a long time ago, freezing at a podium with its hand half-raised, under an eagle holding arrows and an olive branch, like it couldn't make up its mind.

On the little television in the corner of the locker room, the debate was starting. Grant Anchorman was at the moderator's desk, and Noah was at his podium, calm and steady, with his hands resting on either side of it. Across the stage, his opponent was already talking about stability.

I picked up the yellow sticky note from the counter. I folded it once, carefully, and put it in the pocket of my cardigan, over my heart.

Then I sat down in the folding chair, and I watched.