“Clyde!” Tabitha barks.
“Clyde!” Devon shrills in unison.
They both step toward him, then Devon catches herself. This is not her watch anymore. She turns away and I glimpse the pain and confusion on her face. Kayla moves toward her.
Clyde starts to tremor on the floor. Felicity, efficient as ever, seizes a first-aid kit from a wall mount.
“Hello?”
Tabitha’s laptop, lying ignored and open on the desk. It speaks. It has an absurdly cheery tone. I stare at it. For a moment I seem to be the only one who’s noticed.
“Can you hear me?” it says. “Are the speakers on? Do you need me to turn up the volume?”
A familiar tone.
It takes a moment for the realization that Clyde’s voice is coming from the laptop to permeate the room. One by one the others turn and stare with me.
“Clyde?” Tabitha, kneeling by the body, says. Her voice is shaking. She swallows hard. “Did you just download yourself onto my laptop, Clyde?” Her question doesn’t so much have an edge as it has a 9mm barrel.
“Well…” the laptop starts.
And then Clyde sits up and rubs the back of his head. “Bugger,” he says. “Need to be doing the whole horizontal thing next time I try that.”
Felicity does the full-on comedy double take. Clyde, laptop. Laptop, Clyde.
Tabitha is shaking. Visibly shaking. Shudders quaking up her arms and spine.
“Just trying to explain the whole thing,” says the laptop. Apparently to Clyde. So maybe Clyde says it to himself.
“Oh marvelous!” Clyde nods. “Want to finish up?”
“Oh no, you go ahead,” the laptop tells him.
Something’s wrong with reality again. I can feel it. That odd sideways slipping feeling where my brain has to perform gymnastics it was not really built for.
“Well,” Clyde—the meat Clyde, the real Clyde—says, “it’s all fairly simple. I’m a digital file. Big complicated one. But I can be copied. Rewritten. Backed up.” He sits up straighter. “Just a data compression problem really, but I’ve mostly solved that. Handy really.”
Abruptly, and with a certain violence, Tabitha scrabbles away from him, crab-crawling on hands and feet. She hits the wall, slithers up against it, trying to maximize the distance between herself and her boyfriend.
“What?” she manages. Her quaking hand points at the laptop. “What the fuck? Clyde, what the fuck is going on?”
“Tabby?” Clyde sounds genuinely disturbed by her reaction. Genuinely upset. “It’s just a copy. Just another me. So I can’t die. When the EMP goes off.”
“On my laptop?” Her head is twisted on one side. She’s near tears. And this is too much. This is a step too far.
“Yes,” Clyde says. “I thought that would be a good place to keep it. So I’m always with—”
“Which one of you am I fucking dating?” Tabitha screams it, her voice breaking on the last syllable. “Which one of you is my fucking boyfriend?”
“Me.” Clyde taps his chest as if it’s obvious.
“Him,” the laptop says.
Tabitha lets out a noise that’s half shriek, half moan.
And how could he have thought this was all right? How could he have not considered this as an outcome? Clyde’s a smart man.
Was a smart man?
Is a smart… what? God, what is he?
Quickly, decisively, Felicity leans across the table and slaps down the lid of the laptop.
“Hey!” it says, and then the voice is cut off.
“I am not dating a computer program.” Tabitha has her head in her hands. “I am not dating a computer program.”
“No,” Clyde says. “Of course not. It’s just a copy. Just in case.”
“Away,” Tabitha moans. She slides along the wall, keeping the maximum distance between herself and Clyde. “Need air. Need fucking space.”
“This could be terribly useful, Tabby,” Clyde says.
Useful. God I hate that word.
She keeps backing away.
Everything about Clyde slumps. And he really didn’t see this coming. “I was just trying to be useful.” He reaches out to her.
“Feckin’ stop it.” Kayla finally steps away from Devon. Three strides quick enough they blur together. She catches Clyde’s hand. An iron grip. “You’ve done e-feckin’-nough already.”
“Leave him alone!” Tabitha spits her rage and confusion across the room. All the emotions she’s trying not to unleash on Clyde, all the pain—she dumps it on Kayla. “Fucking psycho bitch. Don’t need you. I’m not someone for you to defend. They’re gone. Your girls are gone. Fucking face it. I’m not one. Devon’s not one. Can’t just grab us and make us belong to you. You’re fucking alone. Fucking insane. Fucking pathetic.”
And then she’s out the room in a storm of black lace and tears.
There is silence in her wake. Absolute and utter. Kayla stares after her, still holding Clyde’s wrist. He starts to writhe and twist. His hand turns an ugly shade of purple. Then she releases him, and his gasp of relief is still the only sound. Devon is looking back and forth from Kayla to the doorway. And I really should have taken the time to explain to her what was going on. But I didn’t say a word. And now, no one is.
And in that silence, from nowhere, it suddenly comes to me: what’s been bothering me about the plan to cut power to London.
Not Clyde’s mortality.
Not the horrifying impracticality of the plan.
Not the potential chaos of blacking out the nation’s capital.
Big Ben. The Chronometer—protected by its anti-magic field. The field that prevents the Russians from bypassing the mundane security and teleporting in. The field that is completely and utterly dependent on electricity.
The Russians wanted us to see them. Wanted us to see them pull electricity from thin air. They wanted us to extrapolate. This is everything they’ve been planning for. We’re giving them exactly what they want.
And no one will believe me. If I tell them, no one in this room will trust a single word I say.
And so I stand here, and I don’t say a word.