twinmaker

Hashtag Twinmaker

(Note: The Humble Bookperk Bundle is still available for a short time only! More than ten books, including Twinmaker, DRM-free, benefits going to charity. Don’t miss out! And for anyone disadvantaged by rights issues, my offer of a free copy of my first novel still stands.)

scrambled covers“What now?” asks Jesse at the end of Twinmaker. Good question! Crashland will supply the answer, but that’s still a while off. I’ll start tweeting from there in due course, but for now, here’s the entire raw, unedited list of tweets from book one, like another version of the novel, mostly spoiler-free, broken up and scattered all across the page.

Some of these fragments were edited for length, so the final, definitive version is only available on Twitter. I like that idea. How many versions of this story can there possibly be? One for each reader, I guess . . .

  • You are special. / You are unique. / And you have been selected. #Twinmaker
  • “I was promised men in tights.” “If any of them had been under seventy, maybe it would have worked out. #Twinmaker
  • “Democracy is SO twentieth century.” #Twinmaker “Welcome to the crashlanders.”
  • Anyone over 15 could solo jump. Anyone over 18 could consume alcohol. For 17-year-olds like Clair, that was a winning combination. #Twinmaker
  • daytrippers in feathery cloaks & gothic moonwalkers in black & silver—groups who normally occupied different hemispheres #Twinmaker
  • “writing it down makes it seem real, like a spell from a fairy tale—something that ought to work even though it’s impossible” #Twinmaker
  • Zep was fun, handsome & her best friend’s boyfriend. She didn’t know what was worse—the cliché or the strain of holding two equal & opposite feelings at once #Twinmaker
  • On the roof of the Sphinx Observatory, the night seemed almost mythic in its intensity. #Twinmaker “I’m going to jump! No, really, I am…”
  • “What’s my least favorite city in the world?” “Omsk.” “Is that a real place?” “Of course. You’d never hate somewhere imaginary.” #Twinmaker
  • “Next time, just throw the rope, you idiot.” #Twinmaker
  • Clair got out of bed, threw her clothes in the fabber for recycling, and dialed a set for school. #Twinmaker
  • My nose is too big, she thought for the thousandth time. A sneaky new voice internally riposted, You could fix that. #Twinmaker
  • “Finding the right vocation is like finding the right spouse. Better to have none than the wrong one.” #Twinmaker
  • Anyone could cheat by copying answers from the Air; school was for learning how to cheat *people*. #Twinmaker
  • “You need to stay in school and study for both of us. I’ll learn by osmosis. Maybe we could make it a permanent arrangement.” #Twinmaker
  • “Stay beautiful.” #Twinmaker “You can SEE me, right?”
  • “Remember the Magic Mayflies. You don’t want to piss them off, do you?” #Twinmaker
  • duplicated jewels, disintegrated wills, cloned lovers, swapped bodies, shrunken heads, people turned entirely inside-out #Twinmaker
  • Everyone knew that the amount of human lost in a decade of d-mat was equivalent to a toenail clipping, total. #Twinmaker
  • “Yes” came the immediate reply, along with “No,” “Maybe,” and “Are you joking? This is what we use the sum of all human knowledge for?” #Twinmaker
  • Putting on a live recording of her favorite Poulenc piano music . . . #Twinmaker
  • Stainer. Stainer. Stainer. #Twinmaker
  • “Improvement killed my child” was all the woman’s warning said. #Twinmaker
  • WHOLE was always issuing manifestos and sending viruses through the d-mat network. Cold viruses, not computer ones. #Twinmaker
  • “You’ve got the wrong number.” “The wrong what?” “Address. Telephones, you know?” “They used numbers, not names?” #Twinmaker
  • “Retro is in,” said Tash, “but not that retro.” #Twinmaker
  • “He may be a slimeball,” said Tash, “but at least he has taste.” #Twinmaker
  • He was wearing a yellow T-shirt with a blocky logo—like an upside-down flowerpot, only bright red. #Twinmaker #devo
  • “It’s like a chain letter. You receive a message. It tells you that you can be prettier, smarter, taller, whatever. You write a code on a piece of paper…” #Twinmaker
  • “…and list all the things you’d like to have changed. You take the note with you through d-mat, under your clothes, and supposedly it happens.” #Twinmaker
  • “Do it enough times, the meme says, and you’ll be . . . Improved.” #Twinmaker
  • “Charlie X-ray Romeo Foxtrot/Whiskey Uniform Hotel Bravo/Oscar Echo/Tango Kilo/Alfa Papa Juliet Zulu” #Twinmaker
  • “A return performance in Civil Harassment 101. The starring role, in fact. It was written for me.” #Twinmaker
  • “Anyone who uses d-mat dies inside. It destroys you and what it rebuilds is just a good copy. Soulless. Empty. Hollow.” #Twinmaker
  • “Time costs money, and vegetables take time to grow. Weeks, even.” #Twinmaker
  • “You’ve probably never met any vegetarians before, not now that eating meat is a victimless crime.” #Twinmaker
  • “After the hundredth time, ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’ stops being ironic.” #Twinmaker
  • “A thing imagined is a thing halfway done.” #Twinmaker
  • “Don’t underestimate the power of a seductive idea.” #Twinmaker
  • “If they thought for a second that d-mat was unsafe, the world would come crumbling down around them.” #Twinmaker
  • “We’ve got two self-sufficient herds in Australia now and we’re working on a third.” “Still elephants?” “Still elephants.” #Twinmaker
  • “Home is where the harm is.” #Twinmaker
  • “My generation avoided being crushed under a totalitarian boot heel. You’ll avoid whatever it is you’re worried about too.” #Twinmaker
  • Clair rarely dreamed, but when she did, it was memorable.
  • “I love who you are. You don’t need to change anything or do anything for me to think you’re the best.”
  • Clair would rather discover that all of VIA’s safeguards were useless than that a man like Dylan Linwood was right.
  • Some people talked about losing their train of thought when they jumped, seeing wild flashes of color or even vivid microdreams. / She, however, felt nothing as the machines cycled around her, sucking up enough power to run an old-time country for a year.
  • “‘Woman, I behold thee, flippant, vain, and full of fancies.’”
  • “If you’re going to quote Keats, at least do it properly.”
  • “‘Your eyes are drunk with beauty your heart will never see.’”
  • “‘That which does not change is not alive.’ Sturgeon, exactly. The irony is mine.” # #Twinmaker
  • “Are we going to talk properly or just sit here all day slinging quotes at each other?” #Twinmaker
  • convincing customers that something was unique and not built from a fabber’s memory could be very difficult #Twinmaker
  • “Hello, Clair Hill,” said the voice. “It is nice to meet you.” #Twinmaker
  • “We’re talking about a meme much more sinister than any mere disease” #Twinmaker
  • “I think that’s a Linwood. One of a kind—I mean literally!” #Twinmaker
  • “Soon you’ll be famouser than famous—until some cat meme takes your place.” #Twinmaker
  • “‘Beauty is a terrible and awful thing where boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side.’” #Twinmaker
  • “Thinking about it but never doing anything about it. The story of my life.” #Twinmaker
  • “Guess” involved one taking the other blindfolded to a destination that they then had to determine without using the Air. #Twinmaker
  • “Cram or Crap” scoured the strangest corners of a fabber’s memory to find the most revolting food officially designated as edible. #Twinmaker
  • Next to her right knee, a tiny flame burned a black hole into the grass. #Twinmaker
  • Clair saw a thin but perfectly ordinary left foot. A second one. She clenched her fists to stop them shaking again. #Twinmaker
  • God, her books! Her Tilly Kozlova recordings! She had never once been deliberately disconnected from them. #Twinmaker
  • This shadow world of broken families, sabotage, and conspiracy wasn’t the world she wanted to live in. #Twinmaker
  • Not since childhood had she felt such an intense yearning to see her parents. It was like an adrenaline hit times ten. #Twinmaker
  • “We are the good guys. You don’t want to meet the bad guys.” #Twinmaker
  • She looked awful, a mad thing running wild in the ordinary world. She barely recognized herself. #Twinmaker
  • Two bullets slammed in quick succession into the closed booth door, bang-bang. #Twinmaker
  • You’re dead, she wanted to yell at him. Lie down and leave me alone! #Twinmaker
  • Across the bay was Ndabeni Island, lit up by a ghostly spear of light fired at a slant from a powersat above the equator. #Twinmaker
  • Disconnect. Sever. Disallow. Isolate. Interface by interface, she plucked at the ties connecting her to the rest of the world. #Twinmaker
  • Tuvalu had a special place in the history of the twenty-first century as the first country destroyed in the Water Wars. #Twinmaker
  • Where some had fallen in armed conflicts and others had crumbled from within, Tuvalu had simply vanished beneath rising seas. #Twinmaker
  • people shouldn’t be duplicated or altered, like hats or chocolate bars can be #Twinmaker
  • in a d-mat booth, unlike a fabber, matter can neither be created nor destroyed. #Twinmaker
  • a lonely walk under stars as crisp and cool as a cosmic chandelier #Twinmaker
  • When enough people disappear into a blank spot, you know something secret’s going on in there. #Twinmaker
  • You’re fine as limes, girl. #Twinmaker
  • The vehicle was a Faraday cage like the safe house, safe from everyone outside. A trap for everyone inside. #Twinmaker
  • She had stubbornly resisted all attempts by her parents to camp #Twinmaker
  • The old theater was a garage, a word Clair had never had cause to use before. #Twinmaker
  • a dozen sleek electrobikes resembled ink-stained quicksilver cheetahs, frozen in midstretch. #Twinmaker
  • “This is what d-mat does. It reaches into you and guts you and you don’t even notice until it’s too late.” #Twinmaker
  • “Erased, just like they tried to erase what happened to him. But they can’t erase me. Not if I don’t use d-mat. #Twinmaker
  • She closed her eyes as tightly as she could, feeling hollow inside, as though she had left half her critical organs behind. #Twinmaker
  • Clair had visited some touristy places as a kid, but the spaces between them were utterly unknown to her. #Twinmaker
  • “It can’t be him. He’s really dead this time.” #Twinmaker
  • Shooting at someone shooting at her was one thing. Premeditated murder was another entirely. #Twinmaker
  • “You don’t know what you’re capable of until you try. That’s what my mom always says.” #Twinmaker
  • She needed answers, and sleep, and a shower, and a spare second to think when she wasn’t being hunted through the dark #Twinmaker
  • Dams, bridges, tunnels—all functionally useless now, for most people. #Twinmaker
  • “I’m killer with a screwdriver,” he said. “Never underestimate that.” #Twinmaker
  • she was *walking* in an age of near-instantaneous, pollution-free global transport #Twinmaker
  • “But what does ‘far’ mean? Aren’t all locations the same to you, d-mat girl?” #Twinmaker
  • In the booth, time didn’t seem to pass at all. Never had she stopped to wonder about the spaces involved either. They were irrelevant. #Twinmaker
  • “This is the part where the heroes are slogging on through the dark, refusing to give up because there’s something horrible coming up behind them.” #Twinmaker
  • “Screw adventures. I’d give anything to be home in bed, plugged back into the Air and reading something good.” #Twinmaker
  • everything that had seemed so momentous and world-shattering just hours ago was ended forever #Twinmaker
  • “You wouldn’t use d-mat even to get lucky?” / “Not even. Abstainer boys are made of sterner stuff than that.” #Twinmaker
  • “I could kiss you, Q. Hell, I could kiss this thing, whatever it is.” #Twinmaker
  • VIA occupied One Penn Plaza, a skyscraper on the west shoreline of the main island of Manhattan. #Twinmaker
  • Clair felt a giddy feeling, as though she were back on the roof of the Phoenix Observatory, staring into an abyss. #Twinmaker
  • She thought “That’s a really long way to go” for the first time in her life. #Twinmaker
  • Today is Friday, she thought. I’m supposed to be doing chores and then hanging out with Ronnie, Tash, and Libby. How did I end up here? #Twinmaker
  • “Who’s going to have an emergency out here? The last lot to come by were balloonists. If they have an emergency, they’re dead. Am I right?” #Twinmaker
  • Knees, though Clair, wanting to howl at her stupidity. No one had knees that bony. #Twinmaker
  • “We are kids, Jay.” Jesse edged minutely away from Clair. “What kind of terrorists do you think we’d make?” #Twinmaker
  • “Get out of her body,” said Clair. “Please get out of her body.” #Twinmaker
  • “I am nobody.” #Twinmaker
  • Skylifters were antiques left over from the days when people still hauled freight from one place to another but said they were worried about carbon emissions. #Twinmaker
  • The deep thrumming of propellers was distant but ever present, like giant bees were buoying them up into the sky. #Twinmaker
  • The plains were bound to the east by jagged mountains—the Sierra Nevadas, muscular stone in all its brutality. #Twinmaker
  • “Some urban legends must be based on truth, Clair. They can’t all be lies, even if most people want them to be.” #Twinmaker
  • She couldn’t imagine how it must feel to see a parent die not just once, but over and over again. #Twinmaker
  • I’m beautiful, a voice told her. I’m in heaven, and I’m so beautiful. #Twinmaker
  • The cloudscape was alien and strange. There were valleys and trenches, wide plains, and the occasional towering hill. #Twinmaker
  • The thing about d-mat is that it does build a new person from scratch every time someone goes through it… #Twinmaker
  • and in theory you could duplicate yourself as many times as you wanted from the pattern created… #Twinmaker
  • All that’s stopping you is the consensus that this would be ethically unacceptable. #Twinmaker
  • Like someone watching an actual magic trick, Clair couldn’t help but look for loopholes in order to make it comprehensible. And therefore stoppable. #Twinmaker
  • “The house is me,” said Q. #Twinmaker
  • “Good old Keats,” Clair said. “I knew he’d come in handy one day.” #Twinmaker
  • “Don’t think we’re debating whether to throw you out the window. I promise you we only do that to spies and dupes. Hardly ever to popular zombies like you, Clair.” #Twinmaker
  • “I’m the first to admit that not every decision made in a theater of war is perfectly considered or perfectly rendered.” #Twinmaker
  • Copying a pattern is legally considered kidnapping, erasing a pattern is murder, and damaging a pattern is the same as causing bodily harm. #Twinmaker
  • “D-mat’s like a gun or a drone or a . . . a shoe. How it’s used is what matters.” #Twinmaker
  • No one ever changed the world acting alone. #Twinmaker
  • a ghost in a virtual library containing all of human history and knowledge #Twinmaker
  • She was tumbling through empty air. Ahead of her was nothing but blue sky and an infinite cloudscape far, far below. #Twinmaker
  • “Someone’s trying to make this look like an accident,” said Clair, thinking of Jesse’s mom. “Funny how things like this happen around people in WHOLE.” #Twinmaker
  • Bright-red autumn apples dotted the lush green leafscape like dollops of paint. #Twinmaker
  • He was heavyset and bearded, wearing a check shirt and overalls. He looked like a cartoon lumberjack. So did his friends. #Twinmaker
  • she wondered how there could be nearly enough Abstainers in the world to eat so many apples #Twinmaker
  • although Arcady and his friends might not look like inbred cannibals, she could imagine any number of terrible fates awaiting a girl on her own in the middle of nowhere #Twinmaker
  • She didn’t want any more friends to die that week. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, it was beginning to look somewhat more than careless. #Twinmaker
  • If everything’s fabbed and nothing’s really grown anymore, there goes mutation. Life gets boring—it’s all about produce. #Twinmaker
  • “Those apples I saw are for more than just eating, aren’t they?” #Twinmaker
  • she had to accept the good along with the bad. She figured she could live with that just as long as the bad wasn’t too bad. #Twinmaker
  • The cider was sweet and warming, like a memory of fireworks. #Twinmaker
  • “To life,” Arcady said, “and the hard business of living it.”
  • Even through the grime and blood came a smell that she recognized, musky and natural and all *him*. #Twinmaker
  • There’s a tear in your eye and I’m wondering why / For it never should be there at all. #Twinmaker
  • “Do anything to suggest Improvement is anything other than a harmless meme, and they’ll come after you.” #Twinmaker
  • “I didn’t want to think about what goes on inside the booths . . . until something went wrong.” #Twinmaker
  • “Her pattern contains everything she was, right down to the atom. Everything she *is*.” #Twinmaker
  • Minds were much more than just data, even though people had been zipping around the world for generations without any apparent loss of *soul*. #Twinmaker
  • “Winning the battle isn’t enough,” Turner said. “The war’s the thing.” #Twinmaker
  • Oh, I ran to the rock to hide my face / The rock cried out, “No hiding place” / No hiding place down here. . . . #Twinmaker
  • Not everything was gloom and doom and threats and danger. Clair drank another glass of cider as a toast to that sentiment. #Twinmaker
  • Instead of laughing, Clair felt a sudden, irrational urge to weep, and she knew then that it was time to call it a night. #Twinmaker
  • The moment they learned how little she knew, they’d kill her for sure. The dupes, the wolves in sheepskins. #Twinmaker
  • She willed herself to relax. It was hard under the circumstances, with the dupe’s arm around her throat and a grisly fate awaiting her. . . . #Twinmaker
  • “Give me the gun, Q. Give it.” #Twinmaker
  • Arcady was standing in the doorway, as hairy as a bear, wearing nothing but a shotgun and a worried expression. #Twinmaker
  • Her face grew warm. He was wearing pajama pants and no top, and his chest hair looked very dark against the paleness of his skin. #Twinmaker
  • one executable in your private net, one custom chip built from scratch in a booth, one transmitter to widen the bandwidth #Twinmaker
  • “We’ll trade your friend for one of theirs. Then we use the ax.” #Twinmaker
  • Clair imagined an army composed of infinitely replaceable, Improved dupes and said nothing. #Twinmaker
  • “VIA is toothless,” said Ray. “The watchdog hasn’t even barked in years.” #Twinmaker
  • “You haven’t smuggled any illicit molecules recently. Or tried to sell a bootleg Mona Lisa.” “Home is where the harm is—that’s what my mom says.” #Twinmaker
  • “Improvement started with a note that told people to keep it a secret. So maybe we should issue a note of our own that does the exact opposite.” #Twinmaker
  • She offered him a smile but didn’t look any lower than his neck. He still hadn’t put a shirt on. #Twinmaker
  • “I’m not a terrorist,” said Clair. #Twinmaker
  • “Coriander attracts ladybugs, which eat the asparagus beetles.” #Twinmaker
  • They turned onto the old Route 94, now a green strip with one broad lane for farm traffic. #Twinmaker
  • You are special. / You are unique. / You don’t need—or want—to be selected. #Twinmaker
  • “I am making the final adjustments now, Clair,” said Q. “You are yourself again.” #Twinmaker
  • “You girls are quite the mystery. Let me know when you come out of hiding.” #Twinmaker
  • Witches believed that wishing for something three times made it come true. She was aiming for more like three thousand wishes. #Twinmaker
  • “I didn’t know there were trains anymore,” said Tash. “Where did you find it?” #Twinmaker
  • “Don’t freak out if I disappear every now and again. I’m with people who literally move in mysterious ways.” #Twinmaker
  • “It’s not easy being in the minority. I mean, what are the odds that everyone else in the world is wrong, and you’re right?” #Twinmaker
  • Even when Gemma was staring straight her, she seemed to be tilting her head, putting a question mark at the end of every sentence she said. #Twinmaker
  • “The world is turning upside down, Clair. Not everything—or everyone—is going to survive.” #Twinmaker
  • “Abstainers. There’s a handful in every town, invisible, excluded, but very loyal. Put the word out, and they will come.” #Twinmaker
  • A rose by any name, she thought. A mind in any body . . . #Twinmaker
  • “Deceitful as it is, hope at least leads us to the end of our lives by an agreeable route.” #Twinmaker
  • “If I worried about every stupid thing I’ve done, I’d never sleep again.” #Twinmaker
  • “There’s something very rotten in the state of d-mat.” #Twinmaker
  • “The United States was lucky on the whole. We lost only Florida, and no one complained about that.” #Twinmaker
  • “We imagined huge, planet-sized minds gobbling up every piece of knowledge we had and thinking thoughts that would destroy us all. #Twinmaker
  • “Consciousness is complexity, and the only way we’ve found to make that is the old-fashioned way.” #Twinmaker
  • “We’re all too good at breeding small, dumb minds. Nowhere near smart enough to build our own successors.” #Twinmaker
  • “Define human. Define missing. Hell, define toenail.” #Twinmaker
  • Ronnie called it “stimulating debate,” but Tash preferred “starting arguments”. #Twinmaker
  • She had no idea how people stayed famous all their lives, particularly the ones who never seemed to actually do anything. At a certain point, she supposed, fame became something bigger than the person possessing it. It could even live on after the person died, like a ghost. #Twinmaker
  • ‘Nobody is coming to Lincoln Island.’ #Twinmaker
  • “Every second of every day, WHOLE’s fighting the entire world.” #Twinmaker
  • Suppose you could step into a booth and emerge looking like a supermodel or a famous actor. What pranks might people play on their friends? What about athletes who trained all their lives only to be beaten by someone who’d made themselves stronger overnight? What about parents who want their children to grow up certain ways, whether the kids want to or not? And what about criminals who change everything about themselves—fingerprints, face, eye color, even their genes—in order to escape justice? #Twinmaker
  • “Information, not medication. Suicide is murder, not euthanasia, and we are all accessories.” #Twinmaker
  • There were plenty of beds, but no one went to Pleasantville to sleep. #Twinmaker
  • Clair didn’t want to cause trouble. She wanted the exact opposite. #Twinmaker
  • Old people couldn’t believe their luck. They’d survived the Water Wars, and now they were rich. #Twinmaker
  • D-mat made spaceships obsolete, along with planes, trains, and everything else. #Twinmaker
  • Brooklyn Heights was connected by a restored bridge to the Manhattan archipelago. #Twinmaker
  • Ahead was the famous skyline of the Manhattan Isles, as familiar to Clair as the gondolas that plied its crystalline waters. #Twinmaker
  • The patches of dry land that had once been Chinatown and Little Italy were extensively canalled. #Twinmaker
  • Park Avenue was preserved as a national monument, complete with yellow cabs and food stalls. #Twinmaker
  • At a sign advertising a “genuine replica steakhouse,” they turned left and rolled on up Thirty-Third Street. #Twinmaker
  • Madison Square Garden’s southwestern edge literally hung over the water. #Twinmaker
  • Her red hair was piled up in a series of complex curves with no visible means of support. #Twinmaker
  • The view across the archipelago was a jungle of rooftops and parabolic bridges and sails and swooping monorail tracks. #Twinmaker
  • She looked dirty and desperate, like every other Abstainer she had ever met. Worse than that, she looked as crazy as Dylan Linwood. #Twinmaker
  • “It must mean something when a girl tries to save your life. Right?” #Twinmaker
  • The fabber’s menus contained no weapons, drills, radios, explosives, or anything useful at all. Just a fine selection of coffees. #Twinmaker
  • Q herself didn’t know exactly what her capabilities were. Clair wondered if VIA was in the process of finding out exactly what they were. #Twinmaker
  • The room wasn’t a room. #Twinmaker
  • The d-mat booth was a trap, and Clair was the bait. #Twinmaker
  • “You always wanted to try d-mat,” Clair said. “I’m sorry it had to be like this.” #Twinmaker
  • She clenched her fists. Clair Larhonda Hill wasn’t so easily bought. #Twinmaker
  • “Clair, Clair, Clair,” she said. “It’s always about Clair.” #Twinmaker
  • Before the life entirely left his eyes, he seemed to see her through a veil of hurt and puzzlement. #Twinmaker
  • “Shall I bring him back again? One time if you do as we ask. Many times if you don’t.” #Twinmaker
  • How could there be a copy of her out there when she was still alive right here? #Twinmaker
  • “I don’t believe in the ghosts of dead girls haunting the Air.” #Twinmaker
  • This was an everyday betrayal, human, galling, and desperately frustrating. #Twinmaker
  • “So we’re all zombies now?” #Twinmaker
  • Who listened to old people on the subject of kids these days? #Twinmaker
  • A world ruled forever by people like him wouldn’t be worth living in at all. #Twinmaker
  • “No one uses d-mat against their will. The same with Improvement. We do it to ourselves, Clair, and no one complains.” #Twinmaker
  • “Don’t think of it as betraying her, if that’s what’s bothering you…although I hear you have some proficiency in that regard already.” #Twinmaker
  • It was inconceivable that there could be two versions of that terrible old soul at the same time, both in different bodies, but anything was possible in a world where people could be reduced to data—data that could be edited, copied, and erased as easily any other electronic file . . . in the hands of a madman. #Twinmaker
  • “You think I’m going to attack him with coffee?” #Twinmaker
  • “Do it, Clair! Do it!” #Twinmaker
  • “Peacekeepers have the area sealed off. I may have caused . . . a small amount of mess.”
  • #Twinmaker
  • “You can’t use d-mat to erase someone. That would mean breaking parity—making one of someone into zero of someone. It’s not allowed.” #Twinmaker
  • A bit of Qualia here, a bit of Quiddity there. #Twinmaker
  • Threads of meaning, caught in a tangle. Not yet conscious. Just reactive. Learning. #Twinmaker
  • Like data at the receiving end of a d-mat jump, everything was falling perfectly into place. #Twinmaker
  • She had never had a body before. She had never felt pain. She had never really existed. #Twinmaker
  • “You’re the most amazing person on the planet!” #Twinmaker
  • A plan came to her then, a plan so terrible she almost dismissed it out of hand. She couldn’t possibly do something so awful. #Twinmaker
  • “Always and forever.” #Twinmaker
  • “You wanted to take some direct action, didn’t you? Well, here’s your chance.” #Twinmaker
  • This was for Libby, she told herself, and Q and Turner and the entire world. #Twinmaker
  • “We made a terrorist of you in the end, huh?” #Twinmaker
  • She was cut off from her friends, her family, her entire world. The other Clair had stolen her life! #Twinmaker
  • “D-mat is on the verge of crashing. We have multiple shutdowns and jams. People are missing.” #Twinmaker
  • “Where is Q? We need to talk to her before the system collapses completely.” #Twinmaker
  • How long until the dupes outnumbered every peacekeeper on the planet? #Twinmaker
  • “Friendship has to be earned.” #Twinmaker
  • Clair thought of all the commuters. How many would disappear in transit? How many would blame her if they knew what she had done? #Twinmaker
  • A sense of stillness crept across the plaza, across the city, as though someone had cut the power to the entire planet. #Twinmaker
  • Clair had accomplished everything WHOLE had ever dreamed of. She had turned the world upside down. #Twinmaker
  • “Now what?” Jesse asked. #Twinmaker

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