Paolo Bacigalupi - The Doubt Factory

Of course they were gone. It made perfect sense. She’d just been so wrapped up in the puzzle of it all that she hadn’t thought that 2.0 might have lives and plans and agendas of their own.

The world doesn’t revolve around you, Alix .

Moses had even said they were in town for only a little while. So of course they were gone. Their business was finished here. They’d humiliated her and her father, and they’d made fools of Williams & Crowe. Now they were off on some other Don Quixote mission. They were probably terrorizing some CEO in California by now. Filling the guy’s Santa Barbara mansion with ocean water and turning it into a giant aquarium or something.

She turned in a circle one last time, trying to take it in. It was getting dark now, making the building gloomy.

Whatever she’d been hoping to find was gone. Closure? Some kind of conversation? People to hang out with who didn’t feel morally bankrupt?

Moses. She’d at least wanted to find Moses. She’d wanted to look him in the eye and say that she understood. She’d put all the pieces together. She’d figured it all out. And to top it off, she’d tracked him down. Which meant she’d beaten him. For once, she’d beaten him. For once, she’d surprised him, instead of the other way around.

Why do you even care? What do you have to prove to him?

She remembered chasing him after his first prank. With rats running everywhere, and more mayhem to come, she’d grabbed his sleeve and called for him to wait. And he’d whirled on her, and, in that moment, she’d seen herself in the lenses of his glasses, her Seitz schoolgirl uniform and her tidy French braid, and she’d felt painfully naive.

God, she’d hated that feeling.

She wasn’t used to anyone looking down on her, and there he was, looking smug, because he knew more than she did. She’d wanted to be strong in that moment, to be able to stand up to him.

“You don’t need him,” Alix said to herself. She took a deep breath. “You don’t need any of them anymore. You answered all the questions yourself. You figured it all out on your own.”

So what now?

And she found, to her surprise, that she had an answer for that as well.

The Doubt Factory.

Alix started to smile. She didn’t need Moses to answer questions, and she didn’t need 2.0 to give her a direction. She’d already chosen her direction. Sometime between reading about aspirin and listening to her father’s plotting, she’d chosen a direction on her own. This was just a sentimental detour on the way to her actual destination.

With a new spring in her step, she strode out of the factory’s bay doors and slid them closed.

Full dark was coming on. She could see the lights of New York City far in the distance, a glowing skyline. Much closer, a neon MAPLE CONFECTIONS sign illuminated the bread factory, glazing the area in reddish light. Already Alix’s mind was at work, trying to solve the puzzle of how she could crack the Doubt Factory.

Her father made his living helping companies tell their side of the story, and yet every time he did, he kept a portion of their stories to himself. But somewhere deep inside Banks Strategy Partners, the rest of those stories were hidden.

She just needed to find a way to pry them out.

Alix made her way across the weedy lot to her car, listening to the distant rumblings and beeps and groans of shipping and manufacturing, the music of things being made and moved. Her MINI sat like a toy amid the warehouses. All of it was so big. Bigger than any one person.

Out on the water, she could see a container ship, its lights glowing, giant freight cranes crouching over it, starting to unload.

It’s all so big , she thought, and for a second she felt overwhelmed and small. But then she banished the feeling. Sometimes big things fall hard .

She liked that thought better.

Smiling, Alix climbed into the MINI and revved its engine.

As she put the car in drive, a hand wrapped around her neck and jerked her back against her seat. Alix gasped and tried to break free, but she was pinned.

A voice murmured in her ear, “Didn’t expect to see you again.”

“MOSES.” ALIX SWALLOWED AT THEpressure on her throat. Her heart was pounding as adrenaline ripped through her.

Stay calm .

She had one hand on the wheel, one on the gear shift. She swallowed again. “I can drive us straight into a wall if you don’t let go of my neck, Moses. All I have to do is step on the gas.”

The pressure eased off a little. “That probably wouldn’t go well for either of us, would it?” His voice was so familiar. So confident. He was always so damn confident.

“I’ve got a seat belt,” Alix pointed out. “A crash will work out better for me than you.”

“Maybe. Maybe not,” Moses said. “I’ll take my chances. This just feels safer, you know.” He gave her throat a squeeze. “I’d rather have some leverage.”

“Leverage for what?”

“Good behavior.”

“Good behavior?” Alix laughed out loud. “After what you did to me?” She knew she was hideously vulnerable, but she couldn’t help firing back. “You’re the one who drugged me and stuck me in a cage! I should probably drive you into the wall just on principle!”

“Well, there you go—just another reason not to trust you.”

“The feeling’s mutual, then,” Alix replied.

“Seriously?” Moses sounded almost hurt.

“What do you think?”

The sense of play faded from Moses’s voice, replaced by a surprising earnestness. “If I wanted to hurt you, Alix, you’d already be hurt. It would’ve been easy with you snooping around my place.”

“So why didn’t you? If you don’t trust me so much, why didn’t you just do something?”

There was a long pause. He seemed caught off guard at the question. “Maybe I wanted to know what your game was,” he said finally.

“I don’t play games,” Alix retorted. “That’s what you do, remember?”

Moses laughed harshly. “Don’t sell yourself short. You played me. When I let you go, I was so sure you were telling the truth. You made me believe, Alix, and it’s not often that I get played like that. I mean, I really believed. Hasn’t happened in a long time. But I got to hand it to you, you played me perfectly.”

“Would you please let me go? Your hand is starting to make me uncomfortable.”

“Yeah, sorry, but no. I don’t trust you.”

Alix let the engine rev slightly. The MINI was begging to lunge forward. “Let me go, Moses. Or I put us both into the wall, and then I scrape you off the windshield.”

“You think I’m afraid of dying?” he asked. “Try again, Alix.”

Alix clenched her jaw with irritation. “Just so you know, I didn’t play you.”

“So Williams and Crowe just happened to show up on my doorstep? That was a strange coincidence. I let you go, and then Williams and Crowe came knocking with tear gas.”

“That wasn’t really your doorstep.”

“Bet you were disappointed to find out I was one step ahead of you.”

Alix remembered the tear gas rounds crashing through the upper windows, believing that everyone inside was going to be choking and collapsing.

“No,” she said. “I didn’t want that.” She could still feel the horror of that moment. Seeing what she had set in motion and knowing she was powerless to stop it. She swallowed. “I didn’t know they’d do that.”

“If I didn’t have a backup plan, Tank would be dead by now,” Moses said quietly. “We’d all be in jail, and Tank would be dead.”

At first, Alix thought he was accusing her, but the way he said it, it felt more like he was barely even talking to her. Almost as if he were reminding himself of something.