The second Carly, Carly 2.0, was born where she stood, and she was made of both no and yes. She’d been on her way all afternoon. Carly had felt her stirring with the doorknob in her grip, on her feet, breathing, booming, growing brand-new into her skin. This Carly knew that breath and movement and chance were the parts of the physical fight she was watching on the screen. But she saw an entire machine inside her, a system of Other Carlys that would try things and do things and figure things out at a speed and ferocity that regular Carly didn’t direct.

She was breathless in the hold of discovery. It burned. Tingled. It sang. She was watching with her own eyes something that would never, could never, have been in her memory. That terrible minute was hers again, but from the one viewpoint that she alone on planet Earth was barred from seeing. Outside herself.

A whole silent, hidden life was inside her body waiting, vigilant, to be called on. There were worlds within worlds. The layers between them broke away like sugar glass when they needed to. When they had to. She couldn’t look away from her other self doing the unimaginable.

On the screen, she watched Other Carly give Carly the aim, the strength, and the break from thinking. Other Carly made her try and took away the idea that it wouldn’t work.

If all that, then what else? Then there was more everywhere. Something was working away underneath it all. Everyone, without knowing it, was getting ready. Constantly. Making things. Having ideas they wouldn’t have time to ask permission for. Everyone was inventing fast plans to plug into problems, ways to cope that stayed hidden until, suddenly, they didn’t anymore. Everyone thought they weren’t ready. But that wasn’t all the way true.

The peg turned.

Then Carly felt what was wrong in the room.

The cheerful line of cops behind them were laughing it up, commenting on the looping video. One man slapped his hands together with glee when on-screen Carly’s boot connected with the guy’s head again, and he crashed into a nerveless heap on the tiles.

But the heat of trouble came not from the strangers behind them, but from the left. Her stepfather absorbed most of it, stiff and grim at the computer’s controls. Carly’s mother glowed like the sun, mouth agape.

In a moment of discovery and wonder, Carly had sped right past the obvious thing. Since when are there cameras in the house?

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