Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

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  For Erik Stewart and Aaron Swartz.

  First days, better nations.

  We fight on.

  1

  communist party

  [i]

  Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Wilson Alva Anton Jeff Harley Timothy Curtis Cleveland Cecil Ollie Edmund Eli Wiley Marvin Ellis Espinoza was too old to be at a Communist party. At twenty-seven, he had seven years on the next oldest partier. He felt the demographic void. He wanted to hide behind one of the enormous filthy machines that dotted the floor of the derelict factory. Anything to escape the frank, flat looks from the beautiful children of every shade and size who couldn’t understand why an old man was creepering around.

  “Let’s go,” he said to Seth, who’d dragged him to the party. Seth was terrified of aging out of the beautiful children demographic and entering the world of non-work. He had an instinct for finding the most outré, cutting edge, transgressive goings-on among the children who’d been receding in their rearview mirrors. Hubert, Etc, Espinoza only hung out with Seth because part of his thing about not letting go of his childhood was also not letting go of childhood friends. He was insistent on the subject, and Hubert, Etc was a pushover.

  “This is about to get real,” Seth said. “Why don’t you get us beers?”

  That was exactly what Hubert, Etc didn’t want to do. The beer was where the most insouciant adolescents congregated, merry and weird as tropical fishes. Each more elfin and tragic than the last. Hubert, Etc remembered that age, the certainty that the world was so broken that only an idiot would deign to acknowledge it or its inevitability. Hubert, Etc often confronted his reflection in his bathroom screen, stared into his eyes in their nest of bruisey bags, and remembered being someone who spent every minute denying the world’s legitimacy, and now he was enmeshed in it. Hubert, Etc couldn’t self-delude the knowledge away. Anyone under twenty would spot it in a second.

  “Go on, man, come on. I got you into this party. Least you can do.”

  Hubert, Etc didn’t say any obvious things about not wanting to come in the first place and not wanting beer in the second place. There were lots of pointless places an argument with Seth could go. He had his Peter Pan face on, prepared to be ha-ha-only-serious until you wore down, and Hubert, Etc started the night worn.

  “I don’t have any money,” Hubert, Etc said.

  Seth gave him a look.

  “Oh, yeah,” Hubert, Etc said. “Communist party.”

  Seth passed him two red party cups, their color surely no accident.

  As Hubert, Etc drew up to the taps—spoodged onto a vertical piece of structural steel that shot out of the floor and up to the rafters, skinned with checkered safety-yellow bar codes and smudges of entropy and dancing lights of the DJ—and tried to figure out which of the beautiful children was bartender, factum factotum, or commissar. No one moved to help him or block him as he edged closer, though three of the children stopped to watch with intense expressions.

  All three wore Marx glasses with the huge, bushy beards hanging, like in the vocoder videos, full of surreal menace. These ones were dyed bright colors, and one had something in it—memory wire?—that made it crawl like tentacles.

  Hubert, Etc clumsily filled a cup, and the girl held it while he filled the other. The beer was incandescent, or bioluminescent, and Hubert, Etc worried about what might be in the transgenic jesus microbes that could turn water into beer, but the girl was looking at him from behind those glasses, her eyes unreadable in the flickering dance-lights. He drank.

  “Not bad.” He burped, burped again. “Fizzy, though?”

  “Because it’s fast-acting. It was ditch water an hour ago. We sieved it, brought it up to room temp, dumped in the culture. It’s live, too—add some precursor, it’ll come back. Survives in your urine. Just save some, you want to make more.”

  “Communist beer?” Hubert, Etc said. The best bon mot he could scrounge. He was better when he had time to think.

  “Nazdarovya.” She clicked her cup against his and drained it, loosing a bone-rattling belch when she finished. She gave her chest a thump and scared out smaller burps, refilled the glass.

  “If it comes out in pee,” Hubert, Etc said, “what happens if someone adds the precursor to the sewers? Will it turn to beer?”

  She gave him a look of adolescent scorn. “That would be stupid. Once it’s diluted it can’t metabolize precursor. Flush and it’s just pee. The critters die in an hour or two, so a latrine won’t turn into a reservoir of long-lived existential threats to the water supply. It’s just beer.” Burp. “Fizzy beer.”

  Hubert, Etc sipped. It was really good. Didn’t taste like piss at all. “All beer is rented, right?” he said.

  “Most beer is rented. This is free. You know: ‘free as in free beer.’” She drank half the cup, spilling into her beard. It beaded on the crinkly refugee stuff. “You don’t come to a lot of Communist parties.”

  Hubert, Etc shrugged. “I don’t,” he said. “I’m old and boring. Eight years ago, we weren’t doing this.”

  “What were you doing, Gramps?” Not in a mean way, but her two friends—a girl the same shade as Seth and a guy with beautiful cat-eyes—sniggered.

  “Hoping to get jobs on the zeppelins!” Seth said, slinging an arm around Hubert, Etc’s neck. “I’m Seth, by the way. This is Hubert, Etc.”

  “Etcetera?” the girl said. Just a little smile. Hubert, Etc liked her. He thought that she was probably secretly nice, probably didn’t think he was a dork just because he was a few years older, and hadn’t heard of her favorite kind of synthetic beer. He recognized this belief was driven by a theory of humanity that most people were good, but also by a horrible, oppressive loneliness and nonspecific horniness. Hubert, Etc was bright, which wasn’t always easy, and had a moderate handle on his psyche that made it hard to bullshit himself.

  “Tell her, dude,” Seth said. “Come on, it’s a great story.”

  “It’s not a great story,” Hubert, Etc said. “My parents gave me a lot of middle names is all.”

  “How many is a lot?”

  “Twenty,” he said. “The top twenty names from the 1890 census.”

  “That’s only nineteen,” she said, quickly. “And one first name.”

  Seth laughed like this was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. Even Hubert, Etc smiled. “Most people don’t get that. Technically, I have nineteen middle names and one first name.”

  “Why did your parents give you nineteen middle names and one first name?” she asked. “And are you sure it’s nineteen middle names? Maybe you have ten first names and ten middle names.”

  “I think that it’s hard to claim to have more than one first name, because f
irst has a specificity that middle lacks. Notwithstanding your Mary Anns and Jean Marcs and such, which are hyphenated by convention.”

  “Fair point,” she said. “Though, come on, if Mary Ann is a first name, why isn’t Mary Ann Tanya Jessie Banana Pants Monkey Vomit etc?”

  “My parents would agree. They were making a statement about names, after Anonymous brought in its Real Name Policy. They’d both been active, worked to make it a political party, so they were really fucked off. Thought it was obvious that if you were ‘Anonymous’ you couldn’t have a ‘Real Name Policy.’ They decided to give their kid a unique name that never fit into any database and would give him the right to legally use a whole bunch of sub-names.

  “By the time I got all this, I was used to ‘Hubert,’ and I stuck to it.”

  Seth took Hubert’s beer cup, swilled from it, burped. “I’ve always called you Hubert, Etc, though. It’s cool, and it’s easier to say.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “Do it, though, okay?”

  “What?” Hubert, Etc knew the answer.

  “The names. You’ve got to hear this.”

  “You don’t have to,” she said.

  “I do, probably, or you’ll wonder.” He’d made peace with it. It was part of growing up. “Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Wilson Alva Anton Jeff Harley Timothy Curtis Cleveland Cecil Ollie Edmund Eli Wiley Marvin Ellis Espinoza.”

  She cocked her head, nodded. “Needs more Banana Pants.”

  “Bet you got teased like hell at school though, right?” Seth said.

  This pissed Hubert, Etc off. It was stupid, and it was a recurring stupidity. “Come on, really? You think that names are why kids get teased? The causal arrow points the other way. If the kids are making fun of your name, it’s because you’re unpopular—you’re not unpopular because of your name. If the coolest kid in school was called ‘Harry Balls’ they’d call him Harold. If the school goat was called ‘Lisa Brown,’ they’d call her ‘Shitstain.’” He nearly said, Seriously, don’t be an asshole, but didn’t. He was invested in being an adult. Seth paid no attention to the possibility that he was being an asshole.

  “What’s your name?” Seth said to the girl.

  “Lisa Brown,” she replied.

  Hubert, Etc snickered.

  “Seriously?”

  “No.”

  He waited to see if she’d offer her name, shrugged. “I’m Seth.” He went to her friends, who’d inched closer. One of them did a fancy handshake, which he faked with totally unselfconscious enthusiasm that Hubert, Etc envied and was embarrassed by.

  The dance music got louder. Seth refilled Hubert, Etc’s cup and took it to the dance floor. Hubert was the only one without a cup. The girl refilled hers and passed it.

  “Good stuff,” she shouted, her breath tickling his cheek. The music was really loud, an automated mix, tied into DJ stuff that used lidar and heat-mapping to characterize crowd-responses to musical mixes and optimized them to get everyone on the floor. They’d had it back when Hubert, Etc was young enough to go clubbing, called it Rule 34 for all the different mixes, but it had been cheesy then. Now it was the business.

  “Kinda hoppy, though.”

  “Not the taste. The enzymes. Stuff in it helps you break it down, stops it from turning into formaldehyde in your blood. Good for reducing hangovers. It’s Turkish.”

  “Turkish?”

  “Well, Turkish-ish. Came out of refus in Syria. They’ve got a lab. It’s called Gezi. If you’re interested, I can send you stuff about it.”

  Was she hitting on him? Eight years ago, giving someone your contact details was an invitation. Maybe they’d swung into a time of more promiscuous name-space management and less promiscuous socio-sexual norms. Hubert, Etc wished he’d skimmed a précis of current sociology of twenty-year-olds. He rubbed the interface strip on his ring finger and muttered “contact details,” held out his hand. Her hand was warm, rough, and small. She touched a strip she wore as a choker and whispered, and he felt a confirming buzz from his system, then a double-buzz that meant that she’d reciprocated.

  “So you can white-list me.”

  Hubert, Etc wondered if she was used to sharing contacts so widely that she had to worry about spam or—

  “You’ve never been to one of these,” she said, her face right up to his ear again.

  “No,” he shouted. Her hair smelled like burning tires and licorice.

  “You’ll love this, come on, let’s get in close, they’re going to start soon.”

  She took his hand again, and as her calluses rasped over his skin, he felt another buzz. It was endogenous and hadn’t originated with his interface stuff.

  * * *

  They skirted the dancers, kicking through leaves and puffs of dust that swirled in the lights. There were glittering motes in the dust that made the air seem laden with fairy-glitter. Hubert, Etc caught sight of Seth. Seth looked back and clocked the scene—the girl, the hands, the scramble through dark spaces for private vantage, and his face creased with passing envy before turning into a fratty leer to which he added a thumbs-up. The automatic music thudded, Cantopop and rumba that Rule 34 tumbled out of its directed random-walk through music-space.

  “Here’s good,” she said, as they yanked themselves onto a catwalk. The gritty service-ladder left rust streaks on Hubert, Etc’s palms. Out of the music’s blast, they could hear each other, and Hubert, Etc was aware of his breath and pulse.

  “Keep your eye on that.” She pointed at a machine to one side. Hubert, Etc squinted and saw her friends from before moving around it. “They do furniture, mostly shelving. There was a ton of feedstock in the storeroom.”

  “Did you help put this”—a sweep of his arm to take in the factory, the dancers—“together?”

  She laid one finger alongside the rubber nose, winked slowly. “Supreme Soviet,” she said. She tapped the temple of her glasses, and he caught a shimmer as their magnification kicked in with false color and stabilization. “They’ve got it.” The music cut off mid-note.

  A rumble in the bones of the factory vibrated the catwalk. The dancers looked around for its source, then a wave of attention propagated through them as gaze followed gaze and they focused on the machine, which moved, dust shaking down, dance-lights skewering it, lighting more motes. A new smell now, woodsy, full of dangerous volatiles that boiled off the machine’s elements as they glowed to life. The hush in the room broke when the first composite plank dropped onto the assembly bed, nudged by thousands of infinitesimal fingers that corrected its alignment just as the next plank dropped. Now they fell at regular intervals, a ladder of thin, strong, supple cellulosic boards, swiftly joined by crosspieces, also swept into position, lining up the prefabricated joinery elements that clicked together with a snick. The fingers lifted the grid, moved it down the line, and a new grid was assembled just as quickly, then they mated and clicked together.

  More of them, then a loop of fastening fabric thrown, caught, and cinched around the framework, and the completed piece was tossed to one side. Another was a minute behind it on the line. A dancer sauntered over to the output file and lifted the finished piece easily, brought it one-handed onto the dance floor, sliced through the fastening with a knife that gleamed in the dance-lights. The bed—that’s what it was—click-clacked into place, yawning back, ready for a mattress. The dancer climbed up onto the bed’s grid of slats and started jumping up and down. It was as springy as a trampoline, and in moments she was doing midair splits, butt drops, even a somersault.

  The girl sat back and ran a finger around her beard. “Good stuff.” Hubert, Etc was sure she was smiling.

  “That’s a cool bed frame,” Hubert, Etc said, for lack of something better to say.

  “One of the best,” she said. “They had a ton of profitable lines, but bed frames were the best. Big with hotels, because they’re practically indestructible and they’re featherlight.”

  “Why aren’t they making them anymore?”r />
  “Oh, they are. Muji shut down the plant and moved to Alberta six months ago. Got a huge subsidy to relocate—Ontario couldn’t match the deal. They’d only been here for a couple of years, only employed twenty people all told, their two-year tax holiday was ending. Place has been empty since then. We can do the whole line from here, all Muji’s furniture, including white-label stuff they do for Nestlé and Standard & Poors & Möet & Chandon. Chairs, tables, bookcases, shelving. There’s an empty feedstock plant in Orangeville we’re hitting for the next party, raw material for the supply chain. If we don’t get caught, we can do enough furnishings for a couple thousand families.”

  “You don’t charge for them or anything?”

  A long look. “Communist party, remember?”

  “Yeah, but, how do you eat and stuff?”

  She shrugged. “Here and there. This and that. Kindness of strangers.”

  “So people bring you food and you give them this stuff?”

  “No,” she said. “We don’t do barter. This is gifts, the gift economy. Everything freely given, nothing sought in return.”

  It was Hubert, Etc’s turn. “How often do you get a gift around the same time as you’re giving one of these away? Who doesn’t show up with something to leave behind when they take something?”

  “Of course. It’s hard to get people out of the scarcity quid-pro-quo habit. But we know they don’t have to bring anything. Did you bring anything tonight?”

  He patted his pockets. “I’ve got a couple million bucks, nothing much.”

  “Keep it. Money is the one thing we don’t take. My mom always said money was the crappiest present. Anyone trying to give or get money around here, we sling ’em out on their butts, no second chances.”

  “I’ll keep my wallet in my pants.”

  “Good idea.” She was kind enough not to notice the double entendre that made Hubert, Etc blush. “I’m Pranksterella, by the way.”

  “And I thought my parents were screwed up.”

  The beard wiggled inscrutably: “My parents didn’t give me that one,” she said. “It’s my party name.”