Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

  “Like Trotsky,” he said. “He was Lev Davidovich. Did an independent history unit on Bolshevism in the eleventh grade. This is much more interesting.”

  “They say Old Karl had the right diagnosis and the wrong prescription.” She shrugged. “Putting the ‘party’ back into Communist party makes a difference. Jury’s still out. We’ll probably implode. You guys did, right? The zeppelins?”

  “Zeppelins explode,” he said.

  “Har. De. Har.”

  “Sorry.” He stuck his legs out and rested against a guardrail that creaked, then held. He realized that he could have gone over and fallen ten meters to the concrete floor. “But yeah, the zepps didn’t work out.” They’d made perfect sense on paper. All these time-rich, cash-poor people with friends all over the world. Zepps were cheap as hell to run, if you didn’t care where or how fast you went. There’d been hundreds of startups, talking big about climate-appropriate transport and the “new age of aviation.” Despite all that, there was the inescapable sense that they were in a gold rush, a game of musical chairs that would end with a few lucky souls sitting on enough money to stop pretending to give a shit about any kind of aviation except for the kind that came with champagne and a warm eye mask after takeoff. A lot of money sloshed around, a lot of talk from governments about nurturing local talent and new industrial reality. The talk came with huge R&D tax credits and more investment money.

  Three years into it—during which Hubert, Etc and everyone he knew gave up everything to scramble to put huge, floating cigars into the sky—the thing imploded. Just a few years on, it was retro-chic. Hubert, Etc had seen a “genuine Mark II zeppelin comfort suite” in a clip on super-fashionable decor. A painstakingly restored set of flying dormitory furniture was refitted for two rich, stationary people, not dozens of itinerant flying hobos. Hubert, Etc once spent three months in a co-op that was building the prefab suites, ready to slot into airship platforms. His sweat-equity was supposed to entitle him to a certain amount of time every year in the sky on board any ship carrying a co-op unit, bumbling through the world’s prevailing winds to wherever.

  “Wasn’t your fault. It’s the nature of the beast to believe in bubbles and think you can just entrepreneur your way out.” She unclipped her beard and her glasses. She had a fox face, lots of points, grooved where the heavy glasses had rested, sheened with sweat. She wiped the sweat with her shirttail, giving him a glimpse of her pale stomach, a mole by her navel.

  “And your people here?” He wished for more beer, realized he needed a piss, wondered if he should hold it in to make more.

  “We’re not going to entrepreneur our way out of anything. This isn’t entrepreneurship.”

  “Anti-entrepreneurship’s been tried, too—slacking doesn’t get you anywhere.”

  “We’re not anti-entrepreneur, either. We’re not entrepreneurial in the way that baseball isn’t tic-tac-toe. We’re playing a different game.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Post-scarcity,” said with near-religious solemnity.

  He didn’t succeed at keeping his face still, because she looked pissed off. “Sorry.” Hubert, Etc was one of nature’s apologizers. A housemate once made a set of cardboard tombstones for Halloween, hung like bunting across the kitchen cabinets. Hubert, Etc’s read “Sorry.”

  “Don’t sorry me. Look, Etcetera, at all this. On paper, this place is useless, the stuff coming off that line has to be destroyed. It’s a trademark violation; even though it came off an official Muji line, using Muji’s feedstock, it doesn’t have Muji’s license, so that configuration of cellulose and glue is a crime. That’s so manifestly fucked up and shit that anyone who pays attention to it is playing the wrong game and doesn’t deserve consideration. Anyone who says the world is a better place with this building left to rot—”

  “I don’t think that’s the argument,” Hubert, Etc said. He’d once had this kind of discussion a lot. He wasn’t young and avant-garde, but he understood this. “It’s that telling people what they can do with their stuff produces worse outcomes than letting them do stupid things and letting the market sort out the good ideas from—”

  “You think anyone believes that anymore? You know why people who need furniture don’t just break down the door of this place? It’s not market orthodoxy.”

  “Of course not. It’s fear.”

  “They’re right to be afraid. This world, if you aren’t a success, you’re a failure. If you’re not on top, you’re on the bottom. If you’re in between, you’re hanging on by your fingernails, hoping you can get a better grip before your strength gives out. Everyone holding on is too scared to let go. Everyone on the bottom is too worn down to try. The people on the top? They’re the ones who depend on things staying the way they are.”

  “So what do you call your philosophy then? Post-fear?”

  She shrugged. “Don’t care. Lots of names for it. None of that matters. That’s what I care about.” She pointed to the dancers and the beds. Another line of machines was online and folding-table-and-chair sets were piling up.

  “What about ‘communist’?”

  “What about it?”

  “That’s a label with a lot of history. You could be communists.”

  She waved her beard at him. “Communist party. That doesn’t make us ‘communists’ any more than throwing a birthday party makes us ‘birthdayists.’ Communism is an interesting thing to do, nothing I ever want to be.”

  The ladder clanged and the catwalk vibrated like a tuning fork. They looked over the edge just as Seth’s head came into view. “Hello, lovebirds!” he said. He was sloppy and jittery, high on something interesting. Hubert, Etc grabbed him before he could reel over the guardrail. Another person popped over the edge, one of the bearded threesome that had been by the beer.

  “Hey-hey!” He seemed stoned, too, but it was hard for Hubert, Etc to tell.

  “This is the guy,” Seth said. “The guy with the names.”

  “You’re Etcetera!” the new guy said, arms wide like he was greeting a lost brother. “I’m Billiam.” He gave Hubert, Etc a lingering drunkard’s embrace. Hubert, Etc had dated guys, was open to the idea, but Billiam, beautiful tilted eyes aside, was not his type and too high to consider in any event. Hubert, Etc firmly peeled him off, and the girl helped.

  “Billiam,” she said, “what have you two been up to?”

  Billiam and Seth locked eyes and dissolved into hysterical giggles.

  She gave Billiam a playful shove that sent him sprawling, one foot dangling over the catwalk.

  “Meta,” she said. “Or something like it.”

  He’d heard of it. It gave you ironic distance—a very now kind of high. Conspiracy people thought it was too zeitgeisty to be a coincidence, claimed it was spread to soften the population for its miserable lot. In his day—eight years before—the scourge had been called “Now,” something they gave to source-code auditors and drone pilots to give them robotic focus. He’d eaten a shit-ton of it while working on zepps. It made him feel like a happy android. The conspiracy people had said the same thing about Now that they said about Meta. End of the day, anything that made you discount objective reality and assign a premium to some kind of internal mental state was going to be both pro-survival and pro–status-quo.

  “What’s your name?” Hubert, Etc said.

  “Does it matter?” she said.

  “It’s driving me nuts,” he admitted.

  “You’ve got it in your address book,” she said.

  He rolled his eyes. Of course he did. He rubbed the interface patch on his cuff and fingered it for a moment. “Natalie Redwater?” he said. “As in the Redwaters?”

  “There are a lot of Redwaters,” she said. “We’re some of them. Not the ones you’re thinking of, though.”

  “Close to them,” Billiam said from his stoned, prone, ironic world. “Cousins?”

  “Cousins,” she said.

  Hubert, Etc tried hard not to let phrases like “trusta
farian” and “fauxhemian” cross his mind. He probably failed. She didn’t look happy about having her name out.

  “Cousins as in ‘poor country relations,’” Seth said, from his fetal position, “or cousins as in ‘get to use the small airplane?’”

  Hubert, Etc felt bad, not just because he was crushing on her. He’d known people born to privilege, plenty in the zepp scene, and they could be nice people whose salient facts extended beyond unearned privilege. Seth wouldn’t have normally been a dick about this kind of thing—it was precisely the sort of thing he wasn’t normally a dick about—but he was high.

  “Cousins as in ‘enough to worry about kidnapping’ and ‘not enough to pay the ransom,’ she said, with the air of someone repeating a timeworn phrase.

  The arrival of the two stoned boys sucked the magic out of the night. Below, the machines found a steady rhythm, and Rule 34 spun again, blending witch house and New Romantic, automatically syncing with the machines’ beat. It wasn’t pulling a lot of dancers, but a few diehards were out, being beautiful and in motion. Hubert, Etc stared at them.

  Three things happened: the music changed (psychobilly and dubstep), he opened his mouth to say something, and Billiam said, in a tittering singsong: “Buuuu-sted!” and pointed at the ceiling.

  They followed his finger and saw the flock of drones detach from the ceiling, fold back their wings, and plunge into a screaming drop. Natalie pulled her beard back on and Billiam made sure his was on, too.

  “Seth, masks!” Hubert, Etc shook his friend. There had been a good reason for Seth to carry both of their masks, but he couldn’t remember it. Seth sat up with his eyebrows raised and a smirk on his face. Tucking chin to chest, Hubert, Etc swarmed over Seth and roughly turned out his pockets. He slapped his mask to his face and felt the fabric adhere in bunches and whorls as his breath teased it out and the oils in his skin were wicked through its weave. He did Seth.

  “You don’t need to do this,” Seth said.

  “Right,” said Hubert, Etc. “It’s out of the goodness of my heart.”

  “You’re worried they’ll walk my social graph and find you in the one-hop/high-intensity zone.” Seth’s smile, glowing in the darkness of his face, was infuriatingly calm. It vanished behind the mask. That was the stupid Meta. “You’d be screwed then. They’ll run your data going back years, dude, until they find something. They always find something. They’ll put the screws to you, threaten you with every horrible unless you turn narc. Room 101 all the way, baby—”

  Hubert, Etc gave Seth a harder-than-necessary slap upside the head. Seth said “Ow,” mildly, stopped talking. The drones flew a coverage pattern, like pigeons on crank. Hubert, Etc’s interface surfaces shivered as they detected attempted incursions and shut down. Hubert, Etc downloaded countermeasures regularly, if only to fight off drive-by identity thief creeps, but he shivered back, wondering if he was more up-to-date than the cop-bots.

  The party had broken up. Dancers fled, some holding furniture. The music leapt to offensive-capability volume, a sound so loud it made your eyes hurt. Hubert, Etc clapped his hands over his ears just as one of the drones clipped an I-beam and spun out, smashing to the ground. A drone dive-bombed the sound-system’s control unit, knocked it to the ground. The sound went on.

  Hubert, Etc pulled Seth to sit, pointed at the ladder. They let go of their ears to climb down. It was torture: the brutal sound, the painful vibrations of the metal under their hands and feet. Natalie came down, pointed at a doorway.

  Something heavy and painful clipped Hubert, Etc in the head and shoulder, knocking him to his knees. He got to all fours, then to his feet, seeing stars behind the mask.

  He looked for whatever had hit him. It took him a second to make sense of what he saw. Billiam lay on the floor, limbs in a strange swastika, head visibly misshapen, an inky pool of blood spread around it in the dimness. Fighting dizziness and pain from the sound, he bent over Billiam and gingerly peeled the beard. It was saturated with blood. Billiam’s face was smashed into a parody of human features; his forehead had an ugly dent encompassing one eye. Hubert, Etc tried for a pulse at Billiam’s wrist and then his throat, but all he felt was the thunder of the music. He put his hand on Billiam’s chest to feel for the rise and fall of breath, but couldn’t tell.

  He looked up, but Seth and Natalie had already reached the door. They must not have seen Billiam fall, must not have seen him crash into Hubert, Etc. A drone ruffled Hubert, Etc’s hair. Hubert, Etc wanted to cry. He pushed the feeling down, remembering first aid. He shouldn’t move Billiam. But if he stayed, he’d be nabbed. It might be too late. The part of his brain in charge of cowardly self-justification chattered: Why not just go? It’s not like you can do anything. He might even be dead. He looks dead.

  Hubert, Etc had made a concerted study of that voice and had concluded that it was an asshole. He tried to think past the self-serving rationalizations. He grabbed a bag someone left behind and, working gently, rolled Billiam into recovery position and put the bag under his head. He was propping Billiam up with a broken chair and a length of pipe, eyes squinted, head hammering, when someone grabbed him by his sore shoulder. He almost vomited. This was the day he’d known was coming all his life, when he ended up in prison.

  But it wasn’t a cop—it was Natalie. She said something inaudible over the music. He pointed at Billiam. She knelt down and made a light. She threw up, having the presence of mind to do so in her purse. Hubert, Etc noted distantly that she was thinking of esophageal cells and DNA. That distant part admired her foresight. She got to her feet, grabbed him again by his bad arm, yanked hard. He screamed in pain, the sound lost in the roar, and went, leaving Billiam behind.

  [ii]

  Seth came off of Meta hard, around 4:00 A.M., as they sat in a ravine, listening to their ears ring and water below them burble, listening to the efficient whooshing of passing law enforcement vehicles on the road above. He sat on a log with that superior grin, then he was weeping, head in hands, bent between his knees, with the unselfconscious bray of a toddler.

  Hubert, Etc and Natalie looked at him from their spots against tree trunks, braced against the ravine’s slope. They went to him. Hubert, Etc awkwardly embraced him, and Seth buried his face in Hubert, Etc’s chest. Natalie stroked his arm, murmured things that Hubert, Etc thought of as feminine in some comforting sense. Hubert, Etc was conscious of Seth’s crying and the possibility it might be detected by law-enforcement apparatus. This interfered with his empathy, which wasn’t so extensive to begin with, because Seth was fucked up because he’d taken a stupid drug at a trendy party they’d had no business attending, and now Hubert, Etc was covered in dried blood he hadn’t been able to wipe away on dew-dampened leaves and rocks.

  Hubert, Etc squashed Seth’s face harder against his chest, partly to muffle him. Hubert, Etc’s ears still rang, his head throbbed with his pulse, his fingertips tingled with the soft wreck of Billiam’s face. He was sure Billiam was dead when they left. And because he was Hubert, Etc, he was suspicious of that certainty because if Billiam had already been dead, then they hadn’t left him to die alone on the floor.

  Natalie patted Seth’s arm.

  “Come on, buddy,” she said. “That’s the comedown. Think it out with me, you can do that with a Meta comedown, it’s part of the package. Come on, Steve.”

  “Seth,” Hubert, Etc said.

  “Seth,” she said. She was just as impatient with Seth as he was. “Come on. Think it out. It’s terrible, it’s awful, but this isn’t your real reaction, it’s just dope. Come on, Seth, think it out.” She kept on repeating “think it out.” This must be what you said to people who had a hard time with Meta. He said it, too, and Seth’s sobs subsided. He was quiet for a time, then snored softly.

  Natalie and Hubert, Etc looked at each other. “What now?” Natalie said.

  Hubert, Etc shrugged. “Seth had the car-tokens to get home. We could wake him up.”

  Natalie squeezed her eyes tight. “
I don’t want to do any messaging from here. You came in lockdown, right?”

  Hubert, Etc didn’t roll his eyes. His generation perfected lockdown, getting their systems to go fully dark on their way to parties. It hadn’t been easy, but everyone too lazy to bother ended up in jail, sometimes with their friends, so it became widespread.

  “We came in lockdown,” he said. They’d carred to a place with a thousand statistically probable destinations within a short walk, walked a long way to the party. They weren’t stupid.

  “Well, do you think it’s safe to light up?”

  “Safe for what?”

  He could see her suppressing an eye roll. “To be an acceptable risk. And if you say, ‘acceptable in what way,’ I’ll slug you. Do you think it’s a good idea to light up?”

  “I want to say, ‘good compared to what?’ I don’t know, Natalie. I think—” He swallowed. “I’m pretty sure Billiam is—” He swallowed. “I think he’s dead.” Neither of them looked at the other. Such a stupid accident. “Whatever else, I think it means that the cops’ll be brutal, because a dead person puts the thing in a different category. On the other hand, our DNA is all over that place, and with the deal they’ll make, they’ll come after us no matter what. On the other hand, I mean, in addition to that, or with that in mind, if we light up now, we’re adding corroboration to any inference that says that we were there, which means that—”

  “Enough paranoid rat-holing. We can’t light up.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “A friend,” she said. “I’m sure she got herself home; she’s warm and cozy under a blanket with a cup of tea waiting for her when she gets up.” Natalie sounded bitter for the first time. Hubert, Etc realized he was half frozen and half starving, so thirsty it was like the inside of his mouth had been painted with starch.

  “We’ve got to go.” He looked at himself. In the gray dawn light, the dried blood looked like mud. “Do you think I could get onto the subway like this?”