Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

  “The kids’ wing,” she said. “My sister’s away at university in Rio, so it’s mine for now. I don’t think my parents have been in here five times since the house was built.”

  “The whole thing is one house?” Hubert, Etc said.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Doesn’t seem like the way you’d build a house if you didn’t care about how rich you seemed to other people,” he said.

  She shook her head. “It was a zoning thing. The people on the other side of the ravine”—she gestured at the picture window—“didn’t want to have to look at a ‘monster house’ over breakfast. They’re rich people, we’re rich people, the zoning board didn’t know what to do. Dad settled for building a giant house that looked like three houses.” She swept a sofa free of clutter. “Food’s in the pantry. I’m gonna use the upstairs bathroom. The downstairs one is there, help yourself to toiletries.” She went up the stairs and disappeared around a corner.

  Seth grinned at Hubert, Etc meaningfully, a silent comment on his romantic feelings for Natalie. He wasn’t in the mood. He’d held a dead man in his arms. He was bloody, tired, and nauseated.

  “I’m going to stand under the shower for an hour,” he said. “So you’d better go first.”

  “How do you know I won’t stand under the shower for an hour?” Seth’s maddening grin.

  “Don’t.” He’d spotted towels on the ground by the stone fireplace. He passed one to Seth and shook the other one out and put it on the mantel.

  There was kindling and newspaper and split logs. He built a fire. He found a large t-shirt that didn’t smell bad, with fake burn-holes all over it, a pair of track-bottoms he thought would fit. He stripped off his shirt, pants, and jacket and threw them in the fire. He didn’t know what forensics could do about identifying blood on clothing after laundering but he was sure they could do less with ash. The woven interaction surfaces melted and released acrid smoke. He padded around in a stranger’s clothes, wondering whose they’d been. Maybe Billiam’s.

  Natalie came around the corner and stood on the landing, contemplating him and the mess. “Steve in the bathroom?”

  “Seth. Yeah.”

  “You can use mine, come on.” Just like that, he was in a strange girl’s bedroom.

  It was the bedroom of someone who’d been a student until recently: framed certificates, shelves full of books and trophies, thumbtacked posters for bands and causes, but overlaid with political posters, desk piled with broken interaction surfaces, elaborate homemade vapers that could turn titanium into inhalable smoke. A scattering of paper money, bespeaking illicit transactions, and clunky, semi-functional caging around the walls, floors, and ceiling—a kid’s attempt to block parental spyware. It was better opsec than Hubert, Etc practiced, but he wasn’t sure it’d work.

  Natalie wore loose pajamas, black-and-white striped, and no bra, and he did not stare or even peek. She ran her hand down the bathroom door’s edge, a spot smeared with years of hand prints beyond any ever-clean surface, and it sighed open. “All yours.”

  He passed through the door and turned to close it. She stared at him. “Keep the clothes,” she said. There were tears in her eyes.

  “I’m—” He faltered. “I’m very sorry about Billiam.”

  “Me too.” A tear slipped down her cheek. “He was an asshole, but he was our asshole. He got fucked up too early at the parties. It was his fault. I miss him.” Another tear.

  “Do you want a hug?”

  “No thank you. Just go shower.”

  The bathroom was the kind you saw in showrooms. Active noise-cancellation ate the sound of the water; smart jets’ algorithms increased and decreased the pressure, predicting what he wanted sprayed and how hard; interactive surfaces turned anything into a mirror at a double-tap, giving him an unnerving look at his ass and the back of his head; air-circulators bathed him in warm breezes after he turned down the water, simultaneously drying the bathroom’s surfaces of condensate.

  She was waiting in the doorway. “Sorry,” she said. Her eyes were dry. He held out his towel and made a questioning face. She took it from him and threw it on the floor.

  “Let’s see what Steve’s up to.”

  “Seth.”

  “Who cares.”

  Seth had found the pantry and cleared a coffee table, done a neat job of it, folding and organizing things, piling them in a clear patch of floor. He’d cleared three chairs. On the table: a platter of fruit, teapot and cups, croissants. They smelled good.

  “Snack?”

  “Good work, Steve.” Natalie sounded like she meant it.

  “Any time.” Seth didn’t correct her.

  They snacked in silence. Hubert, Etc wanted to ask about the house, about the food. About Billiam, the party, the third person with a beard, the other girl who’d been their partner-in-crime. But sleep was heavy in his limbs. His eyelids drooped. Natalie looked from him to Seth—who also looked like he could nod off in his chair—and said, “Okay, boys, hit the couches. I’m going to bed.”

  She staggered upstairs and Hubert, Etc stretched out on the least-cluttered sofa, eyes closing as he pressed his face into the cushions’ seam. In the brief moment before sleep, he saw the twisted body of Billiam, felt a phantom sensation of the pulp of Billiam’s skull in his fingers. He had a toe-to-scalp shiver, up and down twice before it subsided and he mercifully slept.

  * * *

  He woke to muttered voices. He looked blearily, trying to orient himself: Seth’s back on the sofa opposite him, the finger-painted wall. He lifted his head—a hungover throb—and located the voices. Natalie, standing in a doorway at the far end, arguing through a crack in the door in a hushed voice. The answer was male, older, maddeningly calm. Jacob. His head slumped. He was going to have to get up. His bladder was painfully full.

  As awkward as ever in his life, dressed in a stranger’s clothes, hungover, in a strange room where a strange—attractive—girl argued with her rich father, he padded as inconspicuously as he could to the toilet. Natalie looked at him, made an unreadable face, turned to her argument.

  When Hubert, Etc came back, drying his hands on the ass of his borrowed track-bottoms, Natalie and her father sat stone-faced across from each other. Jacob sat on the sofa that Hubert, Etc had vacated and she in a chair. Seth slept.

  Hubert, Etc went to the pantry—soft lights within came on and he saw a door on the other side, understood that some servant refilled it during the day—brought out carrot sticks, celery, and hummus on a tray and set it down between the two Redwaters. They glared at each other.

  “Thank you, Hubert,” Jacob Redwater said. He dipped a carrot in hummus, didn’t eat.

  Hubert, Etc sat down next to him, because there was nowhere else.

  Natalie said, “Hubert, what’s more important, human rights or property rights?”

  Hubert, Etc turned the question over. It was loaded. “Are property rights a human right?”

  Jacob smiled and crunched his carrot stick, and Hubert, Etc sensed he’d said the wrong thing.

  Natalie looked grim. “You tell me. That factory we switched on last night. It was worth more as a write-off than it was as a going concern. Some entity that owned it demanded that it sit rotting and useless, even though there were people who wanted what it could make.”

  “If they wanted the factory, they could buy the factory,” Jacob said. “Then make things and sell them.”

  “I don’t think those people could afford to buy a factory,” Hubert, Etc said, glancing at Natalie for approval. She nodded minutely.

  “That’s what capital markets are for,” Jacob said. “If you’ve got a plan for profitably using an asset someone else isn’t using, then you draw up a business plan and take it to investors. If you’re right, one of them will fund you—maybe more than one. Then you sell what you make.”

  “What if no one invests?” Hubert, Etc said. “I know a ton of zepp startups that died because they couldn’t get money, even though they were
making amazing stuff.”

  Jacob took on the air of someone explaining a complex subject to a child. “If no one wants to invest, that means that you don’t have an idea worth investing in, or you aren’t the right person to execute that idea because you don’t know how to convince people to invest.”

  “Don’t you see the circularity there?” Natalie said. “If you can’t convince someone to pay to turn on the factory to make things that people need, then the factory shouldn’t be turned on?”

  “As opposed to what? A free-for-all? Just smash down the doors, walk in and take over?”

  “Why not, if no one else is doing anything with it?”

  The talking-to-a-toddler look: “Because it’s not yours.”

  “So what?”

  “You wouldn’t be happy if a mob busted in here and carried all your precious things out, would you, Natty?”

  With less than a day’s experience, Hubert, Etc could tell that Natalie didn’t want to be called “Natty.” Jacob knew it, was baiting his daughter. It was cheating.

  “I wouldn’t mind,” Hubert, Etc said. “I don’t have much, most of what matters is backed up. I mean, so long as I could find a bed and some clothes the next day, it wouldn’t make a difference.”

  “Natty’s got plenty more than a change of clothes and a bed here in her nest,” Jacob said. “Natty likes nice things.”

  “I do. I want everyone else to have them.” Her look could have sliced steel.

  “Let them work for it, the way we have.”

  Natalie snorted.

  Jacob looked at Hubert, Etc. “You were at the party last night?”

  It was dusk outside the picture window, pinky-orange light sweeping down the ravine, staining the river’s rippling surface.

  “I was.”

  “What do you think about breaking into private property and stealing what you find there?”

  Hubert, Etc wished that he’d pretended to be asleep. He was pretty sure Seth was faking it.

  “No one was using it.” He looked at Natalie. “The hydrogen cells’d filled up, so the windmills were going to waste. The feedstock was worth practically nothing.”

  Natalie said, “What’s the point of having private property if all does is rot?”

  “Oh, please. Private property is the most productive property. Temporary inefficiencies don’t change that. Only kooks and crooks think that stealing other property is a valid form of political action.”

  “Only kleptocrats use terms like ‘temporary inefficiencies’ for wasteful abominations like that Muji factory.”

  “It’s easy to talk about kleptocrats when Daddy pulls strings to keep the cops off your lazy ass. They’ll arrest a hell of a lot of people today, Natty, but not you or your friends.”

  “Don’t pretend your political embarrassment is generosity. Let ’em put me away.”

  “Maybe I will. Maybe a couple of years of hard work in prison will make you appreciate what you’ve got.”

  She looked at Hubert, Etc. “He’s been threatening to send me to a prison since I was ten. It used to be those scared-straight places on private islands, until they were all busted for ‘corrective rape.’ Now it’s adult prison. Why the fuck not, Dad? You’re a major shareholder in most of ’em—they’d give you a discount. I could get inside perspective on the family business.”

  Jacob gave a showy laugh. “Like I’d trust you to run anything. Business is a meritocracy, child. You think you’re going to walk into some fat job just because you’re my kid—”

  “I don’t. Because there aren’t any ‘jobs’ left. Just financial engineering and politics. I’m not qualified for either. For one thing, I can’t say ‘meritocracy’ with a straight face.”

  Hubert, Etc saw that one land. It emboldened him. “It’s the height of self-serving circular bullshit, isn’t it? ‘We’re the best people we know, we’re on top, therefore we have a meritocracy. How do we know we’re the best? Because we’re on top. QED.’ The most amazing thing about ‘meritocracy’ is that so many brilliant captains of industry haven’t noticed that it’s made of such radioactively obvious bullshit you could spot it orbit.” He snuck another look at Natalie. She gave him a minute nod that thrilled him.

  Jacob looked more pissed. Distantly, Hubert, Etc wondered how such a powerful man could be so thin-skinned. Jacob stood and glared. “Easy to say, but last time I looked, you two hadn’t done a fucking thing that mattered to anyone, and were depending on ‘bullshit’ to keep your asses out of jail.”

  “There he goes with the jail stuff again. I suppose prison is one way to win an argument if you can’t think of a better one.”

  “It’s traditional,” Seth said, lifting his face from the pillows. “Spanish Inquisition. USSR. Saudi Arabia. Gitmo.”

  Jacob walked out, closing the connecting door with a dignified click. It was more pissed than a slam. Hubert, Etc felt victorious.

  “This hotel is goddamned noisy.” Seth rolled onto his back, stretching to expose his hairy stomach, gone soft since the last time Hubert, Etc saw it.

  “The room service is awesome, though,” Hubert, Etc said. “And you can’t beat the price.”

  Seth sat up. “That’s your dad, huh?”

  “I know that it’s a cliché to hate your old man when you’re twenty, but he’s such an asshole,” Natalie said. “He really believes that meritocracy stuff. Seriously believes in it. He’s one step away from talking about having the blood of kings in his veins.”

  “The thing I’ve never understood,” Hubert, Etc said, “is how someone can be delusional and still manage to own half the planet? I get how having some delusions would be useful when you’re bossing people around and ripping everyone off, but doesn’t that break down eventually? It’s still capitalism out there. If your competitor brings in some person who isn’t delusional, wouldn’t that person end up bankrupting you?”

  Natalie said, “There’s more than one way to be smart. People like my dad assume that because they’re smart about being evil bastards, they’re smart about everything—”

  “And because they’re smart at everything,” Seth said, “that makes it okay for them to be evil bastards?”

  “Exactly,” she said. “So people like my dad are good at figuring out how to take your company with its ‘smart people’ and get it declared illegal, poach its best ideas, or just buy it and leverage it and financialize it until it doesn’t make anything except for exotic derivatives and tax credits. And the thing is, that’s not good enough for him! He wants to be the one percent of the one percent of the one percent because of his inherent virtue, not because the system is rigged. His whole identity rests on the idea that the system is legit and that he earned his position into it fair and square and everyone else is a whiner.”

  “If they didn’t want to be poor, they shoulda had the sense to be born rich,” Seth said.

  “No offense,” Hubert, Etc added.

  “None taken.” She picked through a pile of laundry, producing a loose-knit eggplant colored cardigan, a pair of twisted underwear hanging off a sleeve. She slingshotted them toward the stairs. “I know my family is richer than Scrooge McDuck, but I don’t pretend we got that way by doing anything except getting lucky a long time ago and using graft, corruption, and sleaze to build that luck up to this tacky place and a dozen more like it.”

  “And what about last night?” Hubert, Etc asked, emboldened by her frankness. “What about that party and all?”

  “What about it?” she said, her tone playful and challenging.

  “What about being richer than Scrooge McDuck and staging a Communist party?”

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “It’s not like you need to—”

  “But I can. Remember, it’s not just ‘to each according to her need,’ it’s ‘from each according to her ability.’ I know how to find factories that are perfect for direct action. I know how to get into them. I know how to pwnify their machines. I know how to throw a hell of a par
ty. I have all this unearned, undeserved privilege. Apart from killing myself as an enemy of the human species, can you think of anything better for me to do with it?”

  “You could give money to—”

  She froze him with a look. “Haven’t you figured it out? Giving money away doesn’t solve anything. Asking the zottarich to redeem themselves by giving money away acknowledges that they deserve it all, should be in charge of deciding where it goes. It’s pretending that you can get rich without being a bandit. Letting them decide what gets funded declares the planet to be a giant corporation that the major shareholders get to direct. It says that government is just middle-management, hired or fired on the whim of the directors.”

  “Plus, if you believe all that, you don’t have to give all your money away,” Seth said. She didn’t seem pissed.

  “What the fuck do we need money for? So long as you keep on pretending that money is anything but a consensus hallucination induced by the ruling elite to convince you to let them hoard the best stuff, you’re never going to make a difference. Steve, the problem isn’t that people spend their money the wrong way, or that the wrong people have money. The problem is money. Money only works if there isn’t enough to go around—if you’re convinced scarce things are fairly allocated—but it’s the same circular meritocratic argument that Etcetera annihilated for my dad: markets are the fairest way to figure out who should get what, and the markets have produced the current terrible allocation, therefore the current terrible allocation is the best solution to a hard problem.”

  “Every time I hear someone saying that money is bullshit, I check to see how much money they have. No offense, Natty, but it’s a lot easier to talk about money being bullshit when you have it.” Seth sat up and rubbed vigorously at his legs. Dried mud flaked off his jeans.