Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

  She snorted. “Is that all you’ve got? ‘Champagne socialist?’ You think the fact that I was born into a lot of money—a lot of money, more money than you’ll ever see or even imagine—disqualifies me from having an opinion about it?”

  Seth wandered over to the larder and pulled out food—fresh fruit, royal jelly rehydration drink, pizza in a M.R.E. box whose tab he pulled and pitched. The silence stretched. Hubert, Etc was about to speak, then Seth said, “I’ve met a lot of cops with bullshit theories about crime and human nature. Generals clearly have batshit opinions about the gravity of ending human life. Every priest, rabbi, and imam seems to know a lot about an invisible, all-powerful being who appears be a fairy tale. So yeah, having a lot of money probably does disqualify you from knowing a single fucking thing about it.” He unboxed the pizza, avoided the rising steam. “Slice?” he said, the smell of garlic, tomato, corn niblets, and anchovies swirled like an oregano dust devil.

  Hubert, Etc hunkered down for Natalie’s eruption. Seth was a master of provocation. But it didn’t come.

  “That’s not entirely stupid. Let’s say that we’ve got different perspectives on money. Tell me, Steve, do you think you can spend and redistribute your way to a better world?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  Hubert, Etc took the pizza box and had a slice. It was good for flash-baked M.R.E. The sauce was tangy and spicy and might be addictive as crack. When he realized that there were as many pizzas as he could eat lurking in potentia in the Redwater estate, he took two more.

  “I’m suspicious of any plan to fix unfairness that starts with ‘step one, dismantle the entire system and replace it with a better one,’ especially if you can’t do anything else until step one is done. Of all the ways that people kid themselves into doing nothing, that one is the most self-serving.”

  “What about walkaways?” Hubert, Etc said. “Seems to me that they’re doing something that makes a difference. No money, no pretending money matters, and they’re doing it right now.”

  Natalie and Seth looked at him. He finished his third slice. “They’re weird and sketchy, but that goes with the territory whenever you’re talking destroying the world as we know it and putting another one in its place.”

  “He’s kidding, right?” Natalie said.

  “Damned if I know,” Seth said. “He’s strange. Etcetera, you’re kidding, right?”

  Hubert, Etc warmed to being the center of attention. “I’m totally serious. Look, I’ve heard the stories, too, I don’t know if they’re true, and if you two are serious about all this change-the-world stuff, I don’t think you can pretend that a couple million weirdos who have exactly that mission don’t exist because you’re uncomfortable with their lifestyle. It’s not like self-heating pizzas are an innate human institution we’ve enjoyed as a species for thousands of years.”

  “What are you proposing?”

  “Not proposing, exactly. But if you wanted, you could have all the info you needed to go walkaway in about ten minutes’ time, could be on the road tomorrow, living like it was the first days of a better nation—or a weirder one.”

  Natalie looked at the darkening sky for a long time. “Billiam used to joke about walkaways. There’d always be a couple who’d show up at the Communist parties the next day and tweak this and that to make it run better. Didn’t talk to us at all, wouldn’t make eye contact, but they always left stuff running better than they found it. Billiam said we were all going to end up as walkaways.”

  “He was a good friend of yours, huh?” Hubert, Etc felt stupid.

  “I’d known him off and on for three years. He wasn’t my best friend, but we’d had fun together. He was a good person, though I’d seen him be a flaming asshole.”

  Seth surprised Hubert, Etc by saying, “That’s not very nice.”

  She made an impatient noise. “Bullshit. I’ve got zero tolerance for not speaking ill of the dead. Billiam was sixty percent good guy, forty percent utter prick. That puts him in the middle of humanity’s bell curve. He hated bullshit with heat from the center of the sun. He was my friend, not yours.”

  Hubert, Etc felt tears, didn’t know why. He went into the bathroom, sat on the toilet lid with his eyes closed, then stared into the mirror screen, letting it cycle through his profiles and the back and top of his head. He looked like shit. His second thought, which came in a bolt of clarity, was that he looked like a normal human, among billions of humans, no more or less good or bad than anyone. He thought about Natalie’s talk of the bell curve and thought that he was within a sigma or two of normal on every axis.

  He splashed cold water on his face and stepped out, trailing his hands along the finger-painted wall. Natalie and Seth looked at him with guilt or concern.

  “You okay, buddy?” Seth said.

  “Natalie,” he said, “I don’t think that the average person is sixty percent good and forty percent prick. I think that the average person sometimes kids himself that he’s the center of the universe, and it’s okay if he does something that he’d be pissed about if someone else did it to him, and tries not to think about it too hard.”

  “Uh, okay—” Natalie said.

  “And I think that the tragedy of human existence is our world is run by people who are really good at kidding themselves, like your father. Your dad manages to kid himself that he’s rich and powerful because he’s the cream and has risen to the top. But he’s not stupid. He knows he’s kidding himself. So underneath that top layer of bullshit is another, more aware belief system: the belief that everyone else would kid themselves the same way he does, if they had the chance.”

  “That’s exactly right,” she said.

  “His beliefs don’t start with the idea that it’s okay to kid yourself you’re a special snowflake who deserves more cookies than all the other kids. It starts with the idea that it’s human nature to kid yourself and take the last cookie, so if he doesn’t, someone else will, so he had better be the most lavishly self-deluded of all, the most prolific taker of cookies, lest someone more horrible, immoral, and greedy than he gets there first and eats all the cookies, takes the plate, and charges rent to drink the milk.”

  Seth said: “Insert tragedy of the commons here.”

  Natalie put her hands up. “You know, I’ve heard the term ‘tragedy of the commons’ like a thousand times and I’ve never actually looked it up. What is it? Something to do with poor people being tragic?”

  “That’s commoners,” Hubert, Etc said. Something was awake and loose inside him now. He wanted to kick the pizza off the coffee table and use it for a stage. “Commons. Common land that belongs to no one. Villages had commons where anyone could bring their livestock for a day’s grazing. The tragedy part is that if the land isn’t anyone’s, then someone will come along and let their sheep eat until there’s nothing but mud. Everyone knows that that bastard is on the way, so they might as well be that bastard. Better that sheep belonging to a nice guy like you should fill their bellies than the grass going to some selfish dickhead’s sheep.”

  “Sounds like bullshit to me.”

  “Oh, it is,” Hubert, Etc said. The thing was moving in his guts, setting his balls and face tingling. “It’s more than mere bullshit. It’s searing, evil, world-changing bullshit. The solution to the tragedy of the commons isn’t to get a cop to make sure sociopaths aren’t overgrazing the land, or shunning anyone who does it, turning him into a pariah. The solution is to let a robber-baron own the land that used to be everyone’s, because once he’s running it for profit, he’ll take exquisite care to generate profit forever.”

  “That’s the tragedy of the commons? A fairy tale about giving public assets to rich people to run as personal empires because that way they’ll make sure they’re better managed than they would be if we just made up some rules? God, my dad must love that story.”

  “It’s the origin story of people like your dad,” Hubert, Etc said. “It’s obvious bullshit for anyone whose sweet deal doesn’t dep
end on it not being obvious.”

  “Hear that, Dad?” she said, looking around the room. “Obvious to anyone whose sweet deal doesn’t depend on it not being obvious, you deluded sociopathic fuck.”

  “He’s got you bugged?” Seth said.

  “I’ve got an individual privacy filter on the house network. But of course the cameras are rolling, because if I get kidnapped or murdered, he’d review them. Of course that’s bullshit and he’s always been able to spoof the locks. He learned it from me, when he went through some audit logs and saw I was doing it. Now he’s locked me out but I’m goddamned certain there are times he’s gone through my footage.” She looked into the air in front of her face. “Yes, Dad, I know you’re listening. It’s pathetic.”

  Hubert, Etc remembered looking at his reflection in the bathroom and wondered if there was long-term archiving of its feed. He knew plenty of people with bugged homes, but you couldn’t live as though you were being observed. When your infographics said you were fully patched, you had to trust them. That’s what made the panics about huge zero-day security ruptures such a fright: the sudden knowledge that everything might have been auto-pwned by a random crim or asshole who used a skin-detection algorithm to catch you masturbating, keywords to flag your embarrassing conversations, harvesting your biometrics for playback attacks on your finances and social nets.

  Living with the knowledge that there were creeps inside your perimeter was creepy. Of all the weird things about being zottarich, this was the weirdest. So far.

  “Sorry,” Hubert, Etc said. “Just getting my head around this. How often does he spy on you?”

  “Who knows? I go somewhere else any time I want to have a real conversation, usually.” She looked around the huge, airy, filthy room. “I don’t come back here much.”

  Hubert, Etc had assumed that the place was a dump because Natalie was a rich slob who didn’t know how good she had it, but he understood that it was a calculated gesture of contempt. This wasn’t her home, it was a perch. Hubert, Etc didn’t always have the best relationship with his parents, but this was a different level.

  “What about your mom?” he said. “Does she know he spies on you?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Mom doesn’t come by often, either—she’s in GMT minus eight or minus nine.” She cocked her head. “Oh, you mean is this a sex thing? No, I’m sure it isn’t. My dad gets his flesh through specialists. He’s never been that kind of perv.” She addressed the air. “See, Dad? I stuck up for you. Whatever you are, you’re not kinked for your own daughters. Bravo.”

  The hair on the back of his neck rose. The thing that had come alive in him had done a slow roll in his guts.

  She looked at them. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Don’t worry, get used to it. It’s no different from being out in reality, sensed and recorded all the time. What’s the worst that can happen? Dad’s not going to have you rubbed out or send mercs on your trail after we drop out.”

  “After we drop out?”

  “Isn’t that what we were talking about? Going walkaway? That’s where this thing was headed—some kind of prince-and-pauper thing: ‘I’ll wager I can put on vagabond’s rags and go unnoticed among the lower classes, what-ho?’”

  “Don’t make me join the walkaways, Etcetera,” Seth said.

  The thing inside Hubert, Etc’s guts roiled. “Was that where I was headed?”

  Natalie caught his eye. Her face shone. She was beautiful. She had zits, a sprinkle of freckles, the sclerae of her eyes were pink and her lids were red-rimmed. She was brimming with life, sorrow, and whatever he’d felt when he realized that the whispered conversations about money and jobs that all the grown-ups had all the time were the outward reflection of deep, unending terror. A fear that gnawed at every grown person. A primordial terror of the tiger outside the cave.

  “Sure as shit sounded like it to me,” she said.

  “Seth,” he said. “What is it that keeps you from going walkaway, exactly?”

  To his surprise, Seth looked genuinely distressed. “You’re joking. Those people are bananas. They’re homeless people, Hubert—” Hubert, Etc noted that Seth had called him ‘Hubert,’ always a sign that they’d tapped into a rich seam of Seth’s psyche. “They’re bums. They eat garbage—”

  “Not exactly garbage,” Hubert, Etc said. “No more than the beer we were drinking last night was piss. Give me a good reason. Loyalty to your employer? Prospects of a rich and fulfilled life?” Like Hubert, Etc, the longest Seth had been employed was six months, and the first month had been classed as “training”—not paid. Neither of them had had anything like real work in months.

  “How about fear of prison?”

  “How about it? You dragged me to an illegal party last night. That’s more likely to get us busted than anything we’d do out in the abandoned territories—”

  “The territories? Be serious, you’d be dead inside of a month.”

  “It’s not the surface of the moon. It’s places where no one wants to bother arresting the population for vagrancy.”

  “Yeah, they don’t arrest ’em, they incinerate ’em for being squatter-terrorists,” Seth said. “And then there’s the friendly fire. It’s a fucking gladiator pit for excess humans.”

  “He’s got a point,” Natalie said. “We’d have to arm up if we went. Dad’s panic room’s full of toys, though—stuff designed to slip millimeter wave. If we brought enough matériel, we’d be the kings of the badlands. Could be fun.”

  Hubert, Etc boggled. “Haven’t you two ever seen a walkaway? They’re practically Zen monks. They’re not out mowing down their rivals with resin AK-3DPs. You’ve seen too many movies.”

  “I’ve seen walkaways, the people who’d visit the liberations, but who knows what they’re like in their native habitat? There’s no sense in being naïve. You’ve got to be insane if you think we’re going to stroll into Mordor with packs full of delicious M.R.E.s and be welcomed as spiritual brothers.”

  Hubert, Etc was now as upset as Seth. “Have you two ever killed someone? Are you prepared to do so? Would you point a gun at another human being and gun him down?”

  Natalie shrugged. “If it was me or him, fuck yeah.” Seth nodded.

  “You’re both full of shit.”

  He and Seth glared. Natalie was more amused than ever.

  The standoff might have continued if Hubert, Etc hadn’t looked up the FAQ. They had a brief argument about which anonymizer to trust—if you were Natalie’s age, all of the proxies that Hubert and Seth used were considered false-flag ops for harvesting intel on dissidents. Natalie, meanwhile, liked an anonymizer that Seth and Hubert, Etc had heard was junk-science wishful-thinking voodoo. It turned out the two systems could be daisy chained, and so they all grudgingly set them up and started searching.

  There were as many walkaway FAQs as walkaways. The impulse to walk away was bound up with the urge to write Thoreauvian memoirs about societal malaise and the tradecraft of going off-grid in the age of total information awareness. They included appendices summing things up for the tldr crowd, with videos, darknet links, shapefiles, and wetjet formulas for making your own crucial frontier enzymes and GMOs. Some of this was radioactively hot, the kind of thing that’d get you watchlisted so hard you’d have to fight through the clouds of drones to go out for milk, but there was nothing in it about weapons.

  Hubert, Etc pointed this out to Natalie and Seth, trying not to be smug. Seth said, “Of course no one talks about peacemakers where spooks could see it. It’ll all be deep darknet.”

  “You’re saying the fact that we can’t find anything about weapons is proof that there must be weapons because if there were weapons no one would talk about weapons?” Hubert, Etc had experience winning arguments with Seth. He noted with pleasure that Natalie agreed and basked in a moment of admiration.

  Seth gave him a belligerent look, couldn’t keep it up. “Fine. No weapons.”

  It dawned on Hubert, Etc that this wasn’t a thoug
ht experiment—somewhere on the way, reading FAQs and watching videos, they’d shaded from playing let’s-pretend to planning. He had screens of notes and a huge wad of cached stuff.

  “Are we going to actually do this? Actually for real?”

  Natalie looked around the room pointedly. Hubert, Etc thought of the parties and the fooling around that must have taken place here, weird zottarich kids who’d played whatever decadent games they favored over the years. He thought of the cameras, spooling up their planning session from different angles, dropping it into long-term archiving.

  “Fuck yeah,” she whispered. “Let’s do it.”

  2

  you all meet in a tavern

  [i]

  Sundays at the Belt and Braces were the busiest, and there was always competition for the best jobs. The first person through the door hit the lights and checked the infographics. These were easy enough to read that anyone could make sense of them, even noobs. But Limpopo was no noob. She had more commits into the Belt and Braces’ firmware than anyone, an order of magnitude lead over the rest. It was technically in poor taste for her to count her commits, let alone keep a tally. In a gift economy, you gave without keeping score, because keeping score implied an expectation of reward. If you’re doing something for reward, it’s an investment, not a gift.

  In theory, Limpopo agreed. In practice, it was so easy to keep score, the leaderboard was so satisfying that she couldn’t help herself. She wasn’t proud of this. Mostly. But this Sunday, first through the door of the Belt and Braces, alone in the big common room with its aligned rows of tables and chairs, all the infographics showing nominal, she felt proud. She patted the wall with a perverse, unacceptable proprietary air. She helped build the Belt and Braces, scavenging badlands for the parts its drone outriders had identified for its construction. It was the project she’d found her walkaway with, the thing uppermost in her mind when she’d looked around the badlands, set down her pack, emptied her pockets of anything worth stealing, put extra underwear in a bag, and walked out onto the Niagara escarpment, past the invisible line that separated civilization from no-man’s-land, out of the world as it was and into the world as it could be.