Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

  The last thing she thought of was Gretyl’s race of permanent overlords, and how much her dad would love that idea.

  * * *

  After a week, everyone stopped walking stooped over, ready for the ceiling to cave in when the drones finished their work. The default commentariat figured out walkaway labs were being terminated with prejudice, and photos of fried corpses that made the rounds on the walkaway net leaked into default. The consensus was that a second strike against the underground campus—whose secrecy was never great and had slipped within days of the attack—was unlikely. Still, they devised evacuation drills.

  It wasn’t medical supplies that filled the tunnels—it was computers. Abstractly, Iceweasel knew computers had mass. All the ones she’d consciously interacted with had been so small as to be invisible—a speck of electronics stuck to something big enough to handle with stupid human hands. Somewhere were air-conditioned, armored data centers full of computers, but they only appeared as plot elements in shitty gwot dramas. She assumed that these geometrically precise wind-tunnel buildings with bombproof bollards and monster chillers had the relationship to reality that Hollywood bank vaults had to real vaults.

  Whether “real” data centers were neat, ranked terraces of aerodynamic hardware, that’s not how walkaways did them. The word went out across the region for compute-power. People came with whatever horsepower they had. They logged it with the master load-balancer, which all the top comp-sci types fiddled with. “Load-balancer” became a conjurer’s phrase, curse and invocation. Something was always wrong, but it did miracles, because the collection of motley devices, sprinkled around the tunnels, linked by tangles of fiber in pink rubber sheaths, delivered compute cycles that made Dis leap into consciousness.

  Iceweasel’s workspace was near a tunnel exit where the heat wasn’t bad and she could watch the warring researcher clades. The comp-sci people always wanted to reboot Dis every time they found a new way of eking out another point of efficiency on the load-balancer; the cog sci people hated this because Dis was making breakthroughs in upload and simulation. Being liberated from the vagaries of the flesh and being able to adjust her mind’s parameters so she stayed in an optimal working state turned Dis into a powerhouse researcher.

  It also made her miserable.

  “I’m groundhog daying again, aren’t I?”

  “Honestly? Yes. We had this conversation, word for word, last week.”

  The cursor blinked. Iceweasel was convinced this was for dramatic effect. Dis could scan the logs of all their conversations in an eye blink, but when something emotionally freighted happened, there was a blinking delay. Iceweasel thought it was Dis’s lack of a body’s expressive range. She found herself interpreting the blinks—this one is a raised eyebrow, that one was a genuine shock, the third was a sarcastic oh-noes face. There were pictures of Dis’s human face in all these expressions and more—stern and lined, with dancing blue eyes; thick, mobile eyebrows and a hatchet-blade nose—but when Iceweasel thought of Dis’s face, she thought of that cursor, blink, blink, blink.

  “So we did. Depressingly enough, I figured that it was a groundhog day moment at this point. I must bore you.”

  “Not usually. I sometimes try out weird conversational gambits at these moments, to see how different your responses are. This is one of them, incidentally.”

  Computer laughter was weird. Iceweasel felt a child’s pride in coming up with a joke that made her parents crack a smile. Dis’s laughter echoed through her earphones. “What’s your hypothesis? If I say the same thing no matter how you react, am I more or less of a person than if I vary my responses based on input? Conceptually, it doesn’t seem like either one would be harder to simulate—both are chatbot 101. We both know plenty of read-only people who always say the same thing no matter what we say.”

  “I think you’re optimizing yourself to be tunnel-vision fixated on the cog sci sim work and you’re incapable of getting off the subject.”

  “I see that we’ve done variations on this before.”

  “Yeah.” Iceweasel didn’t add, and then you melt down.

  When Dis told her about groundhog daying, named after the old movie, she’d underestimated the way the experience would play out for her, going through the same conversations over again, trying different gambits but ending up in the same place, with an incoherent, crashing sim.

  “The literature on this is drawn from brain injuries, temporal lobe insults that nuke short-term memory. The videos are weird: every couple minutes, some old lady has the same conversation with her nurse or daughter: ‘Why am I in this hospital?’ ‘I’ve had a stroke? Was it bad?’ ‘How long have I been here?’ ‘What does the doctor say?’ ‘What do you mean, my memory?’ ‘You mean I’ve had this conversation with you before?’ ‘Every ninety seconds? That’s terrible!’ and then back to ‘Why am I in this hospital?’ Around we go.”

  “Well, your loop lasts more like a day, and isn’t that banal.”

  “You say the nicest things.”

  “It’s interesting to see the differences between reboots. I can’t get over how cool you are with the idea of being annihilated between reboots. You can access the logs, but you wake up knowing that you’ve had a day wiped off the books, and it never slows you down. I get that you’re able to control that, but…”

  “You really don’t understand. No offense. Back up to that read-only person who always answers the same: the reason that person is so frustrating is we know that people can change based on what they know. You’re not the same person you were when you got here ten days ago. If I asked you-minus-ten and you-now the same question, you wouldn’t be surprised if you gave a different answer. If I asked a battery of questions, you’d be surprised if you didn’t give different answers. The you that is you is actually the space of things that you might think in response to some stimulus.”

  “The envelope.”

  “You know this, but you don’t. When I come up clean, I’m only allowed to come up within the section of the envelope that doesn’t freak, which we can find, thanks to the lookahead. Imagine how life will be when everyone gets scanned regularly, when we build bodies that we can decant sims into to bring them to life. There’d be social pressure to not sweat the idea that it’s not ‘you’ in the sim, and anyone who suffers meat-death and comes back as a sim will only be brought up in the corner of the envelope that doesn’t freak and suicide. Give it a generation and there won’t be anyone alive cognitively capable of an existential crisis. I’m a fucking pioneer. Partly that’s because I’ve had years to get used to the idea that everything that makes you recognizable happened in the interactions of physical matter in your body, following physical rules from the universe.”

  “I have a friend back at the B&B, a real hard-line walkaway. She’s always talking about how she’s not a special snowflake. I bet she’d love that: ‘you’re just meat following rules.’”

  “Well, if you’re not meat following rules, what are you? A ghost? Of course you’re meat. The way you feel is determined by your gut, the hairs on your toes, your environment. I don’t have those things, so I am feeling differently from when I was meat. But when I was meat and forty, I felt differently from when I was meat and four. I have continuity with meat-me, what it remembered, that’s enough.”

  Iceweasel’s eyes flicked to the timer. Dis’s cameras were acute enough to spot it. “I’m overdue for my four o’clock meltdown.” She’d had thirty hours of uptime and Iceweasel slept in fits, doing an hour or two of chatter with Dis for every three hours Dis spent with the researchers.

  “You’re making progress. The work must be coming along.”

  “You’re selling yourself short. The only person making progress around here is you, chickie. You play me like an organ. I watch your eyes when we’re talking, see you keeping track of my equilibrium, steering the conversation to keep me between the lines. I don’t know if you know you’re doing it. You’ve become the world’s greatest bot-whisperer. It was
inevitable. Any time you give someone feedback and tell them to control it, their brains will find patterns in the system and optimize them. You’ve done it as sure as if I’d put you in a sim and written an app for your subconscious.”

  Iceweasel felt her neck prickle. Dis was scary-smart, literally inhuman. Every now and again, Iceweasel had the impression she was being manipulated by the sim. “I thought you were going to say that it was my people skills.”

  “Okay,” Dis said. “Raised by zottas, so you got a dose of the psychopath’s ability to make people want to like you even as you’re screwing them.” Back at the B&B, Iceweasel became expert at deflating criticism based on her rich parents. Dis treated it with the matter-of-fact brusqueness with which she conquered every subject. Nothing Iceweasel said made a dent in Dis’s rhetoric. “You hate it when I talk about your money,” Dis said. The sim had lots of cameras, and cycles to evaluate their data.

  “No, I love being judged by my parents. Zottas are the only people it’s okay to be a racist about.”

  “It’s not racism when you’re discriminated against for your choices.”

  “I chose to walkaway.”

  “But you identify enough to get shitty when I pass comment on their social tendencies.”

  Iceweasel looked at the clock again. Dis busted her.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll melt down soon. I’m feeling it. There’s something not right. I feel it from the moment I come up, like hamsters running on a wheel in here, chased by something they can’t see but know is in there. It’s hard to name, but the longer I’m up, the closer it comes—”

  “It’s the no-body thing.” Iceweasel felt a shameful spurt of joy at being able to turn the screw on the sim.

  “Fuck. I’m groundhog daying again.”

  “You always talk about how you can never have a body, and even if you get a body, it won’t be your body, and you won’t have continuity with it.”

  The cursor blinked like an accusation.

  “I can see that. It’s the fucking lookahead. It can’t explore far enough into the envelope’s future to tell which possible me won’t have an existential breakdown.”

  The cursor blinked.

  “Oh God, it’s such a terrible feeling.”

  The infographics were crazy, redlining and jigjagging in pure glitch-aesthetic. Iceweasel had been here, but it didn’t get easier. The slide from lucidity into terror was quick, and the worst part was that the cog sci types insisted that it run its course, all simulation data being captured for analysis. They couldn’t switch her off or roll her back to an earlier state. They had to let her disintegrate.

  “It’s such a terrible feeling. Everything I’ve just said, it’s bullshit. There’s no continuity. I’m not me. I’m just me enough to know that I’m not me. Without a body, without embodiment, I’m a Chinese room. You pass words into me, and a program decides what words I’d pass back and generates them. The Chinese room has just enough accuracy to know how terrifying the real me, the me that can never come back, would find that. Oh, Iceweasel—”

  The cursor flashed. The infographics went nonlinear. Iceweasel swallowed a lump.

  “It’s okay, Dis. You’ve been here before.”

  The infographics jittered. Iceweasel wondered if she’d gone nonverbal. That happened, though not usually this quickly.

  The computer made a noise Iceweasel had never heard. Weird. Unearthly. A scream.

  Iceweasel’s nerve shattered. She fled.

  [v]

  The klaxon roused her, and she was on her feet before full consciousness, shedding her sleep sack and kicking her feet into tough clogs. She blinked. There was no proper diurnal rhythm underground. If enough people wanted a sleep cycle, they’d find a side corridor, roll out mats, turn out the lights, and close the door. But most of them had converged a common day/night anyway, and there were other people around her in blinking incomprehension.

  Gretyl was the first to move, prodding the wall to find out what was going on.

  “Bad guys,” she said. “Two. Armed like mercenaries. Came in through the rock-door.”

  “What’s happened to them?”

  “Less-lethaled,” Gretyl said. There were plenty of people in Walkaway U who could rig booby traps, but by consensus nothing intended to kill outright had been installed. “One’s passed out, the other’s on her knees, shitting herself. Okay, they’ve got her. Let’s go.”

  “Me?”

  “Why not?” Gretyl said, and took her hand, twining fingers. Iceweasel still couldn’t figure Gretyl—sometimes, she had a sisterly air, sometimes motherly. Sometimes flirty. Sometimes all three.

  Iceweasel had never met armed walkaways before. As she’d learned from Limpopo, walking away was all the weapon anyone really needed. But the university crew weren’t prepared to abandon their work—it was too urgent and fragile, though they’d been in touch with other walkaways about cloudifying it for resilience, but it was slow going. The walkaway net had high-speed zones, and this had been one of them, but the major hard-line links had been destroyed in the blaze and they’d dropped back to stupid meshing wireless and there was only so much electromagnetic spectrum in the universe.

  The university crew knew how to make weapons. She remembered her dumb ideas about walkaway territory being full of AK-3DPs and improvised flamethrower tanks. When you’ve got a building full of physicists and synthetic chemists who’ve lost their loved ones in a cowardly missile strike, you don’t need crude shit like that. They could turn your bowels into water at two hundred meters, tasp your nerve endings into pain-overload, sound-pulse your eardrums, knock you out or kill you with methods they discussed with the same enthusiasm that they used with all technical subjects. The ad hoc defense group were tons of chuckles. Iceweasel made it through one meeting and never went back. She didn’t like being reminded that her body was so easily disrupted.

  The defense ad hoc were on the scene when they got there. They’d shrink-wrapped the bad guys. The unconscious one was in the recovery position. Both were naked, clothes strewn untidily around the room. The smell of shit was incredible.

  “What do we do with them now?” Gretyl said. She wore her jolly-fat-lady expression, but Iceweasel knew her well enough to see that it was a mask covering something deadly and anxious.

  Sita—who was on the defense ad hoc—shook her head. “We do what we have to.”

  Iceweasel felt cold. Were they going to execute these two? Were walkaways allowed to do that? There was no rulebook, but ever since she’d walked away, she’d had the sense from the more “senior”—that wasn’t the word—walkaways that there was a consensus about what was within bounds. No one had said that summary execution was Not Done, but she’d assumed that this was the case.

  Part of her was already constructing a rationale. The incursion was an act of war. The firebombing was an act of war. It took innocent lives. These two had been sent to finish the missiles’ work. The other side killed freely. Why should they be squeamish? Where would they keep prisoners, and how, and …

  She shook her head. It was easy to slip into that thinking. In reality she was pissed that these two were here, enraged at the death of the walkaways torched by their paymasters, lost friends of her new crew, lost personhood of Dis. These two had taken money to kill them. Kill her. She wanted revenge, even though it would do no good. The zottas who’d sent them knew where they were, otherwise these two wouldn’t have been sent. More would come. Force couldn’t win.

  “Come on,” Gretyl said. “Let’s get them into the infirmary.”

  The infirmary—originally the place the wounded had been brought when they’d abandoned the campus, now the nexus of the crew’s medical systems—was in a corner of the big room. It had two permanent residents, comatose since the attack. Iceweasel had walked past them hundreds of times and stopped noticing them, but as they wrestled the shrink-wrapped mercs into cots beside them, she was forced to confront them. Burned, bandaged, supine. Tubes going in and out. The crew had
a dozen MDs, though they were all research-oriented, and they’d traded shifts tracking the comatose.

  The shrink-wrapped and the burned, side by side. A solemn circle drew around them. The shit-covered one, the woman, was conscious, her eyes wide, taking it in. Though her mouth was unwrapped, she hadn’t spoken. She breathed in shallow sips. The other one may have been conscious—Iceweasel’s suspicious mind automatically ascribed suspicion to his motionlessness—but he was close-eyed and still.

  Not having a leader made this sort of thing difficult. It was the inverse bystander effect, the first aid puzzle where the more people there when someone collapsed, the less likely that anyone offered assistance. Surely someone else is more qualified. I should just stand ready to help when the best-qualified person steps forward?

  In first aid, they taught you it was more important that someone did something than it was that the perfect person do the best thing. Iceweasel waited for Gretyl or Sita to speak. No one did.

  There were butterflies in her stomach. “We release them, right?”

  She looked at her crew’s faces. None seemed to be saying, “Who the fuck are you?”—her greatest fear. Gretyl looked grim. But thoughtful.

  “They can’t hurt us at this point. They know about our defenses, but if they never return, the next batch will assume our defenses. Everyone knows we can’t last here anyway.” It was like a flowchart in her head—argument a, counterargument b. No one raised the counterarguments.

  “Revenge won’t do any good. These are employees. Someone default is paying them. Hurting them won’t hurt that zotta. The only thing that will hurt that zotta is telling people how to do their own uploads, making it walkaway.”

  Silence.

  The conscious merc coughed.

  “You people are fucking unbelievable,” she said. “Seriously? Just do it.” Her voice was shaky, brave.

  “Do what?” Iceweasel said.

  “What you’re inevitably going to talk yourselves into doing. Kill us.” The two words were delivered in the same tone as the sentence before, but thickly. The merc wasn’t as brave as she seemed. No one wanted to die.