Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

  She had parents. People who loved her. Every human was a hyper-dense node of intense emotional and material investment. Speaking meant someone had spent thousands of hours cooing to you. Those lean muscles, the ringing tone of command—their inputs were from all over the world, carefully administered. The merc was more than a person: like a spaceship launch, her existence implied thousands of skilled people, generations of experts, wars, treaties, scholarship, and supply-chain management. Every one of them was all that.

  She felt vertigo. What business had the walkaways thinking they’d just wing it when it came to civilization? The zottas weren’t anyone’s friend, but they had an interest in the continuation of the civilization whose apex they occupied. These scientists, weirdos, and jobless slackers weren’t qualified to run a planet. They were proud of their lack of qualifications. It was plausible when they were harvesting feedstock and putting up buildings and cooking for each other. Now they were putting a stranger’s body into a machine that was supposed to record her mind, and they were going to bring her body to the brink of death. They did it without law, without authority, without regulation or permit. They were winging it.

  The room tilted. She stepped back. Gretyl caught her. She’d subliminally known Gretyl was there, smelled her familiar smell, sensed her bulk. Gretyl’s big arms went around her waist and she surrendered, leaning back into her bosom. Gretyl’s face was at the place where her throat became her shoulder, breath passing through the pores of the long-wearing refu-suit she’d put on when she left on her rescue mission. She rinsed it out when she remembered, but it hardly needed it. The breath warmed her.

  “You don’t need to watch this.”

  Yes I do, she thought. Now CC prepared to deadhead the mercs, holding up the vial he would administer to the lab cameras, fitting it to the IV feed, squeezing the valve to start the flow. All actions he’d performed moments before on comatose members of their crew, but different. This was a Rubicon they crossed for all walkaway. When this became public knowledge, the world would change for everyone they knew. She was there, and she did nothing to stop it. Would anyone?

  Tam watched raptly. Her expression reminded Iceweasel of the intense concentration of trying to attain an elusive orgasm. It was sexual, a mixture of recklessness and transcendence. Transcendence, that was it. Other adventurers had dabbled, fretted about venturing into the jealous realm of the gods, but walkaways fearlessly burst from mortal into mythical.

  Tam watched. Iceweasel watched, Gretyl’s breath hot on her collarbone, hair tickling her cheek. Iceweasel had conversed with a dead person who had returned from the grave and need not ever die again, who might copy herself millions of times, be able to think faster and broader than any human. She shivered. Gretyl squeezed tighter.

  “I need to go.” She hadn’t planned to say it aloud, but did.

  “Let’s go, then.” Gretyl’s hand was small and damp. The air crackled.

  They kissed as soon as they were beyond the crowd. The kiss had built for a long time. Iceweasel had kissed many people. Some she’d loved, some she’d been indifferent to, some she’d actively disliked and had kissed them and more out of boredom, confusion, or self-destruction. She kissed Seth so many times she forgot how to feel his mouth as separate from her own, so that it became no more erotic than smacking her lips. She’d kissed Etcetera properly good-bye, with the crackle of a really good kiss more charged because she did it in sight of Limpopo, stared at her while she did it, and when she was done, Limpopo kissed her just as fiercely, but with ironic detachment: this is how adults do it.

  Kissing Gretyl was something else. Partly it was that she was older than anyone Iceweasel had kissed. She was also different in her presence, her bulk and mass, the frank brilliance of her mind and her studied indifference to her body’s relationship to other bodies. How many times had Gretyl boldly watched Iceweasel undress, catching her eye, not looking away? How many times had Gretyl undressed before Iceweasel with equal boldness, arranging her huge breasts like she was moving around the pillows before settling into bed?

  Their bodies pressed, Gretyl’s yielding, and Iceweasel couldn’t get her arms all the way around her. She clutched at Gretyl, and Gretyl’s strong, soft arms pulled her. Her thigh pressed between Gretyl’s legs at the hot softness like fresh bread. Gretyl’s hand twined in her hair, turned her face with irresistible strength. Her mouth worked at Gretyl’s, tongue dancing on her lips, her teeth, and Iceweasel let herself moan and surrender.

  Gretyl’s other hand kneaded her ass and brought her closer still. Iceweasel felt so small, as if she was a plaything to be pushed and prodded into the places where Gretyl wanted her, and she welcomed it. In love, there is always one who kisses and one who offers the cheek.

  It was a thing that Billiam liked to say. Billiam and she had hooked up now and again, all that crew had, in an aggressively detached way that they weren’t supposed to take seriously, and all of them ended up being in perpetual heartbreak over. Billiam thought she was cold, a product of her foofiness, and knew the accusation drove her crazy with self-loathing. He’d never say it when she turned him down, oh no. Not a way to manipulate her into fucking him. No, he said it when she did fuck him, especially when she was attentive. “In love, there is always one who kisses and one who offers the cheek,” in his ha-ha-only-serious tone as she let her tongue trail lazily around his nipple, the residue of his cum burning on her lips. She knew he meant she was the one who offered the cheek, that whatever her ministrations, it was about her, not him.

  Billiam’s memory rose in her mind and wouldn’t go. The last time she’d seen him, in the blaring chaos of the Muji factory, head caved in and blood around him, Etcetera’s panic as he went through the motions of pointless first aid. Billiam, his little aphorisms and his ways of getting inside her head, but who cried after they fucked, who had done the craziest, bravest things of them all. He snuck over the border at a Quebec Mohawk reservation to meet upstate New York bio-cookers for starter cultures for their beer. He always made sure they had a getaway plan, counted heads whenever they ran out ahead of the law, once going back to help a kid with a twisted ankle. They barely knew the kid, it was her first action, and she’d been a pain, helpless on the sidelines watching other people do the work, then complaining no one told her what to do.

  They’d all hated her, but Billiam went back and carried her even though she had fifteen centimeters and ten kilos on him. They were nearly caught, and she’d never thanked him or come back again. That was Billiam.

  She’d left him bleeding on the floor. He’d died. Her dad told her that later. He knew about their relationship. He had dossiers on her friends, social graphs describing their relationships. He’d hinted that he knew which were rats, selling information to cops and corporates, which she’d assumed was head-fuckery, but was plausible enough that it was impossible to fully trust anyone in the group.

  She’d left Billiam to die. If he’d lived just a few more years, he’d have gone walkaway. He could have been with her. He could have his head in the scanner. He could be immortal, as she would be, soon.

  Salt tears and snot ran into her mouth. Gretyl gently put her hands on Iceweasel’s cheeks and stared into her eyes with her big, liquid brown eyes, like depths of melting chocolate.

  “We could be dead in an hour. Or any minute. And that”—she jerked her head toward where the mercs were being deadheaded—“that’s something else. Then there’s this,” she said, and kissed her so softly it felt like she’d passed a paintbrush over her lips. “Death, sex, immortality, and immorality. Crying is okay.”

  “There was a friend of mine,” Iceweasel said. “Dead.” She drew a shuddering breath, couldn’t let it out. It was trapped in her chest with her words.

  “We’re all thinking about our dead. We left dead behind in the fire. That crowd in there has the fever. That Tam didn’t have a chance. No way they were going to slow down, certainly not because they might be remembered as monsters by default. When they thin
k about how the future will remember them, they’re imagining being there in person to defend their honor.”

  “It’s crazy,” Iceweasel said. “I can’t even think about it.”

  “We’ve had longer to get used to it. We walked out of default because we were working on this and were terrified and excited by how the zottas treated it like the holy grail. It’s impossible to escape your environment. You can be a spocky lab-coat, but you can’t help but feel like whatever’s got zottas scared and excited is scary and exciting. Whatever they want has to be important.”

  “You know that they’re just psychos, right? Not geniuses. They’ve got no special talent for making the world perfect, or figuring out the future. They’re just good at game-rigging. Con artists.” She thought about her dad, school friends, their pretense to noblesse oblige and refinement. How they’d herd-mentality into some fad but pretend it was a newly discovered, ageless universal truth—not product cooked up by one of their own to sell to the rest. That was the amazing thing: they were in the business of making people feel envy and desperation over material things and exclusive experiences, but were just as susceptible to envy and desperation.

  “The reason they’re so good at making us desperate and selling us shit isn’t that they’re too smart to get conned. It’s because they’re extra-susceptible. They understand how to make us turn on one another in envy and terror because they’re drowning in envy and terror of each other. My dad knows the guy in the next yacht is a bastard who’d slit his throat and steal his empire because my dad is a bastard who’d slit that guy’s throat and steal his empire. This immortality shit? That’s not about all of them living forever, it’s about just one or two living forever, being deathless emperor of time.”

  “You know more about them than I ever will, Icy, but we don’t want to hoard immortality, we want to share it. To viralize it. People who know they can’t die will be better people than people who worry about the end. How could you blind yourself with short-term thinking if you’re planning life everlasting?”

  All the billions who’d died. Every one the apex of a pyramid of resources, love, thoughts no one else ever thought before and would never think again. If you have it in your power to end slow-motion genocide, what kind of monster would you be not to do it? What price was too high? She knew that this was dangerous thinking, the kind people died and killed for. Tam wanted her to stop things because Tam couldn’t make herself stop things.

  It was too late. Iceweasel couldn’t help herself, either.

  * * *

  When it was all said and done, there wasn’t much they wanted to take with. They broke down Dis’s cluster with her supervision; she ran a commentary on her subjective experience of the slow shutdown, retransmitted in realtime to other campuses, researchers, hobbyists, dying people, spies, and gossips. It was part of a dump of everything, all the notes and source code, optimizations and logs. It was time to uncloak. They would hit the road with a lot of fanfare.

  Iceweasel filled the trike’s cargo pods with the essentials, the brain-imaging rigs and the redundant storage modules. They were on the fringes of walkaway network, and the scans they’d made were too bulky to fully mirror. Instead, they were divided up in a redundant swarm among the WU crew, everyone seeding their parts out to denser parts of walkaway as quickly as physics allowed, but for at least a day, a single well-placed strike would wipe out the only five people who had been scanned by CC with the certainty that they could be brought back to life someday.

  The most difficult things to carry were the people themselves. Not just the four deadheads, but all the people. They marched in a long column through the woods towards the B&B. Iceweasel was sure she wasn’t the only one thinking about the efficiency of upload, the sweet nothing of deadheading. If they were deadheading, they wouldn’t have to play out the idiot conversion of sunlight to flora, flora to fauna, fauna to energy, energy to muscular action. They could just lie down, get stacked like cordwood on the back of the trike—they’d ended up wrapping the four deadheaders in cocoons of bubblewrap; they stuck flexible duct-tubing into the mass as it puffed up, creating fresh-air tunnels to their faces.

  Better than stacking like cordwood: if they uploaded, they could fit into someone’s pocket. That person could ride a bicycle or a horse or just jog, and they’d go along with her. Someday, they would transition to beings of insubstantial information, everywhere and nowhere. Someday, they’d stop for a scan before they went out for a swim, just in case they drowned.

  “Colds,” Sita said. “If we do bodies, people will use upload to shake off colds.”

  “How?” Iceweasel asked from atop her trike, its gentle humming rumble numbing the insides of her thighs.

  “Simple,” Sita said. “Take a scan, get a new body out of storage, decant the data into it.”

  Iceweasel snorted. “Then what? Push your old body into a wood chipper?”

  “It’s feedstock,” Sita said. “Put it to sleep and don’t wake it. If you’re sentimental, have it mounted. Or make a coat, or cook it for dinner.”

  “You realize there’s a whole default that thinks that’s what this is about,” Iceweasel said. She’d grown certain there were spies in their midst. She spoke carefully, with the sense she was being recorded and any failure to speak out when jokes like this arose would be held against her. Tam’s talk of war crimes trials roiled in her hindbrain.

  “You realize they’re exactly right,” Sita said. She smiled, stopped. “You know, when the first walkaway prostheses projects started, most of the people contributing had lost an arm or a leg in Belarus or Oman, and were tired of paying a loan shark for something that hurt and barely worked and could be remotely repossessed by an over-the-air kill-switch if they missed a payment. But once they got here and started living, realized how much had been left on the table by conservative companies that didn’t want to get into a patent fight and didn’t see any reason to add advanced functionality to something that you didn’t have any choice about, they got radicalized.

  “They stopped saying ‘I just want to make an arm that’ll get through the day,’ and started saying ‘I want an arm that does everything my old arm did.’ From there, it was a short step to ‘I want an arm that’s better than my old arm.’ And from there, it was an even shorter step to ‘I want an arm that’s so outrageously awesome that you’ll cut off your own to get one.’ That’s what’s coming to immortality. Not just the ability to come back from the dead, but the ability to rethink what it means to be alive. There’s going to be people who decide to deadhead for a year or a decade, to see what’s coming. There’ll be people with broken hearts who deadhead for twenty years to get some distance from their ex. I’ll bet you that someday we’ll look around and discover that all the kids are short for their age, and it’ll turn out that they’ll all have been deadheaded by their parents whenever they had a tantrum and were missing ten percent of their realtime.”

  Iceweasel shook her head. “Stuff just doesn’t change that much. Most people will be doing the same thing in twenty years they’re doing now. Maybe in one hundred years—”

  “You’re going to hate to hear this, but you’re too young to get it. Anything invented before you were eighteen was there all along. Anything invented before you’re thirty is exciting and will change the world forever. Anything invented after that is an abomination and should be banned. You don’t remember what life was like twenty years ago, before walkaways. You don’t understand how different things are, so you think things don’t change that much.

  “When I was your age, we didn’t have abandoned zones or free hardware designs. People without a place to stay were homeless—vagrants, beggars. If you worried about zottas, you went to protests and got your head knocked in. People still thought the answer to their problems was to get a job, and anyone who didn’t get a job was broken or lazy, or if you were a bleeding heart, someone failed by society. Hardly anyone said the world would be better if you didn’t have to work at all. No one po
inted out that people like your old man were LARPing corporate robber-baron anti-heroes of dramas they’d loved as teenagers and they required huge pools of workers and would-be workers under their heel for verisimilitude’s sake.

  “If you’d been deadheading for twenty years and woke today, you’d think that you were dreaming, or having a nightmare. Sure, eighty percent of the people who were alive then are alive now, and eighty percent of the buildings around then are around now. But everything about how we relate to each other and places we occupy has changed. They used to think everything got changed by technology. Now we know the reason people are willing to let technology change their worlds is shit is fucked up for them, and they don’t want to hang onto what they’ve got.

  “The zottas want to control who gets to adopt which technologies, but they don’t want to bear the expense of locking up all walkaways in giant prisons or figuring out how to feed us into wood chippers without making a spectacle, so here we are on the world’s edge, finding our own uses for things. There’s more people than ever who don’t have any love for the way things are. Every one of them would happily jettison everything they think of as normal for the chance to do something weird that might be better.”

  Iceweasel considered the perfect storm of her father’s intolerableness, Billiam’s death, Etcetera’s words, the growing sense that shit was fucked up and shit, a phrase that everyone used as a joke. It wasn’t a funny joke but people told it all the time.

  Ha ha, only serious.

  What would it take for her to upload? When they got to the B&B, they’d set up the imager, and anyone could get uploaded, make a scan of themselves—or “themselves, within the envelope that could tolerate being reanimated in software.” Would she get in? She’d like to talk to Dis about this. She caught herself. She wished she could talk to Dis about this? Didn’t that mean that Dis was a person? Didn’t that settle the question?