Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

  What had Seth given her? What was that smell? Oh, default. Did Seth download a default drug? What a fucking terrible idea. Why would he do that?

  Rising awareness, conscious consciousness. Despair. Either her father had her, or someone who planned on ransoming her. If it was the former, she would likely never get away. If it was the latter she’d end up in with her father, and (see above). Because if there was one thing Iceweasel—fuck it, Natalie—had known for as long as she’d known anything, it was that the daughter of Jacob Redwater was worth more alive and intact than dead or damaged. If her father had finally come to get her—or if he was about to have to do so—he would not let her go again.

  All through her walkaway time, she’d known this day would come when Jacob Redwater twitched his little finger and brought her back before she could be leverage against him—or worse, an embarrassment. She’d never opened his messages, had boycotted her sister and cousins’ messages, because good as her opsec was, good as the best brains of walkaway could make it, she was sure that if there was a zeroday that would let him bug her that he would be able to afford it before it was found and patched, and wouldn’t hesitate to use it. Wouldn’t even understand why anyone would hesitate to use it.

  Eyes open now. Hospital bed. Four-point zip-restraint and when she saw them, she realized her sleeping brain had already noticed, tugged against them in her sleep and expected them.

  Hospital bed, but not a hospital room. Private house. The smell. Her father’s house. She was home. She started, softly, to cry.

  * * *

  Her sister came to her bedside. Cordelia, two years younger than her, hair different from last time they’d seen each other, during a university break; more sophisticated with a precise degree of insouciant messiness, but otherwise she hadn’t changed. She looked down at her big sister with an unreadable expression, set down a large purse on the floor, and settled into an angular wooden chair Natalie vaguely recognized as having once lived in the girls’ side of the house. She could see a burn on one arm that she remembered more clearly than the chair itself.

  The two sisters contemplated each other. Natalie took after their father, had his weird, bladelike nose and the double-dimple in her cheek, both of which she’d hated as a teenager and come to treasure later as setting her apart. Cordelia looked like Mom, faint memory from girlhood, a round china-doll face and wide green eyes and a sprinkle of toasty Kewpie-doll freckles, but with a satanic glint in her eye for the look-and-feel of a knife-wielding horror-doll.

  Natalie gave up. She smiled. There was no honor in pretending to be made of ice. “Nice to see you, Cordelia.”

  Cordelia smiled back, and she saw the ghost of her own smile. Everyone always said they looked alike when they smiled.

  “You’re looking good, sis.”

  “You too. Got some scissors in that giant purse?” She rattled her restraints.

  “I do, and I’m delighted to inform you that I have been authorized to use them.” Her sister always put on a sarcastic, officious voice when she was nervous.

  “Best news I’ve heard all morning. I have to piss like a racehorse.”

  “Let’s get on it.” They weren’t normal scissors; they came in a special sheath that crinkled, and their black blades ate light. Cordelia handled them like they were red hot, snipping at the zip-ties with pantomime caution to keep the tips away from Natalie’s skin, though they parted the plastic ties with normal cut-plastic noises.

  There was a partly open door to Natalie’s left, opposite the blind-darkened window, and she tottered to it, feeling floorboards beneath her feet with alarming, hallucinatory clarity. The bathroom behind it was small, fitted with the same brand of mirror and toilet and showerheads as the rest of the house. The towels were familiar, off-white with a scalloped edge. She peed, washed, didn’t look in the mirror, then did.

  She was clean. Her hair was combed out and trimmed to uniform length, five centimeters all over, the length of the shortest sections of her last haircut, administered by Sita, who could do unexpectedly great things with a pair of scissors.

  Her eyes sunk in dark bags. Her skin was dull, her expression thickened with grogginess. She made a face, checked the back of her head, saw a bruise poking out of her hospital robe. It extended down her shoulder, and now she saw it, her ribs and shoulder throbbed, or perhaps she noticed the throbbing that had been there all along.

  Seeing the injury made her remember the snatch, the little woman with the grip of steel, the unseen man who’d loomed out the shadows. Then she remembered the bodies, Etcetera’s weeping on Limpopo’s shoulder, Gretyl’s head wound, the smoldering ruin of the Better Nation and the fate of its crew.

  She searched the bathroom for a weapon. She couldn’t imagine hitting Cordelia, but she couldn’t imagine not hitting anyone who got in her way.

  Nothing more dangerous than a squeeze bottle of eye-watering peppermint shampoo. Even the toilet-seat lid was bolted. Fine.

  She stepped into the bedroom. Cordelia turned to her, smiling, then the smile faded as she saw Natalie’s expression, and Natalie reached for the room’s door. She wasn’t sure which corridor it opened on, but from there, it’d be easy to find the door and the street and—

  She turned the knob and stepped into the hallway.

  The small woman with her weight forward on the balls of her feet was unquestionably the woman from the woods. The smile, the small teeth. Natalie would have recognized them anywhere, even though without the dazzle paint, the woman’s face was transformed into a forgettable, statistically average mask of mid-Slavic nondescriptness. The teeth, though.

  Natalie looked her in the eye. There was no tough-guy stare-down, just a mild interest. Natalie stepped forward to the side, to go around the woman, but she was right there, moving faster than Natalie had ever seen anyone move. That might be the drug hangover. She stepped to the other side, the woman was already there.

  Staring, she said, “Excuse me,” and tried to step past. The woman blinked.

  “I said excuse me.” She put a hand on the woman’s shoulder, gently pushing her to one side. She didn’t push.

  “Get out of my fucking way.” Natalie regretted the fuck as she said it, nothing to be done about it.

  From behind her, Cordelia: “Natalie, come back in here, okay?”

  “Get out of my way, please.” Her eyes locked on the mild, disinterested gaze of the small woman. “Please.” She sounded so weak. She remembered how she’d faked out the woman, broken her grasp before. Strong and fast, but not invincible. Let her think Natalie was weak.

  Cordelia’s hand on her shoulder. “Come on, Natalie. She’s not going to let you past, and if she did, you wouldn’t be able to leave the house.”

  Still looking into the woman’s mild eyes. “What if I had you as a hostage?”

  “I’d incapacitate both of you.” The woman spoke for the first time. She had a sweet voice, girlish, the voice that went with Cordelia’s face (Cordelia had spent a lifetime cultivating a husky voice because it was too much otherwise), and a bit of an accent that Natalie thought might be Quebecois or possibly, weirdly, Texan.

  “Natalie, please?” Cordelia said.

  “They murdered people,” Natalie said. “In front of me. I helped the wounded. I carried the dead.” Tears on her cheeks, but her voice was steady. “Keep your fucking ‘please.’” There was that fuck again. Fuck it. “Get out of my way, killer, or get ready to incapacitate me, whatever that little asshole euphemism means.”

  The woman didn’t speak. Cordelia’s grip tightened on her shoulder, would not be shrugged away. The woman wore stuff that was almost walkaway: seamless, printed as a single piece, a bitmap woven into it: conservative dark stripes on a darker background. The stripes did something to her perception of the woman’s stance and movement, made it harder to predict where she’d go and when she’d get there. More dazzle.

  Without windup, without letting the thought percolate to her forebrain, she took a rough step, bullin
g into the woman, bodies colliding, and she was already ready to take another step.

  Then she was lying on her back, winded, the woman standing back a step. Her expression was unchanged. Small teeth.

  “Natalie,” Cordelia said. “This isn’t going to get anywhere. You can’t solve this with force. You’re outgunned.”

  Walkaways walk away. But what if you’re confined? Natalie considered another staring contest with the woman, spitting in her face. Doing it over and over. She had a deep intuition the woman would take it. The vivid image of the woman with Natalie’s spit spattered across her face was entertaining in a way she identified as a Jacob Redwaterish feeling.

  She got to her feet, back to the woman, like she was furniture, and refused Cordelia’s help. She went back into the room. The cell. Her shoulder hurt.

  * * *

  They fed her by dumbwaiter, her favorite girlhood foods. It was worse than slop or moldy bread. The dumbwaiters ran through the house, a way to fulfill desire without the bothersome politesse of dealing with human servants. She and Cordelia called it Redwater Prime, after the Amazon service, because they knew somewhere in the chain were people earning nowhere near enough to buy the things they dispatched.

  Cordelia visited the next two days. The house—her father—listened to them. Natalie knew this because when she asked for things they’d sometimes arrive in the dumbwaiter. But she couldn’t directly access interfaces.

  Her father didn’t visit.

  The meals and the fulfilled wishes came at irregular intervals. She knew it was intermittent reinforcement. Give a rat a pellet every time it presses a lever, it will press the lever whenever it’s hungry. Give the rat a pellet on random lever-presses, it will press and press, past satiety, as the pattern-matching part of its brain tried to find the pattern in the randomness. You could produce superstitious rats, it was one of Limpopo’s favorite epithets for people who were specifically stupid in the superstitious rattish way. Superstitious rats noticed a certain combination of actions prior to a lever-press produced a pellet a few times, decided this needed to be done every time, and though it didn’t change the pellet distribution frequency, every pellet was accompanied by the superstitious dance, reinforcing the ritual.

  The woman outside her door never seemed to sleep. Maybe she was twins, or a robot. She was always there, neutral, small teeth bared, blocking the hall. Natalie had explicit, violent torture-fantasies about the woman, what she’d do if she had a gun or a taser or the power to move things with her mind.

  Her mind. The room had: a chair, a bed, remains of her meals—whatever she hadn’t put into the dumbwaiter—dirty laundry, and four walls, two doors, one window. The bathroom: toilet roll, toothbrush—self-pasting—the earthy-smelling probiotic cleanser that put her in mind of her mom, though she didn’t really know if her mom ever used it, and lethally strong peppermint soap she thought of as her father’s, in silicone squeeze bottles that felt like the skin of a sex toy.

  The door wasn’t locked. But the woman wouldn’t let her out, and, as Cordelia reminded her during their increasingly infrequent visits, even if she got down the stairs, the door wouldn’t let her out into the wider world.

  “Have you spent a lot of time in zottaland?” she asked the woman. She’d taken to sitting in the corridor, studying her. Before that, she’d been talking to herself in the room/cell as a performance for the hidden watchers or algorithms. That made her so self-conscious that she’d come to conduct her monologue with the woman, who might have been a statue.

  “I expect you have. Someone like you, good at what you do, you probably hire out for all the most elite barons and plutocrats.

  “Most of my friends were zottas. It wasn’t until I slipped the leash and brought home some civilians that I really got how fucked up this was. My friends had a hard time making sense of it, some of them never got used to it, just kept on remarking on how weird it was. What got me was how they talked about the surveillance, as though they weren’t being watched in every imaginable way back in their apartments or subways or schools. As though the sidewalk wasn’t measuring their gait and sniffing their CO2 plume for forbidden metabolites.

  “I get it now. Zottas do surveillance to themselves. It’s not done to them. You could build a house like this with no sensors, retro, with strings running along the walls to tinkle bells in the servants’ quarters. You could line the walls with copper mesh and make it a radio-free fortress.

  “The eyes and ears are recording angels that remember everything forever. They’re choices. I’d never thought of it, same way a fish doesn’t think about water. I get it now.

  “The definition of zotta is ‘someone who doesn’t live the way everyone else does.’ You know Gatsby? ‘The rich are different.’ No one reads Gatsby as criticism anymore. Now it seems nostalgic. Or Orwell, the inner party with their telescreen off-switches. Why would a zotta choose to install telescreens in his fucking bathroom?”

  She considered the irony of the sensors recording and analyzing her talk about them. She thought about Dis, a computer who was a person. She entertained a fantasy about the house’s network being self-aware, knowing she was talking about it and she was angry at it; she wanted to switch it off. No wonder there’d been so many netsoaps about people killed by rogue computers, the I-can’t-let-you-do-that-Dave cliché that was the go-to dramasauce for hack writers.

  The woman stared, eyes focused, betraying nothing.

  “You must be a hell of a poker player. I once saw the Beefeaters, you know, in London? England, I mean, not Ontario. They were bullshit, trying to pretend they were wooden soldiers, never acknowledging you. I don’t think it’s possible to be vigilant while pretending everyone else is invisible. Tell yourself that long enough, you’ll believe it. You, on the other hand, can hear and see me, but it’s like I’m beneath your notice unless I’m trying to get past. You can hear me. Shit, you probably agree with every word, but what I say isn’t anything compared to the immovable truth of a fuck-ton of money for you if you do the default thing; nothing at all if you follow your conscience.

  “On the other hand, I might be projecting. Maybe you love default, think weird-ass zotta shit is proof of their divine right to rule. Maybe you’re animal cunning and wiry strength, without much going on behind those cool eyes of yours?”

  She stopped, aware that she was a zotta, taunting a person who couldn’t respond because she wasn’t. She felt ashamed.

  “Sorry,” she said, and went into her room.

  [ii]

  Her father visited her on day four. She’d gone twenty-four hours without taunting the guard, and was bored out of her mind. She’d fantasized about a notebook and a pen, anything she could use to pour out her feelings to something other than the unseeable watchers.

  He looked in control. That was the first thing she noticed, the contrast between her shaky nerves and his calm exterior. She thought he’d done something with his face, injections. He looked younger than she remembered, a youthful thirty-five. He turned the chair around, sat straddling it with his arms folded on the back, cocked his head and smiled as though they shared a joke. There was definitely something different in the smile.

  “Welcome home, Natty.”

  She thought about freezing him out, like the guard-woman with her gaze that saw, did not acknowledge. She was so lonely, so bored. Her brain was a hamster wheel, spinning out of control. She needed to slow it with words, even if it was argument.

  “I would like to go now, please.”

  He smiled wider. “How was it?”

  She made herself breathe into her diaphragm, once, twice. “I’m sure you got a blow-by-blow.”

  “Your mother is coming tomorrow. She can’t wait to see you.”

  “They killed people, you know. I saw them, saw the bodies. I held the bodies. My friends—they were my friends.” She struggled to keep her voice calm, was successful except for a wobble on the second “bodies.” She was sure her father picked up on it. He was a man who
was keenly attuned to others’ useful frailties.

  “I can see it’s been hard on you.”

  “You mean, the mercenary terrorists you sent were hard on me.”

  “You’ve lost contact with reality, darling. You can’t believe that. I can’t order air strikes. I don’t know mercenaries. I’m a scary rich guy, but if my enemies fear me, it’s because they’re worried I’ll sue them, not assassinate them.”

  Natalie closed her eyes and tried to find her breath’s rhythm. For her father—her father—to say he couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with what had happened, when there was a ninja mercenary in the hallway—it was too much. It epitomized every conversation they’d ever had where he’d told her everything she felt and hoped for was a girlish dream, every observation of the world around her a girlish fancy.

  Her breath wouldn’t come. Maybe her father hoped the long isolation would make her pliable. But it had broken something inside that jangled. She realized with a rush that felt like a convulsion of vomit she had hardly thought of Gretyl since arriving. It made her wonder if they’d done something to her mind, if she was herself. If there even was a mercenary in the hall who could lay her out with moves so fast she couldn’t follow them. Perhaps it was a dream. Perhaps she was dead, uploaded, simulated.

  She was hyperventilating, and took satisfaction in her father’s discomfort. He could deal with I-hate-you-daddy tantrums, but she was losing it now, was glad to be lost. She was tired of being found, pretending the situation was normal.

  She stood calmly and smoothed down her long t-shirt, adjusting her track-pants’ drawstring—red, with a crisp-edged ROOTS logo over one thigh, the kind of thing she’d slopped in at summer camp, as though the dumbwaiter was loaded by someone trying to make her feel like a grounded teenager and not a kidnap victim—and walked out of the room.

  The guard was not in the hall.

  She broke into a run, hearing her father—a step behind her—shout something she couldn’t make out. She got five long steps down the hall and the merc came around the corner, effortlessly grabbing her arm as she tried to run past, interposing her calf between Natalie’s running legs, pulling smoothly at the arm, throwing her down with a tooth-rattling thud. The floorboards were pale wood with dark grain, and underfloor heating made them feel alive. All she could see was that grain, stretching to the baseboards. She waited for her wind to come back.