Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

  “But I can’t work your shackles. They’re not networked. I can’t do anything with the housenet, that’s totally airgapped. For the best, otherwise all that pwnage would have set off all kinds of alarms.”

  Despite herself, Natalie was drawn into the explanation. “Come on.” Her stimulus-starved brain worked hard. “Occam’s razor. Either there’s this crazy bug because Dad fired his bull-goose sysadmin, and a convenient airgap in the bed’s systems—or you’re my dad’s puppet, and he’s locked you down so you can do magic tricks with the door-locks, but not set me free. You happen to have the ability to bring me a sim of my girlfriend, who would no doubt get me to say things that my dad could use to brainwash me, like Cordelia.”

  “That does sound plausible. I can’t prove that I’m working with you, not your dad. Sims can’t be sure that they aren’t being torqued by the simulator, and that makes us incapable of knowing we’re being manipulated. We’re heads in jars. But how do you know you’re not a sim? We scanned those mercs in the tunnels without their knowledge.”

  “My dad isn’t that—” she almost said powerful, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to go there. “Sentimental.”

  “He’s a dick. I’m really glad we found you. Half the camp thought you were dead. Gretyl insisted you’d been snatched. Someone thought they saw you going into the woods, and they found evidence of a scuffle there. No one could say whether it was you, but everyone else was accounted for or dead. When the only person missing is the kid of an asshole zotta, it’s not a stretch to imagine a snatch.”

  Natalie wanted so, so much to believe this was Dis, a lifeline to outside, life beyond the confines of her lashed-down body. Of course she wanted to. If Dis was her father’s trick, he’d depend on it.

  She had to piss. It had been building, now it was unbearable. She knew she was plumbed into the bed, must have pissed many times before regaining consciousness, but the thought of voluntarily releasing her bladder while tied to a bed was too much.

  “Dis.” She was ashamed of the weakness in her voice. Why couldn’t she be strong, like Limpopo? Like Gretyl?

  “What is it, Iceweasel?”

  No one had called her that since she’d been snatched.

  She lost control over her bladder. The piss coursed out, disappeared silently down the hose, a feeling of heat where the hose was taped to her inner thigh before diving down to the bed’s cistern. Even though she wasn’t soaked with urine, the sense of pissing herself was inescapable, and she lost control of her tears.

  “Oh, Iceweasel. It’s okay to cry, darling. This is totally fucked up and shit. You have people who love you, who sent me to get you loose. I can’t cut your bonds, but I can do plenty else. I can see in every room of the prison wing. There’s three others in a break room. They’re monitoring the room, but I control those monitors. They’re not seeing or hearing a realtime feed, they’re getting a loop of sleeping. Your bed’s streaming real telemetry, but I’m swapping for stored data from your unconscious period. I’ve got their private messages, I can do adversarial stylometry to impersonate them in text and voice—we’ve done work on voices.”

  “I can tell.” Natalie snuffled snot. It was all down her face. Tears ran into her ears and made them itch. The feeling was so ridiculous it made her smile a little.

  “Great, isn’t it? It keeps on getting better to be a pure energy being.”

  “You make it sound like you’re a ghost.”

  “I like ‘pure energy being’ but I’m the only one. It’s better than ghost. Don’t get me started on ‘angel.’ Jesus fucking Christ.”

  Natalie cried again. The hopeless world kept crashing in. She wanted to have hope, to believe in Dis. But she was a walkaway. Walkaways were supposed to confront brutal truths. The brutal truth of Dis was that it was more likely that her dad had a hot-shit hacker who’d run an instance to betray Natalie than it was that he’d forgotten to hire a new sysadmin to take over ops for his safe room.

  “Iceweasel, how about this? You don’t have to believe me. I won’t believe me, either. There’s no way for me to know if I’m who I think I am. The logical thing for us to do is to act like I can’t be trusted.”

  “That’s weird.” Natalie snuffled snot and bore down on the problem.

  “Weird isn’t the opposite of sensible. When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I say so. Uh, hold on. They’re coming in, time for a scheduled call. Close your eyes and pretend to be groggy, which won’t be a stretch. I’ll lurk. It’s best if we don’t let ’em know I’m here, but I will be, listening and recording. When they go, I’ll be here still, whatever you need to stay sane until we can bust you out.”

  She couldn’t help but feel this was exactly what a traitorous Dis would say if she was trying to trick Natalie. But it felt good.

  The door clunked twice, clicked, and swung open.

  [iv]

  As Seth and Tam paced the cargo-train, he contemplated his weird relationship with Gretyl. Back in his beautiful youthful days, a girlfriend once left him for another woman, after he’d hooked up with a guy at a party, someone’s horny, hot cousin. They’d had a crazy night locked in a spare bedroom at someone’s mom’s apartment in Bathurst Heights, leaving linens so be-funked that he heard they’d been burned. In the ensuing drama, he’d challenged his girlfriend on her freak, pointing out boys were boys and girls were girls, and he was exclusive to her in the “girl” part of his life, but that it was unreasonable for her to expect him to swear off dick when she didn’t have one.

  Even as he’d uttered the words, part of him understood them to be self-serving bullshit. He still cringed with embarrassment at the thought of them, a decade later.

  The girl found another girl, because he’d told her to, and quickly decided the other girl was the person she wanted to be exclusive with, without the weaselly “exclusive for people with vaginas” distinction Seth insisted on.

  Seth, single and stinging, told himself it was because there were things you could get from a girl-girl relationship you couldn’t get from girl-boy, and he’d never understand those things, but they must be awesome because his girlfriend dumped his ass. Later he realized the difference between the girl and him wasn’t the penis so much as the cheating-asshole-ness.

  When Iceweasel came home with Gretyl, Seth had been mature about it by Seth standards. When his jealously rose in his gorge, he fought it down, bitterly recalling the self-recrimination that surfaced whenever he thought of the penis/no-penis distinction incident.

  He and Iceweasel didn’t have a serious boy-girl thing, so he had no business feeling jealousy, even by default-ish rules that said there were times when you had business feeling jealous. Then there was Tam, who knew Gretyl well, looked up to her, admired her toughness and badass math chops. Tam and him were an item, a boy-girl thing. It would be monumentally fucked for Seth to pursue Iceweasel.

  Technically, they were all friends, some of whom had hooked up, some engaged in long-term exclusive-ish nookie. When Iceweasel disappeared, they’d been agonized by the not-knowing about their friend/lover/whatever. They’d welded into a guerrilla unit, scouring the net, working connections to find her.

  As the search petered out, it was increasingly Seth and Tam, a couple, and Gretyl, basically a widow, trundling on the back of a cargo-freighter together, staring awkwardly, pretending they all had the same relationship to Iceweasel and the same kind of grief. So much bullshit. Eventually there was no way to pretend.

  Seth and Tam walked alongside the cargo-train, headed for Thetford, passing blighted zones and small default towns with stores and people living like civilization would endure forever. Seth had high school French, but the people who called out in slangy joual might have been speaking Klingon. Despite the language barrier, every time they passed through a town, people joined their column. They’d come at night, wherever they were camped. Inevitably, they were shleppers with mountains of junk that Seth didn’t
let himself get irritated by. He’d been the King of the Shleppers.

  Gretyl rode on the train, face furrowed with sorrow, eyes distant, fingers moving over interface surfaces. At night, Seth brought steaming trays from the mess wagon, collected them when she’d finished, but she hardly noticed.

  Finally, Tam rolled over one night and put her arm across his chest and her face in the hollow of his neck and said, “What the fuck is she doing?” He didn’t know, and Tam mentioned the obvious fact (which he’d been oblivious to), that she was worried sick about Gretyl.

  “Intervention. First thing in the morning.”

  “Now,” Tam said. “I’ll bet you a two-hour foot-rub she’s wide awake.”

  “I’m not wide awake. OW! Now I’m awake.” He rubbed his nipple and glared at Tam in the dark. She had sharp fingernails.

  They pulled on clothes and lit themselves. Fall had slipped toward winter and there was frost on the road where camp had been struck for the night.

  Gretyl was awake and hammering away, a hunkered, moonlit silhouette propped against the side of the train. Her hands danced and her whispers and grunts floated on the breeze. She wore a mask, which Seth hadn’t seen her do before. More than anyone, she seemed able to visualize virtual spaces and prod them without visual feedback. So she was doing something intense.

  The acceptable protocol for masks was to call first, so they knew you were there, rather than tapping them on the shoulder and destroying their creative fog. But Gretyl had her do-not-disturb flags set, even the no-exceptions-this-means-you flags. They stood for a moment, a few steps away from her, wondering what to do.

  “I feel like such an idiot,” Seth said. “I mean, fuck.”

  “Don’t stand there with your dick in your hand. Tap her on the shoulder.”

  A variety of responses about dicks, and hands, occurred to the part of Seth who was still seventeen years old and horny about having a girlfriend with a dick, which was the whole package as far as Seth-Seventeen was concerned. Seth told Seth-Seventeen to shut the fuck up.

  “Why don’t you?”

  “She likes you.” Tam shoved him. Gretyl showed exasperated maternal affection and bemused humor at Seth’s various schticks, but with an edge that left him wondering if she thought he was a colossal asshole.

  “She likes you, too.”

  “You’re closer.” Tam took a quick step backwards.

  He sighed, and Tam blew a kiss that turned into a shooing motion. He edged to Gretyl, whose head bobbed, presumably in tune with her earplugs, implants that filled her earholes with soft blue light to let others know she was not sharing their acoustic consensus reality.

  Nevertheless, he cleared his throat and even said, “Gretyl” into her ear twice—hoping she’d done the sensible thing and programmed her plugs to pass through—before he tentatively touched her shoulder. As he’d feared, she jerked like he’d stabbed her and whipped off the face mask and glared.

  “Are we being attacked?” she said.

  “No, but—”

  “Fuck off.” She pulled her mask down. Tam shook her head and shooed him again. Before he could tap, she whipped the mask down. “Seth, I have not been subtle. I’m doing something that needs concentration. Why have you not fucked off, per my instruction?”

  He looked to Tam. Gretyl looked at her, too, and softened one billionth of a percentage.

  “What do you two want?”

  Tam took Gretyl’s hands, heavy with interface rings. “Gretyl, we want to talk about Iceweasel.”

  Gretyl cocked her head. “Yeah?”

  “She’s been gone for more than a week. We’re all hoping she turns up. We’ve put out the word in walkaway and default, but fretting’s useless. She’s smart and resourceful and so long as we’re reachable, she’ll get in touch once she can.”

  Gretyl smiled, which alarmed Seth. He took a half-step backwards in the guise of settling down on his butt in the dirt opposite Gretyl. It was a weird smile.

  “Was that all?”

  “No.” Tam sat next to Seth. “No, it’s not, Gretyl. You need to understand we’re your friends, we love you, we’re on your side, we’re in this together. We all miss her. We need to support each other, not withdraw into our own corners and—”

  She stopped, because Gretyl’s smile was broader now. Tam said, “Gretyl?”

  Gretyl heaved a sigh and stood so she towered over them. She reached onto the cargo-train’s running board and found a flexible flask with a nipple from which she took a long pull, then passed it to Tam, who sniffed, then drank and passed it to Seth, who found it to be full of something like Scotch, so peaty it was like drinking a cigar. He liked drinking cigars. He took in a larger-than-intended mouthful, then made the best of a not unpleasant situation.

  Gretyl held her hand out and he reluctantly passed the booze back. “To Iceweasel.” She took another drink.

  They both nodded. Looking up at Gretyl was giving Seth a crick in his neck. He got up, just as Gretyl sat and gave him a yes-I’m-fucking-with-you look he knew he gave other people.

  “It’s very nice of you two. You mean well. But I haven’t been heaving dramatic sighs. I’ve been doing something.”

  “What?” Tam’s eyes shone in the soft light of her glowing clothing, underlighting her strong jaw and making her skin a pool of buttery tones in a gray-and-black night. Seth felt a tremor of excitement, partly sexual and partly just excitement. Something was happening.

  “I brought up Dis. There’s so many clusters in Akron. Tons of compute-time, people are happy to share. I ran her and told her Iceweasel had been snatched by her family, and she talked to ninja-types who are good at that kind of thing.”

  “Yeah?” Tam said, calmer than Seth, who got the willies talking to Dis—it wasn’t that she didn’t seem human. It’s that she did. Freaked him to his balls.

  “Yeah.”

  Gretyl looked expectant.

  “I’ll bite,” Seth said. “What happened?”

  “We found her. We pwned the house she’s in. Dis is running on their hardware. She’s in communication with Iceweasel.”

  Seth and Tam looked at each other.

  “I’m not crazy,” Gretyl said. “It’s real, and it’s happening.”

  “When?”

  “Last week. Nothing’s happening now, not until she regains consciousness.”

  “Regains consciousness?” Seth said.

  Tam said, “Really?”

  “Regains consciousness.” Gretyl’s expression that made him flinch. “Really.” Her smile was so big her eyes all but disappeared between her cheeks and forehead. “Really!” Tam, who knew what to do in a way Seth never had, gave Gretyl a hug that he joined.

  “Now what?” Seth said.

  “Now we break her out,” Gretyl said.

  [v]

  Etcetera didn’t know what to expect from Thetford, but this wasn’t it. The zone was abandoned a decade before, when asbestos contamination went critical and even the federal government couldn’t ignore it. The evacuation happened with the usual haste and coercion. The houses still had china in the cupboards, toys in the toy chests, rusting swing sets in the yards.

  Warm winters and wet summers triggered landslides that left the town and the valley silted up, the buildings spongy with black mold. A very dry year capped by a midsummer lightning storm triggered fires across the valley, then more floods. What remained looked like a thousand-year ruin, albeit with odd pockets of perfectly preserved rural life—a farmhouse that escaped the worst and still had a bookcase bulging with old French romance novels, a set of basements and subbasements underneath the hospital that were dry with working emergency lights.

  The walkaways who’d taken over Thetford treated it as a hostile alien planet, where the air could kill you, where the terrain was treacherous and the extreme climate showed no mercy. This was precisely the environment they’d sought, because it was a dress-rehearsal for going to other planets.

  “It’s the ultimate walkaway,” Ke
rsplebedeb said. He was gangly, with a prominent Adam’s apple, and spoke English with a funny accent that came from having a French mother and a Kiwi father in bilingual Montreal. “All that first days of a better nation stuff, it’s just bourgie bullshit. Nations are bullshit. You know what’s not bullshit? Space. No room for power-games in space. No room for coercion, or war.”

  “Run that past me again?” They were in one of the airtight capsules that had been deposited, like the egg sacs of sky-squids, all over Thetford. “Why no war?”

  “Why war?” Kersplebedeb said. He spread his long fingers over the table. He had chipped silver nail polish and a yellow housedress and short hair, which assuaged any fear Etcetera had that the Thetfords would be boringly socially conservative. That was the reputation of space-exploration types.

  “Jealousy. Greed. Irrational hatred.”

  “Once you’re in space, you’re mobile. Unlimited power, anywhere the sun shines. Oxygen anywhere you can find ice to fractionate with solar-powered electrolysis. Food anywhere you can find feedstock, including your poop. Someone wants your lump of ice? Walk away. Someone wants your space habitat? Walk away. Walk away, walk away.

  “People who think about space end up thinking about bullshit like Star Wars and Star Trek. They have faster-than-light travel, but they still fight? Over what? They’ve got transporters. What are they fighting over? What does anyone have that anyone else can’t get, instantly, for free? They have to invent unobtaniums, magic crystals that, for some reason, can’t just be printed out by their transporter beams, or there’s no story.

  “Why do they even die? We’re already making scans of ourselves—if they’ve got transporters, they should do hourly scans!”

  “I get your point.” He wished Limpopo was there, but she’d gone off to get trained at the space-suit factory, along with a contingent of Walkaway U scientists and some B&B people. There was talk of building another factory, because they were all tunnel-bound until they were outfitted. The academics who’d lived in the tunnels accepted this with resignation and mostly just wanted space, time, and freedom from distraction so they could scan everyone. That was okay with everyone. The long march to Quebec was fraught with danger. Sound from the sky made them flinch in anticipation of death-by-drone. Every crackle in the night had been a merc. The case for getting every walkaway into the cloud could not be stronger.