Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

  “No trouble,” she said, and clipped a bracelet around Natalie’s wrist. Natalie lifted her head and strained to see it. It was evil blue metal. She didn’t want to even guess what it did, though she couldn’t stop her subconscious from gaming it out: not shock, because she could grab hold of Mom or Dad or Cordelia and the shock would go through them, too. Maybe something in her nerves, like pain, or seizures, or—

  “No trouble,” she agreed. The merc impersonally lifted the sheet, removed her catheter, let it retract into the bed. The sensation made her gasp with humiliation. The merc wiped her hands with a disposable and dropped it into the bed’s hopper before offering her hand. Natalie took it, because after days—weeks?—supine, she was weak and dizzy and her stomach muscles refused to help swing her huge, numb legs over the bed’s edge. Tears sprang into her eyes, because when she’d been a walkaway, she’d been so strong—they all had been. All the walking. Now she couldn’t walk away even if they cleared a path. Tears rolled down her cheek and slipped into her mouth.

  She snotted up the rest of the tears and blinked hard, let herself be guided to her feet. She swayed, not looking at Mom or Cordelia, locking eyes with Jacob, letting him see what he’d done to her. He’d destroyed her body, but she made her eyes shine to let him know he hadn’t touched her mind.

  Her mom was at her side, getting a shoulder beneath the arm whose hand didn’t have an IV. The merc disconnected the other end of the hose from its bed feed, capped it with a sterile, elasticated wrap, draped the hose around Natalie’s neck. Her mom smelled of her own perfume, made special by a man in Istanbul who used to come to the house once a year, during Sacrifice Feast, when he’d tour the world and drop in on his best clients while all of Turkey ground to a halt. Natalie hadn’t smelled that scent—not quite sweet, not quite musky, and with a whiff of something a bit like cardamom—for years, but she remembered it more clearly than her mother’s face.

  Her mother gasped when she settled her weight over her shoulders. Natalie thought she was too heavy, then: “Jacob, she’s like a bird!” in tones more horrified than Natalie had ever heard from her. She saw her mother’s perfect skin crumpled in a grimace, eyes narrowed into slits that made the hairline wrinkles at their corners deepen in a way she hated.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  They stood, swaying. She felt her legs giving out.

  “I should sit.”

  They both sat. The opening in the mattress where the hoses retracted, smelly and dark, was right behind them. Her mother twisted to look at it, twisted back, and captured Jacob on an even fiercer look.

  “Jacob,” she began.

  “Later,” he said.

  Natalie enjoyed his discomfiture. Cordelia stood halfway between the parents, fretting with her hands, picking her cuticles. She’d been a nail-biter, broken the habit only after several tries, and Natalie could tell that she wanted nothing more than to chow down on her own fingers.

  It struck Natalie that she was the least upset among them, except for the merc. She was on a team with the merc, them versus these fucked-up zottas. That was stupid. The merc was not on her side. Come on, Natalie, focus.

  “I won’t be tied down again.”

  “No, you certainly won’t,” her mother agreed.

  “Frances—” her father began.

  “No, she won’t.” The staring contest smoldered again. The balance had changed. There was a new implicit threat—what would a divorce court judge say about a daughter tied to a bed, starved and intubated, locked away in a safe room? Her mother had been furious about her going walkaway, but that wouldn’t stop her from deploying any leverage Jacob Redwater had handed her.

  “No she won’t,” he said. “Excuse me.” He stepped out of the room. He shut the door. Clunk-clunk.

  Cordelia took a tentative step. Her mother extended an arm and she stepped the rest of the way, let Frances give her one of her hugs, always warm enough, always ending a moment before you expected.

  Cordelia subtly leaned to Natalie, testing for the presence of a potential hug, but Natalie didn’t signal back. Fuck her. For that matter, fuck Frances. They had known she was a prisoner and neither had sprung her. Getting her loosed from four-point restraint hardly qualified as liberation.

  “Natalie, this is just terrible,” her mother said.

  No shit. “Uh-huh.”

  “Why, Natalie? There are more constructive ways to engage with the world. Why become an animal? A terrorist?”

  It was so fucking stupid she couldn’t manage a derisive snort. “What would you prefer?”

  “Move out, if it’s so bad. Your trust is mature, you could buy a place anywhere in the world. Get a job, or not. Take up a cause. Something constructive, Natalie. Something that won’t get you killed or raped or—”

  “Kidnapped by mercenaries and tied to a bed in some rich asshole’s basement?”

  Her mother set her jaw.

  “Natalie,” Cordelia said. “Can I get you anything?”

  “A lawyer. Cops.”

  “Natalie—” Cordelia looked hurt. Natalie didn’t let herself give a shit.

  “You knew I was down here. You knew he had me snatched. You don’t like the walkaways and you don’t like that I’m one, fine. But in case you haven’t noticed, I’m an adult and whether I become a walkaway is none of your business. Neither of you get a say in what I do.”

  “Of course we do. I’m your mother!”

  Even Cordelia smirked.

  She saw rage boil in their mother, different than their father’s, but no less deadly. “Natalie, if you think being an adult means you don’t have any duty to anyone else in the world—”

  She and Cordelia both snorted. It further enraged their mother, but it was the most sisterly moment they’d shared since Natalie first went away to school.

  Frances went rigid and stared straight ahead, not acknowledging them, wishing she hadn’t gone straight to the maternal moment, which left her with no gracious out, and if there’s one thing Frances Mannix Redwater was, it was gracious.

  The door clunked, opened. Jacob came in trailed by the med-tech/paid goon, who carried a precarious armload of clothing. Natalie recognized the clothes from the dumbwaiter in her previous incarceration.

  “We’ll bring in a proper bed later today,” Jacob said, while the man put the clothes on the floor.

  “Books, too,” Natalie said. “Interface stuff. Paper and something to write with.”

  He looked at her, then at Frances.

  “No interface stuff,” Frances said. “But everything else. Some furniture, too. A fridge and food.”

  “Hop to it,” Natalie said, with a giddy laugh. Jacob ignored her. He had a goat, but you couldn’t get it with a jibe as crude as that.

  “Now everyone else out,” Frances said. “I need to talk to Natalie alone.”

  Natalie closed her eyes. Not one of those talks.

  “I’m tired,” she said.

  “You’ve had plenty of time to rest.” Frances managed to make it into an accusation, as though Natalie had lazed around eating bonbons. It wasn’t sarcasm—Frances was capable of being simultaneously outraged because she’d been tied to a bed, and because she’d been too lazy to get out of bed.

  “Everyone, out.” She glared at the merc, who had the sense not to look at Jacob. That would have been the end of her employment in the Redwater household. Natalie guessed being a merc in the employ of zottas required political sense.

  They left and before the door clunked closed, Frances called out to Jacob. “Private. No recording.”

  “Frances—”

  “She’s not going to jump me and hold me hostage, Jacob.”

  “You’ve seen the video—”

  “I saw it. That was before you tied her to a bed for a week and fed her through a tube.”

  “Frances—”

  “Jacob.”

  Jacob turned to the merc, who was already holding something out, palm down. He passed it to Frances. “Panic button,” he
said.

  She pointedly put it in her purse, then set the purse far from the bed, leaning against the wall, buttery yellow leather slumped against stark white. “Good-bye, Jacob.”

  They left the door open.

  [viii]

  Limpopo was volunteering with the scanner crew when Jimmy showed up.

  He didn’t look as cocky as the last time they’d met, with his stupid weapons and such. He’d had a hard walk, fetched up in Thetford with a limp and a head wound, in filthy overlapping thermal layers. He was gaunt, frostbite in three fingers and all his toes.

  “Fancy meeting you here,” he said, when Limpopo came upon him in the great hall of the Thetford spacies, tended by a medic who listened to advice from someone far away who diagnosed Jimmy.

  “You look bad,” she said.

  “Could have been worse. We lost fifteen on the road from Ontario. It’s getting mean.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Not your fault. Actually, possibly it is your fault, you being a big beast in the world of scanning and sims.”

  “I’m a walkaway. We don’t have big beasts.”

  The medic smiled, then did something to Jimmy’s toes that made him suck air through his teeth—one missing—and squeeze his eyes.

  “I think you’ll keep them,” she said. “Except maybe the left little toe.”

  “Huzzah.” He rocked his jaw from side to side.

  “Why are you here, Jimmy? Come to kick more people out of their homes?”

  He shook his head. “It’s not like that. Whatever minor philosophical differences you and I had—”

  It was textbook self-delusion, but Limpopo couldn’t see any reason to point it out.

  “—I have more in common with you than with the assholes who came at us on the road. There’s only one thing they want: a world where they’re on top and everyone else isn’t.”

  I’d love to know how you differentiate that from your philosophy. But I don’t guess you’d be able to explain it.

  “This is clearly where the action is. This has them shit-scared, and scheming.”

  “So you’ve come to help?”

  “Look, there’s an angle, something I haven’t seen on the forums, an outcome that’s worse than anyone’s preparing for. I think it’s because people like you just don’t understand what backup really means.”

  Backup. A perfect, perfectly seductive name for scan and sim. She was amazed she hadn’t heard it. As soon as she did, Limpopo just knew there must be thousands—millions—of people using the term. Once you conceived of the thing that made you you as data, aeons of data-handling anxiety kicked in. If you had data, it had to be backed up. Anything important that wasn’t backed up was good as lost. Data is haunted by Murphy. Do something irreplaceable and magnificent while out of network and backup range and you were begging for critical failure that nuked it all.

  “Backup,” she said.

  “Yes.” Jimmy grinned. He’d followed her thinking. “Of course. No one has thought it through to the logical end.”

  “Which is?”

  Despite his injuries and grubbiness, he enjoyed testing her, waiting to see if she’d spar. She knew there was no way to win a mental sparring match with Jimmy: victory would piss him off, loss would convince him he could walk all over her.

  “Nice seeing you.” She turned to go, because walking away solved the Jimmy problem every time. If he ever figured that out, he might be dangerous.

  “It means,” he said to her back, and she slowed a little, “anyone who can get your backup can find out everything there is to know about you, trick you into the worst betrayals, torture you for all eternity, and you can never walk away from it.”

  “Shit.” She turned around.

  “Anyone who talks about this gets treated as a paranoid nut. Sim people wave their hands and talk about crypto—”

  “What’s wrong with crypto? If no one can decrypt your sim, then—”

  “If no one can decrypt your sim, no one can run your sim. If the only repository for your pass-phrase is your own brain, then when you die—”

  “I get it. You’d have to trust someone with your pass-phrase so they could retrieve your key and use it to decrypt your sim.”

  “Your trusted third party would have to trust her trusted third party with her pass-phrase, and that person would need someone to trust, and there’d need to be some way to find out who had which pass-phrase because once you’re croaked the last thing we’d want was to realize we’d lost your keys. Can you fucking imagine—sorry about your immortal birthright, we forgot the password, derp derp derp.”

  “Ouch.”

  “There’s plenty of crypto weenies trying to figure this out, using shared secrets so to split the key into say, ten pieces such that any five can be used to unlock the file.”

  “Sounds like a good idea.” She’d worked with shared secrets for the B&B’s various incarnations, establishing committees of trusted parties who could collectively institute sweeping changes in the codebase, but only once a quorum agreed.

  “Yes but no. Good in the sense that you need to kidnap and torture a lot more people to unlock someone’s sim without permission, but from a complexity perspective it’s worse—you’re multiplying the number of interlocking relationships necessary to retrieve a sim by ten. As in: now you’ve got ten problems.”

  “What’s the answer?”

  “That’s what I’m worried about—the answer is going to be no answer. There’s urgency, it’s all going to blow up soon. Back in default, they’re treating Akron like an ISIS stronghold, like the fucking end-times. I’d be surprised if they didn’t nuke it.”

  “Fallout.”

  “They’ll blame us for it and set up a contract to treat radiation sickness with some zotta’s emergency services company. You don’t know what it’s like out there.”

  “I know some things.”

  “I guess you do. Sorry, I didn’t mean to, you know—”

  “Mansplain.”

  He looked awkward. She could tell he wished they’d had an argument. He was so easy to outmaneuver, because he couldn’t imagine the people around him weren’t trying to outmaneuver him.

  “Limpopo, it’s been rough for me, the last couple years. After the B&B, uh—”

  “Imploded.”

  “I was angry for a long time. I was angry at you, though I knew it was my fault. Who else’s fault could it be? I chased you out.”

  “You did worse than that.”

  “I did worse than that. I threw you out.”

  “No. You never did that.” You couldn’t do that.

  “I couldn’t do that.” He wasn’t as dumb as he looked. “I took things from you because I thought it would make me strong, because I thought what you were doing was making people weak. But all that stuff, strong and weak—”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Entirely. Strong and weak isn’t what you do, it’s why you do it.” He paused. She was about to say something. “Also what you do. It’s not charity or noblesse oblige to treat people like they’re all equally worthy, even if they aren’t all equally ‘useful’—whatever useful means.” He looked ready to cry. The medic stopped working on his toes and watched him intently. He looked at her, at Limpopo, sighed. Then he went on, which impressed Limpopo, because this confession would be all over Thetford by the time he’d found a place to sleep.

  “I told myself I was making the world better. I thought there were ‘useful’ and ‘useless’ people and if you didn’t keep the useful people happy, the useless ones would starve. Of course I put myself in the useful group. I knew this important secret thing about useless and useful people, and if that’s not useful, what is? I told myself I was making more of everything for everyone. We just needed to let people who were worth the most do whatever they wanted. It was fucked up. I fucked up. That’s what I’m trying to say sorry for.”

  “Your problem is you think ‘useless’ and ‘useful’ are properties of people instead of
things people do. A person can perform usefulness, or anti-usefulness, depending on circumstances. Evolutionary winnowing didn’t somehow pass over the people who don’t contribute the way you want them to, leaving a backlog of natural selection for you to take care of. The reason everything about us is distributed on a normal curve, with a few weirdos way off in the long tails at the right and left and everyone else lumped together under the bulge is that we need people who get on with stuff, and a few firefighters who are kinked just the right way to sort out the weirdest shit happening around the edges. We assume someone who puts out a fire is a one-hundred-meter-tall superhero fated to save the universe, as opposed to someone who got lucky, once, and has been given lots more opportunities to get lucky since.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to say, yeah. It’s hard to figure this shit. It twists my head that I only started disbelieving in useful and useless people when I proved to be useless. Then I had this revelation that the scale I’d judged people on—the scale I was failing on—was irrelevant. That’s one of those convenient things that reeks of bullshitting yourself.”

  “I happen to agree the old scale was bullshit, so I’m giving you a pass.”

  He winced as the medic did something to his toes. Two of them looked bad, black at the tips. Limpopo looked away, grimacing.

  “Thanks,” he grunted, though whether he was talking to her or the medic, she couldn’t say.

  [ix]

  The party wasn’t Pocahontas’s idea, but she took off with it. At first, Etcetera was horrified at the thought. He couldn’t imagine anything worth celebrating amid the death and anxiety. Iceweasel was disappeared and Gretyl was buried in secret projects. He was convinced everyone would be offended, from spacies to late arrivals to aviators to the B&B crew who mourned their dead, but as Pocahontas posted notices of the party’s progress to the spacies’ social hub, it was clear the only anxiety anyone felt about a party was that someone else might hate it.

  Pocahontas was a force of nature. She’d been the first of their crew to figure out how to run the space-suit fabbers, made herself a gorgeous suit she wore on a series of epic, multi-day treks, establishing contact with nearby First Nations bands. Though they weren’t as political as she, none had any use for default and all were curious about the weird spacies who’d taken over Thetford, so many years after it was abandoned. Pocahontas had used the Thetford fab to print parts for a new space-suit fabber, stacking them outside a utility corridor, ready to be hauled to her new friends by anyone who could make a vehicle capable of the run. Gretyl was working on refurbing the engine of their cargo-train, which limped into Thetford. They’d have scrapped it if there hadn’t been so many wounded who couldn’t finish the voyage on their own legs.