Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

  “The upstream provider’s got to run intrusion detection. That’s basic opsec. It’s tolerant—didn’t go nuts when your dad brought in his team, but the more anomalous traffic we generate, the higher the likelihood it’ll fire an alarm at some ops center and generate a warning to Daddy’s security people and then—”

  “I get it,” Iceweasel said. She drew a shuddering breath. Gretyl could hear how close to tears she was. Tears sprang in her eyes. “I’d be alone again, and the party would start for real. I don’t think Dad’s security knows what’s going on here. I know that dude. He runs a tighter ship than this. My dad brought in specialists, deprogrammers for rich girls who join the walkaway cult. Someone who’d insist on running his own show.”

  “Pretty sure you’re right,” Remote said. “Fits available evidence. We can’t assume your dad would tell his security not to worry about alerts. Even if Boss Cop doesn’t know what your dad’s doing in his dungeon, he’s got to know that something’s going on.” She paused. “I wonder…”

  “What?” Local said. Gretyl had a moment’s disorientation. She’d started to think of them as aspects of one person, which they were, but not in the sense that they both had the same knowledge. Remote could wonder something and Local couldn’t know what it was until Remote told her.

  “Jacob Redwater’s not the baddest zotta, not even in the top tier, but he’s still rich and ruthless. I can’t imagine him giving up his little bolt-hole without having another one. I just bet there’s another place like this, only 2.0—”

  “Heard anyone discuss it? Seen any traffic?”

  “Nope, but if it’s there, maybe that’s something we could use.”

  “Push it onto the stack,” Local said, sounding irritated, which also made Gretyl’s head ache. She could get upset with herself. Why should that stop once there were multiple instances of herself? “Come back to it later.”

  “They’re coming. Jacob and his security, that woman merc—”

  Silence.

  Tam took Gretyl’s hand. Gretyl hadn’t had a chance to say good-bye, to again tell Iceweasel that she loved her.

  [x]

  The last time she’d seen her father, he’d been stalking out of the room, with rare, visible fury. Usually he kept it icy and only let it emerge as a dangerous calm tone. When Jacob Redwater’s face twisted into a rage-mask and he raised his voice and clenched his fists, he was at the point of snapping.

  Once, she’d have quailed at the thought. Her mother always assured her Jacob Redwater was a good and patient man, though not a man she had any particular affection for. Natalie and Cordelia were in good hands with him. Anything they did that made him snap was their own fault.

  She could not have given fewer fucks about his rage. She’d flopped on the ground, trying to scream as her skin burned and her muscles contracted, a pain-seizure eclipsing every emotion except for self-pity and towering fury.

  He had changed clothes. He wore tailored weekend stuff, a soft flannel shirt and jeans hid his incipient paunch unless you knew to look for it. He smelled of his sandalwood soap. He’d had a shower and calmed down and fetched the merc, who stood within arm’s reach and slightly ahead, body slightly rotated toward Iceweasel, impassive but alert.

  “There are things you need to know about your friends, things that might help you see what’s going on there.”

  “Is this part of the program? Did your snatch-consultant give you a ten-point process for deprogramming me and this is stage six?”

  He shook his head. “Can you stop? I want to have an adult conversation and present the evidence. I think once you see it, you’ll understand—”

  “Adults don’t have rational discussions that involve kidnapping and violent coercion. You set the terms when you sent her to drag me here. When you tied me up. When you used that on me.”

  Her dad looked at the merc, a flush creeping up his cheeks. Natalie knew from Dis that the cameras in her room fed the control room, even when he was with her, so the merc and the med-tech and anyone else there heard and saw it all. Being called out as a father who’d use the pain-machine on his daughter was not Jacob Redwater’s style. He liked to be liked. He was likable—handsome, with an easy smile and enormous confidence. Natalie had seen friends fall under his spell, mistaking his friendliness for friendworthiness. It was flattering to be friended by a powerful zotta who could really listen to you with an intensity that made it clear he was interested in you, only you.

  That hadn’t worked on Natalie since she was ten.

  He made his eyes sad. “I wish I could tell you how much this has hurt me. I know you don’t think I love you, but I do. I’ve tried to be a good father. I know work kept me away too often. There were times when I should have been there for you—”

  She swallowed her reaction: to tell him she’d always wished he was away more.

  “But I have responsibilities, ones that you haven’t ever understood. I’m willing to take the blame. I’ve tried to shield you and your sister and your mother from what I do to keep us safe. It’s a rough world. I didn’t want to scare you.” His eyes grew moist. That was new. She’d never seen him mist up. He was pulling out the stops. “Natty, don’t tell your sister, but I assumed you’d take over some day. Cordelia is a lovely girl, but she doesn’t have any edge. You’ve got edge. Too much edge. But that’s good, because this world demands edge from the people who run it.”

  He tentatively maneuvered a chair to her bedside. She steeled herself. She didn’t shrink when he sat. The merc positioned herself a little ahead of him. Natalie couldn’t say why, but this made her feel safer. She and the merc were on the same side, ultimately. Both were beholden to Jacob Redwater, though of course the merc had a lot more leeway about the terms of engagement.

  “Your mother and sister never got that, but you did. This family, families like ours, we steer this world. It’s in trouble, Natalie. There’s too many people. Lots of them are bad people who’d destroy everything. Nihilists. They don’t care about human rights or property rights. They’d take everything we have. Jealous people who think they have nothing because we have something.

  “You’ve seen the real world. There are people plenty richer than us. We’re comfortable, I’ll grant you, but we’re not ‘zottas’—not real ones. A couple mistakes, a few changes in the world, we lose everything. Bums on the street.

  “I’ll tell you what would happen next: we’d rebuild. Without handouts. We’d get to work, figure things out, and before long, we’d be on top.

  “The world is lean and mean, and shakes. When you shake the cornflakes box, little flakes sink to the bottom and big flakes end up on top. I’m a hell of a big flake.” He smiled. His charming schtick.

  “I know what you think of that: that I’m deluding myself. I’ve heard your talk about special snowflakes. I know your arguments. I disagree with them. You don’t know my arguments. You think you’ve found a better way. You think your walkabouts can make their way in the world without having someone in charge, without big and small cornflakes.

  “That’s what I want to talk about. You need to know some things about your friends that might be hard to hear. Walkways say the worst thing you can do is bullshit yourself. I want to demonstrate how you’ve bullshitted yourself—about them. They’re not hard to figure. Where there are walkways, there are sellouts, happy to take free food and easy sex, but who also want money, and have a way to get both. Since you left, I’ve known everything that happened in your little world. I get videos. I’ve been inside your networks. I’ve seen traffic analysis.”

  Of course it was true. Why would Jacob Redwater spy on her less in walkaway than he had in default? She’d always had the eyes-on-the-back-of-her-neck feeling, ever since she’d been old enough to leave the house, and it hadn’t let up once she got to the B&B. It took an act of will not to guess which of her “friends” fed reports back to Jacob; which ones were in government employ, or working for zottas or big companies. She’d talked it over with Limpop
o and Limpopo confessed she had to resist the same impulse.

  “It’s not that there aren’t plants here. Of course there are plants. The way plants hurt us isn’t by telling rich people what we’re doing. Fuck rich people—all our shit’s on public networks. The worst thing plants do is make us mistrust each other, think our friends might be our enemies. Once that happens, you’re well fucked. It’s impossible to have a discussion if you think the other person is trying to fuck with you. Everything gets distorted by that lens. Did she leave out the trash because she was distracted, or because she wanted to bicker about chores?

  “That mistrust is the most corrosive thing. Back when I was in default, I was in this protest group, an affinity group loosely connected to the Anonymous Party, doing data-analysis of regulators’ social graphs to show their decisions favored the industries they regulated, such a fucking no-brainer, but it was good to have facts when you met someone who hadn’t figured out the game was rigged.

  “There was a guy in our group, Bill. Bill was weird. Standoffish. Always looking at you from the corner of his eye. Always listening, not talking, like he was taking notes. We worried. We knew there were plants in our group. Whenever we found something juicy—some minister’s wife’s brother running the oil company the minister handed a fat exemption to—the government was always out in front, managing the news cycle before we published, which was overkill, given how little attention the news paid to us. The powers that be are thorough. Anything that might rise to a threat gets neutralized because it costs peanuts to clobber us, and there’s zottabucks moving around they do not want disrupted.

  “We isolated Bill. Created distribution lists and passworded forums he wasn’t invited to. Stopped inviting him to pizza nights. Forgot to tell him when we went out for beers.

  “Bill wasn’t a plant. Bill was clinically depressed. Bill hanged himself with his belt. His roommates didn’t find him for two days. When they put Bill into the fire, no one was there to take his ashes, so I took them. I kept them by my bedside until I walked away. They reminded me that I’d helped isolate Bill. I’d helped make him so alone that when darkness ran up on him, he didn’t have anywhere safe to run. I helped kill Bill. So did my pals. What killed Bill was our suspicion about plants. The worst thing a plant could do wasn’t leak our shit or stir up shit. We leaked our own shit. We were argumentative enough that we didn’t need plants to make us fight with each other. Worrying about plants was a million times worse than the worst thing a plant could do.”

  There had been tears in her eyes.

  Her father said, “Things aren’t what you think. You think you’ve found a way everyone can get along without bosses. There are always bosses—if you don’t know who the boss is, you can’t question her leadership. A system of secret bosses is a system without accountability or consent. It’s a manipulocracy.”

  She looked at the merc, wondering if she was following this, whether she appreciated the irony of her father—her father—criticizing society on the grounds that it was run from behind the scenes by shadowy fixers and string-pullers.

  He caught her look. He nodded and made a charming face. “Takes one to know one, daughter-mine. If I can’t recognize a conspiracy, who could?”

  “When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” She regretted saying it. Why argue with her fucking father? He won as soon as you acknowledged there was a debate.

  He knew it. He smiled wider, put on a frowny, thinky face. “I understand what you’re saying. We all see ourselves reflected in data. Analysis is subjective. But Natalie, I’m not asking you to take what I’m saying at face value. I want you to look at the data yourself, see if what I’m saying is true. That’s not monstrous, is it?”

  “No. Kidnapping and administration of pain-weapons is monstrous. This is just bullshit.”

  “I get you’re angry. I’d be angry. But if I was brainwashed by a cult—if I couldn’t understand what was going on—I would want you to do everything you could to get me to understand what was happening. You have my permission to do everything I’ve done here, to me, if I am ever in the grips of some irrational impulse that puts me in imminent and grave danger.”

  Natalie restrained herself from snorting. Not to spare his feelings, but because derision was acknowledgement, another chance for him to argue. Give him a millimeter, he’d take a parsec. That’s how you became a zotta. It’s how he’d been raised. It was how she’d been raised, which scared the shit out of her, especially these days. She was back in her father’s demesne. In this house, there was so much pressure to accept the easy justifications. Some people had to be on top, some on the bottom, big and little cornflakes. Besides, the Redwaters weren’t really rich; not rich rich, not like Jacob’s cousin Tony Redwater.

  “Believe me, if there was any other way, I would take it. I don’t want this. I want my daughter back. I know what you’re capable of. It’s why I kept you close to home, made sure you knew what went on behind the scenes. You could put it all together.”

  Even though she knew he was flattering her, it worked. Goddamn him, and goddamn her, too. She knew her dad’s bullshit. Even so, something inside her rolled over and preened when Daddy said nice things.

  “That’s what I want you to do. Pull it together.” He twiddled his interface surfaces and a piece of wall slid away, revealing a huge touchscreen, stretching across the room’s width. It was showing a screen saver, the manufacturer’s loop of kids playing lacrosse, blond and lanky, with muscular legs and horsey white teeth. Not zottas, because zottas didn’t need to pose for screensaver photos. But they looked like zottas. Maybe they were actors. Or CGI.

  Her dad made the image go away and replaced it with a social graph. In the graph’s middle, like a gas giant surrounded by a thousand moons, was a circle labeled LIMPOPO [Luiza Gil], a circular cameo of Limpopo, looking younger and scowling ferociously, like she wanted to kick the photographer’s ass. Around her, the moons of various sizes were labeled with the names of her friends, all the walkaways. Just seeing those names made her mist with unbearable nostalgia. The feeling of being away from her true family was a clawed thing gnawing at her guts.

  “Look at it, okay?” He turned to go. The merc followed, contriving to keep an eye on Natalie without walking out backwards. Natalie hardly noticed, because she was trying not to smile, because she’d just noticed Etcetera’s disc, and the minuscule type the system used to render his name in full.

  She drifted over to the wall and caressed Etcetera’s circle, as though she were caressing him, and the graph jumped into life, helpfully arranging itself to better convey its meaning.

  [xi]

  “We are well and truly at vuko jebina now,” Tam declared. She’d learned the phrase from Kersplebedeb, who said it was Serbian for deepest boonies, literally, “where wolves fuck.” Tam loved this phrase, to no one’s surprise.

  Seth looked from side to side. The snow started an hour after they set out. It hadn’t been in the meteorological projections, normal for decades of weird weather. The first flakes were pretty, turning poisoned countryside into a Christmas card of birches and pines iced with fluffy snow like iced gingerbread. Toxic icing, but they weren’t going to eat it and, as Seth had inevitably pointed out, sugar was only slightly better for you than asbestos.

  Pocahontas’s friends were welcoming, though they had little to call their own. They weren’t from one band, but were a commune living on territory the Quebec government had turned over in reparations for jail time, each of them exonerated by physical evidence, sometimes after decades of lockup. It had been the work of a Mohawk legal collective in Quebec City, and after a string of these, they’d been audited, audited again, investigated by the Law Society, and half their lawyers were disbarred and found themselves with full-time jobs saving themselves.

  The community was called Dead Lake. It sported a few windmills and some second-rate fuel cells the residents had carefully coaxed into performing better than anyone could believe. Even
Gretyl was impressed. Tam marveled at their improvements. Their technical crew relieved the wagon of the suit-fabbers and started assembling them. It took less than a day. That evening, all thirty residents came to the utility shed to watch them run.

  Gretyl, Tam, and Seth were invited to a modest dinner, printed stuff with feedstock from down south because game around Thetford was poison and the Dead Lakers knew better than to eat it. Conversation was merry, if stilted. The Dead Lakers thought walkaways were crazy, or maybe silly, and didn’t hide it. They liked walkaways, and provided wonderful hospitality, but it was clear these folks didn’t rate the walkaways’ chances of getting anything done. For them, walkaway was a lifestyle and a hobby. Seth bristled because it was his deepest fear and also his turf—he could make fun of walkaways, but who were these people to tell him what to do? He’d buried his sarcasm, because the Dead Lakers knew the difference between a joke-joke and a ha-ha-only-serious joke, and Seth liked to live on that edge.

  He was relieved to go the next morning. They hit the trail to Thetford in suits, riding the empty cargo wagon as it rumbled across the deep snow at a slow walking pace, sometimes nosing down precipitously as it discovered drop-offs, sometimes listing so far to one side they were nearly thrown.

  The snow had started, about an hour out. Flakes, swirling clouds, then, whiteout.

  “Vuko jebina, huh?” he said. There were trees somewhere—the wagon’s radar automatically avoided them, but it was turning again and again. Its collision-avoidance systems were fubared. This was definitely the place where wolves fucked.