Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

  He looked at Tam, trying to make out her face through the snow and her clear plastic visor. The suits were in whiteout mode, strobing a slow flicker that made it easy to pick a person out against the snow; defoggers blew over the visors, the mask’s earpieces played pin-sharp reproductions of the defoggers from the other two masks, a white-noise symphony overlaid with the gusting wind.

  “Even wolves don’t fuck in this,” Gretyl said. She was in the back, thumping at a mechanical keyboard she’d magneted to its skin, watching a screen projected against her mask. “Shit.” The wagon stopped. “Might as well stop, this thing’s gonna chase its tail until it runs out of juice.”

  Seth’s butt vibrated with ghost sensation of wagon motors. That stopped, and there was just the sound of the wind, the blowers, and the thrum of his pulse. He felt transient fear: where wolves fuck, snow blowing, ground saturated with carcinogens, sky a source of potential death. If he died here, no one would know. If they did know, almost no one would care. His father died when he was ten, his mother had been in jail since he was seventeen and they hadn’t spoken since he was fifteen. Natalie was … Natalie was gone. He had to admit she probably wouldn’t be back.

  He was so small. They were pimples on the world’s face. Unwanted. Uninvited. Alone in snow, on their silly homemade wagon, in high-tech pajamas, where wolves fuck.

  The feeling passed. It had contracted his sense of self to a pinprick and then expanded the world around him to a yawning gulf.

  The world kept on expanding. It wasn’t just him that was tiny and insignificant. It was everything. Zottas, all they’d built. The world’s great cities. Humming networks of meaningless, totalizing money, endlessly and algorithmically shuffled. Deeds and contracts, factories and satellites, endless oil and stone, poison in the sky and carbon in the air. In a thousand years no one would give a shit. The universe didn’t care about humans. The wind didn’t care. The snow didn’t care. The fucking wolves didn’t care. If he froze and mouldered to dirt, like Thetford’s rotting homes, it would be no better and no worse than living to ninety and going into the ground in a box with a stone over his head. It would be no better and no worse than what was coming for all those asshole zottas who thought they could speciate and overcome death.

  Everything they did was human. Everything he did was human. Here, where wolves fucked, it didn’t mean anything; it meant everything.

  “Awooo!” It was louder than he’d intended, but who cared? Tam and Gretyl’s gloves clonked their helmets, then the gain-control cut in. They stared, faces barely visible behind visors, suits strobing silently in swirling flakes. They were annoyed, hungry, needed to pee, and so did he but: “Awooo!” It came out louder this time.

  “Come on, you wolves!” A wild laugh chased the words.

  “Enough.” Tam’s voice had a warning note.

  “It’s not enough. Come on, just try it. Seriously serious.”

  “Seth, come on—”

  Gretyl cut loose with a howl that made their visors rattle and left their ears ringing. “Fuck yeah!” She punched the air.

  Tam heaved a sigh, looked from one to the other, wiped snow off Seth’s shoulders. She filled her lungs and howled. Seth joined. Gretyl joined. They howled and howled, in the place where wolves fuck, and Seth found himself with tears in his eyes, which he couldn’t wipe, but it didn’t matter. He was shedding his skin, leaving behind the last vestiges of default, the last shreds of belief that someday he’d forget this craziness and try to find a job and a place to live and hope no one took them away.

  “I love you people.” He squeezed them so their visors clonked.

  “Ow,” Tam said, but didn’t pull away. “You’re a jerk, but we love you, too.”

  “Yeah,” Gretyl said. “Most of the time.”

  “What do we do? Walk?”

  “And end up frozen to death,” Gretyl said. “Snow can’t keep falling. Once it stops, we’ll ride home. Meantime, we shelter in cargo-pods. If we each take one, we’ll be able to shin out of the suits to take a dump or eat, then get back inside to keep from freezing to death.”

  “How would that work?” Seth said. “I mean, where do we poop?”

  She rapped the engine’s cowl. “Not much room in these. But with care you could crap outside the suit, then get back inside, without getting crap on you. It’ll get on the outside of the suit, but that’s life in the big city. No worse than the stuff that gets stuck to it while we’re walking. We’ll wash them off when we get back.”

  “I’ll strip off outside and hang my butt over the snow. The amount of snow on the ground now, there’s not going to be any airborne contaminants.”

  “Suit yourself, but remember, there’s only so much power in these things and getting naked at minus twenty is going to suck heat out of your body that the suit’s going to have to put back or you’ll die of hypothermia. There might come a moment when you’re wishing you still had those amps in your battery—when your toes are turning black.”

  “This conversation’s taken a delightful turn.” Tam jumped off the engine and sank to her knees. She swept her arms, mounding snow up. “We’re not going to walk very far through this. How about we try to tell someone where we are, and could use help?”

  “I’ve got zero bars,” Gretyl said. “Been that way almost since we left Dead Lake. The aerostats probably landed themselves when the wind kicked up.”

  “I packed a couple drones in the survival kit. Hexcopters, they can fight heavy wind, but they’re not going to get a geographic fix until the sky clears. Still—”

  “Get one high enough and it might bounce a connection between us and Thetford,” Tam said. “There’s a good chance we’ll lose it—another decision we might regret later.”

  “In summary: we should hide in these boxes, shit ourselves, and wait out the weather.” Seth discovered the idea didn’t sound as horrible as it should. The revulsion he wasn’t feeling was part of the package of default-ness that he’d sloughed off.

  “About right,” Tam said. “The weather isn’t ours to command. Physics is physics. Snow is snow. Batteries are batteries. Sometimes the best action is no action.”

  [xii]

  Dis felt swaddled in cotton batting. Her thoughts veered toward panic or sorrow and she’d brace for the torrent of feeling, and it would fizzle. She’d tried antidepressants as a kid, when her parents worried about her “moods.” She knew how it felt when her brain couldn’t make the chemicals that got her into that race-condition of things-are-bad-I-can’t-fix-them-that-makes-it-worse. That was a feeling like reality in retreat, colors bled out and fight gone from her limbs. They said it was a matter of “dialing in the dosage.” They said it was worse before advanced neurosensing that could continuously monitor her reactions. In practice, this meant spending the eighth grade reporting to the nurse’s office every hour to have a disposable electrode band wrapped around her forehead while she lay on a couch and let a machine draw blood. Her parents had to do it at home, including a session at 11:15 every night. They got so good at it that most nights they could take all their measurements without waking her. It helped that the drugs made her sleep like the dead.

  A year ticked by. She got her first period, her first F (in math, always her best subject) and took her first beating, from a group of kids that included three girls who’d come to her birthday party the year before. They sensed her intolerable weakness. None of it left a mark. They told her the meds were working. She experienced vacant anxiety, a purely intellectual sense that things were terrible, but the terribleness didn’t matter. It was remote urgency. It made her feel sinister and unimportant.

  The feeling was terrible but she didn’t feel terrible once she stopped the meds. Everyone had told her she musn’t do that, because cold turkey would cause problems. The lack of urgency she felt for everything extended to the prospect of going crazy from freelancing her own psychopharmacology.

  She did go crazy. It was like the time she’d gone jumping in the surf and waded
out too far, buffeted by waves that spun her around, knocked her over, without any way to predict when the next one would come, coming up sputtering and disoriented.

  Without meds, she’d be overtaken by passions. Innocuous remarks made her furious, or set off tears. Jokes were convulsively funny or unforgivably offensive, sometimes both. She strove to hide it from her parents and teachers, but they noticed. She had to connive to stay off meds, hide them under her tongue and spit them out.

  Bit by bit, she learned to surf the moods. She recognized the furies as phenomena separate from objective reality. They were real. She really felt them. They weren’t triggered by any real thing in the world where everyone else lived. They were private weather, hers to experience alone or share with others as she chose. She treasured her weather and harnessed her storms, turning into a dervish of productivity when the waves crested; using the troughs to retreat and work through troubling concepts.

  She read the transcripts of those sessions when they’d woken her up inside a computer and she’d lost her mind. Reading through them, she sensed the crash of those storms. They’d blown terribly when her mind was untethered flesh.

  She’d thought of storms as wet things, hormonal in origin. She’d mapped the storms to ebbs of mysterious fluids from her glands. But shorn of flesh hormones, the problems were worse. Ungovernable. She pondered this mystery, wondering if the discipline and nimbleness had been the wet part, the trained ability to conjure fluids that lubricated the dry, computational misfirings of her mind.

  They’d stabilized her with her help, translating between her secret language of moods and the technical vocabulary of computation. She had no memory of those moments, only logs, but it was easy to imagine the desperate race to grind out coherent thoughts while waves of panic—she was dead, she was a parlor trick of code and wishful thinking—built to greater heights.

  Afloat in seas of her own calming, she experienced unhurried urgency, the same contradictory feeling that things were alarming but she was not alarmed. It wasn’t a good feeling, but it didn’t make her feel bad, which was the problem.

  Talking with Remote helped. Knowing there was someone else going through the same things helped, even though they never explicitly discussed it. Remote seemed so normal and together. That salved her. If that’s how normal and together Dis looked from the outside then she was probably holding it together, too. Remote was a sort of mirror. What she saw in it was reassuring.

  She helped with party preparations, kept track of the goings-on in Thetford’s great hall, watched the weather, conversed with spacies and worked on cluster optimization and predictive modeling for the constraints they’d apply to each model in storage when they brought them up in their own sims. Working with CC’s sim was educational and scary. She’d envied CC his even keel, but in his digital afterlife, he was a mess. He was worse than she’d ever been. Walkaways all over the world collaborated with her.

  She worried—without feeling worried—about her friends in the snow. There’d been no stable network connectivity for five hours. Last she’d heard, they’d departed from Dead Lake. They were now two hours overdue. The microwave masts outside the space-station sporadically caught distant threads of network signal, enough for the routers to start trading zone files and synchronizing clocks and getting the latest meteorology and frequency-hopping norms, only to fade off in an unrecoverable cascade of packet-loss and blown checksums.

  Walkaway net was different from default’s. Its applications were designed for fault tolerance—built with the assumption the machine you connected to could disappear and reappear without warning, as drones, towers, wires, and fibers failed, faded, or fubared. It assumed it was being wiretapped, under permanent infowar conditions. It insisted on handshakes, signatures, and signed nonces to root out man-in-the-middlers. When Dis went from Stanford to Walkaway U, the network had been the biggest culture shock. Slower in some ways, but without the ubiquitous warnings about copyright infringement, interminable clickthrough agreements, suspicious blackouts of “sensitive” resources when global protests spiked.

  She lived on walkaway networks. She appreciated the subtle genius in its architectures. Sites that had became unreachable sprang back to life thanks to the questing tendrils of the network’s self-healing, restlessly seeking out new ways to bridge the parts that were atomized by entropy or connivance. The downside was that nothing was ever truly down, and anything unreachable warranted a reload. It didn’t work, but sometimes it did, often enough to keep trying. Dis hadn’t thought about BF Skinner since her undergrad days, but after the millionth retry to reach Seth, Tam, and Gretyl, she looked up “intermittent reinforcement” in their locally cached wikip. That’s what it was: intermittent reinforcement. Give a pigeon a food pellet every time it presses a button and it’ll press it when it’s hungry. Change the lever’s algorithm so it randomly drops a pellet and the pigeon will peck and peck, as the pattern-matching parts of its brain sought to figure out the trick of a reliable jackpot.

  She was disconcerted to learn that being a disembodied consciousness didn’t immunize her from such a cheap cognitive trick. Not for the first time, she thought about tinkering with her parameters. Other Dises in other places had done that, under better controlled conditions, with some success. It was so unfair to be subject to this kind of cognitive frailty. Reload reload reload. In fact, reload, she was especially susceptible to it, reload, which was so unfair—

  She drew up short. The big tower had contact with another tower, in the mountains, with line of sight to a fiber downlink, and data flowed. Nothing that reached her friends, but huge swaths of walkaway space came online. Cachers negotiated to opportunistically copy off great slices of it for local access, salting it away against the next electronic famine. All over the world, waystation machines with packets destined for Thetford knocked on its doors, seeking permission to hand off their payloads.

  Amidst it was the news. It brought Dis up short. Every filter she had on the raw feeds was going fucking crazy.

  It was Akron. They’d cheered Akron on as walkaways consolidated their position, using printed health care and food as a calling card for their neighbors: diehard Akronites who couldn’t or wouldn’t vacate the dead city. They’d reveled in videos and casts of Akronites doing the unthinkable, establishing a permanent walkaway city, something you couldn’t walk away from, with permaculture farms and free-for-all white bikes and free schools where kids learned to teach each other and to be taught by other walkaway kids all over the world.

  There’d been bad stuff. It was impossible to tell how much of that was propaganda. Akron had already been full of walkaways and semi-walkaways, throwing Communist parties and opening squats. It had been full of gangs and bad dope, pimps and scared people. Since Akron went walkaway, every murder and beat-down in Akron was top-of-feed news for every service in default, though violence and diseases hadn’t attracted attention in the ten years when Akron had been turning into Akron—even its bankruptcy and the appointment of a zotta “administrator” to replace the lame-duck mayor hadn’t rated particular mention. Akron was the fortieth American city to end up in that situation, and it wasn’t the biggest, or most violent, or most fucked up, so how was that news?

  Default’s few voices of critical thinking pointed this out, pointed out Ohio had stopped keeping stats on the murder rate and overall mortality in Akron four years before, and back then, it had been five times higher than now, best anyone could figure.

  When she saw a shit-ton of bad Akron news, she spacebarred it into ignoreland, but it kept popping up, and the headlines got snaggier and gnarlier and she couldn’t help herself, she read one. Then another. Then she watched videos the cachers had already pulled down and made local copies of, because every feed in Thetford was losing its mind over Akron.

  Default had marched on Akron: the US Army and a ton of private “contractors” in the vanguard, riding mechas or ground-effect vehicles with drone outriders that continuously scanned for IEDs with lid
ar and millimeter-wave and backscatter, emblazoned with radiation trefoils in safety orange on their bellies, more to scare than to fulfill any safety remit.

  They rode in to fight the Four Horsemen: pornographers, mafiosi, drug dealers, and terrorists. Depending on the feed, their mission was to arrest high-profile Zetas who’d gone to ground in Akron; to rescue trafficked children from a pimp ring; to neutralize a Z-Word factory that was pumping out unprecedented quantities of the latest zombinol analog; or, of course, to capture domestic extremists who were working to establish an American Caliphate along with known terrorist cells in Michigan, Oregon, and Louisiana.

  Whichever one they were fighting, they prepared for the worst. “Targeted” strikes took out twenty-two buildings in ten minutes, reducing them to rubble and showering the streets with lethal rains of falling stones. One of the buildings was a hospital, formerly derelict and since reopened by walkaways and allies, with a maternity ward and a palliative care ward where patients chose the manner of their deaths. The war of words about this building was especially heated—it was alleged to be a breeding ground for bio-agents (which walkaway nets insisted were vaxx printers that made ebola and H1N1 vaccine without licenses), a “murder clinic” and a “rogue surgery operation.” The default nets didn’t mention the maternity ward.

  The boots-on-the-ground phase started before the dust settled, literally: pacifier bots that tazed anyone believed to be carrying a weapon or whose facial biometrics were a “sufficient” match for a “high value target.” Once a bot zapped someone, it broadcast loud messages warning everyone to keep clear, then stood guard over the unconscious victim until a snatch squad arrived by ground-effect or sky-hook.

  The walkaway net in Akron suffered a cyberwar attack: first, missiles that took out the fiber head-ends, then RF-tropic aerostats that homed in on wireless masts and blasted them with pulses of noisy RF. The RF noise-floor in the city limits rose to the point where all devices began to fail.