Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

That was the push; then came the pushback. The walkaways and Akronites who’d assumed control of the city planned for this kind of shock/awe. They had bunkers, aerostat-seeking autonomous lasers, dark fiber backups that linked up to microwave relays far out of town, offline atrocity-seeking cameras that recorded footage automatically when the network went dark, crude HERF weapons that stored huge amounts of solar energy whenever the sun shone, ready to discharge it in a powerful whoomf the moment they sensed military spread-spectrum comms.

  Once the word got out about Akron, there was online pushback, too. Walkaways all over the world battered at the comms and infrastructure of the contractors in the vanguard, the DHS, the DoD, the White House internal nets, the DNC’s backchannels, Seven Eyes chatter nets—the whole world of default super-rosa and sub-rosa connectivity. Walkaway backbones prioritized traffic out of Akron, auto-mirrored it across multiple channels.

  This was all to script. For a decade, walkaway had been allied with monthly gezis that popped up in one country or another. They’d made a science of responding to authoritarian enclobberments, regrouping after every uprising to evolve new countermeasures and countercountermeasures against default’s endlessly perfected civil order maintenance routines.

  The difference was these walkaways were getting the full treatment. Not that default hadn’t gone total war on walkaway before, but walkaway had always solved the problem by walking away. Default had produced an endless surplus of sacrifice zones, superfund sites, no-man’s-lands and dead cities for walkaways. To a first approximation, all blasted wastelands were fungible.

  Staying put was not walkaway doctrine, but there were plenty of other people in the planet’s recent history who’d evinced an irrational, deep attachment to the real estate where they’d most recently ground to a halt. The tactics were understood.

  Every gezi ended the same. Clouds of tear gas, lack of food and medicine; mounting injured and mealymouthed promises of zottas lured everyone off the streets and into what was left of their homes. Insignificant concessions were made and everyone agreed something had been done and it was time to move on.

  Everyone knew that wasn’t where these walkaways were headed. Even zottas. Especially zottas. The shock/awe phase was the most brutal ever, lethals and less-lethals mixed indiscriminately. Even the tamest default press was kept away due to fears of cooties and other bio-agents. Ohio’s governor suspended the state legislature until the “emergency” concluded.

  It was nerve-wracking. Walkaway footage from Akron had a desperate vibe. Every face, even the brave ones, looked doomed. The brave ones were the worst.

  Dis knew some people in Akron. There was a Dis in Akron, or had been. She’d recently synched with her twin and feared for her, which was irrational. The meat-people she knew had been backing up since the Akron project was declared. This was the most worrying thing. Walkaways stood their ground because they did not fear death. Though she’d never say it to anyone—not even another Dis instance—she thought of the Akronites as a death-cult. They were fearless suicides who’d been guaranteed an afterlife. Default feeds hinted this, without saying it, because official default position was that uploading—walkaway uploading, anyway—was smoke and mirrors. They were chat-bots with idiosyncratic vocabularies, just convincing enough to trick gullible and desperate extremists who’d turned their back on everything.

  Dis was grand-matron to these walkaways and everyone who thought death was another way of walking away from zottas and their demented ideas about wealth only ever mattering if you had more than everyone else. They were her spiritual children. She represented proof that death was the beginning, not the end. She’d never told anyone to take a backup and throw themselves into enemy crosshairs. She hadn’t had to. Her existence was enough.

  There must be so many Dises running in default’s cyberwar labs. That was how they thought. She’d be the ultimate captive. All it would take to torture her into compliance was a tweak to the parameters of her even-keeled lookaheads, so existential terror smashed her again and again, beneath its high waves, without drowning her. The knowledge of her legion of sisters being grotesquely tortured made her furious—without making her rage, thanks to the lookahead safeguards. She wondered if her tortured sisters experienced the intensity that she was missing, whether they secretly enjoyed it a tiny bit.

  It was impossible to know who was “winning” in Akron. Like all gezis, it was a war of perception and a military conflict. Would default’s rank-and-file see just-desserts when Akron was smashed flat? Or would they see a default victory as a tormenting Goliath grinding Davids like them underfoot? Would guerrillas be seen as plucky Ewoks taking down Imperial Walkers, or as terrorists using IEDs to kill whey-faced American patriots? Default was media savvy. The only press with money to cover anything was underwritten by the same conglomerates that owned the contractors on the invaders’ vanguard.

  Every gezi ended with mixed defeat. Every gezi sent more people to walkaway, convinced no reform would rescue default. Convinced people on top couldn’t contemplate a world where no one had to be poor to make them rich. Every gezi ended with great numbers of people scared into another season of submission, a thumb on their scales that overbalanced the risk of speaking out and made going along to get along tolerable.

  What effect would Akron’s martyrs have? Would fence-sitters become furious with the slaughter and rush to the streets because they wanted no part of the system that did this? Would it terrorize them into sitting still, lest they join the dead? Would they be convinced that it was suicidal to oppose default, regardless of mystical beliefs in “the first days of a better nation” and electronic afterlife?

  “Did you see this?” Limpopo paged her from the party room where preparations were nearly complete. It was hung with improvised bunting, retrofitted for thundering dance music and feasting from extruders that cycled through the delicacies of walkaway’s vast store of recipes.

  “Akron? It’s terrible.”

  She watched Limpopo through sensors—visible light, lidar, electromagnetic. Etcetera was with her, eyes glued to a screen he’d uncrumpled from his shirt-cuff and stuck onto the side of a beer keg. Etcetera held Limpopo’s hand. A pang/not-pang of loneliness visited Dis, a ghost-ache for physical sensation and the hand of a lover.

  “Akron is worse than terrible.” During the storm, the party room filled up with people who’d worked on the machines, music, and food while the nets were down. Now the connectivity was flooding back, they’d returned to their screens. It was a weird hybrid of ancient and modern rhythms. Ancient people worked when the sun shone, slept when it sank, stayed inside when storms blew, and plowed when they cleared. Walkaway nets were environmentally disruptable and nondeterministic networks, so they did the same: endlessly communicated and computed when networks were running, did chores when weather or the world blew the networks down.

  Everyone in the party room was glued to a screen or an interface, some in small groups, some on their own. They flung feeds at each other, whispered excitedly, spooling messages for walkaways in Akron, Stay safe Stay brave You are in our hearts What they do to you they do to us We will never forget you.

  “Wish I had your software controls.” Limpopo’s breath was ragged. There were more deaths in Akron, fresh revelations as a drone flew over a bomb site where mechas were shifting rubble, recovering bodies and parts of bodies. The first feed died when the drone was shot down. This attracted a flock of suicide drones that sacrificed themselves to capture and transmit whatever the powers of default did not want to be seen. More shots brought them down. High-altitude drones winged in, the feeds jerkier because they recorded from a greater distance, with not-quite-stabilized magnification. There were children in the rubble. Limpopo cried. Etcetera cried. Dis wanted to change their feed, show them the doxxings popping up in darknet pastebins, personal facts of the lives of the contractors and soldiers whose faces were tagged from the footage, open letters written to their mothers and fathers, spouses and children, asking h
ow they could do this to their fellow human beings.

  These doxxings were also from the gezi playbook. Sometimes they worked. Even when they didn’t, unexpected things happened. Kids left home, leaked their parents’ private documents implicating their superiors, publishing secret-above-secret rules of engagement with instructions to use lethals when cameras were off, to bury evidence, or implicate insurgents in atrocities. Sometimes parents disowned children who’d done zottas’ dirty work, publicly disavowing slaughter. It split families and communities, but it also brought new ones together. It was controversial because it implicated so many innocents and was a dirty trick, but it was okay with Dis. Even when she’d been alive, she’d been willing to break those eggs to make her omelet. As a dead person running on servers around the world, including several hostile to her and everything she believed in, she couldn’t work up a mouthful of virtual spit in sympathy for people who felt sad that Daddy was exposed as a war criminal.

  Kersplebedeb quietly typed on a keyboard and muttered into a mic.

  “We should be ready to go.” He put his arms around Etcetera’s and Limpopo’s shoulders. “There’ve been more attacks. Two in Ontario, three in PEI, a couple in northern BC, and Nunavut. Some were big and some small, but none of them expected it. A couple were stable, one in PEI was twenty years old, had a good relationship with the normals around them. It’s gone now, not even a crater. Scraped clean.”

  Dis said, “Have you heard anything specific about Thetford? Is anything incoming?” She spoke out of Limpopo’s bracelet, turning herself up loud enough for Kersplebedeb. He blinked and absorbed the fact that she was there.

  “Nothing,” he said. “There’s almost nothing in the air right now, so if something was coming, we wouldn’t see it. If something’s coming, the snow might have stalled it. I think we should be ready to go if and when. I never believed in the Big One, but this feels like a Medium One.”

  “What’s the Big One?” Dis nearly leaped in to answer Etcetera, but she let Limpopo in.

  “It’s first-generation walkaway stuff. The theory was default would decide we were too dangerous to exist and they’d stage a coordinated attack on all of us, all at once. Kill or arrest everyone, end the movement in one go. They’ve got the spook power to know who and where we all are, so the only thing that stops them is whim or lack of gonadal fortitude.”

  Etcetera said, “I thought it was just me who worried about that.”

  “It used to be hotly debated. We thought they’d wipe us out. Then they didn’t, and didn’t, and didn’t. We speculated, were they not willing to risk the good boys and girls of default deciding this ruthlessness couldn’t be abided, taking to the streets with pitchforks? Was it that they liked to have the goats and sheep self-sorted? Did they secretly slum and ogle flesh in the onsen and eat extruder-chow and drink coffium and play bohemian dropout? Were there too many zottas’ kids in walkaway, too much blue blood to be spilled in the Final Solution?”

  “I hate Kremlinology,” Etcetera said. “It obsessed my parents. Second- and third-guessing what the real powers behind Anon Ops were and who pulled their strings and why.”

  Kersplebedeb: “It’s not my favorite, either, but there’s a difference between obsessing over tea leaves and trying to figure out if the next missile is headed your way. Let’s get supplies packed and stashed by the doors, vehicles checked and charged, make sure everyone’s got a suit.”

  “We can’t object to that.” Limpopo got Etcetera’s screen down and stuffed it into a pocket. “Dis, can you help? Get the word out, throw up a git to track what’s done and what needs doing?”

  “Already doing it.” Dis never stopped believing in the Big One. No one who’d worked on uploading and simulation had—it was the unspoken motivation behind the project, only way you could be sure zottas wouldn’t genocide is if they knew that you’d come back as immortal ghosts in the machine to haunt them to the ends of the earth.

  Even as she did it, she worried about Akron, and wondered what was happening with Tam and Gretyl and Seth.

  [xiii]

  Seth’s alarm roused him to check on the snow every hour, first to see if it was safe to get moving; second to ensure he wasn’t entombed under an immovable drift. The other two set theirs at twenty-minute offsets. He managed to doze off the first hour in the uncomfortable cocoon. The chime woke him with a violent start. He experienced near-panic while he tried to figure where the exact fuck he was. Terror so adrenalized him that he wasn’t drowsy when he went back in, so he played an old acoustic minigame he’d been addicted to as a kid, matching the rhythm and pitch of the tones in his earbud with finger-taps and whistles.

  The suit’s interface surfaces were three generations removed from the ones the game was designed for, and were specialized for wildly different purposes to the surfaces he’d grown up with. The game was a lot harder until he tweaked the way the interfaces registered.

  Playing made him nostalgic for the hundreds of hours he’d logged on the game, until he remembered why he’d stopped playing—he’d beaten another kid, Larry Pendleton, to whom he was peripherally connected, part of the same massive grade-nine class at Jarvis Collegiate. He didn’t know Larry well, but they sometimes were in the same groups, and he’d figured Larry was, if not cool, at least not a turd.

  But then Larry said, “Hey, good game, Seth. Guess you’ve got a natural advantage, though.”

  Everyone either didn’t understand what Larry meant, or pretended they didn’t. Seth understood, immediately: “Because you’re black, you’re better at rhythm games. Because you know, black people got rhythm, everyone knows—” Seth saw Larry dropped the remark in a way calculated for plausible deniability, wiggle room to claim it wasn’t racial, that Seth was being oversensitive and social-justicey.

  The unspoken deal with his white friends was he wasn’t allowed to talk about being black, except for the lightest of jokes. To acknowledge he was the black guy in their white crowd was tantamount to accusing them of racism: Why am I the only black face here? It was a deal everyone understood and no one spoke of, especially the Asian and Desi kids in their cadre, because everyone was supposed to be race-blind and being the Angry Minority was a buzzkill for everyone.

  He boiled with shame and anger at fucking Larry Pendleton, who was decades away in default and maybe dead of something antibiotic resistant or in jail or working a precarious job and hoping he didn’t get fired, which was all any of them were doing. But he jammed down the shame and anger of pretending he hadn’t noticed the racism, pretending he wouldn’t always be probationary.

  He spent the hour thoroughly asking himself whether he was a black guy or a walkaway, or a black walkaway, or something else, or all of the above. It was not a question he often asked. Thinking about it made him angry. He didn’t like being angry. He liked being funny and horny, carefree, perennially underestimated, which had many advantages. Being thought of as harmless—“he’s a black guy, but he’s cool, doesn’t make a big deal of it”—was something he’d cultivated early on. It meant he heard and saw things his black friends didn’t see. A lot of it was casual racism. Some of it was good. He got to be more than his skin.

  Being stuck in a box was driving him fucking crazy. All he could think about was skin color. He couldn’t even see his skin in the dark. Then there was the rhythm game, Thumperoo, which he’d played the whole time, until his wrists felt RSI-ish.

  He checked the time. Forty-one minutes until he was scheduled to stick his head out. He sighed. His wrists hurt too much to keep playing and—

  The hatch opened and above him grinned the face of Tam, sun glinting off her visor, obscuring one of her eyes and one of her cheekbones. But he’d know those lips anywhere.

  “Come on, Sleeping Beauty. Prince Charming’s here to wake your ass up.”

  She helped him out. The storm clouds had blown away, leaving blue skies, darkening with impending dusk. Slanting late sun made the fresh powder glitter like it had been dusted with diamond c
hips. Gretyl stood in powder up to her thighs. She flopped on her back and made an angel. “Thank god that’s over. Vuko jebina!”

  He cupped his hands over his visor—for effect—and howled.

  “The wagon won’t make it back until this freezes or melts. It’s snowshoes from here.” Gretyl brushed snow off the tarp they’d put over the survival gear when they’d dumped it out to make room for their bodies.

  She tugged at the tarp. Seth and Tam slogged over to help. They sorted through the neat bundles until they found snowshoes. None of them had ever assembled the shoes, and they couldn’t figure it out. Seth rooted further until he found an aerostat and sent it up, looking for walkaway signals to bridge to the suits. They watched it putter, spinning and tacking, receding to a dot on the darkening sky. Their suits started to make welcoming, subliminal interface buzzes as they in-spooled and out-spooled messages. They brushed away the incoming alerts for a minute, clearing stuff until they could get the snowshoe FAQs.

  Gretyl got there first. She threw a shoe frame atop the snow in a particular way, so it landed partially embedded, then she clicked a mechanism none of them had figured out was clickable until they saw the video. The shoe sprang open and sent powder up in a pretty flurry, lying flat on the surface. She spread the bindings, then did the same with her other shoe.

  Seth and Tam got their shoes spread out, too. They all engaged in involuntary slapstick as they struggled to put them on. Eventually, Tam came to Seth, who had fallen into the snow and was half-submerged with legs in the air. She seized one of his feet and shoved it into the bindings, then did the other, then hauled him upright. He lifted the shoes clear of the snow and set them atop it, and found to his delight that he was stayed on the powder, which creaked beneath the shoes’ webbing. He gave Tam a double thumbs-up, and she handed him her shoes and flopped onto her back and stuck her feet in the air.

  He wasn’t as good at putting them on as Tam, but that was okay. The clear skies, the entombment in the cargo-pods, and the thought of a walk through the woods on these cool-ass outdoor prostheses made them giddy. He wished he could take her into a pod, get naked, and fuck her brains out. It was a comforting randiness. The suit was surprisingly accommodating of his erection. He contrived to brush his hand over Tam’s crotch as he helped her up—this was something they did often, with the ardor of school kids who’ve just found their first fuck-buddies and can’t believe that they’ve got all the ass they want on tap, twenty-four/seven—but the suits were too padded for him to tell if she had a boner, too. He decided she did—she’d changed her hormones recently and hard-ons were a welcome side-effect of the new regime they both enjoyed.