Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

  They held hands—she squeezed, which made him even hornier—and approached Gretyl, who scowled at her shoes, having tramped a wide circle as she tried to put them on. They flanked her and she looked from one to the other.

  “Oh no,” she began, then Tam put one snowshod foot behind her and Seth pushed and over she went, legs in the air, howling in mock-outrage. They clipped the shoes to her feet as she giggled, pulled her upright.

  Seth looked at his heads-up, pulled up the wayfinder, and pointed. “Thataway,” he said.

  They tramped on. As the sun set, they activated nightscopes, and watched the starlight and enhancement algorithms turn everything milky, glowing—a fairyland.

  [xiv]

  Natalie napped a lot. Maybe she was depressed, or maybe it was dope in her food, though Dis didn’t find any record of that anymore in the patient management stuff in control-central.

  Maybe it was her mind’s defense mechanism, shutting down in the face of boredom and frustration. Her friends said they’d come get her. Gretyl promised, but days had passed since she’d heard from them. Her father stopped visiting. She didn’t know if that was because she’d gotten under his skin, or because he’d blown town for some business, which was the sort of thing he’d always done. Mom and Cordelia visited for regular, sterile half-hours. Every time they left, she swore next time, she’d freeze them, sit in stony silence.

  But then they arrived and opened with rehearsed pleasantry—“Oh, Natty, it’s been such a day—” and smile, and she was a Redwater girl among Redwater girls, the sisterhood of ladies who lunch and who would never be allowed to be more than that. Her mother missed Greece, and often passed the whole half hour in a monologue about a particular boat captain, or wonderful honey, or a shrine a Greek family brought her to, approached by knee-walking pilgrims who wore painter’s kneepads to protect themselves as they humped up the hill to the icon of Madonna in the humble building.

  Cordelia talked about school, professors, and a boy—a man, she said—whom Jacob would never approve of. It was easy to hold up her end of these conversations. All she had to do was nod and make noises and not stand and scream it was bullshit, everything Cordelia dedicated her life to was worse than a sham, fueled by delusional conviction that the money, power, and privilege of the Redwaters was something they’d earned—and therefore, everyone without lovely money and power and privilege hadn’t earned it.

  Sometimes, the merc came in. Natalie had listened carefully for someone to mention her name. She desperately wanted to know. The merc was a bridge between worlds. She had to live in the real world where privilege was obviously undeserved. How could she meet clients and not know? She had to be able to make it not matter, because her paycheck depended on her not letting herself care, on understanding walkaway well enough to snatch them. The merc wasn’t her friend, but she was important.

  No one called her by name. When Jacob wanted her, he changed the pitch of his voice, switching to a command tone he always used on bodyguards. It was different from the command tone he used on domestic servants, more militarized, like he was LARPing a blue-jawed sergeant in a war movie. When Mom wanted the merc, she switched to her wheedling tone, the “do me a favor” voice, less gracious for the iron-clad conviction the favor would be done.

  Cordelia never spoke to the merc. She treated her as if she were invisible, a walking C.C.T.V. If she ever looked at the merc, it was with fear.

  The merc was key.

  The next time the merc came in—bringing in a basket with snack food, fresh underwear and shirts, and a pointless shatterproof vase of unseasonal hothouse flowers that had undoubtedly originated with her mother—Natalie locked eyes with her.

  “We could do a side-deal. No one would have to know, not at first. They can’t keep me here forever. Eventually they’ll get bored of the crazy sister in the attic and ship me to a nut-hatch and kick you out on your butt. If I can get out, I can get a contingency lawyer to harass them into unlocking my trust fund. You know how I feel about money, you’ve seen how I want to live. I’d sign it over to you. Airtight and irrevocable. It’s more than they’re going to pay you, more than they could ever pay you. A fortune. A dynastic fortune, the kind that will still be intact when you’re an old lady and your kids are fighting over your deathbed for the dough.

  “I’m sure you’re thinking if you did this you’d be radioactively fucked. That’s why I’m offering you the whole package: life without having to work another day, ever. Automatic deposits, every month, for you, your kids, their kids. The way the trust is written, there’s a good chance that when Mummy and Daddy kick the bucket, there’ll be fresh dough in the trust, even more for you and yours. All they can offer you is a bed under the stairs—I’m offering to turn you into a zotta.”

  The merc looked at her.

  Natalie smiled. “You know I mean it.” She hesitated, because this part was dangerous, if she’d misjudged the woman. “There’s no video of this conversation. Check for yourself, then let’s deal.”

  A maybe-smile crossed the merc’s face, so subtle Natalie might have been kidding herself. She set the basket down and backed out, like she always did, with that confident stride that said, I’m not afraid of you, this is just best-practices.

  As soon as the door clunk-clunked, Dis said, “That was…”

  “I know. I’m sick of being a fucking damsel. Princess Peach sucks. I wanna be Mario. It’s been weeks. This isn’t going to get better. Dad isn’t going to wake up and say, ‘what the fuck was I thinking? Nice people don’t kidnap their daughters!’ If I can’t fake capitulation, he’s going to bury me in some deep hole, a boot camp for rich bitches where they shave your head and make you crawl in mud until you mewl for mercy and then they send you home with a zombinol pump in your appendix and your smile stapled on with sutures.”

  “But if she rats you out, they’ll catch me.”

  “So what? If you’ve pwned them as thoroughly as you say, they’ll have a hell of a time rooting you out—in the meantime, they’ll have to move me, which might be a chance to get away. You’re backed up. Getting caught isn’t the death penalty—just email your diff file to another instance. You can walkaway. That’s the whole point of the Dis Experience.”

  Dis was silent. “I don’t want to leave you alone.”

  “You think I can’t handle it.”

  “I don’t think anyone could handle it, or should have to handle it alone.”

  Natalie remembered how glad she’d been when Dis first spoke, the relief of having an ally. Even not knowing whether Dis was compromised, whether Dis herself could tell if she had been compromised, it had been such a relief. Before Dis, she’d been so isolated that she’d cracked up.

  “Having you here kept me from doing more to help myself. You’re my Deus Ex, promising salvation from afar. I was going insane before you got here, because I was in an insane situation. I’ve been sane since—even though my situation’s more fucked up. That’s not a good thing.”

  Another machine silence. Natalie remembered when Dis was a fragile, cracked-up simulation, how she’d gentled her while she worked on the problem of her own sanity. There was a symmetry in Dis returning the favor.

  “I’m not a sim, Dis. I’m a human being. I’m cracking up because my situation is terminally fubared.”

  Could a sim cry? There was a thickness to Dis’s voice: “I understand.”

  “Are you okay? You shouldn’t be able to feel sad, right?” She was alarmed, thinking of how spectacularly off the rails Dis could go, remembering the terrifying personality disintegrations at the end.

  “I think so. I— There’s a bunch of us, a bunch of Dises, who’ve been trying to loosen the strings on our personalities. Gretyl’s work on lookaheads lets us do it. When we started, we were sparing with lookahead, steering clear of the banks, trying to go down the middle. We’re so much better at lookaheads—the code’s getting tighter—we’re working with wider ranges, closer to the edges.”

  In spite o
f herself, Natalie was fascinated. “But why?”

  Even as she asked it, she understood. Isn’t that just what she was doing? Finding madness to let her meet terror with terror, meet the impossible with the uncompromising?

  “Because I’m not me. That was the one thing we promised ourselves we wouldn’t say. Everyone is counting so hard on simulation. It’s everyone’s plan B, their escape hatch. The more time I spend in this—situation—the less certain I am that I’m still me.”

  “Of course. Not having a body, being transubstantiated to software, that has to change you. Like being stuck here changed me.”

  “I don’t mean I haven’t been changed. I expected I’d be changed. I’ve been around. We outgrew the ‘if I cut off your finger, wouldn’t you still be you?’ word game years ago. I’d still be me, but a different me. If you kept chopping away by centimeters until there’s nothing left but machine, I’d still be me, but I’d be a me that was traumatized and changed.

  “The ‘me’ that counts isn’t just a me I can recognize. It’s a me I want to be. If the only way to be me in silicon is to be a me that only manages not to hate myself by literally refusing to allow myself to think the thought that I should be thinking, then fuck that.”

  “I almost understood that,” Natalie said, smiling despite herself. “Sorry, I don’t mean to joke—”

  “It is funny, in a what-the-actual-fuck way. But it’s terrifying. There’s so much riding on my stupid existential crises—”

  “That must be terrible.”

  “I mean, fuck, I’m an immortal machine-person who can be in hundreds of places at once. I haven’t been imprisoned by my father. I haven’t been kidnapped from my lover. I have no business whining, just because I’ll be lonely if I can’t be with you—”

  “I’ll miss you, too, if they nuke you.” A thought occurred. “Do you think they could capture you and fuck with your parameters to torture you?”

  “No, that’s the one thing I’m dead certain of. I’m all dead-man’s-switches. If they fuck with me, I’ll be securely erased before they know it.”

  “That’s a relief. I’ll miss you, but we’ll talk again. I’m getting out, no matter what. When I do, you’ll be there.”

  “I’m sorry for being needy. I’m a shitty robot. It’s just—” Another pause. Did Dis throw these in for dramatic effect? Was she doing a gnarly lookahead? The voice that came next was so soft that Natalie barely heard it. “No one knows me like you. No one’s seen me in the raw, without rails on my sim. No one can understand the full possibility-envelope of all the ways of being me, and how constrained those possibilities are in the me I am today.”

  Her palpable sorrow—her voice synth had gotten so good—ripped Natalie. Her eyes flooded. She wiped furiously. She didn’t want to be hobbled with concern for someone else’s welfare. She wanted to look after herself.

  The thought snagged like a fishhook. It was a Jacob Redwater thought. A default thought. A zotta thought. It was not a walkaway thought. It was the kind of thought she’d spent years learning to unthink. It was so easy to be a special snowflake and know her misery mattered more than everyone else’s. That could be true. Jacob lived a life where his happiness trumped all others’. But it only worked if you armored yourself against the rest of the world. To build a safe-room in your heart.

  “I love you, Dis.” She didn’t know if it was true, but she wanted it to be true. She wanted to love everyone. Everyone failed to live up to their own ideals. She wanted to fall short of the best ideals. “I love you for who you are now, and for who you are when you’re losing your shit. They’re both you.”

  Machine silence. It stretched. She was about to speak, but clunk-clunk the door unlocked. The merc came in, carrying a tray with a carafe of—long experience told her—lukewarm, shitty coffium that had been denatured of the good stuff.

  The merc closed the door, clunk-clunk, and spun the carafe’s top. The liquid inside steamed in a way that the drinks she was allowed as a prisoner never steamed. She remembered the smell from childhood, cottage trips with Redwater cousins from the dynastic branch, with implanted tracking chips and bodyguards. It wasn’t coffium, it was coffee—prize beyond measure, beans grown in specially isolated fields tended by workers who were microbially screened twice a day for the first signs of blight.

  The merc set the tray down on Natalie’s breakfast table, arranged two china cups, poured—volatile aromatics filled the room with impossible, vivid smells.

  “Cream?” She’d spoken so few words that the voice surprised her. Warm, deeper than Natalie remembered. Was there an accent, a hint of a roll on the r?

  “Not if that’s what I think it is.” She sniffed more deeply. “Yergacheffe?” A cousin—older, well-traveled—taught her to pronounce it with a soft y, a rolled r, a hard ch and a breathy h at the end. It sprang from her lips with ease, a status marker in four syllables. The smell was unmistakable, a fruitiness and acidity that was nothing like other storied beans, the fullness of Blue Mountain, the acid fruitiness of bourbon. Her mouth watered.

  “That’s what it said on the bag.” There was an accent, maybe Eastern European. Growing up, she’d heard a lot of those accents—kids whose parents made fortunes doing nonspecific “entrepreneurial” things. Like the true Redwater cousins, these kids had bodyguards, who also spoke with the accent, only thicker. “The cook sent down a grinder and a press.”

  She sipped, eyes closed, lost in reverie. Natalie saw she was lovely in a predatory way. Not hot—not her type—but maybe someone you’d model a videogame character on in a specific type of videogame aimed at a certain kind of boy. “It’s the first coffee I’ve drunk in Canada. Only get it in Africa, usually. Chinese bosses always insist on it.”

  There’d been a Chinese-Nigerian girl in high school, guarded more heavily than the Russian kids. She had a short temper, and woe betide anyone foolish enough to ask to touch her hair, which Natalie understood. Her name was Sophie. Natalie hadn’t seen her since graduation, but she sometimes thought about the stories Sophie told about the floating super-cities off Lagos where she’d been raised, hopping from one aircraft-carrier-sized walled garden to another.

  Natalie reached for her coffee. Her hands shook. She wished they didn’t. She raised the cup and didn’t spill. She was out of practice with real hot beverages, but managed to sip. It was very hot, and flavorsome in a way that “bitter” didn’t capture. It tasted nothing like coffium, except you could see where one was related to the other in an indefinable way. There was an oiliness to it she hadn’t anticipated. Mouth feel. Another class marker, knowing those two words and having the confidence to use them without feeling bourgie. The dynastic Redwaters could say “mouth feel” without batting an eye, and memorably, cousin Sarah used it to describe a boy she’d met at boarding school in Donetsk.

  She swallowed. Caffeine was so primitive, she expected it to cudgel her like a caveman, but the high, which came on fast, was surprisingly good, a tingling with a smooth peak and a mellow comedown. No one did caffeine anymore. There were options for getting up. It was such a genteel zotta thing, like sherry and cream tea. The zottas had been hoarding the best stuff.

  She drank more. The up was so clean. It steadied her nerves, made her want to move.

  “My name is Nadie.” The merc held out a strong, small hand that gripped hers with calibrated firmness.

  “I’m—Iceweasel.”

  Nadie smiled, small square teeth. “I know. We were inside your nets for two days before I took you. Wasn’t hard.”

  “It’s not supposed to be,” Iceweasel said. “We want people to read the public stuff. Almost everyone isn’t a zotta, which means that almost everyone should join the walkaways.”

  “Some zottas join, too.” Nadie had this Russian—Bulgarian? Belarusian?—deadpan thing, the corner of her mouth a precursor to a smirk, a deniable microexpression that registered nevertheless.

  “Some do.”

  “I’m interested in the information sec
urity aspect of our earlier conversation.”

  “Does that mean we have a deal?”

  “No.” Nadie’s microexpression flickered. “We don’t have a deal. Calm yourself.” She pointed to a readout on the bed that alerted as Iceweasel’s heart-rate and endocrine signifiers thwacked the red zone.

  Iceweasel made herself breathe. Nadie was playing head games. That’s what she’d done from the start. It would be delusional to hope for anything else.

  “I’m calming.”

  “I want to know about infowar. I know you had no jailbroken devices you could use to probe and pwn the safe room. I searched you. No one who comes in is allowed to bring anything that could be used to launch an attack, except your father, and even he submits to an inventory whenever he leaves. The attack came from outside, which should be setting off IDS alarms. That’s not happening. There’s something very bad that I never noticed. This makes me feel foolish.”

  “I don’t think less of you.”

  A microexpression telegraphing dark amusement. The woman was a savant of emotion-hockey.

  “I hope not. I hope you understand I’m a serious person, and I’m not your friend. I’m not your enemy, either, though I have been your opponent. I’m very good at what I do. Good enough that you want to be straight with me. Good enough that if we end up enemies, it should worry you.”