Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

  “It was called Career Wizard. I mean, fuck, right? Kind of name you get by running a thousand A/B splits until you’ve got something middle-of-the-road inoffensive. Graphics were pointy hats, wands. Spell-book with a wizardly finger paging through the index while it worked magick to find you the perfect job for life. Hardy har.

  “Once it chose your career, it had lots of advice about how you get there. It was adamant I should take this course from the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, which sounded amazing, like I was going to hang out with Planck and Einstein and Gödel and dive through the universe’s navel and find its deepest secrets. Of course, hanging out with Max Planck is an elite experience. That one course was going to cost as much as everything else in my degree combined, plus a little more. An added fuck-you.

  “I tried hard to find a way around that course, looked at every permutation of other courses, and Career Wizard kept gonging me, telling me without good old Max, I’d be wasting my time and money. No one would hire me. It had percentages, estimates of how much extra salary I’d command with one high-ticket course.

  “My parents couldn’t afford it. They were maxed out on credit for my fancy high school. This was going to be my debt. I could get a loan. There were tons of lenders, and I could get a great package from Booz if I’d agreed to a six-year ‘internship’ when I was done.”

  Etcetera snorted.

  “I wasn’t that much of a sucker. Unpaid on-site internship in Saudi, living in Booz’s compound, drawing company credit to pay for shit in the company store that costs twenty ex what it cost back home—whether or not they give you a job afterward, they’ll get a cut of your paycheck until you’re dead.

  “There were boards where we were trying to figure this out, guys my age about to commit to this mountain of debt, people in the middle of it, people who’d been through it and were doing internships, maybe even with jobs. It was hard to tell what was going on. There’s selection bias. No one who is happy with how things are going joins one of those boards. They exist for the sole purpose of airing grievances.

  “The other thing is everyone who isn’t there to bitch is a paid astroturf shillbot, some dickweed running thirty sock puppets through ‘persona management’ apps to help them keep it straight. The discussion quality wasn’t super-great, but it sure was depressing. You know research says the best way to predict if something will make you happy is to ask someone—anyone—who’s already done it? Well, everyone I’d met who’d done it said it was slavery.

  “I wasn’t the only one who noticed, but there was such a huge-ass, all-consuming sense that anyone who didn’t buy a ticket to the lottery was going to end up as dog food.”

  “I know that one,” Etcetera said.

  “Not me,” Limpopo said. “I got shit-ass grades, and my school sucked, had one of the worst uni admission rates in the country. Most of my teachers never noticed me, and the ones that did assumed I was a sub-moron.”

  “No way,” Etcetera said.

  “Way.” She’d made a point of acting stupid, so she wouldn’t explode into raw fury.

  “I knew I was smart. I could do good shit. In grade twelve, I’d modded a fabber to output wicking textile, half the weight of standard stuff, twice as strong. I couldn’t sell it or post the makefile, because it violated a hundred patents, but I’d gotten top grades.

  “Mom and Dad were all over the idea of me going to uni. They’d both gotten degrees and swore it had been worth it, though they would owe money until they died, and neither one had ever held a job for more than a couple years. I once overheard them talking about how fucked it would be if I didn’t get a good job because neither of them had a pension and they’d need me to feed them once they were too old to get another job after the next layoff.

  “The pressure was crazy. On the boards, people were saying, hey you assholes, you keep bitching about how everything is fucked up and shit, and there you are, getting ready to play along with it like good debt-slaves. Everyone knows there’s an alternative.”

  “That’d be us,” Etcetera said.

  “That’d be you. No one wanted to say the word ‘walkaway’ because it was a superstition, say their names three times fast and the spies would target you for full-take lifelong surveillance. Anyone who knew walkaways were a thing couldn’t be trusted.”

  “I don’t think it’s that we can’t be trusted.” Limpopo had night-vision on and everything was blue-green false-color, snow glowing like a green LED. “Obviously we can’t be trusted. But as a class, people who heard of walkaways are going to be a different risk from people who haven’t. Once you know there’s an alternative to default, there’s a chance you might walk away. It’s like crypto, how anyone who searches on how to use good crypto gets marked for surveillance retention. It’s not that knowing how to keep a secret from the cops and spooks makes you dangerous. It makes you different.”

  “I don’t think that’s why they retain traffic for people who’ve googled crypto,” Jimmy said. “It’s because most people don’t use crypto. So some default-ass doofus sends you a message in cleartext about something sensitive. Then you send me an encrypted message about it—like, ‘there’s a guy who wants to go walkaway, where’s a good place to go that’s established?’—and you send encrypted messages around to everyone you know and get details and send them to me and I send a non-encrypted message back to my dumb-ass friend. Anyone who’s observing this transaction can make inferences about what went on inside all those black-boxed crypto messages.”

  “That’s probably true. The parallel still stands. Once you know walkaways exist, there’s a chance you’re helping walkaways, or getting ready to split from default, or, worse yet, do something to bring it down. Or trying to find people to come with you. If someone disappears into walkaway, you can find all the people they talked with, figure out who’s the infection agent, who else is likely to be infected, who to target for ‘de-radicalization’ therapy, and who to psy-ops and isolate.”

  “That’s what we figured, a big unspoken thing. Anyone who whispered ‘walkaway’ was shunned, either a provocateur or someone with a target on their back. It was the elephant in the room. So I asked quietly around to see who knew about crypto and anonymizers—”

  “They’re definitely the gateway drug,” Limpopo said. “I got into it through crusty cypherpunks who’d try and get party kids to use better opsec, handing out bootable sticks at underground parties.”

  Jimmy said, “Someone gave me one, but it wouldn’t work on the standalone machine we kept for diagnostics in the basement. Then someone I knew—stoner guy, always had the best shit—got me a connection to a dude who got me a little thing, disguised as a box of breath mints, with a false bottom with a little contact switch that would man-in-the-middle your network connections through an anonymizer.

  “After my time,” Limpopo said.

  “Sounds slick,” Etcetera said.

  “I guess so. But the breath-mints tin thing was a cheap disguise. It was printed shittily so after a week in my pocket, all the writing smudged. It looked like I was carrying around a piece of garbage.

  “But it worked. Slow, but it worked. From there, I got jailbreaks for my interface surfaces so I could get online with a less sketchy connection—faster, too. Then I started reading up on walkaways, their boards, the FAQs, reports from people who’d gone walkaway.

  “From this side of my history, I can see I was gone by the time I got that dumb breath-mints tin. It was just a matter of time. Back then, I agonized about it, felt like I was walking out on life itself. I’d never see my family again, I’d end up dead in a ditch.

  “It was like that up to the moment I hit the road, taking my bike on the train to Ithaca and riding into the mountains, heading for a place where there was an established group. They were gone by the time I got there, but I met someone who’d lived with them, an old woman who didn’t seem quite … there … and she pointed me north, so I headed upstate. I found a different group, older people, ex-military and
people whose pensions ran out. They were more paranoid than you guys, more American—the gun thing. But they made me welcome and didn’t laugh at my weird ideas about what was happening in walkaway land.

  “They had basic fabs, could source feedstock from stuff around them—a lot of it was sunk carbon they sucked straight out of the air. There were about fifty of them. People came and went … slowly. Maybe one or two a month, in either direction.

  “They’d found a way to stay still, on default’s periphery, without making much fuss. They kept their heads down, kept to themselves. They were walkaways because there was nothing for them in default—no rent money, no health care, no food. Their kids visited them sometimes, rendezvousing in the state parks on fake ‘camping trips’ that were the only way to hook up with grandma and grandpa without ending up in an ankle cuff. Some of them talked about finding some zotta who’d let them come and live on his land, be pet bohemians. There are lots of places like that. Walkaways make great fashion accessories.

  “This bored my nuts off. I wasn’t the first young dude to rock up in their bohemian retirement village with my heart full of fire. One guy took me aside while I was trying to get their fab to output the parts for a more ambitious fab, kind of thing you use for heavy machinery. That was the project I’d set for myself. He tried to lay out the facts of life for me.

  “‘Sonny, you have to understand, all we want is to be left alone. We don’t want everyone to drop out like us. We’re not proud of where we ended up. We want better for our kids and grandkids than we got. We did worse than our parents, and they did worse than their parents. All we want is to arrest that, make things better for them.

  “‘By coming here, we make ourselves independent. We’re like the tribal elders in the north pole, who’d go out on ice floes when they couldn’t hunt anymore, getting out of the way and not being a burden on the productive ones.’

  “He wasn’t dumb. Reminded me of my grandpa, who’d died when I was a kid. Cancer, he didn’t get it treated, opted to go fast with a pump button for pain, cremated and scattered to the wind, not one mark on the world, like he’d never lived. My grandpa—Zaidy Frank—wasn’t slow, but he’d never amounted to anything. He’d tried to do his best for Mom, tried to save a little to get her started, had borrowed to put her through school, worked two jobs most of his life. Never got forty whole hours a week unless it was rush-time and he was pulling eighty-hour weeks, spending most of the extra money on cabs to rush from one shift to another and to eat at company cafeterias because he couldn’t get home to pack breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

  “This guy wasn’t in bad physical shape, but he was seventy, wasn’t going to get any kind of job anywhere. He had been there for ten years. He liked working with his hands and checked me out on the fabs when I arrived, showed me their docs and buried expert menus. Almost a mentor, except a mentor is someone who leads and this guy couldn’t lead an expedition to the ice-cream store.

  “We got into an argument. It started friendly, got heated. Whether not making trouble meant default would leave them alone. ‘Well, we’re not hurting anyone, we’re not trying to get welfare or insisting on Medicare or VA benefits or Social Security. We’re living off grid, staying out of the way.’ Just waiting to die and trying not to breathe too loudly in the meantime. ‘Why would they come after us? Why would they put us in jail, which costs them money, when they can just leave us?’”

  “I tried hard to get him to understand. To get him to see if they don’t push back when pushed, default will just know they can be pushed harder next time. Trying to get him to see the superfund site they squatted would someday be something that someone wanted, minerals or a right-of-way or just a view not blighted by used humans. If default understood there was no one who’d put up any kind of fight, they’d be first to go. Default wouldn’t even notice, it’d just send the bulldozers to plow them under.

  “He didn’t believe me. Was patronizing about it. He’d been around the block, seen things. Recited a poem, ‘The old crow is getting slow, the young crow is not. The only thing the old crow knows that the young crow doesn’t know is where to go.’ Perfect self-serving bullshit, rationalizing the least-frightening action as the most prudent. There’s two ways of thinking about it: either the squeaky wheel gets the grease or the nail that stands up highest gets hammered.

  “To be fair, he was tired, had a tiring run, was old and sore and slow and all he wanted was to be left alone.”

  “You didn’t stay?” They were almost at the rise where they’d left the tractor. His limp was worse. He took a few steps, rested for a few breaths, took a few more. The pain must have been incredible, Limpopo knew, but he was lost in his story. She’d seen this on the road: conversation made distance vanish, especially the opportunity to open something difficult and meaningful. Something about talking while staring into the middle distance, created a confessional intimacy to rival post-coital cuddling.

  “Kept working on that fab, having these increasingly passive-aggressive talks with my friend, until he made it clear that if I kept on doing what I was doing, everyone would hate my guts. They were working with a local zotta, the guy who technically owned the land, to get permission to stay, a kind of do-gooder gesture from him. They would be tame. Pets.

  “So I walked away, found another place in New Hampshire, with enough guns to make that Ithaca bunch look tame. They were old, too—never expected to find so many old walkaways, but it makes sense, nothing left to lose. It’s gotta be clear there’s zilch chance of leveling up in default if you reach sixty-seven and you’ve never been anything but a temp.

  “But they were tighter. More radical. They were into gamification, making systems that tracked and advertised performance. It really worked. People busted their asses to get on leaderboards. The tops didn’t get privileges outright, but if you were in the top decile and you thought an idea was right, it carried weight.

  “I know you hate this, Limpopo, but one of the reasons I like it is it’s honest. When you talk, people listen, because you kick ass and bust your own ass to get shit done. When we do it your way, things are better than when we don’t. So the fact that no one says, ‘Hey, Limpopo is the big cheese and we do what she says,’ doesn’t make it not true, or even secret. It just makes the supposedly egalitarian basis of our lives bullshit.”

  They hadn’t walked in some time. His breath was ragged. There was one more rise to crest, and they’d be at the tractor. He could ride and they could swap batteries. Limpopo’s shoulder ached from where his weight rested. She swallowed her irritability, knowing that it had to do with coldness, stress, and exhaustion, not the offensiveness of what he’d just said. She looked at Etcetera, he looked back, telemetry from his face transmitted to her suit so that she could see his expression in night-vision false-color. He was handsome, her lover and best-ish friend. Compassionate, smart without being judgmental, which is all she’d ever aspired to. He had that inquisitive, quizzical expression at the weirdest times, like when he was coming, or now, in freezing dark.

  “Jimmy—” she started and Etcetera lunged at her and slammed her to the ground, taking Jimmy down with her. Etcetera’s whole weight—familiar, yet alarming—was on top of her and he was screaming something, broadcasting through his suit’s speakers as well as through the intercom: “Don’t shoot!”

  She craned her neck, saw the pair of white-glowing figures pointing weapons. The guns had flared, bell-like muzzles. They impassively pointed them at her and everything in her suit stopped working at once. There was a stutter of analytic infographics from Etcetera’s suit beside her as it attempted emergency power-on-self-test, and then it stopped.

  Inside the suit it was dark, cold, and lonely. There was a scrape as Etcetera moved above her, a suit-on-suit rasp, loud in contrast to the terrible stillness. She fancied she felt or saw a foot in the snow, moving on snowshoes similar to hers.

  Then there was another rasp and Etcetera’s weight lifted off with rough sliding motion. She rolled
to see him being jerked upright, moving weakly in the grasp of a person who had snapped his wrists together, strapping and bonding a handle to the scruff of his suit, and yanked him upright. Their suits must have had power-assists, which was something the Thetford crew did for work gangs, but never for long walks, because for those you wanted your power for heat, not playing superman.

  Her visor failed-safe transparent. Her eyes adjusted to moonlight. She saw the other yank up Jimmy, who thrashed weakly and got a hard shake for his trouble. He was tossed to one side like a rag doll, skidding face-first in snow. She lost track of him as white-gloved hands descended and hauled her up. Her attacker’s suit had no visible faceplate, just a smooth expanse of white.

  One hand held her aloft by an armpit, sore and alarming. The other hand probed her head, found the manual release for her visor, tugged it, scrape of suit-on-suit conducting through the helmet, and then a whoosh of cold air as the visor popped open violently (the manual catch was designed to free suffocating people, had a powerful spring in it). The sudden motion startled her captor as much as it did her and he—a he because otherwise her tits were crushed by her armor—fumbled her and nearly dropped her, and she had the presence of mind to squirm and break for it. He casually backhanded her face with his glove—a gauntlet made of something blade-stopping whose external layers had chilled to iciness, so cold it felt like nothing at all, numbing as it made contact, taking away some of her humid skin with it—and she saw stars.

  She looked at the blank faceplate, face aching, cold air making her eyes and nose water. She spat and hit it dead center, spit steaming as it froze. The head cocked. She sensed this person was conversing with the other who held thrashing Etcetera.