Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

  “A service. There are times when someone has to go from one place to another without being noticed. Your father uses these services. They can be co-opted, but only with very high-level pressure, and never quickly. They are expensive. The record of this journey is not something anyone can find easily, not even the police. Especially the police.”

  Iceweasel struggled into the rest of the clothing, found a parka with a fake-fur fringed hood, decided to leave it for now. Between the drink and the blasting passenger compartment heater, she was starting to sweat. She rubbed a spot on the compartment’s side. It made a window for her, showing the streets of Toronto sliding past at a steady clip, the private-hire car sliding nondescriptly through the traffic without any of the showy maneuvers of her father’s cars.

  They crossed the Bloor Viaduct, heading west. There was something … wrong.

  “Did you see that building?”

  “What building?

  “With the metal shutters and crash barriers.”

  Another building, similarly fortified, slid past. Then another, windows smashed and blackened by fire, scorch marks stretching up far as she could see, two stories’ worth of façade gone altogether, a round hole in the building’s skin like a screaming, black-toothed mouth, charred furniture inside.

  “Was that one bombed?”

  “There’ve been riots. It’s why your father is away.”

  “Who’s rioting?”

  Nadie snickered. “Depends on who you ask. The opposition says it’s provocateurs staging false-flag operations. Security services say it’s radicals and walkaways and people paid by foreign governments to destabilize Canada.”

  “What about the rioters themselves?”

  Nadie shrugged. “Some say they’re black bloc. Some are the usual concerned citizens, down with corruption, up with democracy. Many young people, a lot of kids from the general strike contingent—once you’ve been kicked out of school, why not go running loose in the streets?”

  “General strike?”

  “Lots of things happened in default while you’ve been off in the woods, Iceweasel.”

  Intellectually, she knew this was true. Sometimes new walkaways told stories about default. Once they’d built the second B&B, she stopped caring. Being a walkaway had once been in opposition to default, but after a year or two, being a walkaway became who she was. Default was a distant, terrible phenomenon, like a volcano that occasionally sent up plumes that overshadowed her sky, something she could do nothing about except avoid.

  “How does it get to be a riot? When I was—” One of you. She caught herself. “Before I left, they’d kettle you before you took ten steps. The only protests you saw were tiny, shitty ones with permits, behind fences down alleyways—”

  “Sure, when it was a few protests. But the protesters are canny. Some get together at one site, wait for the kettle, then others gather somewhere else, and somewhere else—if they have numbers and patience, they occupy all police resources and still take to the streets. A lot of them get arrested afterwards, from footage, or if they leave DNA or their gaits are recognized by the cameras, but they’re canny.”

  She stared more.

  “But why? What do they want—”

  Nadie shrugged again. “What everyone wants. More for themselves. Less for people like you.”

  Iceweasel felt a jet of anger, saw Nadie’s microexpression, testing.

  “Like you, you mean. Not mine anymore. You can have it.”

  “We take care of that next.”

  The car barreled west and west, through increasingly unfamiliar neighborhoods. For an unbelievable stretch—forty-five minutes, in swift traffic—they moved through a forest of towering high-rises whose south faces were skinned with sun-tracking mirrors focusing light down on solar arrays in their high-fenced yards.

  Beyond these were brownfield sites, chain-link-fenced, ringed with ostentatious sensor arrays intended to intimidate anyone pondering climbing over. She knew this kind of place—it was the mainstay of walkaways. She did strategic assessments of the sites, figuring out camera-angles, estimating the salvage that could be dragged away from within the fence’s perimeter before a security crew arrived.

  They turned off the two-lane highway onto a rural road, then into the remains of a small town. It looked uninhabited, an abandoned main street with a gas station and a grocery store and a shuttered Legion Hall. Another car was parked by the roadside, low-slung, with blue flashers on top—a police interceptor.

  Her asshole tightened and the taste of pumpkin-spice stomach acid rose up her throat. “Shit.”

  Nadie shook her head minutely. “Don’t worry.”

  They pulled in, head-to-head with the police car. The doors of their car opened. They stepped out—Iceweasel grabbed the parka as she did, pulled it on, heart hammering. The doors closed themselves and the car carefully reversed between them, did a three-point turn on the main street and drove the way it had come, their old clothing in it.

  “It’s off the grid now.” Nadie watched it drive away. “It’s heading for a scrapper, will get broken up there, all identifying transponders smashed and melted. Single-use cars are more expensive, but it’s the only way to be sure nothing is recovered.”

  Iceweasel was so distracted by the thought of a single-use automobile that she almost forgot about the police interceptor. Then its doors clunked open and she plunged her hands into her parka’s pockets—lined with soft fleece—and bit down her rising panic.

  The woman who got out of the interceptor was middle aged, in a duffel coat and mud-spattered yellow rubber boots. She was Asian—Chinese maybe. When she looked them up and down, her fleece earmuffs slid and some of her gray-streaked black bob came loose and blew in the wind.

  “Weapons?” She had a strong voice, unaccented, commanding.

  “None. But if you have any, I would like to negotiate with you for them.”

  The woman pursed her lips. “Smart-ass. In, before we freeze.”

  Nadie walked to the interceptor and made to get in, waved impatiently at Iceweasel: “You first, come on.”

  Moving like she was in a nightmare where you can’t stop yourself from going into the room where the monster waits, she drifted to the interceptor, stooping to enter. She swallowed panic at the smell, which was purely tactical, eau de zip cuffs and ruggedized interfaces and body armor. The older woman entered from the other side, and then Nadie came in behind her and she was sandwiched in the middle. She stared at the heavy plexi separating the passenger compartment from the front cop compartment. There were grommets set into the floor, walls, and ceiling, molded into the bodywork. For restraints. She swallowed once more.

  “Calm, calm. Come on, no need for all this.”

  “She’s shaking like a leaf. Young woman, there’s no need. I used this car because it was the fastest, most secure means of transport at my disposal. You aren’t under arrest. You aren’t being kidnapped or rendered, or being taken to a lonely country lane where you’ll be killed, your body slid into a trench—”

  “This is supposed to be reassuring?” Nadie’s tone was bantering. This spooky shit was her element, rendezvouses in commandeered official vehicles in ghost towns.

  “Fine. The point, Ms. Redwater, is that you are perfectly safe and have no cause to worry. My name is Sophia Tan. I know your father, of course, and I know your uncles better.”

  The name rang a bell. Iceweasel studied Tan’s face. It was familiar.

  “You were … deputy premier or something?”

  She laughed. Her smooth skin sprouted laugh lines. “No, dear, I was attorney general. The Clement years. We met, though I had forgot about it and I suppose you did, too. But my social diary doesn’t lie. You were a schoolgirl, a charity event for something your uncle worked on, the scholarship fund for Upper Canada College.”

  “You’re right, I don’t remember. I hated those things.”

  “Me too.”

  She was warming up. She unzipped her parka, took deep
breaths. Nadie looked from her to Tan.

  “Onto the business at hand,” Tan said. She touched her fingertips together in rapid succession. “Evidentiary.” A line of red lights along the compartment’s ceiling began to pulse. “Everything we say and do now is being recorded on tamper-evident storage. The car will transmit a hash of the video to a federal data-retention server at ten-second intervals. Everything we say is admissible in any court in Canada or any OECD nation. For the record, I am Sophia Ma Tan, Social Insurance Number 046 454 286. Ms. Redwater, please identify yourself.”

  She cleared her throat. “Natalie Lilian Redwater, Social Insurance Number 968 335 729.”

  “Ms. Redwater, when you attained your twenty-first birthday on July 17, 2071, you came into full possession of your family trust, a copy of which I obtained from the Public Trustee. I have a hard copy of the trust documents here.” She retrieved a plastic document folder from a pile by her feet and held it up, flipped the page and did so again, repeating the process forty times. Iceweasel’s eyes glazed.

  At last, she was given the papers. They were vaguely familiar—she’d signed a set of documents on her eighteenth birthday, with her father and someone from the family law office, a Bay Street white-shoe firm called Cassels Brock. The young woman from the firm made a point of explaining each document in detail, seeking verbal confirmation of her comprehension at set intervals, while a bulky, sealed evidentiary camera peered at them. This was a reversal of that process, undoing what she had done.

  “Ms. Yushkevich, please identify yourself.”

  Nadie had slipped smoothly into waiting, that relaxed attention/inattention she’d had during the long stretches of guard duty at the start of Iceweasel’s imprisonment. Now she came to life like a machine woken from sleep-state: “Nadiya Vladimirovna Yushkevich. Belarusian passport 3210558A0101. Bahamian national ID number 014-95488.”

  The rest of it was call-and-response, orchestrated flawlessly by Tan, with endless professional patience for bureaucratic ritual. She referred periodically to a long checklist, made them re-do any step that was less than flawless. Once, Iceweasel stumbled six times in a row over the complex wording of her statement of noncoercion and mental capacity. Tan gave her two precisely counted minutes to calm herself before giving her the wording again. Iceweasel got it perfect.

  As their throats ran dry in the heated car interior, Tan produced waterskins, sipping at her own, pinching it shut and tucking it on the bench between her and Iceweasel.

  “That’s that, then.” At last. The sun had set. The sky was murky with low cloud. The rising moon visible as a dull glow above the tree line. “End evidentiary.” The red lights went out.

  “Won’t my dad’s lawyers know we’ve done this?”

  “Oh yes,” Tan said. “I’ve made very powerful enemies today. Ms. Yushkevich and I have an arrangement that compensates me adequately for that.”

  In the dim light of the compartment, it was impossible to read either face.

  “Now what?” She remembered the woman’s joke about dumping her body, realized if that was in the cards, now would be the time. “Time to bump me off?”

  “Certainly not,” Nadie said. “When this is challenged in court, any sign of foul play will make my case much harder.”

  “Oh.”

  “Besides,” Tan said, “we like you. Nadie spoke very highly of you.”

  She didn’t know what to think. Nadie was a killer ninja super-spy—far as Iceweasel could work out, Nadie viewed her as a piece of complicated, delicate furniture.

  “I like her, too,” she managed.

  Tan did something with her fingers and the windows depolarized, showing the true view of the outside, not a video feed. The smudgy sky, the black silhouettes of the winter trees, the crumbling buildings.

  “You have everything?” she said to Nadie.

  “Food, water, power, if you have them,” Nadie said.

  “Just as you requested.” She nudged a backpack on the car’s floor with her toe.

  “Phones? Clean ones?”

  “Couldn’t do that on short notice. But I brought you fresh interface things, rings and such. I keep a stash, factory sealed and bought through anonymizers and dead-drops, just in case. They’re old, so you’ll want to bring up their patch-levels before you expose them to wild network traffic.”

  “That will do,” Nadie said. To Iceweasel’s surprise, they shared a long embrace, almost a mother-daughter thing.

  “Look after yourself. And take care of our little Iceweasel. She seems a nice person. Besides, it wouldn’t look good for either of us if…”

  “As far as I’m concerned, she’s a client. I don’t lose clients.”

  “I know it.” She drummed her fingers and the door locks popped and the lights came up, making the windows into dark mirrors.

  “Come on,” Nadie said.

  Tan held out her hand. Her skin was dry, her hand frail, an old woman’s hand, much older than her face. “Best of luck. God knows if I was your age, I’d do the same. This all can’t last. Even if it can, it shouldn’t.”

  Iceweasel met her eye, nodded. She didn’t understand exactly what was going on, but she had an inkling now.

  She stepped out, zipped up the parka, pulled up the hood, found a pair of thin, plasticky gloves that were fantastically warm while being so membranous they were almost surgical gloves.

  Nadie had already zipped up. She raised a hand to the police interceptor, more a-okay semaphore than bye-bye wave. It pulled away smoothly. They watched the taillights disappear, then stood in the closed-in, frigid dark.

  “Now what?” Iceweasel said.

  Nadie’s voice was full of ironic cheer. “Now we walk away. What else?”

  5

  transitional phase

  [i]

  The first thing Etcetera said: “This wasn’t what I expected.”

  Kersplebedeb whooped, and Gretyl smiled and rubbed her eyes.

  “Welcome back, buddy.”

  “Am I dead?”

  “That,” Kersplebedeb said, “is the million-dollar question.”

  “Why only a million?”

  “It’s not inflation-adjusted. I’m a walkaway hippie, can’t be bothered to keep track of money.”

  “I feel—” The voice stopped. There was a long pause. Gretyl looked at the infographics, saw the processor loads spiking across the cluster. She’d downloaded the latest lookahead patches and they were supposed to radically reduce loading, but their performance so far had been unimpressive. But then, they’d had to recruit 30 percent more compute-time to get Etcetera running than they’d banked on, and so maybe he was an outlier. That was the problem of optimizing all simulation using a single sample—Dis—for benchmarks.

  “You feel?” she prompted, shooting a look at Kersplebedeb to stop him quipping, which he did when he was stressed and holy shit, had he ever been stressed since they’d started this project.

  “Numb, I guess. Seriously, am I dead? I mean the me that was made of meat and skin, is that body dead?”

  “That body is dead,” Gretyl said. “Murdered.”

  “Executed,” Kersplebedeb said.

  “Shit.”

  The infographics went crazy.

  “I can see you’re freaking,” Gretyl said. “That’s understandable. You wouldn’t be you if this news wasn’t upsetting. But the numbness, that’s the sim, it’s trying to keep you from going nonlinear. It’s damping your reactions. There’s a danger you’ll end up in a feedback loop where you get more damped, which makes you feel weirder, which triggers further damping.”

  “What do I do about it?”

  “We’re still figuring it out. You’re a beta-tester.” She didn’t want to think about what would happen when they told him Limpopo was gone. If they told him. No, definitely when. “But we’re hoping it’s one of those things where if you know it’s happening, you can inoculate yourself. Recognize it. Like cognitive behavioral therapy. Realize you’re freaking, and the thing yo
u’re freaking about is the fact that you’re freaking.”

  “You’re asking me to take deep breaths?”

  “Without the breathing part,” Kersplebedeb said.

  Gretyl shot him a look.

  “I feel like I’m breathing.”

  That’s good, Gretyl thought. Iceweasel’s notes from Dis’s awakening said introspection about sensations of embodiment correlated with metastable cognition. She missed Iceweasel so much. Reading her notes was like chewing glass. The local instance of Dis that shared time on Etcetera’s cluster tried several times to make contact with her sister at Jacob Redwater’s house, but hadn’t reached her.

  “You should be able to feel it. It’s a basic part of the sim, feeding ‘all clear’ data to your autonomous nervous system. It’s a replay attack against it, running a loop of everything at the time you were scanned.”

  “That would explain why I’m thirsty. I remember when I sat down, I really wanted a drink, I had cotton mouth for the whole scan. Feels like just a few minutes ago.” The infographics showed emergent stability, fewer oscillations, more green bars and blossoming charts.

  “Seems like you’re calming.”

  “I guess I am. I feel calm, but weird. Still numb. It’s—”

  They waited.

  “It’s scary, Gretyl. I’m dead. I’m inside a box. When I wasn’t like this, I could play word-games about whether this was death, but Gretyl, I’m dead. It’s weird. Back when I was alive, I thought the problem with being a sim—in a sim? Am I a sim or in a sim? Shit. I thought the problem would be the conviction that you were alive. Now I see it’s the opposite. I know I’m dead. I still feel like me, but not alive me. Why didn’t I ever talk to Dis about this? Fuck, fuck, fuck. I’m dead, Gretyl.”

  “Dis is here, if you want to talk to her. She helped prep your sim. The cluster’s ad hoc so we weren’t sure if there’d be enough capacity to run both of you, but if you want to talk to her, we can boot her.”

  “A native guide. Like the guy who takes Dante through Hell.”