Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

  “Private security like you?”

  “Of course like me. What was my job, if not keeping rich people from being pitchforked by poor people? When technology made surveillance cheaper, calculus changed. They could hold onto more money, dispense with pretense that being rich was from doing well, go back to idea of divine right of kings, people born rich because fate favors them. It was more cost-effective to control people who didn’t like this idea with technology than giving crumbs to support the fairy tale of rewards for virtue.

  “As you say, the very rich want to become richer. Once money is a measure of worthiness, the more money, the more worthy. They say, ‘it’s a way of keeping score.’ Zottas play to win. Like oligarch wars in Russia, rich people notice old school chums have very tempting fortunes and all bets are off.”

  “Now you’re one.”

  “I’m not. I’m rich, but I’m not zotta. Things are coming to a head, could go any way. There will be blood spilled in months to come. I don’t want money to keep score. I want money to buy freedom—freedom to go other places quickly, freedom to buy choice food or pay for medical care. I have survived many things, Iceweasel, even more than your walkaway friends in their hiding places. I plan on surviving this.”

  “I hope you do.” Iceweasel meant it.

  “It’s mutual.” She levered herself up and reached for her panties.

  [iii]

  They moved Limpopo around. First, a place she thought of as “the jailhouse,” because of the barred door and the intermittent sound of prisoners down the cellblock, thanks to flukes of ventilation. Her cell was big enough for a narrow cot made of springy, metallic strapping that couldn’t be separated from the frame, no matter how hard she worked, and a seat-less clear plastic toilet, a sink molded directly into the wall. She got a roll of toilet paper and a packet of soap every third day, and used it to clean her body best as she could. Her papery orange jumpsuit—too fragile to wind into rope—refused to get dirty, even when she smeared it with scop from the edible squeeze-tubes she got three times a day.

  The guards who gave her food and toiletries refused to talk. They wore biohazard suits over body armor, goggles and face masks. Once, she was attended by a guard whose visor dripped with mucousy spit. Behind that spit, the guard’s face was contorted with rage. He practically threw her food-tube, shit-roll, and soap, slammed the door (it refused to make any noise above the hiss of its airtight seal).

  Twice, they took her from the cell and brought her to a room for questioning. She was fitted with sensors for these sessions. They shaved her head, attached electrodes to her bare scalp, more at her wrist, over her heart, her throat. She didn’t struggle. Who gave a shit about hair? The important thing was to save her energy for what came next.

  The questioner was not in the room, but present as a voice that came from an earbud the guards inserted. She heard the questioner’s breathing, like he was a lover whispering in her ear. It reminded her of the spacies’ binaural earpieces, but this was to unnerve and disorient her.

  “Luiza?”

  “If you like.”

  “Limpopo, then?” The voice was unemotional.

  “If you like.”

  “We’ll start with something easy.”

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “I would like your pass-phrase.”

  She rattled off a string of nonsense characters.

  “Now the other one.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “The other one. This is the plausible deniability pass-phrase. It’s not hard to tell when you deceive. The infographics give me enormous insight into your mind.”

  She tried to keep her mind still. The act of stilling her mind would also show on his scans. She wondered what he was measuring, how accurate it was. There were brilliant neuro people in the Walkaway U crowd. They said that everyone knew half of everything they believed to be true about the human mind was bullshit. No one could agree which half.

  Time stretched. She wondered if they would hit her, shock her, burn her. They’d killed Jimmy and Etcetera, slashed them across the throat and tossed them into the snow to die.

  “I won’t tell you.”

  “All right.” Guards unstrapped her, led her back to her cell. Days passed. There was nothing to do except stare at the walls. She had always enjoyed solitude, thought of herself as an imperfect walkaway because the company of others was sometimes oppressive. But when ten days came and went with nothing but her thoughts and her desperate, self-defeating attempts to meditate, they came and got her. Found herself actually anticipating the prospect of talking to the voice.

  They shaved her head of the short stubble, reapplied gel and sensors.

  “Today we make a scan,” the voice said. “We will be able to simulate that scan and subject it to questioning under circumstances that transcend and obviate much of this business. Depending on the characteristics of this scan, its reliability and pliability, we may no longer need you at all. Is this clear?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Your pass-phrase.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we have walked your cohort’s social graph, and concluded you are a core node.”

  “That sounds like a good reason for me to keep my mouth shut.”

  “We can try to coerce the information out of you. We can even try physical coercion. You know, we can make a scan from people who are no longer technically alive.”

  It was bullshit. Had to be. CC always maintained it would never work, not without blood flowing through the brain. She didn’t understand the biology, but she knew it had to be bullshit. Didn’t it?

  “That would be quite a trick.”

  “Once we are inside your data, we will use it to effect internal disruptions of your cell. This will complement our strategy of physical interventions.”

  “But why?”

  “Luiza, don’t be ridiculous. You know why.”

  She refused to get angry, though the extended period of solitude made her jumpy and emotional. “Because you know it’s us or you, right?”

  “No. Because you and your friends are terrorists. Luiza, be serious. This isn’t about jealousy. It’s about crime.”

  “What crime?”

  “Luiza.”

  “What crime?”

  “Be serious.”

  “Squatting?”

  “Trespassing. Theft. Theft of trade secrets. Piracy on an unimaginable scale. Circumvention of lawful interception facilities in fabricators. Production of scheduled narcotics. Unlicensed production of potentially lethal pharmaceuticals. Fabrication of military-grade weapons, including mechas and a variety of U.A.V.s. Unlicensed use of electromagnetic spectrum, including uses that can and do disrupt emergency, public safety, and first-responder networks. Need I continue?”

  “What do you want from people? What are they supposed to do? There’s nothing for us in default. Nowhere to live. Nothing to eat. Nothing to do. We are surplus. We’ve gone away, started over, not bothering anyone.”

  “You’ve taken what isn’t yours. You live by taking what isn’t yours.”

  “How else are we supposed to live?”

  “What is your pass-phrase?”

  “When will you do this scan?”

  “It’s underway now. This conversation will help to calibrate it.”

  “Bullshit. I’ve had scans before.”

  “The scanning techniques used by walkaways are crude and unreliable. We have better technology. It’s an advantage of not being a criminal underground.”

  “I’d rather be a criminal underground than a secret police.”

  “We’re not police.”

  “Spooks, then.”

  “Hardly a meaningful term.”

  “I would like to speak to a lawyer.”

  “You are an illegal immigrant, a Brazilian national with an expired passport and no visa. What makes you think you’re entitled to legal representation? How would you pay for it?”

  “I would lik
e to speak to someone from my consulate.”

  “The Brazilian embassy has an official policy of cooperating with counter-terrorism efforts.”

  “Why do you even need my pass-phrase if you’re so fucking godlike? Sounds like you have everything you need.”

  “We have many of the things we need. There may be more inside your network traffic. Besides, we have excellent results from impersonating members of your cult to one another. It’s surprisingly effective.”

  “As is telling me you’re doing it, so I spend all my time trying to figure out which people are sock-puppets?”

  “You won’t need to worry about talking to those people anymore. You have a very good name, so getting even a small number of people to believe you’re a traitor will create enormous internal discord.”

  “What should I call you?”

  The breath whispered in her ears. “Michael will do.”

  “Michael, has it occurred to you that you don’t have anything to bargain with? There’s nothing you can give me that will make me want to give you my pass-phrase, for all the reasons you’ve just set out. You and everyone you work with make it your mission to destroy any chance of the human race surviving to the end of this century. So what is it you hope to get from me today?”

  “I have many things to bargain with, Luiza. I could offer to spare the lives of your friends. We know where they are—we always know where they are. We are capable of being surgical in our strikes against them. You saw how we came for you.”

  In the hours she was alone with her ghosts in her cell, the one that visited her most was Etcetera. She kept seeing his face, hearing his voice. She’d had dreams where she felt he was cuddled behind her, one arm over her, hand between her breasts, his stubble raspy on her back, breath tickling her skin. Waking was like one of those nightmares-within-a-nightmare, in which you believe you are awake, but are still dreaming. Only she had been awake and imprisoned. Never to see Etcetera again. Sometimes she’d tick off his absurd names like a rosary, eyes squeezed shut, trying hard to remember the feelings from her dreams, his smell, the sound, the way he’d held her. The realization he was dead caught her over and over, making her breath catch like a blast of cold air freezing her lungs.

  “I saw how you came for me. What you did.”

  “You’re upset about the loss of your boyfriend, the man with the names.” He sounded faintly mocking, or maybe she was reading that in. She was distantly angry, the emotion a shooting star barely visible against the blazing light of the sun of her grief. She fancied she could hear them calibrating their model of her, placing a high value on such an exotic emotional state.

  “You’re changing the subject. When you murder as you did, you do not make the case for helping you. When you take away my dearest love, you show me you shouldn’t be trusted. When you bargain with me, strapped into your chair, you make me think you’re lying about your ability to run me as a sim. The only reason I can imagine for you to have this conversation with me is because I have something you need, and you can’t get it any other way.”

  There was no reply to that.

  After several minutes, she said, “Hello?”

  No answer came. Time passed. Being confined to her tiny cell had been awful, but at least she could move her limbs, shift her posture. Go to the toilet. Strapped in like this—

  She stifled her rising panic. If they wanted to demonstrate their superiority, they might terrorize her by leaving her like this. Feeling terror would only demonstrate the viability of the tactic. She might be incarcerated by these people for a long time, and they were doubtlessly building a dossier of effective techniques for securing her compliance.

  She waited as long as she could. “I have to pee.” There was a guard in the room: visor, mask, earpiece. His body language told her he was looking at something she couldn’t see, hearing something she couldn’t hear. Maybe he was watching T.V., or a countdown-timer that ticked down the seconds until this part of the experiment was done. She could tell he’d heard her.

  “Please.”

  He pretended he hadn’t heard her. “Michael, if you make me piss myself, you won’t do anything to convince me that you’re a humane, reasonable person I want to cooperate with.”

  She clamped down on her bladder and thought about other things: hard coding problems she’d returned to again and again when she had a moment, trying to get things that should have worked to work; Jimmy’s story (carefully skirting his death), the fight she and Jimmy conducted at the original B&B. She envisioned the steps she’d taken to help recondition the Thetford bicycle fleet, a huge cohort of printed carbon-fiber mountain bikes that were bent, broken, and smashed by the previous warm season’s worth of off-roading, which she and Etcetera and others systematically reconditioned, creating a factory line to strip, evaluate, reassemble, and test each piece, brainstorming solutions to the perverse mechanical problems of stubborn physical matter.

  She really needed to pee. She wondered if they’d given her a diuretic in her last squeeze-tube. It’d be a way to ensure this situation arose. Maybe they wanted to calibrate their model with an image of what happened when she was humiliated.

  “I don’t have to clean it up.”

  The guard didn’t acknowledge her.

  She held it for two more minutes, by her slow count, then let go. She grabbed her mood with iron pincers and refused to let it veer into humiliation because it was just piss. They won if she let this enrage her. That was far worse than the cold, stinking piss that stuck the paperish coveralls to her legs.

  She didn’t say anything after that. She focused on those bicycles, the delight of suddenly realizing the solution to a puzzle that stymied them all, pulling the troublesome bike out of the pile, having it work. Etcetera came up with gnarly ways to get mangled parts free, adjusting gearing mechanisms that seemed unadjustable.

  Her breathing slowed. It occurred to her she was almost dozing as she contemplated these memories. She might spend the rest of her life with these memories, polishing them like a widow polishing framed wedding photos. So be it. She could still walk away, in her mind. Fuck them.

  Then she wondered if this was another part of the calibration, and had to clamp down to keep from crying.

  Try as she might, she couldn’t find that place of memory again. Eventually they brought her back to her cell.

  The next day, they put her in leg irons, bagged her head, and brought her into a vehicle that jounced and jostled for an unguessable time. She was brought into what was unmistakably a bus that stank of unwashed humans and sounded like a bad day on a mental ward. She was belted into a seat, her hands attached to restraints at her sides. There was a person next to her, also seated. When the guards who’d brought her in went away, she said hello.

  “Hello.” It was a woman’s voice.

  “Can you see?”

  “You mean, do I have a bag on my head? Naw. Why do you?”

  She shrugged.

  “Where are we?”

  “Kingston,” the voice said.

  “Ontario?”

  “Not Jamaica.” A snort of laughter. Limpopo got the sense others listened in on their conversations, a localized stillness of eavesdroppers.

  “Where does this bus go?”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “I’m not. It’s— They killed my friends, took me in, held me. Bagged me and brought me here. Now I don’t know where I’m going.”

  “Prison. Kingston Prison for Women.”

  “Oh. I guess that makes sense.”

  “If you say so.”

  Limpopo had been away from real human contact for so long she caught herself warming to this stranger, who could be an undercover interrogator, or even just not a nice person.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Jaclynn,” the woman said. “What’s the G stand for?”

  “G?”

  “Your transfer paperwork. It’s stuck to your chest. Says you’re G. Denton.”

  She shrug
ged. She should have known she wouldn’t be committed to the system as Luiza Gil, let alone Limpopo. As toothless as the Brazilian consul was, as distant and hunted as walkaways were, for so long as she had her name, she could be found. She wasn’t to be found until they were ready to put her on display, if that day ever came.

  “G? To be honest, I have no idea.” She thought of Kipling’s “great grey-green, greasy Limpopo.”

  “Amnesia, huh?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “You’re a real mystery, you know? Bag on your face, no name.”

  “I have a name. I just don’t know what name they’re sending me up under.”

  “What name were you tried under?”

  “No trial. Just snatched. Political. I’m walkaway.”

  “One of those? Figures. Seem to run into plenty of you-all whenever I’m enjoying the hospitality. Hey! Any walkaways on the bus?”

  Voices raised in reply. Catcalls and groans, too. Under her hood, Limpopo grinned. She wondered what “G” stood for.

  6

  the next days of a better nation

  [i]

  The weirdest thing about getting old was not sleeping. Tam routinely found herself awake at hours that she hadn’t seen since she was a teenager. Weird hours when you could spot unsuspected urban wildlife: foraging raccoons, stealthy foxes, bats. Seth, that asshole, didn’t suffer from this problem. Slept like a rock. A bald rock, didn’t have the decency to admit being self-conscious about his receding hairline (“what do you call one hundred rabbits running backwards?” he’d say whenever she raised the subject). She’d had a freak when her hair started going, did several consultations with walkaway docs around the world, found one in Thailand who specialized in trans people, got a file for printable pills she took every day. They did the trick.

  The weirdest thing about sleeplessness was the friendships she’d kindled with people awake and chattering in exotic timezones. The second weirdest thing about growing old was being with Seth. She’d always been saddened by old couples who never spoke to one another. Those long silences felt desperate. She’d promised herself she’d never end up like that, decades of aging, falling apart in the company of a silent, farting lump of a man, racing to see who reached the grave first.