Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

  But as an actual old lady with gray hair and wrinkles, she understood the silences. She didn’t have to talk to Seth about most things, because she had him modeled so well in her mind, she knew what he would say to practically anything she might say to him—and vice versa. They could sit together, not speaking. The silence wasn’t distance, it was closeness. She’d catch him looking and grinning sometimes. She’d grin back. Those grins might be charged with more sexual innuendo than the horniest moment of her entire—admittedly confused—teen years.

  The third weirdest thing was Seth himself, who—for all he could sleep like he was in the world championships—didn’t feel old. She’d come on him once, sitting on the bedside, staring at his bare legs, bare lap, the gray, wiry hair, the veins, the sagging, wrinkled skin. She’d realized with a start he was practically in tears, which was not like the Seth she modeled so well in her own mind.

  “What is it?”

  “This isn’t me. I’m a young man. When I see myself in the mirror, I double-take. This isn’t how I see myself.”

  “Is this about your hair? Because I could introduce you to Dr. Wibulpolprasert—”

  “It’s not the fucking hair. I don’t give a shit about my hair—it’s this.” He slapped his thigh viciously.

  “Easy.” She smoothed his hand.

  “You don’t understand, it’s like there’s a different person looking out of the mirror at me—”

  “Seth?”

  “What?”

  She looked at him for a long moment. Saw realization slowly dawn.

  “Oh. You understand.”

  “I understand.” She lowered him gently to the bed, held him until, goddamn him, he fell asleep.

  Now it was 3:15 in the morning. He was asleep again. She caught him mid-freak more than ever. She worried. She knew what it was not to recognize the person in the mirror. She understood the nagging sense of wrongness. Part of her wanted to go upside his head and tell him to grow up, if he wanted to feel dysphoria, he should try being born trans, try a whole world telling him that he was something he wasn’t.

  She knew it was pointless. Pain was pain. He was being told by everyone around him, in ways subtle and gross, he wasn’t the young man he felt like. Worst of all, she knew, was his body stubbornly insisting on being an old man’s body.

  She’d felt traces of whatever Seth was going through. They’d passed. She’d been through this when she was younger. She could handle it with grace. She could work through it with better thoughts and changes to her hormone regimes. She wasn’t in denial like Seth. Seth had been very boyish looking until, suddenly, he wasn’t.

  She padded the hall, ear cocked for other people moving around the house, tugging her robe shut. The hall lights were muted and the skylight revealed a cloudless night tinged with city lights, not so many to drown out the swollen moon, the spray of stars. There were walkaways up there, some old farts from the Thetford days. She chatted them sometimes, though high latency made it more novelty than social occasion.

  No one was up. The lights dialed up when she drifted into the kitchen, brighter over the prep-surfaces, dimmer over tables, the house guessing she wanted to prep something before sitting, nudging her. There were pink glows in places where there was work to do—some cooling leftovers needed to go into the fridges, a few out-of-place pans set upside-down to dry on the big prep-surface and forgotten. The house knew who’d forgotten them. If they wanted, they could have live leaderboards of “chore heroes” and “mess miscreants” splashed on surfaces around the place. Some houses put them on bathroom mirrors. You’d confront the stark reality of the division of labor while you were swishing your morning tooth-juice.

  Tam and Seth were B&B people. Limpopo people. People who’d been touched by Limpopo refused to turn on leaderboards. The reason to clean up after yourself was you respected your housemates and wanted a place where anyone could walk up to anything and use it, without having to put away someone else’s shit first. When spots were consistently under-maintained, the solution was to figure out why it was hard to get that spot reset, not figure out how to shame people who weren’t doing something that inevitably turned out to be more of a pain in the ass than it had any right to be.

  The other houses swore by their “reputation economies.” Limpopo-descended households were the ones where the good designs for living that worked well and failed well came from. They had the nicest house spirits, literally and figuratively. In a Limpopo house, the fact that you were pissed off at your housemates signaled a design opportunity.

  She put away the pans and stuck the leftovers in the fridge. Contemplated the imposing wall of sealed tubs of food and ingredients.

  “I’m snackish.”

  The house knew what that meant. The lazy-Susan shelves spun, presenting her with three options: ginger and honeycomb ice cream with so much ginger it could blow your head off, which she loved more than was decent; jerk goat and lentils; weird freeze-dried almond cakes that were doped with chili and cardamom so fiendishly addictive that they’d made the collective decision to remove their files from the house repo. Eventually temptation always won out and someone mirror-pulled the latest version. The recipe kept getting better.

  “Like you even had to ask.” She picked up the almond cookies, squeezing the rim to pop the seal and smelling the mouthwatering almond smell as she crossed through the archway, around the carp pool that bubbled softly in the cooler, wetter air, into the small lounge.

  She flumfed on a pile of cushions and picked out a single cake and bit, savoring the crunch, the sweetness and fire that spread through her mouth. She whimpered at the deliciousness. She knew she’d finish the whole batch.

  She fired her finger at the far wall. It screened, showed her favorite hangouts, queued messages for her, news items from feeds judged likely to please. A few higher-priority reminders from people she liked and trusted bounced to let her know they were waiting. She crunched a second cake. Goddamn they were good.

  “Who’s awake?” She repeated herself because the house misapprehended her through her mouthful of food. The screened wall showed faces, avs and handles, highlights from rooms where stuff was happening, pulsing things closer and further as conversations waxed and waned. She had the contradictory feeling of wanting to talk to someone but not wanting to talk to anyone, a stuck-in-a-rut 3:00 A.M. feeling.

  She flumfed again, waved away the screen. There were books, movies, but that 3:00 A.M. wanting-something-but-nothing feeling went for those. She was nostalgic for the excitement of near-death.

  “How do you deal with it?”

  “You mean me?” Limpopo’s voice hadn’t aged, though there were algorithms for making the voice age as the years went by.

  “Who do you think? The house?”

  “I just deal. I’ve got bumpers. When I get to the edge, they knock me back.”

  “Do you ever turn yourself off? Go into watch-cursor mode?”

  “Haven’t been tempted. I think it’s the trauma of my wakeup, all those years—”

  It took fourteen years before anyone figured out how to stabilize Limpopo’s sim. That reflected the long gap between World War Default and the Walkaway Decade, which was a dumb name everyone hated, but at least it had a built-in expiry date. It was also Limpopo’s idiosyncrasies, her weird neuroanatomy. That weirdness was practically normal. When they’d succeeded in bringing up Dis and then, briefly, CC, there was going to be a set of categories you could sort imaged human brains into, like blood types, and each used different sim parameters.

  Scans were more like fingerprints than blood types, each with distinctive and uncooperative wrinkles (literally and figuratively). Stabilization of sims was resistant to overarching systematization, pigheadedly insisting on remaining art, not science.

  Between chaos and the intractability of human brains, Limpopo lay dormant for a long time. When she woke, she immediately grasped the situation. It helped that Etcetera was there. For a time the two had been fast friends. They�
��d even conducted a famous set of discussions on the years Limpopo had missed, all-important years of chaos when no one had been sure what was going on, posting an hour of voice every day, then running on huge clusters that let them absorb millions of replies to their discussion and integrate it into the next day’s debate. The Limpopo/Etcetera Talks were as famous in their own way as the Feynman Lectures.

  Neither ever publicly explained their falling out—nor had either told Tam what it was about (not that she’d asked, though she’d burned with curiosity). They’d kept it secret as long as possible—it wasn’t like house spirits went out to dinner together—but eventually someone produced a signed email from Limpopo to Etcetera in which she told him to go fuck himself forever. That was it, instant viral gossip evil that went around the world.

  The gossip lasted longer than most scandals, because of the questions it raised about sims. If Limpopo and Etcetera had been soul mates when made of meat, how could an accurate simulation get to a point where they hated each other and never wanted to speak again?

  Tam wished there was a graceful way to raise it with Limpopo, explain she thought it was bullshit, most relationships came to an end, the fact that two people fell out of love could be cited as proof the sim was faithful as much as proof it was inaccurate. People grew and changed. A true sim was true to its originator, and what kind of freak wouldn’t be changed by waking up inside a computer?

  “A lot of years,” is what she said.

  “Not aging gracefully, is he? It’s ironic that he looked so young for so long; it let him pretend that he was immune.”

  “None of us can be exactly the person we want to be. I’m not delighted about my hips, don’t like that I’ve lost my night-vision—”

  “Sometimes, it’s something you can get used to, sometimes it’s not. You know there are some kinds of body-mind mismatch that people just can’t—”

  She sighed. “How do you cope?”

  “Being a head in a jar? Bumpers. While I never go into suspension, I sometimes dial myself way slow, let myself dream. It wouldn’t be the worst thing to switch off for another decade. It was refreshing to get that time-lapse view. Imagine if I suspended and left instructions not to wake me for a century.”

  “Sounds awful.”

  “Think it through. Pretty much everyone you loved would be around, in some form. The world would be an amazing new place, jetpacks and shit—”

  “Maybe gone back to default. There’s plenty of walled cities, the Harrier-jet-and-mountaintop set. They spent a hell of a long time on top, who’s to say they won’t get there again?”

  “That’s what you lazy assholes are for, fighting that shit. Wake me when it’s over. I like the sound of that.”

  “They’re right, you’re not Limpopo, she’d never have wanted to sit out the action.”

  There was a longer pause than was comfortable. Tam worried she’d offended Limpopo. She was about to apologize, then—

  “No, there was action the old Limpopo would have wanted to sit out. No one is pure. You guys give me so much sainthood for never wanting leaderboards, never letting anyone keep track of the fact that I was doing all that heavy lifting—but it wasn’t because I didn’t crave the brownie points. It was precisely because I was jonesing for recognition that I refused it. Every day was a struggle to squash the part of me that wanted to be seated on a golden throne and carried around the town square.”

  “Everyone craves recognition, Limpopo. Look at the kids—” There were eleven kids in the house, from six mothers: two dribble-factories that had only just started sleeping through the night, then a smooth bell curve that tapered off at twelve or thirteen (she could never keep track, they had the contradictory property of being impossibly young and always much older than she remembered). “They’re always wanting credit for their work.”

  “They also want to monopolize their parents’ attention, are clutter-blind, and the small ones are incontinent. There are many virtues to the state of childhood, but just because children do something, it doesn’t follow we should aspire to it.”

  “You’ve had this discussion before.”

  “There’ve been kids around as long as there’ve been walkaways. There were always parents who found the risk of taking their kids out of default was less than the risk of leaving them in. The ‘accountability’ stuff in schools accelerated it—once they started paying teachers based on test scores, parents saw their kids getting crammed relentlessly by the system, no room for helping them with their problems or passions. Then they threatened parents with jail for not sending their kids to school—”

  “They didn’t really do that!”

  “Tam, I know you never paid attention to parenting and children, but this can’t have escaped your notice. It was a huge scandal, even by the standards of the day. A bridge too far for lots of parents. There were some big lawsuits. Ever hear of the Augurs?”

  “Rings a bell, ish?”

  “Both parents raised by residential school survivors, saw that their daughter was miserable, decided to take her out for homeschooling, wanted to get her in touch with her First Nations heritage, but refused to buy official homeschooling materials or pay for homeschooling standardized tests. They put ’em in jail.”

  “I sort of remember.”

  “It was huge. The number of parents who walked away—it was when we got the first nursery at B&B, had to adapt refugee-ware from the third Arab Spring, get all the fabbers doing toy-safety checks and mounting changing tables all over the place.”

  “Before my time. I was at the university then.”

  “Right.”

  “There were kids there, but not in my group. The LGBT crowd, I guess it was kinda toxic to people who wanted kids, that bullshit about ‘breeders’ that seems funny when you’re a kid but is shitty in hindsight. Imagine how Gretyl and Iceweasel would have felt if they’d had to hear us talking that way.”

  Iceweasel had delivered two kids, both boys, without much drama, though Gretyl was a bundle of nerves through both labors and had to leave the room, both times. The boys were, what, six and eight? Five and eight? She was a shitty honorary aunt, though she loved both of them in an abstract, cautious way that kept its distance from their penumbra of boogers, spit, and destruction.

  “It’s Stan’s birthday next week.”

  “How do you do that?”

  “What?”

  “Keep track of everyone’s birthday?”

  “I’m the house spirit. Comes with the job. Setting reminders, triggering them when any subject comes up, adding context around the corner. Everyone’s house does it.”

  “But you’re not a bunch of code, you’re a person. It’s different when you’re conversing with someone and that person just happens to recall, perfectly, all the minutiae context brings up.”

  “You could have that. Just get your eyes done.” She was almost totally night-blind now, had to magnify text to extra-huge to read it. Lots of people had the surgery, got displays implanted at the same time, all the tickers and augmented reality bullshit the goggleheads lived for, without the goggles. She hadn’t yet, because the tech got better fast. If she was going to let a laser-cutter near her eyeballs, she wanted to make sure it was for the first and last time and not have to go back next year for a crucial upgrade. She was holding off until her vision was unbearable. “For the record, ‘not code, a person’ is a philosophical point we could run for hours, though I’m tired of it.”

  “Not my thing, either.” Though it was something she often thought about. “Talking to you isn’t like talking to someone who’s getting dribs fed to a HUD by some dumb algorithm. With you, it feels natural.”

  “If there’s one thing I’m not, it’s natural, but thank you.”

  She yawned, checked the time. “Four a.m. Shit. Well, the sleepies are finally arriving, I should get my head down and make them welcome.”

  “You gotcha. Love you, Tam.”

  “Love you, too.” She meant it, knew Limpopo m
eant it. She’d loved and been loved in every walkaway place, but this was the first house that loved her.

  She snuggled up to Seth and put her arms around his paunch, kissed his back where the sparse gray hairs tickled her nose. Her hips ached. She closed her eyes, found her sleep.

  She roused a bit when Seth got up a few hours later. She half-parsed the sounds of him putting on slippers and jim-jams and getting a hint about the closest free toilet, felt him come back in, sit on the bed, looking at her. She smiled a little. He murmured, “It’s okay, you sleep,” and squeezed her hand, leaned over slowly, and with a grunt, and kissed her on the forehead, then on the lips, stubble rasping her skin.

  He rubbed her back and she groaned appreciatively, just for the joy of human contact on a drowsy morning.

  “Gonna get breakfast,” he murmured. She turned her head and kissed his fingers.

  “Kay.”

  “Another bad night, huh?”

  “Just sleepless. Not bad.”

  “Sleep in. Doesn’t matter when you sleep.”

  “Right.” She pulled the covers over her head.

  Stories helped lull her to sleep. She cracked one eye, wiped a surface onto the headboard, and tapped a recording of an old Terry Pratchett novel, the one about the founding of the Discworld newspaper. She’d listened to it a thousand times and could listen to it a thousand times more, and let the reader carry her sleepwards.

  She drifted on words and buttery sun that leaked around the edges of the windows’ polarization film, sometimes waking herself a little with her own soft snores, and then—

  “Tam?”

  She sat bolt upright. Seth’s voice did not often reach that panicked level. She was wide awake, looking at him, standing in their doorway, breathing hard, eyes wide, sparse hair sticking out at mad-professor angles. He held a forgotten piece of toast.

  “Jesus, what is it?”

  “Limpopo is on the phone.”

  She blinked, confused.

  “Seth?”