Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

  “The real Limpopo. Sorry, the living Limpopo. She’s alive, is what I’m saying. She’s alive. She’s on the phone.”

  She brought her hands to her cheeks, a silly way to register surprise, but there you had it.

  “Limpopo is alive?”

  “She’s talking to Limpopo.” He noticed the toast in his hand, stared at it, put it down. She took it away and bit it. It was slathered in butter, brewer’s yeast, and tabasco—Seth’s Platonic ideal breakfast.

  “Jesus.” She found her robe on the floor, put on slippers, finished Seth’s toast. “Come on.”

  The biggest common room had five others in it already, looking stunned and excited, silently listening.

  “They never let you write to anyone?” That was Limpopo’s voice—their Limpopo. The house spirit.

  “Never. I wasn’t the only one. There are—there were?—a bunch of us in policy-segregation, no visitors, no messaging anyone outside. Held under other names.” That voice was Limpopo, too, but older, an old lady’s voice, the voice of a Limpopo that had lived—where?—for more than a decade.

  “But now—”

  “Now the inmates run the asylum.” She sounded giddy. “There were three days when it was really bad. Almost no guards showed up. The ones that did were too scared to do anything except huddle in their control rooms and bark at us over the speakers. Not even that on the third day.

  “At midnight yesterday, click-clunk, all the doors opened. No guards. No admin staff. Nothing. Everyone was starving, of course. We found our way to the caf, once we figured out what was going on. Some of us ad-hocced a kitchen committee, got the fabbers running and fed everyone. Then someone called for volunteers to check out the clinics and started seeing to the sick best as they could. Lot of nurses in here and—sorry, I guess that doesn’t matter. No one here knows what happened out in default. When they used the comms room to call their lawyers, they said Corrections Canada had some kind of internal coup and no one there was talking to the outside world. They say it’s not the first ministry this happened to—apparently Veterans Affairs Canada did this last month? I don’t get a lot of high-quality news and analysis in jail—”

  Tam started to make sense of what she was saying. She’d been in jail. The jails had ruptured. Ruptured was the word they were using for government institutions that fell apart, turned into walkaway-style co-ops that gave away office supplies and opened up the databases for anyone who wanted a crack. She’d heard of ruptured hospitals, police departments, public housing—but jails were a new one. A big one.

  “Limpopo,” she said.

  Both of them answered, which would have been funny and might be later.

  “Sorry, not the house spirit, the living one.”

  “Who’s this?”

  “It’s Tam.”

  “Tam? No fucking way! Tam! You’re still there? Still with Seth?”

  She smiled and squeezed Seth’s hand.

  “Yes, he’s here, too.”

  “You poor fucker.” Everyone knew she was kidding, even Seth.

  “I’ve got him trained. He’s gotten old and slow, and I’m mean.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Where are you, Limpopo? I mean, physically?”

  “Near Kingston, north a bit. Past Joycetown. Kingston Prison for Women.”

  “Are you safe?”

  “You mean, are there murderers about to come and kill me? Not that I can see. I’m not worried about that. There are plenty of sketchy people in here, but there are plenty of sketchy people out there. Most of these women are my friends. Some are like sisters.”

  “Can we come and get you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, can we come and bring you here? Pocahontas is still here, and Gretyl and Iceweasel, and their kids, and Big Wheel, and Little Wheel, and even Kersplebedeb, though she calls herself Noozi now—”

  “Hold up a sec. I don’t know who half those people are. Shit, I don’t even know where you people are—”

  “Gary.”

  “I don’t know who that is either.”

  “Gary, Indiana. Nice place. World leaders in bringing back buildings from the dead. Colonized brickwork, smart trusses, big old places that haven’t been maintained in fifty, seventy-five years.”

  “A state that begins and ends with a vowel? You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

  “You’d love it here, Limpopo. You’re a hero.”

  “It’s true,” said Limpopo-the-house-spirit. “You’re a saint around here.”

  The other Limpopo groaned. “You’re killing me.”

  “Sorry, Limpopo,” Seth said. “We thought you were dead. Martyrdom was in order.”

  She groaned again.

  “Seriously,” Tam said. “Come and see us. Or we’ll all come see you. I don’t care which. We love you. We’ve missed you.”

  “Hey!” said house-spirit Limpopo.

  “Missed hugging and holding you,” Tam said. “And you should meet this other Limpopo, our Limpopo, she’s wonderful.”

  “Don’t suck up,” said the house spirit. “You’re getting mouse turds in your cornflakes for a week, asshole.”

  The other Limpopo laughed. “She sounds like my kind of person. Literally, I suppose. Fuck, who knew this week could get any weirder.”

  There was a crash and thunder of feet on the stairs, and Gretyl and Iceweasel burst into the room, preceded by their boys, who were comets of snot and destruction, squabbling over a toy even as they came through the door, the little one pulling the big one’s hair. Gretyl fluidly pried his fingers out of the curly mop, hauled him into the air and set him down away from his big brother.

  “She’s alive?” Iceweasel said, grabbing the bigger one and swinging him around—he laughed and flung his head back.

  “We’re talking to her now,” Tam said. “Limpopo, Iceweasel and Gretyl are here.”

  “Iceweasel is alive?”

  Iceweasel laughed. “I guess we have a lot to catch up on.”

  The younger boy suddenly looked at her seriously and pushed his hair out of his eyes. “You aren’t dead, Mommy.”

  “I’m not dead. Don’t worry, Jacob.”

  “Mommy?”

  “There’s two of them,” Gretyl said. “Boys. Jacob’s seven and Stan is ten. Say hello to Limpopo, boys.”

  “Limpopo?” Jacob screwed his face up. “The house spirit?”

  “No, another Limpopo. She’s a long way away and we haven’t seen her in a long time. We love her.”

  Jacob shrugged. Stan rolled his eyes at his younger brother’s slow uptake. “Hi, Limpopo! Hi, other Limpopo!”

  Far away, Limpopo cursed imaginatively, which made both boys’ eyes go wide and put smiles on their faces. Tam could see them storing away the language for future deployment. “Hello, boys. Hello, Gretyl. Hello, Iceweasel. It’s good to hear everyone’s alive and thriving.”

  “What’s it going to be,” Tam said. “Are we coming to you or are you coming to us? Because, darling, we have some catching up to do, and for all we know, default is going to get its shit together and come in there and kill or lock up every last one of you.”

  “That’s a possibility we’ve considered. There’s one more thing—the root auth tokens were left in the control center by a guard, that’s what we figure. We have this place pwned from asshole to appetite. Thing about a jail, it’s just as good at keeping people out as it is at keeping people in. Anyone who wants to take this place away is going to have a hell of a time.”

  Tam bit her lip. Everyone looked at everyone. Even the boys were quiet. “Limpopo. We don’t want you hurt. We’re walkaways. There are plenty of big, dumb institutional buildings you and your friends can occupy.”

  “Bullshit.” She surprised them with her vehemence. “They stole our lives. Locked us up. We earned this place. It’s ours. If we walk away, if we fragment, they’ll pick us off, one at a time. We’re never going to be anyone’s captive, never.”

  “You
’re going to stay in jail to stop yourself from being a captive?” Seth’s mouth, as always, ran ahead of his sense.

  “It’s no joke. We bought this place with blood, with our lives. It’s ours. It was our captivity. Now it’s our freedom.”

  “Limpopo,” Iceweasel said, softly. “It’s not like that anymore. Default isn’t the default. I know what it was like. It looked like war, they were going to lock us away or kill us. It changed. The zottas went to war against each other, fought for control over countries whose people refused to fight for any side, walked away with us, turned refugee living into the standard. It was the people who stayed in one place and claimed some chunk of real estate was no one else’s became weirdos. Everyone else hit the road when those people showed.”

  “Bullshit,” Limpopo said. “Maybe in your corner of the world. The state doesn’t just wither away. Someone paid those guards’ salaries for all those years, kept the slop coming into our fabbers’ ingesters. Victory isn’t a thing that walkaways will ever have. Walking away isn’t victory, it’s just not losing.”

  “We haven’t lost,” Iceweasel said. “There are enclaves of people who pretend that it’s normal and things will go back the way they were or were supposed to be soon. These days, it’s not about armed conflict, it’s war of norms, which of us is normal and who are the crazy radicals.” She paused. “Did you hear about the Iraqi invasion?”

  “A new one or one of the old ones?”

  “A totally new one. Iran was supposed to be invading Iraq because, shit, that’s been going on for a long time. Except this time, it didn’t. The pilots they sent into Iraq didn’t drop their bombs—they landed on Kurdish airstrips. The infantrymen, soon as they hit the battle lines, they refused to fight. Bunch of officers, too. Everyone’s kind of freaked. The Iraqi side gives the order to kill the shit out of these weird-ass invaders. Instead, those soldiers refuse, too. The ones that try to fight, their buddies take away their guns. Seriously!”

  “That’s too weird to be true.”

  “Only because she didn’t tell you the best part,” Gretyl said.

  “They were all walkaways,” Jacob shouted. “Just like us!”

  “Way to clobber my punch line, kiddo.” Iceweasel swung him onto her hip and kissed the tip of his nose. “It’s a legend around here. There’s a Gulf-wide walkaway affinity group, running over the same nets everyone else uses to get around their national firewalls, so there’s cover. Once the walkaways on both sides figured they were about to be sent to kill each other, they decided, fuck that noise, and made a plan.”

  “Fuck that noise!” Jacob punched the air. Stan rolled his eyes. Tam was sure he wished he’d seized the opportunity to detonate an f-bomb with impunity. Gretyl and Iceweasel insisted the boys would never learn to swear properly unless they had good role models. So they were enjoined to closely observe swearing, not attempting it until they were sure they had it right. When they tried it, they were subjected to embarrassing judging and coaching on swear-expertise. This was more effective at curbing their language than anything the other parents tried on their kids.

  “That’s amazing, all right,” Limpopo said. “Why didn’t the generals drone them all? Stop the rot from spreading?”

  “There’s a rumor both sides gave the order and the drone operators refused and no one wanted to make an issue out of it. Last thing a general wants is to discover that he’s in charge of an army of one, in the middle of an army of everyone else.”

  “How long ago did this happen?”

  “What was it, a year ago?” Iceweasel said.

  “Eight months,” Tam said.

  “Well, shit. That’s impressive. We don’t get a lot of news in here.”

  “The point is you don’t know what’s going to happen, we can’t know, but there’s reason to be optimistic. People are tired of shooting each other.”

  Tam chuckled. “I don’t know if I’d go that far. There’s a—” She fished for the word. “Credibility for walkaways. A sense we’ve got it figured. Once you realize there’s a world that wants what you have to give, well, it’s hard to convince people to kill each other.”

  “Fuck my ass,” Limpopo said, sending Stan and Jacob into giggles. There was some background noise from her end, a muffled conversation. “I need to think, and there’s not a lot of interface stuff here so I’ve got to give someone else a turn. Sit tight and I’ll call tomorrow, okay?”

  “Sure,” Tam said, and the house spirit echoed her an instant later. Everyone shouted good-bye and Limpopo said good-bye. The room went silent except for the whistling of breath in and out of Jacob’s snotty nose.

  “You’re not going to wait for her to call back, are you?” the house spirit said.

  “Are you shitting me? No way,” Iceweasel said.

  “You want to pack for the kids or should I?” Gretyl said. The boys figured it out a moment later and exchanged excited looks and began to run in circles.

  “You do it. I’ll look around for berths on a train.”

  “Check the bumblers.” Seth was also bouncing. “Winds are favorable to the northeast lately, I bet we can snag a ride a long way.”

  “Good thinking,” Iceweasel said. “Boys, you want to ride in a zeppelin?”

  Both boys babbled and shouted. Then Jacob got so excited he punched Stan, because reasons. They tumbled on the floor, punching and shouting.

  Their moms exchanged a look, shook their heads apologetically at the rest of the adults. “We’re trying to let them sort these out on their own,” Gretyl said. “Sorry.”

  Everyone else was in too good spirits to be bothered. Tam looked in amazement at her housemates, her extended family, and realized she was about to start walking again.

  [ii]

  The train schedules sucked. There was a complex algorithm that figured out how many cars to put on which lines when. It was endlessly wrangled by wonks with different models that weighted priorities differently. Gretyl got sucked into the math, disappearing into a set of accountable-anonymity message boards where this was being hammered out, and Iceweasel messaged Tam to say that she was probably going to be stuck in that rathole for the foreseeable. So Tam should start exploring alternatives.

  There were rideshares heading that way, but they’d have to split into sub-groups and reform at way stations. This was something that you could automate (Tam helped Iceweasel with a kids’ field trip to the Akron Memorial last year and they’d found it easy), but surface vehicles were slow.

  “You need to find a bumbler,” Seth said.

  “Yeah,” Tam said. She tapped her interface surfaces, made sure that the house spirit was locked out. “But it’s uncomfortable.”

  “Etcetera is my friend,” Seth said. “My oldest buddy. Just because he and Limpopo can’t stand each other, doesn’t mean we have to take sides. You’re not betraying her by being friends with him. If you asked her, she’d tell you.”

  “If I asked her, I’d put her in a position where she’d have to tell me she didn’t mind, even if she did. Which is why I’m not asking her. Friends don’t put friends in that position.”

  “If she knew you were holding off on talking to him because you were worried about upsetting her, she’d be outraged.”

  “I don’t doubt it. That’s why I don’t tell her.”

  “Don’t you think that’s all … twisted? Especially since there’s the Other Limpopo”—they’d settled on this because, despite its least-worst awkwardness, all of them agreed “Real Limpopo” was a shitty, most-worst solution—“who was in love with Etcetera and would be glad to talk to him again.”

  She sighed and scrubbed her eyes. She’d been staring at screens for a long time. “It sucks. So what? Lots of things suck. Life isn’t improved by being a dick to people who love you.”

  “Etcetera loves you.”

  “Fuck off.” She let him rub her shoulders. “Argh.” He found the knot in her right shoulder, a gnarl of stubborn pain that felt so good-bad when his thumbs dug into it
.

  “Right there.” She lolled her head.

  “You’re a pushover. I could win every fight by sticking my thumb in this knot.”

  “It’s my kryptonite. Don’t abuse your powers.”

  “I am gonna call Etcetera.”

  “Fuck you.” She snuggled her head against his belly, pushing her sore shoulder knot back into his thumb.

  Five minutes later, he called Etcetera.

  “Been a while,” Etcetera said.

  “Fair enough. It’s all you-know around here.”

  “Missed you. Both of you. All of you. It sucks being the pariah.”

  “Sorry,” Seth said. This made him miserable. Freezing out his oldest friend was hard on him, but he’d never complained.

  Awkward silence.

  “We need your help.”

  More silence.

  “You’re going to like this.

  “We got a phone call. From a prison. In Canada. From an inmate who’d been held there for more than fourteen years, only just got free because the guards unlocked the cell doors and walked away.”

  “Seth—” Something in Etcetera’s voice, an emotion as unmistakable as it was unintelligible. Some hybrid human-machine feeling. Deeply felt. Unnameable.

  “Limpopo,” Seth said.

  There was the weirdest sound Tam had ever heard. It went on and on. She thought it was laughter. With horror, she realized it was sobbing. The only time she’d heard a sim sob, it was in the tunnels at Walkaway U, before they’d figured out how to make them stable. It was a sound sims made before they collapsed.

  “Etcetera? It’s okay, buddy.”

  He cried a long time.

  “You going to be okay?” Seth said, during a lull. “I can get Gretyl, she can help with your guardrails—”

  “I don’t need help. Is she okay?”

  He didn’t mean Gretyl. “She sounds amazing. Fiery. Angry. Wants a fight.”

  “I want a fight, too. What do you need?”

  “You still have contacts who can get a bumbler?”

  “You’re going to her?”

  “She won’t come to us—if they come to lock her back up, she’s going to fight.”

  “Fuckin’ a.”

  “Can you help?”