Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

  “Great.” She caught Gretyl and Seth playing sarcastic eyeball hockey. She glared at them and Seth gave her a squeeze.

  “You’ll love it. Worse come to worst, we’ve got your scan on file, right?”

  “It’s a hell of an afterlife,” Etcetera said. “I’ll show you the ropes.”

  She considered her options—epic grump, sarcasm, capitulation—grinned and said, “Looks like we’re riding!” Seth hugged her. She heard Etcetera whisper praises of his choice in romantic partners.

  [v]

  They arrayed the bikes in the field, ranged smallest to tallest, and scrounged a trailer the boys could sit in that their half-sized bikes could clip to. There was general hilarity while they tried and swapped helmets, taking group photos. The aerialists, unloaded, looked on, gave advice, and tinkered with the bikes.

  They reached a moment when everyone was impatient to go and no one could name a reason not to—everyone’s bladder emptied and so on. They formed up and rode. Tam grit her teeth as she started to ride, but it was smooth. The bike had the combination of rigidity and springiness of tensegrity designs, absorbing shocks with ease but still rigid enough for steerability.

  Stan and Jacob set the pace for the first eight kilometers, a slow ride. Hoa and her friends kept up, hanging on Gretyl’s every word. When Stan and Jacob ran out of steam (red faced, panting) they climbed into the trailer. The rest of the party took the opportunity to pee, drink water, snack, kibitz, trade bikes, and adjust helmets. When they started again, Hoa and friends made their good-byes and turned back.

  They pushed themselves hard, three abreast, sometimes passed by the odd car—most of the vehicle traffic rode on the 401, which was pure default and heavily patrolled—stopping early in a Mohawk reservation where there was a diner with pressure-cooked potato wedges served with cheese-curds. The proprietor was second generation Idle No More. They quickly figured out which friends they had in common.

  The sun was low. They agreed that if they pushed it, they could be in Kingston by nightfall, maybe even have a midnight feast with Limpopo, a prospect that fired their imaginations and enthusiasms, except for Jacob and Stan, who were already asleep in their trailer, curled like a yin/yang. Iceweasel loosened their clothes and popped a shade over them and then stared at them smiling in a way that Tam could understand, but not relate to.

  Seth caught her and gave her a hug and a smoldering kiss, adding sneaky tongue and an earlobe nibble; she got one hand up his sweaty back and then slid it over his butt and gave it a squeeze.

  “Quickie in the bushes?” he whispered.

  “Jeez, you two,” Etcetera said. She remembered he was a cyborg today and jerked away.

  “You sure know how to enhance a mood.” Seth gave her one more hug. “Sorry, darling.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Let’s get this show rolling.”

  She was a walkaway, had been a walkaway since she was fourteen, though she’d come and gone from default—back to her parents, then an aunt, then her parents—until she was seventeen, when she’d gone for good. She had big thigh muscles and calves that bulged, even now she was saggy and middle aged. There had been a time when she thought nothing of walking ten hours a day, day after day. In those days, a bicycle was practically cheating. She could have ridden without breaking a sweat. It was a luxury reserved for the confluence of great roads and good fortune.

  Muscles or no, those days were behind her. After the first hour, she was panting. The wicking fabric of her shirt felt sticky. There were times when her calves and feet cramped and she had to do awkward stretches while riding, grimacing and suppressing groans. She could have called a stop, but there was the thought of dinner with Limpopo. Besides, Seth was grimacing, too, and so were Iceweasel and Gretyl. None of them were calling stops. She wouldn’t be the first one to cry off.

  “Goddamnit!” Seth howled and shook his leg, laid down the bike, and rolled in the grass on the verge. He clutched his leg. They all got off and stretched and complained and sheepishly smiled at each other. Jacob and Stan woke from their naps and ran circles around them and demanded to be allowed to ride. They all agreed it would be unfair not to let the boys ride, so there were hours of slower-paced riding. It was much better.

  The sun was a bloody blob on the horizon behind them, staining the road red, when Jacob and Stan climbed back into their trailer. Iceweasel checked their helmet straps. Gretyl did it again. The two women shot each other daggers and laughed at themselves. They were all old, and were on a long journey together. Something was changing. One era giving way to another. The sense of a change crackled through the cooling air. They ate mushy watermelon slices and squeezie pouches of chocolate scop and electrolyte. They checked the distance and by unspoken consensus got on their machines and started cranking.

  There were no streetlights on the road. They switched to headlights, then nightscopes, then back to headlights when the lights of Kingston brightened the horizon. They circled the city, warned off by hovering police drones and the signs warning of OPP checkpoints. They headed for 15 north, the strip of private prisons built one after another.

  The moon was up and it was getting cold when they reached the exit off the highway to the prisons, a theme-park of jailhouses built by TransCanada as part of its diversification strategy. The juvie hall. The men’s prison. The minimum-security pen. As word went round that change had arrived, each acquired rings of tents and yurts. The phenomenon followed a template that was developed and formalized in the stupidly named “Walkaway Decade.” Some walls came down, others went up. They’d build rammed-earth machines and add sprawling wings and ells, almost certainly an onsen, because that was de rigueur at anything walkaway bigger than a few people.

  The rhythm of the place would change. On days when the sun shone or the wind blew, they’d run coolers with abandon, heat huge pools of water for swimming and bathing, charge and loose drones and other toys. When neither were around, the buildings would switch to passive climate control, the people would switch activities to less power-hungry ones.

  More people would drift in and out, there’d be arguments over what to do and what to make, if anything. Some people would farm scop, others would tend gardens. Or not—some communities never gelled, became ghost towns within months of being established. Sometimes worse things happened. There were dark stories about rapes, murder sprees, cults of personality where charismatic sociopaths brainwashed hordes into doing their bidding. There’d been a mass-suicide, or so they said. Everyone argued about whether these stories were real, minimized by credulous walkaways or stoked to a fever pitch by default psy ops.

  Ahead of them was the women’s prison. Around it, the most carnival-like camp, a county fair for refugees. They had to dismount—none of the bikes had catastrophically failed—and walk the bikes into the thick of things, criss-crossing guy-wires and fragrant coffium parlors that rocked even at this late hour. Halfway, they abandoned the bikes and shared around Gretyl and Iceweasel’s packs as each woman picked up a sound-sleeping boy.

  The prison gates yawned wide. There were a few women on plush armchairs dragged out from some office. They broke off their conversations to inquire casually about who these people were and where they were going. At the mention of Limpopo’s name, their faces lit and they offered to show the group inside.

  “We knew her as DG, of course. That’s what they booked her under. They punished her bad when she used her outside name, so she stopped. Everyone’s changing names now we’re wide open.” “Wide open” was what default press said when the prison guards stopped showing up for work, the kind of thing that you could use to terrorize people about the marauders about to rush out of the prisons and start hacking up people. As they’d ridden through the TransCanada parks, she’d seen banners celebrating “wide open.”

  They were led inside, through wide open—ahem—scanning vestibules and yards and chambers where visitors or inmates could be contained. All the doors were flung back or removed and set on
trestles and piled with assortments of clothes and other things that were either shared by or with the prisoners. The cell block was made up of huge, high-ceilinged, bar-walled rooms ranked with three-high bunk beds, festooned with banners and hung with privacy blankets (maybe they’d been there before wide open, but Tam didn’t think prisons ran that way). The lighting was dim, the sound of whispered conversations around them and the snoring and breathing of hundreds—thousands?—of women made the place sound like a huge, muttering tunnel.

  “This way,” their guide whispered. They went single file down a narrow corridor between bunks, deep into the maze. Tam felt a minute’s default-ness, worry that these women were criminals, some of them had surely done unforgivable violence to land here. There were violent people everywhere. Most of the time, most of them didn’t do anything particularly violent, because even psychos needed to get along and have a life. These people had been nothing but sweet to them since their arrival. Limpopo was one of these people. She made the default part shut up.

  Limpopo was asleep in her bunk, face a grayscale silhouette in dim light, but lined and older than Tam remembered. All of them clustered around her bunk, and Tam flashed on the dwarfs clustered around Snow White’s bier.

  “This is awkward,” Etcetera stage-whispered from Seth’s chest. Limpopo stirred. She scrunched her face—so many wrinkles! Tam’s hand went to her own face. Limpopo blinked her eyes twice, opened them, and looked around. They must have appeared as silhouettes, faceless, but who else would be at her bedside?

  “D,” their guide whispered. “I brought you some friends.” Her voice was thick with tears.

  “Thanks,” Limpopo whispered back. “Thanks, Testshot. Thanks a lot.” She propped herself on her elbows.

  “God damn, it’s good to see you.” Tam thought Limpopo said it, but it was Etcetera again, his voice weirdly modulated with machine emotion.

  Limpopo half smiled, lips quivering. Tears ran down her face. No one knew what to do. Iceweasel passed Stan to Seth and put her arms around Limpopo’s neck and pulled her into a long hug. “I love you, Limpopo,” she whispered.

  “We all do.” Gretyl handed Jake to Tam and wrapped her arms around Limpopo and Iceweasel, half sliding onto the bed to do it. Tam looked at Jake’s sleepy face, saw he was waking, even though he clung like a monkey in a tree, strong arms and dirty hair and sweet/sour unbrushed-teeth breath. “Mama?” he mumbled.

  “Right there.” Tam turned so he could see both mothers hugging the strange old lady in the weird dark room. Strangely, this comforted him. “Can you stand?” He thought about it, nodded. She put him down and joined the hug, squashing Limpopo’s leg as she jockeyed for position. A minute later, Seth’s arms were around her.

  They hugged and cried in the dark. Jake said, with shocking loudness, “I have to pee, Mom!” They laughed and untangled themselves and shushed the boy and whispered apologies to the women roused by the noise. Limpopo led them back through the cell block, into the courtyard lit by flood lamps and populated with small conversational groups sitting on blankets and chairs from inside. They got folding chairs and blankets out of their packs, bottles of delicious whisky from a fabber on the Gil. The ritual was so normal and so weird that Tam kept getting buffeted by it, until they were back in their conversational circle. The boys were mothered by Iceweasel and Gretyl, staring wide-eyed from one grown-up to the next, sleepy and cranky and excited at once. Tam knew how they felt.

  Limpopo told them the story of her incarceration in fits and starts, with many interruptions. It wasn’t a nice story. She’d spent a lot of time in solitary—it was a routine punishment for the mildest infractions. Walkaways were particularly singled out for it. Her longest stretch in solitary was two years, during which she’d had no contact with the general population. It wasn’t much better the rest of the time: for years on end, prisoners were given an hour out of their cells per day. For six months, no one had been allowed out of her cell block except for medical emergencies—no showering, no exercise. Tam thought about the huge, echoing barracks and tried to imagine being stuck in there with hundreds of women for half a year. She shivered and drank more whisky.

  At first, they all listened, rapt. But it was late. They’d had a long day. Starting with Gretyl and Iceweasel and the boys, they trickled away and found empty bunks in the cell block. Finally, it was just her and Seth—and Etcetera. She could barely keep her eyes open.

  Limpopo and Etcetera were engaged in a verbal mind-meld, conversation increasingly intimate, shaded with private nuances Tam couldn’t decode, though that might have been exhaustion.

  Tam realized Seth had fallen asleep in his chair. Limpopo was engaged in conversation with the box on his chest to the exclusion of all else. She shook Seth awake and he gummed his eyes. “Come on. Take off the dead guy and leave him with Limpopo, we’re hitting the sack.”

  Limpopo giggled and Etcetera laughed with her. It felt very conspiratorial between those two as they headed to bed.

  Breakfast was a fun affair, a scavenger hunt through the prisons and tent-cities of the TransCanada park to find fabbers with power and stock, nibbling treats given by passersby and giving back treats, either things they’d brought or things they were gifted along the way. By the time Tam and Seth caught up with the scavenging party, it had spread out and re-formed, using the built-out walkaway net to find one another. It was sunny and muggy. The boys were down to matching bright orange shorts and horned Viking helmets, and flip-flops that made fart noises, to their evident delight.

  Seth looked naked without Etcetera distributed over his body. They reveled in the privacy of being able to talk and cuddle without involving the deceased. It felt like a figurative new day, as well as a literal one. They’d completed their quest, reunited with their lost friend, and reunited their dead friend with that lost friend. Their arms were around each other’s waists, they were well-fed, and the sun was shining. It was a new day, they were surrounded by walkaways. They had nothing and everything to do.

  Limpopo found them sitting in the grass of an overgrown meadow across the highway, watching the big drones make lazy circles overhead. Some were default, some were walkaway, some might have escaped from a farm and flocked on general principles.

  “Good morning, beautiful people.” She nearly sang. In the daylight, she looked even older. She had a stoop, and Tam thought she saw tremor in her hands. She wasn’t much older than Tam, either—she’d had a much harder life. Whatever the differences between their circumstances, Tam knew this was her future. It made her feel indescribably nostalgic for the young, certain woman she’d been.

  “Good morning!” they called. Iceweasel tackled her with a hug. Tam winced, worried about Limpopo’s frailty. But Limpopo laughed and hugged her back and demanded to be reintroduced to the boys, had a solemn conversation with each about their fondest interests—space travel and slimy things—and found sweets in her pockets for them, thousand-flavor gobstoppers the size of golf balls. Their moms nodded permission, and the golf balls disappeared into their mouths, stopping up their gobs for the duration.

  “How are you?” Iceweasel’s arm was around Limpopo’s shoulders, face turned to the sun. “This must be the freakiest thing, you and your friends must be, I don’t know, just—”

  “Yeah,” Limpopo said. “And no. Thing is, when you’re a prisoner, things happen to you. You don’t get a say. I know women who were inside for years—decades—who suddenly were released, without notice. Literally the guards came and got them and kicked them out. No chance to call families, no good-byes. Sometimes, you’d have prisoners who were set to go, paperwork taken care of, and then, minutes before they were supposed to go, it got canceled. No one could say why. When the doors opened, it was an order-of-magnitude bigger version of the arbitrary lives we were already living.

  “We were also used to being self-reliant. We traded favors, got each others’ backs. We did most of the work around the prison. That was the way TransCanada delivered shareholder value�
�making the prisoners do all its work, unpaid, in the name of punishment. Once the doors opened, it wasn’t that difficult to keep the lights on. We don’t have all the consumables we need—being locked out of the power grid means we’re only able to run on what we get from the eggbeaters and panels on the roofs—but all that means is we’ve had to go into the rest of the world and find people to help us and vice versa. There were so many walkaways in lockdown. The idea of running all this stuff without greed and delusion is what we’re all about.” She flashed a grin. “I’d say we’re doing fucking great.”

  The speaker hung around her neck cheered and made clapping noises. “You are my total hero,” Etcetera said. “A shining example to all, dead and alive.”

  That made them smile, too, and brought to mind the question Tam had been dying to ask. “I don’t mean to be weird. But are you going to go get a new scan? Just in case—”

  Limpopo looked away.

  “Dunh-dun-dunnnh,” Etcetera said. “The existential crisis looms.”

  “I know that there’s another one of me out there, back where you live, and she sounds—”

  “Like a total—”

  She slapped the small speaker over her collarbone lightly. “Stop it. It’s not supportive, it’s mean. Whatever happened between you and her doesn’t excuse you being a dick about her with me. Especially with me. She is me.”

  “That’s the existential crisis.” Etcetera didn’t sound wounded, though the living Etcetera would have been in anxious pretzels at the thought of being publicly awful. Did that mean he wasn’t the person he’d been? Or that he’d grown? Or that his bumpers kept his mood down the middle?

  Limpopo looked fierce. “Yes, I’m getting a scan. There’s already two crews running them in the men’s prison. We’re going to set up our own. A lot of us are old now, and even more are sick. Then there’s the possibility they’ll nuke the place as an example.”