Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

  Limpopo faked a punch, gave her a quick hug and a peck on the cheek, and they were off.

  “Here’s what I’m thinking.” They jog-trotted towards the men’s prison. “This place has more surveillance than anywhere you’ve ever been, by a factor of a hundred. Every centimeter is recorded all the time. Those feeds go into a data center that applies heuristics that ranks them so the guards can get it packaged as an infographic.”

  Etcetera said, “You could package up an atrocity-feed. The worst stuff they do, pulled into a single feed that gets slicked together like a drama?”

  “The idea is to prevent atrocities,” Gretyl said. “Nadie said they didn’t want martyrs, another Akron.”

  They reached the gates as drones swarmed out of the skies, seeming to dive-bomb the prisons’ roofs.

  “Uh-oh,” Gretyl said. Limpopo listened to a feed.

  “No,” she said, “that was on purpose. They’re keeping a skeleton crew of aerial routers, enough for signals and telemetry, and landing the rest in Faraday cages until the first E.M.P. It’s a standard tactic, they say they used it in Nigeria, which makes no sense to me.”

  “It was huge,” Gretyl said, “but they must have blocked it. Started with those floating cities off Lagos. Cut loose from the mainland in a walkaway uprising, literally, lost power and plumbing, didn’t have enough onboard to stay stable. Hired mercenaries from the subcontinent to pacify Lagos. The walkaways skunked them, kept their routers in boxes and released them in short bursts, mingling with the mercs’ drones so they’d have to pulse their own birds to get at the walkaways’. The feeds hardly bobbled. Made the mercs look like assholes.”

  They arrived at an IT ops room in a third subbasement. A young boy, no more than fourteen, gave them an enthusiastic tour of the ops center’s features—armored conduit joining it to hard-line fiber links and in-building conduit, backup batteries—

  “It’s got its own air supply?” Gretyl said.

  The boy shrugged. He was skinny, with a small afro and long arms and fingers, a face full of tilt-eyed mischief. “Every block’s got bulkheads they can bring down to just gas one little part of things. Cheap and effective, so long as your team’s got masks.” That explained all the kids in gas masks on the way in—the women’s prison had hardly any. They’d made their own from micropore kerchiefs and goggles. They’d passed a small, efficient assembly line on the way out.

  It was a surreal vantage point to witness the Battle of the TransCanada Prisons. They used private security on the front line, not mercs exactly. These were outsource cops, for-hire guys in uniform that cities with private police forces used—and other cities used to break police unions whenever they got uppity. Men and women in awesome body armor, stuff that looked like Hugo Boss from a cyberpunk revival, faceless and shielded, each an “army of one” with exoskeletons, scary burp-weapons. There were one hundred of them, with drone support and fast nonlethal foot-pursuit bots, headless cheetahs and dogs from alloy and soft solenoids, just enough smarts to run a target down and bear her to the ground, clobber her if she tried to get up before a signed all-clear.

  The part of Gretyl that worried about her family receded as she and Limpopo fed the particulars to the global walkaway audience, wiki-ing countermeasures for every plan of attack they could conceive. Gretyl remembered her earlier thought about all walkaways having been defaults but not vice versa, wondered what the default counterintelligence operatives who monitored this made of it. They’d know this was what walkaways did, work in the open, but they also knew that when they fought each other, they used elaborate fake-outs. Would they be able to believe walkaways were just letting it all hang out, where enemies could see it?

  The enemy forces formed a perimeter around the prison complex. The cameras tracked the drones’ overflight patterns, millimeter-wave, infrared, and backscatter.

  The formalities: “All persons on these premises are subject to arrest. You will not be harmed if you come out with your hands in plain sight. You will have access to counsel. Human rights observers are on hand to ensure the rule of law is respected. You have ten minutes.” The sound came from the prisons’ many speakers as well as bullhorns built into the front lines’ battle suits. The fact they could still transmit audio to the internal speakers made every walkaway’s heart quail. It meant all the work walkaways had done to secure their nets and root out the back-doors left by TransCanada was insufficient. It implied the enemy had access to their cameras, could trigger the gas, seal the bulkheads—

  The network ops boys scrambled, thundering fingers over their interfaces. Gretyl called up everything she’d learned about the network ops for TransCanada, things she’d tweaked when called on to help with something gnarly. Limpopo grabbed her arm, brought up infographics, started analytics on recent traffic to the audio servers. Etcetera got what she was looking at faster than Gretyl. He shouted at the boys, feeding them suggestions for ports to block, network traffic fingerprints to look for in the packet-inspectors.

  Gretyl found calm in the knowledge they were inside one another’s decision loops. She handled diagnostics from walkaways watching the network, wordlessly updating models underpinning Limpopo’s infographics, noting as Limpopo integrated new data into her analysis.

  In four minutes, they’d found four back-doors. Three were trivial, access accounts that should have been removed everywhere, but had been removed almost everywhere. The fourth was harder to de-fang, because it would require a whole-system reboot to catch. They solved it by building a big dumb filter rule that looked for anything that might be trying to log into it, dumping those packets on the floor. Just as they were finishing this hackwork, someone in Redmond messaged Gretyl urgently with one they’d missed, that maybe even defaults had missed, built in by the manufacturer for license-repossession for deadbeat customers who missed payments, which would let them put the whole system into minimal operation mode. In theory, you could only invoke this mode if you had Siemens’ signing key, but it would be naïve to assume that the Canadian spooks running this show didn’t have that.

  “No way to know if that’s all of them,” Etcetera said, speaking the thought they were all thinking with machine bluntness.

  “Nope,” Limpopo said.

  Gretyl said, “Everyone off-site is looking. If there are more vulns, they’ll find them.”

  “Eventually,” Etcetera said.

  “You’ve got a backup,” Gretyl said. “What are you worrying about?”

  “You.” That shut her up.

  “You can be a total asshole,” Limpopo said, but without real rancor. The boys were tweaking their fixes, building in fallbacks, but they snickered at “asshole.”

  “You have two minutes,” the voice said. This time it came only from the loudhailers outside, picked up by cameras aimed at the invaders. Some of their cameras were being blinded by pulsed light weapons, but that attack was designed for civilian institutions, not fortified prisons. TransCanada spent real money on redundant vision systems. Must have galled their shareholders to see all that money that could have been paid as dividends be diverted—

  Gretyl’s phone rang, deep in her ear. She tapped it on, assuming it would be Iceweasel calling to make sure she was all right, which she appreciated and resented—I’m a little busy, babe—but it was a man’s voice.

  “Is this Gretyl Jonsdottir?”

  “Yes.” The call came on her friends-and-family-only ID. It wasn’t known to anyone who sounded like that.

  “Where is Natalie Redwater?”

  “Who is this?” Of course she knew.

  “This is Jacob Redwater. Her father.”

  Gretyl’s game-theory spun up, playing different gambits, trying different theories for what Jacob Redwater wanted. Undoubtedly he knew about her relationship with Iceweasel, must have known about the boys, known there was a Jacob Redwater II out there. He’d kidnapped Iceweasel, determined to make her into a zotta, into a Redwater. She’d hurt him where he was weakest, in the money, and he must
have been furious.

  He must feel some strange version of love for her. She’d known zottas at Cornell, patrons of her lab. She’d had to do dinners with them, fund-raisers, spent hundreds of hours engaged in high-stakes small talk, under her department head’s watchful eye. They weren’t unpleasant to talk to—many were witty conversationalists. But there was something … off about them. It wasn’t until she’d had her crisis of conscience and walked away from Cornell that she’d been able to name it: they had no impostor syndrome. There wasn’t a hint of doubt that every privilege they enjoyed was deserved. The world was correctly stacked. The important people were at the top. The unimportant were at the bottom.

  If she told Jacob Redwater that Iceweasel had gotten away, would he use his influence to make the attack on the prisons more violent? Or would he (could he?) pull forces off the prisons to chase down Iceweasel? More chilling: was Jacob Redwater working with Nadie? Had Nadie kidnapped Iceweasel perhaps to forge some alliance with the rest of the Redwater fortune?

  She was spooking herself. She went for straightforward: “What do you want?”

  “I would like to speak with my daughter.”

  “That’s not possible.” She stuck to the truth, if not all of it.

  “Ms. Jonsdottir, I know you love my daughter.”

  “That’s very true.”

  “Hard as you find this to believe, I love her, too.”

  You’re right, I do find that hard to believe. “I’m sure you do, in your way.” She didn’t mean to micro-agress him, but it slipped out. How could she let that pass?

  He pretended he didn’t notice, though she was sure he had. “I don’t want—” He was overcome by some emotion, or a very good actor. Or both, she reminded herself. The zottas she knew were good at compartmentalizing, sociopath style, understanding other peoples’ emotions well enough to manipulate them, without experiencing actual empathy. “There are children,” he said. “Her children.”

  “Mine, too,” Gretyl said.

  “Yes.”

  “Whatever is about to happen, it doesn’t have to happen to my daughter, or my grandchildren. Your children.”

  “Where are you, Mr. Redwater? Are you at the prison?”

  “As a matter of fact, I am.”

  She’d thought so—the background noise was an echo of the sounds she’d heard through the prisons’ outward cams.

  “You knew they were coming.”

  “I knew. That’s why I came. To keep Natalie safe.” There was a moment. “I could get you out.”

  “Why aren’t you talking to—” She almost said, Iceweasel, then Natalie, settled for, “your daughter?”

  “She won’t answer. It wasn’t easy to get this address for you, but I needed to get a message to her. I know you wouldn’t sacrifice your children for ideology.”

  Fuck it. “You think Iceweasel would?”

  “I think my daughter is justifiably angry at me. This means that I can’t explain certain … facts to her. We can’t even have this discussion.”

  “They’re moving in on us, Mr. Redwater. We can’t have this discussion if I’m under attack.”

  “I can’t call them off.”

  She didn’t say anything. Iceweasel paid enough attention to know Jacob Redwater’s branch of the family assumed control over the main dynastic fortune, making him the primary family power broker. Gretyl would be surprised if they didn’t own a major stake in TransCanada, not to mention outsource cops.

  “It’s not my call. Honestly.”

  “I don’t think we have anything to talk about.” She disconnected. Limpopo stared thoughtfully.

  “My in-laws are seriously fucked up.”

  Etcetera laughed, a weird noise through the speaker. There was always something weird about sim laughter. Some sharp-defined edge to it, enforced by the sims’ bumpers. Gretyl had been scanned. Maybe this was how she’d laugh at her sons’ antics in the future.

  Time ran out. The outsource cops’ drones plummeted in controlled dives, signaling impending attack. The boys in the data center made giddy, frightened noises as they landed their skeleton fleet, chasing the cops’ drones down, just as the first volley of bullets stitched the sky, tracking the drones, killing more than half before they landed. The hard-line fiber links went dead, except the ones that had been covertly dug up and spliced into direct-link microwave repeaters, far from the prison, out in farmers’ fields.

  Gretyl and Limpopo’s fingers collided as they jabbed the same spots on the infographics, cutting service over to those links, tuning the caches and load-balancers to accommodate a sudden two-order-of-magnitude drop in throughput. Traffic in and out of the prisons was now queuing deeply in repeaters’ caches. Out in the world, other caches were doing the same. The network interprets censorship as damage and routes around it, Gretyl thought, and grinned at the ancient, pre-walkaway slogan. It had been true for a while, then a metaphor, then wishful thinking, and now it was a design specification.

  She was in the zone, a human coprocessor for a complex system that used machines as a nervous system to wire together the intelligence of a global crowd of people she loved with all her heart. The part of her that railed and wept when she sent her wife and children away and stayed behind woke briefly and noted that this was the real reason she’d done it. This incredible feeling of strength and connection to something larger. It had been years since Gretyl felt this. Now she felt it again, she realized how much she’d missed it. Living in a better nation was preferable to living in a worse one—but living in the nation’s first days was the difference between falling in love and being in love. She was cheating on her wife. Carrying on an affair with armed insurrection.

  The prisons had defenses. The oncoming forces knew exactly what they were. The crowd had ideas about this. As the mechas with the battering rams stepped into position before each gate, the prison’s own anti-camera dazzlers came to life, lancing beams of powerful, broad-spectrum light directly into the mechas’ sensors. They were shielded against this, but imperfectly, meaning the mechas had to slow down and rely on ultrasonic sensing to guide their passage. The defenders triggered the prison’s sonic antipersonnel weapons, relocated from the cell blocks to the outside walls. The mechas slowed more. Then defenders opened up with the water cannon.

  Under normal circumstances, the water jets wouldn’t bother the mechas. They had excellent gyros. In a pinch they could assume three-point stances for stability. But they were attached to each other by the rams they held in two-by-two grids. The jets hit them from different angles, so the front ones’ corrective shuffling further unbalanced the rear ones, and vice versa. The water-cannoneers set up a rhythm that pushed them further off balance. Within minutes, two of the mecha teams were sprawling. The third retreated in unsteady steps.

  Gretyl heard cheers, saw jubilation in the chats. She knew this was only a skirmish. They were hugely, physically overmatched. The private cops withdrew behind their armor, and a volley of RPGs streaked through the air, bullseyeing each water cannon and the apertures for the anti-photo beams. They’d expected it, but it was terrifying nevertheless, even as the channels filled up with damage manifests, estimating the total cost to TransCanada’s physical plant, watching the company’s share price slide down, as default analysts reading over their shoulders changed their bets on whether TransCanada was going to end up with usable plant or smoking rubble at the end of the day.

  Her phone rang again.

  “Hello.”

  There was latency-lag, then Jacob Redwater’s voice, flanged and compressed. “I want to speak to my daughter.”

  “You’ve made that clear to her on more than one occasion.”

  There was a long pause. “Her mother died last year.”

  “You have my condolences.”

  “I couldn’t find a way to tell her.”

  “I’ll make sure she knows.”

  The boys in the data center lofted a swarm of drones, including some they’d hidden in the woods, behind
the enemy lines. The drones’ feed showed the enemy forces, disciplined and still, poised for their next assault. The damaged mechas limped to the back. The enemy opened fire on their drones. The boys kicked them into automated high-intensity evasive maneuvers that would lop their batteries’ duty-cycles in half. Nearly all survived the first round, though their video feeds turned to a scramble of nauseating roller-coaster footage. The boys’ hadn’t sent them in random patterns—each one ended up in proximity to an enemy surveillance drone, riding its tail. When the ground forces opened up with HERF weapons that fried the drones and knocked them out of the sky, they also took out their own aircraft.

  “Good work!” Gretyl shouted over her shoulder at the boys, who didn’t need anyone to tell them—they were dancing with victory. Meanwhile, the drones’ brief flights had managed to clear 75 percent of the network backlogs, massively relieving the congestion on their surviving fiber.

  Jacob Redwater said, “Your supply of drones is limited. We can get resupplies.”

  “Yes. We can’t win this with force.”

  The external speakers clicked on. A voice spoke: “Gordy, this is Tracey. Your sister Tracey, Gordy. I know we haven’t spoken since I walked away, but I want you to know that I love you. I’m safe and happy. I think about you every day. You have a niece now, we called her Eva, for Mom. The way we live here is better than I ever thought. People are nice to each other, Gordy, the way it was when we were kids. I trust my neighbors. They look out for me. I look out for them. We’re not terrorists, Gordy. We’re people default had no use for. We’ve found a use for each other. Gordy, you don’t have to do this. There are other ways to live. I love you, Gordy.” Another voice, a baby, crying. “That’s Eva, Gordy. She loves you, too. She wants to see her uncle.”

  The feeds zoomed in on one of the front-liners, a man, whose shoulders shook. This had to be Gordy. The crowd had identified him through gait analysis, doxxed him, walked his social graph, found a hit in a walkaway town in Wyoming, gotten Tracey out of bed, recorded the message.