Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

  “So you kidnapped her and deprived her of clothes and companionship because you had her best interests at heart?”

  “Yes. Because I knew the alternative was much worse. Death. As you discovered. That’s why I’m here. Because, whether or not you believe this, I love my daughter. I raised her. I held her when she was born. I told her bedtime stories. I changed her diapers. She is my flesh and blood. I am a part of her, always will be. I don’t want her to die. I don’t want my grandchildren to die.”

  “But we can all die?” Limpopo said. “No especial reason to keep us around. Apart from generating income for TransCanada, we’re surplus.”

  He shrugged. “Not my department. I’m interested in my family. Your family can look out for you.”

  “That’s mighty white of you, Mr. Redwater,” Limpopo said.

  Gretyl almost asked him how much diaper changing and storytelling he did, how much of it was delegated to au pairs. She couldn’t see the point. Jacob Redwater was exactly what he seemed: a zotta who cared about getting things he wanted, didn’t give a shit about what happened to everyone else. However much diaper-changing he’d done, it was enough to reinforce whatever part of him believed kidnapping his daughter was an acceptable alternative to stopping his pals from killing everyone within ten klicks of her.

  She stared at his excellent skin tone and the muscular shoulders under his vest. He looked like he was having a day off at the cottage, someone in a stock-art photo advertising a line of fine outdoor/casual clothing. Burnished by his years, not battered. Not like Gretyl, not like her friends. She walked away because she couldn’t be a party to making men like this immortal gods. They didn’t need her help.

  “Your daughter doesn’t want to see you.” It was true. She didn’t have to ask Iceweasel—she’d never wavered on that.

  “She named her son after me.”

  “We named our son after you so she’d never forget what she turned her back on. I didn’t understand at first. She explained that she wanted to make a Jacob Redwater that wouldn’t be remembered as a selfish monster.”

  He was impassive.

  “Holy shit.” A boy pointed to the screens.

  They followed his finger. There, walking up Highway 15 was a big crowd. Hundreds of people. At the front, still in remains of uniforms and body armor, were the cops who had walked away. They split into three smaller groups, walked right into the private cops who tried to stop them from entering the prisons’ inner courtyards, scuffling briefly as they tried to decide how much force they could use against these newcomers. Then they were beyond the cops, between them and the prisons. They linked arms and sat down in front of the buildings, saying nothing. The walkaway ex-cops sat in the middle. Gretyl understood the crowd around the world hadn’t stopped when the feeds went dead.

  On cue, new drones buzzed the courtyard, all kinds, including network relay. She saw the massive expansion in bandwidth from her seat, surging over the infographics in a flood of blue that went green as the caches on both sides of the link emptied and the congestion cleared—they were in sync with the world.

  Jacob Redwater looked … quizzical. He narrowed his eyes. As the boys waved the feeds to zoom over the whole wall, he gave a minute head shake, as if to say that’s not right.

  What had Nadie said? They don’t want another Akron. They don’t want martyrs. If they bomb the place, it will be with the cameras off. They were into new tactical territory now, on both sides. There had been many assaults on walkaway strongholds by default regimes—religious fundamentalists in America and Saudi Arabia; no-insignia mercs in Ukraine, Moldova, and Siberia; storm troopers backed by huge, network-killing information weapons in China. There had been advances and retreats. Never this kind of siege.

  Gretyl’s phone rang. She knew from the buzz it was her wife. She whooshed out a sigh.

  “We’re okay.” She knew Gretyl would have been quietly freaking after a protracted radio silence.

  “I love you.”

  “I love you, too. The boys love you. Are you okay? We’ve been watching it here. The boys are livid that they didn’t get to stay and help with the drones. They’re not quite clear on the danger. I don’t want to worry them.”

  “Don’t.” She was keenly aware of Jacob Redwater straining to hear, wishing she’d learned how to do that subvocalization thing with her interfaces. She’d never had much call for private audio-spaces—too much of a hermit.

  “Don’t? Oh, worry them. Are you okay? Can you talk?”

  “I can.”

  “But not much. Why? Who’s there? What’s going on? Are you safe?”

  She sighed. Her wife was good at a lot of things, but covert ops wasn’t one of them.

  “Your father is here.”

  It was an eerie silence, silence of an over-compressed audio channel discarding background noise. “Is he going to hurt you?” She sounded cold.

  “He would have a hard time doing that. He’s locked in with us, in a subbasement of the boys’ prison, a control center. He wanted to talk to you, and since you wouldn’t take his calls, he called me.”

  Jacob Redwater was thinking hard about where Iceweasel was. What it meant that she had to have this explained.

  “Of course he’d know how to get in touch with you. You going to ransom him?”

  She couldn’t stop the smile. Because she was expecting it, she got between Jacob Redwater and the door as he stood suddenly, knocking over his chair. He came at her. She remembered what a fit, gym-toned, personally trained, technologically-tuned badass he was. She was about to get slugged. That’s when Troy landed on his back and bore him to the ground, arms locked around his neck. The other boys each took a limb and sat on it.

  “Gretyl?” She sounded alarmed.

  “No problems. Give me a sec?”

  She looked down at Jacob Redwater’s face. He was calm, like he was relaxing with a glass of wine in his den, not lying on a concrete floor with four juvenile delinquents sitting on him. “Jacob, Iceweasel and the boys left before this started. They’re safe. Would you like me to ask Iceweasel if she’d be interested in talking to you?”

  “Not if I was starving to death and he was the only drive-through on Earth,” Iceweasel said, making Gretyl snort. It was crueler and more gloat-y than she’d intended. She caught herself before she apologized to the spread-eagled zotta.

  “I know the answer. Do I get to leave?”

  “Why should we let you? This place is full of handcuffs and cells. We could lock you up, make sure whatever happens to us happens to you. It might not stop them from nuking us. Then again, it might.”

  “Probably not. I used up everything I had, stopping things so I could get in here. Giving into me cost them a lot—” He nodded towards the screens, where private cops and the walkaways faced each other beneath a canopy of drones. “The people calling the shots wouldn’t mind losing me. It would destabilize things, but it would also set an example for the next time something like this happens. I’m not the only powerful person related to someone on your side, you know. Object lessons are expensive. It’s wasteful to pass them up when they’re available.”

  “They’re not going to kill you,” Limpopo said. “Not Jacob Redwater. We’ve seen your board seats. Too many people owe you too much, depend on you too much—”

  Etcetera interrupted—beyond weird, Limpopo and her collarbones arguing—“That means there’s people who would love to step into his shoes.”

  Redwater shrugged best as he could. “You’re both right. If I died here with you, there would be hell to pay. But very powerful people would get the chance to make themselves much more powerful. The reason I was allowed to do what I did was that it’s a fully hedged risk. Delighted if I die, delighted if I don’t.”

  “He probably makes a new scan every morning after breakfast,” Etcetera continued, with machine smugness. “He’d be up and running on a huge cluster by dinner.”

  “Not that often. But I’m current, and they’ve dry-run my sims.
There’s messy probate questions, so it wouldn’t be dinner, exactly.”

  Gretyl hated how he could be pinned to the floor in hostile territory and still be calm and in charge.

  “Gret?”

  “Sorry, I kinda forgot about you. Look, darling, I should go. I love you. I love the boys. You are my world.”

  “We love you, too.” She was crying. Gretyl blinked hard and made herself not cry. Jacob Redwater watched her closely.

  Then Iceweasel made a surprised noise. Gretyl jumped. “What is it?” She saw the monitors and gasped.

  The private cops were retreating, rank by rank, into the APCs, which were pulling out in an orderly fashion. The cops faced out, toward the prison, as they waited their turn to board their vehicles. As if this wasn’t amazing enough, a cop broke ranks, took off her helmet and dropped her gun, just as others did earlier that day, and crossed over to the walkaway lines. Two more did it. The orderly retreat stopped being orderly. Cops milled about. Many looked like they were listening intently to voices in their helmets. Some talked avidly to one another. They called out jokey, comradely farewells to the ones who’d crossed over.

  Jacob Redwater was at a loss. He watched the spectacle, craning his neck from the floor. The expression on his face was the closest thing to fear that Gretyl imagined she’d ever see.

  “What do you think, Jacob?” The laugh in Gretyl’s voice was involuntarily mean. “They pulling out so they can nuke us and send a message? Or are they getting out before the stock market melts down and their guard labor walks out?”

  “May I sit?”

  “Not my decision.”

  The boys looked at each other and got up. He sat and worked his shoulders.

  “I’m leaving.” He was still transfixed by the feeds. One of the APCs was disrupted by a cop who climbed back out and deserted.

  Gretyl looked at him. He was still upright and unwavering, armored with dignity.

  “Jacob, I know there will always be people like you.”

  “Rich people.”

  “People who think other people are like them. People who think you either take or get took. We’ll never be rid of that. It’s a primal fear, toddler selfishness. The question is whether people like you will get to define the default. Whether you can make it a self-fulfilling prophecy, doing for all of us before we do to you, meaning we’re all chumps if we’re not trying to do to you sooner. That default was easier to maintain when we didn’t have enough. When we didn’t have data. When we couldn’t all talk to each other.”

  “Okay.” No hint of overt sarcasm, all the more sarcastic for it.

  “We’re not making a world without greed, Jacob. We’re making a world where greed is a perversion. Where grabbing everything for yourself instead of sharing is like smearing yourself with shit: gross. Wrong. Our winning doesn’t mean you don’t get to be greedy. It means people will be ashamed for you, will pity you and want to distance themselves from you. You can be as greedy as you want, but no one will admire you for it.”

  “Okay.” He was a little paler. Maybe that was wish fulfillment.

  “I think your ride is leaving,” Gretyl said. She was elated. The fatalistic acceptance of her impending destruction uncoiled from her chest, turned to victorious song. The part of her that had been emotionally prepared to die caught up to the part of her that knew she wouldn’t have to. She wanted to drink everything that could be drunk, fuck and sing, build a bonfire and dance naked around it. She was almost dead. Now she would live. Forever, perhaps.

  “Good-bye. I’ll tell Iceweasel and the kids that you asked after them.”

  That hit. He oofed like he’d been gut-punched. She felt like a sudden and total asshole. Whatever kind of monster Jacob Redwater was, he was someone to whom family mattered, in a twisted, coercive way. She almost apologized. She didn’t. She thought she would, but he was gone. Limpopo hugged her ferociously, Etcetera muttered into her cleavage from his speaker. The boys whooped and danced.

  “I love you,” Iceweasel said.

  “I love you, too, darling. I’m coming home.” She wiped tears of joy off her face. “Unless you and the boys want to come back and stay for a while?” She knew it was a stupid thing to ask. She wanted to keep the first days rush alive for a little longer, before going back to the ongoing days default they’d built in Gary.

  “No,” Iceweasel said. She groped for more words, but apparently none came. “What happened to my father?”

  “He left. Intact.”

  “I think I see him now.”

  Gretyl looked at the screen. There he was, walking away, a phalanx of private cops escorting him behind their lines, back to the command vehicles. “That’s him.”

  “Fuck,” Iceweasel said. Gretyl’s heart ached and grew two sizes when she heard the boys giggling at their mom’s swearing. What had she been thinking, putting herself in danger? Risking never seeing her wife, her beautiful boys, ever again? What madness came over her? Was she secretly suicidal? “When will you leave?”

  “Tomorrow or a little later. There’s bound to be a lot of people moving around, next couple days. Hoa might bring bikes. Whatever makes sense.”

  “Will you bring Limpopo?”

  She looked at Limpopo, who watched with frank interest. Stooped and old, eyes blazing, take-no-shit attitude you could see from orbit. Gretyl knew from the first time she’d seen Limpopo that the woman was a fucking superhero.

  “Iceweasel wants to know if you’ll come with me.”

  Limpopo didn’t hesitate. “No. There’s things here I want to help with. It’s my place. I bought it with fourteen years of my life. There are lots of fights to come, and I want to be here with the people who fought for this place. I’ll stay.”

  “You hear that?”

  “Tell her we love her. Tell her that she has a home here, too. Any time.”

  Gretyl said it. Limpopo nodded gravely. The boys watched them wide-eyed, still shocked from the sudden lifting of their death sentence.

  Etcetera added, “Tell the other Limpopo she doesn’t have to worry about me coming back any time soon.”

  “I’m sure that’ll be a great comfort.”

  It turned out that sims could harumph. It was a new one on Gretyl.

  EPILOGUE

  even better nation

  It wasn’t like waking from a dream, but Iceweasel was sure she had dreamed. There was Billiam, flirting outrageously with Noozi, which couldn’t be right, because poor Billiam was long dead. Noozi was in orbit, had been in orbit for fifteen years, swore she felt none of the negative physiological effects, they’d been mitigated by deadheading and pharma they printed on the station’s bioreactor. There’d been doctors, some present, more in the crowd, offering opinions on her scans, on the cancer eating her liver, threatening to spread to her blood. And her father! They’d spoken, with Cordelia. It was like old times. Nadie had been there, too, and, shit, they’d made out, in front of Gretyl. Just the memory of it made her blush.

  Blushing reminded her she had a body. Remembering she had a body made her remember that she’d deadheaded, parked herself because of the cancer. That hadn’t been imaginary. Parked herself after a tearful party with the boys: big, pimply teenagers; and Gretyl, old and sad and trying so hard not to show it; and her friends. Cordelia had been there, had left the walled city she and Dad lived in, snuck in a screen that Dad’s face appeared on, live-linked. He’d said urgent and desperate things that made her cry. She couldn’t remember them.

  She’d deadheaded. Now she was awake. In a room. She strained to look around. It was dim. It smelled nice. Like a forest, with a hint of scented steam. Like there was an onsen nearby. Sulfur, eucalyptus. She was on a hospital bed with rails. She saw light cast by infographics on its sides, cast on the dark floor—stone?—around it. A window, crack of sunlight at the bottom of its blinds. She checked in with her body, found it didn’t hurt. Such a relief she nearly cried. It had hurt a lot, before deadheading. All the time, all over.

 
She squeezed her hands together and they felt … weird. Why weird? She couldn’t say. Footsteps approached. The door opened. When it did she got the room’s dimensions. It was about the size of the bedroom she’d shared with Gretyl. She smelled onsen smells, stronger and sharper. Her skin ached for water and steam. She wanted to sit up, but should she?

  There was a person in the door. A man. Walking toward her. Smiling. Bearded. Young. Wearing something weird, slippery-looking, tight. She could actually see the outline of his balls. It was a singular garment. It could have come off a runway a century ago, or off a printer fifty years after she went to sleep. How long had it been?

  The man smiled. She felt vertigo. That face was familiar. It was impossible. She smelled him, a pleasant smell she remembered from so many nights and days together on so many roads.

  She almost laughed as she said it: “Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Wilson Alva Anton Jeff Harley Timothy Curtis Cleveland Cecil Ollie Edmund Eli Wiley Marvin Ellis Espinoza.” She laughed. He laughed with her. Any thought she’d had that this was Etcetera’s son or clone or robot were dispelled by the laugh.

  “How the actual fuck.”

  He held out his hands, smooth and unwrinkled and not dead.

  “Like it?”

  She took his hand. It was warm, young and vital. She held it to her cheek. She cried on the hand.

  “How?” She looked at his hands, smooth and unmarked.

  “Same as you.” The vertigo was back, hard. The room did a slow roll with her in the center. The reason his hand was so smooth was her hand was so smooth. That was why it felt weird. It was her hand, but it was new. She ran her hands over her body, probed places where she’d unconsciously dreaded surgical scars or bags, squeezed the muscles of her feet and legs and ass, touched her face. Stared at her hands again.