Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

  “Get your friends into the water and make some introductions, girl,” Limpopo said, not opening her eyes.

  They disentangled slowly, then, on impulse, she squeezed Gretyl to her, kissing her cheek, jaw, earlobe. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she said, smell of burned hair in her nostrils.

  “Me too, kid,” she said, and stepped gingerly into the water.

  * * *

  They took a long time to immerse themselves, everything complicated by Gretyl’s burned arm, and by the time they were settled, Limpopo reached her limit and stood and stepped out. She fetched a pail of ice water from the coldest pool and brought it to the edge of theirs, wiping herself down using her small towel. Gretyl was oblivious, surrendering to the water, but Tam watched with caution and Iceweasel watched Tam.

  “How many casualties?” Limpopo said, after Tam caught them up on the story of the last of the evacuation.

  “Three dead,” Tam said, in a flat voice. “CC didn’t make it.”

  Iceweasel was numb. She had carried CC’s charred body. Now it was dead.

  “Lots of injured, too,” Tam said. Iceweasel got out of the pool. She wanted to cry, but tears wouldn’t come. She crossed her arms and leaned her head against a wall, breathing into her diaphragm. “I’m okay,” she said, as she heard someone—Tam?—start to get out of the pool. “Give me a minute.”

  Tam and Limpopo talked, but she tuned them out, focused on her breath and the hot/cold play of air and water on her body. A finger tapped her shoulder and she grudgingly looked up—at Seth.

  “Hail the conquering heroes!” Then, showily: “For I am become worlds, destroyer of death!”

  She smiled despite herself. He was such a dick, but he wasn’t a bad guy. “That’s good, Seth. Did it take you long to come up with?”

  He shook his head. He was naked and goose-pimpled, and she found his body—so recently familiar to the point of being dull—was fascinating, in the way of things that were once freely taken and are now forbidden. “I stole it,” he said. “Some dude’s manifesto out of San Francisco. Those Singularity freaks in the quake-zones, they’re having religious feelings. It’s quip-city on their hangouts. That was my favorite. Amateurs plagiarize, artists steal.”

  “You stole that from Picasso,” she said.

  “Did I? I don’t think so. I haven’t read any of his books. I must have stolen it from someone who stole it from him.”

  She didn’t rise to the bait, though she noticed her campus friends look up. She knew Seth’s game, and didn’t want to play. She was glad to see him, but she and Seth had played enough for one lifetime.

  She heard Tam leave the water, looked up to watch Tam help Gretyl out, felt an unwelcome jealous stab, saw Seth notice. Seth couldn’t get past his scenester instincts, and he was a keen observer of relationships. She saw his eyes flick down to Tam’s cock, up to her breasts, back up to her face.

  “Need some help?” he said, taking two steps their way, offering a hand to Tam, who was off-balance, leaning over to get Gretyl out without wetting her dressing. Tam took his hand. He gave her his winning smile, which was, in fact, fucking winning. When they’d gone walkaway, Seth had been in the incipient stages of beer-gut-itis. Rebuilding the B&B, all the walking and lifting, the anti-shlepper challenge of going into the woods with nothing and relying on the drones and your wits had leaned him out and given him tree-trunk quads and broad shoulders that went well with his mat of tight-curled chest hair. Iceweasel found her own scenester spidey-sense as Tam took him in with an up-and-down sweep, click-click-click, and she felt more unwelcome jealousy. Stupid brain. She wished for an infographic she could sweep her fingers along to banish petty thoughts.

  Limpopo sidled over. “How about the warm pool now?” It was the temperature of a cup of tea left out for twenty minutes, the kind you could sit in and socialize. Limpopo was suggesting that they have a nice, civilized chat.

  “Great,” she said, and let Limpopo lead her.

  They took up station at opposite corners, arms draped over the edge. Iceweasel looked over her left arm, the dark bruise and scrapes. The hot water and the cool air made it glow a vivid pink. It ached distantly.

  The rest of the party eased in, sending the water level up so little waterfalls cascaded out into the drains. Seth was very solicitous of Gretyl, who regarded him with detached amusement as he fussed, darting to offer her a hand. Iceweasel got the impression that some of this was for her benefit, but that much more was for Tam’s, and possibly Limpopo’s.

  It was striking how the presence of a man changed so much about their dynamic, made it about invisible lines of attention. She shrugged, winced at her shoulder, switched her gaze to Gretyl, felt that slow curling low in her belly again. It was scary, the feelings that came up when she looked at Gretyl. Gretyl looked back at her, skewered her on her frank stare, and a shiver raced from her toes to her hairline. Gretyl’s stare said You’re mine and Will you be mine? at the same time. Strong/weak. Soft/firm. Like Gretyl, big arms and muscular back, round soft belly and huge, soft breasts.

  “CC was backed up,” Tam said, breaking in.

  Well of course he was. He was core to the project.

  “Were the others?” She realized she didn’t even know the names of the dead, assumed if Tam hadn’t told her the names they must not be people she was close to, but who knew with Tam?

  “No,” she said. “They weren’t.” She looked angry.

  “But CC was.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “CC was. Is. There’s already a group who’re putting the cluster together, using whatever spare compute-time they can get out of the B&B.”

  Limpopo sat up, twisted from side to side, showing them the top edge of her burn. “We’ve got a lot of compute power here,” she said. “Been running the workshop twenty-four/seven to produce new logic ever since you left, Iceweasel. I thought it might come to this, and we had feedstock.” She smiled a private smile. The old B&B had collapsed right on schedule, about a month before Iceweasel struck out, dissolved in acrimony, and Limpopo had taken undisguised satisfaction in picking through the remains of her sullied creation—but some of the schadenfreude wore off when she came to the places where blood had dried on the walls. The actual fights were never published by the meritocratic crew, but the ugly messages, accusations, and name-calling that led up to them were. Supposedly, no one had died, but if someone had died, they hardly would have advertised the fact.

  Tam nodded. “I heard that. I want to see what happens with this when we’re not resource-constrained. The cargo all got in, right?”

  “Yeah,” Limpopo said. “It was hard without the mechas.”

  Iceweasel thought of how the mechas trashed the A.T.V. and its cargo-pods. “Were those mechas from here?”

  “Yeah.” A storm passed over her face. Iceweasel had hardly ever seen Limpopo mad. It was scary. “A pod of mercs and an infotech goon pwned everything using some zeroday they’d bought from scumbag default infowar researchers. They took over the drone fleet, and while we dewormed it, seized the mechas.”

  “Is the B&B network safe?”

  Limpopo shrugged. “That’s a bitch, huh? Maybe they put deep hooks in that we’ll never find. We’ve done what we could, checked checksums against the backups and known-good sources. The zeroday got sequenced and patched damned quick, since it affects the main branch, all the way up to UN refugee camps where a billion people live.”

  Gretyl whistled. “Shit,” she said. “Can you imagine the bad stuff you could do with an exploit against the whole UNHCR net?”

  Limpopo and she shared a look. “It’s every UNHCR admin’s nightmare. We’ve never had better cooperation with them. They patched in an hour, across their whole base, but there’s other downstream projects like ours that may be vulnerable to total lockout or HVAC shenanigans that could burn them down.”

  The two women’s faces were in near-identical serious configurations. Iceweasel nearly laughed. But the realization that they were alike in so
many ways stopped her. There’d been moments during her years with the B&B where she’d felt jealousy for Limpopo and Etcetera’s romance, and she’d assumed it was to do with Etcetera. Now she wondered if it wasn’t Limpopo. Gretyl was a larger-than-life Limpopo, bigger in every physical and emotional way. The realization made her forget about the implications of their discussion.

  Tam brought her back. “How much of the certainty that the network’s okay is wishful thinking?” She was the one who said what everyone else thought and didn’t want to say. “We’re going to bring Dis online, right? Then CC? Maybe those mercs, why the fuck not. None of us want our friends to be dead until we can toast a whole new set of CPUs, right?”

  Seth splashed. “That’s telling them.” He loved shit disturbers. Not to mention other things about Tam.

  Limpopo said, “There’s that.”

  The water felt less welcoming and the atmosphere got less social.

  [ix]

  Dis was everywhere. The B&B crew couldn’t get enough of her. They touched in to speak to her all over the building. Even with all the compute-time, she had to queue them, calling them as they walked in the woods or lazed in the common room.

  But she always had time for Iceweasel.

  “How’s CC coming?” Iceweasel said.

  Dis didn’t have a blinking cursor anymore, but Iceweasel still could read body language into her pauses. This one was awkward. “Not good. I’ve been trying to talk him through, but he doesn’t want to stabilize. With me it was a matter of finding the possibility space where I could deal with being a head-in-a-jar. It may be that CC doesn’t have that subset.”

  “What? It’s CC! He loves this stuff! It’s what he lived for! That’s like a rocket scientist with a fear of heights!”

  “I don’t know a lot of aerospace dudes, but one reason to get into uploading is your overwhelming existential terror at the thought of dying. It’s not a discipline you’d chase if you were uninterested in the subject.”

  Iceweasel tried to learn to relax. The B&B didn’t need that much work to keep going. A chart making the rounds in their social-spaces showed how if everyone put in an eight-hour shift every three days, they’d have double the hours they needed. One crew was ideologically committed to doing nothing, creating a “safe space” for “post-work.” She understood. Sitting on her ass, especially in public, made her feel guilty. Unworkers were moral cover for people experimenting with doing SFO for a day or a month (or a year).

  She sat on a lounger on B&B’s lawn, a big field of sweet-smelling wild grasses with a thriving biome of critters that rustled and soared around it. She had Dis in both ears, but her system was smart enough to mix in wind-through-grass sound, things chasing each other, yin-yang of breezy aimlessness and panicked scrambling.

  “How long before you can stabilize CC?”

  Another micro-pause. Dis had lots of compute-time. The pauses had to be deliberate. She’d ask Gretyl—comp-sci was a mystery to her, despite hanging around the university crew.

  “Don’t know if I’ll be able to. When I figured how to stabilize myself, I concluded I’d be able to apply the technique to every sim. But I’m a data-set of one. People are idiosyncratic. I’m idiosyncratic. Maybe I’m a rare exception and no one else will do what I’ve done.”

  “That’s not what you said—”

  “It’s what all the people who know what they’re fucking talking about are saying now. Everyone else is running around shouting, ‘Death is cured! USA! USA! USA!’”

  “This is Canada.”

  “Yeah, but you sound stupid chanting ‘Ca-na-da!’ It’s easy to get excited when science actually does something, because science is failing and taking notes. We want to get a ‘breakthrough,’ but not everything is a breakthrough. Sometimes, it’s just a tiny step forward. Or a dead end. I’m trying to bring CC up, but maybe the only way to wake him is in a state so distorted that he’s not recognizable. I’ve modeled using me as a template and mixing our models one bit at a time until we get to a hybrid, with just enough me in to keep him alive. There’s no clean way to do that. Nearly everything I tried modeled out to nothing recognizable as either of us. Interesting as that is, I have no urge to make insane, immortal synthetic personalities out of thin air. We’ve got enough fucking weirdos.”

  “What about everyone else? The other researchers?”

  Dis made a rude noise. “There were real fuckups in Madrid, who brought up a version of me, tried to make me help them. That copy suicided, after sending messages to all the other groups, telling them about the evil shit going down. But Madrid’s the only lab that’s succeeding in bringing a sim up into a stable state. I’ve been thinking of giving everyone else permission to experiment with bringing versions of me online, creepy as that is. Seems it might be the only way of getting anywhere. Science is lumpy. Success sometimes follows success, but sometimes you get mold in the petri dish over the weekend and spend your life trying to figure out what just happened.”

  Another pause.

  “I’m guessing there’s a ton of instances of me running in default. Zottas and their lab-rats wouldn’t have any problem with that. Used to drive CC nuts, the sense that they added our research to theirs, but we never saw what they made of our work. But every time we had any success, their lab-rats were tempted to go walkaway and join us, because everyone wants to work for winners. So at least all my twins are acting as irresistible temptation to fire your boss and hit the road.”

  “Do you wonder if you’re in a default lab, being tricked about the world around you?”

  Computerized laughter. Gretyl said Dis had had a really weird laugh in life. The bizarre computer laugh was a faithful rendition. She must have been as weird as shoes on a snake. “No way. Too many Turing tests to pass. I’m conversing with all of you all the time. They could fuck with my ability to detect whether I was conversing with a bot or not, but that would also make me too stupid to be helpful. I’m as sure that I know what’s sim and what’s reality now as I was when I was meat-alive. Call it ninety-five percent.”

  “What’s the other five percent?”

  “An old A.I. not-joke. In the future we’ll figure out how to simulate everything, so we will. There will be a lot more simulated universes in the whole history of the real universe than there will be real universes. So it’s more likely that you’re a sim than real, whatever real means.”

  “My brain hurts.”

  “Don’t worry, when we simulate you, we’ll ensure you’re in a state that’s comfortable with the idea. Ha-ha-only-serious. It’s like Meta, being like this. Sometimes I dial back and watch the lookaheads, see how close I am to the edge of full panic. It’s interesting to tweak that shit in realtime. You haven’t known freedom until you’ve experienced cognitive liberty, the right to choose your state of mind.”

  “I’m looking forward to it.”

  “You’re being sarcastic, but seriously, not being embodied is awesome. If the clone stuff they’re doing in Lagos works out, I’ll be the first to jump back into a body, but I’ll miss this. There’s something pure about it. It’s much simpler than psychotherapy, and more effective.”

  “Unless you’re CC.”

  “Different strokes for different sims.” She could make the computer-voice sound smug.

  Iceweasel found being a head in a jar dangerously compelling then. It would be wonderful to dial back her anxieties, match her intellectual knowledge that no one was waiting for her to show her true zotta colors with emotional certainty that everyone knew she was a fraud. If she went to therapy to make that match happen, she’d be lionized for her self-knowledge, but if she took a drug that did it, she’d be escaping reality. She wondered how people would think about sims who dispensed with drugs and therapy.

  “I can’t stand just sitting,” she muttered, looking at the worknots, proudly lazing. “I need to do something.”

  “We also serve, who sit and fart.” It made Iceweasel smile.

  “Of all the things I
thought when I went walkaway, I never anticipated chatting with a potty-mouthed simulated neuroscientist.”

  “I’m a real neuroscientist.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I’m going to start a program of micro-correcting people searching for correct adjectives to describe dead immortal simulated artificial people like me.”

  “Don’t you have some research you should be doing?”

  “I’m doing it, running a long lookahead for this conversation and branch-stemming/pruning to find paths to ongoing dialog. Trying to simulate what you were doing when I kept suiciding, before I stabilized. I’m back-forming hypotheses from my transcripts and trying them on you.”

  Iceweasel squirmed. “Why?”

  “I want to generalize a data-driven solution to cheering people the fuck up. I could apply it to sims like CC.”

  “This isn’t cheering me up.”

  “I think it is.”

  Iceweasel felt a moment’s software-like introspection. “Okay, I am cheering up a little.”

  “Good. Noted.” The computer voice assayed a German-like diction: “Lie down on ze couch und tell me about your parintz.”

  [x]

  Gretyl and Iceweasel poked their noses around the rooms where the university took place. The small rooms on the top floor were commandeered by research teams, who crammed three to five people into them, hacking different models. Most of them were working on CC’s sim, because CC had been beloved, and they were freaked by the possibility that the scientist who’d known and done most on simulation, was secretly too freaked to be brought back. If he couldn’t come back, would any of them?

  Other people wanted to use those rooms. The scientists’ work lost some of its urgency as the days stretched. There was talk of renovating the ruins of the original B&B as a new campus, a hint to stop hogging the good stuff.

  The university crew didn’t give a shit.

  “Why should they?” Gretyl said, as she and Iceweasel tapped fruitlessly at a surface, looking for a private place to chat. “Let’s walk, it’s nice out for a change.” A week of shitting-down frozen custard and hail had finally passed by. Weak sun poked from fluffy clouds in a sky that showed signs of blue.