She got to her knees, her feet—the merc didn’t interfere or offer help, stood with that same disinterested attention that let Natalie know she was watching but wasn’t feeling. Natalie steadied herself on the wall, looked at her father, on the far side of the merc. He looked furious, and she realized he was furious with the merc, not her, because the merc had deserted her post, maybe slipping out for a piss, thinking Natalie would be complacent while having a come-to-Jesus negotiation with her old man. The merc had fucked up in front of the big boss. Natalie tried to read her face for the oh-shit expression of waiters and hotel managers when her dad wasn’t happy with them. She was cool. Natalie couldn’t help but admire her. It was twisted, but she felt solidarity with anyone her father planned on destroying.
“No tough-guys on the payroll, huh?” She spun on her heel to walk out of the house. It was stupid, but why not? The woman grabbed her shoulder in a way that gave her surprising leverage, spun her around with almost no force, though there was no way Natalie could stop it. Natalie shrugged at her hand, but the hand rode her shoulder with ease, rising and falling like a flag in a breeze.
“What are your orders, anyway? You said you could ‘incapacitate’ me. Would you beat me unconscious? Give me a secret nerve pinch? Got a taser hidden in your ninja-suit?” She took a long look at her father. He had mastered his expression and projected impatient boredom with his whole body.
“Let’s find out.” Natalie took three running steps toward her dad, who flinched minutely at the last moment. She stopped and spun, stared at the woman, then charged. One step, two steps—wham, on the floorboards, staring at the ceiling, noticing the LED recesses you could only see if you were supine. Her back hurt. She had the ghost sensation of a hand at her wrist, a foot at her ankle, the sense the woman had barely moved to throw her. It was the spirit of all those Sun Tzu-y martial arts: use the enemy’s strength against him. She giggled at the thought that she should take notes, figure out how to dismantle default by using its strength against it.
She stood. The woman stepped back a half step, weight forward, while her dad stayed at the corridor’s far end with his stern, disappointed mask on. It wasn’t entirely intact. There was a bit of worry Mr. Poker Face couldn’t hide. She leaned on the wall and took a couple breaths.
“Let’s make it best two out of three.” Her father’s face flickered, and there it was: fear.
She charged him. He didn’t flinch, but she saw he wanted to, and she turned around and before she could think, she ran straight at the guard, coming in low, like she was playing a platformer and was trying one approach after another to defeat the level’s mini-boss, hoping she didn’t run out of lives before she found the trick. Maybe if she came in low, she’d be harder to throw.
She wasn’t.
This time she jammed her elbow and her body was lanced by a white-lightning sear, making her suck air through her teeth. What was pain, anyway? Dis could feel pain or not, but it was an infographic, a slider you moved up or down. Her arm was hurt—something had been damaged—but the feeling of hurt wasn’t intrinsic. You could be hurt and feel nothing, you could be in immense pain without injury. Injury was in the elbow, pain was in the brain.
But it hurt.
She got to her feet more slowly, rubbed her elbow. She had paid more attention this time, had the impression that the woman had lightly touched her shoulders as she passed, did something to her that caused her weight to overbalance to the front, sending her face-first into the floor.
She breathed. Jacob scowled. She watched him painstakingly convert his fear to anger. Anger was fine. She was fucking pissed.
“Third time’s the charm.”
This time he grabbed her, but she’d been a walkaway, carrying heavy loads for the sheer pleasure of doing things with her hands, walking miles at a time, having long, unhurried, sensuous yoga sessions on the B&B’s lawn that made her strong and supple. He was a gym rat, attended by skilled trainers and a pharmacopoeia that gave him cut transverse abdominals like an underwear model and arms with lean triceps and strong wrists, and he could do an hour on the elliptical, but it was all for show, never used.
She shook him off easily. She thrilled to realize she could have flattened him as easily as the merc was knocking her out, run up one side of him and down the other. It had been years since her father had been physical with her, but she recollected his iron grip, how he could carry her out of the room when she was misbehaving, ignoring her squirming. Let him try now.
She tried for a low sprint pumping her arms for speed, though she knew she’d need to be fired out of a longbow before her speed was high enough to make a difference to the woman. She almost faltered as she drew near, some cowardly part of her not wanting to get the coming beat-down, and she killed that part of her with a blast of will, put on more speed.
Her head bounced off the wall on the way down, filling her vision with stars. She took longer to get up. She was dizzy. It had been a solid hit. Had the woman hurt her on purpose, to punish her for refusing to back down? Had her run-up just been better?
Her father went into the bedroom, she supposed to phone for backup, so she walked this time, turned around, stared at the woman, the two of them alone now save for the watching eyes.
She ran. Something was wrong with her balance, and she couldn’t get her wind. This time the woman caught her and turned her around, neatly canceling all her momentum as she did so. Natalie and she were face to face. The woman’s nothing-special face and small teeth were right there; her breath smelled of toothpaste. She had a booger up one nostril. Her eyebrows weren’t plucked, which Natalie hadn’t noticed, and had a bushiness that reminded her of Gretyl. She wanted to cry.
She tried to walk past, walked into the woman, was pushed gently away. She tried again. She was really dizzy. It had been a bad hit.
This woman wasn’t her enemy, she just had a job. Natalie didn’t care. She swung a wild roundhouse the woman easily sidestepped. Had she smiled a little? It was weird to be here, silent except for breathing, her father’s muttering from the bedroom. Wordless intimacy. She swung again. Again. If she’d had a gun, she’d have shot the woman, her father, herself. What does a walkaway do when she can’t walk away?
She gave up, arms dropping to her sides. Stalked into the bedroom. Her father was in the chair, looking disgusted, like she was pathetic. She supposed she was. What’s more pathetic than a walkaway who stops walking?
She swallowed and tried to work up the courage to fall on him, to stick her thumbs in his eye sockets, rake her nails down his throat, knee him in the balls. The thought of the violence was so seductive that she was actually stayed from moving, surprised at her id’s ardor.
But then she embraced it, with a predator’s grin. She heard herself panting. Now she would do it. Her father understood, she saw it in his eyes. He was scared. The predator rose. She would enjoy this.
One step. Two steps.
A hand on her arm. Strong. A man’s hand, squeezing so hard she gasped, then the needle in her elbow. She turned and saw the man, not big, shorter than her, but with a face like a stone and a bull’s neck. Then she see didn’t anything else.
[iii]
She was certain she was still in the house. You couldn’t fake the smell. But it looked like a hospital room. The door had no handle or inset panel, just some kind of invisible sensor that chose who passed. This hospital bed was bigger, cruder, and she was—she squirmed her hips—she was plumbed into it. There was an IV in her wrist, and a sense of fuzzy well-being she knew couldn’t be endogenous. She wondered what was in the IV bag. She’d have loved some Meta right now.
She was in four-point restraint, with an extra band around her forearm to keep the IV firmly seated.
She supposed it was a suicide attempt. The idea wasn’t very disturbing. Her sorrow was a distant moon orbiting her psyche far away, visible but ultimately exerting only the mildest of tides.
“Now what?” Her voice was thick, her mouth pasty. If there
was saline in the bag, it wasn’t keeping her hydrated. It was like someone had dumped a tablespoon of hydrophilic shipping gel-pellets in her mouth, drying it to the texture of old roadkill.
She willed the door to open, thinking of the days she’d spent in isolation in the other room, wondering if they’d leave her, a tube going in and tubes going out, a brain inextricably tethered to inconvenient meat, easily coerced, thanks to its ridiculous frailties.
Had they had this room ready all along, as plan B? Or had she been kept unconscious while they refitted a room to make it secure?
A nurse came through the door, wearing hospital whites and wheeling a cart. He stood beside the bed.
“Hello,” she said.
He stared at her consideringly, then pulled out the cart’s trays, pointed a thermometer in her ear, fit a pressure cuff to her arm. He flipped back the blanket and impersonally hiked up her gown, accessing a small box taped over her hip that she hadn’t known was there.
“Why doesn’t all that stuff come with remote telemetry? If you’re going to pretend I don’t exist, why not get transmissions in another room, spare yourself the social awkwardness?”
He was good at ignoring her. He checked her catheter, so mechanically that she felt anger instead of humiliation, which was, in its way, a mercy. What an asshole.
“I know there are cameras recording, but at least tip me a wink. Don’t nurses have to take a vow? An oath? Are you a nurse? Maybe you’re a ‘med-tech.’ Did you flunk out of nursing school and get the version that doesn’t come with the Florence Nightingale training?”
Taunting him wasn’t satisfying, and her mouth was so, so dry.
“How about a drink? Water? Juice?”
He had a hose with a sponge tip. He pulled off the sheets and threw them into a basket in the cart’s base, revealing a rubbery under-sheet. Working with that same impersonal efficiency, he gave her a quick sponge bath, hose in one hand and a small hydrophilic towel in the other, stopping after each limb to wring the cloth into his cart. From her distant mental vantage point, Natalie admired the cart and wondered who its primary market was—people with loony old relatives locked up in attics?
He did her face and ears with wipes in sterile packaging, like the guys at the detailing place working squeegees over the windscreen of her dad’s cars. The fact that it was done by humans was a selling point. All the places her dad used had “bespoke” or “hand-wash” or “artisanal” in their names, sometimes all three. She smelled the nurse, soap with a bit of sweat, saw some stubble under his left ear. There was one point where she could have kissed him. Or bit him.
When he was done, he packed up his tray, tugged her clothes into place, and replaced the sheets. He fished under the bed for a flexi-hose with a bite-down nipple on the end. He pulled off lengths of surgical tape and taped it to her collarbone and cheek, so she could turn her head and drink. She could have bitten off a fingertip, but didn’t. He packed his things and left. The door sighed shut and clicked, then clunked, a reminder that it had serious locking stuff. It sounded like the second clunk came through the floor, like the door had a set of pins that penetrated it.
She realized where she was: her dad’s panic room. It had independent, redundant network connections, power backups, food and water stashes, a whole armory. It wasn’t like her dad to tell other people about the panic room—she’d never seen it and knew that opening it would set off alarms all over town. Her dad made sure she knew, just in case she got the idea of throwing a party there.
Dad must’ve built himself a better bolt-hole—he’d mused about one in a second subbasement, bored out beneath the house using a super-covert drill that his zotta buddy had used to turn the plot under his estate into a bat-cave. It sent Dad into ecstasies of jealousy. There’s no way he’d let Mr. Not-a-Nurse into this place if it was still the secret he’d bet his life on. Unless he planned to off all the staff once he’d brainwashed her and entomb them within the reinforced walls, like a pharaoh’s tomb-builders.
These thoughts produced seven minutes’ worth of distraction. When they were exhausted, she was alone with her situation. Thinking of Gretyl made her cry with desire and loneliness. There were thoughts about her father and sister. Hadn’t her father said her mother was on her way? Was she here? She had her own floor on the adults’ side of the house. It hadn’t been occupied often, but when it was, the house’s affect changed. The whole household was alive to the possibility of their mercurial mistress doing one of her patented Valkyrie numbers.
She chased the tail of her thoughts in ever-tighter spirals. It was a desperate place. Visit it enough and it might drive you to suicide.
“Fuck it,” she said aloud. “Brainwashing, rubber hoses, deprogramming, all that Patty Hearst stuff.” She’d learned about Hearst, the poor little rich girl who’d carried a gun with her kidnappers, after Gretyl joked about it. She’d been offended, but then adopted the girl as a totem. Hearst was an idiot, but at least she wasn’t just another rich asshole.
She sang “Consensus,” an incredibly dirty walkaway marching song, thirty verses. The chorus: “Consensus, consensus, it beat us and bent us, but we’re sure that it’s lent us, a shit-eating grin.” Making up new verses was walkaway sport, there were wikis of them. She couldn’t remember them all, but she could make them up on the fly, especially if she sang humm-humm-humm where she couldn’t think of a line, which was automatic disqualification when it was sung in earnest.
The verses got more hum-hum-hummy. She was ready to peter out and start another song, when a voice joined in: “… but we’re sure that it’s lent us, a shit-eating grin!” It was achingly familiar. She shivered from scalp to ankles, hairs on her neck standing.
“Dis?”
“That’s Dis Ex Machina to you, kid,” the voice said.
She cried.
* * *
“This is a dirty trick.” She mastered her tears. “Absolutely disgusting.”
“It would be,” Dis said, “if it was a trick.”
“How would you know if it was or not? You’re on all the version control servers. Anyone who can build a cluster can bring you up. There’ll be hundreds of you, in all kinds of configs. My dad could easily afford a version of you that was constrained so it believed it had infiltrated his network to work against him, while spying on me and everything I did. You would never know. I’d tell you things he’d have to slice my nipples off to get otherwise. He’d call this humane, a ‘low impact’ way of ‘bringing me around’ to sanity, which, in his world, is the ability to bullshit yourself into believing you deserve to have more of everything that everyone else has less of, because of your special snowflakeness.”
“You’re preaching to the converted, girl. Remember, I was walkaway before you.”
“Dis was walkaway before me. You, whatever you are, are an emissary, knowing or not, from default.”
“We’re going in circles. No skin off my back, because I’m a construct. I can park my frustration to one side, move the slider, have this argument with you for as long as you’d like. It’s cool. Comes from a lab in Punjab, ex-IIT math-geeks who want to turn the Āgama into subroutines, Yogic Mastery Apps. They’re turning Meta into math. You’d love it—they worship Gretyl, her optimizations for lookahead modeling are the basis of their discipline. I think if she wasn’t so worried about you, she’d be all over it.”
“That was really low.” She was surprised by the venom in her voice. When her thoughts strayed to Gretyl, she was seized by unbearable helplessness and longing. That Gretyl felt the same about her was a weight crushing her chest.
“Oh, honey,” Dis said. Her computer voice was better. The emotions in those two words were awful. “She misses you so much. I can get you a message from her. Or…”
Natalie knew it was a baited hook. She didn’t want to rise to it. Fish must know the worm has a barb in it, but some bite anyway. Was it hunger? A death wish? “What?”
“They’ve been scanned now,” Dis said. “After
they reached the Thetford abandoned zone, everyone made a scan, first thing. They’re in the walkaway clouds now, more every day. We’re learning so much from the multiplicity of scans, too—I think the problem with bringing back CC was that we just didn’t have a deep enough data-set to make inferences about tailored simulation strategies for brain variations. CC is pretty stable. We can characterize scans based on the likelihood of bringing up a successful sim. Gretyl’s scan is in the top decile. She was made to run on silicon. Sita, too. Hell, Sita was so up for it that she’s running a twin twenty-four/seven, in realtime, with sensors all over herself. Gretyl hasn’t done that, though. We’ve only done the preflighting for her. We haven’t run her…”
Yet, Natalie finished. Gretyl could be here, running on whatever substrate Dis was on. Her Gretyl, not her Gretyl, that was a distinction without a difference.
“So fucking evil.” She didn’t have the energy for bile. It came out like surrender.
“It’s not complicated. Your dad’s got amazing opsec on the main house network. But the patchlevel on his safe room is lagged, because there were conflicts the auto-updaters couldn’t handle, and the ops guy who set it up retired and your dad doesn’t have anyone in his ops department who even knows about this. The alert messages have piled up in an admin dashboard for years, all neglected. I wonder if your dad even has a login for that dash?
“We pwned this place as soon as you went. It was Gretyl’s project, but I did the heavy lifting. We used like seventy percent of walkaway’s compute-time running parallel instances of me, at twenty ex realtime. We clobbered the fucking IDS, smoked the firewall, and now I’m so deep I can do anything.” The door-locks clunked out “shave and a haircut.” It was terrifying and hilarious. Natalie’s anguished smile hurt to hold.
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