Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

  The B&B crew and the surviving aeronauts wanted the scientists to bear down on the scanning project, indoors and safe from the blowing asbestos and leaching heavy metals of Thetford; they themselves wanted to get the fuck out of the tunnels. Walkaways who couldn’t walk away were like foxes whose den lacked an emergency back door. The space-suit project was a priority. The Thetford crew had improvements on the space-suit fab they couldn’t wait to go 2.0 with, so that was likely to achieve liftoff.

  Kersplebedeb laughed, showing horsey teeth and the insides of his nostrils. “You people kill me. You’ve done so much for the project, but you don’t appear to have given any thought to how it changes everything. The rate we’re going, we’ll be launching a thousand walkaways into space by New Year’s.”

  “Where do you plan on getting the launch capacity to put a colony into orbit? Last time I checked your wiki, you had a deal to lift a couple cubesats a year.”

  “All we need is one cubesat, up high with decent comms to Earth-station, and we’re set.”

  The penny dropped. “You want to run a cluster in orbit and put sims on it?”

  Kersplebedeb gave him a “duh” look and pawed through a cooler for a jar of astronauts’ moonshine, made from distilled lichen. It tasted amazing, like a slightly sweet tequila, deceptively smooth and very strong. He spun the lid off the jar and poured two small glasses of greenish liquid. These sit-downs with Kersplebedeb involved a lot of lichen booze. It was a theory-object from walkaway space programs. It was cheap and easy to make even if you didn’t have hard vacuum right outside your airlock.

  “What else would we do?”

  “What would they do up there?”

  “Same thing we’re doing here, but far from people with bombs and weird ideas about doing what you’re told and accepting your station.”

  “You’re going to run copies of yourself in space, on a cubesat, and what, exchange email with them? Let them have high-latency flamewars about engineering problems?”

  “I’ll grant it’s weird.” He sipped the drink and his affect got less wild, more—Etcetera struggled for the word. Default. More sane, more respectable. At some time in Kersplebedeb’s life, he’d been the kind of person who could explain to a boardroom of normal people and make it sound normal. Now he was busting out his normal register for Etcetera. “Things”—he waved his hands—“are coming to a head. Zottas are freaking.”

  “Zottas are always freaking. That’s what they do. Worry whether they have more than everyone.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about, Ets.” This was Kersplebedeb’s name for Etcetera. For a guy called Kersplebedeb, Kersplebedeb was impatient with other peoples’ multisyllabic names. Everyone else got one syllable. “That’s the baseline social anxiety that keeps default’s boilers running. But for the past three generations, zottas have expanded their families. It used to be only one kid got to be stratospherically wealthy. The others would be shirttail squillionaires. They’ll never be poor, but they’re not going to change the course of nations. They’re two orders of magnitude poorer than the eldest.

  “Money’s relative. When your big brother gets to be a hundred times richer than you, it means his kids get to go into orbit for Christmas break, have dinner with presidents, while your kids merely go to Eton or UCC and do deep-sea sub dives instead of space shots. They have dinner with pro athletes and the pop star who plays their fifteenth birthday party. Big brother’s number-two kid ends up like yours, and he’s not happy about that, because number two knows it early. It warps him like it warped you. It rots a family from inside.

  “The 0.001 percent can bud off three fortunes, branching dynasties for the whole brood. This makes things worse because when you’re jealous of your brother, that’s Old Testament badness. Ends with ‘a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.’”

  Etcetera looked puzzled. Kersplebedeb said, “Cain and Abel.” Etcetera mouthed, “Oh,” and made a go-on gesture. He’d had decent-sized gulps of lichen-juice and was filled with expansive goodwill.

  “The endgame: even those zottas run out of new territory to conquer to carry on geometrically expanding their fortunes. There’s nothing left to squeeze out of the rest of us. The capital owned by non-zottas has dropped to negligible. If some desperate zotta figured out how to confiscate all of it, he wouldn’t get one dowry’s worth for his number-two kid.”

  “So they turn on each other?”

  “We’ve sat through this movie before.” Kersplebedeb touched his nose in a gesture Etcetera eventually recognized as meaning “on the nose.” “In the nineteenth century, the rich had the same pattern—one kid from each family got the name and the estate, everyone else became a comfortable nonentity, or, if they were very lucky, got married off to someone else’s number one. Then came the colonial era, new worlds to plunder, and whoosh, geometric expansion for two generations, long enough that there was no one alive who could remember a time when the dynasty was a straight line instead of an expanding tree of fortunes.”

  “What happened?”

  “They ran out of colonies,” Kersplebedeb said.

  “What happened when they ran out?”

  “Oh!” Kersplebedeb took a long drink. Sighed as his Adam’s apple worked. “World War One broke out. They turned on each other.”

  [vi]

  Limpopo flexed her arms in the confines of her environmental suit. It was a fourth-generation model, fresh off the printer and snapped together around her body by a Thetford spacie who made anachronistic squire-and-knight references. When she asked him, he shrugged and said, “Sci-fi and fantasy are two sides of the same coin.” He had a twang that might be Texan, and looked like he might be Vietnamese. Spacies came from all over. They had a wild-eyed visionary aspect that set them apart, even by walkaway standards, where wild-eyed-ness came with the job.

  The suit was stiff but not terrible. There was a hydraulic boost in the joints that helped it support itself, gave it strength of its own, like a junior mecha-loader. She’d ordered hers skinned with a mosaic of van-art Hobbits and elves she’d picked from a catalog, and watched in fascination as an algorithm figured out how to resize and tessellate them so that they covered the whole suit without any mismatched edges.

  She’d been outside once since they’d arrived, ferried by bubble-car into a bouncy-castle room they used for common space. That time, she’d gone in a loaner suit, a gen-2, and it had been so hot and ungainly that she’d done a circuit around one of the ruined houses and gone back in, face mask clouded with condensation and scratches.

  Now she had the custom-fitted gen-4, she was ready to try again. They had a house rule of going in pairs, and she knew Sita had been champing to get outside. They got acquainted on the long march and working in the makeshift infirmary after the Better Nation had been shot down. They were both scared and excited by the rage that burned in Sita. It was a casual ruthlessness in her desire to defend walkaways. She took over defense of the column, putting up drones in a rotating pattern, working evenings to charge and inspect their weapons—mostly pulsed sound and energy weapons, though there was a big, weird projectile thing, a rail-gun they’d brought from Walkaway U and then towed from the B&B.

  Now they were settled in at Thetford Space City, Sita led the project to get neural scanners running, providing administrative and work-flow support. Her own background—computational linguistics—didn’t have practical application to that part of the project, so once things were humming, she didn’t have anything to do besides bringing hot drinks to real experts, and she got squirrelly.

  Sita’s suit was tiled with a forest camouflage pattern that was composed of thousands of distorted faces sporting bizarre expressions. Looking at it made Limpopo’s eyes go swimmy.

  “Ready?” Sita said, through the point-to-point network. It was encrypted, used multiple bands for redundancy, and had clever telemetry in its radios that also detected interference and used it to infer the state of the electromagnetic environment, allow
ing it to overcome electrical storms. Sita’s voice was so crisp, so beautifully EQ’ed with the ambient wind sounds and the windmill thrums, so well-corrected in binaural space that she sounded like a game character.

  Limpopo gave her a thumbs-up and punched the airlock button. They crowded together, and she got Sita’s elbow in the side, making the suit rub along her scar in a way that wasn’t entirely unpleasant. At a time when so many of the people around her treated their bodies as inconvenient meatsuits they were obliged to use as mechas for toting around their precious brains, it was nice to have a piece of her identity that was inextricably bound to her flesh.

  Her last trip out an airlock had been a confusion of impeded movement, chafed skin, and poor visibility. Now, stepping into the tall, brittle wild grass poking out the snow, sapphire visor so clear it felt like UI, complete with lens-flare, she was struck by the place’s beauty.

  Sita gave her a shove from behind. “Dude, don’t block the door.”

  “Sorry.” She sidestepped. The trees were tall and lavish with needles, the snow so fluffy, the sky an expanse of dramatic clouds. “Just a bit—”

  “Hard to remember it’s a blasted wasteland when it’s this beautiful. You should see the wildlife. Moose, deer, even wildcats, judging from scat and paw prints. And birds! Owls, of course, but so many winter birds, you’d swear migration was an urban legend.”

  “How?”

  Sita struck off through the snow, sinking to her knees with each step. Limpopo walked in her footprints, marveling at her suit’s wicking sweat from her back.

  “No people. It’s like this around Chernobyl. Turns out that, relative to sharing a biome with humans, living in the shadow of a radioactive plume or a place where the dirt and air are forty percent asbestos is a good deal.”

  “You put it that way and we sound like a blight.”

  “Whaddya mean ‘we,’ White Man?”

  She knew the joke—“Tonto, the Indians have us surrounded!” “What do you mean ‘we’ White Man?”—even though she’d never read a Lone Ranger book or played the game or seen the cartoons or whatever, but it took a moment to get Sita’s meaning.

  “Really? Anyone who wants a body is worse than asbestos?”

  Sita stopped. The snow was above her knees. She was really having to work to keep up the pace. Limpopo heard her hard breathing in the earbuds. “Let me catch my breath.” Then: “It’s kind of obvious. The amount of stuff we consume to survive, it’s crazy. End-timers used to project our consumption levels forward, multiplying our population by our needed resources, and get to this point where we’d run out of planet in a generation and there’d be famine and war.

  “That kind of linear projection is the kind of thinking that gets people into trouble when they think about the future. It’s like thinking, ‘well, my kid is learning ten exciting new things every week, so by the time she’s sixty, she’ll be smarter than any human in history.’ There are lots of curves that start looking like they go up and to the right forever, but turn into bell curves, or inverted Us, or S-curves, or the fabled hockey-stick that gets steeper and steeper until it goes straight vertical. Any assumption that we’re going to end up like now, but moreso, is so insufficiently weird it’s the only thing you can be sure won’t happen in the future.”

  Limpopo looked at the sky with its scudding clouds, listened to the trees rattling. Her suit’s temperature was perfect ambient, a not-warm/not-cool you wouldn’t notice if it wasn’t minus twenty around you. “I thought the B&B crew liked heavy discussions at the drop of a hat, but then I met you academics. Shit, you like to broaden the frame.”

  Limpopo saw her shoulders shake a little, and she had a moment’s panic that she’d inadvertently reduced Sita to tears, not unheard of in walkaways, everyone carrying around hidden trauma-triggers you could trip by accident.

  When she slogged through the snow and looked at her faceplate, she saw Sita was laughing silently, staring fixedly ahead. When she followed Sita’s gaze, she saw they were being stared down by a moose with an antler rack at least as wide as she was tall.

  “Big moose,” she whispered.

  “Shh,” said Sita, through a hiccuping laugh.

  Limpopo made the hand gesture that bookmarked her suit’s video-recording for interestingness and a soft red light pulsed in the top right of her visor. The moose regarded them for a moment. It had threadbare upholstery spots over its knees. Its shaggy fur glittered with ice crystals. Steam poured out of its nostrils in plumes that swirled in the breeze. Its jaw was ajar, making it look comically stunned, but when she looked into its huge eyes, she saw an unmistakable keenness. This moose wasn’t anyone’s fool.

  The moose shifted and a large turd plopped into the snow, melting and disappearing, leaving behind a steaming hole. They snickered at the unexpected earthiness. It gave them a look Limpopo read as “Oh do grow up,” though that was anthropomorphizing. It shuffled around in a broad circle, ungainly legs swinging in all directions but somehow not stepping in its own turd crater, turned its broad backside to them and walked—no, sauntered—away with a sway-hipped gait that was pure fucks-given-none.

  Both of them burst into laughter. It rolled on, turning into giggle fits that ricocheted between them. Whenever one of them started to taper, the other got things rolling again.

  “Say what you will about bodies,” Limpopo said, at last, “they sure are funny.”

  “No argument.”

  “Come on.” Limpopo took the lead. There was a birch stand ahead, huge trees with curls of white bark peeling away like cuticles begging to be picked at. Limpopo remembered her days after the fire, living on the land. She’d lost her gas-phase stove/generator and been reduced to building campfires, stoking them with shreds of birch bark. She had been traumatized and hurt, but her literal time in the wilderness had a reflective peace, slow-paced satisfaction for each day survived that she’d missed ever since.

  “I can practically hear what you’re thinking.”

  “What’s that?” Limpopo led them past the birch to a fast-moving icy brook with the footprints of many species around it. She tentatively stepped into the rushing water, feeling it as soft massage through the suit’s insulation. The grip-surfaces on her boot soles bound her fast to the streambed. From the brook’s middle, she could see uphill and downhill for some distance. She admired the hills above her, the valley below.

  “You’re thinking how all this beautiful stuff proves that living in a virtual environment would never be truly satisfyingly human.”

  “I wasn’t thinking that, but it’s certainly something I have thought.”

  “Smart-ass.” Sita maneuvered into the streambed, finding a deeper spot, sinking to her knees. “This is beautiful, no question. Being stimulated with this view and this environment is profoundly satisfying.”

  Limpopo stopped herself from saying We agree then, let’s get walking because that kind of flippancy was more Seth’s department and because this was eating Sita.

  “Go on.”

  “First, I’d like you to consider that the reaction we have is a marker for something we could call ‘goodness’ or ‘rightness.’”

  “Or ‘beauty’?”

  “Sure. There’s a body of computational linguistics on the difference between ‘beauty’ and ‘goodness.’ I don’t propose we go down that rathole, but this demands further discussion.”

  “Noted.”

  “Good.” She sloshed to the other side and went into a pine stand where the trees leaned toward the open sky over the crick. “Come on.” Now she was in the lead, heading uphill, and Limpopo understood that there was an abandoned road ahead, switchbacking up the hill. It was blanketed with snow and she wondered if there was any way to attach cross-country skis to the environment suit, because that looked damned challenging.

  “This is beautiful, good and virtuous. It is most prolific and healthy without us. So the best human course is to absent ourselves from it, to do what the original Thetfordians did, but on
a grand scale. Evacuate the planet.”

  “Uh.”

  “Think of it for a minute. I’m not talking mass suicide. I’m talking about balancing our material needs with our aesthetic or, if you want to call it that, our spiritual needs. We’d be seriously bummed if all the wilderness disappeared. We care about Earth and the things that live here because we coevolved with them, so our brains are the products of millions of years’ worth of selection for being awed and satisfied by this kind of place.

  “At the same time, we’re consumptive top predators with the propensity to engage in self-evolution. We’ve hacked Lysenkoism into Darwin.”

  “You lost me.”

  “Lysenko. Soviet scientist. Thought you could change an organism’s germ plasm by physically altering the organism. If you cut off a frog’s leg, then cut off its offspring’s leg, then its offspring’s leg, eventually you’d get a line of naturally three-legged frogs.”

  “That’s dumb.”

  “It was attractive to Stalin, who loved the idea of shaping a generation and imprinting the changes on their kids—which happens, just not genetically. If you teach a generation of people they have to step on their neighbors to survive, setting up a society where everyone who doesn’t gets stepped on, the kids of those people will learn to betray their neighbors from the cradle.”

  “Sounds familiar.”

  “That was just for starters. Stalin insisted they could weatherproof wheat by growing it in shitty conditions. That ended badly. Famine. Millions dead.”

  “But now we can, uh, ‘hack Lysenkoism’?”