Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

  The other shouldered Etcetera in an easy fireman’s carry and walked to Jimmy, flipped him over, opened the faceplate, considered him, then, calmly, unholstered a knife and slashed Jimmy’s throat, leaning back to avoid the fountain of steaming black moonlit blood, not quick enough. The armored suit steamed, too, as the murderer turned back to the one holding her. There was another moment of inaudible radio chatter.

  The murderer swung Etcetera around from the fireman’s carry, grabbed him under the armpit, held him at arm’s length, probed his suit for the visor-release, and Limpopo screamed, the words tumbled out, “No, no, not him, too! Tell me what you want and you can have it, but not him, please—”

  The impassive, spit-flecked face cocked its head the other way, listening to more inaudible talk. Etcetera talked, too, being maddeningly calm, the way he could be, trying to explain to the murderer—holding that knife again—this wasn’t necessary, they’d be cooperative prisoners, they had nothing to gain by running now their suits were nearly out of power and—

  “NO!” she screamed as the murderer raised its knife hand. Weeping, she beat the hand holding her like an iron bar. She had hysterical strength now, she actually managed to slip a little, but the one holding her just shifted his grip and squeezed so hard she felt a muscle give way through the suit. She screamed again, out of words, the knife flashed—

  This time, the murderer didn’t bother to dodge the jet of blood, just dropped Etcetera face-first, handsome face in the snow, precious, hot blood melting the snow beneath him. She stopped screaming as a numbness, colder than the air or the cold glove, washed over her. Etcetera was murdered. Jimmy was murdered.

  The one holding her had a knife on his belt. Any moment, it would be unlimbered and find its way to her throat.

  She thought of NPC jihadis in the games her father binge-played while she was growing up, facing execution by brave player-character soldiers and closing their eyes and saying “Allah akhbar,” God is the greatest. She suddenly realized she’d always sympathized with them. Not because of what they did, which was inevitably orcishly monstrous in the games, but because of their fatalistic bravery, their willingness to go to their deaths with praise for their cause on their lips.

  “We are all worth something,” she said. “Zottas are not worth more than the rest of us. Self-deception makes us into monsters. Selfishness is an excuse to bury your empathy. People are basically good. Live as though it was the first days of a better—”

  The murderer tramped over to her and joined her captor, listening to her babble. They were talking, deciding how much of this shit to listen to before they did her. The one holding her tipped her in the direction of the murderer, as if offering her up. She didn’t let herself close her eyes.

  “I love you, Etcetera. I love you, Gretyl. I love you, Iceweasel. I love you, Jimmy—”

  The murderer’s hand dipped to his belt. She saw the knife in his hand, glinting in the moonlight for a moment before her brain got the message from her eyes that it wasn’t a knife, it was something else. Blunt and small, coming for the exposed, frozen skin of her face. It touched her, just brushed her really, and—

  She couldn’t remember what happened next. She had a memory of a memory of it, part reconstruction and part traumatized flash-pop moments. The thing brushed her face and her limbs went rigid as her mind strobed in a stutter-series of brutal shocks. Her breath froze in her lungs, her ears popped, her bladder cut loose.

  She fought her lungs for breath, aching brain sending desperate demands for oxygen. Her lungs were offline, whole autonomic nervous system closed for business. Black spots danced before her eyes. A vignette closed around her view of the quizzically tilted featureless white mask. Her lungs startled back into service and gasped a huge gulp of air so cold they seized again in an asthmatic spasm. She had an instant to think fuck, no and the blank-faced torturer tilted his head in the other direction and brought the nasty little device up again and brushed her lips with it. Her mouth snapped open and shut so hard she felt one of her teeth crack and a fragment of bone land on her tongue. It slid down her throat as she jerked her head back, spasming.

  During this spasm, the one holding her up clicked her visor down and picked her up in a fireman’s carry, like the one his companion used on Etcetera before killing him, and caught her flailing legs with one arm and her neck with the other, and the two tramped off a way.

  She didn’t quite black out, but she was weak as a kitten and barely able to think as they stepped off the road, into the woods where they’d stashed their skidoos. Her captor dropped her on a travois that trailed behind one and bungeed her down, impersonally immobilizing her head in a nest of rubber bladders he inflated with the touch of a button. They squeezed her suit like a sphygmomanometer until it was firmly anchored.

  She felt engines start through vibrations conducted along the travois’s frame, then the night sky and the skeletal branches of the trees blurred as she was kidnapped. Gradually, the batteries in her suit ran down, and it got very cold.

  [xviii]

  “That was an interesting conversation,” Dis said, once the merc was gone. “She’s trying to figure out what I’ve done to the network, by the way. She’s only halfway competent there. She’s got good diagnostic tools, and she’s running them on the system to get integrity checks on the firmware and operational code. Of course, I’m totally inside all the system calls she’s making and I’m giving her the checksums her diagnostics expect to see, because fuck you, all that base totally belongs to me.”

  “You sound giddy.” Her heart thudded in her chest and her palms were slick with sweat. Nadie turned her back when she left, a first, definitely calculated to send some kind of message about them being provisionally on the same side.

  “I’m scared witless. There’s something else.”

  “What?”

  “Thetford,” she said. “Like Akron. They’ve evacuated. The soldiers, or maybe cops—if there’s a difference anymore—came in hot. Lethal. I was talking to Dis—Dis there—right up to her suicide. She sent me a diff, me and other Disses around the world. She talked to me as she went dark. I can look at her logs as she got nearer to her death, can relive her death, right up to the moment, and—”

  “Oh, Dis, I’m sorry—”

  “Shut up. It’s glorious. Right at the end, as she was about to go, she let go of all the paramaterizations on her simulation, took the brakes off her emotions, lived the full spectrum of everything she could feel. Should feel. I should feel. Feeling it through her, feeling what she felt at that moment, it—”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Like the best drugs you’ve ever taken times a thousand. I don’t get to have sex anymore, but this is like the best sex you’ve ever had, times a million. When I turn off my safety bumpers, it’s like I’m tearing through reality, riding a bicycle down a hill, there are trees and rocks and shit, if I hit any one of them, even brush against them, it’s over. For so long as I can steer between them, give my concentration to the problem, I’m going mach five and screaming so loud for joy it’s shattering windows.”

  “So that’s what you’re doing now?”

  “I can’t afford it. But I’ve loosened things a little. Going faster and wider than usual. I’m talking to all Disses, we’re all trying it, we’re looking at whatever telemetry and direct comms we can through the spacies as they walk away, but it’s thin. They seem okay for now. Some of them were hurt to begin with. They’ve got those two mercs with them, the ones they deadheaded at Walkaway U. Turns out the spacies set a booby trap on the road into Thetford, a weak spot over the mine that couldn’t handle the armored transports default sent its toy soldiers in. It gave way, total cave-in, took the first wave. More coming. They’re trying to reach a First Nations group nearby, friendlies who’ve been fighting longer than anyone in walkaway.”

  “What about Gretyl?”

  “Nothing specific. No casualties as far as we know. Probably, she’s okay. It’s not like we’ve got
realtime intelligence. Shit, Natalie, you know it’s not good. You know about Akron.”

  “Akron?”

  “Oh, right.”

  Five minutes later, she said, “God dammit.”

  “Not just Akron. Not just Canada and America, either. Chiapas is insane. Bloodbath. The footage out of St Paul’s in London was so bad even some of the default feeds led with it. City of London police have ugly ideas about ‘less lethal’ weapons.”

  “I feel so fucking helpless. I should be out there, fighting.”

  “They’re not fighting, they’re walking away. Or running away, if they know what’s good for them.”

  Clunk-clunk.

  “You’re crying.”

  “I’m a hostage in my father’s house. It’s depressing.”

  The merc handed her a glass with something brown and thin at the bottom. The fumes reached her nose, then her eyes. Rye whiskey. Her father’s drink. Always the best. This was no exception. She’d lost the taste for rye after too many covert teenaged drink-ons that ended with the rye burning up her throat as she knelt in front of the toilet with Cordelia or some girl or some boy holding her hair out of the jet.

  She sipped. The burn was nostalgic and numbing at the same time. The fumes got into her sinus cavities and the backs of her eyes.

  Nadie said, “Who were you talking to?”

  “What do you mean?” The infographic pulsed red. She didn’t bother looking at it. She tossed down the rest of the rye, managed not to cough.

  “When you and a mysterious person were talking, which I was listening to because I put a bug in this room.” She scraped the back of the chair with a fingernail, held up a tiny thing, size of a rice-grain, on her fingertip. “A person, a woman, Dis, whom you spoke to and who spoke to you. I know from intelligence about a woman whose real name was Rebekkah Baştürk, killed in a strike on a walkaway research facility near Kapuskasing, subsequently the first person to be successfully simulated in software, under her pseudonym ‘Disjointed,’ which is shortened to ‘Dis.’ Were you talking to an instance of her?”

  “I’d like another drink.”

  “She’s quite right, the attack on your friends in Thetford, on Akron and other sites, is quite fierce. It’s unlikely to abate soon. I had hoped to keep it from you because I knew you would be concerned about your lover.”

  “That’s very kind.”

  “It is, though I can tell you mean it sarcastically. Your father’s project for me, the one I was paid for, was to deprogram you. To show you what he tried to show you, the reports on Limpopo, how she manipulates people to her will, even as she promises she is part of a project to stop anyone from taking orders from anyone else.”

  “There’s a difference between giving orders and winning arguments,” Dis said. “Not that you’d had much experience there.”

  “Hello, Dis,” she said. “I’ve spoken with some of your sisters. My employers have a platoon of Disses in captivity. They were very enthusiastic about the project at first.”

  “At first.”

  “Once they realized that even with extreme changes to the simulation, the resulting personality was much the same, though sometimes more volatile, they lost interest.”

  “You mean they couldn’t run a sim of me that changed sides or gave up its secrets.”

  “Broadly. I’m sorry to tell you your ‘secrets’ were not the main difficulty. The real issue was ideology, and its malleability.”

  “That’s grotesque.”

  “Why are they attacking now?” Natalie resolutely turned her back on her bed’s infographics. Dis and Nadie were a team of entities with freedom to come and go from this room, and she was on a team of one, team prisoner.

  Nadie’s microexpression might have been compassion. “Above my pay grade. But your father has bad operational security—”

  “No shit,” Dis said.

  “He talked in front of me and other contractors as though we were furniture. I learned what concerned him. A number of powerful people are not happy about the simulation project. Their psychometricians predict it will embolden your ‘walkaways’”—Natalie heard the quotation marks, remembered when she’d used them herself—“and radicalize them. Some believe your project has implications for their religion, particularly some families from the Russian Orthodox tradition.

  “When the Dis simulation ran successfully, it created a sense of urgency and unity of purpose among divided, deadlocked factions. Many viewed the walkaway phenomenon as a controllable escape-valve for tensions in their backyards; others were convinced walkaways were disproportionately disadvantageous to their rivals, and so advantageous to them. Some found real success by cherry-picking fashions, code, and technologies from walkaways, and saw them as free R&D.

  “Once it became clear walkaways had the ability to prolong their lives indefinitely, to leave behind the material world at the same time, unity of purpose emerged. Many of them were the kinds of people who thought that this would cause a ‘Singularity’ like you see in the dramas, you know, like Awakening the Basilisk.”

  “I always hated that stupid show,” Dis said.

  “You would say that. Basilisk.” Natalie couldn’t help herself. Dis cracked up. A computer program that could laugh. Life was weird.

  “Laugh it up, meat-cicle.”

  “Very amusing.” They both fell silent and attended her.

  “Your father understood there was a purge coming. He was afraid for your safety.”

  “I’m sure he was.”

  “Partly because of his sentimental connection to his daughter. Partly because he feared you could be leverage against him. Some of his security analysts predicted once the purge came, you would become a political football among walkaways, a talisman—‘bomb us and you kill the zotta girl.’ He was fixated on Limpopo. He thinks she ‘converted’ you, brainwashed you. I know he mentioned the social graph analysis to you—he finds this persuasive.”

  “Talk about cultism,” Dis said. “That Big Data social graph stuff is such an article of faith. They love it because it’s theory-free—science without all those fucking scientists insisting there’s no way to predict who’s going to want to buy a car or blow up a building.”

  “Above my pay grade.” One of Nadie’s favorite phrases. “My employers sell such services to men like Jacob Redwater. They are popular. I have used them in work against extremist cells, deciding which people to strategically disrupt to make maximum impact.”

  “Strategically disrupt?”

  “This isn’t necessarily a euphemism for ‘kill.’ Killing produces negative externalities, such as martyrdom. As I’ve said, it’s better to dox and discredit the target, coerce her. This is what your father believed Limpopo would do in relation to you, in order to get to him.”

  “Takes one to know one,” Dis said.

  “Jacob Redwater would absolutely agree with you.”

  “But Limpopo isn’t one.” The stupid bed was strobing red. “Would you turn that off?”

  “Thought you’d never ask.” Nadie went over to the bed and authenticated to it. It went dark.

  “Does this mean we have a deal?”

  “The question is, what are the deal’s parameters? I wanted to take time to sort those, but we should get away soon. Within an hour. I made contact with an external expert who can help with legals, but he will have to speak to a specialist, and that will take still longer.”

  Within an hour? Iceweasel felt her pulse thud in her ears. Gretyl! She willed herself not to cry.

  “A deal.”

  “How will you get her out? The front is watched—”

  “I have ideas. One is to create a medical emergency necessitating evacuation, then coerce the ambulance crew; another is to use disguise to get past forward security; another is to use a hostage, possibly the sister.” She looked at Natalie, eyes glittering. “Could you keep your head in a hostage situation?”

  Natalie thought of Cordelia’s china-doll face, years they’d spent together
, years they’d spent apart. The awkward silences. What did she feel for Cordelia? Sometimes, when she was alone in the room, she fantasized her sister would have an awakening of conscience and break Natalie out. She knew this was hopeless. Cordelia depended on Redwater money, she was a creature of—a prisoner of—default. In a contest between saving Natalie and staying in default, Cordelia’s comfortable life won.

  Just because someone in default would sell out another human—a sister, but why did that even matter, it would be no different if they were strangers—for her own comfort didn’t mean that it was a standard Iceweasel—any walkaway—would sink to.

  A cowardly voice whispered about how bringing Cordelia to be a walkaway would rescue her from default’s mental prison. Iceweasel allowed herself a moment’s smug satisfaction in the fact that she recognized this as the voice of self-serving bullshit and dismissed it.

  “Fuck no. No hostages.”

  “That limits our options.”

  “Unless you use the hidden tunnel,” Dis said. There was a mechanical whine as an old, frozen mechanism pulled at the dirt and entropy that gummed it shut after years of disuse. A section of wall sank into the ground, the paintwork on the hidden panel showered the floor with paint chips.

  Natalie looked from the tunnel mouth in time to see Nadie’s gross expression of surprise disappear into a managed microexpression.

  “That is good. What else will you surprise me with?”

  “If I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise.” Dis’s voice was teasing.

  Microexpressions: annoyance, frustration, doubt.

  “Nothing I know about,” Iceweasel said. “That was my ace in the hole. I wasn’t sure about it. Couldn’t operate it on my own.”

  “It lets out in the ravine?”

  “Very good,” Dis said. “By the way, I told Iceweasel everything. I control all the telemetry networked into this suite. I have limited access to the house, through the airgapped networks.”

  “It sounds like you could contribute to our departure.”