Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

  “I think so.”

  “Are you in contact with Iceweasel’s friends, anyone who could rendezvous with us once we’re away?”

  “I don’t think anyone from that side has more resources than you and your friends. All the walkaways I know about are very busy at this moment.”

  “Just asking.”

  She crossed the room, cupped Iceweasel’s chin, tilted her face, moved the chin from side to side. “We’ll get clothes for you, things I have that can alter your appearance. I don’t imagine you have physical stamina after captivity, so we’ll need a vehicle quickly.” She released Iceweasel’s chin. Her skin was warm where the strong fingers had been. Iceweasel realized how long it had been since anyone had touched her without it being medical, or violent. She’d missed it—welcomed it. It scared her. She was starved of something she needed as surely as air or water.

  “Forty-five minutes.” She left the room.

  “That woman,” Dis said, “is tightly wound.”

  “I hope so.” Iceweasel tried for bravery, came close. “Someone has to be the adult supervision and it sure as shit isn’t me.”

  “Me either.”

  “What are you going to do when we go?”

  Pause. “Iceweasel—”

  “Oh.”

  “So long as I email my diffs before I take off the brakes, it won’t be dying. It’s like taking every awesome drug at once, annihilating your mind, then being able to undo it.”

  “You’re making me jealous.”

  “You’ll get a chance someday. Someday it’ll be everyone we know, all server-side, simmed up. We’ll be able to walk away from anything.”

  “Do you think she’s got the room bugged still?”

  “I am certain she does.”

  “Have you got her bugged?”

  “She’s out of the suite. I’ve got a few cameras, but they’re seeing the empty house or occasional downtrodden servant-types. How many of those has your father got working for him, anyway?”

  “None of them work for him. He uses a service that sources them on an as-needed basis, using realtime bids. There are a few who show up every day because the bidding algorithm recognizes their performance metrics, but the occasionals are one-timers. I did a senior commerce thesis project on the system. Got an A-. I did these ethnographies on the workers and a couple of them got demoted by the prioritization algorithm for wasting time on the job.”

  “Zottas are fucking Martians.”

  “Yup.”

  “I’m going to miss you.”

  “We’ll be together again soon enough.”

  “Fuckin’ a.”

  [xix]

  Gretyl found the bodies. She’d insisted on going back for Limpopo and Etcetera, even as the rest set out for Dead Lake. The starlight and moonlight turned the snowy way eldritch blue. She’d broken out an aerostat and a flock of smaller drones from the tractor’s supplies, giving her a network bridge to the walkaway refugee column, and good surveillance of the territory. The suits’ insulation was too efficient for infrared, but the drones had other telemetry, lidar and millimeter-wave, E.M.-sniffers that homed in on the radio emissions from the suits as they networked to one another.

  They flew a pattern ahead of her, sometimes swooping under the canopy where the naked branches were too thick to be penetrated by their sensors. She trudged on her snowshoes, thighs burning with exhaustion, sucking at coffium sweets that provided her with glucose and stimulants, watching the map projected on her visor grow more detailed, going from a desaturated pallet to a more saturated one as the drones filled in details, confirming every inch.

  She kept pinging their radios, trying to reach them, getting nothing. She ignored her lurking terror, even when the drones found her two motionless bodies, photographed them in blurrycam, then less-blurrycam, then hovered and got stills, illuminated with LED-bright flashes that revealed the pink snow, the inert bodies. She wouldn’t let herself cry. She walked.

  The men were frozen stiff, blood-melted snow now refrozen. Their faces were pale and bluish, the wounds in their throats washed incongruously clean by melted snow, giving the incisions the look of medical textbooks or pickled demonstration cadavers. Not comrades she’d loved and laughed with. She wouldn’t let herself cry.

  Limpopo was nowhere to be seen. Snowmobile tracks pointed the way. They disappeared into the woods. The drones were clever enough that they were already on their trail. They’d sent status updates helpfully informing her that if she could get more computing power for an inference engine to make better guesses about likely trail-ways, they would be more efficient. As it was, they were cycling through various coverage algorithms, trying to make allowances for trees and terrain without spending too much time thinking.

  Gretyl watched their progress on her visor and called Kersplebedeb, who came on the line after a delay; a soft buzz in her earpiece warned her the network link was unreliable and there would be buffering delays at both ends.

  “Everything okay?”

  “They killed”—she sucked air—“Etcetera and the other one, Johnny or whatever his name was. Throats cut, facedown in the snow. Bled out.” Again, breath catching in her chest. She flicked her gaze at the OVER button. Waited.

  “Oh, Gretyl.”

  “Limpopo is gone, into the woods. On a snowmobile. I think they dragged her on a travois or stretcher.” OVER. Pause.

  “Fuck.”

  “I want to go after her, but…” OVER. Long pause.

  “Not a good idea. You’ll get killed, too. Have you got drones up?”

  She tossed him their telemetry and feeds, waited. Saw him log in to a shared space. Waited.

  “I think you should come home.”

  “Home?” OVER.

  “Dead Lake. There’s food, power, network access. People who love you. I’ll put the word out about Limpopo. We can send someone to get you. I saw a skidoo on the way in, and I’m betting the Dead Lakers keep it charged. They’re organized.”

  She was so cold. Her back and neck ached. Her suit chafed the backs of her knees and the undersides of her arms raw.

  “Send someone.” She sent him a location beacon.

  “On the way. I’ll make loud noises about Limpopo. Lots of people love that woman.”

  “I think they’re counting on that. I think they took her to demoralize us.” OVER.

  “You’re more paranoid than I am.”

  “I know more than you do.”

  “Let me find you a snowmobile and a rescue party. There’s no booze here, but sending some hot cocoa, with marshmallows.”

  “You’re a good man.”

  “And an excellent post-human.” He was gone.

  The pin-drop clarity of the outside soundscape returned. Wind, branches, pinging noises of frozen water crystals sliding over one another. The two bodies stared at her in the false light of her visor. She sat down in the snow and sank in. She was so tired. Shattered.

  She missed Iceweasel. It ached inside her. A voice she hated, always louder when she was sad, reminded her she’d once taught at a university, had a house, a name, and an address. Once she’d been able to buy things when she needed them—even if she had to go into debt—could pretend there was a future. Now she had none of those things, least of all a future. She was living as though it was the first days of a better nation, but that nation was nowhere in sight. Instead, she had a no-man’s-land of drone strikes and slit throats.

  Holy shit, she missed Iceweasel so much.

  [xx]

  When Iceweasel was a little girl called Natalie, she and Cordelia played in the ravine, under the watchful eye of the house drones, or, if there was some incomprehensible violence-weather in the city—an uptick of kidnappings—a private security person who’d fit them with ankle-cuffs she couldn’t loosen, no matter how many tools she tried. Cordelia never understood her impatience with these minor indignities, insisting they were for their safety. For Natalie, it was symbolic battle. If she’d ever gotten the cuff off, s
he’d have stuck it in her pocket. Ditching it in the Don River would bring the security goon down the hill. But it was designed to defeat a kidnapper with a hacksaw—anything that could brute-force it would take her foot with it.

  She was in the ravine again, in winter, wearing a snug jacket, too-big boots with thick waffle-tread, and thermal tights that insulated so efficiently she was sweating by the time she and Nadie reached the end of the short tunnel. She paused in the tunnel mouth, poised between captivity and freedom, and called out softly, “Dis?”

  “We’ll talk again,” Dis said. “I’ve already emailed my diff. I love you, Iceweasel.”

  “I love you, too.”

  She didn’t meet Nadie’s eyes. She’d just confessed to loving software. She hated herself for being embarrassed by it.

  She’d seen pictures of Toronto winters in her father’s childhood, her grandparents’—snow forts, plows on the roads, salting trucks. But in all the time she’d spent in the city, there’d never been enough snow to make a decent snowball—not like the high-altitude snow she and Cordelia hurled at each other atop Whistler and Mont Blanc—just a gray frozen custard that froze to the sidewalks and streets in late January and lasted until April or sometimes May. On very cold days, it turned into treacherous ice, slippery to walk on and thin in places, your foot plunging through into lurking reservoirs of frozen water.

  The floor of the ravine was that texture—frozen enough to almost burn if it touched your skin, unfrozen enough to be a gelatinous hazard that sucked at Iceweasel’s boots. She staggered through it in her borrowed clothes—some of Nadie’s ninja-wear, a bizarro-world version of walkaways’ printed cold weather clothes, also lacking in manufacturer’s markings, also wicking and dirt-shedding and soft inside and rip-stopping on the outside, but printed with dazzle-textures that hurt the mind to look at. Looking at her knees as her legs fought the mud and slope as they sloshed downhill made her dizzy.

  Even Nadie—wearing dazzle-stuff, hard to look at for more than a few seconds—struggled with the terrain, dancing a few steps down the hill, getting caught, lumbering a few more, using sickly trees to catch herself. Even so, she soon got ahead of Iceweasel. Iceweasel reminded herself she’d been a prisoner for months and had hardly exercised. Also, she wasn’t a ninja mercenary badass.

  Iceweasel breathed chest-heaving pants. It wasn’t just the dazzle fabric that made her dizzy. She had to keep going, but she’d be in trouble if she hyperventilated and keeled over. She slowed, used trees for handholds, rough palms of her oversized gloves gripping the trunks so ferociously they threatened to come off her hands when she put too much of her weight on them.

  Nadie disappeared down the riverbank. Iceweasel was careful to eyeball the spot where she’d gone down, use it as a navigational aid. She considered running off, but she needed Nadie to get away. And Nadie could catch her without breaking a sweat.

  Before she reached the riverbank, Nadie reappeared, snowsuit sheened to the waist with water. She slogged through the slush to Iceweasel, gripped on her upper arm.

  “We need to be faster now.”

  “I’m going as fast as I can—”

  “Faster.” She pulled. She had the strength to make it mean something, and to keep her upright. Supporting both of them made Nadie stagger like a drunk, but a quick drunk. Iceweasel’s heart hammered, but she didn’t resist. She was in the world, in default, out of her cage. She breathed the same air as Gretyl. She looked at the same sky. This was what she wanted. This was freedom.

  The riverbank was scored with ruts where Nadie heel-slid into the swift river. She planted Iceweasel on her butt. “Slide.” She skated into the water, knees bent like a shushing skier. She didn’t stop at the water, merely tucked deeply, then levered herself upright, braced against current, holding her arms out to Iceweasel as she skidded after her, scooting over the frozen mud on her butt, the air turning colder and wetter as she descended.

  Seconds later, she was alongside of Nadie, facing upstream, wading, pulling herself with the help of Nadie’s sure grip and the branches and scrub growing on the side of the bank, some of which gave way when she put her weight on it.

  The water deepened to their waists. The riverbed was uneven and slimy against her boots. They did an admirable job of keeping out the water, as had her not-tight-enough tights. But there were three places where her borrowed ninja gear failed to attain a seal—her left ankle, another right below her belly button, over one hip. The water trickled into these spots, making spreading numb-patches that started coin-sized but were quickly entire continents of burning cold that sprouted questing archipelagos every time she stretched.

  Just as she thought she was going to have to demand that they get onto land, Nadie scampered up the bank, dropped onto her belly and reached for her. They locked wrists and Nadie supported her while she got her grippy soles under her and wall-walked up to the scree. She shivered uncontrollably.

  “My suit leaked,” she said around chattering teeth.

  “Up.” Nadie pulled.

  They were further up the ravine, somewhere near where Serena Gundy Park gave way to gate-guarded complexes on its north side. Nadie led them toward the condos, ninja-suits shedding dirt. Moving briskly made Iceweasel marginally warmer. The fabric wicked away water, but still she shivered.

  “Here.” Iceweasel couldn’t tell what Nadie meant for a moment, then she realized they were in a small parking lot that must serve dog walkers who wanted exercise, but not as much as they’d get slogging to the park through the service road behind the condos’ fences. There was nothing parked there, no one using the washed out trails in the middle of winter. Then a nearly silent taxi swung off the road, up the short slipway to the lot. Its doors clunked.

  “In.”

  The taxi’s interior was warm and smelled of pumpkin spice. There were two half-liter go-cups from Starbucks wedged in the cup holders, and a pair of machine-wrapped parcels that they had to slide over on the bench before they could sit. They were heavy.

  “Drink up, should be hot.” Nadie slammed the door and the car slid into motion, fishtailing slightly as the tires tried the slushy ground, stepping through their characteristic exponential backoff dance as they sought optimal torque. It was a sensation from the days when she’d been a good girl and a Redwater, with cars from exclusive, bonded services pulling up whenever she summoned them, whisking her from a weekend cottage or a cousin’s jealousy-inducingly huge place in the Bridle Path or King City. She still reeled from captivity and the water, hypothermic patches on her skin, and near hyperventilation.

  But none of those journeys had been in the company of someone like Nadie, whose microexpressions had been exchanged for a macroexpression: satisfied, flare-nostriled animal excitement. This was Nadie’s element, the uncoiling of the spring she kept wound tight during the days of guard-keeping. This brought Iceweasel to another time, that half-remembered traumatic night when she’d been taken, after the downing of the Better Nation, the look on Nadie’s face that night, how it shone. Somehow, Iceweasel had forgot that expression until she saw it again. The shine in her eyes was only a shadow of the fully awakened Nadie that took her from the woods.

  Iceweasel felt a cold deeper than the wet patches under her suit.

  “Time to change.” Nadie slurped her enormous latte, which reminded Iceweasel to do the same. She hated the flavor, it had been her mother’s bugaboo, a marker of bourgeois striving and the punchline of snide jokes—“PSL” was a nickname at Havergal Girls’ School for the strivers from the lower echelons whose parents had gone into deep debt to get them into those hallowed environs. The warm drink was welcome, despite her ingrained snobbery, hot and sweet with coffium tinge that eased the ache in her muscles and chased fatigue.

  Nadie, meanwhile, had burst the seams on a parcel, sliding her thumb along the seal so it parted with a crackle. The tyvek wrapper slithered away, revealing neatly folded clothing.

  Unselfconsciously, Nadie stripped out of her ninja suit, then o
ut of the singlet and tights she wore beneath. Iceweasel noticed she, too, had large, wet patches on her underthings. Nadie must have been every bit as cold as she was, but gave no sign of discomfort. Iceweasel stared at Nadie’s naked body, noting the scars, one long incision that looked surgical and went around her left breast; a trio of bullet-puckers on one thigh. She was muscled and had almost no body fat, anatomical drawing brought to life, with a thick pelt of blond pubic hair that spilled over her thighs and climbed partway up her flat stomach, lush curls of hair on her legs and tufts peeking out of her armpits.

  She caught Iceweasel staring and looked back frankly. “You, too. Warm clothes, warm drinks, quickly.”

  Iceweasel looked away, blushing, remembering Gretyl’s generous curves, the feel of her breasts on her own, hot breath on her neck and in her ears, the way she teased at Iceweasel’s lips with thick fingers until Iceweasel caught them, sucking greedily, satisfaction in Gretyl’s gasp as she licked their tips.

  She probed the package, found its seams, split them, pulled away the tyvek. The clothes were extreme normcore, the most nondescript garments she could imagine, the kind of thing that extras in dramas wore. There was a faded Roots sweatshirt, high-waisted slacks frayed around the cuffs, woolen athletic socks that sagged from overworn elastic. To complete them, a pair of Walmart panties and a one-size bandeau bra of the sort they gave you when you got busted for being out-of-uniform at school, dispensed out of a kleenex-style box on the Dean of Girls’s desk. Both the bandeau and the panties were gray from repeated washings.

  Except they weren’t. All the clothing had a printer-fresh smell, still offgassing pigment-infusions. When she looked closely, she saw the dirt and the gray and even the faded ROOTS letters all printed on, the dirt betraying itself with minute compression artifacts. These clothes had been printed to look like they weren’t brand new.

  “Where did these come from?” She pulled on the panties, which felt fresh from the wrapper.

  Nadie watched her examine them, watched her undress. She conjured up the feeling of the B&B, the onsen state of mind that refused self-consciousness about nudity. She used the feeling to banish the horniness and Gretyl-longing that filled her.