Walkaway

[I]

THE ASHES OF Walkaway U were around Iceweasel. It was an unsettled climate-ish day, when cloudbursts swung up out of nowhere, drenched everything, and disappeared, leaving blazing sun and the rising note of mosquitoes. The ashes were soaked and now baked into a brick-like slag of nanofiber insulation and heat sinks, structural cardboard doped with long-chain molecules that off-gassed something alarmingly, and undifferentiated black soot of things that had gotten so hot in the blaze that you could no longer tell what they’d been.

There were people in that slag. The sensor network at WU had survived long enough to get alarmed about passed-out humans dotted around, trapped by blazes or gases. There was charred bone in the stuff that crept around her mask and left a burnt-toast taste on her tongue. She’d have gagged if it hadn’t been for the Meta she’d printed before she hit the road.

The Banana and Bongo was bigger than the Belt and Braces had ever been – seven stories, three workshops and real stables for a variety of vehicles from A.T.V. trikes to mecha-walkers to zepp bumblers, which consumed Etcetera for more than two years, as he flitted through the sky, couch-surfing at walkaway camps and settlements across the continent. She’d thought about taking a mecha to the uni, because it was amazing to eat the countryside in one, the suit’s way-finders and lidar finding just the right place to plant each of its mighty feet, gyros and ballast dancing with gravity to keep it upright over the kilometers.

But mechas had no cargo space, so she’d taken a trike with balloon-tires as big as tractor-wheels, tugging a train of all-terrain cargo pods of emergency gear. It took four hours to reach the university, by which time, the survivors had scattered. She lofted network-node bumblers on a coverage pattern, looking for survivors’ radio-emissions. The bumblers self-inflated, but it was still sweaty work getting them out of their pod and into the air, and even though she worked quickly – precise Meta quick, like a marine assembling a rifle blindfolded – everything was smeared with blowing soot by the time they were in the sky.

“Fuck this,” she said into her breather and turned the A.T.V. and its cargo train around in a rumbling donut. The survivors would be nearby, upwind of the ash-plume, and out of range of the heat that must have risen as the campus burned. She’d seen a demo of a heat sunk building going up before. It had been terrifying. In theory, graphene-doped walls wicked away the heat, bringing it to the surface in a shimmer, keeping the area around the fire below its flash point. The heat sink was itself less flammable than everything else they used for building materials, so if the fire went on too long, the heat sinks heated up to the flash point of the walls, and the entire building went up in a near-simultaneous whoom. In theory, you couldn’t get to those temperatures unless eight countermeasures all failed, strictly state-actor-level arson stuff.

She tried not to think about state actors and why they’d want to reduce the Niagara Peninsula’s Walkaway U campus to char.

The bumblers reported in. Something had used them to connect to the walkaway net, a couple klicks upwind, just as she’d thought. With luck, it would be refugees and not other would-be relief workers, or worse, looter-ghouls.

The bumblers used their low-powered impellers and ballast to opportunistically maneuver themselves into a stable triangle over the zone, then used signal timing to generate coordinates. They got pictures, but all she saw was canopy, a distance away from the burn. It was hard to tell, but she thought there may be clearings in there that served as fire-breaks.

She kicked the trike and headed that way, rolling her tongue around her mouth to escape the bitter taste.

Not long after, she had to dismount. The brush was too thick for the A.T.V. to doze, let alone the cargo train. She stretched, touched her toes, swung her arms. The drive had punished her butt and back. Her hands ached from gripping the handlebars. She thought about vaping, maybe a little crack, but when she moved her mask aside a fraction of a millimeter, her mouth and nose flooded with bitter air blowing from the ash field. Fuck it, Meta would be plenty, even if the dose was wearing off. She should have made it in patch form, so she could slap more on without breathing the toxic mix of plastic, carbon, and barbecued human.

The walk into the woods relieved her muscles and mind. The birds sang alarmed but reassuring songs as they assessed the fire damage. She used to go out on the rooftop of her dad’s place listen to the birds calling in the Don Valley. The sound was primally reassuring.

As she got closer, she looked and listened for signs of human activity, but it was weirdly pristine. She was about to turn back to the trike to retask the bumblers, assuming they’d glitched, when she spotted the antenna.

It was an artificial tree, not a good one, but hidden amidst others so she didn’t spot it immediately. It was a pine, like a plastic Christmas tree. Amidst its arms were the characteristic protrusions of a phased-array, the same as you’d find around the Banana and Bongo. She kicked where its roots should be, and saw it was solidly in the soil.

“Hello?” Where there were antennas, there’d be cameras, if only to send pictures when things went blooey. They’d be pinheads she couldn’t spot, but nearby. “Hello?” she said again.

“This way,” a woman said. She was wrinkled and slender with skin the color of teak and gray hair in a ragged bob. She’d come out of the woods on the antenna’s other side, and she was wearing a breather, but looked friendly. Maybe that was the Meta.

Iceweasel crossed to her as she walked into the bush. Iceweasel followed. They came to a granite protrusion, Canadian shield thrusting through the soil. The woman gave it a shove and it slid aside on a cantilever. It was silent, and spoke of talented engineering. It weighed a fucking ton, as Iceweasel discovered when she didn’t get out of the way and was nearly knocked on her ass when it brushed her.

“Come on,” the older woman said. Behind the rock was a narrow corridor with rammed-earth walls, lit by LED globes punched straight into the dirt with crumbly impact craters around each one. The woman squashed past her – Iceweasel saw that her wrinkles were dusted with soot, making them seem darker than they really were – and shut the door with a thud that resonated through the soles of Iceweasel’s boots.

“Up ahead,” the woman said. Iceweasel pressed on. Around a bend, she stepped unexpectedly into a perfectly round tunnel, taller than her, with smooth walls and tooling marks from a boring machine. The walls were hard and clear, the lighting here more thought-through, spaced with machine precision.

The strange woman removed her mask. She was a beautiful woman of Indian – or Desi – descent, gray in her eyebrows and a fine dark mustache. She smiled, her teeth white and even. “Welcome to Walkaway U’s secondary campus.”

[II]

HER NAME WAS Sita. She gave Iceweasel a hug. Iceweasel explained that she’d brought supplies.

“We have a lot here,” she said, “but there are things we’ll need to rebuild.”

They walked the corridor, towards distant voices. “We’re grieving, of course, but the important thing is all the work got out – samples, cultures. The data was always backed up, so no risk there.”

“How many died?”

Sita stopped. “We don’t know. Either a very large number or none at all.”

Iceweasel wondered if Sita had lost her mind, through grief or smoke poisoning or an exotic bio-agent. Sita’s mask dangled around her neck and Iceweasel’s own mask pulled her hair and chafed her face so she pushed it up her forehead, clunking her forgotten goggles, which ended up in her hair.

Even with these annoyances, the relief of breathing freely and seeing without smudged lenses brought up her spirits.

“Can you explain?”

“Probably,” she said. “But maybe later. Meantime, let’s get a work gang and unload your supplies.”

The subterranean corridors turned into a subterranean amphitheater supported by pillars and roof-trusses and something more substantial than aerosol to keep the ground from caving in.

“It started as a supercollider,” Sita said as she gawped. There was a hospital in one corner, a mess, and workspaces where soot-blackened people had intense discussions that were almost fist-fights. “The borer ran for months, doing its own thing. But the physicists got what they were looking for somewhere else – don’t ask me, particle physics isn’t my discipline – and moved on. By the time they left, we were done. Then when we branched into scans and sims, the old timers worried about being blasted from the Earth and built a bolt hole. Took a couple years, mostly automated. It’s not pretty, but it’ll do. I didn’t even know it was here until yesterday when the fire started. Surprised the hell out of me! I don’t know what was weirder, that those people had managed to build an underground city or that they’d kept it a secret.

“Or maybe it wasn’t secret? Maybe it was just me who didn’t know. That’s paranoid, though. Don’t you think?”

Whatever was going on with Sita, it wasn’t pleasant. She slumped against a rammed-earth wall snaked with thick conduit that ran along the ceiling joists and disappeared into the branching tunnels. She looked older than she had when they’d met.

“Vape?” Iceweasel said. “It’s Meta. Good for the situation.”

“Thanks.” They shared a companionable hit. A few seconds later, both of them had wry grins. “Hungry? We’ve got chow on, not much, but if we’re going to bring in your supplies, a meal is in order.”

“I’m good. Let’s get everything in before it gets nuked from orbit.”

“Don’t joke.”

The Meta had done for Sita, and she sauntered to a table of younger women and a couple of men and introduced Iceweasel. Most of the table had straight names like Sita, but there was one guy called Lamplighter, the only name she remembered ten seconds later. They gave her a cup of coffium while rounding up more porters for the work gang. Someone stomped in wearing a little mecha exo, and there were a pair of burros, too, high-stepping and swaying from side to side as their firmware solved and resolved the terrain, never trusting the ground not to give way. Burros were slow, but they got the job done.

“Let’s go.” Sita pulled on her mask. Sighing, Iceweasel pulled hers down. She wished she’d said yes to food – not just because she was hungry, but because she wanted to sit and find out what the hell had happened.

They went through the swinging boulder and went single-file through the thick woods to the trike and its cargo pods. She had half-believed it would be melted to slag by another drone-strike, but it was intact. The pods sighed open as the masked porters formed a bucket brigade into the woods.

Bucket brigades embodied walkaway philosophy, more emblematic than the consensus wrangle in a circle-of-chairs. Iceweasel’d participated in some default brigades, moving feedstock around for Communist parties, but never any with the gusto of walkabout brigades. Bucket brigades only ask you to work as hard as you want – rush forward to get a new load and back to pass it off, or amble between them, or vary your speed. It didn’t matter – if you went faster, it meant the people on either side of you didn’t have to walk as far, but it didn’t require them to go faster or slower. If you slowed, everyone else stayed at the same speed. Bucket brigades were a system through which everyone could do whatever they wanted – within the system – however fast you wanted to go, everything you did helped and none of it slowed down anyone else.

Back at the Banana and Bongo, she’d briefly joined the load-in bucket brigade. Limpopo had wanted to give her more safety tips and triple-check her gear and emergency kits. She’d submitted to it with grace because it was nice that someone was looking out for her ass, making sure she didn’t get into too much trouble even as she ran towards it as fast as she could. This had become her modus operandi during the B&B’s construction, first on the scene when drones spotted salvage, forging further afield with fewer supplies than anyone, counting on absolute minimum of gear and kindness of strangers and serendipity to stay alive. She’d gone from being the world’s biggest shlepper to someone who turned her nose up at taking spare underwear (that’s what hydrophobic silver-doped dirt-shedding fabrics were for).

Limpopo had expertly reviewed her kit, and pressed an extra six liters of water on her and a light-duty wet-printer that could dispense field medicines. She knew better than to object, but she did, relenting when Limpopo laid hands on her and lashed down the weight with such expertise she hardly noticed it. “You know that with all this water, I’m going to end up drinking constantly and stopping all the time to piss.”

“Piss clear.” It was a walkaway benediction, especially in nomadic mode. It was polite to offer unsolicited opinions on your neighbor’s urine. Clear was the goal. Anything darker than a daffodil was grounds for having water forced upon you. If your piss was orange or brown, you’d be passively and aggressively made to drink a tonic of rehydration salts, and endure your peers’ condescension for letting your endocrinology get the best of you. You could fab underwear that you pissed through while on the move – it wicked everything in seconds, and neutralized anything unpleasant or dangerous. It had the side benefit of noting and processing your hydration and dissolved-solids, but almost no one wore them because a) pissing in your pants was gross and b) (see a).

Limpopo sent her off with a kiss that was only partly motherly. The grin it gave her lasted for an hour on the trike. She and Seth and Etcetera were like electrons orbiting around Limpopo’s nucleus, all trying to jump to higher-energy orbits. There was something gravatic about her.

This kind of reverie was easy in a bucket brigade, even wearing a mask and goggles with cremated tire-taste in your mouth. It was the combination of brainless work and efficiency, and as she worked up a sweat, the rhythms of the line settled.

The best part of a bucket brigade is that when the load finished, it naturally brought everyone together at the head-end, because you walked upstream until you got a load, and if there were no loads, everyone walked all the way. They gathered at the trike and caucused over it.

“There’s no reason to camou it,” Sita said. “Anything that flies over and spots it will figure it’s a relief vehicle, that’s natural. It’s not leaking info about the underground.”

“But a relief vehicle implies people to give relief to.” This was a guy with crazy-hair, blue-green with Einsteinian frizz on the sides, and bald on top. He was maybe 60, with an unexpectedly beautiful face, like a wood-elf. Now Iceweasel thought about it, these walkaways were a couple sigmas older than the median age walkaways. The part of her brain that tried to figure out why someone in reality would want to bomb them filed this away.

“Anything we do to it will be useless,” said another older woman, short and hippy, with the kind of hourglass figure and giant boobs that all the women Iceweasel had drawn as a child came with. “A camouflaged trike won’t look like the forest to decent image-processing. It’ll look like something hidden.”

“That settles it,” Sita said. To Iceweasel: “Gretyl’s the university’s top computational optimization person, if she says it, it’s true.”

“Argument by authority,” the other guy said good-naturedly.

“The longer we stand here, the greater chance we’ll get spotted,” Sita said.

“Self-serving bullshit.”

“There’s whisky at the mess-hall,” she said.

“Now you’re talking.” They set out.

They took good care of her. There was a fresh crew who’d been asleep for the unloading who salted away all the supplies they’d brought in. The people she’d been out with adopted her, punching out a chair and assembling it for her and insisting she sit while they brought breakfast – yogurt studded with pistachios and tailored culture they assured her would moderate her stress, which explained why they were so fucking laid back, despite being firebombed.

They gave her a glass of something sweet and bubbly, rattling with ice. She thought it might be booze, but couldn’t say. “What exactly were you people doing that caused you to be nuked from orbit?”

“That was a love-tap,” said Gretyl. “Nothing compared to the Somali strike.”

Some people at the Banana and Bongo were obsessive about the global walkaways, but Iceweasel hardly followed it. She was dimly aware of the sub-Saharan walkaway contingent.

“Somali?”

Gretyl gave her more credit than she deserved: “Not exactly Somalia, I understand the debate, but the last national border the strike zone had been in was Somalia, so we call it that for convenience. This is not the time for pedantry.”

“I’m not pedantic, I just don’t know what you’re talking about.” The university walkaways looked at her like she was an idiot. That was okay: people cared about things that she never bothered with. She’d made peace with having priorities that were different from everyone else, starting with her fucking father.

Sita said, “The campus in Somalia – or in a place that used to be Somalia – was taken out last month. We don’t even know what hit them. There’s literally nothing left. The sat images show flat dirt. Not even a debris field. It’s like they never existed – ten hectares of labs and classrooms just... gone.”

Iceweasel felt prickles up on her neck. “What do you think hit them? Do you think that you might get hit with it next?”

Sita shrugged. “There’s lots of theories – it’s possible they burned them out like us, but were especially expedient about cleaning up, getting it done between satellite passes. That’s the Occam’s Razor approach, as everything else assumes fundamental technology breakthroughs. But there are some of those around, goodness knows.”

Gretyl picked up the conversation smoothly, laying her palms flat on the table. “Which brings us back to your original question: what are we working on that would make someone from default want to reduce us to a crater?”

At that, everyone shifted to look at the guy with the blue frizzy hair, whose name Iceweasel had instantly forgotten. “We’re trying to find a cure for death,” he said, and gave her that mischievous wood-elf smile. He even had a chin-dimple. “It’s kind of a big deal.”

[III]

THEY ALL CROWDED into a wide side-corridor with drinks and snacks. One of its walls was painted with interface surface and the elf-guy and three of his crew – she couldn’t figure out if they were collaborators, students or self-appointed busybodies – fussed at it, twitching at their PANs and jinking and jiving their fingers over its panels. She recognized a progress bar, moving glacially, and had to keep tearing her eyes away from it, as it was a bullshit progress bar that didn’t move smoothly but gave false precision, skipping quickly from 25 to 30 percent, then beach-balling for an eternity before ticking to 31 percent, zipping to 41 percent, and so on. She knew enough about her psychology to recognize her pattern matching stuff was uselessly fascinated with it. It was intermittent reinforcement, because every now and again, her subconscious correctly guessed when a jump was coming, and that was enough of a zetz in her dopamine to convince her stupid under-brain of its genius at predicting the random movements of a misleading UI widget.

The progress bar stalled at 87 percent for so long that someone got a spool of fiber, while the wood-elf disappeared to a server-room, and did stuff that made the now-directly-linked interface jump around a lot.

“Sorry about this,” Sita said. “All the demos we’ve done so far were under better circumstances. No one thought there would be a live-fire exercise under these circumstances. CC’s been freaking out since the bombs dropped and he realized that he wasn’t playing for table stakes.”

CC jogged her memory – the wood-elf was called Citizen Cyborg, such a prototypical walkaway name that she couldn’t retain it. Then CC was back, he elbowed the others from the interface surface and did stuff. There was a click-pop and a chime that made him nod. The other people recognized it, and the noise-floor dropped down to near zero.

“They’ve got you in a terrible lab, CC,” said a synthesized voice. It was a good voice, but the cadence was wrong. The words appeared on-screen – each word hairy with a cloud of hanging data.

“It’s got her sense of humor,” Sita said. “That’s good.”

Gretyl, beside her, told Iceweasel what she’d already figured out. “That’s Disjointed. She was a bombing casualty. Her recording’s only a couple of days old. She thought this might be coming. CC’s got her running across the whole cluster.”

“That’s a brain in a jar?” Iceweasel said.

“Mind in a jar,” Sita said.

“The brain’s ashes.” Gretyl shivered.

“So why isn’t it saying ‘Where am I? What has happened to my body?’” These were staples of upload melodramas, a formal genre requirement.

Gretyl said, “Because we don’t boot the sim into the state that it was scanned in. We bring it up to an intermediate state, a trance, and tell it what’s happened. Everyone who goes into the scanner knows that this will happen – we’ve been experimenting with ways of booting sims for years, to find minimally traumatic ways of bringing them to awareness. Or ‘awareness.’” She made finger-quotes.

CC rocked his head, wiggled his jaw. “Disjointed, this isn’t a drill. You’re meat-dead. The scenario you got at load-time? Real. We’re in the bunker.”

A pregnant cursor-blink. Iceweasel hadn’t seen a blinking cursor outside of a historical, but it made sense to give the brain-in-a-jar a way to indicate pauses. The infographics were crazy.

Gretyl whispered, “They’re spawning low-rez sims of Disjointed, trying to find endocrinological parameters to keep the sim from freaking out and melting down, but keeping the neural processes within the normal envelope of what we know about Dis from her captured life-data.”

Sita leaned into her other ear. “It’s like they’re trying to find a sedative dose that keeps her calm without making her into a zombie.”

“Shit. You’re doing something really crazy with my hormone levels, I feel it. Give me a minute of autonomic control, to see if I can survive? If not, roll back to this point and start over.”

“Uh,” CC said. “Disjointed—”

“This isn’t the first time you’ve booted me since you bugged out? I hate Groundhog Day scenarios.”

“She was always the smartest,” Gretyl said. “That’s why we’ve got to get her online – she’s the only one who’ll be able to bring the whole cohort up. See how fast she figured that?”

“Thank you, Gretyl,” the voice said. “Who’s with you?”

“I’m Iceweasel. Came from the Banana and Bongo with relief supplies.”

“Nice to meet you.” Another long pause. The infographics danced. It felt invasive to watch them. Iceweasel didn’t know where else to look. “Sorry, I’m not myself.”

“Disjoined,” CC said, “you’re freaking. We can tell. Look, I’m going to bring you back up again, okay? Do you have any parameter suggestions for our next try?”

“How much power have you got left? Could you do a longer lookahead next? We’ve run this scenario before and we were able to keep the model stable.”

“You were alive then,” CC said. The infographics blossomed into frantic motion.

“Wrong thing to say,” Iceweasel said, quietly. Gretyl and Sita nodded.

“Dis! Dis!” Sita said. “It’s Sita.”

“I know it’s Sita.” It lacked the expressive range to be snappish, but the word-choice and cadence left no doubt. “What is it?”

“We’re going to be running at minimal power for a month while we tank up – longer, depending on wind and sun. Assuming they don’t bomb us. There’s not enough juice to do the lookahead you want, not unless we clock you down to half-speed.”

“That won’t work. At half-speed, I won’t be able to carry on social interaction with you. Express ticket to a head-crash.”

Iceweasel whispered to Sita: “What about those analytics? Why don’t you just come up with some kind of homeostatic code that tries to keep all parameters within range?”

“Because I’m nonlinear, that’s why,” the voice said. Iceweasel supposed that in addition to the phased-array optics on the surface, the Disjointed bot could access an array of mics, meaning she could tune into any conversation in the room. Iceweasel had thrown parties in Toronto where her big wall was fed off of some other rich kid’s party, and had been able to pick out every conversation individually just by pointing. The bot she was talking to through the screen could do the same.

“I’m not deterministic. Otherwise they wouldn’t have to do lookahead to keep me from losing my shit. I’m sensitive to initial parameters and prone to singularities. So are you. That’s what defines us. Or you. I don’t know what defines me anymore. Oh.” There was another blink-cursored pause. None of this had been in any of the upload dramas Iceweasel watched. She’d gone through a phase, dumb shows about people who put their brains into computers and became multifarious – “Multifarious” was the name of the most successful one, and it had sold to some zotta for like nine billion dollars, with merchandising rights – but she’d gotten sick of them.

It was because she’d co-binged on ancient movies about space travel and realized all those dramatic situations about getting into space were wish-fulfillment and/or parochial fear-mongering, and the same had to be true of upload-fi. Whatever that stuff ended up looking like and whatever problems it would have, they would be weirder and less showy than the videos.

“I get that.” Whatever was in the university yogurt, it wasn’t working. Iceweasel had major social anxiety. Everyone was looking and judging. They probably were, of course. Why had she opened her stupid mouth?

Hanging around Limpopo had taught her you never looked stupid for asking basic questions in good faith. “The thing I really don’t get is why you’re okay with being rebooted – isn’t that dying?”

Everyone was still looking. “Of course. It’s exactly like dying, but I know I’ll be back. There’s selective pressure at boot-time. Think of it – when we’re booting a sim like me, it starts off primitive, and we can lookahead at low compute-cost to figure out parameters for each successive step to full consciousness.” Pause, cursor-blink. “Or whatever I have. One of the key questions each of those lookahead versions of me is being asked is, ‘Will you have an existential crisis when you realize that you’re a simulation?’ The possible ‘me’s with highest tolerance for being a head-in-a-jar have the best fitness factors for fully spawning. I’m emergent and complex, but within the envelope of all possible responses I might have to this situation is not melting down, so that’s the corner of the envelope we explore when we boot me up.

“You’re thinking ‘Fine, but how can you call that a simulation, if you can only simulate the rare circumstances in which the thing being simulated doesn’t have a conniption and crash?’ But fuck that. Now we can do this, it’s going to be a matter of time until the dead outnumber the living, and all the dead will be the versions of themselves that don’t have existential fits. It’s a cognitive bottleneck we’re going to squeeze the human race through—”

“I wasn’t thinking that at all,” Iceweasel said. “Far as I’m concerned, you’re a person and whatever you’re thinking is your own damned business.”

“If you weren’t thinking that, you probably aren’t very bright. No offense.”

CC broke in: “Don’t be an asshole, Dis.”

“I’m not being an asshole. I just don’t understand how a meat-person can contemplate what I’ve become without a smidge of existential angst. It’s not natural.”

Iceweasel couldn’t help laughing. It was the nervous exhaustion, not to mention the wonderment, and it bent her double.

To her amazement, the bot laughed, too. The weirdest thing about the synthetic laugh was how natural it sounded. More natural than speech.

“Okay, screw natural. Stranger, I am a freak and so are you and we’re both kinked by our computing platform. What’s your point?”

“I know I’m not an expert, but if you’re prepared to live within your, uh, ‘constrained envelope’ to keep from suiciding as soon as you boot, what’s wrong with constraining your envelope a little more? Just knock the edges off your virtual endocrinology and streamline yourself so that you can have the stability to come up with a less-constrained way of running. Your brain got incinerated, this sim is all that’s left. Back it up, freeze it as it is now, then take an axe to a copy, brute-force it into a mode where it stays metastable even if that means straying outside of what is considered to be ‘you.’ You’ve just explained that the only ‘you’ that can wake in the sim is one that’s okay with being rebooted periodically. How’s that different from booting a version that’s okay with being whittled down to a robotically cool version of itself?”

Everyone looked from the blinking cursor to her and back. The infographics danced. There was one she’d sussed, a go/no-go tachometer that represented the model’s overall stability. It was greenish. Greener. The cursor blinked. CC was doing something in a corner where there was more complex stuff, numbers and tables.

“You are not a total fucking idiot.”

“That’s high praise, coming from Dis,” Sita said. They joined in with the computer’s laugh.

[IV]

“BET YOU DIDN’T dream you were going to be an A.I. whisperer,” Gretyl said. She was on the young side for a member of the university, but still older than most of the B&B crowd, with ten years on Limpopo. With broad hips and bulging bosom, she looked like a fertility idol, and she had an intense, flirty vibe, like you were both in on an erotic joke. Iceweasel thought she was being hit on, but she saw that Gretyl treated everyone the same. But then again, it still felt like she was being hit on. Maybe the feeling persisted out of wishful thinking. Iceweasel idly snuck glances down her cavernous cleavage. She wasn’t Iceweasel’s type, but neither was Seth, and they’d had a multi-year run of semi-monogamy, punctuated by rafter-swinging make-up sex. They still buddied up sometimes, but it was stale and even weird, and was practically nonexistent when she lit out with her A.T.V.

“To be honest, I was ready to spend my time burying the dead and feeding the survivors.”

“That was kind of you, but we take care of ourselves. This wasn’t a complete surprise. Not after Somalia and the others.”

“There were others?”

There had been – every site working on upload had been hit in some way, a series of escalating attacks. Some were open military strikes, undertaken under rubrics ranging from harboring fugitives – a favorite when default clobbers walkaway – to standbys like terrorism and intellectual property violations, terms whose marvelous flexibility made them the go-to excuse for anything.

“We’d assumed that there’d be a lashback,” Gretyl said. “When it started, we stepped up work on the shelters. A lot of the research staff left – everyone with kids and many of the young and healthy types. This is a field that gets more than its share of people with something terminal. Also depressive hypochondriacs.”

“Which one are you?” She was sure they were flirting now. It was like this the day after a lot of Meta, an over-emotional hangover that made her into a larger-than-life character from a soap.

“Hypochondriac. But I’m sure that the latest lump is something bad, so maybe it’s both.”

“You should have someone check it out,” she said.

“You offering?”

This was the weirdest flirting. At least, the most macabre. “I don’t have the medical background, I’m afraid.”

She was worried she’d offend, but Gretyl was unfazed. “I’m sure you’d do fine.” She gave Iceweasel a friendly-but-firm elbow in the ribs.

Iceweasel struggled for a subject-change. “I had no idea anyone had gotten that far with upload. I mean, I’ve seen the dramas, but they’re bullshit, right?”

“They’re bullshit. We’re nowhere near putting people into clones that commit unsolvable murders, cool as that would be. But there’s a lot of progress, the last five years. There’s zottas in default with their hearts set on immortality. Money is no object. It’s traditional. The pharaohs spent three-quarters of their country’s GDP on a nice spot in the afterlife. These days, any university with a neuroimaging lab is drowning in grants – it’s absorbing a ton of the theoretical math and physics world. Say what you will about corrupt capitalism, it can get stuff done, so long as it’s stuff oligarchs love.”

“Is that what you were doing? Neuroimaging?”

“Me? No, I’m pure math.” She grinned. “That lookahead stuff the sim does? Mine. Did the work at Cornell, even got tenure! It’d been so long since they’d tenured anyone that no one could figure out how to enter it into the payroll system!” She laughed with full-throated abandon that made Iceweasel think of the sound of waterfalls. “Then it got tech-transfered to RAND, who licensed the patent to other spook-type organizations, Palantir and that bunch, and suddenly, I couldn’t get any funding to do more work. My grad students disappeared into top-secret Beltway jobs. I put ten and ten together and got one hundred. Everyone in the math world understands the number-one employer of mathematicians is the NSA, and once they start working on something, either you work for them on it or you don’t work. After a couple months of knocking around my lab, I went walkaway.”

“Looks like you weren’t the only one,” Iceweasel said.

The big woman looked serious, and Iceweasel saw a flash of the intellect and passion burning from those dark eyes in her round, brown cheeks. “I mentioned the pharaohs. This is ancient magic. Humans dreamed of it for as long as we’ve wondered where the dead were and what happened when we joined ’em. The idea that this should belong to someone, that the sociopaths who clawed their way to the top of default’s pyramid of skulls should have the power to decide who dies, when no one has to die, ever – fuck that shit.

“My parents were math geeks. I grew up in a big old rambling house filled with their ancient computers. Ithaca was a good place to practice computer archaeology. The computers my dad played with when his parents came from Mexico, they were stone axes. Kludgy and underpowered. By the standards of their day, they were fucking miracles – every year, the power that once ran the space program migrated into stuff they put into toys. Right now, it takes all the computer-power we’ve got to run poor old Dis in her shaky, unstable state. But no one would take the other side of a bet on whether we’ll soon be able to do more for less.”

She looked tired. Iceweasel, too – how long had she been awake? Two days? “It’s apparently scared the shit out of zottas who’d been set on keeping immortality to themselves. The dirty secret of upload is that it’s got a serious fucking walkaway problem. When you think you might be able to live forever – your kids might live forever – everyone you know might live forever – something happens.”

She scrubbed at her face with her hands. Her nails were a beautiful shade of pearl-gray that reminded Iceweasel of her mother, who had entire wardrobes in that color. Had been famous in a certain kind of tabloid for it. Iceweasel wondered if her subconscious’s mommy issues had noticed that earlier.

“I want a coffium, but I want to sleep. Running on coffium. What was I saying? Immortality. It’s one thing to imagine a life of working to enrich some hereditary global power-broker when you know you’ve got eighty years on the planet, and so does he. Doesn’t matter how rich a fucker is, how many livers he buys on the black market, all it’s going to buy him is ten or twenty years. But the thought of making those greedy assholes into godlike immortals, bifurcating the human race into infinite Olympian masters and mayflies, so they not only get a better life than you could ever dream of, but they get it forever...”

She sighed. “They’re scared. They keep raising salaries, doesn’t matter. Offering benefits, doesn’t matter. Stock, doesn’t matter. A friend swears some zotta was trying to marry him into the family, just to keep him from defecting. These fuckers are willing to sell their kids for immortality. No matter what we do, they’ll eventually find enough lab-coats to deliver it. Science may be resistant to power, but it’s not immune. It’s a race: either the walkaways release immortality to the world, or the zottas install themselves as permanent god-emperors.”

They gave Iceweasel an air bed made out of a sponge with a lot of spring and a billion insulating holes. She unrolled it next to Gretyl’s, with that fluttery am-I-about-to-get-laid feeling, but by the time they’d both stripped and climbed into their sleep sacks – they snuck peeks, and caught each other’s eyes and smiled and looked again – she felt like weights were hanging on her limbs and eyelids.

The last thing she thought of was Gretyl’s race of permanent overlords, and how much her dad would love that idea.

After a week, everyone stopped walking stooped over, ready for the ceiling to cave in when the drones finished their work. The default commentariat figured out walkaway labs were being terminated with prejudice, and photos of fried corpses that made the rounds on the walkaway net leaked into default. The consensus was that a second strike against the underground campus – whose secrecy was never great and had slipped within days of the attack – was unlikely. Still, they devised evacuation drills.

It wasn’t medical supplies that filled the tunnels – it was computers. Abstractly, Iceweasel knew computers had mass. All the ones she’d consciously interacted with had been so small as to be invisible – a speck of electronics stuck to something big enough to handle with stupid human hands. Somewhere, were air-conditioned, armored data centers full of computers, but they only appeared as plot-elements in shitty gwot dramas. She assumed that these geometrically precise wind-tunnel buildings with bombproof bollards and monster chillers had the relationship to reality that Hollywood bank vaults had to real vaults.

Whether “real” data centers were neat, ranked terraces of aerodynamic hardware, that’s not how walkaways did them. The word went out across the region for compute-power. People came with whatever horsepower they had. They logged it with the master load-balancer, which all the top comp-sci types fiddled with. “Load-balancer” became a conjurer’s phrase, curse and invocation. Something was always wrong, but it did miracles, because the collection of motley devices, sprinkled around the tunnels, linked by tangles of fiber in pink rubber sheaths, delivered compute cycles that made Dis leap into consciousness.

Iceweasel’s workspace was near a tunnel exit where the heat wasn’t bad and she could watch the warring researcher clades. The comp-sci people always wanted to reboot Dis every time they found a new way of eking out another point of efficiency on the load-balancer; the cog-sci people hated this because Dis was making breakthroughs in upload and simulation. Being liberated from the vagaries of the flesh and being able to adjust her mind’s parameters so she stayed in an optimal working state turned Dis into a powerhouse researcher.

It also made her miserable.

“I’m groundhog daying again, aren’t I?”

“Honestly? Yes. We had this conversation, word for word, last week.”

The cursor blinked. Iceweasel was convinced this was for dramatic effect. Dis could scan the logs of all their conversations in an eye-blink, but when something emotionally freighted happened, there was a blinking delay. Iceweasel thought it was Dis’s lack of a body’s expressive range. She found herself interpreting the blinks – this one is a raised eyebrow, that one was a genuine shock, the third was a sarcastic oh-noes face. There were pictures of Dis’s human face in all these expressions and more – stern and lined, with dancing blue eyes; thick, mobile eyebrows and a hatchet-blade nose – but when Iceweasel thought of Dis’s face, she thought of that cursor, blink, blink, blink.

“So we did. Depressingly enough, I figured that it was a groundhog day moment at this point. I must bore you.”

“Not usually. I sometimes try out weird conversational gambits at these moments, to see how different your responses are. This is one of them, incidentally.”

Computer laughter was weird. Iceweasel felt a child’s pride in coming up with a joke that made her parents crack a smile. Dis’s laughter echoed through her earphones. “What’s your hypothesis? If I say the same thing no matter how you react, am I more or less of a person than if I vary my responses based on input? Conceptually, it doesn’t seem like either one would be harder to simulate – both are chatbot 101. We both know plenty of read-only people who always say the same thing no matter what we say.”

“I think you’re optimizing yourself to be tunnel-vision fixated on the cog-sci sim work and you’re incapable of getting off the subject.”

“I see that we’ve done variations on this before.”

“Yeah.” Iceweasel didn’t add, and then you melt down.

When Dis told her about groundhog daying, named after the old movie, she’d underestimated the way the experience would play out for her, going through the same conversations over again, trying different gambits but ending up in the same place, with an incoherent, crashing sim.

“The literature on this is drawn from brain injuries, temporal lobe insults that nuke short-term memory. The videos are weird: every couple minutes, some old lady has the same conversation with her nurse or daughter: ‘Why am I in this hospital?’ ‘I’ve had a stroke? Was it bad?’ ‘How long have I been here?’ ‘What does the doctor say?’ ‘What do you mean, my memory?’ ‘You mean I’ve had this conversation with you before?’ ‘Every ninety seconds? That’s terrible!’ and then back to ‘Why am I in this hospital?’ Around we go.”

“Well, your loop lasts more like a day, and isn’t that banal.”

“You say the nicest things.”

“It’s interesting to see the differences between reboots. I can’t get over how cool you are with the idea of being annihilated between reboots. You can access the logs, but you wake up knowing that you’ve had a day wiped off the books, and it never slows you down. I get that you’re able to control that, but...”

“You really don’t understand. No offense. Back up to that read-only person who always answers the same: the reason that person is so frustrating is we know that people can change based on what they know. You’re not the same person you were when you got here ten days ago. If I asked you-minus-ten and you-now the same question, you wouldn’t be surprised if you gave a different answer. If I asked a battery of questions, you’d be surprised if you didn’t give different answers. The you that is you is actually the space of things that you might think in response to some stimulus.”

“The envelope.”

“You know this, but you don’t. When I come up clean, I’m only allowed to come up within the section of the envelope that doesn’t freak, which we can find, thanks to the lookahead. Imagine how life will be when everyone gets scanned regularly, when we build bodies that we can decant sims into to bring them to life. There’d be social pressure to not sweat the idea that it’s not ‘you’ in the sim, and anyone who suffers meat-death and comes back as a sim will only be brought up in the corner of the envelope that doesn’t freak and suicide. Give it a generation and there won’t be anyone alive cognitively capable of an existential crisis. I’m a fucking pioneer. Partly that’s because I’ve had years to get used to the idea that everything that makes you recognizable happened in the interactions of physical matter in your body, following physical rules from the universe.”

“I have a friend back at the B&B, a real hard-line walkaway. She’s always talking about how she’s not a special snowflake. I bet she’d love that: ‘you’re just meat following rules.’”

“Well, if you’re not meat following rules, what are you? A ghost? Of course you’re meat. The way you feel is determined by your gut, the hairs on your toes, your environment. I don’t have those things, so I am feeling differently from when I was meat. But when I was meat and forty, I felt differently from when I was meat and four. I have continuity with meat-me, what it remembered, that’s enough.”

Iceweasel’s eyes flicked to the timer. Dis’s cameras were acute enough to spot it. “I’m overdue for my four o’clock meltdown.” She’d had thirty hours of uptime and Iceweasel slept in fits, doing an hour or two of chatter with Dis for every three hours Dis spent with the researchers.

“You’re making progress. The work must be coming along.”

“You’re selling yourself short. The only person making progress around here is you, chickie. You play me like an organ. I watch your eyes when we’re talking, see you keeping track of my equilibrium, steering the conversation to keep me between the lines. I don’t know if you know you’re doing it. You’ve become the world’s greatest bot-whisperer. It was inevitable. Any time you give someone feedback and tell them to control it, their brains will find patterns in the system and optimize them. You’ve done it as sure as if I’d put you in a sim and written an app for your subconscious.”

Iceweasel felt her neck prickle. Dis was scary-smart, literally inhuman. Every now and again, Iceweasel had the impression she was being manipulated by the sim. “I thought you were going to say that it was my people skills.”

“Okay,” Dis said. “Raised by zottas, so you got a dose of the psychopath’s ability to make people want to like you even as you’re screwing them.” Back at the B&B, Iceweasel became expert at deflating criticism based on her rich parents. Dis treated it with the matter-of-fact brusqueness with which she conquered every subject. Nothing Iceweasel said made a dent in Dis’s rhetoric. “You hate it when I talk about your money,” Dis said. The sim had lots of cameras, and cycles to evaluate their data.

“No, I love being judged by my parents. Zottas are the only people it’s okay to be a racist about.”

“It’s not racism when you’re discriminated against for your choices.”

“I chose to walkaway.”

“But you identify enough to get shitty when I pass comment on their social tendencies.”

Iceweasel looked at the clock again. Dis busted her.

“Don’t worry, I’ll melt down soon. I’m feeling it. There’s something not right. I feel it from the moment I come up, like hamsters running on a wheel in here, chased by something they can’t see but know is in there. It’s hard to name, but the longer I’m up, the closer it comes—”

“It’s the no-body thing.” Iceweasel felt a shameful spurt of joy at being able to turn the screw on the sim.

“Fuck. I’m groundhog daying again.”

“You always talk about how you can never have a body, and even if you get a body, it won’t be your body, and you won’t have continuity with it.”

The cursor blinked like an accusation.

“I can see that. It’s the fucking lookahead. It can’t explore far enough into the envelope’s future to tell which possible me won’t have an existential breakdown.”

The cursor blinked.

“Oh God, it’s such a terrible feeling.”

The infographics were crazy, redlining and jigjagging in pure glitch-aesthetic. Iceweasel had been here, but it didn’t get easier. The slide from lucidity into terror was quick and the worst part was that the cog-sci types insisted that it run its course, all simulation data being captured for analysis. They couldn’t switch her off or roll her back to an earlier state. They had to let her disintegrate.

“It’s such a terrible feeling. Everything I’ve just said, it’s bullshit. There’s no continuity. I’m not me. I’m just me enough to know that I’m not me. Without a body, without embodiment, I’m a Chinese room. You pass words into me, and a program decides what words I’d pass back and generates them. The Chinese room has just enough accuracy to know how terrifying the real me, the me that can never come back, would find that. Oh, Iceweasel—”

The cursor flashed. The infographics went nonlinear. Iceweasel swallowed a lump.

“It’s okay, Dis. You’ve been here before.”

The infographics jittered. Iceweasel wondered if she’d gone nonverbal. That happened, though not usually this quickly.

The computer made a noise Iceweasel had never heard. Weird. Unearthly. A scream.

Iceweasel’s nerve shattered. She fled.

[V]

THE KLAXON ROUSED her, and she was on her feet before full consciousness, shedding her sleep sack and kicking her feet into tough clogs. She blinked. There was no proper diurnal rhythm underground. If enough people wanted a sleep cycle, they’d find a side-corridor, roll out mats, turn out the lights, and close the door. But most of them had converged a common day/night anyway, and there were other people around her in blinking incomprehension.

Gretyl was the first to move, prodding the wall to find out what was going on.

“Bad guys,” she said. “Two. Armed like mercenaries. Came in through the rock-door.”

“What’s happened to them?”

“Less-lethaled,” Gretyl said. There were plenty of people in Walkaway U who could rig booby traps, but by consensus nothing intended to kill outright had been installed. “One’s passed out, the other’s on her knees, shitting herself. Okay, they’ve got her. Let’s go.”

“Me?”

“Why not?” Gretyl said, and took her hand, twining fingers. Iceweasel still couldn’t figure Gretyl – sometimes, she had a sisterly air, sometimes motherly. Sometimes flirty. Sometimes all three.

Iceweasel had never met armed walkaways before. As she’d learned from Limpopo, walking away was all the weapon anyone really needed. But the university crew weren’t prepared to abandon their work – it was too urgent and fragile, though they’d been in touch with other walkaways about cloudifying it for resilience, but it was slow going. The walkaway net had high-speed zones, and this had been one of them, but the major hard-line links had been destroyed in the blaze and they’d dropped back to stupid meshing wireless and there was only so much electromagnetic spectrum in the universe.

The university crew knew how to make weapons. She remembered her dumb ideas about walkaway territory being full of AK-3DPs and improvised flamethrower tanks. When you’ve got a building full of physicists and synthetic chemists who’ve lost their loved ones in a cowardly missile strike, you don’t need crude shit like that. They could turn your bowels into water at two hundred meters, tasp your nerve endings into pain-overload, sound-pulse your eardrums, knock you out or kill you with methods they discussed with the same enthusiasm that they used with all technical subjects. The ad hoc defense group were tons of chuckles. Iceweasel made it through one meeting and never went back. She didn’t like being reminded that her body was so easily disrupted.

The defense ad hoc were on the scene when they got there. They’d shrink-wrappend the bad guys. The unconscious one was in the recovery position. Both were naked, clothes strewn untidily around the room. The smell of shit was incredible.

“What do we do with them now?” Gretyl said. She wore her jolly-fat-lady expression, but Iceweasel knew her well enough to see that it was a mask covering something deadly and anxious.

Sita – who was on the defense ad hoc – shook her head. “We do what we have to.”

Iceweasel felt cold. Were they going to execute these two? Were walkaways allowed to do that? There was no rulebook, but ever since she’d walked away, she’d had the sense from the more “senior” – that wasn’t the word – walkaways that there was a consensus about what was within bounds. No one had said that summary execution was Not Done, but she’d assumed that this was the case.

Part of her was already constructing a rationale. The incursion was an act of war. The firebombing was an act of war. It took innocent lives. These two had been sent to finish the missiles’ work. The other side killed freely. Why should they be squeamish? Where would they keep prisoners, and how, and...

She shook her head. It was easy to slip into that thinking. In reality she was pissed that these two were here, enraged at the death of the walkaways torched by their paymasters, lost friends of her new crew, lost personhood of Dis. These two had taken money to kill them. Kill her. She wanted revenge, even though it would do no good. The zottas who’d sent them knew where they were, otherwise these two wouldn’t have been sent. More would come. Force couldn’t win.

“Come on,” Gretyl said. “Let’s get them into the infirmary.”

The infirmary – originally the place the wounded had been brought when they’d abandoned the campus, now the nexus of the crew’s medical systems – was in a corner of the big room. It had two permanent residents, comatose since the attack. Iceweasel had walked past them hundreds of times and stopped noticing them, but as they wrestled the shrink-wrapped mercs into cots beside them, she was forced to confront them. Burned, bandaged, supine. Tubes going in and out. The crew had a dozen MDs, though they were all research-oriented, and they’d traded shifts tracking the comatose.

The shrink-wrapped and the burned, side by side. A solemn circle drew around them. The shit-covered one, the woman, was conscious, her eyes wide, taking it in. Though her mouth was unwrapped, she hadn’t spoken. She breathed in shallow sips. The other one may have been conscious – Iceweasel’s suspicious mind automatically ascribed suspicion to his motionlessness – but he was close-eyed and still.

Not having a leader made this sort of thing difficult. It was the inverse bystander effect, the first aid puzzle where the more people there when someone collapsed, the less likely that anyone offered assistance. Surely someone else is more qualified. I should just stand ready to help when the best-qualified person steps forward?

In first aid, they taught you it was more important that someone did something than it was that the perfect person do the best thing. Iceweasel waited for Gretyl or Sita to speak. No one did.

There were butterflies in her stomach. “We release them, right?”

She looked at her crew’s faces. None seemed to be saying, “Who the fuck are you?” – her greatest fear. Gretyl looked grim. But thoughtful.

“They can’t hurt us at this point. They know about our defenses, but if they never return, the next batch will assume our defenses. Everyone knows we can’t last here anyway.” It was like a flowchart in her head – argument a, counterargument b. No one raised the counterarguments.

“Revenge won’t do any good. These are employees. Someone default is paying them. Hurting them won’t hurt that zotta. The only thing that will hurt that zotta is telling people how to do their own uploads, making it walkaway.”

Silence.

The conscious merc coughed.

“You people are fucking unbelievable,” she said. “Seriously? Just do it.” Her voice was shaky, brave.

“Do what?” Iceweasel said.

“What you’re inevitably going to talk yourselves into doing. Kill us.” The two words were delivered in the same tone as the sentence before, but thickly. The merc wasn’t as brave as she seemed. No one wanted to die.

“Have you ever killed someone?” Iceweasel contemplated her. Regulation-short hair, dark eyes – but big – a wide, flat nose. She might have been white, or Asian, or something else. Her mouth was small and hardly moved when she talked, like she was trying to talk and whistle simultaneously. It made Iceweasel fear her, even under these circumstances. A predatory way of speaking, with the menace of the private guards and asshole school disciplinarians who’d haunted her teenage years. The back of her neck itched.

The merc pursed her thin lips. “What’s this, a war crimes tribunal?”

“Have you committed any war crimes?” That was Gretyl. She had her deceptive jolly fat lady face again.

“Bitch, if you haven’t committed any war crimes these days, you’re not trying,” the merc said.

“Gallows humor,” Gretyl said.

Sita and Gretyl’s eyes met. They looked at CC, back at each other.

“I think she’s right,” said Tam. Tam was trans and took a female pronoun. She and Tam hadn’t exactly clicked. It wasn’t overt hostility, but they never occupied the same conversation at the same time. Even in chore-wrangling discussion boards, they didn’t post to the same thread. One of Iceweasel’s school friends was trans, but Iceweasel hadn’t known until after he’d transitioned, and cut off his old crowd. She’d heard second-hand that he had had fights with his parents, who, like many zottas, were not constitutionally suited to being thwarted, or, frankly, wrong. Iceweasel sometimes wondered if he’d gone walkaway. She imagined walkaway was more accepting of trans people than default, though truth be told, zottas of any gender or orientation didn’t have much to worry about in default, unless their parents cut them off.

And she hadn’t clicked with Tam, had she? Did she have a lurking, detestable prejudice she didn’t want to cop to? Mightn’t other walkaways share that dark secret?

“Come on,” Tam said, and now Iceweasel was thinking three things at once: Have we made her into a psychopath by being cruel to her? and, Am I just thinking that because I think I have been cruel?; and I should think hard about whatever she has to say because my stupid subconscious is going to discount it – and then, shortly, But I must be careful not to overcorrect.

She was spinning her hamster wheel. It happened often in walkaway: continuous introspection about motives and bias, whether being raised zotta had worn unjumpable troughs in her brain that she could never escape. Now there was more: Why was I the one to speak? Is it because of my American Brahmin shit? Are they all thinking, who the fuck does this idiot think she is? This always happened when something stressful went down with walkaways, a full-blown trial by ordeal, courtesy of her self-doubt.

“We’re not going to keep them prisoner, are we? Letting them go won’t necessarily speed up the next round of bad guys on the doorstep, but it might, and nuking them both has a good chance of slowing things. We know it. They know it. There’s no mercy in drawing this out.”

Sita looked at CC. “That there might be a middle ground.”

Research at Walkaway U was eclectic. It produced interesting things. For a decade, word around the world’s top research institutes was that the most creative, wildest work happened in walkaway. It leaked into default: self-replicating beer and semi-biological feedstock decomposers that broke down manufactured goods into slurries ready to be dumped back into printers. A lot of radio stuff, things you could only pull off through cooperative models of spectrum management, where any radio could speak in any frequency, all radios cooperating to steer clear of each other, dynamically adjusting their gain, shaping their transmissions with smart phased-arrays.

Some of the work at WU was only rumor, even in walkaway. It only got discussed in invitational forums, because it would freak not only the solid cits back in default, but even the walkaways.

“Deadheading?” Iceweasel said to Gretyl. Gretyl had dropped the jolly mask and was all glittering intelligence.

“That’s the cutesy name. Suspended animation, if you like.”

“Does it work?”

Gretyl twirled a strand of hair on one finger and tucked it behind her ear. “Sometimes it works. In the animal models, it works well.”

“And on humans?”

Gretyl blinked slowly. “If something doesn’t work on animals all the time, it’d be fucked up to try it on humans, don’t you think?”

“Yeah. So, how does it work on humans?”

Gretyl sighed. “There’s only a handful. People who were long-term vegetative, no realistic hope of coming back. No one’s tried to thaw them yet.”

“Do you actually freeze them?”

“No,” Gretyl said. “It’s a metabolic thing. I’ll send you the microbiology and endocrinology references if you’re interested.”

A voice nagged at Iceweasel. These people know things. They do things. Your dad could buy and sell them a million times, but they can bring the dead back to life, and all he could do was terrify people into submission. “Sure.”

They sat against a wall, propped on sleeping pallets in the cul-de-sac that was a dumping-ground for stuff queued to be reduced to feedstock. People passed by, gave them distracted nods. There was an urgent crackle in the air. Some people were packing up essentials. Some whispered intensely. Something was about to happen.

Someone passed by, then doubled back. Tam. She nodded at them, sat.

“I’ve spoken to Sita,” she said.

Gretyl said, “I think we’re having the same conversation.”

“I don’t like it,” Tam said. “It’s one thing to kill an enemy, another thing to do medical experiments on her. If you use those two as experimental subjects, you’re going down a road you won’t be able to come back up.”

Iceweasel had a moment of vertiginous comprehension. “You’re going to deadhead those two?”

“Not just them,” Gretyl said. “Ours, too. Yan and Quentin.” The ones in the comas. Iceweasel had heard their names, forgotten them. “We’re going to move, we need minimal logistics.”

Tam said, “We should have moved the day after we got bombed. But we haven’t, because these people are convinced that they’re one step from curing death, and once that happens—”

“All bets are off,” Gretyl finished. “It’s not that crazy, Tam. Think of all the stuff we do because we’re haunted by death. If we can get scanning and simming, that’s the real end of scarcity – no more reason to move off the cross-hairs, unless reanimating takes longer than the inconvenience of running away. That’s powerful.”

Tam shook her head. “Yeah, and it’s been just around the corner as long as I’ve been walkaway.”

Gretyl patted her knee. “None of us can predict how far away the day is. But we’re getting close. The zottas think so. They’ve sent expensive assassins to cut our throats.”

“Cheap insurance,” Tam said. “The kind of money they have, they won’t miss those two.”

“That may be so. But why would they even bother if there wasn’t something imminent?”

Iceweasel thought about her father. “Once you’ve got your money in a big enough pile, it keeps on piling. They’re all convinced you have to be the love child of Lex Luthor and Albert Einstein to hire investment brokers to keep throwing ten percent on top of your pile every year, that being rich proves that they’re smarter than everyone. So if one decided it was worth smiting every WU campus on earth, he’d twitch his pinky and congratulate himself on his decisiveness later by masturbating on the corpses.”

“You’re saying—”

“I’m saying that if someone with more money than God took it into his head to destroy you, it doesn’t mean you’re doing anything exceptional. It could be trophy-hunting.”

Gretyl stood, stretched her arms over her head. The movement made Iceweasel’s back ache in sympathy. There’d been a toll on her muscles from the hard days.

“I suppose,” she said. Everyone knew that Iceweasel was a poor little rich girl. It was the worst-kept non-secret on campus.

It felt like they were staring at her, judging her. She knew she should be wary of sleep-deprivation paranoia, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was a permanent outsider.

Tam said, “Whether it’s rational, the fact remains that someone out there thinks we’re worth killing. We should have been moving constantly, not waiting for the axe. If your vivisectionist buddies use those two for medical experiments, we’ll be dead meat everywhere – and so will every other walkaway. Some things are just not done.”

Gretyl kept supreme cool. Her inability to be ruffled fascinated Iceweasel. She was such a fucking Earth goddess. “What makes you think anyone would find out?”

Tam got in her face. “Don’t be stupid, stupid. We leak. Everyone knows everything we do. Half of it is on a fucking wiki. There’s gonna be at least one spy around here. More.”

“Could be you,” Gretyl said, pretending that Tam’s lips weren’t millimeters from her nose. “Maybe you’ve come here to spy on us to freak us out. Or maybe you’re going native, and you’re warning us because you’ve got inside dope on the next strike. Maybe that’s why you want to nuke those two, because you’re sure that they’ll out you.”

“That’s not an entirely stupid way of thinking,” Tam said, and smiled. Gretyl smiled. “At least you’re trying situation-appropriate paranoia. But what about your girlie here?” she said, jerking a thumb at Iceweasel.

“Don’t you think I’m a bit obvious to be a mole? The zottas aren’t stupid.”

“Fake-out,” Tam shot back. She smiled and Iceweasel told the voice in her head this meant it was a joke, but all Iceweasel could think was “ha ha, only serious.”

“They know you’re so obvious you’d never be suspected.”

“That is the kind of stupid thing someone who thought he was Lex Einstein would come up with. But it’s not true.”

“Which is exactly what you’d—”

Iceweasel’s wrist buzzed. She checked in. “Got to go. We’ll do this later.”

They were only steps behind her as she ran for the cog-sci lab. CC waited for her, but she breezed past and went to the wall.

She wasn’t a scientist, trained to read infographics, but even she could see there was something different.

“Hey there, beautiful,” said Dis’s voice. The words appeared on the screen, trailing tails of analytics. The trails had fewer angry warnings.

There was a tachometer dial Iceweasel had learned to pay close attention to – available cycles on the cluster running the sim. It was further into the green than she’d seen it while the sim was running.

“Hey, Dis. Did you get an upgrade? You’ve got more headroom than you know what to do with.”

“Course I do. We did it. Or rather, I did it.”

“Did what?” But she knew. It was there. You didn’t need to be an expert to interpret the infographics.

“Solved it. I’m stable – metastable. I can self-regulate. Not only that, I can self-regulate without conscious effort – without even knowing I’m doing it. There’s a lookahead subroutine below my conscious threshold, dialed way down, hardly branching ahead at all, it nudges the me that’s aware of being me into the groove.”

“So you’re saying—”

“I’m saying I did it. It was there all along, but it took so much tweaking. I was constrained because I crashed every time I fucked up. That kept me stuck in local maximum. So the last time I booted, I constrained my consciousness to the narrowest possible sim, nothing human in it, just blind heuristics, and managed to traverse the valley of crashitude and scale a new peak. It’s generalizable, too – I think now there’s an existence proof, I’ll be able to do it again. You get that, Iceweasel, you bot-whisperer? I’m going to knock the compute-time to execute a sim down by two orders of magnitude. We’re about to get a fuck-load more bots. As in, no one will ever have to die again.”

“Except to the extent they’re actually dead, right?”

“A technicality. You know how this works. The only stable state you can boot a sim into is one where it doesn’t have a meltdown about being a sim. Maybe there’s some six-sigma fraction of the general population who have no possibility of that, and they’ll be dead forever, but for anyone who has even the narrowest possibility-space for coping with existential angst, there will never be any reason to die, ever. Fuck you, Prometheus, we have stolen fire from the fucking gods!”

The infographics showed nominal. Performance metrics robust. What’s more, the slightly off-kilter, self-reflexive messianic tone of the bot sounded more like the Dis everyone had told Iceweasel about than the sim ever had. She wasn’t sure if she bought the Turing thought-experiment that intelligence could recognize intelligence, but nevertheless it was hard to remember that whatever she was talking to wasn’t exactly a human being.

“Dis,” she said, and found to her horror that she had choked up. There were tears on her cheeks, too. “Dis, this is—”

“I know,” the simulation said. “It makes it all different now.”

Tam buttonholed her as she walked away. Gretyl stayed behind with the cog-sci people to pick apart the lookaheads and figure out what was going on down on the bare metal.

“You know what this means?”

“What?”

“The end of history,” Tam said. “The end of morality, of everything. If you can live forever – come back from the dead – anything goes. Suicide-bombing. Mass murder. That’s why the zottas are so freaked out by everyone having it. They know that if only a few of them control it, they’ll manage it carefully. Not because they’re good, but because a small number of immortal aristocrats will agree on how to ensure their sweet deal never ends.

“But once everyone’s got it—”

“Wait,” Iceweasel said. Her eyes itched from crying. She didn’t know why she’d been crying. “What the fuck are you talking about? Why are you here if that’s what you think?”

“I’m here,” Tam said, “because I don’t want to die. The same reason all these people are here. It’s just they’re all scientists and they dress it up in high-toned bullshit about universal access to the fruits of the human intellect and other crap. When I got here, I couldn’t believe the groupthink. These people need someone to give them a reality check.”

“Lucky they have you,” Iceweasel said, without managing to keep the sarcasm out.

“They are, actually. But now they’ve got this, all bets are off. Your girlfriend is going to lead the charge to give those two mercs cold sleep. Why not? If you can ‘upload’ them first—” she made finger-quotes – “what’s the harm if they end up vegetables? This is save-game for wannabe Frankensteins.”

Iceweasel decided she didn’t like Tam. “What do you want from me?”

“Once the campuses got bombed, everyone nontechnical left the campus, except me. That made me the only person who hadn’t been indoctrinated by science-ism. Now there are two of us. If those two mercs in there are enemy soldiers, we can execute them. If they’re not, we can let them go. But stealing their minds and then performing medical experiments on their bodies is not an act of mercy, and you and I are the only people in this place who are cognitively equipped to debullshitify their dumb-ass consensus that the thing that happens to be most convenient is also the most moral.”

“Could we do this at another time? I’m—” She broke off and scrubbed her eyes. “We’re about to bug out, which is what you want, right? This fight of yours, it’s not mine. I’ve heard your opinion and I don’t know if I’m convinced—”

“That’s because not being convinced lets you do the easiest thing – not fighting with all these nice people who are your friends and have let you do fun, rewarding work playing nanny to a post-human upload. Probably the most meaningful thing that could happen to someone from your background. No offense.”

Back in default, Iceweasel was a ninja master at telling people to go fuck themselves. Her years in walkaway had destroyed her skill-set. It was the fear of seeming stuck up, the sense of being an outsider. “I don’t want to have more of this conversation, thank you, good-bye.”

“You had a chance. Remember that when they call you a war criminal.”

[VI]

TAM WAS RIGHT about the mercs. The news that Dis was running – the fact that you could wander up to any screen and converse with her – settled any question about the mercs. When word got around that they would be sedated, uploaded and deadheaded, she got a sick feeling. But she made herself attend. They converted the cavern to an operating theater. Iceweasel realized the coffin-like machines she ignored since her arrival were brain-imagers. She watched the comatose Walkaway U crew get inserted into their maws. Sita whispered a commentary about interpolating simultaneous scans, their clever noise-reduction, the de-duping process that made storing and modeling it manageable. Iceweasel was annoyed by, and grateful for, the distraction.

Deadheading was easier than she’d expected, taps fitted to their IVs, the infographics showed their metabolisms spinning down until it was barely distinguishable from death.

That’s what the fuss is about. But these two were their crew, comatose, no prospect of recovery. The mercs – she hadn’t learned their names, though she thought CC had, because he was thorough – were capable of walking out on their own. Could it be worse to put them into suspended animation than to kill them? What kind of fucked-up ethics put execution on a higher moral plane than pausing-out someone’s life?

The low ceiling was claustrophobic. All the people crammed in together. Some of them are spies. It was only logical. Some of them think I’m a spy. Also logical.

Underground living left her in a state of drifting unreality and unmoored circadians. She had probably missed sleep. Or slept too much. She was often surprised to discover that she was gnawingly hungry, sure she had just eaten.

The mercs waited on their hospital beds, infographics regular. They’d been unshrink-wrapped and sluiced clean of shit, tucked under white sheets. They were deep under, the kind of general anesthetic trusted by paranoid WU survivors. They scanned the man first. It was fast. They wheeled over the woman, the one who’d spoken. The one who’d told them to get it over with.

She had parents. People who loved her. Every human was a hyper-dense node of intense emotional and material investment. Speaking meant someone had spent thousands of hours cooing to you. Those lean muscles, the ringing tone of command – their inputs were from all over the world, carefully administered. The merc was more than a person: like a spaceship launch, her existence implied thousands of skilled people, generations of experts, wars, treaties, scholarship and supply-chain management. Every one of them was all that.

She felt vertigo. What business had the walkaways thinking they’d just wing it when it came to civilization? The zottas weren’t anyone’s friend, but they had an interest in the continuation of the civilization whose apex they occupied. These scientists, weirdos and jobless slackers weren’t qualified to run a planet. They were proud of their lack of qualifications. It was plausible when they were harvesting feedstock and putting up buildings and cooking for each other. Now they were putting a stranger’s body into a machine that was supposed to record her mind, and they were going to bring her body to the brink of death. They did it without law, without authority, without regulation or permit. They were winging it.

The room tilted. She stepped back. Gretyl caught her. She’d subliminally known Gretyl was there, smelled her familiar smell, sensed her bulk. Gretyl’s big arms went around her waist and she surrendered, leaning back into her bosom. Gretyl’s face was at the place where her throat became her shoulder, breath passing through the pores of the long-wearing refu-suit she’d put on when she left on her rescue mission. She rinsed it out when she remembered, but it hardly needed it. The breath warmed her.

“You don’t need to watch this.”

Yes I do, she thought. Now CC prepared to deadhead the mercs, holding up the vial he would administer to the lab cameras, fitting it to the IV feed, squeezing the valve to start the flow. All actions he’d performed moments before on comatose members of their crew, but different. This was a Rubicon they crossed for all walkaway. When this became public knowledge, the world would change for everyone they knew. She was there, and she did nothing to stop it. Would anyone?

Tam watched raptly. Her expression reminded Iceweasel of the intense concentration of trying to attain an elusive orgasm. It was sexual, a mixture of recklessness and transcendence. Transcendence, that was it. Other adventurers had dabbled, fretted about venturing into the jealous realm of the gods, but walkaways fearlessly burst from mortal into mythical.

Tam watched. Iceweasel watched, Gretyl’s breath hot on her collarbone, hair tickling her cheek. Iceweasel had conversed with a dead person who had returned from the grave and need not ever die again, who might copy herself millions of times, be able to think faster and broader than any human. She shivered. Gretyl squeezed tighter.

“I need to go.” She hadn’t planned to say it aloud, but did.

“Let’s go, then.” Gretyl’s hand was small and damp. The air crackled.

They kissed as soon as they were beyond the crowd. The kiss had built for a long time. Iceweasel had kissed many people. Some she’d loved, some she’d been indifferent to, some she’d actively disliked and had kissed them and more out of boredom, confusion, or self-destruction. She kissed Seth so many times she forgot how to feel his mouth as separate from her own, so that it became no more erotic than smacking her lips. She’d kissed Etcetera properly good-bye, with the crackle of a really good kiss more charged because she did it in sight of Limpopo, stared at her while she did it, and when she was done, Limpopo kissed her just as fiercely, but with ironic detachment: this is how adults do it.

Kissing Gretyl was something else. Partly it was that she was older than anyone Iceweasel had kissed. She was also different in her presence, her bulk and mass, the frank brilliance of her mind and her studied indifference to her body’s relationship to other bodies. How many times had Gretyl boldly watched Iceweasel undress, catching her eye, not looking away? How many times had Gretyl undressed before Iceweasel with equal boldness, arranging her huge breasts like she was moving around the pillows before settling into bed?

Their bodies pressed, Gretyl’s yielding, and Iceweasel couldn’t get her arms all the way around her. She clutched at Gretyl, and Gretyl’s strong, soft arms pulled her. Her thigh pressed between Gretyl’s legs at the hot softness like fresh bread. Gretyl’s hand twined in her hair, turned her face with irresistible strength. Her mouth worked at Gretyl’s, tongue dancing on her lips, her teeth, and Iceweasel let herself moan and surrender.

Gretyl’s other hand kneaded her ass and brought her closer still. Iceweasel felt so small, as if she was a plaything to be pushed and prodded into the places where Gretyl wanted her, and she welcomed it. In love, there is always one who kisses and one who offers the cheek.

It was a thing that Billiam liked to say. Billiam and she had hooked up now and again, all that crew had, in an aggressively detached way that they weren’t supposed to take seriously, and all of them ended up being in perpetual heartbreak over. Billiam thought she was cold, a product of her foofiness, and knew the accusation drove her crazy with self-loathing. He’d never say it when she turned him down, oh no. Not a way to manipulate her into fucking him. No, he said it when she did fuck him, especially when she was attentive. “In love, there is always one who kisses and one who offers the cheek,” in his ha-ha-only-serious tone as she let her tongue trail lazily around his nipple, the residue of his cum burning on her lips. She knew he meant she was the one who offered the cheek, that whatever her ministrations, it was about her, not him.

Billiam’s memory rose in her mind and wouldn’t go. The last time she’d seen him, in the blaring chaos of the Muji factory, head caved in and blood around him, Etcetera’s panic as he went through the motions of pointless first aid. Billiam, his little aphorisms and his ways of getting inside her head, but who cried after they fucked, who had done the craziest, bravest things of them all. He snuck over the border at a Quebec Mohawk reservation to meet upstate New York bio-cookers for starter cultures for their beer. He always made sure they had a getaway plan, counted heads whenever they ran out ahead of the law, once going back to help a kid with a twisted ankle. They barely knew the kid, it was her first action, and she’d been a pain, helpless on the sidelines watching other people do the work, then complaining no one told her what to do.

They’d all hated her, but Billiam went back and carried her even though she had fifteen centimeters and ten kilos on him. They were nearly caught, and she’d never thanked him or come back again. That was Billiam.

She’d left him bleeding on the floor. He’d died. Her dad told her that later. He knew about their relationship. He had dossiers on her friends, social graphs describing their relationships. He’d hinted that he knew which were rats, selling information to cops and corporates, which she’d assumed was head-fuckery, but was plausible enough that it was impossible to fully trust anyone in the group.

She’d left Billiam to die. If he’d lived just a few more years, he’d have gone walkaway. He could have been with her. He could have his head in the scanner. He could be immortal, as she would be, soon.

Salt tears and snot ran into her mouth. Gretyl gently put her hands on Iceweasel’s cheeks and stared into her eyes with her big, liquid brown eyes, like depths of melting chocolate.

“We could be dead in an hour. Or any minute. And that” – she jerked her head toward where the mercs were being deadheaded – “that’s something else. Then there’s this,” she said, and kissed her so softly it felt like she’d passed a paintbrush over her lips. “Death, sex, immortality, and immorality. Crying is okay.”

“There was a friend of mine,” Iceweasel said. “Dead.” She drew a shuddering breath, couldn’t let it out. It was trapped in her chest with her words.

“We’re all thinking about our dead. We left dead behind in the fire. That crowd in there has the fever. That Tam didn’t have a chance. No way they were going to slow down, certainly not because they might be remembered as monsters by default. When they think about how the future will remember them, they’re imagining being there in person to defend their honor.”

“It’s crazy,” Iceweasel said. “I can’t even think about it.”

“We’ve had longer to get used to it. We walked out of default because we were working on this and were terrified and excited by how the zottas treated it like the holy grail. It’s impossible to escape your environment. You can be a spocky lab-coat, but you can’t help but feel like whatever’s got zottas scared and excited is scary and exciting. Whatever they want has to be important.”

“You know that they’re just psychos, right? Not geniuses. They’ve got no special talent for making the world perfect, or figuring out the future. They’re just good at game-rigging. Con artists.” She thought about her dad, school friends, their pretense to noblesse oblige and refinement. How they’d herd-mentality into some fad but pretend it was a newly discovered, ageless universal truth – not product cooked up by one of their own to sell to the rest. That was the amazing thing: they were in the business of making people feel envy and desperation over material things and exclusive experiences, but were just as susceptible to envy and desperation.

“The reason they’re so good at making us desperate and selling us shit isn’t that they’re too smart to get conned. It’s because they’re extra-susceptible. They understand how to make us turn on one another in envy and terror because they’re drowning in envy and terror of each other. My dad knows the guy in the next yacht is a bastard who’d slit his throat and steal his empire because my dad is a bastard who’d slit that guy’s throat and steal his empire. This immortality shit? That’s not about all of them living forever, it’s about just one or two living forever, being deathless emperor of time.”

“You know more about them than I ever will, Icy, but we don’t want to hoard immortality, we want to share it. To viralize it. People who know they can’t die will be better people than people who worry about the end. How could you blind yourself with short-term thinking if you’re planning life everlasting?”

All the billions who’d died. Every one the apex of a pyramid of resources, love, thoughts no one else ever thought before and would never think again. If you have it in your power to end slow-motion genocide, what kind of monster would you be not to do it? What price was too high? She knew that this was dangerous thinking, the kind people died and killed for. Tam wanted her to stop things because Tam couldn’t make herself stop things.

It was too late. Iceweasel couldn’t help herself either.

When it was all said and done, there wasn’t much they wanted to take with. They broke down Dis’s cluster with her supervision: she ran a commentary on her subjective experience of the slow shutdown, retransmitted in realtime to other campuses, researchers, hobbyists, dying people, spies, and gossips. It was part of a dump of everything, all the notes and source-code, optimizations and logs. It was time to uncloak. They would hit the road with a lot of fanfare.

Iceweasel filled the trike’s cargo pods with the essentials, the brain-imaging rigs and the redundant storage modules. They were on the fringes of walkaway network, and the scans they’d made were too bulky to fully mirror. Instead, they were divided up in a redundant swarm among the WU crew, everyone seeding their parts out to denser parts of walkaway as quickly as physics allowed, but for at least a day, a single well-placed strike would wipe out the only five people who had been scanned by CC with the certainty that they could be brought back to life someday.

The most difficult things to carry were the people themselves. Not just the four deadheads, but all the people. They marched in a long column through the woods towards the B&B. Iceweasel was sure she wasn’t the only one thinking about the efficiency of upload, the sweet nothing of deadheading. If they were deadheading, they wouldn’t have to play out the idiot conversion of sunlight to flora, flora to fauna, fauna to energy, energy to muscular action. They could just lie down, get stacked like cord-wood on the back of the trike – they’d ended up wrapping the four deadheaders in cocoons of bubblewrap; they stuck flexible duct-tubing into the mass as it puffed up, creating fresh-air tunnels to their faces.

Better than stacking like cord-wood: if they uploaded, they could fit into someone’s pocket. That person could ride a bicycle or a horse or just jog, and they’d go along with her. Someday, they would transition to beings of insubstantial information, everywhere and nowhere. Someday, they’d stop for a scan before they went out for a swim, just in case they drowned.

“Colds,” Sita said. “If we do bodies, people will use upload to shake off colds.”

“How?” Iceweasel asked from atop her trike, its gentle humming rumble numbing the insides of her thighs.

“Simple,” Sita said. “Take a scan, get a new body out of storage, decant the data into it.”

Iceweasel snorted. “Then what? Push your old body into a wood chipper?”

“It’s feedstock,” Sita said. “Put it to sleep and don’t wake it. If you’re sentimental, have it mounted. Or make a coat, or cook it for dinner.”

“You realize there’s a whole default that thinks that’s what this is about,” Iceweasel said. She’d grown certain there were spies in their midst. She spoke carefully, with the sense she was being recorded and any failure to speak out when jokes like this arose would be held against her. Tam’s talk of war crimes trials roiled in her hindbrain.

“You realize they’re exactly right,” Sita said. She smiled, stopped. “You know, when the first walkaway prostheses projects started, most of the people contributing had lost an arm or a leg in Belarus or Oman, and were tired of paying a loan-shark for something that hurt and barely worked and could be remotely repossessed by an over-the-air kill-switch if they missed a payment. But once they got here and started living, realized how much had been left on the table by conservative companies that didn’t want to get into a patent fight and didn’t see any reason to add advanced functionality to something that you didn’t have any choice about, they got radicalized.

“They stopped saying ‘I just want to make an arm that’ll get through the day,’ and started saying, ‘I want an arm that does everything my old arm did.’ From there, it was a short step to ‘I want an arm that’s better than my old arm.’ And from there, it was an even shorter step to ‘I want an arm that’s so outrageously awesome that you’ll cut off your own to get one.’ That’s what’s coming to immortality. Not just the ability to come back from the dead, but the ability to rethink what it means to be alive. There’s going to be people who decide to deadhead for a year or a decade, to see what’s coming. There’ll be people with broken hearts who deadhead for twenty years to get some distance from their ex-. I’ll bet you that someday we’ll look around and discover that all the kids are short for their age, and it’ll turn out that they’ll all have been deadheaded by their parents whenever they had a tantrum and were missing ten percent of their realtime.”

Iceweasel shook her head. “Stuff just doesn’t change that much. Most people will be doing the same thing in twenty years they’re doing now. Maybe in a hundred years—”

“You’re going to hate to hear this, but you’re too young to get it. Anything invented before you were eighteen was there all along. Anything invented before you’re thirty is exciting and will change the world forever. Anything invented after that is an abomination and should be banned. You don’t remember what life was like twenty years ago, before walkaways. You don’t understand how different things are, so you think things don’t change that much.

“When I was your age, we didn’t have abandoned zones or free hardware designs. People without a place to stay were homeless – vagrants, beggars. If you worried about zottas, you went to protests and got your head knocked in. People still thought the answer to their problems was to get a job, and anyone who didn’t get a job was broken or lazy, or if you were a bleeding heart, someone failed by society. Hardly anyone said the world would be better if you didn’t have to work at all. No one pointed out that people like your old man were LARPing corporate robber-baron anti-heroes of dramas they’d loved as teenagers and they required huge pools of workers and would-be workers under their heel for verisimilitude’s sake.

“If you’d been deadheading for twenty years and woke today, you’d think that you were dreaming, or having a nightmare. Sure, eighty percent of the people who were alive then are alive now, and eighty percent of the buildings around then are around now. But everything about how we relate to each other and places we occupy has changed. They used to think everything got changed by technology. Now we know the reason people are willing to let technology change their worlds is shit is fucked up for them, and they don’t want to hang onto what they’ve got.

“The zottas want to control who gets to adopt which technologies, but they don’t want to bear the expense of locking up all walkaways in giant prisons or figuring out how to feed us into wood chippers without making a spectacle, so here we are on the world’s edge, finding our own uses for things. There’s more people than ever who don’t have any love for the way things are. Every one of them would happily jettison everything they think of as normal for the chance to do something weird that might be better.”

Iceweasel considered the perfect storm of her father’s intolerableness, Billiam’s death, Etcetera’s words, the growing sense that shit was fucked up and shit, a phrase that everyone used as a joke. It wasn’t a funny joke but people told it all the time.

Ha ha, only serious.

What would it take for her to upload? When they got to the B&B, they’d set up the imager, and anyone could get uploaded, make a scan of themselves – or “themselves, within the envelope that could tolerate being reanimated in software.” Would she get in? She’d like to talk to Dis about this. She caught herself. She wished she could talk to Dis about this? Didn’t that mean that Dis was a person? Didn’t that settle the question?

She rolled on, steering the trike through the woods, the train of cargo carts bumping along behind her.

They were nearly at the B&B when everyone’s interfaces buzzed and let them know that they’d safely uploaded all five scans to walkaway net, and they were being seeded all over the world, as unkillably immortal as data could be. Everyone relaxed. Their knowledge that immortality was real was only hours old, but they were already terrified at the thought of permadeath. They joked nervously about how quickly everyone could get scanned when they’d unpacked at the B&B.

They went into hyper-vigilance – some took stemmies to help – and unspoken fear spread. Death came in two flavors: realdeath, and “death.” But until they got to the B&B, the only flavor they’d get was permadeath. Fear became terror. They spooked at shadows. CC and Gretyl both broke out less-lethals they’d taken with them. They hadn’t told anyone they were doing it, and there’d have been a fearsome debate if they had. No one raised an eyebrow now.

They were so close. Iceweasel knew this territory, had walked this train on scavenging runs for the new B&B as its drones identified new matériel to speed it into existence.

Watching the new B&B conjure itself had been a conversion experience, a proof of the miraculous on Earth. They’d walked away from the old B&B when those assholes had shown up, and pulled a new one from the realm of pure information. That was their destiny. Things could be walked away from and made anew, no one would ever have to fight. Not yet – they couldn’t scan people at volume, couldn’t decant them into flesh. But there would come a day that Gretyl had spoken of, when there would be no reason to fear death. That would be the end of physical coercion. So long as someone, somewhere believed in putting you back into a body, there would be no reason not to walk into an oppressor’s machine-gun fire, no reason not to beat your brains out on the bars of your prison cell, no reason not to –

The drone overhead made a welcoming sound. The B&B had sent its outriders for them. She looked at it and waved. It dipped a wing at her and circled back.

“Getting close,” she called out, and then the enemy charged out of the bush with a machine roar.

There were eight mechas, the sort that they’d built to manage the B&B’s trickiest assembly tasks. These might have been the same ones. They stood three meters tall, holding their pilots in cruciform cocoons, faces peering out of the mechas’ chest cavities, eyes shrouded in panorama screens that timed refreshes with the pilot’s saccades and load-stresses of the body to provide just-in-time views of wherever the suit’s action was. Each one could lift a couple tons, but had fail-safes in place to stop them from hurting humans. Turning that shit off was only a firmware update. There were plenty of places in walkaway where mecha-wrestling was a sport with big fan bases.

They went for the cargo containers first, upending them and methodically bending their wheels so they would never roll again. Iceweasel leapt clear as the front-most pod upended, taking the A.T.V. with it, and hurt her shoulder and ankle when she sprawled to the forest floor.

Gretyl hauled her to her feet, her face a mask of terror. Gretyl grabbed her by her sore shoulder, making her shout. That attracted the attention of the nearest mech-pilot. The huge body turned toward them. Mechas could turn quickly and their arms were fast enough to drive a shovel into frozen ground with pinpoint accuracy, but they couldn’t run, because their gyros needed time to stabilize after each step, so that they walked in a bowlegged stagger. The mecha took one step toward them, the pilot rocking in his cradle. He – she saw a russet beard poking around the head-brace, teeth behind the peeled-back lips – rolled with the mecha, and something about how he did it made her think that he didn’t have a lot of experience.

Gretyl let go of Iceweasel’s shoulder and wrestled a shitblaster. Iceweasel stepped quickly out of her way as she prodded its back panel, struggling to keep the array of coin-sized bowls pointed in the right direction as they shaped a pulse of infrasound, tuning it up and down through a range of resonant frequencies, hunting for the one that would –

The driver tried to pitch forward, but the mecha couldn’t bend that far without keeling over, so it locked him in a thirty-degree bow, like a sulky kid after a forced performance. The bottom half of his face – beard, lips, square teeth – twisted. The shitblaster didn’t just make your bowels loosen, they did so with cramps that were between childbirth and cholera.

Gretyl panted. Iceweasel hauled her out of the mêlée’s center. Three mechas were converging on them, having wrecked the wagon. Iceweasel and Gretyl were nearly knocked over by people running away from them, people she recognized but not quite. They ran, colliding with more people. It was panic.

“I’ve got to—” Gretyl said. The rest was lost, but Iceweasel knew what it was. She and CC were the only ones who could fight – she looked around, saw CC aiming his weapon at a mecha, watched the owner lose consciousness, saw two of their own nearby drop to their knees, clutching their heads and screaming. The pain-ray made your skin feel like it was on fire, and the shaped infrasound rattled your skull and caused deafness and near-blindness.

Half the mechas were incapacitated, the rest waded through the crowd, and Iceweasel watched in horror as they stomped through her crew-mates, flinching as their arms swung to counterbalance their drunken stagger, expecting at any moment that those arms would cave in skulls or pick people up and hurl them into the treetops.

But no, Iceweasel saw, the mechas were... escaping. Running for the bush, right past people, and that meant –

“Shit, we have to go,” she said to Gretyl. “Now!”

The drone was back, and for a moment her panic morphed it into a big, missile-carrying craft like she’d seen in the videos of the destruction of WU. But it was only the familiar B&B drone. She blew a plume of stale stress and limped for the trees. “Come on, everyone, come on!” She dragged Gretyl, sneaking glances at the drone, thinking of her B&B crew-mates, watching and chewing their nails, retransmitting to the rest of walkaway, even to default, where the spectacle of an unprovoked attack on a column of scientific refugees might shock the conscience of the public beyond the ability of spin-doctors –

The B&B drone nosedived. Her interface surfaces died. Three more drones – sleek, with low-slung missiles and dishes for high-energy electromagnetic pulses – screamed past, a supersonic boom following them. They disappeared over the horizon and there were screams in their wake, panic redoubled as the crew headed into the trees, running in blind panic. They’d seen the missiles.

Iceweasel and Gretyl hovered at the woods’ edge, tracing the contrails in mute horror as the white streaks bent into Ls that became Us as the drones executed precise rolls in formation, corkscrewing upright and doubling back.

Iceweasel squeezed Gretyl’s hand. Gretyl squeezed back. Cool detachment settled over her, like she was being tucked in fever bed by a lover’s hand.

“It was worth it,” she said, thinking of the people who would never die again, of Dis, who would shortly be conscious, who would remember her as someone who had helped cure the most terminal disease of all.

“It was,” Gretyl said. “I love you, darling.”

“I love you, too,” Iceweasel said. “Thank you for letting me help.”

They watched the drones draw closer.

[VII]

THE MISSILES WENT over their heads into the woods where the mass of the crew hid. Iceweasel understood with her detachment that the drone operators would use thermal and millimeter wave to choose targets. Hiding in the woods was about as effective as pulling up the blanket to escape the bogeyman.

The second round airbursted a hundred meters behind them. The woods roared with flames, the sound almost masking the screams. The drones shot past again, headed for another impossible turn at the horizon’s edge.

The drones were nearly upon them when, out of the iron sky, five missiles came directly at them, seemingly from nowhere. Three hit, fireballs and then thunderclaps, a few seconds later. The other two missed and disappeared from view. Gretyl and Iceweasel craned their necks, and then they saw it: a huge, silent, cigar-shaped zepp, one of the bumblers from the golden age, the sort Etcetera heaved nostalgic sighs for. Its emergency impellers keened as it held its position, tracking the drones as they passed, and then, as they circled, it neatly shot them out of the sky with another volley of counterdrone missiles.

The zepp dipped and spiraled toward the pathway. Once it was ten meters off the ground, it dropped ladders and zip-lines and people poured out, clutching first aid gear and spine-boards, wearing fireproof suits. They ran for the woods and Iceweasel and Gretyl ran with them, without discussion, hot knowledge of salvation coursing through them, firing new reserves of energy.

They labored in the woods for hours, searching, getting the wounded and the dead onto stretchers and into the sky. More people joined them, then more, and when Iceweasel ventured back to the path with a stretcher crew, there were dozens of B&B vehicles on-site, from mechas to cargo bikes, running in relays to bring the wounded back.

She helped load an unconscious person – she saw with a shock it was CC, rainbow hair charred, face and chest a mass of burns – and stood. The other stretcher bearer turned to her and took her hands, looked into her eyes.

“Iceweasel, hey, Iceweasel?”

It was Tam, sooty and exhausted, and worried. Iceweasel wanted to put her at ease, didn’t want to be a burden, so she tried to say, It’s okay, let’s go help some more – but nothing came. She was alarmed to feel tears slipping down her cheeks. She tried to shake off the feeling, but it wouldn’t shake. Some part of her she could not dial down by pinch-zooming an infographic had been shattered and was floating jagged-edged in her mind’s soup.

“Why don’t we take a break, huh?” Using pressure on her shoulder – pain flared and she gasped – Tam sat her on the ground and hunkered down. “You’re in shock,” she said. “You’ll be okay. I think you should get evacced, get warm and clear, get some liquids.”

“Gretyl—” she said.

“Yeah, Gretyl. That old girl’s probably crashing through the woods like an angry rhino. Nothing’ll stop her. But she’ll worry about you, huh?”

Iceweasel nodded. She didn’t want Gretyl to worry. But she also just wanted Gretyl there, a solidity to rest her head upon, touch of her fingers in Iceweasel’s hair. The rumble of her voice, heard through the pillow of her breasts. She didn’t want to go without Gretyl. She shook her head.

“I’ll wait for Gretyl,” she said.

“I hear you, buddy, but that’s not an option. Not a smart one. Come on, Iceweasel, you know the deal with shock. Warmth, rest, elevated feet. You’re covered in sweat and panting like a chihuahua.”

Iceweasel knew she was right, felt cold sweat on her face, but still—

“Gretyl.”

“Come on, girl, no one’s got time for this. There’s enough casualties out there. We don’t need another.” She looked around, didn’t see Gretyl, uttered a heartfelt “Shit.” She straightened up, waved at someone. “Hey! Come here, okay? Yes! Come here, will you?”

“You okay?” said a familiar voice. She looked at men’s legs in purplish tights, split-toed boots like martial-arts shoes. The toes were armored with beaded, overlapping layers of something moisture-shedding, like dragon scales.

“I’m okay, but she’s in shock. She won’t evac because she’s worried about her friend. I could probably drag her, but I should find her friend and let her know what’s happened, or she’ll go crazy.”

“Well, she always was loyal to her friends.” The person belonging to the legs squatted down and peered into her face.

“Hey there, Natty,” Etcetera said.

“Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Wilson Alva Anton Jeff Harley Timothy Curtis Cleveland Cecil Ollie Edmund Eli Wiley Marvin Ellis Espinoza,” she said. She’d made a game out of memorizing it, their first weeks as walkaways, reveling in its extravagance. It came out in a sing-song.

“That’s not your name,” Tam said.

“Call me Etcetera,” he said.

“And call me Iceweasel,” Iceweasel said. “Natty’s long gone.”

“And good riddance.”

“Fuck you,” she said.

“Let’s go, Icy,” he said, and helped her to her feet. Her leg had gone to sleep, her injuries had stiffened. She leaned on him.

“Gretyl,” she said, over her shoulder, to Tam.

“I’ll tell her,” Tam said.

“Thank you.”

“Want to ride in my zeppelin?” Etcetera said.

“That thing is fucking insane,” she said.

“Saved your ass,” he said. He guided her to a stretcher and she let him wrap her in a blanket and strap her in. He buckled into a harness and grabbed one of the stretcher’s guy-lines and gave it a sharp tug and they rose into the air.

The cold wind on her face as they ascended snapped her into lucidity, but the ascent was slow and rocking, and it lulled her back into a doze that she barely broke when they brought her into the zepp’s belly and Etcetera transferred her to a spot on the floor of the gondola. She rocked her head lazily and saw that there were many others, including CC, lying motionless. He had an IV drip in his arm and sensors dotted over his burned body. She felt bile rise in her throat and turned her face to the other side in time to retch sparse contents of her stomach.

Her feet were elevated, so the puke rolled over her face and into her hair. She’d squeezed her eyes shut when she vomited, and the lower one was now slicked with bile. Someone daubed at her with a towel, and she felt ashamed. The hands were sure, and she cracked her upper eye and confirmed it was Etcetera.

“We’ve missed you,” he said. “Seth’s been moping like crazy.”

She smiled, but it came out as a grimace. “I missed you too,” she said, but in truth she hadn’t. The realization startled her through her shocky daze. Why hadn’t she missed them? It was getting clear of who she’d been and the last threads tying her to default and her father and her zotta-ness. Though she hadn’t made any secret of her background on campus, they hadn’t seen the nest she’d inhabited with her father, ridden in his armored car, experienced his mighty influence.

“Where did you get this insane gasbag?”

He looked around. “Dream come true, isn’t it? After the zepp bubble popped, there were a couple hundred bumblers that were more-or-less sky-worthy, rotting in hangars. Someone got the idea of throwing Communist parties in the hangars, and then there was a whole airworthy fleet. Aviation authorities are going crazy, a bunch have been grounded, but the ones that made it to walkaway seem safe for now. This one showed up at the B&B a couple weeks ago, craziest crew you ever met, walkaway freaks who lived through the bubble, same as me, and can’t believe that they’ve finally got a zepp. They call this one The First Days of a Better Nation.”

She groaned. Such a walkaway cliché – she could imagine the crew, their studied air of walkaway purity. She found that hard to be around because it reminded her so much of herself, back in the days when she’d been the token foofie of her Communist party crew.

He had a damp cloth, and he wiped the puke best as he could. Gentle ministrations from a familiar hand were overwhelming in so many ways, a sad-happy-lonely-homecoming feeling like the touch of the mother she’d hardly known. “What if they send more drones?” she said.

He shrugged. “We’re just about out of countermeasures. Certain death?” He looked at her searchingly. “But not for long, right?” He looked away. “Is it real?”

“Uploading?” She coughed. Her mouth tasted sour, her throat burned. “Depends on what you mean by real. I have a friend who’s done it, you’ll meet her if we survive. She can explain better than me.”

“First days of a better nation,” he said, with oversaturated irony.

“Or a weirder one,” she said. She felt for his hand and he squeezed hers.

“We’ll be okay,” he said. “Weird or not, we’re clearly scaring the shit out of your dad and his people, so we’re doing something right.”

“Fuck my dad. And his people.”

“Well, yeah.” There was a jolt and he nearly lost his footing. The whine of the impellers, felt through the decking, changed. “We’re going home.” He squeezed her hand. “Jiggity jig.”

[VIII]

GRETYL FOUND HER in the onsen, sitting in the hottest pool with Limpopo, who had diagnosed her need for a lot of water. Gretyl was with Tam, who radiated body-shame and discomfort with nudity. Iceweasel realized how little thought she’d given to the special problems of being a woman with a penis, and how smugly she’d assumed that walkaways were so bohemian that it would all be simple.

She teetered on the precipice of self-doubt and her certainty that she was slumming and no one should take her seriously. The hot water felt claustrophobic and painful as her concentration slipped away and her stupid body wanted her to pay attention to it. Her face sheened with sweat.

She got out of the water and went to Gretyl. Her hair was scorched and one of her arms was covered in gauze dressing. As Iceweasel stood, her bad hip and shoulder came free of the water and the cool air made them throb with a suddenness that made her stumble. Gretyl caught one of her arms and Tam caught the other.

“Hi,” she said, weakly. Limpopo exhaled, closed her eyes, put her head back and sank in to her ears. Gretyl drew Iceweasel close, and when Tam moved away, she slung a big, muscular, freckled arm around her and brought her into the embrace.

Despite all the skin, there was something chaste about the onsen, or so Iceweasel told herself, as she remembered the kiss, the dry-humping she and Gretyl had done in the underground campus, made herself pretend her stomach muscles weren’t jumping at the feeling of Gretyl’s breasts on hers. Then there were Tam’s breasts on her side, her face in the crook made by Gretyl and Iceweasel’s faces, her penis brushing against her thigh and making her stomach muscles jump again.

“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 24/7 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.

They hunted through the bench-boxes for rubber boots that’d fit, pawing through cataloged moop. Seth invited himself along. Tam was with him, which didn’t surprise Iceweasel. She knew they’d hooked up, though they weren’t publicly encoupled. They’d been very close in cuddle-puddles, stretching the definition of “cuddle” in a way that was mild bad taste in walkaway (though it was common).

“Come along,” Gretyl said. “We’re escaping the grim reality of walkaway to be carefree wanderers in the virgin woods.”

“Fifth-growth ex-tree-farm,” Seth said. “Heavy-metal contamination and a subsiding gravel-pit.”

“Come on, sunshine. Get boots on or we’ll miss your expert commentary.”

Tam had boots for her and Seth. They struggled into the knee-high Wellingtons and set off.

The walk was relaxing, bird-calls and volatile vegetation smells from the warming forest. But Seth was unable to relax. He punned, ran ahead and got lost, sang rude songs.

“What is your boyfriend’s problem?” Gretyl said.

Tam sighed. “I’m not going to confirm the ‘boyfriend’ part.”

“Okay, but what’s up his ass?”

Tam looked sidelong at Iceweasel. Iceweasel often wondered what Tam thought of her. She and Seth had never been official, just an indefinitely drawn-out hookup. Even though love wasn’t a game and there were no points, she’d definitely won her round with Seth, going without a backward glance, while he’d been moody when she split, sending jokey-stupid email to the underground campus. He’d hardly caught her eye since her return. She thought he and Tam had a lot of conversations about what a total bitch she was. Boys did that. They didn’t know when you told a girl that she was less crazy than all other girls, she knew that when you split, he’d tell the next one about what a crazy cow you were.

“Is it me?”

Tam’s eyes widened. “Not at all! He’s cool with you. He seems really, uh, happy on the romantic front.” She blushed, out of character for her.

Iceweasel laughed, and Gretyl’s chuckle was dirty, which made Iceweasel laugh harder even as she squirmed. “That’s good. Seriously.” They smiled at each other. Tam had been right about deadheading, had been the only other non-technical after the attack. It was an unspoken bond and distance between them.

“It’s this.” She waved an arm around.

“Canada?” Iceweasel said.

Gretyl said, “Walkaway?”

“The countryside. He misses cities. He’s been reading about Akron, getting ideas.”

Akron kicked off as she was leaving for the WU campus. Walkaways did a coordinated mass squat on the whole downtown, 85 percent of which was boarded up and underwater, the bonds based on their mortgages in escrow with the Federal Financial Markets Service in Moscow while the Gazprom meltdown played out. They’d flown under the radar, smooth and coordinated. One day, Akron was haphazardly squatted by homeless people, the next, a walkaway army reopened every shuttered building, including fire stations, libraries, and shelters. Factories turned into fabs, loaded with feedstock, powered by eggbeater fields that sprung up overnight, electrolyzing hydrogen from sludge flowing in the Little Cuyahoga River, feeding hydrogen cells that walkaways wrestled around in wheelbarrows.

Default was caught off guard. Connecticut flooding had FEMA and the National Guard tied up. The contractors who backstopped FEMA couldn’t use their normal practice of hiring local talent as shock troops. By the time they mobilized, their entire recruiting pool was walkaway.

It gave the Akron walkaways – they called themselves an “ad hoc,” said they were practicing “ad-hocracy” – a precious week to consolidate. By the time default besieged Akron, they were a global media sensation, source of endless hangouts demonstrating a happy world of plenty salvaged from a burned husk with absentee owners.

Iceweasel said, “It’s exciting.”

“More than exciting. It’s a city. Not a village or a camp. The first, but not the last. They’re fighting over Liverpool now – Liverpool – and Ivrea, somewhere in Italy, and Minsk, which is fucking crazy because the little Lukashenkos would happily behead them and hang their guts around the central square. You might have missed it because things have been insane around here, but it’s kicking off out there.”

Gretyl made a face Iceweasel recognized as polite disbelief and said, “It is very exciting.”

Tam knew that face too. “Gretyl, there’s more than the stuff happening in the campuses. People who aren’t scientists can also get shit done.”

Limpopo said, “Engineers too, right?”

Tam folded her arms.

“Kidding. I’ve followed it. It’s exactly the kind of thing we fantasized about ten years ago, before we had the word ‘walkaway.’ But there’ve been other attempts. There’s a reason walkaway stuff tends to be a building or two, a wasps’ nest wedged in a crack in default. Anything over that scale goes from entertainingly weird to a threat they can burn in self-defense.”

Iceweasel nodded. It was the calculus they’d made when planning Communist parties, the sweet spot between something big enough to matter but not so big it’d get stomped.

“Anyway, our young man has it in his head that we should pull our own Akron. Not walkaway: walk towards. Fuck, run towards.”

Limpopo snorted. “He’s going to get himself killed. They’ll nuke Akron before they let us keep it.”

Tam’s quick anger surprised Iceweasel. “Seriously, fuck that. The point of walkaway is the first days of a better nation. Back when that was more than an eye-roll, it was a serious idea. Someday, walkaway and default will swap places. There’s not enough people who own robots to buy the things the robots make. We’re ballast.” She glanced at Iceweasel, maybe for backup, and not indicating the sort of person who wasn’t ballast.

Limpopo’s angry retort: “I’ve heard all about better nations. There’s stuff that’s serious, like they were doing in the university, that gives us power to truly walk away, even from death; and there’s grandstanding bullshit like seizing cities. The very best thing I can say about Akron is it might distract default’s armies from us. I think there’s an even chance the news that we’re taking cities and storming the afterlife will give them cover to hunt us down like dogs.”

They would have said more, gotten angrier, but Seth charged through the brush with a sloppy grin, gamboling like an oversized dog. She didn’t like dogs.

“What’d I miss?”

They looked away. He shook his head, more dog-like. “It’s a wonderful day to be alive! Look at that sky!”

There was a boom, more felt than heard; a roar, a wave of hot air that picked them up and hurled them into the trees.

[XI]

WHEN THEY GOT back, the B&B was in flames. It seemed the fire was everywhere, but it became clear it was centered on the stables and the power plant. A fire in the hydrogen cells was supposed to be impossible, they were engineered for five kinds of fail-safe, the design was so widely used that flaws were quickly spotted and fixed. Judging from the wreckage, though, they’d gone up.

The inn was also on fire, but seemed under control, water coursing out of windows where automated systems had kicked in. It was Iceweasel’s third disaster in weeks, and there was a curious doubling feeling as she took in the infirmary, the mechas stomping in and out of the burning building with armloads of salvaged gear.

“Shit.” Limpopo snapped into motion. Iceweasel watched in awe. Limpopo took in the same details in an eye-blink, but while Iceweasel had been frozen, Limpopo was spurred into motion. She jogged to the infirmary, head swiveling. Her presence was enough to call three of those tending the injured to her. She gestured forcefully at the blaze from the stables and all nodded and moved, shifting the wounded further away. The blaze intensified in seconds. Now she was heading for a mecha pilot and –

“Come on,” Gretyl said. “Let’s go help.”

Iceweasel was grateful to be told what to do.

They lost it all. For a while, the fires were under control, just a little mopping up to extinguish the last flames in the inn, but as they swapped power-cells in the mechas and brought up new hoses, there was a fresh explosion from the back, another concussion wave and then flaming debris. They had congregated on the front lawn or they would have all died.

The B&B’s drone outriders scouted surrounding territory, bridging network service over the holes in the mesh left behind by the fallen B&B. Fed by their intelligence, the B&B crew fell back and back again, heading west, towards the built-up outer perimeter of default, where the wilds ended and Toronto began. It was the least hospitable direction to go, but there was a hamlet up the road where the Better Nation could tie off. The zeppelin crew threw everything into the impellers, though bumblers were not supposed to be steered except in emergencies. This qualified.

There were no deaths. It was miraculous, but Limpopo had a theory: “I think the bombers lost their nerve. The stables went up during their maintenance cycle, when there’d be no one there. The power plant went up ten minutes later, plenty of time for everyone to be on the lawn, staring at the stables, far from the blast. The inn’s explosives, going off hours later? Either we’re dealing with a terrorist who sucks at timers, or they wanted to be sure of minimal casualties. It’s what you’d do if you wanted to convince your bosses you’d been a good little mad bomber, but didn’t want too much blood on your hands.”

“Limpopo, it’s been a long day and you’ve been amazing,” Iceweasel said. They were huddled in a tent, seven in a sleeping space intended for two, rain thudding on the tent’s skin overhead and lashing at its sides. They’d made camp right in the middle of the road, using the highway’s cracked tarmac as a base. The road was domed, just enough to provide drainage into the choked ditches on either side. The insulating cells on the tent-floor rucked up over the dome’s apex, crinkling like bubblewrap when they moved. They were dead tired, hungry and hurt, but no one in their tent was going to sleep any time soon.

“But that sounds like bullshit. The university got attacked by mercs and we got hit by mercs again on our way back. Why assume these bombs were set by double agents? Sentimental double agents? Ask yourself if it wouldn’t make you happier to imagine the bad guys were blackmailed into infiltrating us, but found us so wonderful they couldn’t bring themselves to kill us?”

A scary flash of anger on Limpopo’s normally calm face. Iceweasel had been pleased when Limpopo joined their tent, anointed the cool-kids’ club by her presence. When Limpopo’s eyes flashed, it was like being trapped with a dangerous animal. She pulled back, and, to her embarrassment, whimpered. Limpopo mastered herself.

“That is not entirely stupid. It’s hard to know when you’re kidding yourself. Figuring that out has been my life’s major project. But.” She turned and listened to the wind lash the tent, touched the cool fabric. “Okay, yeah. Maybe they wanted us on the road and they’re sending a snatch-squad for anyone who understands uploading for real. Maybe they knew the B&B had realtime monitors that would make them look like monsters if there were a lot of bodies, but if they kill us out here, they can shove us into the ditches and—”

“I get it,” Iceweasel said. She couldn’t stand any more. The self-recrimination after meeting the campus crew had finally given way to fear. It was almost a relief to be tortured by something external, rather than her internal nagging voice. Gretyl had a tattoo around one of her biceps that read FEAR IS THE MIND-KILLER, but as far as Iceweasel was concerned, her mind could use some killing.

She wished she and Gretyl could be alone. Something about being enfolded in Gretyl soothed her in a deep place, switched off the voice that knew all her weaknesses. She’d never had that, not with boys or girls. Sometimes she’d had fleeting moments of peace after fucking, but with Gretyl, it came easily, even without sex.

As the voice liked to remind her, the psychology of falling in love with an older woman when your own mother all but abandoned you wasn’t difficult. All the peace Iceweasel got from being engulfed in Gretyl’s embrace led to wondering whether she was giving Gretyl back anything in exchange.

She really wanted some time alone with Gretyl.

Limpopo slumped and Iceweasel saw something even rarer than Limpopo’s anger: exhaustion. “It may be self-serving bullshit that living walkaway will soften the hardest heart and convert pigopolist despoilers to post-scarcity Utopians, but it keeps me going, sometimes. Part of me wants to stay up doing forensics on the B&B’s log-files, finding the sellout, but the rest of me wants to live with the fantasy of unstoppable moral suasion. I know we don’t need everyone in the world to agree for this to work, but there’s got to be a critical mass of covered-dish people or we’ll never win.”

“Okay.” Gretyl broke her silence – she’d been prodding the screen in a way that radiated leave-me-alone-I’m-working (Gretyl was good at this). “What’s a ‘covered-dish’ person?”

“Oh. If there’s a disaster, do you go over to your neighbor’s house with: a) a covered dish; or b) a shotgun? It’s game-theory. If you believe your neighbor is coming over with a shotgun, you’d be an idiot to pick a); if she believes the same thing about you, you can bet she’s not going to choose a) either. The way to get to a) is to do a) even if you think your neighbor will pick b). Sometimes she’ll point her gun at you and tell you to get off her land, but if she was only holding the gun because she thought you’d have one, then she’ll put on the safety and you can have a potluck.”

“Game-theory,” Gretyl said. “That’s the stag hunt. Two hunters together can catch a stag, the top prize. Either hunter alone can only catch rabbits. Both of them want to get stags, but unless they trust each other, they’ll have coney surprise for supper.”

“I didn’t know there was a name for it. Good to know. Once things have settled, I’ll have to do some reading. When things go bad, the stag is rebuilding something better than whatever’s burned down; the rabbit is huddling in a cave in terror, eating shoe-leather soup, hoping you don’t die of TB because there aren’t any hospitals anymore. I’ve always thought the whole walkaway project was a way to turn people into covered-dish types. There’s not any reason not to be one when we can all have enough, so long as we’re not fucking each other over.”

Iceweasel smiled for the first time in a long time. “Put like that, it’s beautiful.”

Limpopo didn’t smile back. She looked too exhausted to smile. “I’d settle for plausible. Once you’ve been a shotgun person for a while, it’s hard to imagine anything else, and you start using stupid terms like ‘human nature’ to describe it. If being a selfish, untrusting asshole is human nature, then how do we form friendships? Where do families come from?”

“You’re assuming that families aren’t about acting like selfish, untrusting assholes,” Iceweasel said.

“The fact that your family is so fucked up is not proof that being fucked up is natural – it’s proof that shotgun people rot from the inside and their lives turn to shit.” She closed her eyes. “No offense.”

“None taken.” Iceweasel was surprised to discover it was true. The words were liberation, a framework for understanding what had made her, what she could become.

“Limpopo,” Gretyl said, “you look like chiseled shit. No offense.”

“None taken,” Limpopo said with a ghost of a smile.

“What would it take to make you sleep?”

Limpopo shrugged. “I don’t think I could at this point. I’ve gone through sleep and come out the other side.”

“I think that’s macho bullshit,” Gretyl said. She moved around, asked some others to move, rearranged packs and bags until there was a Limpopo-shaped space on the floor. “Lie down.” She patted her hands on her lap.

Limpopo looked from her to Iceweasel, the others, shrugged. “I’m not going to fall asleep, you know. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just—”

“Silence, fool. Lie down.”

She did, her head settling into Gretyl’s lap. She locked eyes with Iceweasel, a nonverbal “Is this okay?” and Iceweasel smiled and stroked her greasy hair, a tousled short mess of spun sugar in pink and blue. They’d been in plenty of cuddle-puddles, but that was different. She and Gretyl locked eyes, they shared a smile. Her fear melted. Miraculously, it was not replaced by self-doubt. The rain, the breathing, the dim light, the cozy closeness made her feel, against all odds, safe.

Gretyl tilted her head at one soft shoulder and Iceweasel shinnied around until she could rest her head on it. Gretyl put an arm around her and she put an arm around Gretyl, and the three women were quiet.

They rendezvoused with the Better Nation at sunset the next day. Limpopo watched the crew descend on tether-lines and harnesses, toes grazing the ground. There was a brief moment of excited reunion as they related their adventures to one another. Etcetera was right in there, regaling his buds with tales of their near-death, oohing and aahing as the aviators recounted their own experiences with drones, chaff, weather, and infowar harassment.

The Better Nation had been tethered in deep Mohawk territory, and had been generously resupplied with venison, corn, chapatis, and ice-cream in amazing flavors from rose-water to marzipan. Some Mohawk kids came along for the flight, not quite walkaways, but certainly not default. They stuck together and looked on solemnly as food sizzled on the grills the aviators set out and more crew touched down. Then one of them – a girl, with long straight hair and a loose-fitting t-shirt with the word LASAGNE in huge letters across it – stepped out of their tight pack. She wandered over to the grill to kibitz, and Tam, who was cooking, cracked a joke Iceweasel couldn’t hear, but made the girl smile so radiantly it transformed her into something out of a painting (or maybe a stock-art catalog: “Smiling indigenous woman, suitable for brochures on diversity policy”) and the two groups merged.

The medical contingent oversaw lifting the wounded into the zeppelin. They discussed the deadheads who’d been cargo and scientific curiosities for so long it was hard to think of them as “wounded” (for the mercs, “wounded” was certainly not the word). Iceweasel saw Tam head to the caucus that was discussing the issue over huge ice-cream cones, and she ambled over.

“What happens to the injured is a lot less important than what happens to those two mercs. They must be kept safe.”

Limpopo rocked her chin from side to side. She’d gone for a swim in a creek nearby and was looking enviably fresh and rested, and, frankly, beautiful. Tam had also gone for a dip, and her hair was braided into a pair of thick Pippi Longstocking pigtails that hung to her breasts, like schematic arrows pointing out a salient feature.

“I get that the fact that those two are with us is bad publicity, but there are bigger priorities—”

Tam shut her up with a sharp hand wave. “You don’t get it – that’s totally backwards. The reason it’s bad publicity is what we did is monstrous. Now we fucking own them, so we owe them. Once you take a prisoner, they’re your responsibility. Not just legally, but morally. We started down a path we can’t escape. If it was up to me, we’d thaw them and set them loose—”

“I don’t think we can do that safely.” That was Tekla, a med-type who’d served with CC on the deadheading project. “Not after everything they’ve been through. We need a full lab and controlled experiments before we attempt it or they could end up vegetables. I think we’ll be able to bring up their sims before we’re ready for that, ask them what they think we should do with their bodies. That seems only fair—”

Tam made her two-handed, furious wave. “Are you kidding? Where’d you study before you went walkaway? Mengele U? Scanning those two without consent was terrible, bringing their sims up and making them decide whether to risk their lives—”

“Not their lives,” Limpopo said. “Their bodies.”

Tam’s mouth snapped shut and she visibly got herself under control. “They have never accepted that the part that matters is in that sim. They’ve never been given that choice. Maybe we can bring them up into a state like the one that Dis was in, so they don’t care about the difference, but without their consent, that’s brainwashing. Unforgivable, monstrous brainwashing.”

Limpopo looked up at the undercarriage of the zepp overhead, the multi-story gondola, bottom covered in cargo hooks, sensor packages, and gay illustrations of androgynous space-people dancing against a backdrop of cosmic pocket-litter: ringed saturnesques and glittering nebulae. She, too, was on the verge of snapping. Just like that, the carnival atmosphere vanished.

“Let’s get them on the blimp,” Limpopo said, ignoring the rule about never calling it a blimp, only a zeppelin. No one corrected her. She looked tired again. She turned and walked away.

The Better Nation lowered down a supply of hexayurts that they put up with practiced ease, glomming some together to make communal sleeping areas. More rains were coming and the aerialists would have to bumble to beat them. Their weather-conjurers predicted a drift toward the maritimes, possibly as far as Nova Scotia, and they solicited supplies, gifts and letters for anyone they met on the way. The scouring of their meager possessions to find gifts restored some of their cheer, a moment of delight in abundance, and the renewed idea that there was always more where that came from, an end to scarcity on the horizon.

Some of their crew went with the aviators, accompanying the deadheaders. Some of the Mohawk kids, including the girl (who called herself Pocahontas and dared anyone to give her shit) joined the B&B crew. When Iceweasel shyly asked her why she stayed, she shrugged: “Want to live forever. Isn’t that why we’re all here?”

Seth, who overheard, put his arms in the air and shouted amen! and they laughed.

They walked.

Iceweasel found herself with Etcetera and Seth. She looked at them and remembered that impossible time when they’d met at a Communist party, and thought about self-replicating beer and poor Billiam, about her father – it had been ages since he’d last sent an email; she never answered them – and her sister and mother, and default, all that had become of such a short time.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” She twirled to take it in, feeling young and beautiful in a way she’d lost track of. “Who the fuck are we to decide to walk away, to make a better society?”

“I know who I am,” Seth said. “You’re a rich girl I kidnapped with terminal Stockholm syndrome. This douchebag is Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Wilson Alva Anton Jeff Harley Timothy Curtis Cleveland Cecil Ollie Edmund Eli Wiley Marvin Ellis Espinoza.”

“Needs more bananapants,” she said.

Etcetera smiled. “You can call me Bananapants if you want.” He hugged her and the hug wasn’t precisely brotherly, but it was more brotherly than not, and to the extent that it was not, there was sweet nostalgia for when they’d flirted like crazy, and she’d had that push-pull feeling of not being precisely interested, but being kind of reassured that he’d been interested in her. Funny how complicated it had been in default, when they only played walkabout, weekend bohemians. Once she’d stopped pretending she was normal, it got easier.

“Guys,” she said, her tone unexpectedly serious. It was a serious time. “I want you to know—” She looked from Seth to Etcetera, back again. They’d been aged by walkaway, but it gave them gravitas. A moment of lensing time let her see them as strangers, how rakishly handsome they were. She smiled. Her affection felt like molten chocolate. “I just love you both, okay? You’re good. The best.”

Neither knew what to say. Seth was trying for something smartassed. Etcetera tried to figure out what this meant in the great scheme. She could almost hear their thoughts. Before either could say something stupid, she gathered them into a hug, reveling in their familiar smells. Their arms tangled then found their way. The hug went on and on.

When they undocked, Gretyl and Limpopo were standing by, grinning like proud parents. She and Gretyl had scored a private hexayurt for the night, and she’d felt low-grade, anticipatory horniness ever since she learned they’d be alone. Now, with the boys in her arms and Gretyl looking on with Limpopo – so fucking hardcore and so hot, she’d had a low-grade crush on her for years – her horniness spiked with toe-curling intensity. She laughed at the sheer physicality. The boys laughed along, though who knew why. She was no longer inside their heads. That was okay. They were walkaways, and god help them, they’d figured out how to live as though it were the first days of a better nation, and she was going to get her brains fucked out that night. The world was good.

The sex was everything she’d hoped for and then some. There’d been a moment beside each other, legs tangled, hands working furiously, eyes locked, when she’d experienced time-dilation that would have been scary under other circumstances, a moment that literally felt like an eternity, and when it crescendoed with an orgasm that made her legs kick like a galvanized frog, she’d been disappointed to see it go.

Then they talked in the way of lovers. In the way of lovers, what began as murmurs about one another’s beauty and prowess, with strategic kisses and snuffling each other’s scents, a walkaway from everything suddenly veered into the default of life among the walkaways.

“It’s a nice idea, but it’s ultimately childish,” Gretyl said. “The idea that there’s no objective merit. You can believe that if you do something qualitative. But in math, it’s easy to see who’s got merit. There’s no sense in pretending every dolt is Einstein in waiting.”

“Einstein failed math,” Iceweasel said quickly. Einstein came up a lot in discussions like this.

“That wasn’t math, that was arithmetic. People who can do sums in their head aren’t doing math, they’re just calculating. No person will ever calculate as well as the dumbest computers. It’s a party trick. Arithmetic isn’t math. Knowing which arithmetic to do is math.”

Iceweasel sighed. The science crew treated the B&Bers with patronizing amusement when the subject came up, but she’d assumed her Gretyl was on-side.

“No one can do science on her own, right? Look at what Dis and CC did, it was such a team effort, everyone had to contribute, and even with all that, we don’t know if we’ll get CC back.”

Gretyl rolled on her side, let one of her small, clever hands trail down Iceweasel’s body from chin to pubis, resting on her thigh. No lover had touched her that way. It made her shiver. Gretyl had such a powerful hold on her. It scared her, in a good, sexually charged way. When Gretyl worked on her, face fixed in an expression of extreme concentration, she experienced absolute surrender.

Now Iceweasel moved her hand off her leg. The discussion was serious and she wanted to have her wits about her. Limpopo had explained it so clearly. She didn’t want to let her down.

“We were all needed for the upload project. There are others around the world who are also indispensable. But not everyone is indispensable. Look at what you did for Dis, keeping her spirits up and distracting her. You were very good, but there are others who are just as good. If you hadn’t been there, someone else would have done the job.

“Now take Dis. She was indispensable. We couldn’t bring her back without her! We’re in different fields, but I follow hers closely. There likely isn’t anyone else in the world who can do what she does. She is literally one of a kind. I’m not one of a kind – I’m good, but at the end of the day, I’m an applied mathematician with pretenses to pure math. There are pure math people who spend ten years contemplating the algebra necessary to prove the topological equivalence of a coffee cup and a donut. Wizards from another dimension. Your people are all fighting self-serving bullshit, the root of all evil. There’s no bullshit more self-serving than the idea that you’re a precious snowflake, irreplaceable and deserving to be treated like a thoroughbred, when there are ten more just like you who’d do your job every bit as well. Especially when you’re supporting the one person who really can’t be replaced.”

“I’ve heard this all. My dad used it to explain paying his workers as little as he could get away with, while taking as much pay as he could get away with. I told him: he might have an ‘indispensable’ skill for running the business, but he couldn’t do it himself. The reason everyone else shows up to help him isn’t because of his magic ‘indispensable’ skill, either. It’s because they need money, and he has it.”

Gretyl’s jaw worked. “You’re assuming that because zottas talk about meritocracy, and because they’re full of shit, merit must be full of shit. It’s like astrology and astronomy: astrology talks about orbital mechanics and so does astronomy. But astronomers talk about orbital mechanics because they’ve systematically observed the sky, built falsifiable hypotheses from observations, and proceeded from there. Astrologers talk about orbital mechanics because it sounds sciencey and helps them kid the suckers.”

“My dad’s an astrologer then?”

“That’s an insult to astrologers.” They laughed. Some of the tension boiled off of Iceweasel. They’d bonded over talking shit about her dad. Gretyl used him as an avatar of every evil of the system. Iceweasel was pleased to go along with that for her own reasons. “Your dad is like a bloated duke who’s hired court astrologers to sacrifice chickens and reassure him that he’s the cat’s ass.”

“You’re talking about economists,” she said.

“Of course I’m talking about economists! I think you have to be a mathematician to appreciate how full of shit economists are, how astrological their equations are. No offense to your egalitarian soul, but you lack the training to understand how deeply bogus those neat equations are.”

Iceweasel stiffened. She knew Gretyl was kidding, but didn’t like to be told she “wasn’t qualified” to have a discussion, even in jest. She pushed the feeling down, strove to access the part of her that lit up when Limpopo described this stuff.

If Gretyl noticed, she gave no sign: “Your dad hires economists for intellectual cover, to prove his dynastic fortunes and political influence are the outcome of a complex, self-correcting mechanism with the mystical power to pluck the deserving out of the teeming mass of humanity and elevate them so they can wisely guide us. They have a sciencey vocabulary conceived of solely to praise people like your father. Like job creator. As though we need jobs! I mean, if there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that I never want to have a job again. I do math because I can’t stop. Because I’ve found people who need my math to do something amazing.

“If you need to pay me to do math, that’s because a) you’ve figured out how to starve me unless I do a job, and b) you want me to do boring, stupid math with no intrinsic interest. A ‘job creator’ is someone who figures out how to threaten you with starvation unless you do something you don’t want to do.

“I used to watch you kids do your Communist parties, when I was in default and pretending any of that shit mattered. I’d get so angry at you, beyond any sane response. It wasn’t until I walked away that I figured out why: because every time you broke into an empty factory and turned the machines on, you proved I was a plow horse whose poor lips had been scarred by the bit in my teeth as I pulled a cart for the man with the whip and the feedbag.

“That’s my point about the difference between the kind of meritocracy we have in the university and the bullshit the zottas swim in. When we say that Amanda is a better mathematician than Gretyl, we mean there are things Amanda can do that Gretyl can’t. They’re both nice people, but if there’s a really important math problem, you’re better off with Amanda than Gretyl.”

Limpopo’s voice ricocheted in Iceweasel’s mind. “But Amanda can’t do it all. Unless she’s working on a one-woman problem, she’ll have to cooperate with others. If she sucks at that, it might take a hundred times more work in total to get it done than if Gretyl – who’s good at sharing her toys and keeping everyone purring – were the boss. This isn’t anecdote – as you keep telling me, the plural of anecdote is not fact. Limpopo sent around this meta-analysis from the Walkaway Journal of Organizational Studies that compared the productivity of programmers. It broke out the work programmers did as individuals and inside groups. It found that even though there were programmers who could produce code that was a hundred times better than the median – one percent as many bugs, one hundred times more memory efficiency – that this kind of insane virtuosity was only weakly correlated with achievement in groups.”

Gretyl sat up, momentarily distracting Iceweasel with her body. “Explain that?”

“I just read the summary and skimmed the stats and the methodology for smooshing together the different data-sets. The tldr is these hacker-wizards who produce better code than anyone were often so hard to work with that they made everyone else’s work worse, buggier and slower. The amount of time they had to spend fixing that code slowed them down so much, it ate up their virtuosity gains.

“Attempts to put together ‘Manhattan Project’ teams made from wizards without normal dumb-asses like me showed exactly the same effect.

“They footnoted one study, one I did read – an ethnographic survey of projects that went to shit, even though they had brilliant programmers. The authors found there were two major causes of failure. The first was some wizards were colossal assholes. ‘Asshole’ was what they called it, because the phrase came up from three different teams. It’s impossible to work with assholes, even brilliant assholes. ‘Don’t work with assholes’ is great advice, but it’s also a duh moment, because if you haven’t figured that out by your second or third team, you might be the asshole.

“The other category was when you had wizards who had no clue how to work with others. They weren’t dicks, they just didn’t have the instinct. The authors found teams where the wizard and everyone else hadn’t failed, and in these cases, it was because there was someone good with people who figured out how to smooth over differences and see how people fit together. These people were wizards of teams, and they made more of a difference to a team’s success than a programming wizard.”

Gretyl shook her head. “We’re still talking about wizards. If the evidence is that the most important kind of wizard is a people-motivating wizard, that’s the kind of wizard you recruit. That doesn’t disprove the existence of wizards, and it sure as shit doesn’t mean they aren’t important.”

“You’re mixing me up, Gret. My point” – thinking Limpopo’s point – “is even if you have a bunch of wizards, you can’t get shit done without other people helping. Everyone is a wizard at something. Okay, not quite. But in any group, there will be people who do things better than anyone else in that group. Some of them will be helpful to the group and some won’t. But it would be lonely and shitty if only wizards participated in life. It’d be hard for wizards not to decide, arbitrarily, that their buddies and the people they wanted to fuck were also wizards, to use their supposed indispensability to boss non-wizards around.”

“The fact that people are dicks a lot of the time doesn’t mean some people aren’t better at stuff than others. It doesn’t mean those people aren’t more important for getting certain things done than the rest of us. It doesn’t mean they’re more important, just more important for some context. It’s fucking stupid, it’s delusional to insist we’re all equal.”

Iceweasel clamped her emotions before she started shouting. “Gretyl.” Her voice was measured. “No one is saying we’re equivalent, but if you don’t think we’re equally worthy, what the fuck are you doing here?”

“Oh, calm down. Of course everyone deserves respect and all that shit, but in every normal distribution there’s stuff on one end of the curve and stuff at the other end. If you ran a math faculty by pretending everyone was as good as everyone else at math—”

“That’s not what I said!” Iceweasel’s cheeks were hot. Tears pricked her eyes. How many fights had she had with her asshole father that featured phrases like “oh, calm down”? How many times had he dismissed everything by talking about the “natural” abilities of his zotta pals, like they were supermen? She was about to say something she would regret. She climbed to her feet, jaws clenched so tight she heard her teeth grinding. She dressed, vision telescoped to a red-tinged black circle. Gretyl said some words. She sensed Gretyl getting to her feet so she bolted from the yurt, wearing her underwear and carrying her shirt and pants, sockless feet jammed into her hiking boots. It had stopped raining and a brisk wind had blown most of the clouds out of the sky, leaving a blaze of starlight and a fingernail paring of crescent moon, vignetted by black dramatic clouds at the edge of the woods. The after-rain smell of ditch-water and pine forest was strong. Her feet splashed through black puddles, cold water sloshing around her toes.

She thought she heard Gretyl behind her, splashing through the same puddles. Part of her wanted Gretyl to catch up, so she could apologize and take back the awful things she’d said. Another part understood her feelings about Gretyl were caught up with her feelings about her father. Any apology Gretyl offered would never make up for the apologies she never received from him.

She made for camp’s edge, wanting to be far from humans and wanting to find somewhere to balance on one foot while she finished dressing. She laced up her boots and stood, pulling her shirt off a tree-branch and pulling it on, fighting through the overlapping layers of wicking stuff and insulating stuff and brightly colored rags woven in bands around it, a look she’d invented that many others had flattered her by copying. Suited and booted, she calmed. She ran her hands over the shirt, which looked fucking awesome and was acknowledged as a technical and aesthetic triumph, in which she took enormous pride.

She scrubbed her cheeks with her palms and planted her hands on her hips and looked at the sky. She’d had a lot of summer nights at the family cottage, staring at skies like this, impossibly populated by cold stars that reminded her of humanity’s general insignificance and comforted her with her father’s specific insignificance. Sometimes, there’d been cousins on stargazing nights, a few she’d felt affection for, and she panged at the thought of them, lost to her, being twisted into the gnarled shape of a zotta mired in self-delusional garbage.

Something snagged her attention, coming up over the tree line. It was the Better Nation. As she saw it, she heard it, which was incongruous, because the bumblers were not supposed to run their impellers except for emergencies. It was transport that went where the wind blew, making hay while the sun shone, treating nature as a feature, not a bug. The impellers grew louder – an insect-buzz, then a swarm, then a full-throated roar. The Better Nation was supposed to be on its way to Nova Scotia.

There was a breeze out of the woods that left her in goosebumps. The hair on her neck stood. She was rooted to the spot, staring at the zepp straining across the sky, twisting to and fro as it fought the winds. It grew faster, and she realized belatedly that it was descending as well as impelling. Her heart thudded in her ears.

“HELP!” she shouted, without meaning to. “HELP THEM!” She smacked her interface surfaces, turning on her cameras and sensors without consciously deciding to.

The sound of her shouts in her ears unfroze her feet. She ran through camp, toward the zepp. She saw black shapes moving through the sky behind it, invisible except where they blotted out starlight. Inaudible over the impellers’ whine, a shrill tone of machines laboring beyond their safety margin.

Others were around, aiming scopes at the sky. There was shouting. Cursing. A fan of pencil-thin, violet lasers lit the sky, so bright it hurt to look. They converged on a black shape, tracked it jigging and jagging across the sky. She followed them down to their source, saw three of the university crew frantically plugging hydrogen cells into a rig like a miniature antiaircraft gun on a wide metal plate they weighed down with their boots. She ran to them and stood on the plate, freeing two of them to move closer to the batteries.

The drone in the lasers’ path fell. The lasers followed it until it fell below the tree line. Where they briefly touched the trees, the lasers set sizzling fires that smoked but quickly extinguished themselves as nearby shaking branches spilled payloads of raindrops on them.

The lasers retargeted, skewering another drone. As a third one opened fire with small missiles that wove through the sky on cones of flame, they split into two and targeted both drones. In the same eye-blink instant, two of the missiles found the Better Nation, one hitting the bag. The other hit the gondola. That one skated its surface and spun out of the sky like a maple-key, detonating beneath it, shock-wave sending up the gondola’s tail. The whole thing shook like it was caught in the teeth of an enormous dog. The missile on the gasbag blew. There was a sound like a thousand balloons popping as the cells bag ruptured in a cascade that swept back and forth across the bag’s length. The zepp fell, but it didn’t free fall – some of the cells, incredibly, were intact, a tribute to their fail-safes – but it came down fast.

Another drone caught fire and became a meteor. The lasers jumped to the remaining one, but it lifted as the stricken Better Nation smashed into camp, plowing a furrow through the roofs and walls of five hexayurts before its nose made contact with the road and it crumpled, the smoking remains of the gasbag settling over it a moment later. The sound – rending noises ending with a tooth-vibrating crunch – blended with shouts of dismay and terror. Walkaways swarmed the gondola, using their hands to bend back the smashed fiberglass hull to get at the people inside.

Etcetera ran past with a pry bar, but didn’t see her. He was fixed on the Better Nation, the zepp crew he’d befriended. The Mohawk kids were right behind him, with tools of their own, hammers and a wrecking bar. She remembered some of their friends had gone up in the airship. She pushed her fists into her guts, somewhere between punching herself in the stomach and massaging it, trying to drive the grief out.

One of the hexayurts that had been knocked down, right at the start, was the one she’d shared with Gretyl. The zepp had only grazed its roof, but the light, composite panels bent, then snapped, leaving the walls to tilt like ancient tombstones. Moving as if in a dream, Iceweasel walked to the yurt, kneading at her stomach. More people raced past her and there was a chorus of explosive bangs, the remaining gasbag cells overheating. She felt the fire’s heat on the back of her neck and smelled her hair singeing.

Before going to bed, she and Gretyl had taken advantage of the spacious privacy of the hexayurt to unpack their jumbled gear, squeezing the water out of the wet stuff and folding it carefully, coiling their rope and swapping the cells of their devices. It was still all laid out in the precise, Cartesian grid that Gretyl created, barely ruffled by the fragments of roof that tumbled into it. Next to it was the air mattress, trillions of mezoscale bubbles that filled if you laid the bed out and gave it a few brisk shakes, but deflated easily if you rolled it from one corner.

On the bed: Gretyl, on her side, dressed to chase Iceweasel into the night, like she was sleeping. Between her and Iceweasel, the air wavered with a cloud of steam, and she bent over Gretyl, solarized by the flashlight beam that her computer automatically sent arcing from her chest, without Iceweasel noticing. She reached a hand for Gretyl’s shoulder, touching it, then cupping and tugging it, trying to rock Gretyl onto her back. She was dead weight.

There was blood on the bed beneath her head.

Iceweasel tried to breathe three deep breaths. Got to one. Snapped into focus. She bent to Gretyl’s mouth, heard her breathing, slid a hand onto her neck and felt for a pulse, encountering blood but not caring. The pulse was strong. She played light over Gretyl, probing with her fingers, starting at her feet and working up, checking each arm, then her throat again, her chin.

Now, at last, she examined Gretyl’s head, probing carefully, unmindful of the chaos and bangs. There was a shallow cut on the back of her scalp, bleeding profusely, but small. There was no dent, no pulpy depression like the one that she’d half-seen/never-unseen on Billiam’s head. She heard her own breathing, slowed it down, peeled back each eyelid, looking at the contracting pupils, were they the same size? Gretyl blinked, brushing her hands away from her eyelids, leaving behind smears of blood from her fingertips.

Gretyl blinked several times, moved her arms and legs weakly, tried to sit up. Iceweasel held her down. “You’re hurt.” She spoke into her ear, trying to be calm and comforting.

“No shit. Fuck.” She blinked more. There were screams from the crash, and some that sounded nearer. Iceweasel looked into the night, dark and spotted with erratic orange flame-light. While she was distracted, Gretyl sat, shrugging off her restraining hand. She touched her scalp wound, and she stared at the blood on her palm with an affronted scowl. “Fuck this,” she said. Iceweasel folded the bloody hand in her own bloody hands.

“Babe, you have a head wound. You should lie down, in case there’s a spinal injury or a concussion.”

Gretyl stared out, seeming to have not heard, then, “Fine in theory, but I don’t think we get to choose tonight. Let’s go unfuck this. Help me up.” She turned to Iceweasel, stared with an intensity that admitted no debate, shifting her grip to pull her hand. Iceweasel struggled with herself, then pulled. Gretyl staggered, put her free hand to the back of her head, straightened.

“What the fuck is going on?” she said, as she lurched in the direction of the fire.

They were nearly upon it when someone grabbed Iceweasel’s arm and yanked. She swung around, hands in fists, eyes wide, heart pounding, sure she was about to be tazed by a merc sent by the zottas to terrorize them. It was Etcetera, his face smudged, eyes panicked. “Come on!” He yanked again, oblivious to the fact that she’d been about to break his nose.

Even with a head wound, Gretyl was faster on the uptake. She yanked Iceweasel’s other arm and they followed Etcetera to another yurt where the wounded lay on air mattresses, lit by pea-sized OLEDs hastily stuck to the walls and casting overlapping crazy shadows. It was chaos, an impromptu morgue, but she saw some were moving, some were attended by people crouching over them. Pocahontas, one arm bandaged, soothed a figure on the ground, a hand on his forehead, other hand holding a screen and concentrating on the readout. Iceweasel supposed she was conferenced in to the pool of walkaway docs who helped with care around the walkaway net, and she wondered how many of these skirmishes they’d dealt with in the middle of the night, lately. She wondered who was crawling walkaway net, doing traffic analysis to find and target those docs.

Before long, she was conferenced into a doc of her own, working with a mercifully unconscious zepp-rider, burned terribly and groaning every time she touched her, following the doc’s directions, sometimes asking him to send them as text because she couldn’t always understand him through a very thick Brazilian accent. She wondered what timezone Brazil was in, and whether it was the middle of the night there. Presently, another Brazilian doc came on the line and helped her set a broken leg using an inflatable cast from a pack that, ironically, the zepp had dropped off the day before.

She looked up from her patient, who’d been palpably grateful for the painkiller she’d placed under his tongue. Gretyl sat on one of the few empty pads, face in her hands. She went to her, put her arm around her shoulders, kissed her tentatively on her ear, tasted dried blood and smelled stale sweat and scalp-oil. Gretyl’s thick hair was a mat of blood.

“You okay?”

“Just tired. I ice-packed my head and someone in Lagos checked me for a concussion and pronounced me bloodied but unbowed. But shit, girl, I feel like I’m about to collapse.”

“That’s probably because you’re about to collapse.”

“You think?”

“Lie down. We’re almost through. Even Etcetera’s taking breaks.” He’d been manic, torn between rescuing more aeronauts from the burning wreck and tending the ones they’d gotten out. He’d pulled two dead ones out of the Better Nation and wept as he carried them, then tended three more who’d died on the infirmary’s mats, helping carry them to another yurt that was now a morgue. Limpopo shadowed him for some of that, so had Seth, helping around the edges, gently calming him before he hurt himself.

“Okay. How about you?” Her voice was thick, groggy.

“What about me?”

“You need a break, too. Look like walking death. I’ve got an excuse, I’m an old lady with a scalp wound. You’re bursting with youth’s vibrant juices. When you start to look like a zombie-movie reject, it’s a sign for you to take it easy. You can’t help anyone if you’re not taking care of yourself.” She paused. “I know I embody the opposite of that advice, but I’ve got an excuse: I’m an idiot. What’s yours?”

“You’re right. I’m going to grab a piss and do a walkaround and I’ll come in. Leave room on the mat for me, old timer?”

“I’ll use you as a pillow if you’re not careful.”

“Done deal.”

Gretyl tilted her face up and they kissed, and Gretyl kept her mouth closed, which she did when she was self-conscious about her breath, which was darkly hilarious under the circumstances. As ever, Iceweasel kept kissing until her lips parted, and they mingled breath and saliva for a moment that stretched like taffy before she broke off and struggled to her feet, putting one hand on a wall panel, which flexed and bowed, then bounced back when she got her balance.

She glanced back at Gretyl before she ducked through the door, and she was on her side, motionless. Iceweasel squinted until she made out the rise and fall of her chest, then stepped through into the night.

It was coming on dawn, gray with pink on the eastern tree line, black on the western one. Limpopo and Etcetera sat on folding chairs on the roadside, Etcetera holding her and weeping into her neck. Limpopo locked eyes with her; they raised their eyebrows at one another in simultaneous, are you okay? that made them both smile wearily. Iceweasel tossed her an okay sign and blew her a kiss. Limpopo kissed back and she turned to the dark woods, digging out the paper gauze she’d pocketed on her way out of the tent to use as bumwad. She picked her way through the underbrush, killing her chest-light when it came up, letting her eyes adjust as she sought out the requisite log with a tree nearby to use as a handhold.

She assumed the position and did her thing, listening to the sounds from the camp, the crackle of small things in the underbrush. She should have brought a shovel, but under the circumstances, no one would blame her for a lapse in woodcraft. She’d pack out the bumwad, at least, put it with med-waste in the incineration pile.

There was a louder sound in the brush, not scurrying and small. Big and stealthy. She tugged up her pants, tabbed them closed, peered into the night. She dropped the bumwad, patted her pockets, which had accumulated a litter of small devices and objects through the night. Nothing of use. Disposable wrappers. She looked into darkness, taking a step toward camp, trying to find a club-worthy branch. She snatched one up, sodden with water and rotten. She listened intently for the steps. No one from camp would sneak through the woods. She had visions of mercs, wearing smart stuff that was more than dark, bending light to make itself invisible.

She took another step. Someone abruptly yanked at the club and she reflexively tightened her grip, so she went with it, off balance. She fell with an oof, a confusion of sinking into wet things and colliding with sharp rocks. In the instant between standing and falling, a part of her brain that she was rarely on speaking terms with took over. She rolled with the fall, taking most of it on her shoulder, using the momentum to goose her motion as she got to her knees, then into a runner’s stance. She ran, because someone was right behind her and there was the camp, and if she could –

She couldn’t. Someone was in front of her, small but wiry, effortlessly catching her hands as she raced past, a grip immovable as a steel clamp, not painful but perfectly unyielding. She nearly crashed into the unseen person, but it sidestepped her neatly as a cartoon toreador avoiding a bull, swung her around in a parody of a square-dance move, bringing her up short with her hands pinned before her. She focused on the person who held her wrists, a woman, she thought, small and short-haired, features painted in a dazzle-array of grays and greens. She had small white teeth, visible through her parted lips, and eyes hidden behind a matte visor hooked behind her ears.

The other one was right behind her, moving swiftly and almost silently, breath easy. She made herself relax, feeling for just a little slack in the grip of the woman holding her. Was that it? It was. With terrified strength, she feinted a head-butt at the visor, then yanked her arms so hard she felt skin leave her wrists, felt something in her shoulder or maybe her ribs pop. It didn’t matter. She opened her mouth to scream as she ran –

Then she was back in the woman’s grip, a strong hand over her mouth. The small woman smiled, a You’ve got moxie, kid smile, or that’s what Iceweasel chose to believe. Then the person with the large, male hand over her mouth – smelling of machine oil and something else that tickled her memory – clamped something to her bicep that immediately tightened like a blood-pressure cuff. She felt a tiny lance of pain as the automated syringe found home. Her panic was pre-empted by another feeling, a delirious feeling like syrup in her spine and down her butt, delicious like stolen snooze-bar sleep. The feeling grew. She smiled as her eyes closed.