Walkaway

[I]

THE FIRST THING Etcetera said: “This wasn’t what I expected.”

Kersplebedeb whooped and Gretyl smiled and rubbed her eyes.

“Welcome back, buddy.”

“Am I dead?”

“That,” Kersplebedeb said, “is the million-dollar question.”

“Why only a million?”

“It’s not inflation-adjusted. I’m a walkaway hippie, can’t be bothered to keep track of money.”

“I feel—” The voice stopped. There was a long pause. Gretyl looked at the infographics, saw the processor loads spiking across the cluster. She’d downloaded the latest lookahead patches and they were supposed to radically reduce loading, but their performance so far had been unimpressive. But then, they’d had to recruit 30 percent more compute-time to get Etcetera running than they’d banked on, and so maybe he was an outlier. That was the problem of optimizing all simulation using a single sample – Dis – for benchmarks.

“You feel?” she prompted, shooting a look at Kersplebedeb to stop him quipping, which he did when he was stressed and holy shit, had he ever been stressed since they’d started this project.

“Numb, I guess. Seriously, am I dead? I mean the me that was made of meat and skin, is that body dead?”

“That body is dead,” Gretyl said. “Murdered.”

“Executed,” Kersplebedeb said.

“Shit.”

The infographics went crazy.

“I can see you’re freaking,” Gretyl said. “That’s understandable. You’d wouldn’t be you if this news wasn’t upsetting. But the numbness, that’s the sim, it’s trying to keep you from going nonlinear. It’s damping your reactions. There’s a danger you’ll end up in a feedback loop where you get more damped, which makes you feel weirder, which triggers further damping.”

“What do I do about it?”

“We’re still figuring it out. You’re a beta-tester.” She didn’t want to think about what would happen when they told him Limpopo was gone. If they told him. No, definitely when. “But we’re hoping it’s one of those things where if you know it’s happening, you can inoculate yourself. Recognize it. Like cognitive behavioral therapy. Realize you’re freaking, and the thing you’re freaking about is the fact that you’re freaking.”

“You’re asking me to take deep breaths?”

“Without the breathing part,” Kersplebedeb said.

Gretyl shot him a look.

“I feel like I’m breathing.”

That’s good, Gretyl thought. Iceweasel’s notes from Dis’s awakening said introspection about sensations of embodiment correlated with metastable cognition. She missed Iceweasel so much. Reading her notes was like chewing glass. The local instance of Dis that shared time on Etcetera’s cluster tried several times to make contact with her sister at Jacob Redwater’s house, but hadn’t reached her.

“You should be able to feel it. It’s a basic part of the sim, feeding ‘all clear’ data to your autonomous nervous system. It’s a replay attack against it, running a loop of everything at the time you were scanned.”

“That would explain why I’m thirsty. I remember when I sat down, I really wanted a drink, I had cotton mouth for the whole scan. Feels like just a few minutes ago.” The infographics showed emergent stability, fewer oscillations, more green bars and blossoming charts.

“Seems like you’re calming.”

“I guess I am. I feel calm, but weird. Still numb. It’s—”

They waited.

“It’s scary, Gretyl. I’m dead. I’m inside a box. When I wasn’t like this, I could play word-games about whether this was death, but Gretyl, I’m dead. It’s weird. Back when I was alive, I thought the problem with being a sim – in a sim? Am I a sim or in a sim? Shit. I thought the problem would be the conviction that you were alive. Now I see it’s the opposite. I know I’m dead. I still feel like me, but not alive me. Why didn’t I ever talk to Dis about this? Fuck, fuck, fuck. I’m dead, Gretyl.”

“Dis is here, if you want to talk to her. She helped prep your sim. The cluster’s ad hoc so we weren’t sure if there’d be enough capacity to run both of you, but if you want to talk to her, we can boot her.”

“A native guide. Like the guy who takes Dante through Hell.”

“Virgil,” Kersplebedeb said. “Did you ever see the Nigerian anime? It was amazing.”

To Gretyl’s surprise, Etcetera laughed. “I can’t imagine.”

“I’ll find a copy. It used to be way seeded on walkaway net, a classic of its kind.”

“What kind?”

“Nigerian animated epic poetry. They did a series on the Norse sagas. And Gilgamesh.”

“You’re shitting me.”

Kersplebedeb laughed. “I’m shitting you. There’s no such thing as Nigerian anime, far as I know. But wouldn’t that be awesome? We should invent it.”

“Wouldn’t we need to be Nigerian?”

“There’s plenty of walkaways in Nigeria. We’ll find collaborators.”

“Guys?”

“Sorry, Gretyl.”

Kersplebedeb squeezed her hand. “You doing okay?”

Gretyl and Etcetera said “Yes” at the same moment, laughed together. It felt like talking to him on a voice-link, not to his spirit beyond the grave. The moment passed.

“You know the weirdest thing?”

“What?”

“I want to talk to my parents. Last couple years, we’ve hardly spoken. It’s not like we don’t get along, I love them, but we had less and less to say. They’d tell me what they were doing, getting petitions signed or ringing doorbells to get voters out for some election everyone knew was gerrymandered to five nines. I’d tell them about some walkaway thing, working on the B&B, it was like I was describing some movie they’d never see – a Nigerian anime epic poem. They nodded along, but I could tell they weren’t following. I was making mouth-noises.

“But now I’m dead, I feel this urgent need to talk to them. I don’t have a message from beyond the grave. I want to hear their voices...” The infographics were inscrutable. He was thinking hard. Things were spiking so much that she worried he was in a race condition and they’d have to restart him, but then: “This feels... temporary. Like I could be erased any moment. Like I’ve been given another day of life, to clear up my business, before I’m gone. Before I go away forever, I want to talk to my parents.”

“Oh,” Gretyl said. At least this is less troublesome than putting him in touch with Limpopo. “Well, we can find a bridge to default. The connectivity here’s good, though I haven’t tried to do anything latency-sensitive with default yet.”

“Where are we, anyway?”

Kersplebedeb laughed. “You’ll love this.”

“What?”

“We’re at the B&B. The second one. After we left, another group of walkaways rebuilt it, made it slightly, uh—”

“Huge,” Kersplebedeb said. “I visited the old one once, and this one makes it look like a shed. Sleeps four thousand now. It’s not an inn, it’s a town. There’s the biggest, freakiest vertical farm you’ve seen, ten stories tall.”

“How’d it get so big?”

“There’s places around the Niagara Escarpment that are shutting down. Counties are bankrupt, privatized, schools shut, hospitals, too. They cleared out and went wherever they could. Some walkaways in Romania have good rammed-earth designs that make building simpler. New B&B wings spring up. Sometimes a building just appears, some place you were the day before, with its fixtures and fittings. There’s kids playing street-hockey out front and grannies watching from the stoop.”

“That sounds wonderful. I wish I could see it.”

“I’ll send you photos.” Gretyl was grateful for the change of subject.

“I just realized I have a UI. Literally until I thought, ‘How does this place look?’ It didn’t look like anything and then, whoosh, there’s a UI, like a demo, a dash with vector clip-art buttons, chat, settings, cams, files, infographics...”

“That’s a Dis thing,” Gretyl said. “She got tired of waiting for images in her visual sensorium. She found some old UI for shut-ins, people with Gehrig’s, controlled by an E.E.G. Can you see a pointer?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Try and move it.”

“Try how?”

“Just try.”

“Woah.”

“Did it work?”

“It’s working. Hang on—”

Surreptitiously, she opened a mirror of his UI, saw the arrow skip around the big, generic buttons, land on “infographics.”

“How do I click?”

“Just try.”

Now they could both see his infographics. She watched on the screens she’d smoothed around the walls, he watched in his no-space-place where his disembodied, fragile consciousness was revived.

“That’s me, then?”

“That’s reductionist. It’s a way of thinking about specific parts of you. Technically, I’m part of you.”

“How do you figure?”

“You are you because of how you react to me. If you reacted to me in a completely different way to how you’d have reacted back when you were, uh—”

“Made of meat.”

“If you did, you wouldn’t be the same person anymore. This conversation we’re having, it defines you in part.”

“Do I stop being me if you die?”

“Kind of.”

Kersplebedeb made a rude noise.

“No, listen.”

“Hey, I just found the camera for you two.” He’d made a window with feeds from cameras around the room. She looked like shit. So did Kersplebedeb. But she looked old. And fat. And unloved.

She swallowed. “When someone important is gone, you can’t react the way you would if they were there. Like when” – she swallowed – “when Iceweasel was around. I’d get angry, but she’d cool me out. She was part of my cognition, an outboard prosthesis for my emotions. She kept me on even kilter, the way lookahead routines do. When she—” She stopped. “Now she’s gone, I’m not the person I was. Our identities exist in combination with other people.”

Kersplebedeb looked at her funny. “I’ve never thought about it that way, but it’s true. Other people make you better or worse.”

“Gretyl,” Etcetera said, “is Limpopo dead?”

The blood drained from her face.

“Why would you say that?”

“She’s not with you. You’re talking about how people change when people they love are gone. Did Limpopo die?”

“We don’t know,” Gretyl said.

“I don’t think so,” Kersplebedeb said. “It looked like a snatch. Whoever killed you and Jimmy.”

“Who’s Jimmy?”

“He arrived after your scan. The guy who stole the Belt and Braces from you all. Limpopo told me the story.”

The infographics danced.

“That Jimmy? What the actual fuck was he doing around me and Limpopo?”

“You two went back to rescue him. He couldn’t walk. Frostbite. They blew up the Thetford compound, we hit the road. He was in rough shape – showed up in Thetford rough, didn’t have time to recover before we split again. We can’t find a scan for him.”

“But you have Limpopo’s?”

“Yes,” Gretyl said.

“What?”

“What?”

“Estoy aqui por loco, no por pendejo, Gretyl. I’m dead, not oblivious. What about Limpopo’s scan?”

“We didn’t want to run it because she might still be alive and that’s a weird thing to do to someone alive. If that person shows up and there’s a sim of her, she has to kill a version of herself. Or confront that possibility.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Then why is Kersplebedeb looking like you’re full of shit?”

He shrugged. “Forgot he’d found the camera.”

Gretyl stood with her back to the wall, staring at the ceiling.

“What about Limpopo, Kersplebedeb?”

“We’ve been making scans, starting back with a bunch of scientists and, weirdly, two random mercs at Walkaway U; then more at the B&B, and more in Space City. They’re all different, made using different post-processing, different calibration, different gear, different everything. There are walkaways all over the world trying to make scans, everyone’s got their own ideas about it. It’s a mess. This working group came up with a standard way of encapsulating the data and preflighting it to see whether it was likely to run in a given sim. It’s a confidence measure for every brain in a bottle, a single number that represents whether we know how to bring you back to life.”

“Sounds sensible. Things were chaotic when I got scanned. So Limpopo’s scan isn’t as good as you’d hoped?”

“Your scan is a nine point eight. Hers is a one point seven-six.”

“Shit. Scale of ten, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Shit. Boy am I fucking glad I’m a sim and there’s code keeping me numb. There’s a part of me that knows that this news makes me want to fucking suicide, thinking of eternity as a brain in a jar while Limpopo is dead forever.”

“It’s not quite that. I know what you feel. No one’s heard from Iceweasel in months. Her backup is a two point four. That number doesn’t represent the likelihood we’ll ever be able to run a sim; it represents the likelihood we can run it right now. The problem of modeling human consciousness on computerized substrates is the big one, one that we’ve been prodding at the edges of for years. There’s practically a religion, all that Singularity stuff they used to talk about. We’ve had a breakthrough, it’s led to a couple of spectacular successes, including you, including this conversation. But the most important thing about that breakthrough isn’t what we can do now that we didn’t used to be able to do – it’s the fact that we are making progress. What’s more likely, we’ve just found the only breakthrough out there, or this was just the first of many breakthroughs?”

“I don’t know which. No one does. It’s a data-set with one point. A breakthrough.” But Etcetera sounded excited. His infographics confirmed it.

“It’s more. You know we got Dis’s sim running by simulating her imperfectly? Her busted, unstable sim contributed to the stable version. From here on in, there’s going to be more eminent, legendary scientists who’ve devoted their lives to this running as sims, able to run multiple copies of themselves, to back up different versions of themselves and recover from those backups if they try failed experiments, able to think everything they used to be able to think with their meat-brains and also to think things they never could have thought.

“We’ve designed the mechanical computers that’ll help us build electronic calculators that’ll help us build fully programmable computers. We’ve built the forge that’ll let us make the tools that’ll let us build the forge that’ll let us make better tools that’ll let us build the forge—”

“I get it. I thought sims were prone to infinite recursion. Being a meat-person must totally suck.”

“It does.” She heaved a sigh. “I wish I could paramaterize my brain, keep it from veering off into bad territory. I miss her so much.”

Kersplebedeb put his arms around her. She let him, rested her head on his skinny chest, smelling his boy-smell, tinged with lichen tequila and lentilish vegan fungus-culture. She didn’t let people hug her often, but she should. She missed this.

[II]

“WAKE UP.” NADIE shook her shoulder. Iceweasel curled into a ball, but it was hopeless. Nadie wasn’t a merc anymore, but she could be persuasive.

Nadie prodded her in the ribs. When she covered the spot, she gave her another poke in the tummy. She looked at her tormentor. “This better be important.”

“You’re going to love this.” She sat down at the foot of Iceweasel’s bed. It was a familiar design – a self-assembling Muji bed, identical to the sort she’d liberated on the night she’d met Seth and Etcetera; its plans were a downloadable. It was a walkaway staple. It hardly creaked as it took Nadie’s weight.

Iceweasel ground her fists into her eyes and struggled into a sitting position, focusing on Nadie, who, for a change, wore a macroexpression: a shit-eating grin.

“What is it?”

“Take this.” She handed Iceweasel a long-stemmed plastic glass, warm from the printer. She bent down and played with something at the foot of the bed that clinked and sloshed, then came up with an improbable bottle of champagne, real champagne, with the Standard & Poors and Moët & Chandon labels she remembered from New Year’s parties with the Redwater cousins. Using the tail of her forest-green, shimmering tee, she eased out the cork with more grace than Iceweasel had seen anyone manage, filled up her glass and another from the floor.

They clinked glasses. Iceweasel drank vintage champagne at seven in the morning, in a tiny walkaway room, one of dozens strung around the rafters of a vast, abandoned factory outside South Bend, with an ex-merc. The weirdest part: she understood it.

“Paperwork came through?”

Nadie drained the rest of the champagne, letting it run down her muscular throat, smiled wolfishly, tossed the glass out the window and guzzled out of the bottle as the glass clattered indestructibly on the far-below factory floor.

“Congratulations, zotta, you’re a rich woman.”

It had been a rough couple of months, as Nadie’s attorneys worked through the Ontario courts, then a Federal challenge. Twice, Nadie disappeared for weeks, heading to God-knows-where to be deposed by Fair Witnesses whose discretion was supposedly an article of faith, though Iceweasel was sure Nadie relied more on her opsec than the Fair Witnesses’ professional code.

The first time Nadie went, she’d sat with Iceweasel and described, in blood-curdling detail, the armies of mercs hunting them, the tremendous resources they’d brought to bear. There were vast surveillance nets sucking up every packet that traversed both the main walkaway trunks and the most highly connected default nodes, looking for a variety of keywords, anything that could be fingerprinted as characteristic of Iceweasel or her previous network access, which had been retrieved from the inconceivably vast databases of captured net-traffic. From her typing patterns to the habitual order in which she visited her favorite sites to the idiosyncrasies of her grammar, syntax and punctuation, the surveillance-bots were sieving the network torrents for her.

“This isn’t the background radiation of surveillance,” Nadie said. “This is focused lasers. Coherent light, understand? Even with the kinds of budgets they swing in spookland, they can’t aim this at everyone – you’re in an exclusive club.”

To hear Nadie explain it, the upper stratosphere was full of hi-rez drones tasked to match her gait and face (should she be so unwise as to look at the sky), every bio-war early-warning sensor was sniffing for her DNA, any person she met was even-odds an undercover whose decade could be made with the bounty on Iceweasel’s head.

“If you’re trying to scare me, it’s working. You don’t need to. I told you I wouldn’t go anywhere until you were sure all the money stuff was final. I’ll be here when you get back.”

“You’ve mistaken me, Ms. Weasel. I don’t tell you this because I’m worried you’ll run away and I won’t find you. I say it because I’m afraid you’ll run and get snatched by something bigger and smarter than either of us. I am good, but there is the question of overwhelming force of numbers and unlimited budget. Your father has convinced his brothers that if you are allowed to carry out this plan, it will present a ‘moral hazard’ to others in their employ. Every zotta knows that only the eldest can expect their own fortunes, and the lesser siblings who’re destined to a life of mere wealth might be tempted to walkaway as you were. If the hired help can be swung to their cause, how could that be allowed to stand?”

“What’re you saying?”

“We are both to be made an example of, I’m afraid. If they can stop this, they will, even if it costs them more than they stand to lose. The good news is I have reliable intelligence that their Plan B, should this fail, is to pretend this never happened, do little to draw attention to it. I expect if we maintain disciplined opsec, we will both walk away with what we want.”

Iceweasel endured a new kind of captivity with the South Bend walkaways, her skin dyed three shades darker – she had to take tablets, every morning, and it got a little splotchy anywhere her skin creased – wearing fingertip interface surfaces that looked like affectations and got in the way but ensured she didn’t leave behind any fingerprints; wearing colored contacts and letting Nadie gum long-lasting glue between her smallest toes on each foot to change her gait.

She called herself Missioncreep, a name assigned by Nadie. She did chores around the factory, took long walks in the blighted woods, taking care to scrub her hands and shoes when she returned, again before eating or touching her mucous membranes. She read books, walkaway classics, Bakunin and Illich and Luxemburg, old dead anarchists. She’d read Homage to Catalonia and felt she finally understood Orwell – the seeds of Nineteen Eighty-Four were in the betrayals and the manipulation. Just as she warmed to old George, she remembered with a bolt that he had sent a list of names of his friends and comrades to a secret policewoman he’d fallen in love with, betraying them. She realized she didn’t understand Orwell at all.

Being a walkaway was supposedly about refusing to kid yourself about your special snowflakeness, recognizing even though different people could do different things, that all people were worthy and no one was worth more than any other. Everyone else was a person with the same infinite life inside them you had.

In the isolation of the squatted factory – which turned out hundreds of pieces of furniture every day, free for anyone – she experienced people as obstacles. She waited until the commissary was likely to be empty before descending from her aerie to grab furtive meals, avoiding eye contact, making the least conversation without being hostile. It was the worst walkaway behavior, treating communal resources like a homeless shelter, not being a part of the world. She’d seen people advised to leave the B&B for less. But Nadie must have spun some yarn about her traumatic past, because people looked on with sympathy and never called out her behavior.

Reading alone, playing the stupid telepathy game where she pretended that she knew what people thought just because she read words that supposedly bridged the thoughts of one person to the mind of another, she was overcome by a feeling she had traded the indefinite detention of her father’s panic room for an enforced, fugitive isolation.

She went through that feeling, came out the other side: numb acceptance that this was life. Living as Missioncreep, speaking to no one, making as little mark on the world as possible. Nadie was her role model; the merc and her bizarre vigilance that demanded you be both attentive and absent. The more she practiced, the more natural it felt, except for panicky flashes when she wondered if she was losing herself in this persona. Those were so unpleasant that she was glad when they receded and were walled away behind the sentry’s wooden façade.

Now, sitting there, rarely seen morning sun on her skin, looking at Nadie’s shit-eating grin. She struggled to come to grips with this new reality.

She guzzled her champagne, a flavor she’d never liked, liked even less with the taste of walkaway country on her tongue: public toothpaste formula and gummy, scummy of morning breath. But as bubbles and sweet, cold tartness washed her tongue and a burp forced its way out her nose with a burning, CO2 tingle, reality sharpened. She recalled, in fast shuffle, the times she’d drunk ostentatiously proffered champagne at family events, then the taste of corn-mash white lightning she and Seth and Hubert, Etcetera sipped as they slipped away from her father’s house, the beers and vodkas they’d made at the B&B, and then –

“I’m free?”

“Darling, you are free as anyone can be in this world.”

Missioncreep – no, Iceweasel – realized Nadie was drunk, had been drinking something else while she went to whatever hidey-hole she’d kept the champagne in. She had never seen Nadie in this state. She was almost... sloppy. Not to say she didn’t exude the air of sudden death, but it was a jovial, even sexy kind of sudden death.

“Congratulations.” She set down her champagne and scrubbed her eyes, the scratchy contacts’ familiar itch suddenly vivid. She impulsively plucked them out and rolled them like boogers and flicked them away, blinking tears from her eyes until her vision cleared. The contacts were supposed to be optically neutral, but there was an unmistakable difference. She looked at her funny, dark brown skin, the blotches in the creases of her palms and the crook of her elbow. She, too, was smiling.

“So, does this mean I can use the net again? I can call my friends?”

“You can join your friends, chickie – I even know where you can find them.”

“I don’t know what to say, I mean—”

“Fucking wonderful! Birthday and Christmas and your Bat-Mitzvah, rolled into one!” She slugged another long draught of champagne, passed the bottle.

Iceweasel looked around her cell-like room, her meager things, the normcore clothing Nadie brought, generic interface surfaces that she’d avoided personalizing lest she inadvertently create a fingerprintable element. Their local storage held the books she’d read, but she could replace those easily enough. She wanted to walk away from all of it. Even when she realized their encrypted storage contained the notes she’d made during the long solitude, she didn’t give a shit. Those were Missioncreep’s notes, made by a stranger receding in her rearview.

She drank from the bottle. Champagne didn’t taste sweet and sickly this time. It tasted wonderful. This must be what other people felt when they drank champagne – power and freedom, the sense of being beholden to none save those of your choosing. That was why it tasted bad before – it symbolized her captivity to Redwaterness. Now it was the opposite. She’d probably never taste it again, she hoped she’d never taste it again. She guzzled more, let it run sticky over her chin and down her throat.

Nadie sat on the end of her bed, small white teeth, square face, ice-blue eyes, the cords of her neck and the sinews of her muscled arms standing out, cheeks flushed, wildness in her eyes. On impulse, Iceweasel reached out and Nadie took her hand. Her palm was hard with callus, strong as teak. Iceweasel felt her pulse throb. She thought of Gretyl. Thinking of Gretyl should make her want to go, to resist the impulse that had hold of her, but thinking of Gretyl made her want to –

She leaned in. Nadie leaned in too, her hand tightening on Iceweasel’s almost to the point of pain. Iceweasel knew Nadie chose to take her to the point between pain and pleasure. She was the mistress of that point and could land on it like a commando pilot setting down a bird on an aircraft carrier, kissing it with control that made it look easy.

When they kissed, those small, square teeth nipped at her lips. She groaned before realizing she was making any sound. A dam inside her broke, pent-up emotion of the months in one kind of captivity or another, times she’d missed Gretyl with a longing that blotted out rational thought. She squeezed Nadie’s hand, heedless of how hard, feeling Nadie was indestructible.

Nadie’s free arm went around her. She was crushed to the woman. She realized that for all of Nadie’s strength, there wasn’t much to her – she was tiny. The body pressing to hers couldn’t have been more different from Gretyl’s. Her feelings for Nadie and Gretyl were polar opposites. No matter that Nadie had terrorized her, hurt her, kidnapped her – she had rescued her. She was there, so alive, in the way that no person had been for her for a long time.

She wrestled her hand free and reached for Nadie’s ass, compact as a tennis ball, slid her hand down the waistband of her leggings, feeling skin/skin contact whose feeling she’d worked so hard to forget. Her mouth flooded with saliva. Her fingers curled, found the matted, wet hair, slippery folds, her fingertips slipping inside. Nadie’s teeth nipped harder at her lip, making her pull back. Nadie followed, not letting her go. It hurt. It felt good. She panted.

Nadie sprang away and tore off her clothes in a series of economical motions. She was an anatomical drawing – the body Iceweasel had glimpsed in the taxi, with its strange rivers and arroyos of scar tissue stretched over lean muscle. Panting, reaching for her, some part of Iceweasel’s brain noticed she had a slightly crooked left forearm, an old break that hadn’t healed right.

Nadie dodged her grasp, settled on her haunches, staring frankly with cool, glittering eyes. She reached for the champagne and took another slug. She cocked her head expectantly. Iceweasel understood, skinned out of her clothes. Gooseflesh as she bared herself to that gaze. She reached again and Nadie shook her head minutely and dodged back, continuing to stare.

Nadie’s eyes roamed over her body. Iceweasel’s breath came in short pants. She could feel the gaze. Nadie could tear her to pieces, force her to submit. Every nerve and hair follicle came to electric, tingling life. Nadie’s eyes narrowed. She smiled lazily, traced one of her own nipples, large and pale pink, with a callused fingertip. The sound of skin on skin was loud, the only other sound Iceweasel’s breath. She reached for her own breast, touched it as Nadie was touching hers.

It didn’t feel like her own finger. It felt like Nadie’s. Matching her movement for movement, it was as though her nervous system lost track of its own boundaries.

Nadie nodded and licked a fingertip, brought it back to her nipple. Mesmerized, Iceweasel did the same. The feeling of being touched by a stranger wasn’t so strong, but as she fell into Nadie’s cool eyes, it grew. When, in her peripheral vision, she saw Nadie’s finger slide lower and followed suit, she gasped. She hadn’t masturbated in months, not since she’d been taken, not for some time before. That part of her switched off when she was kidnapped, but it had waited and it saw its chance. Their hands moved faster, blurring, soft wet sounds and breathing growing in pitch. When she arched her back and gasped, Nadie dived across the bed and bore her to her back, burying her face between her legs, tongue flickering quickly and remorselessly, hands on her hips refusing to give as she bucked. She buried her fingers in Nadie’s short hair, shouted words without meaning, rode it, not caring who heard, not caring what Nadie felt, burning away self-consciousness in a moment that went on and on.

When she was done, she gingerly released Nadie, felt her tongue on the inside of her thighs, felt the juices and saliva cooling under her ass. Nadie ascended like a serpent, all muscle and sinew. She smelled and tasted herself on Nadie’s face as her thigh slid between Nadie’s legs and Nadie pressed it, all that strength coiled atop her. Iceweasel was lightheaded from hyperventilation, champagne and bone-shattering orgasm, but she was still full of animal horniness. She rolled Nadie, aware that Nadie allowed herself to be rolled, but knowing this was what Nadie wanted, as she grabbed the woman’s wrists and pressed them over her head, burying her face in the tuft in her armpit before nipping at her breast, biting harder, listening carefully to the answering gasps, straining to hold the wrists. Nadie pushed against her and she reared up and pushed back and looked into Nadie’s eyes. They were unfocused, her breath in sharp pants.

“Do you want this?” she whispered. Her hand drifted lower. Continuous consent was a walkaway thing. She was used to asking this question and having it asked of her, but it was exotic for Nadie. Nadie’s eyes focused on hers for a moment, and she bit her lip and whimpered. “Yes.”

On impulse, Iceweasel said, “What’s that?”

“Yes,” Nadie said. “Yes, please. Please?”

The submission from this woman, who could kill a hundred ways with her bare hands, electrified the room.

Slowly, teasingly, she moved her hand and went to work. Nadie’s hips worked and bucked, and she stopped, pulled away, looked in her eyes. “Do you want this?”

“Please,” Nadie said. “Please, please.”

More kissing movement. Nadie’s hips writhed. She stopped again.

“Do you want this?”

“I want it. Please. Yes. Please Iceweasel, please. Please don’t stop.”

They locked eyes again. Iceweasel held her gaze, fingers dug into those incredible ass-muscles, and she waited. Nadie chewed her lip and her eyes shone. Her skin shone, sheened with sweat.

“Please, oh please, don’t stop. Please?”

Slowly, she lowered her face. This time, she didn’t stop, rode the bucking of Nadie’s hips, used her whole body to follow as Nadie reared up, shuddered, screaming and tearing at the sheets with clawed hands.

When she was done, Iceweasel daintily licked her fingers and flopped beside Nadie, whose chest heaved like a bellows. Her skin was clammy with drying sweat, and Iceweasel flung a leg and an arm across her and nipped at a scar on her collarbone, at the base of her throat.

“Mmmm,” Nadie purred. “Very nice. Quite a going-away present. I didn’t get you anything.”

“You said something about directions to my friends?”

“That’s hardly a favor. They’re not in good shape, even if they think they are. Your ‘default’ world gets less stable every day. The existence of walkaways is seen as a prime cause, destabilizing influence beyond all others. Don’t imagine just because you can run away once or twice they won’t decide to take you all again, someday.”

“We can rebuild. Look at Akron.”

The new Akron, built on the site of the leveled buildings, refused to be a graveyard. The people who’d flocked to it to rebuild after the army and the mercs and the guardsmen had joined returning locals to build new kinds of buildings, advanced refugee housing straight out of the UNHCR playbook, designed to use energy merrily when the wind blew or the sun shone, to hibernate the rest of the time. The multi-story housing interleaved greenhouses and hydroponic market-gardens with homes, capturing human waste for fertilizer and waste-water for irrigation, capturing human CO2 and giving back oxygen. They were practically space-colonies, inhabited by some of the poorest people in the world, who adapted and improved systems so many other poor people had improved over the disasters the human race had weathered. The hexayurt suburbs acted as a kind of transition-zone between default and the new kind of permanent walkaway settlement, places where people came and went, if they decided that Akron wasn’t for them.

Akron wasn’t the first city like this – there was Lódź; Cape Town, Monrovia. It was the first American city, the first explicitly borne of the crackdown on walkaways. It put the State Department in the awkward position of condemning a settlement that was functionally equivalent to many it had praised elsewhere.

“I hear a lot about Akron. Once is a fluke. It’s only months old. It could fall down tomorrow. I was in Lódź when it happened there. Lódź wasn’t the first city where it was tried. It failed in Kraków, badly. There were deaths, many. A terrible sickness, fevers in the water, no one could make the dispensaries print the right medicine. You have heard about the successes of these cities, but there are so many failures.”

“People walk away because the world doesn’t want them. We’re a liability. I’ve heard my father talk about it: the people who want to come to Canada, people who want to have children, people who dream of having their children learn all they need to get by in the world, dream of health care and old age without misery. As far as he’s concerned, those people are redundant, except when they represent a chance to win a government contract to feed them as cheaply as possible, or house them in prison camps. Do you know how much money my father makes from his share of the Redwater private prisons? He calls it his gulag wealth fund.”

Nadie chuckled and smacked her thigh. “I forgot how funny your old man was. You don’t have to worry, little girl, you don’t have that blood on your hands.”

“It’s on yours now.”

“I’ve had real blood on my hands. I can live with metaphorical blood.”

“But why? Can’t you see it’s insane? Why should the world go on when its system doesn’t need people anymore? Our system should serve us, not the other way around. Look at walkaways: if you show up in walkaway, there will be things you can do to make room for yourself. Walkaway is based on the idea anyone should be able to pitch in with her work and provide everything she needs to live well, bed and roof and food, and extra for people who can’t do so much. In stable walkaway places, the problem is there aren’t enough humans.”

“Congratulations, you’ve made virtue of inefficiency. Taking more hours to do the same work isn’t an ideological triumph.”

This was familiar turf for Iceweasel, a discussion that often roiled dinner tables in walkaway.

“You’re right, that’s fucking ridiculous. If that were the case, we’d be idiots. But it’s not. In default, unwanted humans work their asses off, scrounging money, scrounging shitty-ass jobs, getting their kids using interface surfaces for whatever learnware they can find and trust. The one thing they’re not allowed to do is put all those labor hours into growing food for themselves, or building themselves a permanent home, or building community centers. Because the system that organizes the land where the homes and the food and the community center would go has decided that these are better used for other purposes.”

“If you tell me about the uselessness of nice restaurants, I may giggle. You should know I have reservations at six of the seven best restaurants in the world next week, and the S.S.T. tickets to get me to them.”

“Restaurants are nice. We have places where you can eat nice meals in walkaway. Sometimes, they might ask you to help cook. At B&B, that was a hot job, people fought for it. It would be an honor to let a stranger at the kitchen. Default is organized so that only some people can eat at restaurants, so only some people must work at restaurants. In walkaway, everyone can eat whenever they want, and there’s plenty to do as a result – cooking and growing things and clearing things away. New walkaways always struggle to find enough to do, worrying they’re not keeping busy enough to make up for all the stuff they’re consuming. We do more automation than default, not less, and the number of labor-hours needed to keep you fat and happy for a day is a lot less than the inefficient system over in default where you have to scramble just to scrape by.”

“That won’t be my problem. I’m going to lie around and have grape-peelers feed me. Give me a year, I’ll be wearing a toga and a laurel.”

“The only zottas I know who live like that are either addicts or broken. Real zottas like my dad work as many hours as any beggar. Being a zotta means worrying you’re not zotta enough, grafting away to make your pile of gold bigger than those other assholes’ piles. I bet my old man hasn’t had eight hours of sleep in a row in ten years. If it wasn’t for medical technology, that fucker’d be dead of ten heart attacks and twenty strokes.”

“No one forces him.”

“You know it’s true. You worked for zottas. Have you ever met a lazy zotta?”

“Of course.”

“Was she a drunk? Or a pill-popper?”

“Well—”

“No one forces you. It’s a fucking amazing noncoincidence that everyone with more money than they could spend spends every hour trying to get more. Walkaways, who have nothing, play like no one in default. They play like kids, before anyone knows about schedules, lie around like teenagers who fuck off from school and lie on a roof and bullshit for hours. They do things people always think, If only I was rich... The irony is, rich people don’t get to do that stuff.”

“I understand irony. You don’t need to hammer me.”

“With zottas, it’s a good idea to explain thoroughly. They’re not good at thinking critically about money.”

Nadie propped herself on one elbow, their bodies briefly adhering from dried sweat. “What you’re saying, it’s not news, Ms Ex-Zotta. I am older. I’ve spent as many years living with zottas as you. You don’t understand: this isn’t stable. There isn’t going to be default world and walkaway world trading people forever. When you have big rich people, and everyone else poor as poor, the result is... unstable.

“If there are rich and poor, you need a story to explain why some have so much and so many have little. You need a story that explains this is fair. Last century, the rich made things stable by giving some money back, tax and education and so on. Welfare state. People could become rich. Invent something, you could become rich, even if you weren’t born rich.

“But those zottas – not zottas yet, actually, just gigas or megas – only let their money be taxed because it was cheaper than paying for private security and official surveillance they needed to keep hold of wealth if the system grew unstable because of the gap between them and everyone.”

“Private security like you?”

“Of course like me. What was my job, if not keeping rich people from being pitchforked by poor people? When technology made surveillance cheaper, calculus changed. They could hold onto more money, dispense with pretense that being rich was from doing well, go back to idea of divine right of kings, people born rich because fate favors them. It was more cost-effective to control people who didn’t like this idea with technology than giving crumbs to support the fairy tale of rewards for virtue.

“As you say, the very rich want to become richer. Once money is a measure of worthiness, the more money, the more worthy. They say, ‘it’s a way of keeping score.’ Zottas play to win. Like oligarch wars in Russia, rich people notice old school chums have very tempting fortunes and all bets are off.”

“Now you’re one.”

“I’m not. I’m rich, but I’m not zotta. Things are coming to a head, could go any way. There will be blood spilled in months to come. I don’t want money to keep score. I want money to buy freedom – freedom to go other places quickly, freedom to buy choice food or pay for medical care. I have survived many things, Iceweasel, even more than your walkaway friends in their hiding-places. I plan on surviving this.”

“I hope you do.” Iceweasel meant it.

“It’s mutual.” She levered herself up and reached for her panties.

[III]

THEY MOVED LIMPOPO around. First, a place she thought of as “the jailhouse,” because of the barred door and the intermittent sound of prisoners down the cellblock, thanks to flukes of ventilation. Her cell was big enough for a narrow cot made of springy, metallic strapping that couldn’t be separated from the frame, no matter how hard she worked, and a seat-less clear plastic toilet, a sink molded directly into the wall. She got a roll of toilet paper and a packet of soap every third day, and used it to clean her body best as she could. Her papery orange jumpsuit – too fragile to wind into rope – refused to get dirty, even when she smeared it with scop from the edible squeeze-tubes she got three times a day.

The guards who gave her food and toiletries refused to talk. They wore biohazard suits over body armor, goggles and face masks. Once, she was attended by a guard whose visor dripped with mucousy spit. Behind that spit, the guard’s face was contorted with rage. He practically threw her food-tube, shit-roll, and soap, slammed the door (it refused to make any noise above the hiss of its air-tight seal).

Twice, they took her from the cell and brought her to a room for questioning. She was fitted with sensors for these sessions. They shaved her head, attached electrodes to her bare scalp, more at her wrist, over her heart, her throat. She didn’t struggle. Who gave a shit about hair? The important thing was to save her energy for what came next.

The questioner was not in the room, but present as a voice that came from an earbud the guards inserted. She heard the questioner’s breathing, like he was a lover whispering in her ear. It reminded her of the spacies’ binaural ear pieces, but this was to unnerve and disorient her.

“Luiza?”

“If you like.”

“Limpopo, then?” The voice was unemotional.

“If you like.”

“We’ll start with something easy.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“I would like your pass-phrase.”

She rattled off a string of nonsense characters.

“Now the other one.”

She didn’t say anything.

“The other one. This is the plausible deniability pass-phrase. It’s not hard to tell when you deceive. The infographics give me enormous insight into your mind.”

She tried to keep her mind still. The act of stilling her mind would also show on his scans. She wondered what he was measuring, how accurate it was. There were brilliant neuro people in the Walkaway U crowd. They said that everyone knew half of everything they believed to be true about the human mind was bullshit. No one could agree which half.

Time stretched. She wondered if they would hit her, shock her, burn her. They’d killed Jimmy and Etcetera, slashed them across the throat and tossed them into the snow to die.

“I won’t tell you.”

“All right.” Guards unstrapped her, led her back to her cell. Days passed. There was nothing to do except stare at the walls. She had always enjoyed solitude, thought of herself as an imperfect walkaway because the company of others was sometimes oppressive. But when ten days came and went with nothing but her thoughts and her desperate, self-defeating attempts to meditate, they came and got her. Found herself actually anticipating the prospect of talking to the voice.

They shaved her head of the short stubble, reapplied gel and sensors.

“Today we make a scan,” the voice said. “We will be able to simulate that scan and subject it to questioning under circumstances that transcend and obviate much of this business. Depending on the characteristics of this scan, its reliability and pliability, we may no longer need you at all. Is this clear?”

“What do you want?”

“Your pass-phrase.”

“Why?”

“Because we have walked your cohort’s social graph, and concluded you are a core node.”

“That sounds like a good reason for me to keep my mouth shut.”

“We can try to coerce the information out of you. We can even try physical coercion. You know, we can make a scan from people who are no longer technically alive.”

It was bullshit. Had to be. CC always maintained it would never work, not without blood flowing through the brain. She didn’t understand the biology, but she knew it had to be bullshit. Didn’t it?

“That would be quite a trick.”

“Once we are inside your data, we will use it to effect internal disruptions of your cell. This will complement our strategy of physical interventions.”

“But why?”

“Luiza, don’t be ridiculous. You know why.”

She refused to get angry, though the extended period of solitude made her jumpy and emotional. “Because you know it’s us or you, right?”

“No. Because you and your friends are terrorists. Luiza, be serious. This isn’t about jealousy. It’s about crime.”

“What crime?”

“Luiza.”

“What crime?”

“Be serious.”

“Squatting?”

“Trespassing. Theft. Theft of trade secrets. Piracy on an unimaginable scale. Circumvention of lawful interception facilities in fabricators. Production of scheduled narcotics. Unlicensed production of potentially lethal pharmaceuticals. Fabrication of military-grade weapons, including mechas and a variety of U.A.V.s. Unlicensed use of electromagnetic spectrum, including uses that can and do disrupt emergency, public safety and first-responder networks. Need I continue?”

“What do you want from people? What are they supposed to do? There’s nothing for us in default. Nowhere to live. Nothing to eat. Nothing to do. We are surplus. We’ve gone away, started over, not bothering anyone.”

“You’ve taken what isn’t yours. You live by taking what isn’t yours.”

“How else are we supposed to live?”

“What is your pass-phrase?”

“When will you do this scan?”

“It’s underway now. This conversation will help to calibrate it.”

“Bullshit. I’ve had scans before.”

“The scanning techniques used by walkaways are crude and unreliable. We have better technology. It’s an advantage of not being a criminal underground.”

“I’d rather be a criminal underground than a secret police.”

“We’re not police.”

“Spooks, then.”

“Hardly a meaningful term.”

“I would like to speak to a lawyer.”

“You are an illegal immigrant, a Brazilian national with an expired passport and no visa. What makes you think you’re entitled to legal representation? How would you pay for it?”

“I would like to speak to someone from my consulate.”

“The Brazilian embassy has an official policy of cooperating with counter-terrorism efforts.”

“Why do you even need my pass-phrase if you’re so fucking god-like? Sounds like you have everything you need.”

“We have many of the things we need. There may be more inside your network traffic. Besides, we have excellent results from impersonating members of your cult to one another. It’s surprisingly effective.”

“As is telling me you’re doing it, so I spend all my time trying to figure out which people are sock-puppets?”

“You won’t need to worry about talking to those people anymore. You have a very good name, so getting even a small number of people to believe you’re a traitor will create enormous internal discord.”

“What should I call you?”

The breath whispered in her ears. “Michael will do.”

“Michael, has it occurred to you that you don’t have anything to bargain with? There’s nothing you can give me that will make me want to give you my pass-phrase, for all the reasons you’ve just set out. You and everyone you work with make it your mission to destroy any chance of the human race surviving to the end of this century. So what is it you hope to get from me today?”

“I have many things to bargain with, Luiza. I could offer to spare the lives of your friends. We know where they are – we always know where they are. We are capable of being surgical in our strikes against them. You saw how we came for you.”

In the hours she was alone with her ghosts in her cell, the one that visited her most was Etcetera. She kept seeing his face, hearing his voice. She’d had dreams where she felt he was cuddled behind her, one arm over her, hand between her breasts, his stubble raspy on her back, breath tickling her skin. Waking was like one of those nightmares-within-a-nightmare, in which you believe you are awake, but are still dreaming. Only she had been awake and imprisoned. Never to see Etcetera again. Sometimes she’d tick off his absurd names like a rosary, eyes squeezed shut, trying hard to remember the feelings from her dreams, his smell, the sound, the way he’d held her. The realization he was dead caught her over and over, making her breath catch like a blast of cold air freezing her lungs.

“I saw how you came for me. What you did.”

“You’re upset about the loss of your boyfriend, the man with the names.” He sounded faintly mocking, or maybe she was reading that in. She was distantly angry, the emotion a shooting star barely visible against the blazing light of the sun of her grief. She fancied she could hear them calibrating their model of her, placing a high value on such an exotic emotional state.

“You’re changing the subject. When you murder as you did, you do not make the case for helping you. When you take away my dearest love, you show me you shouldn’t be trusted. When you bargain with me, strapped into your chair, you make me think you’re lying about your ability to run me as a sim. The only reason I can imagine for you to have this conversation with me is because I have something you need, and you can’t get it any other way.”

There was no reply to that.

After several minutes, she said, “Hello?”

No answer came. Time passed. Being confined to her tiny cell had been awful, but at least she could move her limbs, shift her posture. Go to the toilet. Strapped in like this –

She stifled her rising panic. If they wanted to demonstrate their superiority, they might terrorize her by leaving her like this. Feeling terror would only demonstrate the viability of the tactic. She might be incarcerated by these people for a long time, and they were doubtlessly building a dossier of effective techniques for securing her compliance.

She waited as long as she could. “I have to pee.” There was a guard in the room: visor, mask, ear piece. His body-language told her he was looking at something she couldn’t see, hearing something she couldn’t hear. Maybe he was watching T.V., or a countdown-timer that ticked down the seconds until this part of the experiment was done. She could tell he’d heard her.

“Please.”

He pretended he hadn’t heard her. “Michael, if you make me piss myself, you won’t do anything to convince me that you’re a humane, reasonable person I want to cooperate with.”

She clamped down on her bladder and thought about other things: hard coding problems she’d returned to again and again when she had a moment, trying to get things that should have worked to work; Jimmy’s story (carefully skirting his death), the fight she and Jimmy conducted at the original B&B. She envisioned the steps she’d taken to help recondition the Thetford bicycle fleet, a huge cohort of printed carbon-fiber mountain bikes that were bent, broken and smashed by the previous warm season’s worth of off-roading, which she and Etcetera and others systematically reconditioned, creating a factory line to strip, evaluate, reassemble and test each piece, brainstorming solutions to the perverse mechanical problems of stubborn physical matter.

She really needed to pee. She wondered if they’d given her a diuretic in her last squeeze-tube. It’d be a way to ensure this situation arose. Maybe they wanted to calibrate their model with an image of what happened when she was humiliated.

“I don’t have to clean it up.”

The guard didn’t acknowledge her.

She held it for two more minutes, by her slow count, then let go. She grabbed her mood with iron pincers and refused to let it veer into humiliation because it was just piss. They won if she let this enrage her. That was far worse than the cold, stinking piss that stuck the paperish coveralls to her legs.

She didn’t say anything after that. She focused on those bicycles, the delight of suddenly realizing the solution to a puzzle that stymied them all, pulling the troublesome bike out of the pile, having it work. Etcetera came up with gnarly ways to get mangled parts free, adjusting gearing mechanisms that seemed unadjustable.

Her breathing slowed. It occurred to her she was almost dozing as she contemplated these memories. She might spend the rest of her life with these memories, polishing them like a widow polishing framed wedding photos. So be it. She could still walk away, in her mind. Fuck them.

Then she wondered if this was another part of the calibration, and had to clamp down to keep from crying.

Try as she might, she couldn’t find that place of memory again. Eventually they brought her back to her cell.

The next day, they put her in leg irons, bagged her head and brought her into a vehicle that jounced and jostled for an unguessable time. She was brought into what was unmistakably a bus that stank of unwashed humans and sounded like a bad day on a mental ward. She was belted into a seat, her hands attached to restraints at her sides. There was a person next to her, also seated. When the guards who’d brought her in went away, she said hello.

“Hello.” It was a woman’s voice.

“Can you see?”

“You mean, do I have a bag on my head? Naw. Why do you?”

She shrugged.

“Where are we?”

“Kingston,” the voice said.

“Ontario?”

“Not Jamaica.” A snort of laughter. Limpopo got the sense others listened in on their conversations, a localized stillness of eavesdroppers.

“Where does this bus go?”

“You’re shitting me.”

“I’m not. It’s – They killed my friends, took me in, held me. Bagged me and brought me here. Now I don’t know where I’m going.”

“Prison. Kingston Prison for Women.”

“Oh. I guess that makes sense.”

“If you say so.” Limpopo had been away from real human contact for so long she caught herself warming to this stranger, who could be an undercover interrogator, or even just not a nice person.

“What’s your name?”

“Jaclynn,” the woman said. “What’s the G stand for?”

“G?”

“Your transfer paperwork. It’s stuck to your chest. Says you’re G. Denton.”

She shrugged. She should have known she wouldn’t be committed to the system as Luiza Gil, let alone Limpopo. As toothless as the Brazilian consul was, as distant and hunted as walkaways were, for so long as she had her name, she could be found. She wasn’t to be found until they were ready to put her on display, if that day ever came.

“G? To be honest, I have no idea.” She thought of Kipling’s “great gray-green, greasy Limpopo.”

“Amnesia, huh?”

“Not exactly.”

“You’re a real mystery, you know? Bag on your face, no name.”

“I have a name. I just don’t know what name they’re sending me up under.”

“What name were you tried under?”

“No trial. Just snatched. Political. I’m walkaway.”

“One of those? Figures. Seem to run into plenty of you-all whenever I’m enjoying the hospitality. Hey! Any walkaways on the bus?”

Voices raised in reply. Catcalls and groans too. Under her hood, Limpopo grinned. She wondered what “G” stood for.