Walkaway Read online

  “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 she 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 secondhand 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 a 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. Notwithstanding our endless capacity for kidding ourselves that it’s different when we do it, 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, Icewe
asel 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’d 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.