“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, dif
ferent 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 & Möet & 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 wa
lkaways, 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.