Walkaway

  “We have cultural as well as genetic traits. We pass them on. When we come up with a society like default, it selects for people who are wasteful jerks that succeed by stabbing their neighbors in the back, even though we’ve got a species-wide priority of not going extinct through environmental catastrophe, pandemic, and war.”

  They wound up and up the hill. The snow was just as deep, but there weren’t trees to avoid, so the going was easier. Still, Limpopo was getting puffed out, to her embarrassment. Sita, fifteen years older, showed no sign of slowing, so Limpopo swallowed her pride and called for a rest. They were over the tree line and could see over it deep into the basin, the weird tunnel-scape of the spacies, the rotting houses and farms colonized by small trees that just pierced the snow.

  “Wow,” Limpopo said, not subjecting her laboring lungs to anything longer.

  “Indeed. So, Lysenkoism. With the sims, we can make Lysenkoism work. Think of Dis inside her constraint envelope. We’ve brainwashed her—or helped her brainwash herself—to be fine with being a simulation.”

  A cold feeling spread in Limpopo’s gut. She looked at Sita with horror. “You’re not talking about turning people into sims who aren’t moved by natural beauty?”

  Sita stared through her face mask. “Oh girl, no. Jesus, you think I’m a monster? We could constrain our sims to spaces where we value nature so much that we prefer to be disembodied and not a force for its destruction, to experiencing it directly.”

  “That’s just weird.”

  They moved again. Two switchbacks later, Limpopo said, “I think I’ve got that. That is some fucked up shit.”

  “For hundreds of years, people have been trying to get everyone to live gently on the land, but their whole pitch was, ‘hold still and try not to breathe.’ It was all hair-shirt, no glory in nature’s beauty. The environmental prescription has been to act as much as possible like you were already dead. Don’t reproduce. Don’t consume. Don’t trample the earth or you’ll compress the dirt and kill the plants. Every exhalation poisons the atmosphere with CO2. Is it any wonder we haven’t gotten there?

  “We know there’s truth in it. It’s all around us. You can only act like the planet is infinite—like wishful thinking trumped physics—for so long before it goes to shit. That’s why Cape Canaveral is a SCUBA site. Think about it too long and you’ll come to the conclusion that nothing you do matters. It’s either kill yourself now or kill your descendants just by drawing breath.

  “Now we’ve got a deal for humanity that’s better than anything before: lose the body. Walk away from it. Become an immortal being of pure thought and feeling, able to travel the universe at light speed, unkillable, consciously deciding how you want to live your life and making it stick, by fine-tuning your parameters so you’re the version of yourself that does the right thing, that knows and honors itself.”

  They came to a ruined building, a vast refinery or processing plant, big as an aerodrome, two great cave-ins marring the roofline.

  Sita gestured at it. “A couple years without maintenance and it just imploded. It’s the climate control. Place like that, unless you build it air- and vapor-tight, give it a Q factor like a space suit, it’ll cost you more to heat than you could make by running it. That stuff needs climate control or it starts to trap moisture, and come summer it rots. The next winter it’s worse. A couple years later, boom, it’s rubble. That thing was a giant computer that housed people and machines, and when they turned the computer off, it was an instant tear-down.

  “The universe hates us. We are temporary violations of the second law of thermodynamics. We push entropy off to the edges, but it’s patient, and it builds, and when we take our eyes off of it, kerblam, it’s back with a vengeance.

  “You want to change the history of the future, give us a chance for a life worth living, without oppression? There’s only one way. You know it, but you can’t make yourself face it.”

  “But I could if I was a sim? Nudge the sliders until I was in the envelope that loved being simulated?”

  “Bingo. We’d have a world that belonged to animals, and we’d experience it through sensors that perfectly simulated our wet stuff, but without crushing all those precious roots.”

  “Can I make a suggestion?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “When you make this pitch, don’t mention Lysenko. Making the world a better place by realizing the failed dreams of the pet mad scientist of one of history’s greatest monsters—”

  “Duh.”

  “Just saying.”

  “The point isn’t Lysenko or Stalin. It’s the angels of our better natures. Everything we know we should do but can’t bring ourselves to do because the part of us that sees the whole map and knows it’s the way to go can’t convince the part that’s in the driver’s seat. It’s about being able to choose, make the choice stick.”

  “What if someone else chooses for you?”

  “If someone else gets control over your sliders? Disaster. Teetotal capsizement. Terror without historical parallel. Better make sure that doesn’t happen.”

  “I get the feeling that you’ve already planned this argument, Sita. An ambush.”

  “Not an ambush,” she said. “Just the marketplace of ideas. We’re getting somewhere, something is brewing that’s going to bubble over. We’re part of it. I want to get everyone ready for it, so there’s a minimum of headless chickening.”

  Limpopo remembered arguments with Jimmy about the way the world was about to change and how she had to face it, how he’d offered to put her in charge if she backed him. It was so nakedly manipulative that she’d never been tempted. Is that what Sita was doing? If so, why wasn’t her back up?

  “One more question.”

  “As many as you’d like, Limpopo.”

  “Just one. Then I want to go back to enjoying nature.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Why do we have differing levels of executive control over our minds? Why would we evolve to foil our own better natures?”

  “Because evolution isn’t directed. It’s not streamlined. We’re an attic stuffed with everything our ancestors found useful, even if it stopped being useful thousands of years ago. Unless it makes you have fewer babies, it hangs around in the genome. Being out of control of your rational priorities certainly increases the number of babies you’ll make.”

  Limpopo laughed in spite of herself, despite Sita having obviously used that line before. “All that stuff in the attic, it’s useful, right? That’s why the attics themselves haven’t been squeezed out by evolution. Having a statistically normal distribution across every trait—including the ability to make up your mind and stick to it—means that as a species we’re able to face a variety of challenges. We’ve got a tool for every occasion, genomically speaking.”

  “Can I interrupt you?”

  “Of course.”

  “This isn’t a new argument. There’s a whole neurodiversity contingent who hate my ideas of sliders, and want to preserve our incapacity to ‘make up your mind and stick to it’ in case there’s some hypothetical species-destroying crossroads in the future where we need to rescue it. I say, you keep your irrationality intact. I’ll switch mine off. Other people can make up their own minds. Because the inability to see reason is a species-destroying crossroads and we’re at it now. If we don’t figure out how to put off gratification today for survival tomorrow, to beat the solipsist’s delusion that you’re a special snowflake—”

  “Okay, I know how this goes.”

  “I know you do.”

  They picked through the ruins, over huge machines under their blankets of snow and treacherous piles of rubble that could be used as wobbly staircases to reach the remains of the roof and odd preserved relics, including a manager’s station with a faded set of laminated safety memos tacked around its missing observation window.

  “If it turns out the level of executive control we get from sims backfires, we’ll just turn it off. That’s the point of exec
utive control: deciding what you’re going to do.”

  “What about the existential crises?”

  “What?”

  “Iceweasel told me that Dis kept suiciding—”

  “Crashing.”

  “Terminally freaking. Until you figured out how to constrain her to versions of herself that wouldn’t have existential crises.”

  “Yeah…” She sounded cautious. Limpopo sensed weakness.

  “You can’t simulate someone unless you turn down the slider that freaks out at the thought of being simulated.”

  “Yes…” Deeper caution.

  “What happens if you ditch your bodies, upload, and it turns out the human race can’t survive without whatever makes us terrified of losing our bodies?”

  “That is perverse.”

  “It’s not. It’s not hard to think of an aversion to having a body-ectomy as pro-survival. What if you’re engineering the mass suicide of the human race?”

  “All you’ve got is a hypothetical. I’ve got a concrete risk: we are in the midst of mass suicide. If it turns out turning off our existential terror makes us give up hope and switch ourselves off, we’ll deal with that when it arrives. Come on, Limpopo, be serious.”

  The rebuttal was so hot, so different from the argument thus far, Limpopo knew she’d touched something tender. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling. When people got like this, you couldn’t convince them of anything. She wished for a way to turn off Sita’s anxiety, a slider she could dial to a middle ground where Sita could confront her anxieties without freaking. Sita wished she had one, too.

  [vii]

  “Hello, Jacob,” Natalie said. She hadn’t called him that before, but Dad wouldn’t cut it. Her father gripped the foot of her bed while the door’s locks cycled, clunk-clunk.

  “I don’t like this, you know.”

  “Then let’s stop it. You untie me and let me go, and we’ll part ways. Not every family stays a family forever. I’ll send you a Christmas card every year and I’ll come to the funeral. No hard feelings.”

  He looked wounded. That might have been partly genuine, which was amazing, considering that she was in four-point restraint. The moment passed.

  “Your mother and sister want to visit.”

  She rolled her eyes. Dis had been her constant companion since she’d awoken in the bolt-hole. Without her, Natalie imagined she would have been in quite a weakened state, desperate for company. Solitary confinement was officially torture. She ping-ponged between a conviction Dis was a traitor and the possibility Dis was genuinely on her side, but even that state of indeterminacy was a chewy mental problem that kept her sane.

  “It’s not like I could stop them.”

  He pursed his lips. “Don’t be difficult—” She suppressed a snort. “I can’t bring them in while you’re like this.”

  She couldn’t suppress the second snort. “You make it sound like I tied myself up.”

  “What the fuck else was I supposed to do? Natalie, I’m being gentle with you. Do you know what other parents do with kids who run away with your friends? Do you have any idea what that kind of deprogramming looks like?”

  “I have a pretty good idea. I remember Lanie.”

  Lanie Lieberman was her best friend until the year they turned thirteen, when Lanie went off-piste, sneaking away for daring encounters with boys, booze, and the kind of club where the bouncers let a thirteen-year-old in if she dressed right and came with the right louche rich boy. They’d grounded her, put trackers on her, droned her, put a bodyguard on her, then two, but Lanie was a Houdini—especially with help from scumbag kid-fiddling older boys from families even richer than hers, who had their own money for the countermeasures Lanie needed to get away.

  After that, it had been private school, then military school, then a place for troubled kids, and finally a place whose name Lanie never spoke. It was the only one she couldn’t escape from. Judging from her pallor when she returned, it had been underground or somewhere far north. In Natalie’s imagination it was an abandoned mine or a stretch of tundra. The Lanie who came back from it was … hinky. Not just wounded, but cross-wired in a terrifying, mystifying way. Sad things sometimes made her laugh. When other people laughed, she’d get a look of concentration and anger, she had to keep her rage in check.

  They stopped pretending they were friends by fifteen. At sixteen, Lanie got early admission to a university no one had heard of in Zurich, supposed to be an amazing boot up in the finance industry, where even math dumbos could learn to be high-flying quants. The last Natalie heard of her was a hand-delivered invitation to her father’s funeral, a neat ink signature below the engraving. Natalie didn’t go to the funeral and couldn’t imagine the database cross-section that spit out her name as a potential attendee.

  Her dad smiled wanly. “Things have come a long way since the days of Lanie Lieberman. There’s trade shows for what we could be doing right now. I made two discreet queries and now I get brochures on rag paper so thick it could shingle the roof. Natalie, you’re a growth industry, and the methodology is faster, more ruthless and more effective than anything from back then. Thumbscrews versus psychoanalysis.”

  Curious in spite of herself: “But you didn’t ship me off.”

  “Not yet. Natalie, hard as you might find this to believe, I respect you in addition to loving you as your father. I would like the part of you that makes you you to survive this adventure. I don’t want an automaton with a superficial resemblance to my daughter. I want you to realize all this pissing around with radical politics and campouts with dropouts is not a long-term strategy. I understand you feel guilty about having so much when everyone else has so little, but what good do you think it does to turn your back on reality? You can’t wish inequality away. In my ideal world, you’d run the family foundation, oversee our good works. There’s a lot of poor people out there who owe their vaccinations, water, and education to the Redwater Foundation. Take some of that energy you put into anarchy and channel it into something productive. You could even set aside a little brownfield for experimental communities based on walkaway principles.”

  She just stared at him. She knew if she’d really been in solitary all that time, this would have sounded like a hell of an offer. If not for Dis, she’d beg for this. She knew how susceptible she was to isolation. It wasn’t just being alone. It was being alone with herself. Did this mean Dis wasn’t working for her father? Or was this a subtle, super-Machiavellian Jacob Redwater deal that made him the stuff of legend, even in zotta circles?

  “When are Mom and Cordelia going to visit?”

  He shook his head. It was so patronizing. “Your mother isn’t going to bail you out. She’s more upset than I am. Cordelia, well, she’s afraid of you. Wants to put you on anti-psychotics. Thinks you’re going to attack her.”

  “When are they coming for a visit?”

  “Do you want to see them?”

  She stared him down. He’d tilted her bed up to a forty-five-degree angle, so she could look at him over the rumpled white hill-scape of her sheet-draped body.

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  When he was gone, Dis whooped loudly enough that she winced.

  “Jesus, keep it down!”

  “This place is so shockproof you could use it to print holograms,” Dis said.

  “My head isn’t shockproof.”

  “Sorry. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but your dad is a colossal asshole.”

  “I’d apologize for him, but fuck that.”

  “Yeah.”

  “If it matters, I’m more convinced you’re not working for him.”

  “What a relief.”

  “That voice sim is getting better at sarcasm.”

  “I’ve been sneaking updates to my local copy. The voice synth people are good—merging normalized speech recordings from MMOs and voice-response systems, getting incredible stuff out of it. I’ve been playing around with some of the possibilities.” The last sentence came out in a g
rowl of predatory menace so scary Natalie jerked in her bonds.

  “Jesus.”

  “I know, right? I cheated, though. Used sub-sonics. It’s pretty amazing what I can do. You should hear my sexy ingénue.”

  “No thanks. I can’t remember ever feeling less interested in sex—”

  “They’re coming.”

  The door clunked and clunked again and gasped open, and in came Natalie’s mother, in her pearl gray, like a monochrome Jackie O, smaller than Natalie remembered, but no older. She took a small step inside, her nose wrinkled at a smell Natalie had lost all awareness of. She stared at Natalie. Cordelia slipped in behind her, round face a china-doll mask. Natalie felt a pang of weird sympathy for her, being with their mother on her own, the sole focus of Mother’s attention.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  Her mom circled the bed, walking around three sides before coming to the wall, retracing her steps, coming to rest beside Natalie.

  “Jacob,” she called. Jacob stepped into the room, looking pained.

  “Yes, Frances?”

  “Remove these restraints.”

  “Mom—” Cordelia began, but her mother held up a shaking hand.

  “Jacob. Now.”

  They locked eyes. She remembered this from childhood, their wars of silent gazes. As she’d grown, she’d realized these were a game of chicken where each gave the other longer to contemplate the ways retribution could come, until one looked away. As usual, Jacob broke contact first.

  “I’ll be back.”

  Natalie assumed he’d gone to get the med-tech or whatever he was, but a moment later, he was back with the merc. She nodded a little at Natalie, a degree of acknowledgment that was practically a full-body hug given their previous interactions. Maybe Natalie had impressed her with her “spunk.” Or maybe she’d been given permission—or orders—to lighten up.

  “Frances, Cordelia, please stand back.”

  Mom looked like she was going to argue, but Cordelia dragged her arm. “Come on, Mom.”

  Once they had a few meters’ distance between them and the bed, the merc stepped forward and locked eyes with Natalie.