Walkaway

  “I don’t think—”

  “Let’s do it,” Seth said. “If they’ve got her prisoner, that’s fucked up. She’s our friend, she’s sinking beneath the waves, we need to rescue her.”

  “Rescue her? That’s insane, Seth. She’s in a fucking armed compound.”

  “I’d jump into shark-infested waters to save Tam.” She looked to see if he was smart-assing, but he was grave.

  “Don’t be an asshole, Seth. Don’t you think that Gretyl’s beaten herself up for not going rambo on Daddy Iceweasel’s dungeon? It’s a suicide mission.”

  “It was a suicide mission, without Dis’s help. Now it’s merely insane. Come on, you want to live forever or something?”

  “Let’s call her first,” Tam said. “For all we know, Dis is ready to break her out without anyone getting shot.”

  * * *

  Getting Dis on the phone wasn’t easy. There was a Dis instance running on the spacies’ cluster—running a Dis instance was a prerequisite for being taken seriously as a walkaway clade these days—but it was slow and stock. The spacies used her to help their research on the microsat upload project, and the scanning crew consulted her to keep the array of cheap scanners synched to do the powerful computation necessary to interpolate low-precision measurements into very high-rez, high-accuracy databases that turned all the parts of a person that mattered into a digital file.

  The local Dis didn’t know about her instance-sister in Jacob Redwater’s bolt-hole, but that Dis left Gretyl with a letter to other Dis instances, encrypted with a key protected by the private pass-phrase Dis had used in life. The local Dis accepted the file, decrypted it, thought about it for a computerish eyeblink. “This is crazy.”

  “Yeah,” Gretyl said.

  “Which part?” Seth said.

  “The whole thing. Kidnapping, infiltration, pwnage. It’s terrible. It’s terrifying. It’s also badass, all that pwnage.”

  “Conceited much?” Seth kept it light, but Gretyl could tell he chafed. He’d never known Dis alive, so for him, she was this omnipresent transhuman oracle. When Gretyl heard Dis’s voice, she pictured the colleague she’d worked alongside, the way she’d waved her hands and paced when she talked, felt the physical presence of her through a mental illusion so complete it seemed she could reach out and grab Dis and hug her.

  “Nope,” Dis said. “That wasn’t me-me. That was other-Dis-me. English needs new pronouns. Other-Dis-me and I are and are not the same person, and the accomplishments I happen to be praising are not accomplishments that me-me had anything to do with, so I am not tooting my own horn, just admiring the work of a very close colleague. But I could have done the same thing, of course.”

  “Of course,” Seth said. Gretyl could see the through-the-looking-glass logic of talking to Dis had charmed him.

  Tam said, “Plus, don’t be a dick to the immortal simulated dead lady. It’s bad manners.”

  Gretyl didn’t know if Tam and Dis got on but she felt there must have been history there.

  “You say the sweetest things,” Dis said. “Now, how about we place a call?”

  “Please,” Gretyl said. The word was louder and more forceful than intended. Her palms were sweaty and her pulse throbbed in her ears. Perhaps she could even talk to Iceweasel?

  A moment, then a strange sound from the speaker, another moment. Then, “Hi there.”

  “Couldn’t reach her?” Gretyl felt like she was drowning in disappointment.

  “What? Oh. No, this is me—Dis. I mean the one at Natalie’s father’s house.”

  “I’m here too.”

  “This is too weird,” Tam said.

  “I’ll drop an octave,” said one of the Dises, in a deeper voice, and the other said, “Man, that’s weird.”

  “Which is which?” Gretyl’s head swam.

  “I’m local,” said deep-Dis.

  “I’m on-site,” the other said.

  Tam took charge. “Okay,” she said, “I’m going to call you ‘Local’ and ‘Remote’ for this call. Deal?”

  “Deal,” both voices said at the same instant. Gretyl thought about her own backup, sitting in storage, wondered what it’d be like to converse with it, or multiple copies of it. The thought was nauseous; though the possibility had come up many times over the years, it had never been this immediate.

  “Remote, what’s going on with Iceweasel?”

  “They untied her three days ago. She’s been doing isometric exercises whenever they’re not around, but she’s still weak. She was out for ten days. They’re giving her sedatives in her food. They’ve stockpiled hypnotics, but I can’t tell if they’re going to use them—it’s a multi-factional thing, the mother and father not in agreement about how to proceed. The disagreement has as much to do with their fucked-up husband/wife dynamic as it does with their feelings for their kid.

  “Emotionally, she’s not in great shape, even with sedatives. She’s pissed, having jangly feelings about her parents. When Mom visits, she veers from affection, or maybe pity, to a mother-daughter ‘I hate you!’ dynamic that’s got a sharp edge.”

  “Because her mother is complicit in her kidnapping,” Tam said.

  “Yeah, because of the kidnapping. Thought that went without saying.”

  “Trying for maximum clarity.”

  “Max-clarity it is. I’m totally inside their network now. Updated firmware on every device connected to the safe-room net, left a back door. The only way to get me out would be to burn everything and start over. It’s airgapped from the house network. There are a half-dozen sensors outside the safe room, optical/sound/radiation/air quality. I’m not sure, but I think they’re physically co-located with house network devices—they may even be house network sensors, hacked to send a second data stream into the safe room. There might be a way to pwn those sensors and use them to get inside the house net, but I’m worried that’ll trip the intrusion detection system and give it all away, so I’ve stayed away.

  “From watching the sensors, I believe there’s only one full-time security thug, a woman who might have been on the snatch-team that got Natalie—that’s what they call her. I’m basing that on conversations I’ve eavesdropped on between Natalie and her family. There’s also a medic and an admin assistant who gofers food and meds. They’re keeping it small, which makes sense from a secrecy/opsec perspective. Apart from them, the only people who go in or out of the safe room are the mother, the father, and the sister.”

  “They’re all in one room?” Gretyl said.

  “No, the safe room is a complex: two entrances, one through the house and the other via a tunnel that leads to the exterior. There are three rooms, besides the tunnel: a vestibule, the room they’re using as a control center, and Natalie’s room. Natalie’s room has its own sealing doors and independent air and power—it’s meant to be the impregnable safe, defense-in-depth. There’s a toilet in Natalie’s room, and a chem toilet in the control room with a jury-rigged screen around it. The gofer empties it—it’s got a cartridge that slides out. I see her swapping it a couple times a day, and she pulls epic faces, though the others give her gears about it and insist it’s odor free. Everyone thinks their shit doesn’t stink.”

  “What are they doing with Iceweasel?” Tam asked, because Gretyl was still taking this in, trying to picture it in her mind’s eye. She thought she should ask Remote for a set of photos and plans, then imagined seeing a picture of Iceweasel—Natalie!—thin and drugged, and her stomach did another slow roll.

  “I think that Dad’s plan was to bring someone in to brainwash her—there’s supplies and dope stockpiled that fits that hypothesis. Based on conversations he’s had with wifey in the control room, she vetoed it, though Dad’s not happy and has set some ultimatum. I don’t have details, because they don’t talk about it in front of the help, and there’s nowhere for the help to go except Natalie’s room. This is the stuff they hiss at each other in spare moments.

  “Mommy Dearest visits every day, so does sis, bu
t they go on their own. Mommy has breakfast with Natalie, talks with her about the old days, telling stories that Natalie is either indifferent or hostile to. The old lady keeps up a brave face but I can get her respiration and pulse and Natalie’s getting her goat. She’s good at it. Lots of practice.

  “Sis does better, getting Natalie to tell walkaway stories, being nonjudgmental-ish”—Seth snorted—“commiserating about how terrible Mommy and Daddy are.”

  “What about escape?” Gretyl said—the question she’d been bursting to ask.

  “What about it?”

  Gretyl made a choked sound. It felt like Dis was jerking her around, but was she, really? She wasn’t the person Gretyl had known—maybe she wasn’t a person at all. She had been through a dramatic experience—killed, brought back, forked and ramified and simulated—and existed in a programatically constrained state to prevent her from thinking certain thoughts. Who knew what other emotions were choked off because they co-occurred with existential crises? Maybe angst and empathy were entangled particles, and extinguishing one extinguished both.

  “What about helping her to escape from her family and come back here?”

  “Oh.”

  “Well?”

  “I’ve talked with her about it. She’d like to, but views it as a remote possibility. I can unlock the safe room, even lock the rest of them out of it while she uses the tunnel. But getting from Toronto back to somewhere outside of her parents’ reach? That’s black ops exfiltration, not running away from home.”

  Gretyl forced deep breaths and pushed down despair. This was why she hadn’t asked, because she’d already figured this out.

  “But you can get her out—I mean, out of the house?”

  “Yes. She’s got clothes, and her sister has the same size feet. Assuming she could get her sister’s shoes, she could get free, though she’d be pretty goddamned cold. No way to get her a winter coat.”

  Local chimed in, deep voiced, “Too bad we can’t get her a space suit.”

  Remote paused, and Gretyl had the sense that she and Local were exchanging data. “That’d be perfect. Wishful thinking.”

  Tam cut in: “Never mind. Knowing what’s possible is important, knowing what’s impossible tells us what we have to work on next.”

  “Hope,” said Seth.

  “Treading water.” Tam squeezed Gretyl’s hand.

  “Oh!” Remote said, then, “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “Another fight with her father. One of his visits. He was trying to convince her walkaways were like him, greedy and shitty. Naturally, she told him to fuck off, and he started in about Limpopo. He knows a lot about her, stuff in her background I’d never heard, some of it ugly. Natalie bore it well, but she’s brittle, and he kept pushing until she snapped and came at him, physically, and he used his compliance button—”

  “What?”

  “They’ve got her in a pain cuff; less-lethal stuff they use in prison psych wards and asylum-seeker detentions. Melt-your-face stuff. It’s got good anti-tamper. There’s a whole box of them in the safe-room’s stores, which is creepy as fuck.”

  “No kidding,” Tam said. “Why would you need compliance weapons in a safe room that only your family was supposed to know about?”

  Seth shook his head. “I’ve met the guy. I bet he’s got lifeboat captain fantasies about having to keep everyone else in line for their own good, you know, like on Farnham.”

  “Ugh, I hated that show.”

  “Everyone hates that show.”

  “Not zottas.” Seth snapped off a sharp salute. “Yes sir, Farnham, sir, and may I thank you, sir, for helping us survive this terrible disaster through your superhuman judgment and special snowflakiness!”

  Gretyl lost her breathing. She hadn’t seen a compliance bracelet, but she’d been hit by a compliance weapon, during a wildcat adjuncts’ strike at Cornell, when campus cops rolled into the quad with M.R.A.P.s, kettled everyone, and started sniping anyone they took for a leader. Gretyl hadn’t been on the picket, but she’d stopped to discuss it with a boi who’d been one of her grad students, because they had always had good instincts for picking their battles, and she wanted to hear them out.

  She supposed for campus cops, anyone with graying hair was a ringleader—she was the oldest person in the quad by at least ten years—and she’d been hit. The pain came in two waves, first a sharp, stinging sensation all over her body like being shocked by a loose wire. It hurt, but it wasn’t debilitating. Later, she found out this was the “honeymoon stage” of the weapon, and it was supposed to stop perps in their tracks, but leave them coherent enough to understand the orders being shouted at them.

  She stopped talking, looked wildly for her pain’s source, saw a visored cop in an M.R.A.P. turret, one eye covered with a bulging magnifier/scope, lower half of her face impassive as she played her wand over Gretyl’s body. It auto-tracked targets, shaping the pulse to keep it center-mass as the perp jerked and writhed.

  No one shouted orders at her. Seconds later, pain blossomed like a thousand razors bursting out of her skin all over, all at once. There were no words for it. It didn’t let up at all. Pain got as bad as it could get, got worse. It was unimaginable. The boi immediately understood what was happening and dumped their backpack, seizing a sheet and snapping it over her. The pain had sizzled off/on-off/on, then stopped, leaving her twitching.

  (The chivalry cost the poor boi their own safety—they were the sniper’s next target and it took Gretyl an eternity before she was recovered enough to get the blanket over them.)

  The thought of Iceweasel with one of those cuffs—her father’s finger on the button—made her want to cry as memories of that day flooded back.

  Gradually, Seth and Tam became aware of her upset and stopped bantering. “Hey,” Tam said. “Be strong. We’ll sort this out.”

  “Yeah.” Seth sounded less convinced, despite his hope-talk. “This is a temporary situation.”

  “How is she?” Gretyl said, and was alarmed by how small her voice sounded.

  Remote noticed, too. Her voice lost its flippancy: “She’s resting. Withdrawn.” Then: “Would you like to talk to her?”

  “Can I?” The thought made her heart thunder.

  “One sec.” Gretyl noticed a tic of Remote’s voice. When she finished speaking, the sound cut off too perfectly on the last syllable, cleanly clipping at the end of the sound-wave, without open-mic hiss while the sound duplexing algorithm made extra certain the squishy human was finished, not wool-gathering. When you conversed with someone hosted on a machine, metadata became data. She wondered what a conversation between Remote and Local would sound like, then realized they wouldn’t use sound at all, then realized that she was trying to distract herself from the fact that she was about to speak to—

  “Okay, put them on.” The voice was thready.

  “Dude!” Seth said. “How’s prison?”

  Tam slugged him. He grunted and Iceweasel said, “You’re such an asshole, Seth.”

  “But I’m a lovable scamp, you have to admit.”

  “I admit it.” Her voice quavered.

  “How are you hanging in, darling?” Tam said.

  “I, uh—” A pause, shuddering breath. “I’m scared. I don’t see how they can ever let me go now.”

  “We’ll get you.” Gretyl surprised herself.

  “Gretyl?” Iceweasel’s voice quavered more, cracking on the second syllable.

  “I love you,” she blurted. Tears coursed down her cheeks. “I love you, Iceweasel. We’re coming for you. Be strong.”

  “Oh, Gretyl.” Full-blown sobs now.

  Gretyl sobbed, too. The rest waited in respectful silence.

  “The worst part—” Iceweasel began, then was lost to tears. “The worst thing is that it gets so normal. Like I’ve been sick for a long time, and I’m in a hospital, getting better. There are times when I can’t remember—”

  “I won’t forget you.” Gretyl’s chest convulsed at the
thought of the hours that passed without a thought of Iceweasel; working on the engine, just brutish stubbornness of the material world, inconvenience of weather and the suit, the brainteaser of solving the mechanical puzzle of the stricken machine. The focus felt good. It was freedom from the grief she’d carried so long.

  “But.” Gretyl couldn’t speak for sobs. “But.” She mastered her breathing. “If it makes it easier—If it hurts less, it’s okay to forget about us. About me. If you can find a way to be happy, I won’t be hurt—” Oh, no? “I’ll understand.” Because you do it, too. “It’s okay.”

  No reply, then sobs, then nothing. Then: “I won’t ever forget. It’ll never be okay. If I die here, I’ll die with you in my mind.”

  “Don’t die,” Gretyl blurted. “Just hang on.”

  “I’ll hang on.”

  Gretyl’s world telescoped to the two of them, minds reaching across space, piercing walls, transcending the channel set up by the simulated Dises. It was like they were touching again. “I—”

  “Yeah,” Iceweasel said. “Yes. Me, too. You, too.”

  “Yes.” A terrible weight lifted from Gretyl.

  “Uh,” Remote broke in.

  “Yes?” they said together, still in synchrony.

  “I can get you through the tunnel—I can even get you shoes. But I can’t help once you’re outside.”

  “I know,” Iceweasel said.

  “Let us try and find something,” Gretyl said. “We’re going to default tomorrow, a First Nations reservation, we’re delivering—never mind what we’re delivering. We’re going to be there for a day or two. Then everyone’s coming here, from all over for…” She swallowed. “A party.” She felt like she was betraying Iceweasel.

  “Will you bridge me in?”

  “What?”

  “The party. Can you bridge me in?”

  “It’s bad opsec,” Remote said. “Every time we open a channel to the world, there’s a chance that someone’s going to notice the traffic.”

  “I thought you pwned the whole network?”

  “Yeah, but there’s the upstream. I’ve got the connectivity contracts here, read ’em all. They’re with a Redwater subsidiary, one of your cousins, the big timers. It’s for another Redwater property, a place across the ravine they use for secure storage, and there’s a point-to-point microwave link with line-of-sight laser backup, so anyone who used the contract to figure out what building to storm to kidnap Jacob and his family would find themselves three hundred meters away, in a building with remote monitoring and nasty surprises.