[iv]
THE HOUSE WAS one of three in a row overlooking the ravine’s edge, at the end of a winding, rutted road overhung with leafy trees. The garage door slid aside as they pulled into the rightmost house. It shut and locked into place with huge, shining, round rods sunk deep into the floor and ceiling and walls. The car doors gasped open and he was in a vast space beneath all three houses, brightly lit and dotted with vehicles. Jacob held his hand out to Natalie and she ignored him, then stumbled a little as she twisted to avoid him taking her elbow.
“Come on,” she said to Hubert, Etc and Seth and set off for the garage’s other end.
“Thanks for the ride,” Hubert, Etc called as he quick-stepped after her. Jacob leaned against the car, watching them go. Hubert, Etc couldn’t make out his expression.
She took them up a narrow staircase to a large, messy room with sofas and a panoramic window overlooking the ravine – a green, steep drop-off with the Don River below, white and frothing as it cascaded to Lake Ontario. It smelled funky, old laundry and unwashed dishes, an overlay of scented candles. One wall was finger-painted from floor to ceiling and scribbled on with Sharpies and glitter and ball-point.
“The kids’ wing,” she said. “My sister’s away at university in Rio, so it’s mine for now. I don’t think my parents have been in here five times since the house was built.”
“The whole thing is one house?” Hubert, Etc said.
“Yeah,” she said.
“Doesn’t seem like the way you’d build a house if you didn’t care about how rich you seemed to other people,” he said.
She shook her head. “It was a zoning thing. The people on the other side of the ravine” – she gestured at the picture window – “didn’t want to have to look at a ‘monster house’ over breakfast. They’re rich people, we’re rich people, the zoning board didn’t know what to do. Dad settled for building a giant house that looked like three houses.” She swept a sofa free of clutter. “Food’s in the pantry. I’m gonna use the upstairs bathroom. The downstairs one is there, help yourself to toiletries.” She went up the stairs and disappeared around a corner.
Seth grinned at Hubert, Etc meaningfully, a silent comment on his romantic feelings for Natalie. He wasn’t in the mood. He’d held a dead man in his arms. He was bloody, tired, and nauseated.
“I’m going to stand under the shower for an hour,” he said. “So you’d better go first.”
“How do you know I won’t stand under the shower for an hour?” Seth’s maddening grin.
“Don’t.” He’d spotted towels on the ground by the stone fireplace. He passed one to Seth and shook the other one out and put it on the mantel.
There was kindling and newspaper and split logs. He built a fire. He found a large t-shirt that didn’t smell bad, with fake burn-holes all over it, a pair of track-bottoms he thought would fit. He stripped off his shirt, pants and jacket and threw them in the fire. He didn’t know what forensics could do about identifying blood on clothing after laundering but he was sure they could do less with ash. The woven interaction surfaces melted and released acrid smoke. He padded around in a stranger’s clothes, wondering whose they’d been. Maybe Billiam’s.
Natalie came around the corner and stood on the landing, contemplating him and the mess. “Steve in the bathroom?”
“Seth. Yeah.”
“You can use mine, come on.” Just like that, he was in a strange girl’s bedroom.
It was the bedroom of someone who’d been a student until recently: framed certificates, shelves full of books and trophies, thumbtacked posters for bands and causes, but overlaid with political posters, desk piled with broken interaction surfaces, elaborate homemade vapers that could turn titanium into inhalable smoke. A scattering of paper money, bespeaking illicit transactions, and clunky, semi-functional caging around the walls, floors and ceiling – a kid’s attempt to block parental spyware. It was better opsec than Hubert, Etc practiced, but he wasn’t sure it’d work.
Natalie wore loose pajamas, black-and-white striped, and no bra, and he did not stare or even peek. She ran her hand down the bathroom door’s edge, a spot smeared with years of hand prints beyond any ever-clean surface, and it sighed open. “All yours.”
He passed through the door and turned to close it. She stared at him. “Keep the clothes,” she said. There were tears in her eyes.
“I’m—” He faltered. “I’m very sorry about Billiam.”
“Me too.” A tear slipped down her cheek. “He was an asshole, but he was our asshole. He got fucked up too early at the parties. It was his fault. I miss him.” Another tear.
“Do you want a hug?”
“No thank you. Just go shower.”
The bathroom was the kind you saw in showrooms. Active noise-cancellation ate the sound of the water; smart jets’ algorithms increased and decreased the pressure, predicting what he wanted sprayed and how hard; interactive surfaces turned anything into a mirror at a double-tap, giving him an unnerving look at his ass and the back of his head; air-circulators bathed him in warm breezes after he turned down the water, simultaneously drying the bathroom’s surfaces of condensate.
“Sorry,” she said. Her eyes were dry. He held out his towel and made a questioning face. She took it from him and threw it on the floor.
“Let’s see what Steve’s up to.”
“Seth.”
“Who cares.”
Seth had found the pantry and cleared a coffee table, done a neat job of it, folding and organizing things, piling them in a clear patch of floor. He’d cleared three chairs. On the table: a platter of fruit, teapot and cups, croissants. They smelled good.
“Snack?”
“Good work, Steve.” Natalie sounded like she meant it.
“Any time.” Seth didn’t correct her.
They snacked in silence. Hubert, Etc wanted to ask about the house, about the food. About Billiam, the party, the third person with a beard, the other girl who’d been their partner-in-crime. But sleep was heavy in his limbs. His eyelids drooped. Natalie looked from him to Seth – who also looked like he could nod off in his chair – and said, “Okay, boys, hit the couches. I’m going to bed.”
She staggered upstairs and Hubert, Etc stretched out on the least cluttered sofa, eyes closing as he pressed his face into the cushions’ seam. In the brief moment before sleep, he saw the twisted body of Billiam, felt a phantom sensation of the pulp of Billiam’s skull in his fingers. He had a toe-to-scalp shiver, up and down twice before it subsided and he mercifully slept.
*
He woke to muttered voices. He looked blearily, trying to orient himself: Seth’s back on the sofa opposite him, the finger-painted wall. He lifted his head – a hungover throb – and located the voices. Natalie, standing in a doorway at the far end, arguing through a crack in the door in a hushed voice. The answer was male, older, maddeningly calm. Jacob. His head slumped. He was going to have to get up. His bladder was painfully full.
As awkward as ever in his life, dressed in a stranger’s clothes, hungover, in a strange room where a strange – attractive – girl argued with her rich father, he padded as inconspicuously as he could to the toilet. Natalie looked at him, made an unreadable face, turned to her argument.
When Hubert, Etc came back, drying his hands on the ass of his borrowed track-bottoms, Natalie and her father sat stone-faced across from each other. Jacob sat on the sofa that Hubert, Etc had vacated and she in a chair. Seth slept.
Hubert, Etc went to the pantry – soft lights within came on and he saw a door on the other side, understood that some servant refilled it during the day – brought out carrot sticks, celery and hummus on a tray and set it down between the two Redwaters. They glared at each other.
“Thank you, Hubert,” Jacob Redwater said. He dipped a carrot in hummus, didn’t eat.
Hubert, Etc sat down next to him, because there was nowhere else.
Natalie said, “Hubert, what’s more important, human rights or property rights?”
Hubert, Etc turned the question over. It was loaded. “Are property rights a human right?”
Jacob smiled and crunched his carrot stick and Hubert, Etc sensed he’d said the wrong thing.
Natalie looked grim. “You tell me. That factory we switched on last night. It was worth more as a write-off than it was as a going concern. Some entity that owned it, demanded that it sit rotting and useless, even though there were people who wanted what it could make.”
“If they wanted the factory, they could buy the factory,” Jacob said. “Then make things and sell them.”
“I don’t think those people could afford to buy a factory,” Hubert, Etc said, glancing at Natalie for approval. She nodded minutely.
“That’s what capital markets are for,” Jacob said. “If you’ve got a plan for profitably using an asset someone else isn’t using, then you draw up a business plan and take it to investors. If you’re right, one of them will fund you – maybe more than one. Then you sell what you make.”
“What if no one invests?” Hubert, Etc said. “I know a ton of zepp startups that died because they couldn’t get money, even though they were making amazing stuff.”
Jacob took on the air of someone explaining a complex subject to a child. “If no one wants to invest, that means that you don’t have an idea worth investing in, or you aren’t the right person to execute that idea because you don’t know how to convince people to invest.”
“Don’t you see the circularity there?” Natalie said. “If you can’t convince someone to pay to turn on the factory to make things that people need, then the factory shouldn’t be turned on?”
“As opposed to what? A free-for-all? Just smash down the doors, walk in and take over?”
“Why not, if no one else is doing anything with it?”
The talking-to-a-toddler look: “Because it’s not yours.”
“So what?”
“You wouldn’t be happy if a mob busted in here and carried all your precious things out, would you, Natty?”
With less than a day’s experience, Hubert, Etc could tell that Natalie didn’t want to be called “Natty.” Jacob knew it, was baiting his daughter. It was cheating.
“I wouldn’t mind,” Hubert, Etc said. “I don’t have much, most of what matters is backed up. I mean, so long as I could find a bed and some clothes the next day, it wouldn’t make a difference.”
“Natty’s got plenty more than a change of clothes and a bed here in her nest,” Jacob said. “Natty likes nice things.”
“I do. I want everyone else to have them.” Her look could have sliced steel.
“Let them work for it, the way we have.”
Natalie snorted.
Jacob looked at Hubert, Etc. “You were at the party last night?”
It was dusk outside the picture window, pinky-orange light sweeping down the ravine, staining the river’s rippling surface.
“I was.”
“What do you think about breaking into private property and stealing what you find there?”
Hubert, Etc wished that he’d pretended to be asleep. He was pretty sure Seth was faking it.
“No one was using it.” He looked at Natalie. “The hydrogen cells’d filled up, so the windmills were going to waste. The feedstock was worth practically nothing.”
Natalie said, “What’s the point of having private property if all it does is rot?”
“Oh, please. Private property is the most productive property. Temporary inefficiencies don’t change that. Only kooks and crooks think that stealing other property is a valid form of political action.”
“Only kleptocrats use terms like ‘temporary inefficiencies’ for wasteful abominations like that Muji factory.”
“It’s easy to talk about kleptocrats when Daddy pulls strings to keep the cops off your lazy ass. They’ll arrest a hell of a lot of people today, Natty, but not you or your friends.”
“Don’t pretend your political embarrassment is generosity. Let ’em put me away.”
“Maybe I will. Maybe a couple of years of hard work in prison will make you appreciate what you’ve got.”
She looked at Hubert, Etc. “He’s been threatening to send me to a prison since I was ten. It used to be those scared-straight places on private islands, until they were all busted for ‘corrective rape.’ Now it’s adult prison. Why the fuck not, Dad? You’re a major shareholder in most of ’em – they’d give you a discount. I could get inside perspective on the family business.”
Jacob gave a showy laugh. “Like I’d trust you to run anything. Business is a meritocracy, child. You think you’re going to walk into some fat job just because you’re my kid—”
“I don’t. Because there aren’t any ‘jobs’ left. Just financial engineering and politics. I’m not qualified for either. For one thing, I can’t say ‘meritocracy’ with a straight face.”
Hubert, Etc saw that one land. It emboldened him. “It’s the height of self-serving circular bullshit, isn’t it? ‘We’re the best people we know, we’re on top, therefore we have a meritocracy. How do we know we’re the best? Because we’re on top. QED.’ The most amazing thing about ‘meritocracy’ is that so many brilliant captains of industry haven’t noticed that it’s made of such radioactively obvious bullshit you could spot it from orbit.” He snuck another look at Natalie. She gave him a minute nod that thrilled him.
Jacob looked more pissed. Distantly, Hubert, Etc wondered how such a powerful man could be so thin-skinned. Jacob stood and glared. “Easy to say, but last time I looked, you two hadn’t done a fucking thing that mattered to anyone, and were depending on ‘bullshit’ to keep your asses out of jail.”
“There he goes with the jail stuff again. I suppose prison is one way to win an argument if you can’t think of a better one.”
“It’s traditional,” Seth said, lifting his face from the pillows. “Spanish Inquisition. USSR. Saudi Arabia. Gitmo.”
Jacob walked out, closing the connecting door with a dignified click. It was more pissed than a slam. Hubert, Etc felt victorious.
“This hotel is goddamned noisy.” Seth rolled onto his back, stretching to expose his hairy stomach, gone soft since the last time Hubert, Etc saw it.
“The room service is awesome, though,” Hubert, Etc said. “And you can’t beat the price.”
Seth sat up. “That’s your dad, huh?”
“I know that it’s a cliché to hate your old man when you’re twenty, but he’s such an asshole,” Natalie said. “He really believes that meritocracy stuff. Seriously believes in it. He’s one step away from talking about having the blood of kings in his veins.”
“The thing I’ve never understood,” Hubert, Etc said, “is how someone can be delusional and still manage to own half the planet? I get how having some delusions would be useful when you’re bossing people around and ripping everyone off, but doesn’t that break down eventually? It’s still capitalism out there. If your competitor brings in some person who isn’t delusional, wouldn’t that person end up bankrupting you?”
Natalie said, “There’s more than one way to be smart. People like my dad assume that because they’re smart about being evil bastards, they’re smart about everything—”
“And because they’re smart at everything,” Seth said, “that makes it okay for them to be evil bastards?”
“Exactly,” she said. “So people like my dad are good at figuring out how to take your company with its ‘smart people’ and get it declared illegal, poach its best ideas, or just buy it and leverage it and financialize it until it doesn’t make anything except for exotic derivatives and tax-credits. And the thing is, that’s not good enough for him! He wants to be the one percent of the one percent of the one percent because of his inherent virtue, not because the system is rigged. His whole identity rests on the idea that the system is legit and that he earned his position into it fair and square and everyone else is a whiner.”
“If they didn’t want to be poor, they shoulda had the sense to be born rich,” Seth said.
“No offense,” Hubert, Etc added.
“None taken.” She picked through a pile of laundry, producing a loose-knit eggplant colored cardigan, a pair of twisted underwear hanging off a sleeve. She slingshotted them toward the stairs. “I know my family is richer than Scrooge McDuck, but I don’t pretend we got that way by doing anything except getting lucky a long time ago and using graft, corruption and sleaze to build that luck up to this tacky place and a dozen more like it.”
“And what about last night?” Hubert, Etc asked, emboldened by her frankness. “What about that party and all?”
“What about it?” she said, her tone playful and challenging.
“What about being richer than Scrooge McDuck and staging a Communist party?”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“It’s not like you need to—”
“But I can. Remember, it’s not just ‘to each according to her need,’ it’s ‘from each according to her ability.’ I know how to find factories that are perfect for direct action. I know how to get into them. I know how to pwnify their machines. I know how to throw a hell of a party. I have all this unearned, undeserved privilege. Apart from killing myself as an enemy of the human species, can you think of anything better for me to do with it?”
“You could give money to—”
She froze him with a look. “Haven’t you figured it out? Giving money away doesn’t solve anything. Asking the zottarich to redeem themselves by giving money away acknowledges that they deserve it all, should be in charge of deciding where it goes. It’s pretending that you can get rich without being a bandit. Letting them decide what gets funded declares the planet to be a giant corporation that the major shareholders get to direct. It says that government is just middle-management, hired or fired on the whim of the directors.”
“Plus, if you believe all that, you don’t have to give all your money away,” Seth said. She didn’t seem pissed.
“What the fuck do we need money for? So long as you keep on pretending that money is anything but a consensus hallucination induced by the ruling elite to convince you to let them hoard the best stuff, you’re never going to make a difference. Steve, the problem isn’t that people spend their money the wrong way, or that the wrong people have money. The problem is money. Money only works if there isn’t enough to go around – if you’re convinced scarce things are fairly allocated – but it’s the same circular meritocratic argument that Etcetera annihilated for my dad: markets are the fairest way to figure out who should get what, and the markets have produced the current terrible allocation, therefore the current terrible allocation is the best solution to a hard problem.”
“Every time I hear someone saying that money is bullshit, I check to see how much money they have. No offense, Natty, but it’s a lot easier to talk about money being bullshit when you have it.” Seth sat up and rubbed vigorously at his legs. Dried mud flaked off his jeans.
She snorted. “Is that all you’ve got? ‘Champagne socialist’? You think the fact that I was born into a lot of money – a lot of money, more money than you’ll ever see or even imagine – disqualifies me from having an opinion about it?”
Seth wandered over to the larder and pulled out food – fresh fruit, royal jelly rehydration drink, pizza in an M.R.E. box whose tab he pulled and pitched. The silence stretched. Hubert, Etc was about to speak, then Seth said, “I’ve met a lot of cops with bullshit theories about crime and human nature. Generals clearly have batshit opinions about the gravity of ending human life. Every priest, rabbi and imam seems to know a lot about an invisible, all-powerful being who appears to be a fairy tale. So yeah, having a lot of money probably does disqualify you from knowing a single fucking thing about it.” He unboxed the pizza, avoided the rising steam. “Slice?” he said, the smell of garlic, tomato, corn niblets and anchovies swirled like an oregano dust devil.
Hubert, Etc hunkered down for Natalie’s eruption. Seth was a master of provocation. But it didn’t come.
“That’s not entirely stupid. Let’s say that we’ve got different perspectives on money. Tell me, Steve, do you think you can spend and redistribute your way to a better world?”
“Damned if I know.”
Hubert, Etc took the pizza box and had a slice. It was good for flash-baked M.R.E. The sauce was tangy and spicy and might be addictive as crack. When he realized that there were as many pizzas as he could eat lurking in potentia in the Redwater estate, he took two more.
“I’m suspicious of any plan to fix unfairness that starts with ‘step one, dismantle the entire system and replace it with a better one,’ especially if you can’t do anything else until step one is done. Of all the ways that people kid themselves into doing nothing, that one is the most self-serving.”
“What about walkaways?” Hubert, Etc said. “Seems to me that they’re doing something that makes a difference. No money, no pretending money matters, and they’re doing it right now.”
Natalie and Seth looked at him. He finished his third slice. “They’re weird and sketchy, but that goes with the territory whenever you’re talking destroying the world as we know it and putting another one in its place.”
“He’s kidding, right?” Natalie said.
“Damned if I know,” Seth said. “He’s strange. Etcetera, you’re kidding, right?”
Hubert, Etc warmed to being the center of attention. “I’m totally serious. Look, I’ve heard the stories too, I don’t know if they’re true, and if you two are serious about all this change-the-world stuff, I don’t think you can pretend that a couple million weirdos who have exactly that mission don’t exist because you’re uncomfortable with their lifestyle. It’s not like self-heating pizzas are an innate human institution we’ve enjoyed as a species for thousands of years.”
“What are you proposing?”
“Not proposing, exactly. But if you wanted, you could have all the info you needed to go walkaway in about ten minutes’ time, could be on the road tomorrow, living like it was the first days of a better nation – or a weirder one.”
Natalie looked at the darkening sky for a long time. “Billiam used to joke about walkaways. There’d always be a couple who’d show up at the Communist parties the next day and tweak this and that to make it run better. Didn’t talk to us at all, wouldn’t make eye contact, but they always left stuff running better than they found it. Billiam said we were all going to end up as walkaways.”
“He was a good friend of yours, huh?” Hubert, Etc felt stupid.
“I’d known him off and on for three years. He wasn’t my best friend, but we’d had fun together. He was a good person, though I’d seen him be a flaming asshole.”
Seth surprised Hubert, Etc by saying, “That’s not very nice.”
She made an impatient noise. “Bullshit. I’ve got zero tolerance for not speaking ill of the dead. Billiam was sixty percent good guy, forty percent utter prick. That puts him in the middle of humanity’s bell curve. He hated bullshit with heat from the center of the sun. He was my friend, not yours.”
Hubert, Etc felt tears, didn’t know why. He went into the bathroom, sat on the toilet lid with his eyes closed, then stared into the mirror screen, letting it cycle through his profiles and the back and top of his head. He looked like shit. His second thought, which came in a bolt of clarity, was that he looked like a normal human, among billions of humans, no more or less good or bad than anyone. He thought about Natalie’s talk of the bell curve and thought that he was within a sigma or two of normal on every axis.
He splashed cold water on his face and stepped out, trailing his hands along the finger-painted wall. Natalie and Seth looked at him with guilt or concern.
“You okay, buddy?” Seth said.
“Natalie,” he said, “I don’t think that the average person is sixty percent good and forty percent prick. I think that the average person sometimes kids himself that he’s the center of the universe and it’s okay if he does something that he’d be pissed about if someone else did it to him, and tries not to think about it too hard.”
“Uh, okay—” Natalie said.
“And I think that the tragedy of human existence is our world is run by people who are really good at kidding themselves, like your father. Your dad manages to kid himself that he’s rich and powerful because he’s the cream and has risen to the top. But he’s not stupid. He knows he’s kidding himself. So underneath that top layer of bullshit is another, more aware belief system: the belief that everyone else would kid themselves the same way he does, if they had the chance.”
“That’s exactly right,” she said.
“His beliefs don’t start with the idea that it’s okay to kid yourself you’re a special snowflake who deserves more cookies than all the other kids. It starts with the idea that it’s human nature to kid yourself and take the last cookie, so if he doesn’t, someone else will, so he had better be the most lavishly self-deluded of all, the most prolific taker of cookies, lest someone more horrible, immoral and greedy than he gets there first and eats all the cookies, takes the plate, and charges rent to drink the milk.”
Seth said: “Insert tragedy of the commons here.”
Natalie put her hands up. “You know, I’ve heard the term ‘tragedy of the commons’ like a thousand times and I’ve never actually looked it up. What is it? Something to do with poor people being tragic?”
“That’s commoners,” Hubert, Etc said. Something was awake and loose inside him now. He wanted to kick the pizza off the coffee table and use it for a stage. “Commons. Common land that belongs to no one. Villages had commons where anyone could bring their livestock for a day’s grazing. The tragedy part is that if the land isn’t anyone’s, then someone will come along and let their sheep eat until there’s nothing but mud. Everyone knows that that bastard is on the way, so they might as well be that bastard. Better that sheep belonging to a nice guy like you should fill their bellies than the grass going to some selfish dickhead’s sheep.”
“Sounds like bullshit to me.”
“Oh, it is,” Hubert, Etc said. The thing was moving in his guts, setting his balls and face tingling. “It’s more than mere bullshit. It’s searing, evil, world-changing bullshit. The solution to the tragedy of the commons isn’t to get a cop to make sure sociopaths aren’t overgrazing the land, or shunning anyone who does it, turning him into a pariah. The solution is to let a robber-baron own the land that used to be everyone’s, because once he’s running it for profit, he’ll take exquisite care to generate profit forever.”
“That’s the tragedy of the commons? A fairy tale about giving public assets to rich people to run as personal empires because that way they’ll make sure they’re better managed than they would be if we just made up some rules? God, my dad must love that story.”
“It’s the origin story of people like your dad,” Hubert, Etc said. “It’s obvious bullshit for anyone whose sweet deal doesn’t depend on it not being obvious.”
“Hear that, Dad?” she said, looking around the room. “Obvious to anyone whose sweet deal doesn’t depend on it not being obvious, you deluded sociopathic fuck.”
“He’s got you bugged?” Seth said.
“I’ve got an individual privacy filter on the house network. But of course the cameras are rolling, because if I get kidnapped or murdered, he’d review them. Of course that’s bullshit and he’s always been able to spoof the locks. He learned it from me, when he went through some audit logs and saw I was doing it. Now he’s locked me out but I’m goddamned certain there are times he’s gone through my footage.” She looked into the air in front of her face. “Yes, Dad, I know you’re listening. It’s pathetic.”
Hubert, Etc remembered looking at his reflection in the bathroom and wondered if there was long-term archiving of its feed. He knew plenty of people with bugged homes, but you couldn’t live as though you were being observed. When your infographics said you were fully patched, you had to trust them. That’s what made the panics about huge zero-day security ruptures such a fright: the sudden knowledge that everything might have been auto-pwned by a random crim or asshole who used a skin-detection algorithm to catch you masturbating, keywords to flag your embarrassing conversations, harvesting your biometrics for playback attacks on your finances and social nets.
Living with the knowledge that there were creeps inside your perimeter was creepy. Of all the weird things about being zottarich, this was the weirdest. So far.
“Sorry,” Hubert, Etc said. “Just getting my head around this. How often does he spy on you?”
“Who knows? I go somewhere else any time I want to have a real conversation usually.” She looked around the huge, airy, filthy room. “I don’t come back here much.”
Hubert, Etc had assumed that the place was a dump because Natalie was a rich slob who didn’t know how good she had it, but he understood that it was a calculated gesture of contempt. This wasn’t her home, it was a perch. Hubert, Etc didn’t always have the best relationship with his parents, but this was a different level.
“What about your mom?” he said. “Does she know he spies on you?”
“Sure,” she said. “Mom doesn’t come by often, either – she’s in GMT minus eight or minus nine.” She cocked her head. “Oh, you mean is this a sex thing? No, I’m sure it isn’t. My dad gets his flesh through specialists. He’s never been that kind of perv.” She addressed the air. “See, Dad? I stuck up for you. Whatever you are, you’re not kinked for your own daughters. Bravo.”
The hair on the back of his neck rose. The thing that had come alive in him had done a slow roll in his guts.
She looked at them. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Don’t worry, get used to it. It’s no different from being out in reality, sensed and recorded all the time. What’s the worst that can happen? Dad’s not going to have you rubbed out or send mercs on your trail after we drop out.”
“After we drop out?”
“Isn’t that what we were talking about? Going walkaway? That’s where this thing was headed – some kind of prince-and-pauper thing: ‘I’ll wager I can put on vagabond’s rags and go unnoticed among the lower classes, what-ho?’”
“Don’t make me join the walkaways, Etcetera,” Seth said.
The thing inside Hubert, Etc’s guts roiled. “Was that where I was headed?”
Natalie caught his eye. Her face shone. She was beautiful. She had zits, a sprinkle of freckles, the sclerae of her eyes were pink and her lids were red-rimmed. She was brimming with life, sorrow, and whatever he’d felt when he realized that the whispered conversations about money and jobs that all the grown-ups had all the time were the outward reflection of deep, unending terror. A fear that gnawed at every grown person. A primordial terror of the tiger outside the cave.
“Sure as shit sounded like it to me,” she said.
“Seth,” he said. “What is it that keeps you from going walkaway, exactly?”
To his surprise, Seth looked genuinely distressed. “You’re joking. Those people are bananas. They’re homeless people, Hubert—” Hubert, Etc noted that Seth had called him “Hubert,” always a sign that they’d tapped into a rich seam of Seth’s psyche. “They’re bums. They eat garbage—”
“Not exactly garbage,” Hubert, Etc said. “No more than the beer we were drinking last night was piss. Give me a good reason. Loyalty to your employer? Prospects of a rich and fulfilled life?” Like Hubert, Etc, the longest Seth had been employed was six months, and the first month had been classed as “training” – not paid. Neither of them had had anything like real work in months.
“How about fear of prison?”
“How about it? You dragged me to an illegal party last night. That’s more likely to get us busted than anything we’d do out in the abandoned territories—”
“The territories? Be serious, you’d be dead inside of a month.”
“It’s not the surface of the moon. It’s places where no one wants to bother arresting the population for vagrancy.”
“Yeah, they don’t arrest ’em, they incinerate ’em for being squatter-terrorists,” Seth said. “And then there’s the friendly fire. It’s a fucking gladiator pit for excess humans.”
“He’s got a point,” Natalie said. “We’d have to arm up if we went. Dad’s panic room’s full of toys, though – stuff designed to slip millimeter wave. If we brought enough matériel, we’d be the kings of the badlands. Could be fun.”
Hubert, Etc boggled. “Haven’t you two ever seen a walkaway? They’re practically Zen monks. They’re not out mowing down their rivals with resin AK-3DPs. You’ve seen too many movies.”
“I’ve seen walkaways, the people who’d visit the liberations, but who knows what they’re like in their native habitat? There’s no sense in being naïve. You’ve got to be insane if you think we’re going to stroll into Mordor with packs full of delicious M.R.E.s and be welcomed as spiritual brothers.”
Hubert, Etc was now as upset as Seth. “Have you two ever killed someone? Are you prepared to do so? Would you point a gun at another human being and gun him down?”
Natalie shrugged. “If it was me or him, fuck yeah.” Seth nodded.
“You’re both full of shit.”
He and Seth glared. Natalie was more amused than ever.
The standoff might have continued if Hubert, Etc hadn’t looked up the FAQ. They had a brief argument about which anonymizer to trust – if you were Natalie’s age, all of the proxies that Hubert and Seth used were considered false-flag ops for harvesting intel on dissidents. Natalie, meanwhile, liked an anonymizer that Seth and Hubert, Etc had heard was junk-science wishful-thinking voodoo. It turned out the two systems could be daisy chained, and so they all grudgingly set them up and started searching.
There were as many walkaway FAQs as walkaways. The impulse to walk away was bound up with the urge to write Thoreauvian memoirs about societal malaise and the tradecraft of going off-grid in the age of total information awareness. They included appendices summing things up for the tldr crowd, with videos, darknet links, shapefiles, and wetjet formulas for making your own crucial frontier enzymes and GMOs. Some of this was radioactively hot, the kind of thing that’d get you watchlisted so hard you’d have to fight through the clouds of drones to go out for milk, but there was nothing in it about weapons.
Hubert, Etc pointed this out to Natalie and Seth, trying not to be smug. Seth said, “Of course no one talks about peacemakers where spooks could see it. It’ll all be deep darknet.”
“You’re saying the fact that we can’t find anything about weapons is proof that there must be weapons because if there were weapons no one would talk about weapons?” Hubert, Etc had experience winning arguments with Seth. He noted with pleasure that Natalie agreed and basked in a moment of admiration.
Seth gave him a belligerent look, couldn’t keep it up. “Fine. No weapons.”
It dawned on Hubert, Etc that this wasn’t a thought-experiment – somewhere on the way, reading FAQs and watching videos, they’d shaded from playing let’s-pretend to planning. He had screens of notes and a huge wad of cached stuff.
“Are we going to actually do this? Actually for real?”
Natalie looked around the room pointedly. Hubert, Etc thought of the parties and the fooling around that must have taken place here, weird zottarich kids who’d played whatever decadent games they favored over the years. He thought of the cameras, spooling up their planning session from different angles, dropping it into long-term archiving.
“Fuck yeah,” she whispered. “Let’s do it.”