[iii]
SHE WAS CERTAIN she was still in the house. You couldn’t fake the smell. But it looked like a hospital room. The door had no handle or inset panel, just some kind of invisible sensor that chose who passed. This hospital bed was bigger, cruder, and she was – she squirmed her hips – she was plumbed into it. There was an IV in her wrist, and a sense of fuzzy-wellbeing she knew couldn’t be endogenous. She wondered what was in the IV bag. She’d have loved some Meta right now.
She was in four-point restraint, with an extra band around her forearm to keep the IV firmly seated.
She supposed it was a suicide attempt. The idea wasn’t very disturbing. Her sorrow was a distant moon orbiting her psyche far away, visible but ultimately exerting only the mildest of tides.
“Now what?” Her voice was thick, her mouth pasty. If there was saline in the bag, it wasn’t keeping her hydrated. It was like someone had dumped a tablespoon of hydrophilic shipping gel-pellets in her mouth, drying it to the texture of old roadkill.
She willed the door to open, thinking of the days she’d spent in isolation in the other room, wondering if they’d leave her, a tube going in and tubes going out, a brain inextricably tethered to inconvenient meat, easily coerced, thanks to its ridiculous frailties.
Had they had this room ready all along, as plan B? Or had she been kept unconscious while they refitted a room to make it secure?
A nurse came through the door, wearing hospital whites and wheeling a cart. He stood beside the bed.
“Hello,” she said.
He stared at her consideringly, then pulled out the cart’s trays, pointed a thermometer in her ear, fit a pressure cuff to her arm. He flipped back the blanket and impersonally hiked up her gown, accessing a small box taped over her hip that she hadn’t known was there.
“Why doesn’t all that stuff come with remote telemetry? If you’re going to pretend I don’t exist, why not get transmissions in another room, spare yourself the social awkwardness?”
He was good at ignoring her. He checked her catheter, so mechanically that she felt anger instead of humiliation, which was, in its way, a mercy. What an asshole.
“I know there are cameras recording, but at least tip me a wink. Don’t nurses have to take a vow? An oath? Are you a nurse? Maybe you’re a ‘med-tech.’ Did you flunk out of nursing school and get the version that doesn’t come with the Florence Nightingale training?”
Taunting him wasn’t satisfying, and her mouth was so, so dry.
“How about a drink? Water? Juice?”
He had a hose with a sponge tip. He pulled off the sheets and threw them into a basket in the cart’s base, revealing a rubbery under-sheet. Working with that same impersonal efficiency, he gave her a quick sponge bath, hose in one hand and a small hydrophilic towel in the other, stopping after each limb to wring the cloth into his cart. From her distant mental vantage point, Natalie admired the cart and wondered who its primary market was – people with loony old relatives locked up in attics?
He did her face and ears with wipes in sterile packaging, like the guys at the detailing place working squeegees over the windscreen of her dad’s cars. The fact that it was done by humans was a selling point. All the places her dad used had “bespoke” or “hand-wash” or “artisanal” in their names, sometimes all three. She smelled the nurse, soap with a bit of sweat, saw some stubble under his left ear. There was one point where she could have kissed him. Or bit him.
When he was done, he packed up his tray, tugged her clothes into place and replaced the sheets. He fished under the bed for a flexi-hose with a bite-down nipple on the end. He pulled off lengths of surgical tape and taped it to her collarbone and cheek, so she could turn her head and drink. She could have bitten off a fingertip, but didn’t. He packed his things and left. The door sighed shut and clicked, then clunked, a reminder that it had serious locking stuff. It sounded like the second clunk came through the floor, like the door had a set of pins that penetrated it.
She realized where she was: her dad’s panic room. It had independent, redundant network connections, power backups, food and water stashes, a whole armory. It wasn’t like her dad to tell other people about the panic room – she’d never seen it and knew that opening it would set off alarms all over town. Her dad made sure she knew, just in case she got the idea of throwing a party there.
Dad must’ve built himself a better bolt hole – he’d mused about one in a second sub-basement, bored out beneath the house using a super-covert drill that his zotta buddy had used to turn the plot under his estate into a bat-cave. It sent Dad into ecstasies of jealousy. There’s no way he’d let Mr Not-a-Nurse into this place if it was still the secret he’d bet his life on. Unless he planned to off all the staff once he’d brainwashed her and entomb them within the reinforced walls, like a pharaoh’s tomb-builders.
These thoughts produced seven minutes’ worth of distraction. When they were exhausted, she was alone with her situation. Thinking of Gretyl made her cry with desire and loneliness. There were thoughts about her father and sister. Hadn’t her father said her mother was on her way? Was she here? She had her own floor on the adults’ side of the house. It hadn’t been occupied often, but when it was, the house’s affect changed. The whole household was alive to the possibility of their mercurial mistress doing one of her patented Valkyrie numbers.
She chased the tail of her thoughts in ever-tighter spirals. It was a desperate place. Visit it enough and it might drive you to suicide.
“Fuck it,” she said aloud. “Brainwashing, rubber hoses, deprogramming, all that Patty Hearst stuff.” She’d learned about Hearst, the poor little rich girl who’d carried a gun with her kidnappers, after Gretyl joked about it. She’d been offended, but then adopted the girl as a totem. Hearst was an idiot, but at least she wasn’t just another rich asshole.
She sang “Consensus,” an incredibly dirty walkaway marching song, thirty verses. The chorus: “Consensus, consensus, it beat us and bent us, but we’re sure that it’s lent us, a shit-eating grin.” Making up new verses was walkaway sport, there were wikis of them. She couldn’t remember them all, but she could make them up on the fly, especially if she sang humm-humm-humm where she couldn’t think of a line, which was automatic disqualification when it was sung in earnest.
The verses got more hum-hum-hummy. She was ready to peter out and start another song, when a voice joined in: “...but we’re sure that it’s lent us, a shit-eating grin!” It was achingly familiar. She shivered from scalp to ankles, hairs on her neck standing.
“Dis?”
“That’s Dis Ex Machina to you, kid,” the voice said.
She cried.
*
“This is a dirty trick.” She mastered her tears. “Absolutely disgusting.”
“It would be,” Dis said, “if it was a trick.”
“How would you know if it was or not? You’re on all the version control servers. Anyone who can build a cluster can bring you up. There’ll be hundreds of you, in all kinds of configs. My dad could easily afford a version of you that was constrained so it believed it had infiltrated his network to work against him, while spying on me and everything I did. You would never know. I’d tell you things he’d have to slice my nipples off to get otherwise. He’d call this humane, a ‘low-impact’ way of ‘bringing me around’ to sanity, which, in his world, is the ability to bullshit yourself into believing you deserve to have more of everything that everyone else has less of, because of your special snowflakeness.”
“You’re preaching to the converted, girl. Remember, I was walkaway before you.”
“Dis was walkaway before me. You, whatever you are, are an emissary, knowing or not, from default.”
“We’re going in circles. No skin off my back, because I’m a construct. I can park my frustration to one side, move the slider, have this argument with you for as long as you’d like. It’s cool. Comes from a lab in Punjab, ex-IIT math-geeks who want to turn the Āgama into subroutines, Yogic Mastery Apps. They’re turning Meta into math. You’d love it – they worship Gretyl, her optimizations for lookahead modeling are the basis of their discipline. I think if she wasn’t so worried about you, she’d be all over it.”
“That was really low.” She was surprised by the venom in her voice. When her thoughts strayed to Gretyl, she was seized by unbearable helplessness and longing. That Gretyl felt the same about her was a weight crushing her chest.
“Oh, honey,” Dis said. Her computer voice was better. The emotions in those two words were awful. “She misses you so much. I can get you a message from her. Or...”
Natalie knew it was a baited hook. She didn’t want to rise to it. Fish must know the worm has a barb in it, but some bite anyway. Was it hunger? A death wish? “What?”
“They’ve been scanned now,” Dis said. “After they reached the Thetford abandoned zone, everyone made a scan, first thing. They’re in the walkaway clouds now, more every day. We’re learning so much from the multiplicity of scans, too – I think the problem with bringing back CC was that we just didn’t have a deep enough data-set to make inferences about tailored simulation strategies for brain variations. CC is pretty stable. We can characterize scans based on the likelihood of bringing up a successful sim. Gretyl’s scan is in the top decile. She was made to run on silicon. Sita, too. Hell, Sita was so up for it that she’s running a twin 24/7, in realtime, with sensors all over herself. Gretyl hasn’t done that, though. We’ve only done the preflighting for her. We haven’t run her...”
Yet, Natalie finished. Gretyl could be here, running on whatever substrate Dis was on. Her Gretyl, not her Gretyl, that was a distinction without a difference.
“So fucking evil.” She didn’t have the energy for bile. It came out like surrender.
“It’s not complicated. Your dad’s got amazing opsec on the main house network. But the patchlevel on his safe-room is lagged, because there were conflicts the auto-updaters couldn’t handle, and the ops guy who set it up retired and your dad doesn’t have anyone in his ops department who even knows about this. The alert messages have piled up in an admin dashboard for years, all neglected. I wonder if your dad even has a login for that dash?
“We pwned this place as soon as you went. It was Gretyl’s project, but I did the heavy lifting. We used like seventy percent of walkaway’s compute-time running parallel instances of me, at twenty ex realtime. We clobbered the fucking IDS, smoked the firewall, and now I’m so deep I can do anything.” The door-locks clunked out “shave and a haircut.” It was terrifying and hilarious. Natalie’s anguished smile hurt to hold.
“But I can’t work your shackles. They’re not networked. I can’t do anything with the housenet, that’s totally airgapped. For the best, otherwise all that pwnage would have set off all kinds of alarms.”
Despite herself, Natalie was drawn into the explanation. “Come on.” Her stimulus-starved brain worked hard. “Occam’s razor. Either there’s this crazy bug because Dad fired his bull-goose sysadmin, and a convenient airgap in the bed’s systems – or you’re my dad’s puppet, and he’s locked you down so you can do magic tricks with the door-locks, but not set me free. You happen to have the ability to bring me a sim of my girlfriend, who would no doubt get me to say things that my dad could use to brainwash me, like Cordelia.”
“That does sound plausible. I can’t prove that I’m working with you, not your dad. Sims can’t be sure that they aren’t being torqued by the simulator, and that makes them incapable of knowing we’re being manipulated. We’re heads in jars. But how do you know you’re not a sim? We scanned those mercs in the tunnels without their knowledge.”
“My dad isn’t that—” she almost said powerful, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to go there. “Sentimental.”
“He’s a dick. I’m really glad we found you. Half the camp thought you were dead. Gretyl insisted you’d been snatched. Someone thought they saw you going into the woods, and they found evidence of a scuffle there. No one could say whether it was you, but everyone else was accounted for or dead. When the only person missing is the kid of an asshole zotta, it’s not a stretch to imagine a snatch.”
Natalie wanted so, so much to believe this was Dis, a lifeline to outside, life beyond the confines of her lashed-down body. Of course she wanted to. If Dis was her father’s trick, he’d depend on it.
She had to piss. It had been building, now it was unbearable. She knew she was plumbed into the bed, must have pissed many times before regaining consciousness, but the thought of voluntarily releasing her bladder while tied to a bed was too much.
“Dis.” She was ashamed of the weakness in her voice. Why couldn’t she be strong, like Limpopo? Like Gretyl?
“What is it, Iceweasel?”
No one had called her that since she’d been snatched.
She lost control over her bladder. The piss coursed out, disappeared silently down the hose, a feeling of heat where the hose was taped to her inner thigh before diving down to the bed’s cistern. Even though she wasn’t soaked with urine, the sense of pissing herself was inescapable, and she lost control of her tears.
“Oh, Iceweasel. It’s okay to cry, darling. This is totally fucked up and shit. You have people who love you, who sent me to get you loose. I can’t cut your bonds, but I can do plenty else. I can see in every room of the prison wing. There’s three others in a break room. They’re monitoring the room, but I control those monitors. They’re not seeing or hearing a realtime feed, they’re getting a loop of sleeping. Your bed’s streaming real telemetry, but I’m swapping for stored data from your unconscious period. I’ve got their private messages, I can do adversarial stylometry to impersonate them in text and voice – we’ve done work on voices.”
“I can tell.” Natalie snuffled snot. It was all down her face. Tears ran into her ears and made them itch. The feeling was so ridiculous it made her smile a little.
“Great, isn’t it? It keeps on getting better to be a pure energy being.”
“You make it sound like you’re a ghost.”
“I like ‘pure energy being’ but I’m the only one. It’s better than ghost. Don’t get me started on ‘angel.’ Jesus fucking Christ.”
Natalie cried again. The hopeless world kept crashing in. She wanted to have hope, to believe in Dis. But she was a walkaway. Walkaways were supposed to confront brutal truths. The brutal truth of Dis was that it was more likely that her dad had a hot-shit hacker who’d run an instance to betray Natalie than it was that he’d forgotten to hire a new sysadmin to take over ops for his safe-room.
“Iceweasel, how about this? You don’t have to believe me. I won’t believe me, either. There’s no way for me to know if I’m who I think I am. The logical thing for us to do is to act like I can’t be trusted.”
“That’s weird.” Natalie snuffled snot and bore down on the problem.
“Weird isn’t the opposite of sensible. When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
“If you say so.”
“I say so. Uh, hold on. They’re coming in, time for a scheduled call. Close your eyes and pretend to be groggy, which won’t be a stretch. I’ll lurk. It’s best if we don’t let ’em know I’m here, but I will be, listening and recording. When they go, I’ll be here still, whatever you need to stay sane until we can bust you out.”
She couldn’t help but feel this was exactly what a traitorous Dis would say if she was trying to trick Natalie. But it felt good.
The door clunked twice, clicked, and swung open.