[ix]
THE PARTY WASN’T Pocahontas’s idea, but she took off with it. At first, Etcetera was horrified at the thought. He couldn’t imagine anything worth celebrating amid the death and anxiety. Iceweasel was disappeared and Gretyl was buried in secret projects. He was convinced everyone would be offended, from spacies to late arrivals to aviators to the B&B crew who mourned their dead, but as Pocahontas posted notices of the party’s progress to the spacies’ social hub, it was clear the only anxiety anyone felt about a party was that someone else might hate it.
Pocahontas was a force of nature. She’d been the first of their crew to figure out how to run the space-suit fabbers, made herself a gorgeous suit she wore on a series of epic, multi-day treks, establishing contact with nearby First Nations bands. Though they weren’t as political as she, none had any use for default and all were curious about the weird spacies who’d taken over Thetford, so many years after it was abandoned. Pocahontas had used the Thetford fab to print parts for a new space-suit fabber, stacking them outside a utility corridor, ready to be hauled to her new friends by anyone who could make a vehicle capable of the run. Gretyl was working on refurbing the engine of their cargo train, which limped into Thetford. They’d have scrapped it if there hadn’t been so many wounded who couldn’t finish the voyage on their own legs.
Gretyl was better than Etcetera had any right to expect. Seth told him what she’d done, and though she rarely heard from Dis – the sim was running on the safe-room’s own servers, to avoid the risk of discovery through mountains of traffic where none was expected – the terse messages made her stoic, if not cheerful. According to Dis, Iceweasel was sane and intact despite torture. She was made of indomitable steel. “If she’s not losing her shit, how could I?” Gretyl said, one morning, as Limpopo brought them coffium and fresh rolls.
“You going to sing?” Limpopo said. Etcetera looked sharply at her. Gretyl had a beautiful voice, torchy. Back in the ancient days of the B&B common-room, she’d passed evenings singing songs from her deep repertoire, accompanied by zero or more B&B musicians. A capella, she was astounding; with a band, she was transcendent. But she hadn’t sung since Iceweasel was taken from her.
“At the party?” Gretyl said.
“At the party.”
“Is there a band?” Etcetera thought she was looking for an out – I don’t think I could do it unaccompanied or we don’t have time to practice – but her eyes glinted –.
“The spacies have a couple of bands, but I don’t know if they’re any good.”
Pocahontas – who’d flitted through the common-space, directing people as they set up for the party – homed in on them, having followed this conversation on the hoof.
“There’s a good band and a so-so band,” she said.
“What kind of music?”
“The good band is loud and fast. The so-so band does folk stuff.”
“I’ll sing with both of them,” she said.
Pocahontas gave her hand a squeeze. “Done. Thanks.”
“You want some coffium?” Etcetera said. Watching Pocahontas dash around made him exhausted.
“I don’t drug.”
They all looked uncomfortable. Etcetera hadn’t known any First Nations people personally, but he knew there was stuff about booze and other substances. He shrugged. They were all walkaways, right? Man, woman, white, brown, First Nations or otherwise.
“Sorry,” Limpopo said. He wondered if he should have apologized, too. He felt stupid and anxious, and that meant it was something he should be paying attention to.
“No biggie. Your neurotransmitters are your own business.”
“What can we do to help?” Etcetera looked for a better subject.
Instantly: “Get the fab to Dead Lake,” she said. “They can’t come to the party without protective suits.”
“Ah,” Etcetera said. He should have known she’d say that.
“We’ll all get on it,” Limpopo said, and squeezed his hand, though whether it was sympathy or a reminder to live up to his promises, he couldn’t say. “Count on us.”
“I am,” she said, with the solemn simplicity that she had in endless supply. It killed the mood’s lightness, made them gravely committed to throwing a party of unparalleled fun. Pocahontas looked from face to face, smiled, and launched herself in the direction of another group.
Gretyl watched her go. “She’s amazing. A party.” She shook her head. “And now we’ve got to get those fab parts, what, seventy klicks?”
“Sorry.”
“Nothing to apologize for. It’s high time we got the cargo train running.” She drank her coffium. “Some of that stuff is wedged tight and won’t come out without a fight. We’ll hack it out. It’ll be tough in the suits.”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t be glum,” Limpopo said. “It’ll be fun to do hard work for a change.”
She was right. Back when they’d built the second B&B, this was a common fixture of their days – some big, hard technological challenge they’d have to solve together, downloading tutorials and tapping the global walkaway frequency to find someone who could get through the problem. Sometimes, they’d labor over a trivial technical problem for weeks, stumped, until, one day, something worked, and the experience would be sweeter for the bitterness of the struggle.
He drained his coffium and looked at the party preparations all around him, and remembered he was a walkaway. He was living the first days of a better nation, doing something that meant something. His existence was a feature and not a bug.
Limpopo smiled. She’d read his thoughts.
“Drink up,” she said to Gretyl. “Let’s get down to it.”
Etcetera felt the tension melt out of his back, replaced with warm purpose. Work needed doing, and he could help. What more could anyone ask for?
*
When Gretyl shucked her suit, she was a mass of aches that had not manifested when she was deep in work, hacking at the damaged carrier train with saws, blasting it with cutting torches, hammering at unyielding metal and polymers.
She stood by the airlock, smelling her stink. She groaned and put her forehead to the wall.
“You okay?” Tam looked genuinely, embarrassingly concerned. When Tam joined the Walkaway U crowd, Gretyl mothered her, helping her navigate the opaque waters of the academic enclave. After the attack, Gretyl watched with pride as Tam transformed into a dervish, ferrying people and supplies into the tunnels, risking her life, strong and inspiring.
Since she’d lost Iceweasel, Gretyl’s world had smashed to fragments. Even at the best of times she felt like a fractured vase that had been glued together by a cack-handed repairer, cracks on display for all to see. Damaged goods. Tam had flipped their script, trying to mother Gretyl in a way Gretyl hated, not least because she needed it.
“I’m okay.” Gretyl tried to starch her posture, paint on a smile. Working on the engine was hard, but it gave her a break from all-consuming fear for Iceweasel. The worst part about being mothered was her own pathetic need to be mothered.
“That’s good. Because honestly, you look like chiseled shit.”
“Thanks.”
“Someone had to tell you the truth, dude.” Tam slipped behind her. Her hands gripped Gretyl’s shoulders. “You’re tight as a tennis racket.” She squeezed experimentally, strong thumbs digging into Gretyl’s shoulders. Gretyl groaned. Now Tam’s hands were on her, she felt the tension, like a rubber-band pulled to the breaking point. Despite herself, she leaned into Tam, and Tam squeezed back. Gretyl groaned again.
“Come on, then.” Tam continued to knead. “Tell me where it hurts.” Gretyl heard the grin. Tam was enjoying this. Gretyl gave up. “What are you doing now?”
“Gonna find somewhere to sleep.” The spacies’ complex, crowded before they arrived, was now thronged, and it was a juggling act to find a free bed – or even a corner where bedding could be placed temporarily – in the evening. “We stopped for a late lunch and I was gonna sleep dinner. I mean skip dinner.”
“You’re in luck.” Tam worked the knots. “Seth and I found a place. It’s big.” She squeezed. “And comfy.”
Gretyl groaned. “Come on then.” Surrender felt good.
The room was big enough that Gretyl felt guilty. But it was a weird shape, with low ceilings in places, uneven flooring in others, the result of a weather event that buckled the bulkheads, introducing cracks whose temporary seals no one had made permanent.
It was lit with constellations of throwie lights, scattered in smears across the ceiling and walls, and there was a spacie-style adaptive sleep-surface, millions of sensor-embedded foam cells, like a living thing that cuddled and supported you according to an algorithm that second-guessed your circulation, writhing in a way that was disturbing and wonderful.
Seth was already lounging in his underpants, sipping lichen tequila from one of the glass bulbs that were everywhere in Thetford, though she hadn’t met the prolific glassblower.
He waved the bulb blearily and called out a greeting. Tam barked at him in mock drill sergeant to pull himself together and offer their guest hospitality. He climbed to his feet, found booze and another bulb – elongated like a teardrop, shot with swirls of cyanotic blue and rusty orange/red – and poured. She started to wave it off, then caught the smell and relented.
Fuck it. She took a burning sip, swirling it through her foul-tasting mouth, and letting it trickle down her dry throat.
“Hot towels.” Tam snapped her fingers. Seth groaned theatrically but pulled on drawstring pants and stepped out.
“You don’t need to—” Gretyl said.
“Oh yes we do.” Tam pinched her nose dramatically. Gretyl shrugged. She probably did stink – the B&B’s onsen was far behind, and the weeks underground after the bombing of Walkaway U had accustomed her to a baseline of BO that fulfilled every default stereotype of stinky walkaways.
Tam rifled through chests crammed into a crawlspace, consulting her interface, coming up with a pair of silk-like robes, chucking one to Gretyl. They kicked their dirty clothes into the sizable pile left by Seth, shrugged into the robes and collapsed into bed.
Seth wheeled in an insulated chest. He popped the lid, releasing fragrant steam. There were showers at the spacies’ compound, but swollen numbers had driven everyone to the wikis for alternatives from other walkaways and the towels were a winner. It wasn’t easy to bathe yourself with them, but that was a feature, not a bug, far as most people were concerned.
Seth flopped down between them. “Okay, I’m ready.”
Tam slugged him in the arm – Gretyl saw that she kept her middle knuckle raised, driving it straight into the meat of his bicep. “No. Way.”
He rubbed his arm. “Ow.”
“Yes,” she explained. “Ow. Want another?” She made a fist. Gretyl saw they were both trying to suppress grins. Young love.
“Okay, who’s first?”
“Guests first,” Tam said.
Gretyl wanted to object, but lying on the bed, swaddled in the soft robe, sapped her of her residual strength. Groaning – theatrically, this time – she shrugged out of the robe, feeling her skin goose-pimple as the recirculated air kissed it.
The first heavy, wet, fragrant towel made contact, draped across her back with a wet slap followed by a spreading heat that was like a languorous tongue, and then it was joined by another, wielded by Tam, across the backs of her legs. Tam rubbed along her sore, tight hamstrings. The four hands scrubbed at her through the heat, strumming her aching muscles, clever thumbs and grinding knuckles, elbows in the unyielding knots. Where the towels slipped, her wet skin shrank from the air currents.
All too soon, they told her to roll over, and they did her front, working her abdominal muscles, her thighs, her clenched jaw, her scalp. The towels were soaked with sage and pine. The smell suffused the room. She kept nodding off, luxuriating in attention, then waking as a knuckle caught a sore spot.
Then it was Tam’s turn. There were more hot towels in the crate. Seth found a thermostat interface and cranked up the heat. Gretyl dispensed with the robe, which made things easier as she worked the hot towels into Tam’s skinny legs and bony back. Seth brought more lichen-juice, and she spilled some on her fingers, and when she licked it off, she tasted the sage and pine. The flavor was incredible and she told them so. They dribbled booze over their fingers and licked away and everyone agreed and they also got looser and mellower. And sloppier.
By the time they moved onto Seth, the heat, moisture and booze made the room as swimmy as a Turkish bath. There were dry towels in a compartment with its own element. They came out warm and fluffy as kittens. Bundled up, they burrowed beneath the covers.
Gretyl marveled at the feeling of peace, the intimacy that was asexual and sensuous at the same time. It was child-like, a feeling from before sex, or maybe the feeling of someone very old, beyond sex. Everything was at peace.
So why was she crying?
The tears had slipped silently down her cheeks for some time. She noticed them because they were pooling in her ears and slipping down her neck. She’d once sliced her hand with a kitchen knife, and there’d been a moment when she’d stared at the pulsing blood, understood it, but not felt it, before the pain crashed on her, radioactively intense and thunderclap-sudden. She’d shouted in surprise – not at the wound, but at the sudden onset of pain.
It was the same now: the wound visible, the ache lagging it. She gulped, sobbed, then brayed, doubling over like she’d been punched in the stomach. The pain there was sickening. All her buried fear and sadness for her lover crashed down.
Seth figured it out first, wrapping her in his arms, murmuring shh-shh, rocking her. Tam was slower on the uptake, but she took Gretyl’s hands and squeezed them, saying that’s right, let it out. Gretyl was so far down her pain that she didn’t worry about being mothered by Tam.
The sorrow was obliterating. The siren-wail blotted out coherent thought. It abated to the point where she could hear her thoughts and first among them was terror that Iceweasel would never come back. Her father and family would turn her into a zotta.
The storm passed, floods of tears slowing to trickles. Her eyes stung and her guts ached. She disentangled herself and swung her legs over the bed and put her face in her hands.
“What are we doing?”
“You mean in general, or specifically, right here and now?” Seth said, and Gretyl felt Tam reach out and pinch him.
“I’m not being funny,” he said.
“You’re never funny,” Tam said. “That’s the point.”
“Ouch.”
Gretyl looked up, tugged her robe around her and stood to pace, promptly stubbing a toe on the cold, uneven floor. She yelped and sat back down, rubbing her toe.
“I have an answer, you know,” Seth said.
“To what?”
“What we’re doing,” he said.
Tam sighed. “Go ahead. If Gretyl doesn’t mind.”
She shook her head. She felt affection for these broken, sweet, loving people.
“When I was a kid and I’d hear about walkaways, they always seemed insanely optimistic to me. If they ever seriously threatened default, it would crush them. It was naïve – thinking default could peacefully co-exist with anything else. How could it? If the excuse for putting a clutch of rich assholes in charge of the world was that without them we’d starve, how could they allow people to live without their stern but loving leadership?
“I thought of myself as a realist. Reality had a well-known pessimistic bias, so that made me a pessimist. I liked the idea of walking away, but I was on the other side.”
Tam squeezed his hand. “Then you followed a hot rich girl into the woods and everything changed. I’ve heard this.”
“Not the important part, because I only figured it out when we got to Thetford.” He paused. Gretyl thought he was being dramatic, but he was gathering his thoughts, uncharacteristic vulnerability on his face in the dim light. She wanted to hear what he’d say next. Maybe he’d discovered something important.
“If your ship goes down in the middle of the open water, you don’t give up and sink. You tread water, clutch onto a spar, do something.”
He stopped, wrung his hands.
“Realistically speaking, if you’re in the middle of the sea, you’re a goner. But you tread water until you can’t kick another stroke. Not because you’re optimistic. If you polled ten random shipwreck victims treading water in open sea, every one would tell you they’re not optimistic.
“What they are is hopeful. Or at least not hope-empty. They don’t give up because that means death and living people can sometimes change their situations, while dead ones can’t change a fucking thing.
“I’ve never been lost at sea, but I think if your buddy was weaker than you, and you were holding him up, you’d kick just as hard, because you’d be hoping for both of you. Because giving up for someone else is even harder than giving up for you.
“Now I’m walkaway, I’ve been shot at and chased from my home, but I can’t feature going back to default, because default is the bottom of the sea and walkaway is a floating stick we can clutch. Default has no use for us except as a competition for other nonzottas, someone who’ll do someone else’s job if they get too uppity and demand to be treated as human beings instead of marginal costs. We are surplus to default’s requirements. If they could, they’d sink us.
“So what we’re doing, Gretyl, is exercising hope. It’s all you can do when the situation calls for pessimism. Most people who hope have their hopes dashed. That’s realism, but everyone whose hopes weren’t dashed started off by having hope. Hope’s the price of admission. It’s still a lotto with shitty odds, but at least it’s our lotto. Treading water in default thinking you might become a zotta is playing a lotto you can’t win, and whose winners – the zottas – get to keep winning at your expense because you keep playing. Hope’s what we’re doing. Performing hope, treading water in open ocean with no rescue in sight.”
“So, basically, ‘live as though it were the first days of the better nation?’” But Gretyl smiled when she said it.
“That kind of wry cynicism is my department, you know.”
“It’s fun being a dick.”
He grinned back. “It is, isn’t it?”
“So it’s hope. But—” She heaved a sigh.
Tam brought lichen tequila. She had a fleeting thought about how it was a bad habit to use alcohol to cope with distress, then drank from the bulb. It burned pleasurably.
“Iceweasel,” she said.
“Poor Iceweasel,” Tam said. “Have you heard from Dis?”
“No. I don’t want to break security protocol. Every time I call her, it raises the chances of her being discovered. She said she’d get in touch when things changed, when there was something I could do. But she hasn’t called.”
“Let’s call her. Fuck protocol. They didn’t discover her when she rooted their network, what more could one more network session do?”
“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 smartassing, 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 hi-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 bad-ass, 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 housenet, 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, but 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 brain-teaser 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.
“The upstream provider’s got to run intrusion detection. That’s basic opsec. It’s tolerant – didn’t go nuts when your dad brought in his team, but the more anomalous traffic we generate, the higher the likelihood it’ll fire an alarm at some ops center and generate a warning to Daddy’s security people and then—”
“I get it,” Iceweasel said. She drew a shuddering breath. Gretyl could hear how close to tears she was. Tears sprang in her eyes. “I’d be alone again, and the party would start for real. I don’t think Dad’s security knows what’s going on here. I know that dude. He runs a tighter ship than this. My dad brought in specialists, deprogrammers for rich girls who join the walkaway cult. Someone who’d insist on running his own show.”
“Pretty sure you’re right,” Remote said. “Fits available evidence. We can’t assume your dad would tell his security not to worry about alerts. Even if Boss Cop doesn’t know what your dad’s doing in his dungeon, he’s got to know that something’s going on.” She paused. “I wonder...”
“What?” Local said. Gretyl had a moment’s disorientation. She’d started to think of them as aspects of one person, which they were, but not in the sense that they both had the same knowledge. Remote could wonder something and Local couldn’t know what it was until Remote told her.
“Jacob Redwater’s not the baddest zotta, not even in the top tier, but he’s still rich and ruthless. I can’t imagine him giving up his little bolt hole without having another one. I just bet there’s another place like this, only 2.0—”
“Heard anyone discuss it? Seen any traffic?”
“Nope, but if it’s there, maybe that’s something we could use.”
“Push it onto the stack,” Local said, sounding irritated, which also made Gretyl’s head ache. She could get upset with herself. Why should that stop once there were multiple instances of herself? “Come back to it later.”
“They’re coming. Jacob and his security, that woman merc—”
Silence.
Tam took Gretyl’s hand. Gretyl hadn’t had a chance to say good-bye, to again tell Iceweasel that she loved her.