[viii]
LIMPOPO WAS VOLUNTEERING with the scanner crew when Jimmy showed up.
He didn’t look as cocky as the last time they’d met, with his stupid weapons and such. He’d had a hard walk, fetched up in Thetford with a limp and a head wound, in filthy overlapping thermal layers. He was gaunt, frostbite in three fingers and all his toes.
“Fancy meeting you here,” he said, when Limpopo came upon him in the great hall of the Thetford spacies, tended by a medic who listened to advice from someone far away who diagnosed Jimmy.
“You look bad,” she said.
“Could have been worse. We lost fifteen on the road from Ontario. It’s getting mean.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault. Actually, possibly it is your fault, you being a big beast in the world of scanning and sims.”
“I’m a walkaway. We don’t have big beasts.”
The medic smiled, then did something to Jimmy’s toes that made him suck air through his teeth – one missing – and squeeze his eyes.
“I think you’ll keep them,” she said. “Except maybe the left little toe.”
“Huzzah.” He rocked his jaw from side to side.
“Why are you here, Jimmy? Come to kick more people out of their homes?”
He shook his head. “It’s not like that. Whatever minor philosophical differences you and I had—”
It was textbook self-delusion, but Limpopo couldn’t see any reason to point it out.
“– I have more in common with you than with the assholes who came at us on the road. There’s only one thing they want: a world where they’re on top and everyone else isn’t.”
I’d love to know how you differentiate that from your philosophy. But I don’t guess you’d be able to explain it.
“This is clearly where the action is. This has them shit-scared, and scheming.”
“So you’ve come to help?”
“Look, there’s an angle, something I haven’t seen on the forums, an outcome that’s worse than anyone’s preparing for. I think it’s because people like you just don’t understand what backup really means.”
Backup. A perfect, perfectly seductive name for scan and sim. She was amazed she hadn’t heard it. As soon as she did, Limpopo just knew there must be thousands – millions – of people using the term. Once you conceived of the thing that made you you as data, aeons of data-handling anxiety kicked in. If you had data, it had to be backed up. Anything important that wasn’t backed up was good as lost. Data is haunted by Murphy. Do something irreplaceable and magnificent while out of network and backup range and you were begging for critical failure that nuked it all.
“Backup,” she said.
“Yes.” Jimmy grinned. He’d followed her thinking. “Of course. No one has thought it through to the logical end.”
“Which is?”
Despite his injuries and grubbiness, he enjoyed testing her, waiting to see if she’d spar. She knew there was no way to win a mental sparring match with Jimmy: victory would piss him off, loss would convince him he could walk all over her.
“Nice seeing you.” She turned to go, because walking away solved the Jimmy problem every time. If he ever figured that out, he might be dangerous.
“It means,” he said to her back, and she slowed a little, “anyone who can get your backup can find out everything there is to know about you, trick you into the worst betrayals, torture you for all eternity, and you can never walk away from it.”
“Shit.” She turned around.
“Anyone who talks about this gets treated as a paranoid nut. Sim people wave their hands and talk about crypto—”
“What’s wrong with crypto? If no one can decrypt your sim, then—”
“If no one can decrypt your sim, no one can run your sim. If the only repository for your pass-phrase is your own brain, then when you die—”
“I get it. You’d have to trust someone with your pass-phrase so they could retrieve your key and use it to decrypt your sim.”
“Your trusted third party would have to trust her trusted third party with her pass-phrase, and that person would need someone to trust, and there’d need to be some way to find out who had which pass-phrase because once you’re croaked the last thing we’d want was to realize we’d lost your keys. Can you fucking imagine – sorry about your immortal birthright, we forgot the password, derp derp derp.”
“Ouch.”
“There’s plenty of crypto weenies trying to figure this out, using shared secrets so to split the key into say, ten pieces such that any five can be used to unlock the file.”
“Sounds like a good idea.” She’d worked with shared secrets for the B&B’s various incarnations, establishing committees of trusted parties who could collectively institute sweeping changes in the codebase, but only once a quorum agreed.
“Yes but no. Good in the sense that you need to kidnap and torture a lot more people to unlock someone’s sim without permission, but from a complexity perspective it’s worse – you’re multiplying the number of interlocking relationships necessary to retrieve a sim by ten. As in: now you’ve got ten problems.”
“What’s the answer?”
“That’s what I’m worried about – the answer is going to be no answer. There’s urgency, it’s all going to blow up soon. Back in default, they’re treating Akron like an ISIS stronghold, like the fucking end-times. I’d be surprised if they didn’t nuke it.”
“Fallout.”
“They’ll blame us for it and set up a contract to treat radiation sickness with some zotta’s emergency services company. You don’t know what it’s like out there.”
“I know some things.”
“I guess you do. Sorry, I didn’t mean to, you know—”
“Mansplain.”
He looked awkward. She could tell he wished they’d had an argument. He was so easy to outmaneuver, because he couldn’t imagine the people around him weren’t trying to outmaneuver him.
“Limpopo, it’s been rough for me, the last couple years. After the B&B, uh—”
“Imploded.”
“I was angry for a long time. I was angry at you, though I knew it was my fault. Who else’s fault could it be? I chased you out.”
“You did worse than that.”
“I did worse than that. I threw you out.”
“No. You never did that.” You couldn’t do that.
“I couldn’t do that.” He wasn’t as dumb as he looked. “I took things from you because I thought it would make me strong, because I thought what you were doing was making people weak. But all that stuff, strong and weak—”
“Bullshit.”
“Entirely. Strong and weak isn’t what you do, it’s why you do it.” He paused. She was about to say something. “Also what you do. It’s not charity or noblesse oblige to treat people like they’re all equally worthy, even if they aren’t all equally ‘useful’ – whatever useful means.” He looked ready to cry. The medic stopped working on his toes and watched him intently. He looked at her, at Limpopo, sighed. Then he went on, which impressed Limpopo, because this confession would be all over Thetford by the time he’d found a place to sleep.
“I told myself I was making the world better. I thought there were ‘useful’ and ‘useless’ people and if you didn’t keep the useful people happy, the useless ones would starve. Of course I put myself in the useful group. I knew this important secret thing about useless and useful people, and if that’s not useful, what is? I told myself I was making more of everything for everyone. We just needed to let people who were worth the most do whatever they wanted. It was fucked up. I fucked up. That’s what I’m trying to say sorry for.”
“Your problem is you think ‘useless’ and ‘useful’ are properties of people instead of things people do. A person can perform usefulness, or anti-usefulness, depending on circumstances. Evolutionary winnowing didn’t somehow pass over the people who don’t contribute the way you want them to, leaving a backlog of natural selection for you to take care of. The reason everything about us is distributed on a normal curve, with a few weirdos way off in the long tails at the right and left and everyone else lumped together under the bulge is that we need people who get on with stuff, and a few fire-fighters who are kinked just the right way to sort out the weirdest shit happening around the edges. We assume someone who puts out a fire is a one-hundred-meter-tall superhero fated to save the universe, as opposed to someone who got lucky, once, and has been given lots more opportunities to get lucky since.”
“That’s what I’m trying to say, yeah. It’s hard to figure this shit. It twists my head that I only started disbelieving in useful and useless people when I proved to be useless. Then I had this revelation that the scale I’d judged people on – the scale I was failing on – was irrelevant. That’s one of those convenient things that reeks of bullshitting yourself.”
“I happen to agree the old scale was bullshit, so I’m giving you a pass.”
He winced as the medic did something to his toes. Two of them looked bad, black at the tips. Limpopo looked away, grimacing.
“Thanks,” he grunted, though whether he was talking to her or the medic, she couldn’t say.