[xii]
DIS FELT SWADDLED in cotton batting. Her thoughts veered toward panic or sorrow and she’d brace for the torrent of feeling, and it would fizzle. She’d tried anti-depressants as a kid, when her parents worried about her “moods.” She knew how it felt when her brain couldn’t make the chemicals that got her into that race-condition of things-are-bad-I-can’t-fix-them-that-makes-it-worse. That was a feeling like reality in retreat, colors bled out and fight gone from her limbs. They said it was a matter of “dialing in the dosage.” They said it was worse before advanced neurosensing that could continuously monitor her reactions. In practice, this meant spending the eighth grade reporting to the nurse’s office every hour to have a disposable electrode band wrapped around her forehead while she lay on a couch and let a machine draw blood. Her parents had to do it at home, including a session at 11:15 every night. They got so good at it that most nights they could take all their measurements without waking her. It helped that the drugs made her sleep like the dead.
A year ticked by. She got her first period, her first F (in math, always her best subject) and took her first beating, from a group of kids that included three girls who’d come to her birthday party the year before. They sensed her intolerable weakness. None of it left a mark. They told her the meds were working. She experienced vacant anxiety, a purely intellectual sense that things were terrible, but the terribleness didn’t matter. It was remote urgency. It made her feel sinister and unimportant.
The feeling was terrible but she didn’t feel terrible once she stopped the meds. Everyone had told her she musn’t do that, because cold turkey would cause problems. The lack of urgency she felt for everything extended to the prospect of going crazy from freelancing her own psychopharmacology.
She did go crazy. It was like the time she’d gone jumping in the surf and waded out too far, buffeted by waves that spun her around, knocked her over, without any way to predict when the next one would come, coming up sputtering and disoriented.
Without meds, she’d be overtaken by passions. Innocuous remarks made her furious, or set off tears. Jokes were convulsively funny or unforgivably offensive, sometimes both. She strove to hide it from her parents and teachers, but they noticed. She had to connive to stay off meds, hide them under her tongue and spit them out.
Bit by bit, she learned to surf the moods. She recognized the furies as phenomena separate from objective reality. They were real. She really felt them. They weren’t triggered by any real thing in the world where everyone else lived. They were private weather, hers to experience alone or share with others as she chose. She treasured her weather and harnessed her storms, turning into a dervish of productivity when the waves crested; using the troughs to retreat and work through troubling concepts.
She read the transcripts of those sessions when they’d woken her up inside a computer and she’d lost her mind. Reading through them, she sensed the crash of those storms. They’d blown terribly when her mind was untethered flesh.
She’d thought of storms as wet things, hormonal in origin. She’d mapped the storms to ebbs of mysterious fluids from her glands. But shorn of flesh hormones, the problems were worse. Ungovernable. She pondered this mystery, wondering if the discipline and nimbleness had been the wet part, the trained ability to conjure fluids that lubricated the dry, computational misfirings of her mind.
They’d stabilized her with her help, translating between her secret language of moods and the technical vocabulary of computation. She had no memory of those moments, only logs, but it was easy to imagine the desperate race to grind out coherent thoughts while waves of panic – she was dead, she was a parlor trick of code and wishful thinking – built to greater heights.
Afloat in seas of her own calming, she experienced unhurried urgency, the same contradictory feeling that things were alarming but she was not alarmed. It wasn’t a good feeling, but it didn’t make her feel bad, which was the problem.
Talking with Remote helped. Knowing there was someone else going through the same things helped, even though they never explicitly discussed it. Remote seemed so normal and together. That salved her. If that’s how normal and together Dis looked from the outside then she was probably holding it together too. Remote was a sort of mirror. What she saw in it was reassuring.
She helped with party preparations, kept track of the goings on in Thetford’s great hall, watched the weather, conversed with spacies and worked on cluster optimization and predictive modeling for the constraints they’d apply to each model in storage when they brought them up in their own sims. Working with CC’s sim was educational and scary. She’d envied CC his even keel, but in his digital afterlife, he was a mess. He was worse than she’d ever been. Walkaways all over the world collaborated with her.
She worried – without feeling worried – about her friends in the snow. There’d been no stable network connectivity for five hours. Last she’d heard, they’d departed from Dead Lake. They were now two hours overdue. The microwave masts outside the space-station sporadically caught distant threads of network signal, enough for the routers to start trading zone files and synchronizing clocks and getting the latest meteorology and frequency-hopping norms, only to fade off in an unrecoverable cascade of packet-loss and blown checksums.
Walkaway net was different from default’s. Its applications were designed for fault tolerance – built with the assumption the machine you connected to could disappear and reappear without warning, as drones, towers, wires and fibers failed, faded or fubared. It assumed it was being wiretapped, under permanent infowar conditions. It insisted on handshakes, signatures and signed nonces to root out man-in-the-middlers. When Dis went from Stanford to Walkaway U, the network had been the biggest culture shock. Slower in some ways, but without the ubiquitous warnings about copyright infringement, interminable clickthrough agreements, suspicious blackouts of “sensitive” resources when global protests spiked.
She lived on walkaway networks. She appreciated the subtle genius in its architectures. Sites that had became unreachable sprang back to life thanks to the questing tendrils of the network’s self-healing, restlessly seeking out new ways to bridge the parts that were atomized by entropy or connivance. The downside was that nothing was ever truly down, and anything unreachable warranted a reload. It didn’t work, but sometimes it did, often enough to keep trying. Dis hadn’t thought about B.F. Skinner since her undergrad days, but after the millionth retry to reach Seth, Tam and Gretyl, she looked up “intermittent reinforcement” in their locally cached wikip. That’s what it was: intermittent reinforcement. Give a pigeon a food pellet every time it presses a button and it’ll press it when it’s hungry. Change the lever’s algorithm so it randomly drops a pellet and the pigeon will peck and peck, as the pattern matching parts of its brain sought to figure out the trick of a reliable jackpot.
She was disconcerted to learn that being a disembodied consciousness didn’t immunize her from such a cheap cognitive trick. Not for the first time, she thought about tinkering with her parameters. Other Dises in other places had done that, under better controlled conditions, with some success. It was so unfair to be subject to this kind of cognitive frailty. Reload reload reload. In fact, reload, she was especially susceptible to it, reload, which was so unfair –
She drew up short. The big tower had contact with another tower, in the mountains, with line of sight to a fiber downlink, and data flowed. Nothing that reached her friends, but huge swaths of walkaway space came online. Cachers negotiated to opportunistically copy off great slices of it for local access, salting it away against the next electronic famine. All over the world, waystation machines with packets destined for Thetford knocked on its doors, seeking permission to hand off their payloads.
Amidst it was the news. It brought Dis up short. Every filter she had on the raw feeds was going fucking crazy.
It was Akron. They’d cheered Akron on as walkaways consolidated their position, using printed health care and food as a calling-card for their neighbors: die hard Akronites who couldn’t or wouldn’t vacate the dead city. They’d reveled in videos and casts of Akronites doing the unthinkable, establishing a permanent walkaway city, something you couldn’t walk away from, with permaculture farms and free-for-all white bikes and free schools where kids learned to teach each other and to be taught by other walkaway kids all over the world.
There’d been bad stuff. It was impossible to tell how much of that was propaganda. Akron had already been full of walkaways and semi-walkaways, throwing Communist parties and opening squats. It had been full of gangs and bad dope, pimps and scared people. Since Akron went walkaway, every murder and beat-down in Akron was top-of-feed news for every service in default, though violence and diseases hadn’t attracted attention in the ten years when Akron had been turning into Akron – even its bankruptcy and the appointment of a zotta “administrator” to replace the lame-duck mayor hadn’t rated particular mention. Akron was the fortieth American city to end up in that situation, and it wasn’t the biggest, or most violent, or most fucked up, so how was that news?
Default’s few voices of critical thinking pointed this out, pointed out Ohio had stopped keeping stats on the murder rate and overall mortality in Akron four years before, and back then, it had been five times higher than now, best anyone could figure.
When she saw a shit-ton of bad Akron news, she spacebarred it into ignoreland, but it kept popping up, and the headlines got snaggier and gnarlier and she couldn’t help herself, she read one. Then another. Then she watched videos the cachers had already pulled down and made local copies of, because every feed in Thetford was losing its mind over Akron.
Default had marched on Akron: the US Army and a ton of private “contractors” in the vanguard, riding mechas or ground-effect vehicles with drone outriders that continuously scanned for IEDs with lidar and millimeter-wave and backscatter, emblazoned with radiation trefoils in safety orange on their bellies, more to scare than to fulfill any safety remit.
They rode in to fight the Four Horsemen: pornographers, mafiosi, drug dealers and terrorists. Depending on the feed, their mission was to arrest high-profile Zetas who’d gone to ground in Akron; to rescue trafficked children from a pimp ring; to neutralize a Z-Word factory that was pumping out unprecedented quantities of the latest zombinol analog; or, of course, to capture domestic extremists who were working to establish an American Caliphate along with known terrorist cells in Michigan, Oregon, and Louisiana.
Whichever one they were fighting, they prepared for the worst. “Targeted” strikes took out twenty-two buildings in ten minutes, reducing them to rubble and showering the streets with lethal rains of falling stones. One of the buildings was a hospital, formerly derelict and since reopened by walkaways and allies, with a maternity ward and a palliative care ward where patients chose the manner of their deaths. The war of words about this building was especially heated – it was alleged to be a breeding ground for bio-agents (which walkaway nets insisted were vaxx printers that made ebola and H1N1 vaccine without licenses), a “murder clinic” and a “rogue surgery operation.” The default nets didn’t mention the maternity ward.
The boots-on-the-ground phase started before the dust settled, literally: pacifier bots that tazed anyone believed to be carrying a weapon or whose facial biometrics were a “sufficient” match for a “high-value target.” Once a bot zapped someone, it broadcast loud messages warning everyone to keep clear, then stood guard over the unconscious victim until a snatch-squad arrived by ground-effect or sky-hook.
The walkaway net in Akron suffered a cyberwar attack, first missiles that took out the fiber head-ends, then RF-tropic aerostats that homed in on wireless masts and blasted them with pulses of noisy RF. The RF noise-floor in the city limits rose to the point where all devices began to fail.
That was the push; then came the push-back. The walkaways and Akronites who’d assumed control of the city planned for this kind of shock/awe. They had bunkers, aerostat-seeking autonomous lasers, dark fiber backups that linked up to microwave relays far out of town, offline atrocity-seeking cameras that recorded footage automatically when the network went dark, crude HERF weapons that stored huge amounts of solar energy whenever the sun shone, ready to discharge it in a powerful whoomf the moment they sensed military spread-spectrum comms.
Once the word got out about Akron, there was online pushback, too. Walkaways all over the world battered at the comms and infrastructure of the contractors in the vanguard, the DHS, the DoD, the White House internal nets, the DNC’s backchannels, Seven Eyes chatter nets – the whole world of default super-rosa and sub-rosa connectivity. Walkaway backbones prioritized traffic out of Akron, auto-mirrored it across multiple channels.
This was all to script. For a decade, walkaway had been allied with monthly gezis that popped up in one country or another. They’d made a science of responding to authoritarian enclobberments, regrouping after every uprising to evolve new countermeasures and countercountermeasures against default’s endlessly perfected civil order maintenance routines.
The difference was these walkaways were getting the full treatment. Not that default hadn’t gone total war on walkaway before, but walkaway had always solved the problem by walking away. Default had produced an endless surplus of sacrifice zones, superfund sites, no-man’s-lands and dead cities for walkaways. To a first approximation, all blasted wastelands were fungible.
Staying put was not walkaway doctrine, but there were plenty of other people in the planet’s recent history who’d evinced an irrational, deep attachment to the real-estate where they’d most recently ground to a halt. The tactics were understood.
Every gezi ended the same. Clouds of tear gas, lack of food and medicine; mounting injured and mealymouthed promises of zottas lured everyone off the streets and into what was left of their homes. Insignificant concessions were made and everyone agreed something had been done and it was time to move on.
Everyone knew that wasn’t where these walkaways were headed. Even zottas. Especially zottas. The shock/awe phase was the most brutal ever, lethals and less-lethals mixed indiscriminately. Even the tamest default press was kept away due to fears of cooties and other bio-agents. Ohio’s governor suspended the state legislature until the “emergency” concluded.
It was nerve-wracking. Walkaway footage from Akron had a desperate vibe. Every face, even the brave ones, looked doomed. The brave ones were the worst.
Dis knew some people in Akron. There was a Dis in Akron, or had been. She’d recently synched with her twin and feared for her, which was irrational. The meat-people she knew had been backing up since the Akron project was declared. This was the most worrying thing. Walkaways stood their ground because they did not fear death. Though she’d never say it to anyone – not even another Dis instance – she thought of the Akronites as a death-cult. They were fearless suicides who’d been guaranteed an afterlife. Default feeds hinted this, without saying it, because official default position was that uploading – walkaway uploading, anyway – was smoke and mirrors. They were chatbots with idiosyncratic vocabularies, just convincing enough to trick gullible and desperate extremists who’d turned their back on everything.
Dis was grand-matron to these walkaways and everyone who thought death was another way of walking away from zottas and their demented ideas about wealth only ever mattering if you had more than everyone else. They were her spiritual children. She represented proof that death was the beginning, not the end. She’d never told anyone to take a backup and throw themselves into enemy cross-hairs. She hadn’t had to. Her existence was enough.
There must be so many Dises running in default’s cyberwar labs. That was how they thought. She’d be the ultimate captive. All it would take to torture her into compliance was a tweak to the parameters of her even-keeled lookaheads, so existential terror smashed her again and again, beneath its high waves, without drowning her. The knowledge of her legion of sisters being grotesquely tortured made her furious – without making her rage, thanks to the lookahead safeguards. She wondered if her tortured sisters experienced the intensity that she was missing, whether they secretly enjoyed it a tiny bit.
It was impossible to know who was “winning” in Akron. Like all gezis, it was a war of perception and a military conflict. Would default’s rank-and-file see just-desserts when Akron was smashed flat? Or would they see a default victory as a tormenting Goliath grinding Davids like them underfoot? Would guerrillas be seen as plucky Ewoks taking down Imperial Walkers, or as terrorists using IEDs to kill whey-faced American patriots? Default was media savvy. The only press with money to cover anything was underwritten by the same conglomerates that owned the contractors on the invaders’ vanguard.
Every gezi ended with mixed defeat. Every gezi sent more people to walkaway, convinced no reform would rescue default. Convinced people on top couldn’t contemplate a world where no one had to be poor to make them rich. Every gezi ended with great numbers of people scared into another season of submission, a thumb on their scales that overbalanced the risk of speaking out and made going along to get along tolerable.
What effect would Akron’s martyrs have? Would fence-sitters become furious with the slaughter and rush to the streets because they wanted no part of the system that did this? Would it terrorize them into sitting still, lest they join the dead? Would they be convinced that it was suicidal to oppose default, regardless of mystical beliefs in “the first days of a better nation” and electronic afterlife?
“Did you see this?” Limpopo paged her from the party room where preparations were nearly complete. It was hung with improvised bunting, retrofitted for thundering dance music and feasting from extruders that cycled through the delicacies of walkaway’s vast store of recipes.
“Akron? It’s terrible.”
She watched Limpopo through sensors – visible light, lidar, electromagnetic. Etcetera was with her, eyes glued to a screen he’d uncrumpled from his shirt-cuff and stuck onto the side of a beer keg. Etcetera held Limpopo’s hand. A pang/not-pang of loneliness visited Dis, a ghost-ache for physical sensation and the hand of a lover.
“Akron is worse than terrible.” During the storm, the party room filled up with people who’d worked on the machines, music, and food while the nets were down. Now the connectivity was flooding back, they’d returned to their screens. It was a weird hybrid of ancient and modern rhythms. Ancient people worked when the sun shone, slept when it sank, stayed inside when storms blew, and plowed when they cleared. Walkaway nets were environmentally disruptable, and nondeterministic networks, so they did the same: endlessly communicated and computed when networks were running, did chores when weather or the world blew the networks down.
Everyone in the party room was glued to a screen or an interface, some in small groups, some on their own. They flung feeds at each other, whispered excitedly, spooling messages for walkaways in Akron, Stay safe Stay brave You are in our hearts What they do to you they do to us We will never forget you.
“Wish I had your software controls.” Limpopo’s breath was ragged. There were more deaths in Akron, fresh revelations as a drone flew over a bomb site where mechas were shifting rubble, recovering bodies and parts of bodies. The first feed died when the drone was shot down. This attracted a flock of suicide drones that sacrificed themselves to capture and transmit whatever the powers of default did not want to be seen. More shots brought them down. High-altitude drones winged in, the feeds jerkier because they recorded from a greater distance, with not-quite-stabilized magnification. There were children in the rubble. Limpopo cried. Etcetera cried. Dis wanted to change their feed, show them the doxxings popping up in darknet pastebins, personal facts of the lives of the contractors and soldiers whose faces were tagged from the footage, open letters written to their mothers and fathers, spouses and children, asking how they could do this to their fellow human beings.
These doxxings were also from the gezi playbook. Sometimes they worked. Even when they didn’t, unexpected things happened. Kids left home, leaked their parents’ private documents implicating their superiors, publishing secret-above-secret rules of engagement with instructions to use lethals when cameras were off, to bury evidence, or implicate insurgents in atrocities. Sometimes parents disowned children who’d done zottas’ dirty work, publicly disavowing slaughter. It split families and communities, but it also brought new ones together. It was controversial because it implicated so many innocents and was a dirty trick, but it was okay with Dis. Even when she’d been alive, she’d been willing to break those eggs to make her omelet. As a dead person running on servers around the world, including several hostile to her and everything she believed in, she couldn’t work up a mouthful of virtual spit in sympathy for people who felt sad that Daddy was exposed as a war criminal.
Kersplebedeb quietly typed on a keyboard and muttered into a mic.
“We should be ready to go.” He put his arms around Etcetera’s and Limpopo’s shoulders. “There’ve been more attacks. Two in Ontario, three in PEI, a couple in northern BC, and Nunavut. Some were big and some small, but none of them expected it. A couple were stable, one in PEI was twenty years old, had a good relationship with the normals around them. It’s gone now, not even a crater. Scraped clean.”
Dis said, “Have you heard anything specific about Thetford? Is anything incoming?” She spoke out of Limpopo’s bracelet, turning herself up loud enough for Kersplebedeb. He blinked and absorbed the fact that she was there.
“Nothing,” he said. “There’s almost nothing in the air right now, so if something was coming, we wouldn’t see it. If something’s coming, the snow might have stalled it. I think we should be ready to go if and when. I never believed in the Big One, but this feels like a Medium One.”
“What’s the Big One?” Dis nearly leaped in to answer Etcetera, but she let Limpopo in.
“It’s first-generation walkaway stuff. The theory was default would decide we were too dangerous to exist and they’d stage a coordinated attack on all of us, all at once. Kill or arrest everyone, end the movement in one go. They’ve got the spook power to know who and where we all are, so the only thing that stops them is whim or lack of gonadal fortitude.”
Etcetera said, “I thought it was just me who worried about that.”
“It used to be hotly debated. We thought they’d wipe us out. Then they didn’t, and didn’t, and didn’t. We speculated, were they not willing to risk the good boys and girls of default deciding this ruthlessness couldn’t be abided, taking to the streets with pitchforks? Was it that they liked to have the goats and sheep self-sorted? Did they secretly slum and ogle flesh in the onsen and eat extruder-chow and drink coffium and play bohemian dropout? Were there too many zottas’ kids in walkaway, too much blue blood to be spilled in the Final Solution?”
“I hate Kremlinology,” Etcetera said. “It obsessed my parents. Second- and third-guessing what the real powers behind Anon Ops were and who pulled their strings and why.”
Kersplebedeb: “It’s not my favorite, either, but there’s a difference between obsessing over tea-leaves and trying to figure out if the next missile is headed your way. Let’s get supplies packed and stashed by the doors, vehicles checked and charged, make sure everyone’s got a suit.”
“We can’t object to that.” Limpopo got Etcetera’s screen down and stuffed it into a pocket. “Dis, can you help? Get the word out, throw up a git to track what’s done and what needs doing?”
“Already doing it.” Dis never stopped believing in the Big One. No one who’d worked on uploading and simulation had – it was the unspoken motivation behind the project, only way you could be sure zottas wouldn’t genocide is if they knew that you’d come back as immortal ghosts in the machine to haunt them to the ends of the earth.
Even as she did it, she worried about Akron, and wondered what was happening with Tam and Gretyl and Seth.