[xvii]
LIMPOPO WATCHED JIMMY fade. He’d lagged from the start, struggling with frostbitten toes in unwieldy snowshoes. He’d rallied when she took his pack and redistributed its contents among the group. Then he flagged again. She tapped his suit and opened a private channel.
“We’ll put you on a travois, tow you.”
“Don’t be stupid. You’re already towing those two fucking mercs and all this other shit. You don’t need to shlep me. Time’s wasting. I know where you’re headed. Just give me an extra battery and let me catch my breath, I’ll get to you in a day. If you move on, tell me where. I can look after myself.”
“We’re not the marines, but I don’t like leaving anyone behind. Those assholes are down the pit for now, but there’ll be more along and there’s safety in numbers.”
“No there isn’t.”
She shrugged. “There’s some safety in numbers. We’re not defenseless.”
“You’re also not particularly frightening.”
“We’ve scared someone.” She slipped his arm over her shoulders, took his weight. “Let’s have this argument while we walk, or we’ll get separated from the main group.”
“I’ve done really stupid things.” His voice was flat.
“Welcome to the human race.”
“What we did with the B&B—”
“That was a giant dick move, all right.”
“But the new one was even better, I hear.”
“It was. Gone now, of course.”
“Of course.”
“But the improvements got saved into the version-control. The next will be even better. Every complex ecosystem has parasites. Come on.” He’d slowed again, and his breath was rasping. Privately, Etcetera messaged to see if she needed help, and she pulled down a “go on, it’s okay” autoresponse with a flick of her eyes.
“I think I need a rest.”
“Let’s rest, then.” She dropped her pack, and helped him into the snow. He hissed in pain when she loosened his snowshoes.
“That bad?”
“It’s okay.”
“Don’t be an asshole.”
“It’s bad.”
“Better.”
She felt anxiety about the group getting away. She knew this was the right thing to do. If they couldn’t all make it together, they sure as shit wouldn’t make it separately.
“You know, I got recruited to turn traitor,” he said, after a long pause.
“How’d that go?”
“After the B&B collapsed – the original one, I mean. Guy met me on the road while I was heading for the US border. I thought I’d find these people who were bunkering with guns and canned goods, see if I couldn’t get them to bug in and save other people, instead of bugging out to save themselves. I’d heard about places where there were drug-runners’ tunnels you could slip through.
“I was on the road, three days. I’d set up a pop-shelter and was getting dinner on, scop out of a fab, when a woman turned up in my camp. Quiet as a ninja, dressed in tacticals, little side-arm I didn’t recognize on her hip. She invited herself over, squatted down next to my stove, warmed her hands. Looked me in the eye, said, ‘Jimmy, you seem like a smart guy.’ Which was funny. I’d fucked up on a colossal scale, taken something beautiful and turned it to shit by trying to impose my ideas on it.
“I get smartassy when I’m stinging, so I said something like ‘You should get out more, if I’m your idea of a smart guy.’
“She laughed and unclipped a squeeze flask. I smelled that it was good Scotch, Islay, smoky. She drank, passed it. It was good. ‘You had the right idea, but didn’t have a chance with that place. Too many fifth columnists working to undermine you. I was inside their network from day one, watching them closely, and I could show you chapter and verse how they fucked you. They say there are no leaders, but if you dig into it, it’s easy to see what Limpopo says, goes. She doesn’t give orders, but she sure as shit gets people to do what she wants. But you know that.’”
“What did they offer you?” Limpopo felt strangely flattered to learn she was subjected to this kind of scrutiny.
“Money at first, but I could tell she knew that wasn’t what I wanted. Then she offered me oppo research and support for getting back at you, which was the clincher for me.”
“You took her up on it?” This was beyond any confession she’d anticipated. She didn’t know whether to respect him for making it or smack him for his sins.
He laughed bitterly. “Are you fucking kidding me? You know the joke: ‘I’m here because I’m crazy, not because I’m an asshole.’ By the time the B&B collapsed under me – after getting into a fist-fight with a guy I thought was my best friend! – I figured out whatever problems I had were my own, especially since your new B&B was running fine a couple klicks down the road. It was an incontrovertible A/B split. The idea I would try it again, using this asshole merc’s intel to try and fuck you? I was an asshole, but at least I knew if it came down to a fight between this fucker and you, I’d be on your side.”
“I don’t fight, though.” She wondered if he was bullshitting her.
“You walk away.”
“Indeed.”
“You seriously, totally walk away.” He looked at the receding backs of the column, tried to lever himself up, grunted, sank down. “You’d better go on.”
“Fuck off.”
“Yeah, well.” He laughed. She peered through his visor. He had a lightyears-away look. “When you walked away from the B&B, I mean.” He laughed again. Tears rolled down his cheeks. “It was beautiful. I was so pissed at you then, felt like the world’s biggest asshole. You could not have ruined me more if you’d curb-stomped me. I never recovered.” Raspy breath. “Never recovered. I’d arrived with my gang, you saw them, boys who thought the sun shone out of my ass, completely bought into meritocracy, not just as a way of figuring out who got what, but as a way of solving all our problems.” Another faraway look.
“I don’t think you got that. My guys looked at the world like Plato, you know, The Republic. Every person has something he’s good at. You find those things and help those people get there and that makes everyone happy and productive and we’ll all be better. You don’t need to order people to do jobs they hate. Just use ranking to make sure that if you’re doing a job you’re no good at, everyone knows it, including you. You get a smaller share of the collective loot than you would if you were doing something you were better at.
“Once you get hold of this idea, you can turn it into math, model its game-theory, find its Nash equilibrium. It’s such a beautiful idea. It models perfectly. Under it, everyone is happier. Everyone gets nudged into doing the thing they’re best at, which is the best way to make everyone happy.
“When you walked away, when you didn’t even argue, you made it into bullshit. For weeks, we pretended it wasn’t. But you’d had a place where everyone took what they needed. You didn’t need to police it or give people tokens certifying they’d earned the right to be there. It just... worked.”
Limpopo adjusted her crouch in the snow, flopped onto her butt. Her calves ached from crouching. “Whoops!” She brushed the snow that showered from her snowshoes off her visor. “The stuff you’re describing, it’s the kind of thing people do in emergencies, when there’s rationing. It’s like the rules for a lifeboat captain, you know, barking orders to keep everyone in line so everyone gets out of it alive.”
“It’s funny: back when no one was sending tanks after me, I felt we were in a state of emergency. There was not enough to go around, at any moment we could be nuked or starving. Now I feel as soon as we find somewhere to stop, we’ll rebuild everything we’ve had and more. Like there’s no reason to ever turn anyone away.”
“Sounds like you got somewhere good.” She welled with sympathy for Jimmy, which was funny. Maybe not. She understood him better than he did. Under other circumstances, she could be him.
“I have. That’s weird, objectively, given where I am. But I’m backed up. I feel this incredible feeling, it’ll all be all right. We’re going to win, Limpopo.”
Someone trudged through the snow. Etcetera. She waved at him, blinked open a private chat. “It’s okay.”
“Good. Can I come over?”
“Course,” she said.
“He seems like a good guy,” Jimmy said.
“Glad you approve.”
“Didn’t mean it that way, but I do. He came back for you, which is what you’re supposed to do, if you’re looking out for people around you.”
“Like I came back for you.”
“Like you did. Not to rescue me. To take care of me because we’re part of the same thing.”
She bridged in Etcetera. “Jimmy, you’ve come a long way since we met, but you’re still coming along, if you don’t mind my saying. I came back to help you because helping people is what you do, whether or not they’re in your thing, because that’s the best world to live in.”
“First days of a better nation,” he said, with a little sarcasm.
“It’s only funny because it’s true,” Etcetera said, taking her hand.
“We make fun of it, but it’s the best way I know to live. I don’t always live up to it. You get a radar for it, if you practice. A Jiminy Cricket voice tells you if you make a bit of effort, you’ll feel better for it, know the world is a better place for you being in it.”
“I misspoke,” Jimmy said. She felt bad because they’d lectured him and the poor guy was about to lose his toes if he didn’t get firebombed first. But he hadn’t misspoken.
“It’s okay.”
Etcetera popped his visor, head wreathed in steam, rooted for a squeeziepouch of scop. “Want some? It’s spacie food, weird flavors. The rabbit is really good. For a cultured fungal slime.”
“You really sell it.” Limpopo remembered she had some shake-and-heat coffiums in her pack. She got those out and they sat around in the snow and ate, looking at each other’s bare faces while the wind did its best to blast off their skin. It rattled the branches. The sun was low on the horizon, a bloody plum running to overripe mush.
“We’d better get a move on,” Jimmy said.
“Good to go?”
“Good as I’ll ever be. Rest did me good. Food too.” He clicked his visor into place. “Company, too.”
She gave his shoulder a squeeze and helped get his feet into his snowshoes, taking care with the injured one. They got him to his feet, got shoed, and they set off after the column.
They moved slowly but well, at a steady clip. After a few minutes, Dis called. “You three okay?”
Limpopo said, “Just moving a little slower than the rest.”
“They’re a klick and a half ahead, almost at the cargo train. Gretyl says if they can get it moving, they’ll come back for you.”
“That’s nice of them. What’s going on there?”
“Oh,” Dis said. There was something funny going on. “Oh, well, it’s not good.”
“Shit.”
“Lots of them, all at once. Blew three airlocks simultaneously. They’re hup-hup-hupping around the hallways in nightscopes. They gassed the place, not sure what with, but they’re wearing breathers and skin protection.”
“What about you?”
“I’ve got my backups. Ready to wipe when and if. When. These kids aren’t playing.”
“Dis—” Etcetera’s voice cracked.
“Get used to it. This one’s for all the marbles. Immortality or bust.” Then: “Oh.”
“What’s going on, Dis?”
“They’re not happy at all that everyone’s gone. Smashing the crockery. They’re breaching the hull, a lot.”
“What about your cluster?”
“Underground. They have a couple dudes down in utility spaces but they’re trying to root everything and looking for tripwires. They’re not stupid. Making good progress. Maybe an hour?”
“And your power?”
“Independent backup. Shit, they’re doing the comm links. There, just emailed another diff. We probably won’t have much longer—”
Then it was silent.
“Fuckers,” Etcetera said, with feeling.
“First days of a better nation,” Jimmy said. “If you could see them now, what would you say to them?” His feet crunched irregularly through the snow. Limpopo could tell that he was stung by what she’d said.
“If they were trying to kill me, I’d say don’t shoot. I’m an idealist, not a kamikaze.”
“Fair point. What if you had them at a table?”
“I wouldn’t say anything. I’d offer them dinner. Or I’d just go about doing what I do. I’m an idealist, not a preacher.”
“I get it.”
“What made you walk away, Jimmy?”
Crunch, crunch. “It was debt at first. My parents went into deep hock to get me through high school, and I busted my ass with everyone else. I knew they were spending huge, but I didn’t think about what that meant until I was graduating and we started talking college. I knew that I wasn’t going to go away anywhere, we weren’t zottas, but everyone in my fancy school was going to go to do a roll-your-own, everyone thinking about their star course, the one they’d take from an Ivy or a Big Ten, cornerstone of their degree, lead their employment profiles when they graduated.
“I did it, too. I had this idea I’d go into materials engineering, because I’d liked my science classes okay, and there was this stupid app they made you wear for the last two years of school that was supposed to predict your optimal career. It got this huge push from the administration, like religion for them. They could only keep their charter if they ran a certain percentage of students through it and they followed its advice. So once you got your career picked by the thing, that was it. Every teacher and administrator knew their paychecks depended on you doing what it told you.
“It was called Career Wizard. I mean, fuck, right? Kind of name you get by running a thousand A/B splits until you’ve got something middle-of-the-road inoffensive. Graphics were pointy hats, wands. Spell-book with a wizardly finger paging through the index while it worked magick to find you the perfect job for life. Hardy har.
“Once it chose your career, it had lots of advice about how you get there. It was adamant I should take this course from the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, which sounded amazing, like I was going to hang out with Planck and Einstein and Gödel and dive through the universe’s navel and find its deepest secrets. Of course, hanging out with Max Planck is an elite experience. That one course was going to cost as much as everything else in my degree combined, plus a little more. An added fuck-you.
“I tried hard to find a way around that course, looked at every permutation of other courses, and Career Wizard kept gonging me, telling me without good old Max, I’d be wasting my time and money. No one would hire me. It had percentages, estimates of how much extra salary I’d command with one high-ticket course.
“My parents couldn’t afford it. They were maxed out on credit for my fancy high school. This was going to be my debt. I could get a loan. There were tons of lenders, and I could get a great package from Booz if I’d agreed to a six-year ‘internship’ when I was done.”
Etcetera snorted.
“I wasn’t that much of a sucker. Unpaid on-site internship in Saudi, living in Booz’s compound, drawing company credit to pay for shit in the company store that costs twenty ex what it cost back home – whether or not they give you a job afterward, they’ll get a cut of your paycheck until you’re dead.
“There were boards where we were trying to figure this out, guys my age about to commit to this mountain of debt, people in the middle of it, people who’d been through it and were doing internships, maybe even with jobs. It was hard to tell what was going on. There’s selection bias. No one who is happy with how things are going joins one of those boards. They exist for the sole purpose of airing grievances.
“The other thing is everyone who isn’t there to bitch is a paid astroturf shillbot, some dickweed running thirty sock puppets through ‘persona management’ apps to help them keep it straight. The discussion quality wasn’t super-great, but it sure was depressing. You know research says the best way to predict if something will make you happy is to ask someone – anyone – who’s already done it? Well, everyone I’d met who’d done it said it was slavery.
“I wasn’t the only one who noticed, but there was such a huge-ass, all-consuming sense that anyone who didn’t buy a ticket to the lottery was going to end up as dog-food.”
“I know that one,” Etcetera said.
“Not me,” Limpopo said. “I got shit-ass grades and my school sucked, had one of the worst uni admission rates in the country. Most of my teachers never noticed me, and the ones that did assumed I was a sub-moron.”
“No way,” Etcetera said.
“Way.” She’d made a point of acting stupid, so she wouldn’t explode into raw fury.
“I knew I was smart. I could do good shit. In grade twelve, I’d modded a fabber to output wicking textile, half the weight of standard stuff, twice as strong. I couldn’t sell it or post the makefile, because it violated a hundred patents, but I’d gotten top grades.
“Mom and Dad were all over the idea of me going to uni. They’d both gotten degrees and swore it had been worth it, though they would owe money until they died, and neither one had ever held a job for more than a couple years. I once overheard them talking about how fucked it would be if I didn’t get a good job because neither of them had a pension and they’d need me to feed them once they were too old to get another job after the next layoff.
“The pressure was crazy. On the boards, people were saying, hey you assholes, you keep bitching about how everything is fucked up and shit, and there you are, getting ready to play along with it like good debt-slaves. Everyone knows there’s an alternative.”
“That’d be us,” Etcetera said.
“That’d be you. No one wanted to say the word ‘walkaway’ because it was a superstition, say their names three times fast and the spies would target you for full-take lifelong surveillance. Anyone who knew walkaways were a thing couldn’t be trusted.”
“I don’t think it’s that we can’t be trusted.” Limpopo had night-vision on and everything was blue-green false-color, snow glowing like a green LED. “Obviously we can’t be trusted. But as a class, people who heard of walkaways are going to be a different risk from people who haven’t. Once you know there’s an alternative to default, there’s a chance you might walk away. It’s like crypto, how anyone who searches on how to use good crypto gets marked for surveillance retention. It’s not that knowing how to keep a secret from the cops and spooks makes you dangerous. It makes you different.”
“I don’t think that’s why they retain traffic for people who’ve googled crypto,” Jimmy said. “It’s because most people don’t use crypto. So some default-ass doofus sends you a message in cleartext about something sensitive. Then you send me an encrypted message about it – like, ‘there’s a guy who wants to go walkaway, where’s a good place to go that’s established?’ – and you send encrypted messages around to everyone you know and get details and send them to me and I send a non-encrypted message back to my dumb-ass friend. Anyone who’s observing this transaction can make inferences about what went on inside all those black-boxed crypto messages.”
“That’s probably true. The parallel still stands. Once you know walkaways exist, there’s a chance you’re helping walkaways, or getting ready to split from default or, worse yet, do something to bring it down. Or trying to find people to come with you. If someone disappears into walkaway, you can find all the people they talked with, figure out who’s the infection agent, who else is likely to be infected, who to target for ‘de-radicalization’ therapy, and who to psy-ops and isolate.”
“That’s what we figured, a big unspoken thing. Anyone who whispered ‘walkaway’ was shunned, either a provocateur or someone with a target on their back. It was the elephant in the room. So I asked quietly around to see who knew about crypto and anonymizers—”
“They’re definitely the gateway drug,” Limpopo said. “I got into it through crusty cypherpunks who’d try and get party kids to use better opsec, handing out bootable sticks at underground parties.”
Jimmy said, “Someone gave me one, but it wouldn’t work on the standalone machine we kept for diagnostics in the basement. Then someone I knew – stoner guy, always had the best shit – got me a connection to a dude who got me a little thing, disguised as a box of breath mints, with a false bottom with a little contact switch that would man-in-the-middle your network connections through an anonymizer.”
“After my time,” Limpopo said.
“Sounds slick,” Etcetera said.
“I guess so. But the breath-mints tin thing was a cheap disguise. It was printed shittily so after a week in my pocket, all the writing smudged. It looked like I was carrying around a piece of garbage.
“But it worked. Slow, but it worked. From there, I got jailbreaks for my interface surfaces so I could get online with a less sketchy connection – faster, too. Then I started reading up on walkaways, their boards, the FAQs, reports from people who’d gone walkaway.
“From this side of my history, I can see I was gone by the time I got that dumb breath-mints tin. It was just a matter of time. Back then, I agonized about it, felt like I was walking out on life itself. I’d never see my family again, I’d end up dead in a ditch.
“It was like that up to the moment I hit the road, taking my bike on the train to Ithaca and riding into the mountains, heading for a place where there was an established group. They were gone by the time I got there, but I met someone who’d lived with them, an old woman who didn’t seem quite... there... and she pointed me north, so I headed upstate. I found a different group, older people, ex-military and people whose pensions ran out. They were more paranoid than you guys, more American – the gun thing. But they made me welcome and didn’t laugh at my weird ideas about what was happening in walkaway land.
“They had basic fabs, could source feedstock from stuff around them – a lot of it was sunk carbon they sucked straight out of the air. There were about fifty of them. People came and went... slowly. Maybe one or two a month, in either direction.
“They’d found a way to stay still, on default’s periphery, without making much fuss. They kept their heads down, kept to themselves. They were walkaways because there was nothing for them in default – no rent money, no health care, no food. Their kids visited them sometimes, rendezvousing in the state parks on fake ‘camping trips’ that were the only way to hook up with grandma and grandpa without ending up in an ankle cuff. Some of them talked about finding some zotta who’d let them come and live on his land, be pet bohemians. There are lots of places like that. Walkaways make great fashion accessories.
“This bored my nuts off. I wasn’t the first young dude to rock up in their bohemian retirement village with my heart full of fire. One guy took me aside while I was trying to get their fab to output the parts for a more ambitious fab, kind of thing you use for heavy machinery. That was the project I’d set for myself. He tried to lay out the facts of life for me.
“‘Sonny, you have to understand, all we want is to be left alone. We don’t want everyone to drop out like us. We’re not proud of where we ended up. We want better for our kids and grandkids than we got. We did worse than our parents, and they did worse than their parents. All we want is to arrest that, make things better for them.
“‘By coming here, we make ourselves independent. We’re like the tribal elders in the north pole, who’d go out on ice floes when they couldn’t hunt anymore, getting out of the way and not being a burden on the productive ones.’
“He wasn’t dumb. Reminded me of my grandpa, who’d died when I was a kid. Cancer, he didn’t get it treated, opted to go fast with a pump button for pain, cremated and scattered to the wind, not one mark on the world, like he’d never lived. My grandpa – Zaidy Frank – wasn’t slow, but he’d never amounted to anything. He’d tried to do his best for Mom, tried to save a little to get her started, had borrowed to put her through school, worked two jobs most of his life. Never got forty whole hours a week unless it was rush-time and he was pulling eighty-hour weeks, spending most of the extra money on cabs to rush from one shift to another and to eat at company cafeterias because he couldn’t get home to pack breakfast, lunch and dinner.
“This guy wasn’t in bad physical shape, but he was seventy, wasn’t going to get any kind of job anywhere. He had been there for ten years. He liked working with his hands and checked me out on the fabs when I arrived, showed me their docs and buried expert menus. Almost a mentor, except a mentor is someone who leads and this guy couldn’t lead an expedition to the ice-cream store.
“We got into an argument. It started friendly, got heated. Whether not making trouble meant default would leave them alone. ‘Well, we’re not hurting anyone, we’re not trying to get welfare or insisting on Medicare or VA benefits or Social Security. We’re living off grid, staying out of the way.’ Just waiting to die and trying not to breathe too loudly in the meantime. ‘Why would they come after us? Why would they put us in jail, which costs them money, when they can just leave us?’
“I tried hard to get him to understand. To get him to see if they don’t push back when pushed, default will just know they can be pushed harder next time. Trying to get him to see the superfund site they squatted would someday be something that someone wanted, minerals or a right of way or just a view not blighted by used humans. If default understood there was no one who’d put up any kind of fight, they’d be first to go. Default wouldn’t even notice, it’d just send the bulldozers to plow them under.
“He didn’t believe me. Was patronizing about it. He’d been around the block, seen things. Recited a poem, ‘The old crow is getting slow, the young crow is not. The only thing the old crow knows that the young crow doesn’t know is where to go.’ Perfect self-serving bullshit, rationalizing the least-frightening action as the most prudent. There’s two ways of thinking about it: either the squeaky wheel gets the grease or the nail that stands up highest gets hammered.
“To be fair, he was tired, had a tiring run, was old and sore and slow and all he wanted was to be left alone.”
“You didn’t stay?” They were almost at the rise where they’d left the tractor. His limp was worse. He took a few steps, rested for a few breaths, took a few more. The pain must have been incredible, Limpopo knew, but he was lost in his story. She’d seen this on the road: conversation made distance vanish, especially the opportunity to open something difficult and meaningful. Something about talking while staring into the middle-distance created a confessional intimacy to rival post-coital cuddling.
“Kept working on that fab, having these increasingly passive-aggressive talks with my friend, until he made it clear that if I kept on doing what I was doing, everyone would hate my guts. They were working with a local zotta, the guy who technically owned the land, to get permission to stay, a kind of do-gooder gesture from him. They would be tame. Pets.
“So I walked away, found another place in New Hampshire, with enough guns to make that Ithaca bunch look tame. They were old, too – never expected to find so many old walkaways, but it makes sense, nothing left to lose. It’s gotta be clear there’s zilch chance of leveling up in default if you reach sixty-seven and you’ve never been anything but a temp.
“But they were tighter. More radical. They were into gamification, making systems that tracked and advertised performance. It really worked. People busted their asses to get on leaderboards. The tops didn’t get privileges outright, but if you were in the top decile and you thought an idea was right, it carried weight.
“I know you hate this, Limpopo, but one of the reasons I like it is it’s honest. When you talk, people listen, because you kick ass and bust your own ass to get shit done. When we do it your way, things are better than when we don’t. So the fact that no one says, ‘Hey, Limpopo is the big cheese and we do what she says,’ doesn’t make it not true, or even secret. It just makes the supposedly egalitarian basis of our lives bullshit.”
They hadn’t walked in some time. His breath was ragged. There was one more rise to crest, and they’d be at the tractor. He could ride and they could swap batteries. Limpopo’s shoulder ached from where his weight rested. She swallowed her irritability, knowing that it had to do with coldness, stress and exhaustion, not the offensiveness of what he’d just said. She looked at Etcetera, he looked back, telemetry from his face transmitted to her suit so that she could see his expression in night-vision false-color. He was handsome, her lover and best-ish friend. Compassionate, smart without being judgmental, which is all she’d ever aspired to. He had that inquisitive, quizzical expression at the weirdest times, like when he was coming, or now, in freezing dark.
“Jimmy—” she started and Etcetera lunged at her and slammed her to the ground, taking Jimmy down with her. Etcetera’s whole weight – familiar, yet alarming – was on top of her and he was screaming something, broadcasting through his suit’s speakers as well as through the intercom: “Don’t shoot!”
She craned her neck, saw the pair of white-glowing figures pointing weapons. The guns had flared, bell-like muzzles. They impassively pointed them at her and everything in her suit stopped working at once. There was a stutter of analytic infographics from Etcetera’s suit beside her as it attempted emergency power-on-self-test, and then it stopped.
Inside the suit it was dark, cold, and lonely. There was a scrape as Etcetera moved above her, a suit-on-suit rasp, loud in contrast to the terrible stillness. She fancied she felt or saw a foot in the snow, moving on snowshoes similar to hers.
Then there was another rasp and Etcetera’s weight lifted off with rough sliding motion. She rolled to see him being jerked upright, moving weakly in the grasp of a person who had snapped his wrists together strapping and bonding a handle to the scruff of his suit and yanked him upright. Their suits must have had power-assists, which was something the Thetford crew did for work gangs, but never for long walks, because for those you wanted your power for heat, not playing superman.
Her visor failed-safe transparent. Her eyes adjusted to moonlight. She saw the other yank up Jimmy, who thrashed weakly and got a hard shake for his trouble. He was tossed to one side like a ragdoll, skidding face first in snow. She lost track of him as white-gloved hands descended and hauled her up. Her attacker’s suit had no visible faceplate, just a smooth expanse of white.
One hand held her aloft by an armpit, sore and alarming. The other hand probed her head, found the manual release for her visor, tugged it, scrape of suit-on-suit conducting through the helmet, and then a whoosh of cold air as the visor popped open violently (the manual catch was designed to free suffocating people, had a powerful spring in it). The sudden motion startled her captor as much as it did her and he – a he because otherwise her tits were crushed by her armor – fumbled her and nearly dropped her and she had the presence of mind to squirm and break for it. He casually backhanded her face with his glove – a gauntlet made of something blade-stopping whose external layers had chilled to iciness, so cold it felt like nothing at all, numbing as it made contact, taking away some of her humid skin with it – and she saw stars.
She looked at the blank faceplate, face aching, cold air making her eyes and nose water. She spat and hit it dead center, spit steaming as it froze. The head cocked. She sensed this person was conversing with the other who held thrashing Etcetera.
The other shouldered Etcetera in an easy fireman’s carry and walked to Jimmy, flipped him over, opened the faceplate, considered him, then, calmly, unholstered a knife and slashed Jimmy’s throat, leaning back to avoid the fountain of steaming black moonlit blood, not quick enough. The armored suit steamed too as the murderer turned back to the one holding her. There was another moment of inaudible radio chatter.
The murderer swung Etcetera around from the fireman’s carry, grabbed him under the armpit, held him at arm’s length, probed his suit for the visor-release, and Limpopo screamed, the words tumbled out, “No, no, not him, too! Tell me what you want and you can have it, but not him, please—”
The impassive, spit-flecked face cocked its head the other way, listening to more inaudible talk. Etcetera talked, too, being maddeningly calm, the way he could be, trying to explain to the murderer – holding that knife again – this wasn’t necessary, they’d be cooperative prisoners, they had nothing to gain by running now their suits were nearly out of power and –
“NO!” she screamed as the murderer raised its knife hand. Weeping, she beat the hand holding her like an iron bar. She had hysterical strength now, she actually managed to slip a little, but the one holding her just shifted his grip and squeezed so hard she felt a muscle give way through the suit. She screamed again, out of words, the knife flashed –
This time, the murderer didn’t bother to dodge the jet of blood, just dropped Etcetera face first, handsome face in the snow, precious, hot blood melting the snow beneath him. She stopped screaming as a numbness, colder than the air or the cold glove, washed over her. He was murdered. Jimmy was murdered.
The one holding her had a knife on his belt. Any moment, it would be unlimbered and find its way to her throat.
She thought of NPC jihadis in the games her father binge-played while she was growing up, facing execution by brave player-character soldiers and closing their eyes and saying “Allah akhbar,” God is the greatest. She suddenly realized she’d always sympathized with them. Not because of what they did, which was inevitably orcishly monstrous in the games, but because of their fatalistic bravery, their willingness to go to their deaths with praise for their cause on their lips.
“We are all worth something,” she said. “Zottas are not worth more than the rest of us. Self-deception makes us into monsters. Selfishness is an excuse to bury your empathy. People are basically good. Live as though it was the first days of a better—”
The murderer tramped over to her and joined her captor, listening to her babble. They were talking, deciding how much of this shit to listen to before they did her. The one holding her tipped her in the direction of the murderer, as if offering her up. She didn’t let herself close her eyes.
“I love you, Etcetera. I love you, Gretyl. I love you, Iceweasel. I love you, Jimmy—”
The murderer’s hand dipped to his belt. She saw the knife in his hand, glinting in the moonlight for a moment before her brain got the message from her eyes that it wasn’t a knife, it was something else. Blunt and small, coming for the exposed, frozen skin of her face. It touched her, just brushed her really, and –
She couldn’t remember what happened next. She had a memory of a memory of it, part reconstruction and part traumatized flash-pop moments. The thing brushed her face and her limbs went rigid as her mind strobed in a stutter-series of brutal shocks. Her breath froze in her lungs, her ears popped, her bladder cut loose.
She fought her lungs for breath, aching brain sending desperate demands for oxygen. Her lungs were offline, whole autonomic nervous system closed for business. Black spots danced before her eyes. A vignette closed around her view of the quizzically tilted featureless white mask. Her lungs startled back into service and gasped a huge gulp of air so cold they seized again in an asthmatic spasm. She had an instant to think fuck, no and the blank-faced torturer tilted his head in the other direction and brought the nasty little device up again and brushed her lips with it. Her mouth snapped open and shut so hard she felt one of her teeth crack and a fragment of bone land on her tongue. It slid down her throat as she jerked her head back, spasming.
During this spasm, the one holding her up clicked her visor down and picked her up in a fireman’s carry, like the one his companion used on Etcetera before killing him, and caught her flailing legs with one arm and her neck with the other, and the two tramped off a way.
She didn’t quite black out, but she was weak as a kitten and barely able to think as they stepped off the road, into the woods where they’d stashed their skidoos. Her captor dropped her on a travois that trailed behind one and bungeed her down, impersonally immobilizing her head in a nest of rubber bladders he inflated with the touch of a button. They squeezed her suit like a sphygmomanometer until it was firmly anchored.
She felt engines start through vibrations conducted along the travois’s frame, then the night sky and the skeletal branches of the trees blurred as she was kidnapped. Gradually, the batteries in her suit ran down, and it got very cold.