[ii]
THE ONSEN ROSE, brick by brick. Things got going when some of its crew fabbed construction mechas, which, of course, the boys wanted to pilot. The mechas ran automatically, and had fail-safes. Everyone agreed the boys were good at them, and, unlike adults, never bored of repetitive manual tasks, provided they got to pilot robots while they did it.
At first, they insisted the boys have nearby adult co-pilots holding dead-man’s switches, but there were no adults with the stamina to keep up with the boys’ drive to build. Also, the onsen was going up fast as it was thanks to their contribution. It would have been a dick move to slow them down.
“Parenting,” Iceweasel pronounced, “is the art of getting out of the way of your kids’ development.” That settled it.
Besides, it gave them more time together than they’d had since Stan was born.
It was a second honeymoon, spent in the heady first days of a – very small – new nation, former prisoners and their families adding more each day, powdering the steel bars of the jails for fabber feedstock, pumping out support struts, spun for minimum weight/materials, structural versions of the bikes they’d ridden, but with more fail-safes. Hoa and friends came for a three-day stay, cycling on more of the same. They found a group of excited ex-cons who wanted to know how the weird bikes worked. Now there were three workshops making variations on the theme. It was getting to the point where serious arguments were brewing about bicycle/pedestrian etiquette.
Gretyl had forgot how energizing revolutionary life was. Back in Gary, they were set in routine, the kind of thing you have to do if you’re raising kids and keeping some life for yourself. Here, no two days were alike. Every day brought new challenges, new solutions. It had been years since Gretyl was part of a place where there were serious arguments on the message boards. Here they raged, even erupting into fist-fights, cooled out by peacemakers who rose to the challenge.
Just as she was getting pleased with it all –
“Gretyl.” The way Iceweasel said it froze her. She’d heard Iceweasel sad, afraid, even panicked. But never had she heard that note in her wife’s voice.
“What?” Gretyl waved her interface surfaces clear, flicked her wrists to shake off the tasks she’d queued. Their shelter felt cramped, not cozy.
Iceweasel was sweating. Her eyes were wide. Gretyl felt her heart pick up the pace.
Another woman stepped through the doorway. She was...coiled. Not very tall, hair cut short and stylish, face all planes, maybe Slavic. Her posture was like a cat about to pounce. Gretyl couldn’t guess her age: older than Iceweasel, but in such excellent physical shape it was impossible to say by how much. She had small, square teeth, which she displayed in a quick smile. Gretyl knew who she had to be.
“You’d be Nadie?”
Nadie nodded minutely. “Gretyl.” She extended a hand. Dry. Strong. Callused. Perfect manicure, dun-colored polish, blunt tips.
Gretyl looked from Iceweasel to Nadie.
“How bad?”
“Limpopo is bringing the boys. Nadie has a helicopter.”
“A helicopter.”
Iceweasel’s hands shook. Gretyl wanted to take them, but she was irrationally, powerfully angry with her wife. This was the other part of being a professional revolutionary: people around you died, all the time. Now her boys, her children, who had the power to make her ache with a force that radiated from the pit of her stomach to the furthest tips of her extremities, just by looking over their shoulders at her with unclouded eyes and sweet mouths, were in the path of unimaginable force. There would be guns and worse. The videos from Akron ran all the time, quick animations dropped into message boards to make cheap points about the brutality of the outside world.
“How long?”
“Not long,” Nadie said. “There were long arguments, thankfully. Gave me time to get here. But now they’ve decided, they’re moving.”
“Why won’t they shoot down your helicopter?” Gretyl asked. Her heart thundered.
“Because it’s my helicopter,” Nadie said. She tilted her head. “Zotta.”
“Right.”
Iceweasel’s hands were fists. There came the welcome sound of boys’ voices and the stamp of machinery. Gretyl didn’t bother with the door. She kicked through the photo-reactive film wall, splintering the cool dark of the interior with a spray of sunlight.
The boys were each piloting mechas. Limpopo, Seth and Tam were riding on them, standing on the robots’ shoulders, clinging to the handles on their heads. The boys whooped as they pushed the machines as fast as they’d go, apparently under orders not to worry about what they trashed. The mechas’ arms flailed ahead of them, smashing tents and yurts out of the way.
Iceweasel and Nadie joined her, coming through the door. Gretyl saw Nadie assess the group, minutely shake her head.
“We won’t all fit in your helicopter, will we?”
She’d spoken to Nadie. Iceweasel looked at her sharply. “Gretyl, don’t be an asshole—” Gretyl knew that one. It went like this: I fucked up, now everything you say will remind me of that and make me furious. She knew it. Didn’t have time for it. She ignored her.
“Not enough,” Nadie said.
“How many?”
“I came to bring you four.”
Gretyl recognized evasion. “How many do you have room for, though?”
Limpopo dismounted, helped the boys while the rest climbed down. Gretyl spared them a glance, made sure they were dressed, had sun-hats. “Get water,” she said to Iceweasel. Air, clothes, water, food. Walkaway triage. “Food.” To Nadie: “How many?”
“I came for four.”
Motherhood had made a coward of her. She was ashamed, because she couldn’t say, If our friends don’t go, we don’t go. It wasn’t her life on the line anymore.
“Take us all.” She tried to mean it.
Iceweasel was back, yanking compression straps on their biggest backpack, misshapen with whatever she’d thrown into it.
“How many?”
Nadie gave her a perfectly unreadable look, looked back to Gretyl. “Could you choose?”
“I’d rather explain choosing to my kids than explain why there were empty seats next to them when people started dying.”
“Would it make a difference if I told you they were coming in nonlethal?”
“Like Akron?”
“Not like Akron.” They had an audience crowded around. Whatever they saw in their body-language kept them quiet. “Exactly not like Akron. Akron made martyrs. It hurt them all over the world. They’re coming in nonlethal, as police, to restore order, to investigate murders.”
“What murders?” Limpopo said. She was stooped, had a tremor, but asserted herself with a tone that stood two meters fifty and cut hard.
Nadie shook her head. “No time.” She looked at them. “I can take, uh, one more.”
They looked at each other. Gretyl said, “She has a helicopter.”
They looked at each other again.
“I’ll stay,” Gretyl said. Iceweasel shot her a look of shock and sorrow. Gretyl gave her a look that said she would not entertain argument. It didn’t get much use in their relationship. It meant something.
Limpopo said, “This is my home. I’ll bear witness. Die, if it comes to that.”
Etcetera said something soft from her collarbones, pitched for her hearing. A small smile touched her lips. She caressed the speaker.
“You can’t stay,” Iceweasel said. Stan started to cry, such a rarity that Jake bawled too. Gretyl hefted him onto one hip and let him bury his face in her throat. Gretyl looked at Limpopo’s face. She was struck by how different it was, how much the years in prison hadn’t just aged her, but changed her. Before, Gretyl had been struck by the pains Limpopo took not to appear to give orders or hint at having authority. Now, she was pure alpha, radiating unquestionable dominance.
“I’m not leaving,” Limpopo said with unshakable self-assurance.
It was Seth and Tam’s turn. They looked from Iceweasel to Gretyl. “Gretyl,” Seth said. “You’re a mother, you can’t—”
“I can.” She swallowed the lump in her throat. “I will. There’s some things you can’t run from.” She thought of her grad student and what they’d gone through. “I want my kids safe, but our family has no more right to be intact than anyone’s.” She wasn’t making sense, not even to herself. “I’ve done a lot of walking away.” She shrugged. “I’m going to stay.”
It might have gone on, except for Nadie. She cocked her head, listened to something in her cochlea, discreetly wiggled her fingers, narrowed her eyes. “We’re going.” She held out her hands to take Stan from Gretyl. Gretyl held him and kissed him and blinked hard to keep the tears back. She did the same to Jake. She consciously committed the boys’ smell to her memory, telling herself that she would never forget the smell and faces and voices of her beloved sons. Then she took her wife into her arms and held Iceweasel with an embrace that stretched back through the ages to their first rough, furtive groping, through the years of love and companionship, the hardships and absences, the reunions and the fights and reconciliations. It took everything she had and everything she didn’t even know she had not to cry, especially as she felt Iceweasel’s tears on her own cheeks, salty and as familiar as her own.
Nadie made an urgent sound. “Take-off in seven minutes. We’ll have to run.” She ran, Stan on her hip. Iceweasel scooped their other son and ran after her and Seth and Tam gave her a helpless look and ran too.
Then it was her and Limpopo.
“Do you want to see if there’s anything in the shelter you want to save?”
Gretyl, moving in a numb dream, went back into the shelter, prodded their bedding and scattered possessions. There were three blankets, two small and one large. The small ones smelled like the boys, the big one like Iceweasel. She took them in her arms. Jake’s stuffed mouse, Mousey, fell out of his blanket. She picked him up by his worn, chewed paw. He stared at her with beady eyes as she tucked him back into the blankets.
“You can put them with my stuff,” Limpopo said.
They walked at a fast clip to the prison. Limpopo was distracted, stumbling as she walked and talked into her interface and texted at the same time. Sometimes, she’d ask Etcetera to send a message. By the time they reached the sprawling camp at the prison gates, it was semi-panic as people raced inside the gates or away from the prisons altogether, carrying bundles on their backs. Children cried, but apart from that, it was very quiet. Clipped, tight voices, many in that odd pitch intended for interface mics, not human ears.
“Inside,” Limpopo said. Gretyl heard a helicopter rotor, far off, brought on the breeze, getting quieter as it flew away. She stopped in her tracks and brought her hands to her face. She really sobbed. Limpopo led her by the elbow, whispering it was okay, her family was safe. They had to move.
Gretyl let herself be led. Her mind had split, one fraction was overwhelmed with sorrow and self-recrimination. The other part – the part that made that decision – racing through strategy and tactics for whatever was coming. Nadie said the coming forces wouldn’t make martyrs of them, they were coming to show this was fighting crime, not fighting war. Not fighting for the existence of a society whose end was coming.
Walkaways had something the default side didn’t have: except for a few children, every walkaway had been default, once. Almost no one in default – and no one whom anyone listened to, period – had ever walked away. Gretyl found it easy to superimpose the default view on situations.
They would be perversely cheered by a fight, by prisoners and their supporters – criminals-once-removed – brawling and being gassed into submission and stacked like cord-wood.
If they fought back, it might be a massacre, but they wouldn’t be martyrs. They’d be ISIS, ideology-crazed monsters to be put down with whatever regrettable force was necessary.
All this while Gretyl still sobbed, each part of her observing the other with perverse fascination, wondering which one was the real Gretyl.
*
The boys’ prison attracted the hardcore networking freaks. They sent runners to the women’s prison asking for anyone with network experience to ride the faders on the routing algorithms that would rebalance their network infrastructure as parts of it were knocked out. Gretyl and Limpopo looked at one another.
“My place is here—” Limpopo began. One of her friends – the woman who’d shown them Limpopo’s bunk, whose name Gretyl couldn’t place amid the tense emotion – made a raspberry.
“Don’t be an idiot. You’re not our grandma, you’re just another con. We don’t need you here to look after us. Do your thing. Everyone knows you’re hot shit with programming and ops. Keeping our feeds running will do more to keep us strong than sticking your skinny old body between us and hired goons.”
Limpopo faked a punch, gave her a quick hug and a peck on the cheek and they were off.
“Here’s what I’m thinking.” They jog-trotted towards the men’s prison. “This place has more surveillance than anywhere you’ve ever been, by a factor of a hundred. Every centimeter is recorded all the time. Those feeds go into a data center that applies heuristics that ranks them so the guards can get it packaged as an infographic.”
Etcetera said, “You could package up an atrocity-feed. The worst stuff they do, pulled into a single feed that gets slicked together like a drama?”
“The idea is to prevent atrocities,” Gretyl said. “Nadie said they didn’t want martyrs, another Akron.”
They reached the gates as drones swarmed out of the skies, seeming to dive-bomb the prisons’ roofs.
“Uh-oh,” Gretyl said. Limpopo listened to a feed.
“No,” she said, “that was on purpose. They’re keeping a skeleton crew of aerial routers, enough for signals and telemetry, and landing the rest in Faraday cages until the first E.M.P. It’s a standard tactic, they say they used it in Nigeria, which makes no sense to me.”
“It was huge,” Gretyl said, “but they must have blocked it. Started with those floating cities off Lagos. Cut loose from the mainland in a walkaway uprising, literally, lost power and plumbing, didn’t have enough onboard to stay stable. Hired mercenaries from the subcontinent to pacify Lagos. The walkaways skunked them, kept their routers in boxes and released them in short bursts, mingling with the mercs’ drones so they’d have to pulse their own birds to get at the walkaways’. The feeds hardly bobbled. Made the mercs look like assholes.”
They arrived at an IT ops room in a third sub-basement. A young boy, no more than fourteen, gave them an enthusiastic tour of the ops center’s features – armored conduit joining it to hard-line fiber links and in-building conduit, backup batteries –
“It’s got its own air supply?” Gretyl said.
The boy shrugged. He was skinny, with a small afro and long arms and fingers, a face full of tilt-eyed mischief. “Every block’s got bulkheads they can bring down to just gas one little part of things. Cheap and effective, so long as your team’s got masks.” That explained all the kids in gas masks on the way in – the women’s prison had hardly any. They’d made their own from micropore kerchiefs and goggles. They’d passed a small, efficient assembly line on the way out.
It was a surreal vantage-point to witness the Battle of the TransCanada Prisons. They used private security on the front line, not mercs exactly. These were outsource cops, for-hire guys in uniform that cities with private police forces used – and other cities used to break police unions whenever they got uppity. Men and women in awesome body armor, stuff that looked like Hugo Boss from a cyberpunk revival, faceless and shielded, each an “army of one” with exoskeletons, scary burp-weapons. There were one hundred of them, with drone support and fast nonlethal foot-pursuit bots, headless cheetahs and dogs from alloy and soft solenoids, just enough smarts to run a target down and bear her to the ground, clobber her if she tried to get up before a signed all-clear.
The part of Gretyl that worried about her family receded as she and Limpopo fed the particulars to the global walkaway audience, wikiing countermeasures for every plan of attack they could conceive. Gretyl remembered her earlier thought about all walkaways having been defaults but not vice versa, wondered what the default counterintelligence operatives who monitored this made of it. They’d know this was what walkaways did, work in the open, but they also knew that when they fought each other, they used elaborate fake-outs. Would they be able to believe walkaways were just letting it all hang out, where enemies could see it?
The enemy forces formed a perimeter around the prison complex. The cameras tracked the drones’ overflight patterns, millimeter-wave, infra red, and backscatter.
The formalities: “All persons on these premises are subject to arrest. You will not be harmed if you come out with your hands in plain sight. You will have access to counsel. Human-rights observers are on hand to ensure the rule of law is respected. You have ten minutes.” The sound came from the prisons’ many speakers as well as bullhorns built into the front lines’ battle-suits. The fact they could still transmit audio to the internal speakers made every walkaway’s heart quail. It meant all the work walkaways had done to secure their nets and root out the back-doors left by TransCanada was insufficient. It implied the enemy had access to their cameras, could trigger the gas, seal the bulkheads –
The network ops boys scrambled, thundering fingers over their interfaces. Gretyl called up everything she’d learned about the network ops for TransCanada, things she’d tweaked when called on to help with something gnarly. Limpopo grabbed her arm, brought up infographics, started analytics on recent traffic to the audio servers. Etcetera got what she was looking at faster than Gretyl. He shouted at the boys, feeding them suggestions for ports to block, network traffic fingerprints to look for in the packet-inspectors.
Gretyl found calm in the knowledge they were inside one another’s decision loops. She handled diagnostics from walkaways watching the network, wordlessly updating models underpinning Limpopo’s infographics, noting as Limpopo integrated new data into her analysis.
In four minutes, they’d found four back-doors. Three were trivial, access accounts that should have been removed everywhere, but had been removed almost everywhere. The fourth was harder to de-fang, because it would require a whole-system reboot to catch. They solved it by building a big dumb filter rule that looked for anything that might be trying to log into it, dumping those packets on the floor. Just as they were finishing this hackwork, someone in Redmond messaged Gretyl urgently with one they’d missed, that maybe even defaults had missed, built in by the manufacturer for license-repossession for deadbeat customers who missed payments, which would let them put the whole system into minimal operation mode. In theory, you could only invoke this mode if you had Siemens’ signing key, but it would be naïve to assume that the Canadian spooks running this show didn’t have that.
“No way to know if that’s all of them,” Etcetera said, speaking the thought they were all thinking with machine bluntness.
“Nope,” Limpopo said.
Gretyl said, “Everyone off-site is looking. If there are more vulns, they’ll find them.”
“Eventually,” Etcetera said.
“You’ve got a backup,” Gretyl said. “What are you worrying about?”
“You.” That shut her up.
“You can be a total asshole,” Limpopo said, but without real rancor. The boys were tweaking their fixes, building in fallbacks, but they snickered at “asshole.”
“You have two minutes,” the voice said. This time it came only from the loudhailers outside, picked up by cameras aimed at the invaders. Some of their cameras were being blinded by pulsed light weapons, but that attack was designed for civilian institutions, not fortified prisons. TransCanada spent real money on redundant vision systems. Must have galled their shareholders to see all that money that could have been paid as dividends be diverted –
Gretyl’s phone rang, deep in her ear. She tapped it on, assuming it would be Iceweasel calling to make sure she was all right, which she appreciated and resented – I’m a little busy, babe – but it was a man’s voice.
“Is this Gretyl Jonsdottir?”
“Yes.” The call came on her friends-and-family-only ID. It wasn’t known to anyone who sounded like that.
“Where is Natalie Redwater?”
“Who is this?” Of course she knew.
“This is Jacob Redwater. Her father.”
Gretyl’s game-theory spun up, playing different gambits, trying different theories for what Jacob Redwater wanted. Undoubtedly he knew about her relationship with Iceweasel, must have known about the boys, known there was a Jacob Redwater II out there. He’d kidnapped Iceweasel, determined to make her into a zotta, into a Redwater. She’d hurt him where he was weakest, in the money, and he must have been furious.
He must feel some strange version of love for her. She’d known zottas at Cornell, patrons of her lab. She’d had to do dinners with them, fund-raisers, spent hundreds of hours engaged in high-stakes small talk, under her department head’s watchful eye. They weren’t unpleasant to talk to – many were witty conversationalists. But there was something... off about them. It wasn’t until she’d had her crisis of conscience and walked away from Cornell that she’d been able to name it: they had no impostor syndrome. There wasn’t a hint of doubt that every privilege they enjoyed was deserved. The world was correctly stacked. The important people were at the top. The unimportant were at the bottom.
If she told Jacob Redwater that Iceweasel had gotten away, would he use his influence to make the attack on the prisons more violent? Or would he (could he?) pull forces off the prisons to chase down Iceweasel? More chilling: was Jacob Redwater working with Nadie? Had Nadie kidnapped Iceweasel perhaps to forge some alliance with the rest of the Redwater fortune?
She was spooking herself. She went for straightforward: “What do you want?”
“I would like to speak with my daughter.”
“That’s not possible.” She stuck to the truth, if not all of it.
“Ms Jonsdottir, I know you love my daughter.”
“That’s very true.”
“Hard as you find this to believe, I love her, too.”
You’re right, I do find that hard to believe. “I’m sure you do, in your way.” She didn’t mean to micro-agress him, but it slipped out. How could she let that pass?
He pretended he didn’t notice, though she was sure he had. “I don’t want—” He was overcome by some emotion, or a very good actor. Or both, she reminded herself. The zottas she knew were good at compartmentalizing, sociopath style, understanding other people’s emotions well enough to manipulate them, without experiencing actual empathy. “There are children,” he said. “Her children.”
“Mine, too,” Gretyl said.
“Yes.”
“Whatever is about to happen, it doesn’t have to happen to my daughter, or my grandchildren. Your children.”
“Where are you, Mr Redwater? Are you at the prison?”
“As a matter of fact, I am.”
She’d thought so – the background noise was an echo of the sounds she’d heard through the prisons’ outward cams.
“You knew they were coming.”
“I knew. That’s why I came. To keep Natalie safe.” There was a moment. “I could get you out.”
“Why aren’t you talking to—” She almost said, Iceweasel, then Natalie, settled for, “your daughter?”
“She won’t answer. It wasn’t easy to get this address for you, but I needed to get a message to her. I know you wouldn’t sacrifice your children for ideology.”
Fuck it. “You think Iceweasel would?”
“I think my daughter is justifiably angry at me. This means that I can’t explain certain... facts to her. We can’t even have this discussion.”
“They’re moving in on us, Mr Redwater. We can’t have this discussion if I’m under attack.”
“I can’t call them off.”
She didn’t say anything. Iceweasel paid enough attention to know Jacob Redwater’s branch of the family assumed control over the main dynastic fortune, making him the primary family power-broker. Gretyl would be surprised if they didn’t own a major stake in TransCanada, not to mention outsource cops.
“It’s not my call. Honestly.”
“I don’t think we have anything to talk about.” She disconnected. Limpopo stared thoughtfully.
“My in-laws are seriously fucked up.”
Etcetera laughed, a weird noise through the speaker. There was always something weird about sim laughter. Some sharp-defined edge to it, enforced by the sims’ bumpers. Gretyl had been scanned. Maybe this was how she’d laugh at her sons’ antics in the future.
Time ran out. The outsource cops’ drones plummeted in controlled dives, signaling impending attack. The boys in the data center made giddy, frightened noises as they landed their skeleton fleet, chasing the cops’ drones down, just as the first volley of bullets stitched the sky, tracking the drones, killing more than half before they landed. The hard-line fiber links went dead, except the ones that had been covertly dug up and spliced into direct-link microwave repeaters, far from the prison, out in farmers’ fields.
Gretyl and Limpopo’s fingers collided as they jabbed the same spots on the infographics, cutting service over to those links, tuning the caches and load-balancers to accommodate a sudden two-order-of-magnitude drop in throughput. Traffic in and out of the prisons was now queuing deeply in repeaters’ caches. Out in the world, other caches were doing the same. The network interprets censorship as damage and routes around it, Gretyl thought, and grinned at the ancient, pre-walkaway slogan. It had been true for a while, then a metaphor, then wishful thinking, and now it was a design specification.
She was in the zone, a human co-processor for a complex system that used machines as a nervous system to wire together the intelligence of a global crowd of people she loved with all her heart. The part of her that railed and wept when she sent her wife and children away and stayed behind woke briefly and noted that this was the real reason she’d done it. This incredible feeling of strength and connection to something larger. It had been years since Gretyl felt this. Now she felt it again, she realized how much she’d missed it. Living in a better nation was preferable to living in a worse one – but living in the nation’s first days was the difference between falling in love and being in love. She was cheating on her wife. Carrying on an affair with armed insurrection.
The prisons had defenses. The oncoming forces knew exactly what they were. The crowd had ideas about this. As the mechas with the battering rams stepped into position before each gate, the prison’s own anti-camera dazzlers came to life, lancing beams of powerful, broad-spectrum light directly into the mechas’ sensors. They were shielded against this, but imperfectly, meaning the mechas had to slow down and rely on ultrasonic sensing to guide their passage. The defenders triggered the prison’s sonic antipersonnel weapons, relocated from the cellblocks to the outside walls. The mechas slowed more. Then the defenders opened up with the water cannon.
Under normal circumstances, the water jets wouldn’t bother the mechas. They had excellent gyros. In a pinch they could assume three-point stances for stability. But they were attached to each other by the rams they held in two-by-two grids. The jets hit them from different angles, so the front ones’ corrective shuffling further unbalanced the rear ones, and vice versa. The water-cannoneers set up a rhythm that pushed them further off balance. Within minutes, two of the mecha teams were sprawling. The third retreated in unsteady steps.
Gretyl heard cheers, saw jubilation in the chats. She knew this was only a skirmish. They were hugely, physically overmatched. The private cops withdrew behind their armor and a volley of RPGs streaked through the air, bullseyeing each water cannon and the apertures for the anti-photo beams. They’d expected it, but it was terrifying nevertheless, even as the channels filled up with damage manifests, estimating the total cost to TransCanada’s physical plant, watching the company’s share price slide down, as default analysts reading over their shoulders changed their bets on whether TransCanada was going to end up with usable plant or smoking rubble at the end of the day.
Her phone rang again.
“Hello.”
There was latency-lag, then Jacob Redwater’s voice, flanged and compressed. “I want to speak to my daughter.”
“You’ve made that clear to her on more than one occasion.”
There was a long pause. “Her mother died last year.”
“You have my condolences.”
“I couldn’t find a way to tell her.”
“I’ll make sure she knows.”
The boys in the data center lofted a swarm of drones, including some they’d hidden in the woods, behind the enemy lines. The drones’ feed showed the enemy forces, disciplined and still, poised for their next assault. The damaged mechas limped to the back. The enemy opened fire on their drones. The boys kicked them into automated high-intensity evasive maneuvers that would lop their batteries’ duty-cycles in half. Nearly all survived the first round, though their video feeds turned to a scramble of nauseating roller-coaster footage. The boys’ hadn’t sent them in random patterns – each one ended up in proximity to an enemy surveillance-drone, riding its tail. When the ground forces opened up with HERF weapons that fried the drones and knocked them out of the sky, they also took out their own aircraft.
“Good work!” Gretyl shouted over her shoulder at the boys, who didn’t need anyone to tell them – they were dancing with victory. Meanwhile, the drones’ brief flights had managed to clear 75 percent of the network backlogs, massively relieving the congestion on their surviving fiber.
Jacob Redwater said, “Your supply of drones is limited. We can get resupplies.”
“Yes. We can’t win this with force.”
The external speakers clicked on. A voice spoke: “Gordy, this is Tracey. Your sister Tracey, Gordy. I know we haven’t spoken since I walked away, but I want you to know that I love you. I’m safe and happy. I think about you every day. You have a niece now, we called her Eva, for Mom. The way we live here is better than I ever thought. People are nice to each other, Gordy, the way it was when we were kids. I trust my neighbors. They look out for me. I look out for them. We’re not terrorists, Gordy. We’re people default had no use for. We’ve found a use for each other. Gordy, you don’t have to do this. There are other ways to live. I love you, Gordy.” Another voice, a baby, crying. “That’s Eva, Gordy. She loves you, too. She wants to see her uncle.”
The feeds zoomed in on one of the front-liners, a man, whose shoulders shook. This had to be Gordy. The crowd had identified him through gait analysis, doxxed him, walked his social graph, found a hit in a walkaway town in Wyoming, gotten Tracey out of bed, recorded the message.
The silence stretched. The private cop beside Gordy put a tentative hand on his shoulder. Gordy shook it off violently, shoving him away.
The moment stretched. Then Gordy shucked his gauntlets with a flick of his wrists, sending them to clatter in the road. His bare fingers worked the catches of his visor, until it yawned open. His face was an indistinct moving blur, brown with camera-corrected streaks of white where his teeth and eyes were. He took his helmet off, shucked his weapons, let them fall around his feet.
The cops around him stared, body-language telegraphing the open mouths behind their visors. He walked off, orthogonal to the jails and the cops’ lines, up 15 toward Ottawa, toward the dairies and dells of eastern Ontario.
He walked away.
The silence was something holy, church silence. It was a miracle, battlefield conversion.
“Akin!” the voice was amplified, from behind cop lines, loud enough to rattle the glass. “Get back into line, Akin!” It was a command voice, an asshole-tightening order-giving voice. Gordy’s shoulders stiffened. Gordy kept walking, divesting himself of more body armor, dropping the jacket into the road behind him as he walked. His head was high, but his shoulders shook like he was crying.
One of the cops in the front line raised his gun, muzzle big as a cannon, built to send focused, bowel-shredding ultrasonic at its target: the prolapsizer, they called it. The man whose hand had been flung off Gordy’s shoulder tackled the man with the gun before he could aim. They writhed on the ground until they were pulled apart by more cops, and stood, facing one another, held by the arms, chests heaving.
Gordy disappeared over a hill.