Twice, they took her from the cell and brought her to a room for questioning. She was fitted with sensors for these sessions. They shaved her head, attached electrodes to her bare scalp, more at her wrist, over her heart, her throat. She didn’t struggle. Who gave a shit about hair? The important thing was to save her energy for what came next.
The questioner was not in the room, but present as a voice that came from an earbud the guards inserted. She heard the questioner’s breathing, like he was a lover whispering in her ear. It reminded her of the spacies’ binaural ear pieces, but this was to unnerve and disorient her.
“Luiza?”
“If you like.”
“Limpopo, then?” The voice was unemotional.
“If you like.”
“We’ll start with something easy.”
“Am I under arrest?”
“I would like your pass-phrase.”
She rattled off a string of nonsense characters.
“Now the other one.”
She didn’t say anything.
“The other one. This is the plausible deniability pass-phrase. It’s not hard to tell when you deceive. The infographics give me enormous insight into your mind.”
She tried to keep her mind still. The act of stilling her mind would also show on his scans. She wondered what he was measuring, how accurate it was. There were brilliant neuro people in the Walkaway U crowd. They said that everyone knew half of everything they believed to be true about the human mind was bullshit. No one could agree which half.
Time stretched. She wondered if they would hit her, shock her, burn her. They’d killed Jimmy and Etcetera, slashed them across the throat and tossed them into the snow to die.
“I won’t tell you.”
“All right.” Guards unstrapped her, led her back to her cell. Days passed. There was nothing to do except stare at the walls. She had always enjoyed solitude, thought of herself as an imperfect walkaway because the company of others was sometimes oppressive. But when ten days came and went with nothing but her thoughts and her desperate, self-defeating attempts to meditate, they came and got her. Found herself actually anticipating the prospect of talking to the voice.
They shaved her head of the short stubble, reapplied gel and sensors.
“Today we make a scan,” the voice said. “We will be able to simulate that scan and subject it to questioning under circumstances that transcend and obviate much of this business. Depending on the characteristics of this scan, its reliability and pliability, we may no longer need you at all. Is this clear?”
“What do you want?”
“Your pass-phrase.”
“Why?”
“Because we have walked your cohort’s social graph, and concluded you are a core node.”
“That sounds like a good reason for me to keep my mouth shut.”
“We can try to coerce the information out of you. We can even try physical coercion. You know, we can make a scan from people who are no longer technically alive.”
It was bullshit. Had to be. CC always maintained it would never work, not without blood flowing through the brain. She didn’t understand the biology, but she knew it had to be bullshit. Didn’t it?
“That would be quite a trick.”
“Once we are inside your data, we will use it to effect internal disruptions of your cell. This will complement our strategy of physical interventions.”
“But why?”
“Luiza, don’t be ridiculous. You know why.”
She refused to get angry, though the extended period of solitude made her jumpy and emotional. “Because you know it’s us or you, right?”
“No. Because you and your friends are terrorists. Luiza, be serious. This isn’t about jealousy. It’s about crime.”
“What crime?”
“Luiza.”
“What crime?”
“Be serious.”
“Squatting?”
“Trespassing. Theft. Theft of trade secrets. Piracy on an unimaginable scale. Circumvention of lawful interception facilities in fabricators. Production of scheduled narcotics. Unlicensed production of potentially lethal pharmaceuticals. Fabrication of military-grade weapons, including mechas and a variety of U.A.V.s. Unlicensed use of electromagnetic spectrum, including uses that can and do disrupt emergency, public safety and first-responder networks. Need I continue?”
“What do you want from people? What are they supposed to do? There’s nothing for us in default. Nowhere to live. Nothing to eat. Nothing to do. We are surplus. We’ve gone away, started over, not bothering anyone.”
“You’ve taken what isn’t yours. You live by taking what isn’t yours.”
“How else are we supposed to live?”
“What is your pass-phrase?”
“When will you do this scan?”
“It’s underway now. This conversation will help to calibrate it.”
“Bullshit. I’ve had scans before.”
“The scanning techniques used by walkaways are crude and unreliable. We have better technology. It’s an advantage of not being a criminal underground.”
“I’d rather be a criminal underground than a secret police.”
“We’re not police.”
“Spooks, then.”
“Hardly a meaningful term.”
“I would like to speak to a lawyer.”
“You are an illegal immigrant, a Brazilian national with an expired passport and no visa. What makes you think you’re entitled to legal representation? How would you pay for it?”
“I would like to speak to someone from my consulate.”
“The Brazilian embassy has an official policy of cooperating with counter-terrorism efforts.”
“Why do you even need my pass-phrase if you’re so fucking god-like? Sounds like you have everything you need.”
“We have many of the things we need. There may be more inside your network traffic. Besides, we have excellent results from impersonating members of your cult to one another. It’s surprisingly effective.”
“As is telling me you’re doing it, so I spend all my time trying to figure out which people are sock-puppets?”
“You won’t need to worry about talking to those people anymore. You have a very good name, so getting even a small number of people to believe you’re a traitor will create enormous internal discord.”
“What should I call you?”
The breath whispered in her ears. “Michael will do.”
“Michael, has it occurred to you that you don’t have anything to bargain with? There’s nothing you can give me that will make me want to give you my pass-phrase, for all the reasons you’ve just set out. You and everyone you work with make it your mission to destroy any chance of the human race surviving to the end of this century. So what is it you hope to get from me today?”
“I have many things to bargain with, Luiza. I could offer to spare the lives of your friends. We know where they are – we always know where they are. We are capable of being surgical in our strikes against them. You saw how we came for you.”
In the hours she was alone with her ghosts in her cell, the one that visited her most was Etcetera. She kept seeing his face, hearing his voice. She’d had dreams where she felt he was cuddled behind her, one arm over her, hand between her breasts, his stubble raspy on her back, breath tickling her skin. Waking was like one of those nightmares-within-a-nightmare, in which you believe you are awake, but are still dreaming. Only she had been awake and imprisoned. Never to see Etcetera again. Sometimes she’d tick off his absurd names like a rosary, eyes squeezed shut, trying hard to remember the feelings from her dreams, his smell, the sound, the way he’d held her. The realization he was dead caught her over and over, making her breath catch like a blast of cold air freezing her lungs.