“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.