She looked at them. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Don’t worry, get used to it. It’s no different from being out in reality, sensed and recorded all the time. What’s the worst that can happen? Dad’s not going to have you rubbed out or send mercs on your trail after we drop out.”
“After we drop out?”
“Isn’t that what we were talking about? Going walkaway? That’s where this thing was headed – some kind of prince-and-pauper thing: ‘I’ll wager I can put on vagabond’s rags and go unnoticed among the lower classes, what-ho?’”
“Don’t make me join the walkaways, Etcetera,” Seth said.
The thing inside Hubert, Etc’s guts roiled. “Was that where I was headed?”
Natalie caught his eye. Her face shone. She was beautiful. She had zits, a sprinkle of freckles, the sclerae of her eyes were pink and her lids were red-rimmed. She was brimming with life, sorrow, and whatever he’d felt when he realized that the whispered conversations about money and jobs that all the grown-ups had all the time were the outward reflection of deep, unending terror. A fear that gnawed at every grown person. A primordial terror of the tiger outside the cave.
“Sure as shit sounded like it to me,” she said.
“Seth,” he said. “What is it that keeps you from going walkaway, exactly?”
To his surprise, Seth looked genuinely distressed. “You’re joking. Those people are bananas. They’re homeless people, Hubert—” Hubert, Etc noted that Seth had called him “Hubert,” always a sign that they’d tapped into a rich seam of Seth’s psyche. “They’re bums. They eat garbage—”
“Not exactly garbage,” Hubert, Etc said. “No more than the beer we were drinking last night was piss. Give me a good reason. Loyalty to your employer? Prospects of a rich and fulfilled life?” Like Hubert, Etc, the longest Seth had been employed was six months, and the first month had been classed as “training” – not paid. Neither of them had had anything like real work in months.
“How about fear of prison?”
“How about it? You dragged me to an illegal party last night. That’s more likely to get us busted than anything we’d do out in the abandoned territories—”
“The territories? Be serious, you’d be dead inside of a month.”
“It’s not the surface of the moon. It’s places where no one wants to bother arresting the population for vagrancy.”
“Yeah, they don’t arrest ’em, they incinerate ’em for being squatter-terrorists,” Seth said. “And then there’s the friendly fire. It’s a fucking gladiator pit for excess humans.”
“He’s got a point,” Natalie said. “We’d have to arm up if we went. Dad’s panic room’s full of toys, though – stuff designed to slip millimeter wave. If we brought enough matériel, we’d be the kings of the badlands. Could be fun.”
Hubert, Etc boggled. “Haven’t you two ever seen a walkaway? They’re practically Zen monks. They’re not out mowing down their rivals with resin AK-3DPs. You’ve seen too many movies.”
“I’ve seen walkaways, the people who’d visit the liberations, but who knows what they’re like in their native habitat? There’s no sense in being naïve. You’ve got to be insane if you think we’re going to stroll into Mordor with packs full of delicious M.R.E.s and be welcomed as spiritual brothers.”
Hubert, Etc was now as upset as Seth. “Have you two ever killed someone? Are you prepared to do so? Would you point a gun at another human being and gun him down?”
Natalie shrugged. “If it was me or him, fuck yeah.” Seth nodded.
“You’re both full of shit.”
He and Seth glared. Natalie was more amused than ever.
The standoff might have continued if Hubert, Etc hadn’t looked up the FAQ. They had a brief argument about which anonymizer to trust – if you were Natalie’s age, all of the proxies that Hubert and Seth used were considered false-flag ops for harvesting intel on dissidents. Natalie, meanwhile, liked an anonymizer that Seth and Hubert, Etc had heard was junk-science wishful-thinking voodoo. It turned out the two systems could be daisy chained, and so they all grudgingly set them up and started searching.
There were as many walkaway FAQs as walkaways. The impulse to walk away was bound up with the urge to write Thoreauvian memoirs about societal malaise and the tradecraft of going off-grid in the age of total information awareness. They included appendices summing things up for the tldr crowd, with videos, darknet links, shapefiles, and wetjet formulas for making your own crucial frontier enzymes and GMOs. Some of this was radioactively hot, the kind of thing that’d get you watchlisted so hard you’d have to fight through the clouds of drones to go out for milk, but there was nothing in it about weapons.
Hubert, Etc pointed this out to Natalie and Seth, trying not to be smug. Seth said, “Of course no one talks about peacemakers where spooks could see it. It’ll all be deep darknet.”
“You’re saying the fact that we can’t find anything about weapons is proof that there must be weapons because if there were weapons no one would talk about weapons?” Hubert, Etc had experience winning arguments with Seth. He noted with pleasure that Natalie agreed and basked in a moment of admiration.
Seth gave him a belligerent look, couldn’t keep it up. “Fine. No weapons.”
It dawned on Hubert, Etc that this wasn’t a thought-experiment – somewhere on the way, reading FAQs and watching videos, they’d shaded from playing let’s-pretend to planning. He had screens of notes and a huge wad of cached stuff.
“Are we going to actually do this? Actually for real?”
Natalie looked around the room pointedly. Hubert, Etc thought of the parties and the fooling around that must have taken place here, weird zottarich kids who’d played whatever decadent games they favored over the years. He thought of the cameras, spooling up their planning session from different angles, dropping it into long-term archiving.
“Fuck yeah,” she whispered. “Let’s do it.”
2
YOU ALL MEET IN A TAVERN
[I]
SUNDAYS AT THE Belt and Braces were the busiest, and there was always competition for the best jobs. The first person through the door hit the lights and checked the infographics. These were easy enough to read that anyone could make sense of them, even noobs. But Limpopo was no noob. She had more commits into the Belt and Braces’ firmware than anyone, an order of magnitude lead over the rest. It was technically in poor taste for her to count her commits, let alone keep a tally. In a gift economy, you gave without keeping score, because keeping score implied an expectation of reward. If you’re doing something for reward, it’s an investment, not a gift.
In theory, Limpopo agreed. In practice, it was so easy to keep score, the leaderboard was so satisfying that she couldn’t help herself. She wasn’t proud of this. Mostly. But this Sunday, first through the door of the Belt and Braces, alone in the big common-room with its aligned rows of tables and chairs, all the infographics showing nominal, she felt proud. She patted the wall with a perverse, unacceptable proprietary air. She helped build the Belt and Braces, scavenging badlands for the parts its drone outriders had identified for its construction. It was the project she’d found her walkaway with, the thing uppermost in her mind when she’d looked around the badlands, set down her pack, emptied her pockets of anything worth stealing, put extra underwear in a bag, and walked out onto the Niagara escarpment, past the invisible line that separated civilization from no-man’s-land, out of the world as it was and into the world as it could be.