“Revenge won’t do any good. These are employees. Someone default is paying them. Hurting them won’t hurt that zotta. The only thing that will hurt that zotta is telling people how to do their own uploads, making it walkaway.”
Silence.
The conscious merc coughed.
“You people are fucking unbelievable,” she said. “Seriously? Just do it.” Her voice was shaky, brave.
“Do what?” Iceweasel said.
“What you’re inevitably going to talk yourselves into doing. Kill us.” The two words were delivered in the same tone as the sentence before, but thickly. The merc wasn’t as brave as she seemed. No one wanted to die.
“Have you ever killed someone?” Iceweasel contemplated her. Regulation-short hair, dark eyes – but big – a wide, flat nose. She might have been white, or Asian, or something else. Her mouth was small and hardly moved when she talked, like she was trying to talk and whistle simultaneously. It made Iceweasel fear her, even under these circumstances. A predatory way of speaking, with the menace of the private guards and asshole school disciplinarians who’d haunted her teenage years. The back of her neck itched.
The merc pursed her thin lips. “What’s this, a war crimes tribunal?”
“Have you committed any war crimes?” That was Gretyl. She had her deceptive jolly fat lady face again.
“Bitch, if you haven’t committed any war crimes these days, you’re not trying,” the merc said.
“Gallows humor,” Gretyl said.
Sita and Gretyl’s eyes met. They looked at CC, back at each other.
“I think she’s right,” said Tam. Tam was trans and took a female pronoun. She and Tam hadn’t exactly clicked. It wasn’t overt hostility, but they never occupied the same conversation at the same time. Even in chore-wrangling discussion boards, they didn’t post to the same thread. One of Iceweasel’s school friends was trans, but Iceweasel hadn’t known until after he’d transitioned, and cut off his old crowd. She’d heard second-hand that he had had fights with his parents, who, like many zottas, were not constitutionally suited to being thwarted, or, frankly, wrong. Iceweasel sometimes wondered if he’d gone walkaway. She imagined walkaway was more accepting of trans people than default, though truth be told, zottas of any gender or orientation didn’t have much to worry about in default, unless their parents cut them off.
And she hadn’t clicked with Tam, had she? Did she have a lurking, detestable prejudice she didn’t want to cop to? Mightn’t other walkaways share that dark secret?
“Come on,” Tam said, and now Iceweasel was thinking three things at once: Have we made her into a psychopath by being cruel to her? and, Am I just thinking that because I think I have been cruel?; and I should think hard about whatever she has to say because my stupid subconscious is going to discount it – and then, shortly, But I must be careful not to overcorrect.
She was spinning her hamster wheel. It happened often in walkaway: continuous introspection about motives and bias, whether being raised zotta had worn unjumpable troughs in her brain that she could never escape. Now there was more: Why was I the one to speak? Is it because of my American Brahmin shit? Are they all thinking, who the fuck does this idiot think she is? This always happened when something stressful went down with walkaways, a full-blown trial by ordeal, courtesy of her self-doubt.
“We’re not going to keep them prisoner, are we? Letting them go won’t necessarily speed up the next round of bad guys on the doorstep, but it might, and nuking them both has a good chance of slowing things. We know it. They know it. There’s no mercy in drawing this out.”
Sita looked at CC. “That there might be a middle ground.”
Research at Walkaway U was eclectic. It produced interesting things. For a decade, word around the world’s top research institutes was that the most creative, wildest work happened in walkaway. It leaked into default: self-replicating beer and semi-biological feedstock decomposers that broke down manufactured goods into slurries ready to be dumped back into printers. A lot of radio stuff, things you could only pull off through cooperative models of spectrum management, where any radio could speak in any frequency, all radios cooperating to steer clear of each other, dynamically adjusting their gain, shaping their transmissions with smart phased-arrays.
Some of the work at WU was only rumor, even in walkaway. It only got discussed in invitational forums, because it would freak not only the solid cits back in default, but even the walkaways.
“Deadheading?” Iceweasel said to Gretyl. Gretyl had dropped the jolly mask and was all glittering intelligence.
“That’s the cutesy name. Suspended animation, if you like.”
“Does it work?”
Gretyl twirled a strand of hair on one finger and tucked it behind her ear. “Sometimes it works. In the animal models, it works well.”
“And on humans?”
Gretyl blinked slowly. “If something doesn’t work on animals all the time, it’d be fucked up to try it on humans, don’t you think?”
“Yeah. So, how does it work on humans?”
Gretyl sighed. “There’s only a handful. People who were long-term vegetative, no realistic hope of coming back. No one’s tried to thaw them yet.”
“Do you actually freeze them?”
“No,” Gretyl said. “It’s a metabolic thing. I’ll send you the microbiology and endocrinology references if you’re interested.”
A voice nagged at Iceweasel. These people know things. They do things. Your dad could buy and sell them a million times, but they can bring the dead back to life, and all he could do was terrify people into submission. “Sure.”
They sat against a wall, propped on sleeping pallets in the cul-de-sac that was a dumping-ground for stuff queued to be reduced to feedstock. People passed by, gave them distracted nods. There was an urgent crackle in the air. Some people were packing up essentials. Some whispered intensely. Something was about to happen.
Someone passed by, then doubled back. Tam. She nodded at them, sat.
“I’ve spoken to Sita,” she said.
Gretyl said, “I think we’re having the same conversation.”
“I don’t like it,” Tam said. “It’s one thing to kill an enemy, another thing to do medical experiments on her. If you use those two as experimental subjects, you’re going down a road you won’t be able to come back up.”
Iceweasel had a moment of vertiginous comprehension. “You’re going to deadhead those two?”
“Not just them,” Gretyl said. “Ours, too. Yan and Quentin.” The ones in the comas. Iceweasel had heard their names, forgotten them. “We’re going to move, we need minimal logistics.”
Tam said, “We should have moved the day after we got bombed. But we haven’t, because these people are convinced that they’re one step from curing death, and once that happens—”
“All bets are off,” Gretyl finished. “It’s not that crazy, Tam. Think of all the stuff we do because we’re haunted by death. If we can get scanning and simming, that’s the real end of scarcity – no more reason to move off the cross-hairs, unless reanimating takes longer than the inconvenience of running away. That’s powerful.”
Tam shook her head. “Yeah, and it’s been just around the corner as long as I’ve been walkaway.”