Iceweasel filled the trike’s cargo pods with the essentials, the brain-imaging rigs and the redundant storage modules. They were on the fringes of walkaway network, and the scans they’d made were too bulky to fully mirror. Instead, they were divided up in a redundant swarm among the WU crew, everyone seeding their parts out to denser parts of walkaway as quickly as physics allowed, but for at least a day, a single well-placed strike would wipe out the only five people who had been scanned by CC with the certainty that they could be brought back to life someday.
The most difficult things to carry were the people themselves. Not just the four deadheads, but all the people. They marched in a long column through the woods towards the B&B. Iceweasel was sure she wasn’t the only one thinking about the efficiency of upload, the sweet nothing of deadheading. If they were deadheading, they wouldn’t have to play out the idiot conversion of sunlight to flora, flora to fauna, fauna to energy, energy to muscular action. They could just lie down, get stacked like cord-wood on the back of the trike – they’d ended up wrapping the four deadheaders in cocoons of bubblewrap; they stuck flexible duct-tubing into the mass as it puffed up, creating fresh-air tunnels to their faces.
Better than stacking like cord-wood: if they uploaded, they could fit into someone’s pocket. That person could ride a bicycle or a horse or just jog, and they’d go along with her. Someday, they would transition to beings of insubstantial information, everywhere and nowhere. Someday, they’d stop for a scan before they went out for a swim, just in case they drowned.
“Colds,” Sita said. “If we do bodies, people will use upload to shake off colds.”
“How?” Iceweasel asked from atop her trike, its gentle humming rumble numbing the insides of her thighs.
“Simple,” Sita said. “Take a scan, get a new body out of storage, decant the data into it.”
Iceweasel snorted. “Then what? Push your old body into a wood chipper?”
“It’s feedstock,” Sita said. “Put it to sleep and don’t wake it. If you’re sentimental, have it mounted. Or make a coat, or cook it for dinner.”
“You realize there’s a whole default that thinks that’s what this is about,” Iceweasel said. She’d grown certain there were spies in their midst. She spoke carefully, with the sense she was being recorded and any failure to speak out when jokes like this arose would be held against her. Tam’s talk of war crimes trials roiled in her hindbrain.
“You realize they’re exactly right,” Sita said. She smiled, stopped. “You know, when the first walkaway prostheses projects started, most of the people contributing had lost an arm or a leg in Belarus or Oman, and were tired of paying a loan-shark for something that hurt and barely worked and could be remotely repossessed by an over-the-air kill-switch if they missed a payment. But once they got here and started living, realized how much had been left on the table by conservative companies that didn’t want to get into a patent fight and didn’t see any reason to add advanced functionality to something that you didn’t have any choice about, they got radicalized.
“They stopped saying ‘I just want to make an arm that’ll get through the day,’ and started saying, ‘I want an arm that does everything my old arm did.’ From there, it was a short step to ‘I want an arm that’s better than my old arm.’ And from there, it was an even shorter step to ‘I want an arm that’s so outrageously awesome that you’ll cut off your own to get one.’ That’s what’s coming to immortality. Not just the ability to come back from the dead, but the ability to rethink what it means to be alive. There’s going to be people who decide to deadhead for a year or a decade, to see what’s coming. There’ll be people with broken hearts who deadhead for twenty years to get some distance from their ex-. I’ll bet you that someday we’ll look around and discover that all the kids are short for their age, and it’ll turn out that they’ll all have been deadheaded by their parents whenever they had a tantrum and were missing ten percent of their realtime.”
Iceweasel shook her head. “Stuff just doesn’t change that much. Most people will be doing the same thing in twenty years they’re doing now. Maybe in a hundred years—”
“You’re going to hate to hear this, but you’re too young to get it. Anything invented before you were eighteen was there all along. Anything invented before you’re thirty is exciting and will change the world forever. Anything invented after that is an abomination and should be banned. You don’t remember what life was like twenty years ago, before walkaways. You don’t understand how different things are, so you think things don’t change that much.
“When I was your age, we didn’t have abandoned zones or free hardware designs. People without a place to stay were homeless – vagrants, beggars. If you worried about zottas, you went to protests and got your head knocked in. People still thought the answer to their problems was to get a job, and anyone who didn’t get a job was broken or lazy, or if you were a bleeding heart, someone failed by society. Hardly anyone said the world would be better if you didn’t have to work at all. No one pointed out that people like your old man were LARPing corporate robber-baron anti-heroes of dramas they’d loved as teenagers and they required huge pools of workers and would-be workers under their heel for verisimilitude’s sake.
“If you’d been deadheading for twenty years and woke today, you’d think that you were dreaming, or having a nightmare. Sure, eighty percent of the people who were alive then are alive now, and eighty percent of the buildings around then are around now. But everything about how we relate to each other and places we occupy has changed. They used to think everything got changed by technology. Now we know the reason people are willing to let technology change their worlds is shit is fucked up for them, and they don’t want to hang onto what they’ve got.
“The zottas want to control who gets to adopt which technologies, but they don’t want to bear the expense of locking up all walkaways in giant prisons or figuring out how to feed us into wood chippers without making a spectacle, so here we are on the world’s edge, finding our own uses for things. There’s more people than ever who don’t have any love for the way things are. Every one of them would happily jettison everything they think of as normal for the chance to do something weird that might be better.”
Iceweasel considered the perfect storm of her father’s intolerableness, Billiam’s death, Etcetera’s words, the growing sense that shit was fucked up and shit, a phrase that everyone used as a joke. It wasn’t a funny joke but people told it all the time.
Ha ha, only serious.
What would it take for her to upload? When they got to the B&B, they’d set up the imager, and anyone could get uploaded, make a scan of themselves – or “themselves, within the envelope that could tolerate being reanimated in software.” Would she get in? She’d like to talk to Dis about this. She caught herself. She wished she could talk to Dis about this? Didn’t that mean that Dis was a person? Didn’t that settle the question?
She rolled on, steering the trike through the woods, the train of cargo carts bumping along behind her.