When he was done, he packed up his tray, tugged her clothes into place and replaced the sheets. He fished under the bed for a flexi-hose with a bite-down nipple on the end. He pulled off lengths of surgical tape and taped it to her collarbone and cheek, so she could turn her head and drink. She could have bitten off a fingertip, but didn’t. He packed his things and left. The door sighed shut and clicked, then clunked, a reminder that it had serious locking stuff. It sounded like the second clunk came through the floor, like the door had a set of pins that penetrated it.
She realized where she was: her dad’s panic room. It had independent, redundant network connections, power backups, food and water stashes, a whole armory. It wasn’t like her dad to tell other people about the panic room – she’d never seen it and knew that opening it would set off alarms all over town. Her dad made sure she knew, just in case she got the idea of throwing a party there.
Dad must’ve built himself a better bolt hole – he’d mused about one in a second sub-basement, bored out beneath the house using a super-covert drill that his zotta buddy had used to turn the plot under his estate into a bat-cave. It sent Dad into ecstasies of jealousy. There’s no way he’d let Mr Not-a-Nurse into this place if it was still the secret he’d bet his life on. Unless he planned to off all the staff once he’d brainwashed her and entomb them within the reinforced walls, like a pharaoh’s tomb-builders.
These thoughts produced seven minutes’ worth of distraction. When they were exhausted, she was alone with her situation. Thinking of Gretyl made her cry with desire and loneliness. There were thoughts about her father and sister. Hadn’t her father said her mother was on her way? Was she here? She had her own floor on the adults’ side of the house. It hadn’t been occupied often, but when it was, the house’s affect changed. The whole household was alive to the possibility of their mercurial mistress doing one of her patented Valkyrie numbers.
She chased the tail of her thoughts in ever-tighter spirals. It was a desperate place. Visit it enough and it might drive you to suicide.
“Fuck it,” she said aloud. “Brainwashing, rubber hoses, deprogramming, all that Patty Hearst stuff.” She’d learned about Hearst, the poor little rich girl who’d carried a gun with her kidnappers, after Gretyl joked about it. She’d been offended, but then adopted the girl as a totem. Hearst was an idiot, but at least she wasn’t just another rich asshole.
She sang “Consensus,” an incredibly dirty walkaway marching song, thirty verses. The chorus: “Consensus, consensus, it beat us and bent us, but we’re sure that it’s lent us, a shit-eating grin.” Making up new verses was walkaway sport, there were wikis of them. She couldn’t remember them all, but she could make them up on the fly, especially if she sang humm-humm-humm where she couldn’t think of a line, which was automatic disqualification when it was sung in earnest.
The verses got more hum-hum-hummy. She was ready to peter out and start another song, when a voice joined in: “...but we’re sure that it’s lent us, a shit-eating grin!” It was achingly familiar. She shivered from scalp to ankles, hairs on her neck standing.
“Dis?”
“That’s Dis Ex Machina to you, kid,” the voice said.
She cried.
“This is a dirty trick.” She mastered her tears. “Absolutely disgusting.”
“It would be,” Dis said, “if it was a trick.”
“How would you know if it was or not? You’re on all the version control servers. Anyone who can build a cluster can bring you up. There’ll be hundreds of you, in all kinds of configs. My dad could easily afford a version of you that was constrained so it believed it had infiltrated his network to work against him, while spying on me and everything I did. You would never know. I’d tell you things he’d have to slice my nipples off to get otherwise. He’d call this humane, a ‘low-impact’ way of ‘bringing me around’ to sanity, which, in his world, is the ability to bullshit yourself into believing you deserve to have more of everything that everyone else has less of, because of your special snowflakeness.”
“You’re preaching to the converted, girl. Remember, I was walkaway before you.”
“Dis was walkaway before me. You, whatever you are, are an emissary, knowing or not, from default.”
“We’re going in circles. No skin off my back, because I’m a construct. I can park my frustration to one side, move the slider, have this argument with you for as long as you’d like. It’s cool. Comes from a lab in Punjab, ex-IIT math-geeks who want to turn the Āgama into subroutines, Yogic Mastery Apps. They’re turning Meta into math. You’d love it – they worship Gretyl, her optimizations for lookahead modeling are the basis of their discipline. I think if she wasn’t so worried about you, she’d be all over it.”
“That was really low.” She was surprised by the venom in her voice. When her thoughts strayed to Gretyl, she was seized by unbearable helplessness and longing. That Gretyl felt the same about her was a weight crushing her chest.
“Oh, honey,” Dis said. Her computer voice was better. The emotions in those two words were awful. “She misses you so much. I can get you a message from her. Or...”
Natalie knew it was a baited hook. She didn’t want to rise to it. Fish must know the worm has a barb in it, but some bite anyway. Was it hunger? A death wish? “What?”
“They’ve been scanned now,” Dis said. “After they reached the Thetford abandoned zone, everyone made a scan, first thing. They’re in the walkaway clouds now, more every day. We’re learning so much from the multiplicity of scans, too – I think the problem with bringing back CC was that we just didn’t have a deep enough data-set to make inferences about tailored simulation strategies for brain variations. CC is pretty stable. We can characterize scans based on the likelihood of bringing up a successful sim. Gretyl’s scan is in the top decile. She was made to run on silicon. Sita, too. Hell, Sita was so up for it that she’s running a twin 24/7, in realtime, with sensors all over herself. Gretyl hasn’t done that, though. We’ve only done the preflighting for her. We haven’t run her...”
Yet, Natalie finished. Gretyl could be here, running on whatever substrate Dis was on. Her Gretyl, not her Gretyl, that was a distinction without a difference.
“So fucking evil.” She didn’t have the energy for bile. It came out like surrender.
“It’s not complicated. Your dad’s got amazing opsec on the main house network. But the patchlevel on his safe-room is lagged, because there were conflicts the auto-updaters couldn’t handle, and the ops guy who set it up retired and your dad doesn’t have anyone in his ops department who even knows about this. The alert messages have piled up in an admin dashboard for years, all neglected. I wonder if your dad even has a login for that dash?
“We pwned this place as soon as you went. It was Gretyl’s project, but I did the heavy lifting. We used like seventy percent of walkaway’s compute-time running parallel instances of me, at twenty ex realtime. We clobbered the fucking IDS, smoked the firewall, and now I’m so deep I can do anything.” The door-locks clunked out “shave and a haircut.” It was terrifying and hilarious. Natalie’s anguished smile hurt to hold.