“Of course we do. I’m your mother!”
Even Cordelia smirked.
She saw rage boil in their mother, different than their father’s, but no less deadly. “Natalie, if you think being an adult means you don’t have any duty to anyone else in the world—”
She and Cordelia both snorted. It further enraged their mother, but it was the most sisterly moment they’d shared since Natalie first went away to school.
Frances went rigid and stared straight ahead, not acknowledging them, wishing she hadn’t gone straight to the maternal moment, which left her with no gracious out, and if there’s one thing Frances Mannix Redwater was, it was gracious.
The door clunked, opened. Jacob came in trailed by the med-tech/paid goon, who carried a precarious armload of clothing. Natalie recognized the clothes from the dumbwaiter in her previous incarceration.
“We’ll bring in a proper bed later today,” Jacob said, while the man put the clothes on the floor.
“Books, too,” Natalie said. “Interface stuff. Paper and something to write with.”
He looked at her, then at Frances.
“No interface stuff,” Frances said. “But everything else. Some furniture, too. A fridge and food.”
“Hop to it,” Natalie said, with a giddy laugh. Jacob ignored her. He had a goat, but you couldn’t get it with a jibe as crude as that.
“Now everyone else out,” Frances said. “I need to talk to Natalie alone.”
Natalie closed her eyes. Not one of those talks.
“I’m tired,” she said.
“You’ve had plenty of time to rest.” Frances managed to make it into an accusation, as though Natalie had lazed around eating bonbons. It wasn’t sarcasm – Frances was capable of being simultaneously outraged because she’d been tied to a bed, and because she’d been too lazy to get out of bed.
“Everyone, out.” She glared at the merc, who had the sense not to look at Jacob. That would have been the end of her employment in the Redwater household. Natalie guessed being a merc in the employ of zottas required political sense.
They left and before the door clunked closed, Frances called out to Jacob. “Private. No recording.”
“Frances—”
“She’s not going to jump me and hold me hostage, Jacob.”
“You’ve seen the video—”
“I saw it. That was before you tied her to a bed for a week and fed her through a tube.”
“Frances—”
“Jacob.”
Jacob turned to the merc, who was already holding something out, palm down. He passed it to Frances. “Panic button,” he said.
She pointedly put it in her purse, then set the purse far from the bed, leaning against the wall, buttery yellow leather slumped against stark white. “Good-bye, Jacob.”
They left the door open.
[VIII]
LIMPOPO WAS VOLUNTEERING with the scanner crew when Jimmy showed up.
He didn’t look as cocky as the last time they’d met, with his stupid weapons and such. He’d had a hard walk, fetched up in Thetford with a limp and a head wound, in filthy overlapping thermal layers. He was gaunt, frostbite in three fingers and all his toes.
“Fancy meeting you here,” he said, when Limpopo came upon him in the great hall of the Thetford spacies, tended by a medic who listened to advice from someone far away who diagnosed Jimmy.
“You look bad,” she said.
“Could have been worse. We lost fifteen on the road from Ontario. It’s getting mean.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault. Actually, possibly it is your fault, you being a big beast in the world of scanning and sims.”
“I’m a walkaway. We don’t have big beasts.”
The medic smiled, then did something to Jimmy’s toes that made him suck air through his teeth – one missing – and squeeze his eyes.
“I think you’ll keep them,” she said. “Except maybe the left little toe.”
“Huzzah.” He rocked his jaw from side to side.
“Why are you here, Jimmy? Come to kick more people out of their homes?”
He shook his head. “It’s not like that. Whatever minor philosophical differences you and I had—”
It was textbook self-delusion, but Limpopo couldn’t see any reason to point it out.
“– I have more in common with you than with the assholes who came at us on the road. There’s only one thing they want: a world where they’re on top and everyone else isn’t.”
I’d love to know how you differentiate that from your philosophy. But I don’t guess you’d be able to explain it.
“This is clearly where the action is. This has them shit-scared, and scheming.”
“So you’ve come to help?”
“Look, there’s an angle, something I haven’t seen on the forums, an outcome that’s worse than anyone’s preparing for. I think it’s because people like you just don’t understand what backup really means.”
Backup. A perfect, perfectly seductive name for scan and sim. She was amazed she hadn’t heard it. As soon as she did, Limpopo just knew there must be thousands – millions – of people using the term. Once you conceived of the thing that made you you as data, aeons of data-handling anxiety kicked in. If you had data, it had to be backed up. Anything important that wasn’t backed up was good as lost. Data is haunted by Murphy. Do something irreplaceable and magnificent while out of network and backup range and you were begging for critical failure that nuked it all.
“Backup,” she said.
“Yes.” Jimmy grinned. He’d followed her thinking. “Of course. No one has thought it through to the logical end.”
“Which is?”
Despite his injuries and grubbiness, he enjoyed testing her, waiting to see if she’d spar. She knew there was no way to win a mental sparring match with Jimmy: victory would piss him off, loss would convince him he could walk all over her.
“Nice seeing you.” She turned to go, because walking away solved the Jimmy problem every time. If he ever figured that out, he might be dangerous.
“It means,” he said to her back, and she slowed a little, “anyone who can get your backup can find out everything there is to know about you, trick you into the worst betrayals, torture you for all eternity, and you can never walk away from it.”
“Shit.” She turned around.
“Anyone who talks about this gets treated as a paranoid nut. Sim people wave their hands and talk about crypto—”
“What’s wrong with crypto? If no one can decrypt your sim, then—”
“If no one can decrypt your sim, no one can run your sim. If the only repository for your pass-phrase is your own brain, then when you die—”
“I get it. You’d have to trust someone with your pass-phrase so they could retrieve your key and use it to decrypt your sim.”
“Your trusted third party would have to trust her trusted third party with her pass-phrase, and that person would need someone to trust, and there’d need to be some way to find out who had which pass-phrase because once you’re croaked the last thing we’d want was to realize we’d lost your keys. Can you fucking imagine – sorry about your immortal birthright, we forgot the password, derp derp derp.”
“Ouch.”
“There’s plenty of crypto weenies trying to figure this out, using shared secrets so to split the key into say, ten pieces such that any five can be used to unlock the file.”