“So, basically, ‘live as though it were the first days of the better nation?’” But Gretyl smiled when she said it.
“That kind of wry cynicism is my department, you know.”
“It’s fun being a dick.”
He grinned back. “It is, isn’t it?”
“So it’s hope. But—” She heaved a sigh.
Tam brought lichen tequila. She had a fleeting thought about how it was a bad habit to use alcohol to cope with distress, then drank from the bulb. It burned pleasurably.
“Iceweasel,” she said.
“Poor Iceweasel,” Tam said. “Have you heard from Dis?”
“No. I don’t want to break security protocol. Every time I call her, it raises the chances of her being discovered. She said she’d get in touch when things changed, when there was something I could do. But she hasn’t called.”
“Let’s call her. Fuck protocol. They didn’t discover her when she rooted their network, what more could one more network session do?”
“I don’t think—”
“Let’s do it,” Seth said. “If they’ve got her prisoner, that’s fucked up. She’s our friend, she’s sinking beneath the waves, we need to rescue her.”
“Rescue her? That’s insane, Seth. She’s in a fucking armed compound.”
“I’d jump into shark-infested waters to save Tam.” She looked to see if he was smartassing, but he was grave.
“Don’t be an asshole, Seth. Don’t you think that Gretyl’s beaten herself up for not going rambo on Daddy Iceweasel’s dungeon? It’s a suicide mission.”
“It was a suicide mission, without Dis’s help. Now it’s merely insane. Come on, you want to live forever or something?”
“Let’s call her first,” Tam said. “For all we know, Dis is ready to break her out without anyone getting shot.”
Getting Dis on the phone wasn’t easy. There was a Dis instance running on the spacies’ cluster – running a Dis instance was a prerequisite for being taken seriously as a walkaway clade these days – but it was slow and stock. The spacies used her to help their research on the microsat upload project, and the scanning crew consulted her to keep the array of cheap scanners synched to do the powerful computation necessary to interpolate low-precision measurements into very hi-rez, high-accuracy databases that turned all the parts of a person that mattered into a digital file.
The local Dis didn’t know about her instance-sister in Jacob Redwater’s bolt hole, but that Dis left Gretyl with a letter to other Dis instances, encrypted with a key protected by the private pass-phrase Dis had used in life. The local Dis accepted the file, decrypted it, thought about it for a computerish eyeblink. “This is crazy.”
“Yeah,” Gretyl said.
“Which part?” Seth said.
“The whole thing. Kidnapping, infiltration, pwnage. It’s terrible. It’s terrifying. It’s also bad-ass, all that pwnage.”
“Conceited much?” Seth kept it light, but Gretyl could tell he chafed. He’d never known Dis alive, so for him, she was this omnipresent transhuman oracle. When Gretyl heard Dis’s voice, she pictured the colleague she’d worked alongside, the way she’d waved her hands and paced when she talked, felt the physical presence of her through a mental illusion so complete it seemed she could reach out and grab Dis and hug her.
“Nope,” Dis said. “That wasn’t me-me. That was other-Dis-me. English needs new pronouns. Other-Dis-me and I are and are not the same person, and the accomplishments I happen to be praising are not accomplishments that me-me had anything to do with, so I am not tooting my own horn, just admiring the work of a very close colleague. But I could have done the same thing, of course.”
“Of course,” Seth said. Gretyl could see the through-the-looking-glass logic of talking to Dis had charmed him.
Tam said, “Plus, don’t be a dick to the immortal simulated dead lady. It’s bad manners.”
Gretyl didn’t know if Tam and Dis got on but she felt there must have been history there.
“You say the sweetest things,” Dis said. “Now, how about we place a call?”
“Please,” Gretyl said. The word was louder and more forceful than intended. Her palms were sweaty and her pulse throbbed in her ears. Perhaps she could even talk to Iceweasel?
A moment, then a strange sound from the speaker, another moment. Then, “Hi there.”
“Couldn’t reach her?” Gretyl felt like she was drowning in disappointment.
“What? Oh. No, this is me – Dis. I mean the one at Natalie’s father’s house.”
“I’m here too.”
“This is too weird,” Tam said.
“I’ll drop an octave,” said one of the Dises, in a deeper voice, and the other said, “Man, that’s weird.”
“Which is which?” Gretyl’s head swam.
“I’m local,” said deep-Dis.
“I’m on-site,” the other said.
Tam took charge. “Okay,” she said, “I’m going to call you ‘Local’ and ‘Remote’ for this call. Deal?”
“Deal,” both voices said at the same instant. Gretyl thought about her own backup, sitting in storage, wondered what it’d be like to converse with it, or multiple copies of it. The thought was nauseous; though the possibility had come up many times over the years, it had never been this immediate.
“Remote, what’s going on with Iceweasel?”
“They untied her three days ago. She’s been doing isometric exercises whenever they’re not around, but she’s still weak. She was out for ten days. They’re giving her sedatives in her food. They’ve stockpiled hypnotics, but I can’t tell if they’re going to use them – it’s a multi-factional thing, the mother and father not in agreement about how to proceed. The disagreement has as much to do with their fucked-up husband/wife dynamic as it does with their feelings for their kid.
“Emotionally, she’s not in great shape, even with sedatives. She’s pissed, having jangly feelings about her parents. When Mom visits, she veers from affection, or maybe pity, to a mother–daughter ‘I hate you!’ dynamic that’s got a sharp edge.”
“Because her mother is complicit in her kidnapping,” Tam said.
“Yeah, because of the kidnapping. Thought that went without saying.”
“Trying for maximum clarity.”
“Max-clarity it is. I’m totally inside their network now. Updated firmware on every device connected to the safe-room net, left a back door. The only way to get me out would be to burn everything and start over. It’s airgapped from the house network. There are a half-dozen sensors outside the safe-room, optical/sound/radiation/air quality. I’m not sure, but I think they’re physically co-located with house network devices – they may even be house network sensors, hacked to send a second data-stream into the safe-room. There might be a way to pwn those sensors and use them to get inside the housenet, but I’m worried that’ll trip the intrusion detection system and give it all away, so I’ve stayed away.
“From watching the sensors, I believe there’s only one full-time security thug, a woman who might have been on the snatch-team that got Natalie – that’s what they call her. I’m basing that on conversations I’ve eavesdropped on between Natalie and her family. There’s also a medic and an admin assistant who gofers food and meds. They’re keeping it small, which makes sense from a secrecy/opsec perspective. Apart from them, the only people who go in or out of the safe-room are the mother, the father, and the sister.”