He had changed clothes. He wore tailored weekend stuff, a soft flannel shirt and jeans hid his incipient paunch unless you knew to look for it. He smelled of his sandalwood soap. He’d had a shower and calmed down and fetched the merc, who stood within arm’s reach and slightly ahead, body slightly rotated toward Iceweasel, impassive but alert.
“There are things you need to know about your friends, things that might help you see what’s going on there.”
“Is this part of the program? Did your snatch-consultant give you a ten-point process for deprogramming me and this is stage six?”
He shook his head. “Can you stop? I want to have an adult conversation and present the evidence. I think once you see it, you’ll understand—”
“Adults don’t have rational discussions that involve kidnapping and violent coercion. You set the terms when you sent her to drag me here. When you tied me up. When you used that on me.”
Her dad looked at the merc, a flush creeping up his cheeks. Natalie knew from Dis that the cameras in her room fed the control room, even when he was with her, so the merc and the med-tech and anyone else there heard and saw it all. Being called out as a father who’d use the pain-machine on his daughter was not Jacob Redwater’s style. He liked to be liked. He was likable – handsome, with an easy smile and enormous confidence. Natalie had seen friends fall under his spell, mistaking his friendliness for friendworthiness. It was flattering to be friended by a powerful zotta who could really listen to you with an intensity that made it clear he was interested in you, only you.
That hadn’t worked on Natalie since she was ten.
He made his eyes sad. “I wish I could tell you how much this has hurt me. I know you don’t think I love you, but I do. I’ve tried to be a good father. I know work kept me away too often. There were times when I should have been there for you—”
She swallowed her reaction: to tell him she’d always wished he was away more.
“But I have responsibilities, ones that you haven’t ever understood. I’m willing to take the blame. I’ve tried to shield you and your sister and your mother from what I do to keep us safe. It’s a rough world. I didn’t want to scare you.” His eyes grew moist. That was new. She’d never seen him mist up. He was pulling out the stops. “Natty, don’t tell your sister, but I assumed you’d take over some day. Cordelia is a lovely girl, but she doesn’t have any edge. You’ve got edge. Too much edge. But that’s good, because this world demands edge from the people who run it.”
He tentatively maneuvered a chair to her bedside. She steeled herself. She didn’t shrink when he sat. The merc positioned herself a little ahead of him. Natalie couldn’t say why, but this made her feel safer. She and the merc were on the same side, ultimately. Both were beholden to Jacob Redwater, though of course the merc had a lot more leeway about the terms of engagement.
“Your mother and sister never got that, but you did. This family, families like ours, we steer this world. It’s in trouble, Natalie. There’s too many people. Lots of them are bad people who’d destroy everything. Nihilists. They don’t care about human rights or property rights. They’d take everything we have. Jealous people who think they have nothing because we have something.
“You’ve seen the real world. There are people plenty richer than us. We’re comfortable, I’ll grant you, but we’re not ‘zottas’ – not real ones. A couple mistakes, a few changes in the world, we lose everything. Bums on the street.
“I’ll tell you what would happen next: we’d rebuild. Without handouts. We’d get to work, figure things out, and before long, we’d be on top.
“The world is lean and mean, and shakes. When you shake the cornflakes box, little flakes sink to the bottom and big flakes end up on top. I’m a hell of a big flake.” He smiled. His charming schtick.
“I know what you think of that: that I’m deluding myself. I’ve heard your talk about special snowflakes. I know your arguments. I disagree with them. You don’t know my arguments. You think you’ve found a better way. You think your walkabouts can make their way in the world without having someone in charge, without big and small cornflakes.
“That’s what I want to talk about. You need to know some things about your friends that might be hard to hear. Walkaways say the worst thing you can do is bullshit yourself. I want to demonstrate how you’ve bullshitted yourself – about them. They’re not hard to figure. Where there are walkaways, there are sellouts, happy to take free food and easy sex, but who also want money, and have a way to get both. Since you left, I’ve known everything that happened in your little world. I get videos. I’ve been inside your networks. I’ve seen traffic analysis.”
Of course it was true. Why would Jacob Redwater spy on her less in walkaway than he had in default? She’d always had the eyes-on-the-back-of-her-neck feeling, ever since she’d been old enough to leave the house, and it hadn’t let up once she got to the B&B. It took an act of will not to guess which of her “friends” fed reports back to Jacob; which ones were in government employ, or working for zottas or big companies. She’d talked it over with Limpopo and Limpopo confessed she had to resist the same impulse.
“It’s not that there aren’t plants here. Of course there are plants. The way plants hurt us isn’t by telling rich people what we’re doing. Fuck rich people – all our shit’s on public networks. The worst thing plants do is make us mistrust each other, think our friends might be our enemies. Once that happens, you’re well fucked. It’s impossible to have a discussion if you think the other person is trying to fuck with you. Everything gets distorted by that lens. Did she leave out the trash because she was distracted, or because she wanted to bicker about chores?
“That mistrust is the most corrosive thing. Back when I was in default, I was in this protest group, an affinity group loosely connected to the Anonymous Party, doing data-analysis of regulators’ social graphs to show their decisions favored the industries they regulated, such a fucking no-brainer, but it was good to have facts when you met someone who hadn’t figured out the game was rigged.
“There was a guy in our group, Bill. Bill was weird. Standoffish. Always looking at you from the corner of his eye. Always listening, not talking, like he was taking notes. We worried. We knew there were plants in our group. Whenever we found something juicy – some minister’s wife’s brother running the oil company the minister handed a fat exemption to – the government was always out in front, managing the news cycle before we published, which was overkill, given how little attention the news paid to us. The powers that be are thorough. Anything that might rise to a threat gets neutralized because it costs peanuts to clobber us, and there’s zottabucks moving around they do not want disrupted.
“We isolated Bill. Created distribution lists and passworded forums he wasn’t invited to. Stopped inviting him to pizza nights. Forgot to tell him when we went out for beers.
“Bill wasn’t a plant. Bill was clinically depressed. Bill hanged himself with his belt. His roommates didn’t find him for two days. When they put Bill into the fire, no one was there to take his ashes, so I took them. I kept them by my bedside until I walked away. They reminded me that I’d helped isolate Bill. I’d helped make him so alone that when darkness ran up on him, he didn’t have anywhere safe to run. I helped kill Bill. So did my pals. What killed Bill was our suspicion about plants. The worst thing a plant could do wasn’t leak our shit or stir up shit. We leaked our own shit. We were argumentative enough that we didn’t need plants to make us fight with each other. Worrying about plants was a million times worse than the worst thing a plant could do.”