Default’s few voices of critical thinking pointed this out, pointed out Ohio had stopped keeping stats on the murder rate and overall mortality in Akron four years before, and back then, it had been five times higher than now, best anyone could figure.
When she saw a shit-ton of bad Akron news, she spacebarred it into ignoreland, but it kept popping up, and the headlines got snaggier and gnarlier and she couldn’t help herself, she read one. Then another. Then she watched videos the cachers had already pulled down and made local copies of, because every feed in Thetford was losing its mind over Akron.
Default had marched on Akron: the US Army and a ton of private “contractors” in the vanguard, riding mechas or ground-effect vehicles with drone outriders that continuously scanned for IEDs with lidar and millimeter-wave and backscatter, emblazoned with radiation trefoils in safety orange on their bellies, more to scare than to fulfill any safety remit.
They rode in to fight the Four Horsemen: pornographers, mafiosi, drug dealers and terrorists. Depending on the feed, their mission was to arrest high-profile Zetas who’d gone to ground in Akron; to rescue trafficked children from a pimp ring; to neutralize a Z-Word factory that was pumping out unprecedented quantities of the latest zombinol analog; or, of course, to capture domestic extremists who were working to establish an American Caliphate along with known terrorist cells in Michigan, Oregon, and Louisiana.
Whichever one they were fighting, they prepared for the worst. “Targeted” strikes took out twenty-two buildings in ten minutes, reducing them to rubble and showering the streets with lethal rains of falling stones. One of the buildings was a hospital, formerly derelict and since reopened by walkaways and allies, with a maternity ward and a palliative care ward where patients chose the manner of their deaths. The war of words about this building was especially heated – it was alleged to be a breeding ground for bio-agents (which walkaway nets insisted were vaxx printers that made ebola and H1N1 vaccine without licenses), a “murder clinic” and a “rogue surgery operation.” The default nets didn’t mention the maternity ward.
The boots-on-the-ground phase started before the dust settled, literally: pacifier bots that tazed anyone believed to be carrying a weapon or whose facial biometrics were a “sufficient” match for a “high-value target.” Once a bot zapped someone, it broadcast loud messages warning everyone to keep clear, then stood guard over the unconscious victim until a snatch-squad arrived by ground-effect or sky-hook.
The walkaway net in Akron suffered a cyberwar attack, first missiles that took out the fiber head-ends, then RF-tropic aerostats that homed in on wireless masts and blasted them with pulses of noisy RF. The RF noise-floor in the city limits rose to the point where all devices began to fail.
That was the push; then came the push-back. The walkaways and Akronites who’d assumed control of the city planned for this kind of shock/awe. They had bunkers, aerostat-seeking autonomous lasers, dark fiber backups that linked up to microwave relays far out of town, offline atrocity-seeking cameras that recorded footage automatically when the network went dark, crude HERF weapons that stored huge amounts of solar energy whenever the sun shone, ready to discharge it in a powerful whoomf the moment they sensed military spread-spectrum comms.
Once the word got out about Akron, there was online pushback, too. Walkaways all over the world battered at the comms and infrastructure of the contractors in the vanguard, the DHS, the DoD, the White House internal nets, the DNC’s backchannels, Seven Eyes chatter nets – the whole world of default super-rosa and sub-rosa connectivity. Walkaway backbones prioritized traffic out of Akron, auto-mirrored it across multiple channels.
This was all to script. For a decade, walkaway had been allied with monthly gezis that popped up in one country or another. They’d made a science of responding to authoritarian enclobberments, regrouping after every uprising to evolve new countermeasures and countercountermeasures against default’s endlessly perfected civil order maintenance routines.
The difference was these walkaways were getting the full treatment. Not that default hadn’t gone total war on walkaway before, but walkaway had always solved the problem by walking away. Default had produced an endless surplus of sacrifice zones, superfund sites, no-man’s-lands and dead cities for walkaways. To a first approximation, all blasted wastelands were fungible.
Staying put was not walkaway doctrine, but there were plenty of other people in the planet’s recent history who’d evinced an irrational, deep attachment to the real-estate where they’d most recently ground to a halt. The tactics were understood.
Every gezi ended the same. Clouds of tear gas, lack of food and medicine; mounting injured and mealymouthed promises of zottas lured everyone off the streets and into what was left of their homes. Insignificant concessions were made and everyone agreed something had been done and it was time to move on.
Everyone knew that wasn’t where these walkaways were headed. Even zottas. Especially zottas. The shock/awe phase was the most brutal ever, lethals and less-lethals mixed indiscriminately. Even the tamest default press was kept away due to fears of cooties and other bio-agents. Ohio’s governor suspended the state legislature until the “emergency” concluded.
It was nerve-wracking. Walkaway footage from Akron had a desperate vibe. Every face, even the brave ones, looked doomed. The brave ones were the worst.
Dis knew some people in Akron. There was a Dis in Akron, or had been. She’d recently synched with her twin and feared for her, which was irrational. The meat-people she knew had been backing up since the Akron project was declared. This was the most worrying thing. Walkaways stood their ground because they did not fear death. Though she’d never say it to anyone – not even another Dis instance – she thought of the Akronites as a death-cult. They were fearless suicides who’d been guaranteed an afterlife. Default feeds hinted this, without saying it, because official default position was that uploading – walkaway uploading, anyway – was smoke and mirrors. They were chatbots with idiosyncratic vocabularies, just convincing enough to trick gullible and desperate extremists who’d turned their back on everything.
Dis was grand-matron to these walkaways and everyone who thought death was another way of walking away from zottas and their demented ideas about wealth only ever mattering if you had more than everyone else. They were her spiritual children. She represented proof that death was the beginning, not the end. She’d never told anyone to take a backup and throw themselves into enemy cross-hairs. She hadn’t had to. Her existence was enough.
There must be so many Dises running in default’s cyberwar labs. That was how they thought. She’d be the ultimate captive. All it would take to torture her into compliance was a tweak to the parameters of her even-keeled lookaheads, so existential terror smashed her again and again, beneath its high waves, without drowning her. The knowledge of her legion of sisters being grotesquely tortured made her furious – without making her rage, thanks to the lookahead safeguards. She wondered if her tortured sisters experienced the intensity that she was missing, whether they secretly enjoyed it a tiny bit.