It was impossible to know who was “winning” in Akron. Like all gezis, it was a war of perception and a military conflict. Would default’s rank-and-file see just-desserts when Akron was smashed flat? Or would they see a default victory as a tormenting Goliath grinding Davids like them underfoot? Would guerrillas be seen as plucky Ewoks taking down Imperial Walkers, or as terrorists using IEDs to kill whey-faced American patriots? Default was media savvy. The only press with money to cover anything was underwritten by the same conglomerates that owned the contractors on the invaders’ vanguard.
Every gezi ended with mixed defeat. Every gezi sent more people to walkaway, convinced no reform would rescue default. Convinced people on top couldn’t contemplate a world where no one had to be poor to make them rich. Every gezi ended with great numbers of people scared into another season of submission, a thumb on their scales that overbalanced the risk of speaking out and made going along to get along tolerable.
What effect would Akron’s martyrs have? Would fence-sitters become furious with the slaughter and rush to the streets because they wanted no part of the system that did this? Would it terrorize them into sitting still, lest they join the dead? Would they be convinced that it was suicidal to oppose default, regardless of mystical beliefs in “the first days of a better nation” and electronic afterlife?
“Did you see this?” Limpopo paged her from the party room where preparations were nearly complete. It was hung with improvised bunting, retrofitted for thundering dance music and feasting from extruders that cycled through the delicacies of walkaway’s vast store of recipes.
“Akron? It’s terrible.”
She watched Limpopo through sensors – visible light, lidar, electromagnetic. Etcetera was with her, eyes glued to a screen he’d uncrumpled from his shirt-cuff and stuck onto the side of a beer keg. Etcetera held Limpopo’s hand. A pang/not-pang of loneliness visited Dis, a ghost-ache for physical sensation and the hand of a lover.
“Akron is worse than terrible.” During the storm, the party room filled up with people who’d worked on the machines, music, and food while the nets were down. Now the connectivity was flooding back, they’d returned to their screens. It was a weird hybrid of ancient and modern rhythms. Ancient people worked when the sun shone, slept when it sank, stayed inside when storms blew, and plowed when they cleared. Walkaway nets were environmentally disruptable, and nondeterministic networks, so they did the same: endlessly communicated and computed when networks were running, did chores when weather or the world blew the networks down.
Everyone in the party room was glued to a screen or an interface, some in small groups, some on their own. They flung feeds at each other, whispered excitedly, spooling messages for walkaways in Akron, Stay safe Stay brave You are in our hearts What they do to you they do to us We will never forget you.
“Wish I had your software controls.” Limpopo’s breath was ragged. There were more deaths in Akron, fresh revelations as a drone flew over a bomb site where mechas were shifting rubble, recovering bodies and parts of bodies. The first feed died when the drone was shot down. This attracted a flock of suicide drones that sacrificed themselves to capture and transmit whatever the powers of default did not want to be seen. More shots brought them down. High-altitude drones winged in, the feeds jerkier because they recorded from a greater distance, with not-quite-stabilized magnification. There were children in the rubble. Limpopo cried. Etcetera cried. Dis wanted to change their feed, show them the doxxings popping up in darknet pastebins, personal facts of the lives of the contractors and soldiers whose faces were tagged from the footage, open letters written to their mothers and fathers, spouses and children, asking how they could do this to their fellow human beings.
These doxxings were also from the gezi playbook. Sometimes they worked. Even when they didn’t, unexpected things happened. Kids left home, leaked their parents’ private documents implicating their superiors, publishing secret-above-secret rules of engagement with instructions to use lethals when cameras were off, to bury evidence, or implicate insurgents in atrocities. Sometimes parents disowned children who’d done zottas’ dirty work, publicly disavowing slaughter. It split families and communities, but it also brought new ones together. It was controversial because it implicated so many innocents and was a dirty trick, but it was okay with Dis. Even when she’d been alive, she’d been willing to break those eggs to make her omelet. As a dead person running on servers around the world, including several hostile to her and everything she believed in, she couldn’t work up a mouthful of virtual spit in sympathy for people who felt sad that Daddy was exposed as a war criminal.
Kersplebedeb quietly typed on a keyboard and muttered into a mic.
“We should be ready to go.” He put his arms around Etcetera’s and Limpopo’s shoulders. “There’ve been more attacks. Two in Ontario, three in PEI, a couple in northern BC, and Nunavut. Some were big and some small, but none of them expected it. A couple were stable, one in PEI was twenty years old, had a good relationship with the normals around them. It’s gone now, not even a crater. Scraped clean.”
Dis said, “Have you heard anything specific about Thetford? Is anything incoming?” She spoke out of Limpopo’s bracelet, turning herself up loud enough for Kersplebedeb. He blinked and absorbed the fact that she was there.
“Nothing,” he said. “There’s almost nothing in the air right now, so if something was coming, we wouldn’t see it. If something’s coming, the snow might have stalled it. I think we should be ready to go if and when. I never believed in the Big One, but this feels like a Medium One.”
“What’s the Big One?” Dis nearly leaped in to answer Etcetera, but she let Limpopo in.
“It’s first-generation walkaway stuff. The theory was default would decide we were too dangerous to exist and they’d stage a coordinated attack on all of us, all at once. Kill or arrest everyone, end the movement in one go. They’ve got the spook power to know who and where we all are, so the only thing that stops them is whim or lack of gonadal fortitude.”
Etcetera said, “I thought it was just me who worried about that.”
“It used to be hotly debated. We thought they’d wipe us out. Then they didn’t, and didn’t, and didn’t. We speculated, were they not willing to risk the good boys and girls of default deciding this ruthlessness couldn’t be abided, taking to the streets with pitchforks? Was it that they liked to have the goats and sheep self-sorted? Did they secretly slum and ogle flesh in the onsen and eat extruder-chow and drink coffium and play bohemian dropout? Were there too many zottas’ kids in walkaway, too much blue blood to be spilled in the Final Solution?”
“I hate Kremlinology,” Etcetera said. “It obsessed my parents. Second- and third-guessing what the real powers behind Anon Ops were and who pulled their strings and why.”
Kersplebedeb: “It’s not my favorite, either, but there’s a difference between obsessing over tea-leaves and trying to figure out if the next missile is headed your way. Let’s get supplies packed and stashed by the doors, vehicles checked and charged, make sure everyone’s got a suit.”
“We can’t object to that.” Limpopo got Etcetera’s screen down and stuffed it into a pocket. “Dis, can you help? Get the word out, throw up a git to track what’s done and what needs doing?”
“Already doing it.” Dis never stopped believing in the Big One. No one who’d worked on uploading and simulation had – it was the unspoken motivation behind the project, only way you could be sure zottas wouldn’t genocide is if they knew that you’d come back as immortal ghosts in the machine to haunt them to the ends of the earth.