“If they were trying to kill me, I’d say don’t shoot. I’m an idealist, not a kamikaze.”
“Fair point. What if you had them at a table?”
“I wouldn’t say anything. I’d offer them dinner. Or I’d just go about doing what I do. I’m an idealist, not a preacher.”
“I get it.”
“What made you walk away, Jimmy?”
Crunch, crunch. “It was debt at first. My parents went into deep hock to get me through high school, and I busted my ass with everyone else. I knew they were spending huge, but I didn’t think about what that meant until I was graduating and we started talking college. I knew that I wasn’t going to go away anywhere, we weren’t zottas, but everyone in my fancy school was going to go to do a roll-your-own, everyone thinking about their star course, the one they’d take from an Ivy or a Big Ten, cornerstone of their degree, lead their employment profiles when they graduated.
“I did it, too. I had this idea I’d go into materials engineering, because I’d liked my science classes okay, and there was this stupid app they made you wear for the last two years of school that was supposed to predict your optimal career. It got this huge push from the administration, like religion for them. They could only keep their charter if they ran a certain percentage of students through it and they followed its advice. So once you got your career picked by the thing, that was it. Every teacher and administrator knew their paychecks depended on you doing what it told you.
“It was called Career Wizard. I mean, fuck, right? Kind of name you get by running a thousand A/B splits until you’ve got something middle-of-the-road inoffensive. Graphics were pointy hats, wands. Spell-book with a wizardly finger paging through the index while it worked magick to find you the perfect job for life. Hardy har.
“Once it chose your career, it had lots of advice about how you get there. It was adamant I should take this course from the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, which sounded amazing, like I was going to hang out with Planck and Einstein and Gödel and dive through the universe’s navel and find its deepest secrets. Of course, hanging out with Max Planck is an elite experience. That one course was going to cost as much as everything else in my degree combined, plus a little more. An added fuck-you.
“I tried hard to find a way around that course, looked at every permutation of other courses, and Career Wizard kept gonging me, telling me without good old Max, I’d be wasting my time and money. No one would hire me. It had percentages, estimates of how much extra salary I’d command with one high-ticket course.
“My parents couldn’t afford it. They were maxed out on credit for my fancy high school. This was going to be my debt. I could get a loan. There were tons of lenders, and I could get a great package from Booz if I’d agreed to a six-year ‘internship’ when I was done.”
Etcetera snorted.
“I wasn’t that much of a sucker. Unpaid on-site internship in Saudi, living in Booz’s compound, drawing company credit to pay for shit in the company store that costs twenty ex what it cost back home – whether or not they give you a job afterward, they’ll get a cut of your paycheck until you’re dead.
“There were boards where we were trying to figure this out, guys my age about to commit to this mountain of debt, people in the middle of it, people who’d been through it and were doing internships, maybe even with jobs. It was hard to tell what was going on. There’s selection bias. No one who is happy with how things are going joins one of those boards. They exist for the sole purpose of airing grievances.
“The other thing is everyone who isn’t there to bitch is a paid astroturf shillbot, some dickweed running thirty sock puppets through ‘persona management’ apps to help them keep it straight. The discussion quality wasn’t super-great, but it sure was depressing. You know research says the best way to predict if something will make you happy is to ask someone – anyone – who’s already done it? Well, everyone I’d met who’d done it said it was slavery.
“I wasn’t the only one who noticed, but there was such a huge-ass, all-consuming sense that anyone who didn’t buy a ticket to the lottery was going to end up as dog-food.”
“I know that one,” Etcetera said.
“Not me,” Limpopo said. “I got shit-ass grades and my school sucked, had one of the worst uni admission rates in the country. Most of my teachers never noticed me, and the ones that did assumed I was a sub-moron.”
“No way,” Etcetera said.
“Way.” She’d made a point of acting stupid, so she wouldn’t explode into raw fury.
“I knew I was smart. I could do good shit. In grade twelve, I’d modded a fabber to output wicking textile, half the weight of standard stuff, twice as strong. I couldn’t sell it or post the makefile, because it violated a hundred patents, but I’d gotten top grades.
“Mom and Dad were all over the idea of me going to uni. They’d both gotten degrees and swore it had been worth it, though they would owe money until they died, and neither one had ever held a job for more than a couple years. I once overheard them talking about how fucked it would be if I didn’t get a good job because neither of them had a pension and they’d need me to feed them once they were too old to get another job after the next layoff.
“The pressure was crazy. On the boards, people were saying, hey you assholes, you keep bitching about how everything is fucked up and shit, and there you are, getting ready to play along with it like good debt-slaves. Everyone knows there’s an alternative.”
“That’d be us,” Etcetera said.
“That’d be you. No one wanted to say the word ‘walkaway’ because it was a superstition, say their names three times fast and the spies would target you for full-take lifelong surveillance. Anyone who knew walkaways were a thing couldn’t be trusted.”
“I don’t think it’s that we can’t be trusted.” Limpopo had night-vision on and everything was blue-green false-color, snow glowing like a green LED. “Obviously we can’t be trusted. But as a class, people who heard of walkaways are going to be a different risk from people who haven’t. Once you know there’s an alternative to default, there’s a chance you might walk away. It’s like crypto, how anyone who searches on how to use good crypto gets marked for surveillance retention. It’s not that knowing how to keep a secret from the cops and spooks makes you dangerous. It makes you different.”
“I don’t think that’s why they retain traffic for people who’ve googled crypto,” Jimmy said. “It’s because most people don’t use crypto. So some default-ass doofus sends you a message in cleartext about something sensitive. Then you send me an encrypted message about it – like, ‘there’s a guy who wants to go walkaway, where’s a good place to go that’s established?’ – and you send encrypted messages around to everyone you know and get details and send them to me and I send a non-encrypted message back to my dumb-ass friend. Anyone who’s observing this transaction can make inferences about what went on inside all those black-boxed crypto messages.”
“That’s probably true. The parallel still stands. Once you know walkaways exist, there’s a chance you’re helping walkaways, or getting ready to split from default or, worse yet, do something to bring it down. Or trying to find people to come with you. If someone disappears into walkaway, you can find all the people they talked with, figure out who’s the infection agent, who else is likely to be infected, who to target for ‘de-radicalization’ therapy, and who to psy-ops and isolate.”
“That’s what we figured, a big unspoken thing. Anyone who whispered ‘walkaway’ was shunned, either a provocateur or someone with a target on their back. It was the elephant in the room. So I asked quietly around to see who knew about crypto and anonymizers—”