“But they were tighter. More radical. They were into gamification, making systems that tracked and advertised performance. It really worked. People busted their asses to get on leaderboards. The tops didn’t get privileges outright, but if you were in the top decile and you thought an idea was right, it carried weight.
“I know you hate this, Limpopo, but one of the reasons I like it is it’s honest. When you talk, people listen, because you kick ass and bust your own ass to get shit done. When we do it your way, things are better than when we don’t. So the fact that no one says, ‘Hey, Limpopo is the big cheese and we do what she says,’ doesn’t make it not true, or even secret. It just makes the supposedly egalitarian basis of our lives bullshit.”
They hadn’t walked in some time. His breath was ragged. There was one more rise to crest, and they’d be at the tractor. He could ride and they could swap batteries. Limpopo’s shoulder ached from where his weight rested. She swallowed her irritability, knowing that it had to do with coldness, stress and exhaustion, not the offensiveness of what he’d just said. She looked at Etcetera, he looked back, telemetry from his face transmitted to her suit so that she could see his expression in night-vision false-color. He was handsome, her lover and best-ish friend. Compassionate, smart without being judgmental, which is all she’d ever aspired to. He had that inquisitive, quizzical expression at the weirdest times, like when he was coming, or now, in freezing dark.
“Jimmy—” she started and Etcetera lunged at her and slammed her to the ground, taking Jimmy down with her. Etcetera’s whole weight – familiar, yet alarming – was on top of her and he was screaming something, broadcasting through his suit’s speakers as well as through the intercom: “Don’t shoot!”
She craned her neck, saw the pair of white-glowing figures pointing weapons. The guns had flared, bell-like muzzles. They impassively pointed them at her and everything in her suit stopped working at once. There was a stutter of analytic infographics from Etcetera’s suit beside her as it attempted emergency power-on-self-test, and then it stopped.
Inside the suit it was dark, cold, and lonely. There was a scrape as Etcetera moved above her, a suit-on-suit rasp, loud in contrast to the terrible stillness. She fancied she felt or saw a foot in the snow, moving on snowshoes similar to hers.
Then there was another rasp and Etcetera’s weight lifted off with rough sliding motion. She rolled to see him being jerked upright, moving weakly in the grasp of a person who had snapped his wrists together strapping and bonding a handle to the scruff of his suit and yanked him upright. Their suits must have had power-assists, which was something the Thetford crew did for work gangs, but never for long walks, because for those you wanted your power for heat, not playing superman.
Her visor failed-safe transparent. Her eyes adjusted to moonlight. She saw the other yank up Jimmy, who thrashed weakly and got a hard shake for his trouble. He was tossed to one side like a ragdoll, skidding face first in snow. She lost track of him as white-gloved hands descended and hauled her up. Her attacker’s suit had no visible faceplate, just a smooth expanse of white.
One hand held her aloft by an armpit, sore and alarming. The other hand probed her head, found the manual release for her visor, tugged it, scrape of suit-on-suit conducting through the helmet, and then a whoosh of cold air as the visor popped open violently (the manual catch was designed to free suffocating people, had a powerful spring in it). The sudden motion startled her captor as much as it did her and he – a he because otherwise her tits were crushed by her armor – fumbled her and nearly dropped her and she had the presence of mind to squirm and break for it. He casually backhanded her face with his glove – a gauntlet made of something blade-stopping whose external layers had chilled to iciness, so cold it felt like nothing at all, numbing as it made contact, taking away some of her humid skin with it – and she saw stars.
She looked at the blank faceplate, face aching, cold air making her eyes and nose water. She spat and hit it dead center, spit steaming as it froze. The head cocked. She sensed this person was conversing with the other who held thrashing Etcetera.
The other shouldered Etcetera in an easy fireman’s carry and walked to Jimmy, flipped him over, opened the faceplate, considered him, then, calmly, unholstered a knife and slashed Jimmy’s throat, leaning back to avoid the fountain of steaming black moonlit blood, not quick enough. The armored suit steamed too as the murderer turned back to the one holding her. There was another moment of inaudible radio chatter.
The murderer swung Etcetera around from the fireman’s carry, grabbed him under the armpit, held him at arm’s length, probed his suit for the visor-release, and Limpopo screamed, the words tumbled out, “No, no, not him, too! Tell me what you want and you can have it, but not him, please—”
The impassive, spit-flecked face cocked its head the other way, listening to more inaudible talk. Etcetera talked, too, being maddeningly calm, the way he could be, trying to explain to the murderer – holding that knife again – this wasn’t necessary, they’d be cooperative prisoners, they had nothing to gain by running now their suits were nearly out of power and –
“NO!” she screamed as the murderer raised its knife hand. Weeping, she beat the hand holding her like an iron bar. She had hysterical strength now, she actually managed to slip a little, but the one holding her just shifted his grip and squeezed so hard she felt a muscle give way through the suit. She screamed again, out of words, the knife flashed –
This time, the murderer didn’t bother to dodge the jet of blood, just dropped Etcetera face first, handsome face in the snow, precious, hot blood melting the snow beneath him. She stopped screaming as a numbness, colder than the air or the cold glove, washed over her. He was murdered. Jimmy was murdered.
The one holding her had a knife on his belt. Any moment, it would be unlimbered and find its way to her throat.
She thought of NPC jihadis in the games her father binge-played while she was growing up, facing execution by brave player-character soldiers and closing their eyes and saying “Allah akhbar,” God is the greatest. She suddenly realized she’d always sympathized with them. Not because of what they did, which was inevitably orcishly monstrous in the games, but because of their fatalistic bravery, their willingness to go to their deaths with praise for their cause on their lips.
“We are all worth something,” she said. “Zottas are not worth more than the rest of us. Self-deception makes us into monsters. Selfishness is an excuse to bury your empathy. People are basically good. Live as though it was the first days of a better—”
The murderer tramped over to her and joined her captor, listening to her babble. They were talking, deciding how much of this shit to listen to before they did her. The one holding her tipped her in the direction of the murderer, as if offering her up. She didn’t let herself close her eyes.
“I love you, Etcetera. I love you, Gretyl. I love you, Iceweasel. I love you, Jimmy—”
The murderer’s hand dipped to his belt. She saw the knife in his hand, glinting in the moonlight for a moment before her brain got the message from her eyes that it wasn’t a knife, it was something else. Blunt and small, coming for the exposed, frozen skin of her face. It touched her, just brushed her really, and –
She couldn’t remember what happened next. She had a memory of a memory of it, part reconstruction and part traumatized flash-pop moments. The thing brushed her face and her limbs went rigid as her mind strobed in a stutter-series of brutal shocks. Her breath froze in her lungs, her ears popped, her bladder cut loose.