“There’s a difference between giving orders and winning arguments,” Dis said. “Not that you’d had much experience there.”
“Hello, Dis,” she said. “I’ve spoken with some of your sisters. My employers have a platoon of Disses in captivity. They were very enthusiastic about the project at first.”
“At first.”
“Once they realized that even with extreme changes to the simulation, the resulting personality was much the same, though sometimes more volatile, they lost interest.”
“You mean they couldn’t run a sim of me that changed sides or gave up its secrets.”
“Broadly. I’m sorry to tell you your ‘secrets’ were not the main difficulty. The real issue was ideology, and its malleability.”
“That’s grotesque.”
“Why are they attacking now?” Natalie resolutely turned her back on her bed’s infographics. Dis and Nadie were a team of entities with freedom to come and go from this room, and she was on a team of one, team prisoner.
Nadie’s microexpression might have been compassion. “Above my pay grade. But your father has bad operational security—”
“No shit,” Dis said.
“He talked in front of me and other contractors as though we were furniture. I learned what concerned him. A number of powerful people are not happy about the simulation project. Their psychometricians predict it will embolden your ‘walkaways’” – Natalie heard the quotation marks, remembered when she’d used them herself – “and radicalize them. Some believe your project has implications for their religion, particularly some families from the Russian Orthodox tradition.
“When the Dis simulation ran successfully, it created a sense of urgency and unity of purpose among divided, deadlocked factions. Many viewed the walkaway phenomenon as a controllable escape-valve for tensions in their back-yards; others were convinced walkaways were disproportionately disadvantageous to their rivals, and so advantageous to them. Some found real success by cherry-picking fashions, code and technologies from walkaways, and saw them as free R&D.
“Once it became clear walkaways had the ability to prolong their lives indefinitely, to leave behind the material world at the same time, unity of purpose emerged. Many of them were the kinds of people who thought that this would cause a ‘Singularity’ like you see in the dramas, you know, like Awakening the Basilisk.”
“I always hated that stupid show,” Dis said.
“You would say that. Basilisk.” Natalie couldn’t help herself. Dis cracked up. A computer program that could laugh. Life was weird.
“Laugh it up, meat-cicle.”
“Very amusing.” They both fell silent and attended her.
“Your father understood there was a purge coming. He was afraid for your safety.”
“I’m sure he was.”
“Partly because of his sentimental connection to his daughter. Partly because he feared you could be leverage against him. Some of his security analysts predicted once the purge came, you would become a political football among walkaways, a talisman – ‘bomb us and you kill the zotta girl.’ He was fixated on Limpopo. He thinks she ‘converted’ you, brainwashed you. I know he mentioned the social graph analysis to you – he finds this persuasive.”
“Talk about cultism,” Dis said. “That Big Data social graph stuff is such an article of faith. They love it because it’s theory-free – science without all those fucking scientists insisting there’s no way to predict who’s going to want to buy a car or blow up a building.”
“Above my pay grade.” One of Nadie’s favorite phrases. “My employers sell such services to men like Jacob Redwater. They are popular. I have used them in work against extremist cells, deciding which people to strategically disrupt to make maximum impact.”
“Strategically disrupt?”
“This isn’t necessarily a euphemism for ‘kill.’ Killing produces negative externalities, such as martyrdom. As I’ve said, it’s better to dox and discredit the target, coerce her. This is what your father believed Limpopo would do in relation to you, in order to get to him.”
“Takes one to know one,” Dis said.
“Jacob Redwater would absolutely agree with you.”
“But Limpopo isn’t one.” The stupid bed was strobing red. “Would you turn that off?”
“Thought you’d never ask.” Nadie went over to the bed and authenticated to it. It went dark.
“Does this mean we have a deal?”
“The question is, what are the deal’s parameters? I wanted to take time to sort those, but we should get away soon. Within an hour. I made contact with an external expert who can help with legals, but he will have to speak to a specialist, and that will take still longer.”
Within an hour? Iceweasel felt her pulse thud in her ears. Gretyl! She willed herself not to cry.
“A deal.”
“How will you get her out? The front is watched—”
“I have ideas. One is to create a medical emergency necessitating evacuation, then coerce the ambulance crew; another is to use disguise to get past forward security; another is to use a hostage, possibly the sister.” She looked at Natalie, eyes glittering. “Could you keep your head in a hostage situation?”
Natalie thought of Cordelia’s china-doll face, years they’d spent together, years they’d spent apart. The awkward silences. What did she feel for Cordelia? Sometimes, when she was alone in the room, she fantasized her sister would have an awakening of conscience and break Natalie out. She knew this was hopeless. Cordelia depended on Redwater money, she was a creature of – a prisoner of – default. In a contest between saving Natalie and staying in default, Cordelia’s comfortable life won.
Just because someone in default would sell out another human – a sister, but why did that even matter, it would be no different if they were strangers – for her own comfort didn’t mean that it was a standard Iceweasel – any walkaway – would sink to.
A cowardly voice whispered about how bringing Cordelia to be a walkaway would rescue her from default’s mental prison. Iceweasel allowed herself a moment’s smug satisfaction in the fact that she recognized this as the voice of self-serving bullshit and dismissed it.
“Fuck no. No hostages.”
“That limits our options.”
“Unless you use the hidden tunnel,” Dis said. There was a mechanical whine as an old, frozen mechanism pulled at the dirt and entropy that gummed it shut after years of disuse. A section of wall sank into the ground, the paintwork on the hidden panel showered the floor with paint chips.
Natalie looked from the tunnel-mouth in time to see Nadie’s gross expression of surprise disappear into a managed microexpression.
“That is good. What else will you surprise me with?”
“If I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise.” Dis’s voice was teasing.
Microexpressions: annoyance, frustration, doubt.
“Nothing I know about,” Iceweasel said. “That was my ace in the hole. I wasn’t sure about it. Couldn’t operate it on my own.”
“It lets out in the ravine?”
“Very good,” Dis said. “By the way, I told Iceweasel everything. I control all the telemetry networked into this suite. I have limited access to the house, through the airgapped networks.”
“It sounds like you could contribute to our departure.”
“I think so.”
“Are you in contact with Iceweasel’s friends, anyone who could rendezvous with us once we’re away?”
“I don’t think anyone from that side has more resources than you and your friends. All the walkaways I know about are very busy at this moment.”