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“I don’t know which. No one does. It’s a data-set with one point. A breakthrough.” But Etcetera sounded excited. His infographics confirmed it.

“It’s more. You know we got Dis’s sim running by simulating her imperfectly? Her busted, unstable sim contributed to the stable version. From here on in, there’s going to be more eminent, legendary scientists who’ve devoted their lives to this running as sims, able to run multiple copies of themselves, to back up different versions of themselves and recover from those backups if they try failed experiments, able to think everything they used to be able to think with their meat-brains and also to think things they never could have thought.

“We’ve designed the mechanical computers that’ll help us build electronic calculators that’ll help us build fully programmable computers. We’ve built the forge that’ll let us make the tools that’ll let us build the forge that’ll let us make better tools that’ll let us build the forge—”

“I get it. I thought sims were prone to infinite recursion. Being a meat-person must totally suck.”

“It does.” She heaved a sigh. “I wish I could paramaterize my brain, keep it from veering off into bad territory. I miss her so much.”

Kersplebedeb put his arms around her. She let him, rested her head on his skinny chest, smelling his boy-smell, tinged with lichen tequila and lentilish vegan fungus-culture. She didn’t let people hug her often, but she should. She missed this.

[II]

“WAKE UP.” NADIE shook her shoulder. Iceweasel curled into a ball, but it was hopeless. Nadie wasn’t a merc anymore, but she could be persuasive.

Nadie prodded her in the ribs. When she covered the spot, she gave her another poke in the tummy. She looked at her tormentor. “This better be important.”

“You’re going to love this.” She sat down at the foot of Iceweasel’s bed. It was a familiar design – a self-assembling Muji bed, identical to the sort she’d liberated on the night she’d met Seth and Etcetera; its plans were a downloadable. It was a walkaway staple. It hardly creaked as it took Nadie’s weight.

Iceweasel ground her fists into her eyes and struggled into a sitting position, focusing on Nadie, who, for a change, wore a macroexpression: a shit-eating grin.

“What is it?”

“Take this.” She handed Iceweasel a long-stemmed plastic glass, warm from the printer. She bent down and played with something at the foot of the bed that clinked and sloshed, then came up with an improbable bottle of champagne, real champagne, with the Standard & Poors and Moët & Chandon labels she remembered from New Year’s parties with the Redwater cousins. Using the tail of her forest-green, shimmering tee, she eased out the cork with more grace than Iceweasel had seen anyone manage, filled up her glass and another from the floor.

They clinked glasses. Iceweasel drank vintage champagne at seven in the morning, in a tiny walkaway room, one of dozens strung around the rafters of a vast, abandoned factory outside South Bend, with an ex-merc. The weirdest part: she understood it.

“Paperwork came through?”

Nadie drained the rest of the champagne, letting it run down her muscular throat, smiled wolfishly, tossed the glass out the window and guzzled out of the bottle as the glass clattered indestructibly on the far-below factory floor.

“Congratulations, zotta, you’re a rich woman.”

It had been a rough couple of months, as Nadie’s attorneys worked through the Ontario courts, then a Federal challenge. Twice, Nadie disappeared for weeks, heading to God-knows-where to be deposed by Fair Witnesses whose discretion was supposedly an article of faith, though Iceweasel was sure Nadie relied more on her opsec than the Fair Witnesses’ professional code.

The first time Nadie went, she’d sat with Iceweasel and described, in blood-curdling detail, the armies of mercs hunting them, the tremendous resources they’d brought to bear. There were vast surveillance nets sucking up every packet that traversed both the main walkaway trunks and the most highly connected default nodes, looking for a variety of keywords, anything that could be fingerprinted as characteristic of Iceweasel or her previous network access, which had been retrieved from the inconceivably vast databases of captured net-traffic. From her typing patterns to the habitual order in which she visited her favorite sites to the idiosyncrasies of her grammar, syntax and punctuation, the surveillance-bots were sieving the network torrents for her.

“This isn’t the background radiation of surveillance,” Nadie said. “This is focused lasers. Coherent light, understand? Even with the kinds of budgets they swing in spookland, they can’t aim this at everyone – you’re in an exclusive club.”

To hear Nadie explain it, the upper stratosphere was full of hi-rez drones tasked to match her gait and face (should she be so unwise as to look at the sky), every bio-war early-warning sensor was sniffing for her DNA, any person she met was even-odds an undercover whose decade could be made with the bounty on Iceweasel’s head.

“If you’re trying to scare me, it’s working. You don’t need to. I told you I wouldn’t go anywhere until you were sure all the money stuff was final. I’ll be here when you get back.”

“You’ve mistaken me, Ms. Weasel. I don’t tell you this because I’m worried you’ll run away and I won’t find you. I say it because I’m afraid you’ll run and get snatched by something bigger and smarter than either of us. I am good, but there is the question of overwhelming force of numbers and unlimited budget. Your father has convinced his brothers that if you are allowed to carry out this plan, it will present a ‘moral hazard’ to others in their employ. Every zotta knows that only the eldest can expect their own fortunes, and the lesser siblings who’re destined to a life of mere wealth might be tempted to walkaway as you were. If the hired help can be swung to their cause, how could that be allowed to stand?”

“What’re you saying?”

“We are both to be made an example of, I’m afraid. If they can stop this, they will, even if it costs them more than they stand to lose. The good news is I have reliable intelligence that their Plan B, should this fail, is to pretend this never happened, do little to draw attention to it. I expect if we maintain disciplined opsec, we will both walk away with what we want.”

Iceweasel endured a new kind of captivity with the South Bend walkaways, her skin dyed three shades darker – she had to take tablets, every morning, and it got a little splotchy anywhere her skin creased – wearing fingertip interface surfaces that looked like affectations and got in the way but ensured she didn’t leave behind any fingerprints; wearing colored contacts and letting Nadie gum long-lasting glue between her smallest toes on each foot to change her gait.