Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

All the billions who’d died. Every one the apex of a pyramid of resources, love, thoughts no one else ever thought before and would never think again. If you have it in your power to end slow-motion genocide, what kind of monster would you be not to do it? What price was too high? She knew that this was dangerous thinking, the kind people died and killed for. Tam wanted her to stop things because Tam couldn’t make herself stop things. It was too late. Iceweasel couldn’t help herself either.

“You realize they’re exactly right,” Sita said. She smiled, stopped. “You know, when the first walkaway prostheses projects started, most of the people contributing had lost an arm or a leg in Belarus or Oman, and were tired of paying a loan-shark for something that hurt and barely worked and could be remotely repossessed by an over-the-air kill-switch if they missed a payment. But once they got here and started living, realized how much had been left on the table by conservative companies that didn’t want to get into a patent fight and didn’t see any reason to add advanced functionality to something that you didn’t have any choice about, they got radicalized. “They stopped saying ‘I just want to make an arm that’ll get through the day,’ and started saying, ‘I want an arm that does everything my old arm did.’ From there, it was a short step to ‘I want an arm that’s better than my old arm.’ And from there, it was an even shorter step to ‘I want an arm that’s so outrageously awesome that you’ll cut off your own to get one.’ That’s what’s coming to immortality. Not just the ability to come back from the dead, but the ability to rethink what it means to be alive. There’s going to be people who decide to deadhead for a year or a decade, to see what’s coming. There’ll be people with broken hearts who deadhead for twenty years to get some distance from their ex-. I’ll bet you that someday we’ll look around and discover that all the kids are short for their age, and it’ll turn out...

“You’re going to hate to hear this, but you’re too young to get it. Anything invented before you were eighteen was there all along. Anything invented before you’re thirty is exciting and will change the world forever. Anything invented after that is an abomination and should be banned. You don’t remember what life was like twenty years ago, before walkaways. You don’t understand how different things are, so you think things don’t change that much.

They used to think everything got changed by technology. Now we know the reason people are willing to let technology change their worlds is shit is fucked up for them, and they don’t want to hang onto what they’ve got.

The rest of the party eased in, sending the water level up so little waterfalls cascaded out into the drains. Seth was very solicitous of Gretyl, who regarded him with detached amusement as he fussed, darting to offer her a hand. Iceweasel got the impression that some of this was for her benefit, but that much more was for Tam’s, and possibly Limpopo’s. It was striking how the presence of a man changed so much about their dynamic, made it about invisible lines of attention. She shrugged, winced at her shoulder, switched her gaze to Gretyl, felt that slow curling low in her belly again. It was scary, the feelings that came up when she looked at Gretyl. Gretyl looked back at her, skewered her on her frank stare, and a shiver raced from her toes to her hairline. Gretyl’s stare said You’re mine and Will you be mine? at the same time. Strong/weak. Soft/firm. Like Gretyl, big arms and muscular back, round soft belly and huge, soft breasts.

Akron kicked off as she was leaving for the WU campus. Walkaways did a coordinated mass squat on the whole downtown, 85 percent of which was boarded up and underwater, the bonds based on their mortgages in escrow with the Federal Financial Markets Service in Moscow while the Gazprom meltdown played out. They’d flown under the radar, smooth and coordinated. One day, Akron was haphazardly squatted by homeless people, the next, a walkaway army reopened every shuttered building, including fire stations, libraries, and shelters. Factories turned into fabs, loaded with feedstock, powered by eggbeater fields that sprung up overnight, electrolyzing hydrogen from sludge flowing in the Little Cuyahoga River, feeding hydrogen cells that walkaways wrestled around in wheelbarrows. Default was caught off guard. Connecticut flooding had FEMA and the National Guard tied up. The contractors who backstopped FEMA couldn’t use their normal practice of hiring local talent as shock troops. By the time they mobilized, their entire recruiting pool was walkaway. It gave the Akron walkaways – they called themselves an “ad hoc,” said they were practicing “ad-hocracy” – a precious week to consolidate. By the time default besieged Akron, they were a global media sensation, source of endless hangouts demonstrating a happy world of plenty salvaged from a burned husk with absentee owners. Iceweasel said, “It’s exciting.” “More than exciting. It’s a city. Not a village or a camp. The first, but not the la...

As the voice liked to remind her, the psychology of falling in love with an older woman when your own mother all but abandoned you wasn’t difficult. All the peace Iceweasel got from being engulfed in Gretyl’s embrace led to wondering whether she was giving Gretyl back anything in exchange.

“Guys,” she said, her tone unexpectedly serious. It was a serious time. “I want you to know—” She looked from Seth to Etcetera, back again. They’d been aged by walkaway, but it gave them gravitas. A moment of lensing time let her see them as strangers, how rakishly handsome they were. She smiled. Her affection felt like molten chocolate. “I just love you both, okay? You’re good. The best.”

When they undocked, Gretyl and Limpopo were standing by, grinning like proud parents. She and Gretyl had scored a private hexayurt for the night, and she’d felt low-grade, anticipatory horniness ever since she learned they’d be alone. Now, with the boys in her arms and Gretyl looking on with Limpopo – so fucking hardcore and so hot, she’d had a low-grade crush on her for years – her horniness spiked with toe-curling intensity. She laughed at the sheer physicality. The boys laughed along, though who knew why. She was no longer inside their heads. That was okay. They were walkaways, and god help them, they’d figured out how to live as though it were the first days of a better nation, and she was going to get her brains fucked out that night. The world was good. *

“You’re talking about economists,” she said. “Of course I’m talking about economists! I think you have to be a mathematician to appreciate how full of shit economists are, how astrological their equations are. No offense to your egalitarian soul, but you lack the training to understand how deeply bogus those neat equations are.” Iceweasel stiffened. She knew Gretyl was kidding, but didn’t like to be told she “wasn’t qualified” to have a discussion, even in jest. She pushed the feeling down, strove to access the part of her that lit up when Limpopo described this stuff. If Gretyl noticed, she gave no sign: “Your dad hires economists for intellectual cover, to prove his dynastic fortunes and political influence are the outcome of a complex, self-correcting mechanism with the mystical power to pluck the deserving out of the teeming mass of humanity and elevate them so they can wisely guide us. They have a sciencey vocabulary conceived of solely to praise people like your father. Like job creator. As though we need jobs! I mean, if there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that I never want to have a job again. I do math because I can’t stop. Because I’ve found people who need my math to do something amazing.

“If you need to pay me to do math, that’s because a) you’ve figured out how to starve me unless I do a job, and b) you want me to do boring, stupid math with no intrinsic interest. A ‘job creator’ is someone who figures out how to threaten you with starvation unless you do something you don’t want to do.

“But Amanda can’t do it all. Unless she’s working on a one-woman problem, she’ll have to cooperate with others. If she sucks at that, it might take a hundred times more work in total to get it done than if Gretyl – who’s good at sharing her toys and keeping everyone purring – were the boss. This isn’t anecdote – as you keep telling me, the plural of anecdote is not fact. Limpopo sent around this meta-analysis from the Walkaway Journal of Organizational Studies that compared the productivity of programmers. It broke out the work programmers did as individuals and inside groups. It found that even though there were programmers who could produce code that was a hundred times better than the median – one percent as many bugs, one hundred times more memory efficiency – that this kind of insane virtuosity was only weakly correlated with achievement in groups.”

“I just read the summary and skimmed the stats and the methodology for smooshing together the different data-sets. The tldr is these hacker-wizards who produce better code than anyone were often so hard to work with that they made everyone else’s work worse, buggier and slower. The amount of time they had to spend fixing that code slowed them down so much, it ate up their virtuosity gains. “Attempts to put together ‘Manhattan Project’ teams made from wizards without normal dumb-asses like me showed exactly the same effect. “They footnoted one study, one I did read – an ethnographic survey of projects that went to shit, even though they had brilliant programmers. The authors found there were two major causes of failure. The first was some wizards were colossal assholes. ‘Asshole’ was what they called it, because the phrase came up from three different teams. It’s impossible to work with assholes, even brilliant assholes. ‘Don’t work with assholes’ is great advice, but it’s also a duh moment, because if you haven’t figured that out by your second or third team, you might be the asshole. “The other category was when you had wizards who had no clue how to work with others. They weren’t dicks, they just didn’t have the instinct. The authors found teams where the wizard and everyone else hadn’t failed, and in these cases, it was because there was someone good with people who figured out how to smooth over differences and see how people fit together. These people were wizards of ...

She sang “Consensus,” an incredibly dirty walkaway marching song, thirty verses. The chorus: “Consensus, consensus, it beat us and bent us, but we’re sure that it’s lent us, a shit-eating grin.”

“We know there’s truth in it. It’s all around us. You can only act like the planet is infinite – like wishful thinking trumped physics – for so long before it goes to shit. That’s why Cape Canaveral is a SCUBA site. Think about it too long and you’ll come to the conclusion that nothing you do matters. It’s either kill yourself now or kill your descendants just by drawing breath.

Everything we know we should do but can’t bring ourselves to do because the part of us that sees the whole map and knows it’s the way to go can’t convince the part that’s in the driver’s seat. It’s about being able to choose, make the choice stick.”

Because the inability to see reason is a species-destroying crossroads and we’re at it now. If we don’t figure out how to put off gratification today for survival tomorrow, to beat the solipsist’s delusion that you’re a special snowflake—”

“That voice sim is getting better at sarcasm.” “I’ve been sneaking updates to my local copy. The voice synth people are good – merging normalized speech recordings from MMOs and voice-response systems, getting incredible stuff out of it. I’ve been playing around with some of the possibilities.” The last sentence came out in a growl of predatory menace, so scary Natalie jerked in her bonds. “Jesus.” “I know, right? I cheated, though. Used sub-sonics. It’s pretty amazing what I can do. You should hear my sexy ingénue.” “No thanks. I can’t remember ever feeling less interested in sex—”

“Your problem is you think ‘useless’ and ‘useful’ are properties of people instead of things people do. A person can perform usefulness, or anti-usefulness, depending on circumstances. Evolutionary winnowing didn’t somehow pass over the people who don’t contribute the way you want them to, leaving a backlog of natural selection for you to take care of. The reason everything about us is distributed on a normal curve, with a few weirdos way off in the long tails at the right and left and everyone else lumped together under the bulge is that we need people who get on with stuff, and a few fire-fighters who are kinked just the right way to sort out the weirdest shit happening around the edges. We assume someone who puts out a fire is a one-hundred-meter-tall superhero fated to save the universe, as opposed to someone who got lucky, once, and has been given lots more opportunities to get lucky since.”

“I’m okay.” Gretyl tried to starch her posture, paint on a smile. Working on the engine was hard, but it gave her a break from all-consuming fear for Iceweasel. The worst part about being mothered was her own pathetic need to be mothered.

“WE ARE WELL and truly at vuko jebina now,” Tam declared. She’d learned the phrase from Kersplebedeb, who said it was Serbian for deepest boonies, literally, “where wolves fuck.” Tam loved this phrase, to no one’s surprise.

It didn’t work, but sometimes it did, often enough to keep trying. Dis hadn’t thought about B.F. Skinner since her undergrad days, but after the millionth retry to reach Seth, Tam and Gretyl, she looked up “intermittent reinforcement” in their locally cached wikip. That’s what it was: intermittent reinforcement. Give a pigeon a food pellet every time it presses a button and it’ll press it when it’s hungry. Change the lever’s algorithm so it randomly drops a pellet and the pigeon will peck and peck, as the pattern matching parts of its brain sought to figure out the trick of a reliable jackpot.

Her palpable sorrow – her voice synth had gotten so good – ripped Natalie. Her eyes flooded. She wiped furiously. She didn’t want to be hobbled with concern for someone else’s welfare. She wanted to look after herself.

“I love you, Dis.” She didn’t know if it was true, but she wanted it to be true. She wanted to love everyone. Everyone failed to live up to their own ideals. She wanted to fall short of the best ideals. “I love you for who you are now, and for who you are when you’re losing your shit. They’re both you.”

“They’re definitely the gateway drug,” Limpopo said. “I got into it through crusty cypherpunks who’d try and get party kids to use better opsec, handing out bootable sticks at underground parties.”

She missed Iceweasel. It ached inside her. A voice she hated, always louder when she was sad, reminded her she’d once taught at a university, had a house, a name, and an address. Once she’d been able to buy things when she needed them – even if she had to go into debt – could pretend there was a future. Now she had none of those things, least of all a future. She was living as though it was the first days of a better nation, but that nation was nowhere in sight. Instead, she had a no-man’s-land of drone-strikes and slit throats. Holy shit, she missed Iceweasel so much.

The new Akron, built on the site of the leveled buildings, refused to be a graveyard. The people who’d flocked to it to rebuild after the army and the mercs and the guardsmen had joined returning locals to build new kinds of buildings, advanced refugee housing straight out of the UNHCR playbook, designed to use energy merrily when the wind blew or the sun shone, to hibernate the rest of the time. The multi-story housing interleaved greenhouses and hydroponic market-gardens with homes, capturing human waste for fertilizer and waste-water for irrigation, capturing human CO2 and giving back oxygen. They were practically space-colonies, inhabited by some of the poorest people in the world, who adapted and improved systems so many other poor people had improved over the disasters the human race had weathered. The hexayurt suburbs acted as a kind of transition-zone between default and the new kind of permanent walkaway settlement, places where people came and went, if they decided that Akron wasn’t for them.

“People walk away because the world doesn’t want them. We’re a liability. I’ve heard my father talk about it: the people who want to come to Canada, people who want to have children, people who dream of having their children learn all they need to get by in the world, dream of health care and old age without misery. As far as he’s concerned, those people are redundant, except when they represent a chance to win a government contract to feed them as cheaply as possible, or house them in prison camps. Do you know how much money my father makes from his share of the Redwater private prisons? He calls it his gulag wealth fund.”

“People who think other people are like them. People who think you either take or get took. We’ll never be rid of that. It’s a primal fear, toddler selfishness. The question is whether people like you will get to define the default. Whether you can make it a self-fulfilling prophecy, doing for all of us before we do to you, meaning we’re all chumps if we’re not trying to do to you sooner. That default was easier to maintain when we didn’t have enough. When we didn’t have data. When we couldn’t all talk to each other.”

“We’re not making a world without greed, Jacob. We’re making a world where greed is a perversion. Where grabbing everything for yourself instead of sharing is like smearing yourself with shit: gross. Wrong. Our winning doesn’t mean you don’t get to be greedy. It means people will be ashamed for you, will pity you and want to distance themselves from you. You can be as greedy as you want, but no one will admire you for it.”

IT WASN’T LIKE waking from a dream, but Iceweasel was sure she had dreamed. There was Billiam, flirting outrageously with Noozi, which couldn’t be right, because poor Billiam was long dead. Noozi was in orbit, had been in orbit for fifteen years, swore she felt none of the negative physiological effects, they’d been mitigated by deadheading and pharma they printed on the station’s bioreactor. There’d been doctors, some present, more in the crowd, offering opinions on her scans, on the cancer eating her liver, threatening to spread to her blood. And her father! They’d spoken, with Cordelia. It was like old times. Nadie had been there, too, and, shit, they’d made out, in front of Gretyl. Just the memory of it made her blush. Blushing reminded her she had a body. Remembering she had a body made her remember that she’d deadheaded, parked herself because of the cancer. That hadn’t been imaginary. Parked herself after a tearful party with the boys: big, pimply teenagers; and Gretyl, old and sad and trying so hard not to show it; and her friends. Cordelia had been there, had left the walled city she and Dad lived in, snuck in a screen that Dad’s face appeared on, live-linked. He’d said urgent and desperate things that made her cry. She couldn’t remember them. She’d deadheaded. Now she was awake. In a room. She strained to look around. It was dim. It smelled nice. Like a forest, with a hint of scented steam. Like there was an onsen nearby. Sulfur, eucalyptus. She was on a hospital...