Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

“Not bad.” He burped, burped again. “Fizzy, though?” “Because it’s fast-acting. It was ditch water an hour ago. We sieved it, brought it up to room temp, dumped in the culture. It’s live, too—add some precursor, it’ll come back. Survives in your urine. Just save some, you want to make more.”

“Most beer is rented. This is free. You know: ‘free as in free beer.’” She drank half the cup, spilling into her beard. It beaded on the crinkly refugee stuff.

“Kinda hoppy, though.” “Not the taste. The enzymes. Stuff in it helps you break it down, stops it from turning into formaldehyde in your blood. Good for reducing hangovers. It’s Turkish.”

He rubbed the interface strip on his ring finger and muttered “contact details,” held out his hand. Her hand was warm, rough, and small. She touched a strip she wore as a choker and whispered, and he felt a confirming buzz from his system, then a double-buzz that meant that she’d reciprocated. “So you can white-list me.”

“You’ve never been to one of these,” she said, her face right up to his ear again. “No,” he shouted. Her hair smelled like burning tires and licorice.

End of the day, anything that made you discount objective reality and assign a premium to some kind of internal mental state was going to be both pro-survival and pro–status-quo.

She forked up more hash and pointed it at them. On impulse, Hubert, Etc let her feed it to him. It was surprisingly good, and the clink of the fork on his tooth made him shiver like an amazing piss.

His whole identity rests on the idea that the system is legit and that he earned his position into it fair and square and everyone else is a whiner.”

“I’m suspicious of any plan to fix unfairness that starts with ‘step one, dismantle the entire system and replace it with a better one,’ especially if you can’t do anything else until step one is done. Of all the ways that people kid themselves into doing nothing, that one is the most self-serving.”

Natalie caught his eye. Her face shone. She was beautiful. She had zits, a sprinkle of freckles, the sclerae of her eyes were pink and her lids were red-rimmed. She was brimming with life, sorrow, and whatever he’d felt when he realized that the whispered conversations about money and jobs that all the grown-ups had all the time were the outward reflection of deep, unending terror. A fear that gnawed at every grown person. A primordial terror of the tiger outside the cave.

Their fingers moved in the tiniest of increments, spreading, entwining. It may have taken thirty minutes. Each of their hands was saying, “Is this okay?” and waiting for the other’s to move, “Yes, it’s okay,” before moving again. They were sending pulsed SYN/ACK/SYNACKs over a balky network.

“But it’s hard to pretend that you’re not the protagonist in the movie of your life. Normally it doesn’t matter, but being around here rubs your nose in it.”

“From now on, this place is on a quid-pro-quo basis. Everyone gets out what they put in. You’ve put in so much, well, you could stay for years without lifting a finger. You’ve got reputation capital to burn.”

We can live like it’s the first days of a better world, not like it’s the first pages of an Ayn Rand novel. Have this place, but you can’t have us. We withdraw our company.”

“The best way to be superhuman is to do things that you love with other people who love them, too. The only way to do that is to admit you’re doing it because you love it and if you do more than everyone, you’re still only doing that because that’s what you choose.”

“A technicality. You know how this works. The only stable state you can boot a sim into is one where it doesn’t have a meltdown about being a sim. Maybe there’s some six-sigma fraction of the general population who have no possibility of that, and they’ll be dead forever, but for anyone who has even the narrowest possibility-space for coping with existential angst, there will never be any reason to die, ever. Fuck you, Prometheus, we have stolen fire from the fucking gods!”

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.

“Is the B&B network safe?” Limpopo shrugged. “That’s a bitch, huh? Maybe they put deep hooks in that we’ll never find. We’ve done what we could, checked checksums against the backups and known-good sources. The zeroday got sequenced and patched damned quick, since it affects the main branch, all the way up to UN refugee camps where a billion people live.”

Gretyl had a tattoo around one of her biceps that read FEAR IS THE MIND-KILLER, but as far as Iceweasel was concerned, her mind could use some killing.

A ‘job creator’ is someone who figures out how to threaten you with starvation unless you do something you don’t want to do.

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 firefighters who are kinked just the right way to sort out the weirdest shit happening around the edges.

“If your ship goes down in the middle of the open water, you don’t give up and sink. You tread water, clutch onto a spar, do something.”

“I know. I’m sick of being a fucking damsel. Princess Peach sucks. I wanna be Mario. It’s been weeks.

She’s got good diagnostic tools, and she’s running them on the system to get integrity checks on the firmware and operational code. Of course, I’m totally inside all the system calls she’s making and I’m giving her the checksums her diagnostics expect to see, because fuck you, all that base totally belongs to me.”

“Missed hugging and holding you,” Tam said. “And you should meet this other Limpopo, our Limpopo, she’s wonderful.” “Don’t suck up,” said the house spirit. “You’re getting mouse turds in your cornflakes for a week, asshole.”

Better nation’ talk needs to die in a fire. We’re not doing nations anymore. We’re doing people, doing stuff. Nations mean governments, passports, borders.”

That’s the next generation’s job, right? No matter how hard you try, the little fuckers always generation-gap you.”