“Akron?”
“Oh, right.”
Five minutes later, she said, “God dammit.”
“Not just Akron. Not just Canada and America, either. Chiapas is insane. Bloodbath. The footage out of St Paul’s in London was so bad even some of the default feeds led with it. City of London police have ugly ideas about ‘less lethal’ weapons.”
“I feel so fucking helpless. I should be out there, fighting.”
“They’re not fighting, they’re walking away. Or running away, if they know what’s good for them.”
Clunk-clunk.
“You’re crying.”
“I’m a hostage in my father’s house. It’s depressing.”
The merc handed her a glass with something brown and thin at the bottom. The fumes reached her nose, then her eyes. Rye whiskey. Her father’s drink. Always the best. This was no exception. She’d lost the taste for rye after too many covert teenaged drink-ons that ended with the rye burning up her throat as she knelt in front of the toilet with Cordelia or some girl or some boy holding her hair out of the jet.
She sipped. The burn was nostalgic and numbing at the same time. The fumes got into her sinus cavities and the backs of her eyes.
Nadie said, “Who were you talking to?”
“What do you mean?” The infographic pulsed red. She didn’t bother looking at it. She tossed down the rest of the rye, managed not to cough.
“When you and a mysterious person were talking, which I was listening to because I put a bug in this room.” She scraped the back of the chair with a fingernail, held up a tiny thing, size of a rice-grain, on her fingertip. “A person, a woman, Dis, whom you spoke to and who spoke to you. I know from intelligence about a woman whose real name was Rebekkah Ba?türk, killed in a strike on a walkaway research facility near Kapuskasing, subsequently the first person to be successfully simulated in software, under her pseudonym ‘Disjointed,’ which is shortened to ‘Dis.’ Were you talking to an instance of her?”
“I’d like another drink.”
“She’s quite right, the attack on your friends in Thetford, on Akron and other sites, is quite fierce. It’s unlikely to abate soon. I had hoped to keep it from you because I knew you would be concerned about your lover.”
“That’s very kind.”
“It is, though I can tell you mean it sarcastically. Your father’s project for me, the one I was paid for, was to deprogram you. To show you what he tried to show you, the reports on Limpopo, how she manipulates people to her will, even as she promises she is part of a project to stop anyone from taking orders from anyone else.”
“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 backyards; 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?”