“That won’t be my problem. I’m going to lie around and have grape-peelers feed me. Give me a year, I’ll be wearing a toga and a laurel.”
“The only zottas I know who live like that are either addicts or broken. Real zottas like my dad work as many hours as any beggar. Being a zotta means worrying you’re not zotta enough, grafting away to make your pile of gold bigger than those other assholes’ piles. I bet my old man hasn’t had eight hours of sleep in a row in ten years. If it wasn’t for medical technology, that fucker’d be dead of ten heart attacks and twenty strokes.”
“No one forces him.”
“You know it’s true. You worked for zottas. Have you ever met a lazy zotta?”
“Of course.”
“Was she a drunk? Or a pill-popper?”
“Well—”
“No one forces you. It’s a fucking amazing non-coincidence that everyone with more money than they could spend spends every hour trying to get more. Walkaways, who have nothing, play like no one in default. They play like kids, before anyone knows about schedules, lie around like teenagers who fuck off from school and lie on a roof and bullshit for hours. They do things people always think, If only I was rich.… The irony is, rich people don’t get to do that stuff.”
“I understand irony. You don’t need to hammer me.”
“With zottas, it’s a good idea to explain thoroughly. They’re not good at thinking critically about money.”
Nadie propped herself on one elbow, their bodies briefly adhering from dried sweat. “What you’re saying, it’s not news, Ms. Ex-Zotta. I am older. I’ve spent as many years living with zottas as you. You don’t understand: this isn’t stable. There isn’t going to be default world and walkaway world trading people forever. When you have big rich people, and everyone else poor as poor, the result is … unstable.
“If there are rich and poor, you need a story to explain why some have so much and so many have little. You need a story that explains this is fair. Last century, the rich made things stable by giving some money back, tax and education and so on. Welfare state. People could become rich. Invent something, you could become rich, even if you weren’t born rich.
“But those zottas—not zottas yet, actually, just gigas or megas—only let their money be taxed because it was cheaper than paying for private security and official surveillance they needed to keep hold of wealth if the system grew unstable because of the gap between them and everyone.”
“Private security like you?”
“Of course like me. What was my job, if not keeping rich people from being pitchforked by poor people? When technology made surveillance cheaper, calculus changed. They could hold onto more money, dispense with pretense that being rich was from doing well, go back to idea of divine right of kings, people born rich because fate favors them. It was more cost-effective to control people who didn’t like this idea with technology than giving crumbs to support the fairy tale of rewards for virtue.
“As you say, the very rich want to become richer. Once money is a measure of worthiness, the more money, the more worthy. They say, ‘it’s a way of keeping score.’ Zottas play to win. Like oligarch wars in Russia, rich people notice old school chums have very tempting fortunes and all bets are off.”
“Now you’re one.”
“I’m not. I’m rich, but I’m not zotta. Things are coming to a head, could go any way. There will be blood spilled in months to come. I don’t want money to keep score. I want money to buy freedom—freedom to go other places quickly, freedom to buy choice food or pay for medical care. I have survived many things, Iceweasel, even more than your walkaway friends in their hiding places. I plan on surviving this.”
“I hope you do.” Iceweasel meant it.
“It’s mutual.” She levered herself up and reached for her panties.
[iii]
They moved Limpopo around. First, a place she thought of as “the jailhouse,” because of the barred door and the intermittent sound of prisoners down the cellblock, thanks to flukes of ventilation. Her cell was big enough for a narrow cot made of springy, metallic strapping that couldn’t be separated from the frame, no matter how hard she worked, and a seat-less clear plastic toilet, a sink molded directly into the wall. She got a roll of toilet paper and a packet of soap every third day, and used it to clean her body best as she could. Her papery orange jumpsuit—too fragile to wind into rope—refused to get dirty, even when she smeared it with scop from the edible squeeze-tubes she got three times a day.
The guards who gave her food and toiletries refused to talk. They wore biohazard suits over body armor, goggles and face masks. Once, she was attended by a guard whose visor dripped with mucousy spit. Behind that spit, the guard’s face was contorted with rage. He practically threw her food-tube, shit-roll, and soap, slammed the door (it refused to make any noise above the hiss of its airtight seal).
Twice, they took her from the cell and brought her to a room for questioning. She was fitted with sensors for these sessions. They shaved her head, attached electrodes to her bare scalp, more at her wrist, over her heart, her throat. She didn’t struggle. Who gave a shit about hair? The important thing was to save her energy for what came next.
The questioner was not in the room, but present as a voice that came from an earbud the guards inserted. She heard the questioner’s breathing, like he was a lover whispering in her ear. It reminded her of the spacies’ binaural earpieces, but this was to unnerve and disorient her.
“Luiza?”
“If you like.”
“Limpopo, then?” The voice was unemotional.
“If you like.”
“We’ll start with something easy.”
“Am I under arrest?”
“I would like your pass-phrase.”
She rattled off a string of nonsense characters.
“Now the other one.”
She didn’t say anything.
“The other one. This is the plausible deniability pass-phrase. It’s not hard to tell when you deceive. The infographics give me enormous insight into your mind.”
She tried to keep her mind still. The act of stilling her mind would also show on his scans. She wondered what he was measuring, how accurate it was. There were brilliant neuro people in the Walkaway U crowd. They said that everyone knew half of everything they believed to be true about the human mind was bullshit. No one could agree which half.
Time stretched. She wondered if they would hit her, shock her, burn her. They’d killed Jimmy and Etcetera, slashed them across the throat and tossed them into the snow to die.
“I won’t tell you.”