Gretyl, moving in a numb dream, went back into the shelter, prodded their bedding and scattered possessions. There were three blankets, two small and one large. The small ones smelled like the boys, the big one like Iceweasel. She took them in her arms. Jake’s stuffed mouse, Mousey, fell out of his blanket. She picked him up by his worn, chewed paw. He stared at her with beady eyes as she tucked him back into the blankets.
“You can put them with my stuff,” Limpopo said.
They walked at a fast clip to the prison. Limpopo was distracted, stumbling as she walked and talked into her interface and texted at the same time. Sometimes, she’d ask Etcetera to send a message. By the time they reached the sprawling camp at the prison gates, it was semi-panic as people raced inside the gates or away from the prisons altogether, carrying bundles on their backs. Children cried, but apart from that, it was very quiet. Clipped, tight voices, many in that odd pitch intended for interface mics, not human ears.
“Inside,” Limpopo said. Gretyl heard a helicopter rotor, far off, brought on the breeze, getting quieter as it flew away. She stopped in her tracks and brought her hands to her face. She really sobbed. Limpopo led her by the elbow, whispering it was okay, her family was safe. They had to move.
Gretyl let herself be led. Her mind had split, one fraction was overwhelmed with sorrow and self-recrimination. The other part—the part that made that decision—racing through strategy and tactics for whatever was coming. Nadie said the coming forces wouldn’t make martyrs of them, they were coming to show this was fighting crime, not fighting war. Not fighting for the existence of a society whose end was coming.
Walkaways had something the default side didn’t have: except for a few children, every walkaway had been default, once. Almost no one in default—and no one whom anyone listened to, period—had ever walked away. Gretyl found it easy to superimpose the default view on situations.
They would be perversely cheered by a fight, by prisoners and their supporters—criminals-once-removed—brawling and being gassed into submission and stacked like cordwood.
If they fought back, it might be a massacre, but they wouldn’t be martyrs. They’d be ISIS, ideology-crazed monsters to be put down with whatever regrettable force was necessary.
All this while Gretyl still sobbed, each part of her observing the other with perverse fascination, wondering which one was the real Gretyl.
*
The boys’ prison attracted the hardcore networking freaks. They sent runners to the women’s prison asking for anyone with network experience to ride the faders on the routing algorithms that would rebalance their network infrastructure as parts of it were knocked out. Gretyl and Limpopo looked at one another.
“My place is here—” Limpopo began. One of her friends—the woman who’d shown them Limpopo’s bunk, whose name Gretyl couldn’t place amid the tense emotion—made a raspberry.
“Don’t be an idiot. You’re not our grandma, you’re just another con. We don’t need you here to look after us. Do your thing. Everyone knows you’re hot shit with programming and ops. Keeping our feeds running will do more to keep us strong than sticking your skinny old body between us and hired goons.”
Limpopo faked a punch, gave her a quick hug and a peck on the cheek, and they were off.
“Here’s what I’m thinking.” They jog-trotted towards the men’s prison. “This place has more surveillance than anywhere you’ve ever been, by a factor of a hundred. Every centimeter is recorded all the time. Those feeds go into a data center that applies heuristics that ranks them so the guards can get it packaged as an infographic.”
Etcetera said, “You could package up an atrocity-feed. The worst stuff they do, pulled into a single feed that gets slicked together like a drama?”
“The idea is to prevent atrocities,” Gretyl said. “Nadie said they didn’t want martyrs, another Akron.”
They reached the gates as drones swarmed out of the skies, seeming to dive-bomb the prisons’ roofs.
“Uh-oh,” Gretyl said. Limpopo listened to a feed.
“No,” she said, “that was on purpose. They’re keeping a skeleton crew of aerial routers, enough for signals and telemetry, and landing the rest in Faraday cages until the first E.M.P. It’s a standard tactic, they say they used it in Nigeria, which makes no sense to me.”
“It was huge,” Gretyl said, “but they must have blocked it. Started with those floating cities off Lagos. Cut loose from the mainland in a walkaway uprising, literally, lost power and plumbing, didn’t have enough onboard to stay stable. Hired mercenaries from the subcontinent to pacify Lagos. The walkaways skunked them, kept their routers in boxes and released them in short bursts, mingling with the mercs’ drones so they’d have to pulse their own birds to get at the walkaways’. The feeds hardly bobbled. Made the mercs look like assholes.”
They arrived at an IT ops room in a third subbasement. A young boy, no more than fourteen, gave them an enthusiastic tour of the ops center’s features—armored conduit joining it to hard-line fiber links and in-building conduit, backup batteries—
“It’s got its own air supply?” Gretyl said.
The boy shrugged. He was skinny, with a small afro and long arms and fingers, a face full of tilt-eyed mischief. “Every block’s got bulkheads they can bring down to just gas one little part of things. Cheap and effective, so long as your team’s got masks.” That explained all the kids in gas masks on the way in—the women’s prison had hardly any. They’d made their own from micropore kerchiefs and goggles. They’d passed a small, efficient assembly line on the way out.
It was a surreal vantage point to witness the Battle of the TransCanada Prisons. They used private security on the front line, not mercs exactly. These were outsource cops, for-hire guys in uniform that cities with private police forces used—and other cities used to break police unions whenever they got uppity. Men and women in awesome body armor, stuff that looked like Hugo Boss from a cyberpunk revival, faceless and shielded, each an “army of one” with exoskeletons, scary burp-weapons. There were one hundred of them, with drone support and fast nonlethal foot-pursuit bots, headless cheetahs and dogs from alloy and soft solenoids, just enough smarts to run a target down and bear her to the ground, clobber her if she tried to get up before a signed all-clear.
The part of Gretyl that worried about her family receded as she and Limpopo fed the particulars to the global walkaway audience, wiki-ing countermeasures for every plan of attack they could conceive. Gretyl remembered her earlier thought about all walkaways having been defaults but not vice versa, wondered what the default counterintelligence operatives who monitored this made of it. They’d know this was what walkaways did, work in the open, but they also knew that when they fought each other, they used elaborate fake-outs. Would they be able to believe walkaways were just letting it all hang out, where enemies could see it?