“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.
“When I was your age, we didn’t have abandoned zones or free hardware designs. People without a place to stay were homeless—vagrants, beggars. If you worried about zottas, you went to protests and got your head knocked in. People still thought the answer to their problems was to get a job, and anyone who didn’t get a job was broken or lazy, or if you were a bleeding heart, someone failed by society. Hardly anyone said the world would be better if you didn’t have to work at all. No one pointed out that people like your old man were LARPing corporate robber-baron anti-heroes of dramas they’d loved as teenagers and they required huge pools of workers and would-be workers under their heel for verisimilitude’s sake.
“If you’d been deadheading for twenty years and woke today, you’d think that you were dreaming, or having a nightmare. Sure, eighty percent of the people who were alive then are alive now, and eighty percent of the buildings around then are around now. But everything about how we relate to each other and places we occupy has changed. 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 zottas want to control who gets to adopt which technologies, but they don’t want to bear the expense of locking up all walkaways in giant prisons or figuring out how to feed us into wood chippers without making a spectacle, so here we are on the world’s edge, finding our own uses for things. There’s more people than ever who don’t have any love for the way things are. Every one of them would happily jettison everything they think of as normal for the chance to do something weird that might be better.”
Iceweasel considered the perfect storm of her father’s intolerableness, Billiam’s death, Etcetera’s words, the growing sense that shit was fucked up and shit, a phrase that everyone used as a joke. It wasn’t a funny joke but people told it all the time.
Ha ha, only serious.
What would it take for her to upload? When they got to the B&B, they’d set up the imager, and anyone could get uploaded, make a scan of themselves—or “themselves, within the envelope that could tolerate being reanimated in software.” Would she get in? She’d like to talk to Dis about this. She caught herself. She wished she could talk to Dis about this? Didn’t that mean that Dis was a person? Didn’t that settle the question?
She rolled on, steering the trike through the woods, the train of cargo-carts bumping along behind her.
*
They were nearly at the B&B when everyone’s interfaces buzzed and let them know that they’d safely uploaded all five scans to walkaway net, and they were being seeded all over the world, as unkillably immortal as data could be. Everyone relaxed. Their knowledge that immortality was real was only hours old, but they were already terrified at the thought of permadeath. They joked nervously about how quickly everyone could get scanned when they’d unpacked at the B&B.
They went into hyper-vigilance—some took stemmies to help—and unspoken fear spread. Death came in two flavors: realdeath, and “death.” But until they got to the B&B, the only flavor they’d get was permadeath. Fear became terror. They spooked at shadows. CC and Gretyl both broke out less-lethals they’d taken with them. They hadn’t told anyone they were doing it, and there’d have been a fearsome debate if they had. No one raised an eyebrow now.
They were so close. Iceweasel knew this territory, had walked this train on scavenging runs for the new B&B as its drones identified new matériel to speed it into existence.
Watching the new B&B conjure itself had been a conversion experience, a proof of the miraculous on Earth. They’d walked away from the old B&B when those assholes had shown up, and pulled a new one from the realm of pure information. That was their destiny. Things could be walked away from and made anew; no one would ever have to fight. Not yet—they couldn’t scan people at volume, couldn’t decant them into flesh. But there would come a day that Gretyl had spoken of, when there would be no reason to fear death. That would be the end of physical coercion. So long as someone, somewhere, believed in putting you back into a body, there would be no reason not to walk into an oppressor’s machine-gun fire, no reason not to beat your brains out on the bars of your prison cell, no reason not to—
The drone overhead made a welcoming sound. The B&B had sent its outriders for them. She looked at it and waved. It dipped a wing at her and circled back.
“Getting close,” she called out, and then the enemy charged out of the bush, with a machine roar. There were eight mechas, the sort that they’d built to manage the B&B’s trickiest assembly tasks. These might have been the same ones. They stood three meters tall, holding their pilots in cruciform cocoons, faces peering out of the mechas’ chest cavities, eyes shrouded in panorama screens that timed refreshes with the pilot’s saccades and load-stresses of the body to provide just-in-time views of wherever the suit’s action was. Each one could lift a couple tons, but had fail-safes in place to stop them from hurting humans. Turning that shit off was only a firmware update. There were plenty of places in walkaway where mecha-wrestling was a sport with big fan bases.
They went for the cargo-containers first, upending them and methodically bending their wheels so they would never roll again. Iceweasel leapt clear as the front-most pod upended, taking the A.T.V. with it, and hurt her shoulder and ankle when she sprawled to the forest floor.
Gretyl hauled her to her feet, her face a mask of terror. Gretyl grabbed her by her sore shoulder, making her shout. That attracted the attention of the nearest mech-pilot. The huge body turned toward them. Mechas could turn quickly and their arms were fast enough to drive a shovel into frozen ground with pinpoint accuracy, but they couldn’t run, because their gyros needed time to stabilize after each step, so that they walked in a bowlegged stagger. The mecha took one step toward them, the pilot rocking in his cradle. He—she saw a russet beard poking around the head-brace, teeth behind the peeled-back lips—rolled with the mecha, and something about how he did it made her think that he didn’t have a lot of experience.