“I expect you have. Someone like you, good at what you do, you probably hire out for all the most elite barons and plutocrats.
“Most of my friends were zottas. It wasn’t until I slipped the leash and brought home some civilians that I really got how fucked up this was. My friends had a hard time making sense of it, some of them never got used to it, just kept on remarking on how weird it was. What got me was how they talked about the surveillance, as though they weren’t being watched in every imaginable way back in their apartments or subways or schools. As though the sidewalk wasn’t measuring their gait and sniffing their CO2 plume for forbidden metabolites.
“I get it now. Zottas do surveillance to themselves. It’s not done to them. You could build a house like this with no sensors, retro, with strings running along the walls to tinkle bells in the servants’ quarters. You could line the walls with copper mesh and make it a radio-free fortress.
“The eyes and ears are recording angels that remember everything forever. They’re choices. I’d never thought of it, same way a fish doesn’t think about water. I get it now.
“The definition of zotta is ‘someone who doesn’t live the way everyone else does.’ You know Gatsby? ‘The rich are different.’ No one reads Gatsby as criticism anymore. Now it seems nostalgic. Or Orwell, the inner party with their telescreen off-switches. Why would a zotta choose to install telescreens in his fucking bathroom?”
She considered the irony of the sensors recording and analyzing her talk about them. She thought about Dis, a computer who was a person. She entertained a fantasy about the house’s network being self-aware, knowing she was talking about it and she was angry at it; she wanted to switch it off. No wonder there’d been so many netsoaps about people killed by rogue computers, the I-can’t-let-you-do-that-Dave cliché that was the go-to dramasauce for hack writers.
The woman stared, eyes focused, betraying nothing.
“You must be a hell of a poker player. I once saw the Beefeaters, you know, in London? England, I mean, not Ontario. They were bullshit, trying to pretend they were wooden soldiers, never acknowledging you. I don’t think it’s possible to be vigilant while pretending everyone else is invisible. Tell yourself that long enough, you’ll believe it. You, on the other hand, can hear and see me, but it’s like I’m beneath your notice unless I’m trying to get past. You can hear me. Shit, you probably agree with every word, but what I say isn’t anything compared to the immovable truth of a fuck-ton of money for you if you do the default thing; nothing at all if you follow your conscience.
“On the other hand, I might be projecting. Maybe you love default, think weird-ass zotta shit is proof of their divine right to rule. Maybe you’re animal cunning and wiry strength, without much going on behind those cool eyes of yours?”
She stopped, aware that she was a zotta, taunting a person who couldn’t respond because she wasn’t. She felt ashamed.
“Sorry,” she said, and went into her room.
[ii]
Her father visited her on day four. She’d gone twenty-four hours without taunting the guard, and was bored out of her mind. She’d fantasized about a notebook and a pen, anything she could use to pour out her feelings to something other than the unseeable watchers.
He looked in control. That was the first thing she noticed, the contrast between her shaky nerves and his calm exterior. She thought he’d done something with his face, injections. He looked younger than she remembered, a youthful thirty-five. He turned the chair around, sat straddling it with his arms folded on the back, cocked his head and smiled as though they shared a joke. There was definitely something different in the smile.
“Welcome home, Natty.”
She thought about freezing him out, like the guard-woman with her gaze that saw, did not acknowledge. She was so lonely, so bored. Her brain was a hamster wheel, spinning out of control. She needed to slow it with words, even if it was argument.
“I would like to go now, please.”
He smiled wider. “How was it?”
She made herself breathe into her diaphragm, once, twice. “I’m sure you got a blow-by-blow.”
“Your mother is coming tomorrow. She can’t wait to see you.”
“They killed people, you know. I saw them, saw the bodies. I held the bodies. My friends—they were my friends.” She struggled to keep her voice calm, was successful except for a wobble on the second “bodies.” She was sure her father picked up on it. He was a man who was keenly attuned to others’ useful frailties.
“I can see it’s been hard on you.”
“You mean, the mercenary terrorists you sent were hard on me.”
“You’ve lost contact with reality, darling. You can’t believe that. I can’t order air strikes. I don’t know mercenaries. I’m a scary rich guy, but if my enemies fear me, it’s because they’re worried I’ll sue them, not assassinate them.”
Natalie closed her eyes and tried to find her breath’s rhythm. For her father—her father—to say he couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with what had happened, when there was a ninja mercenary in the hallway—it was too much. It epitomized every conversation they’d ever had where he’d told her everything she felt and hoped for was a girlish dream, every observation of the world around her a girlish fancy.
Her breath wouldn’t come. Maybe her father hoped the long isolation would make her pliable. But it had broken something inside that jangled. She realized with a rush that felt like a convulsion of vomit she had hardly thought of Gretyl since arriving. It made her wonder if they’d done something to her mind, if she was herself. If there even was a mercenary in the hall who could lay her out with moves so fast she couldn’t follow them. Perhaps it was a dream. Perhaps she was dead, uploaded, simulated.
She was hyperventilating, and took satisfaction in her father’s discomfort. He could deal with I-hate-you-daddy tantrums, but she was losing it now, was glad to be lost. She was tired of being found, pretending the situation was normal.
She stood calmly and smoothed down her long t-shirt, adjusting her track-pants’ drawstring—red, with a crisp-edged ROOTS logo over one thigh, the kind of thing she’d slopped in at summer camp, as though the dumbwaiter was loaded by someone trying to make her feel like a grounded teenager and not a kidnap victim—and walked out of the room.
The guard was not in the hall.