She sang “Consensus,” an incredibly dirty walkaway marching song, thirty verses. The chorus: “Consensus, consensus, it beat us and bent us, but we’re sure that it’s lent us, a shit-eating grin.” Making up new verses was walkaway sport, there were wikis of them. She couldn’t remember them all, but she could make them up on the fly, especially if she sang humm-humm-humm where she couldn’t think of a line, which was automatic disqualification when it was sung in earnest.
The verses got more hum-hum-hummy. She was ready to peter out and start another song, when a voice joined in: “… but we’re sure that it’s lent us, a shit-eating grin!” It was achingly familiar. She shivered from scalp to ankles, hairs on her neck standing.
“Dis?”
“That’s Dis Ex Machina to you, kid,” the voice said.
She cried.
*
“This is a dirty trick.” She mastered her tears. “Absolutely disgusting.”
“It would be,” Dis said, “if it was a trick.”
“How would you know if it was or not? You’re on all the version control servers. Anyone who can build a cluster can bring you up. There’ll be hundreds of you, in all kinds of configs. My dad could easily afford a version of you that was constrained so it believed it had infiltrated his network to work against him, while spying on me and everything I did. You would never know. I’d tell you things he’d have to slice my nipples off to get otherwise. He’d call this humane, a ‘low impact’ way of ‘bringing me around’ to sanity, which, in his world, is the ability to bullshit yourself into believing you deserve to have more of everything that everyone else has less of, because of your special snowflakeness.”
“You’re preaching to the converted, girl. Remember, I was walkaway before you.”
“Dis was walkaway before me. You, whatever you are, are an emissary, knowing or not, from default.”
“We’re going in circles. No skin off my back, because I’m a construct. I can park my frustration to one side, move the slider, have this argument with you for as long as you’d like. It’s cool. Comes from a lab in Punjab, ex-IIT math-geeks who want to turn the āgama into subroutines, Yogic Mastery Apps. They’re turning Meta into math. You’d love it—they worship Gretyl, her optimizations for lookahead modeling are the basis of their discipline. I think if she wasn’t so worried about you, she’d be all over it.”
“That was really low.” She was surprised by the venom in her voice. When her thoughts strayed to Gretyl, she was seized by unbearable helplessness and longing. That Gretyl felt the same about her was a weight crushing her chest.
“Oh, honey,” Dis said. Her computer voice was better. The emotions in those two words were awful. “She misses you so much. I can get you a message from her. Or…”
Natalie knew it was a baited hook. She didn’t want to rise to it. Fish must know the worm has a barb in it, but some bite anyway. Was it hunger? A death wish? “What?”
“They’ve been scanned now,” Dis said. “After they reached the Thetford abandoned zone, everyone made a scan, first thing. They’re in the walkaway clouds now, more every day. We’re learning so much from the multiplicity of scans, too—I think the problem with bringing back CC was that we just didn’t have a deep enough data-set to make inferences about tailored simulation strategies for brain variations. CC is pretty stable. We can characterize scans based on the likelihood of bringing up a successful sim. Gretyl’s scan is in the top decile. She was made to run on silicon. Sita, too. Hell, Sita was so up for it that she’s running a twin twenty-four/seven, in realtime, with sensors all over herself. Gretyl hasn’t done that, though. We’ve only done the preflighting for her. We haven’t run her…”
Yet, Natalie finished. Gretyl could be here, running on whatever substrate Dis was on. Her Gretyl, not her Gretyl, that was a distinction without a difference.
“So fucking evil.” She didn’t have the energy for bile. It came out like surrender.
“It’s not complicated. Your dad’s got amazing opsec on the main house network. But the patchlevel on his safe room is lagged, because there were conflicts the auto-updaters couldn’t handle, and the ops guy who set it up retired and your dad doesn’t have anyone in his ops department who even knows about this. The alert messages have piled up in an admin dashboard for years, all neglected. I wonder if your dad even has a login for that dash?
“We pwned this place as soon as you went. It was Gretyl’s project, but I did the heavy lifting. We used like seventy percent of walkaway’s compute-time running parallel instances of me, at twenty ex realtime. We clobbered the fucking IDS, smoked the firewall, and now I’m so deep I can do anything.” The door-locks clunked out “shave and a haircut.” It was terrifying and hilarious. Natalie’s anguished smile hurt to hold.
“But I can’t work your shackles. They’re not networked. I can’t do anything with the housenet, that’s totally airgapped. For the best, otherwise all that pwnage would have set off all kinds of alarms.”
Despite herself, Natalie was drawn into the explanation. “Come on.” Her stimulus-starved brain worked hard. “Occam’s razor. Either there’s this crazy bug because Dad fired his bull-goose sysadmin, and a convenient airgap in the bed’s systems—or you’re my dad’s puppet, and he’s locked you down so you can do magic tricks with the door-locks, but not set me free. You happen to have the ability to bring me a sim of my girlfriend, who would no doubt get me to say things that my dad could use to brainwash me, like Cordelia.”
“That does sound plausible. I can’t prove that I’m working with you, not your dad. Sims can’t be sure that they aren’t being torqued by the simulator, and that makes us incapable of knowing we’re being manipulated. We’re heads in jars. But how do you know you’re not a sim? We scanned those mercs in the tunnels without their knowledge.”
“My dad isn’t that—” she almost said powerful, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to go there. “Sentimental.”
“He’s a dick. I’m really glad we found you. Half the camp thought you were dead. Gretyl insisted you’d been snatched. Someone thought they saw you going into the woods, and they found evidence of a scuffle there. No one could say whether it was you, but everyone else was accounted for or dead. When the only person missing is the kid of an asshole zotta, it’s not a stretch to imagine a snatch.”
Natalie wanted so, so much to believe this was Dis, a lifeline to outside, life beyond the confines of her lashed-down body. Of course she wanted to. If Dis was her father’s trick, he’d depend on it.
She had to piss. It had been building, now it was unbearable. She knew she was plumbed into the bed, must have pissed many times before regaining consciousness, but the thought of voluntarily releasing her bladder while tied to a bed was too much.
“Dis.” She was ashamed of the weakness in her voice. Why couldn’t she be strong, like Limpopo? Like Gretyl?
“What is it, Iceweasel?”