No one had called her that since she’d been snatched.
She lost control over her bladder. The piss coursed out, disappeared silently down the hose, a feeling of heat where the hose was taped to her inner thigh before diving down to the bed’s cistern. Even though she wasn’t soaked with urine, the sense of pissing herself was inescapable, and she lost control of her tears.
“Oh, Iceweasel. It’s okay to cry, darling. This is totally fucked up and shit. You have people who love you, who sent me to get you loose. I can’t cut your bonds, but I can do plenty else. I can see in every room of the prison wing. There’s three others in a break room. They’re monitoring the room, but I control those monitors. They’re not seeing or hearing a realtime feed, they’re getting a loop of sleeping. Your bed’s streaming real telemetry, but I’m swapping for stored data from your unconscious period. I’ve got their private messages, I can do adversarial stylometry to impersonate them in text and voice—we’ve done work on voices.”
“I can tell.” Natalie snuffled snot. It was all down her face. Tears ran into her ears and made them itch. The feeling was so ridiculous it made her smile a little.
“Great, isn’t it? It keeps on getting better to be a pure energy being.”
“You make it sound like you’re a ghost.”
“I like ‘pure energy being’ but I’m the only one. It’s better than ghost. Don’t get me started on ‘angel.’ Jesus fucking Christ.”
Natalie cried again. The hopeless world kept crashing in. She wanted to have hope, to believe in Dis. But she was a walkaway. Walkaways were supposed to confront brutal truths. The brutal truth of Dis was that it was more likely that her dad had a hot-shit hacker who’d run an instance to betray Natalie than it was that he’d forgotten to hire a new sysadmin to take over ops for his safe room.
“Iceweasel, how about this? You don’t have to believe me. I won’t believe me, either. There’s no way for me to know if I’m who I think I am. The logical thing for us to do is to act like I can’t be trusted.”
“That’s weird.” Natalie snuffled snot and bore down on the problem.
“Weird isn’t the opposite of sensible. When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
“If you say so.”
“I say so. Uh, hold on. They’re coming in, time for a scheduled call. Close your eyes and pretend to be groggy, which won’t be a stretch. I’ll lurk. It’s best if we don’t let ’em know I’m here, but I will be, listening and recording. When they go, I’ll be here still, whatever you need to stay sane until we can bust you out.”
She couldn’t help but feel this was exactly what a traitorous Dis would say if she was trying to trick Natalie. But it felt good.
The door clunked twice, clicked, and swung open.
[iv]
As Seth and Tam paced the cargo-train, he contemplated his weird relationship with Gretyl. Back in his beautiful youthful days, a girlfriend once left him for another woman, after he’d hooked up with a guy at a party, someone’s horny, hot cousin. They’d had a crazy night locked in a spare bedroom at someone’s mom’s apartment in Bathurst Heights, leaving linens so be-funked that he heard they’d been burned. In the ensuing drama, he’d challenged his girlfriend on her freak, pointing out boys were boys and girls were girls, and he was exclusive to her in the “girl” part of his life, but that it was unreasonable for her to expect him to swear off dick when she didn’t have one.
Even as he’d uttered the words, part of him understood them to be self-serving bullshit. He still cringed with embarrassment at the thought of them, a decade later.
The girl found another girl, because he’d told her to, and quickly decided the other girl was the person she wanted to be exclusive with, without the weaselly “exclusive for people with vaginas” distinction Seth insisted on.
Seth, single and stinging, told himself it was because there were things you could get from a girl-girl relationship you couldn’t get from girl-boy, and he’d never understand those things, but they must be awesome because his girlfriend dumped his ass. Later he realized the difference between the girl and him wasn’t the penis so much as the cheating-asshole-ness.
When Iceweasel came home with Gretyl, Seth had been mature about it by Seth standards. When his jealously rose in his gorge, he fought it down, bitterly recalling the self-recrimination that surfaced whenever he thought of the penis/no-penis distinction incident.
He and Iceweasel didn’t have a serious boy-girl thing, so he had no business feeling jealousy, even by default-ish rules that said there were times when you had business feeling jealous. Then there was Tam, who knew Gretyl well, looked up to her, admired her toughness and badass math chops. Tam and him were an item, a boy-girl thing. It would be monumentally fucked for Seth to pursue Iceweasel.
Technically, they were all friends, some of whom had hooked up, some engaged in long-term exclusive-ish nookie. When Iceweasel disappeared, they’d been agonized by the not-knowing about their friend/lover/whatever. They’d welded into a guerrilla unit, scouring the net, working connections to find her.
As the search petered out, it was increasingly Seth and Tam, a couple, and Gretyl, basically a widow, trundling on the back of a cargo-freighter together, staring awkwardly, pretending they all had the same relationship to Iceweasel and the same kind of grief. So much bullshit. Eventually there was no way to pretend.
Seth and Tam walked alongside the cargo-train, headed for Thetford, passing blighted zones and small default towns with stores and people living like civilization would endure forever. Seth had high school French, but the people who called out in slangy joual might have been speaking Klingon. Despite the language barrier, every time they passed through a town, people joined their column. They’d come at night, wherever they were camped. Inevitably, they were shleppers with mountains of junk that Seth didn’t let himself get irritated by. He’d been the King of the Shleppers.
Gretyl rode on the train, face furrowed with sorrow, eyes distant, fingers moving over interface surfaces. At night, Seth brought steaming trays from the mess wagon, collected them when she’d finished, but she hardly noticed.
Finally, Tam rolled over one night and put her arm across his chest and her face in the hollow of his neck and said, “What the fuck is she doing?” He didn’t know, and Tam mentioned the obvious fact (which he’d been oblivious to), that she was worried sick about Gretyl.
“Intervention. First thing in the morning.”
“Now,” Tam said. “I’ll bet you a two-hour foot-rub she’s wide awake.”
“I’m not wide awake. OW! Now I’m awake.” He rubbed his nipple and glared at Tam in the dark. She had sharp fingernails.