“I’m a walkaway. We don’t have big beasts.”
The medic smiled, then did something to Jimmy’s toes that made him suck air through his teeth—one missing—and squeeze his eyes.
“I think you’ll keep them,” she said. “Except maybe the left little toe.”
“Huzzah.” He rocked his jaw from side to side.
“Why are you here, Jimmy? Come to kick more people out of their homes?”
He shook his head. “It’s not like that. Whatever minor philosophical differences you and I had—”
It was textbook self-delusion, but Limpopo couldn’t see any reason to point it out.
“—I have more in common with you than with the assholes who came at us on the road. There’s only one thing they want: a world where they’re on top and everyone else isn’t.”
I’d love to know how you differentiate that from your philosophy. But I don’t guess you’d be able to explain it.
“This is clearly where the action is. This has them shit-scared, and scheming.”
“So you’ve come to help?”
“Look, there’s an angle, something I haven’t seen on the forums, an outcome that’s worse than anyone’s preparing for. I think it’s because people like you just don’t understand what backup really means.”
Backup. A perfect, perfectly seductive name for scan and sim. She was amazed she hadn’t heard it. As soon as she did, Limpopo just knew there must be thousands—millions—of people using the term. Once you conceived of the thing that made you you as data, aeons of data-handling anxiety kicked in. If you had data, it had to be backed up. Anything important that wasn’t backed up was good as lost. Data is haunted by Murphy. Do something irreplaceable and magnificent while out of network and backup range and you were begging for critical failure that nuked it all.
“Backup,” she said.
“Yes.” Jimmy grinned. He’d followed her thinking. “Of course. No one has thought it through to the logical end.”
“Which is?”
Despite his injuries and grubbiness, he enjoyed testing her, waiting to see if she’d spar. She knew there was no way to win a mental sparring match with Jimmy: victory would piss him off, loss would convince him he could walk all over her.
“Nice seeing you.” She turned to go, because walking away solved the Jimmy problem every time. If he ever figured that out, he might be dangerous.
“It means,” he said to her back, and she slowed a little, “anyone who can get your backup can find out everything there is to know about you, trick you into the worst betrayals, torture you for all eternity, and you can never walk away from it.”
“Shit.” She turned around.
“Anyone who talks about this gets treated as a paranoid nut. Sim people wave their hands and talk about crypto—”
“What’s wrong with crypto? If no one can decrypt your sim, then—”
“If no one can decrypt your sim, no one can run your sim. If the only repository for your pass-phrase is your own brain, then when you die—”
“I get it. You’d have to trust someone with your pass-phrase so they could retrieve your key and use it to decrypt your sim.”
“Your trusted third party would have to trust her trusted third party with her pass-phrase, and that person would need someone to trust, and there’d need to be some way to find out who had which pass-phrase because once you’re croaked the last thing we’d want was to realize we’d lost your keys. Can you fucking imagine—sorry about your immortal birthright, we forgot the password, derp derp derp.”
“Ouch.”
“There’s plenty of crypto weenies trying to figure this out, using shared secrets so to split the key into say, ten pieces such that any five can be used to unlock the file.”
“Sounds like a good idea.” She’d worked with shared secrets for the B&B’s various incarnations, establishing committees of trusted parties who could collectively institute sweeping changes in the codebase, but only once a quorum agreed.
“Yes but no. Good in the sense that you need to kidnap and torture a lot more people to unlock someone’s sim without permission, but from a complexity perspective it’s worse—you’re multiplying the number of interlocking relationships necessary to retrieve a sim by ten. As in: now you’ve got ten problems.”
“What’s the answer?”
“That’s what I’m worried about—the answer is going to be no answer. There’s urgency, it’s all going to blow up soon. Back in default, they’re treating Akron like an ISIS stronghold, like the fucking end-times. I’d be surprised if they didn’t nuke it.”
“Fallout.”
“They’ll blame us for it and set up a contract to treat radiation sickness with some zotta’s emergency services company. You don’t know what it’s like out there.”
“I know some things.”
“I guess you do. Sorry, I didn’t mean to, you know—”
“Mansplain.”
He looked awkward. She could tell he wished they’d had an argument. He was so easy to outmaneuver, because he couldn’t imagine the people around him weren’t trying to outmaneuver him.
“Limpopo, it’s been rough for me, the last couple years. After the B&B, uh—”
“Imploded.”
“I was angry for a long time. I was angry at you, though I knew it was my fault. Who else’s fault could it be? I chased you out.”
“You did worse than that.”
“I did worse than that. I threw you out.”
“No. You never did that.” You couldn’t do that.
“I couldn’t do that.” He wasn’t as dumb as he looked. “I took things from you because I thought it would make me strong, because I thought what you were doing was making people weak. But all that stuff, strong and weak—”
“Bullshit.”
“Entirely. Strong and weak isn’t what you do, it’s why you do it.” He paused. She was about to say something. “Also what you do. It’s not charity or noblesse oblige to treat people like they’re all equally worthy, even if they aren’t all equally ‘useful’—whatever useful means.” He looked ready to cry. The medic stopped working on his toes and watched him intently. He looked at her, at Limpopo, sighed. Then he went on, which impressed Limpopo, because this confession would be all over Thetford by the time he’d found a place to sleep.