Of course it was true. Why would Jacob Redwater spy on her less in walkaway than he had in default? She’d always had the eyes-on-the-back-of-her-neck feeling, ever since she’d been old enough to leave the house, and it hadn’t let up once she got to the B&B. It took an act of will not to guess which of her “friends” fed reports back to Jacob; which ones were in government employ, or working for zottas or big companies. She’d talked it over with Limpopo and Limpopo confessed she had to resist the same impulse.
“It’s not that there aren’t plants here. Of course there are plants. The way plants hurt us isn’t by telling rich people what we’re doing. Fuck rich people—all our shit’s on public networks. The worst thing plants do is make us mistrust each other, think our friends might be our enemies. Once that happens, you’re well fucked. It’s impossible to have a discussion if you think the other person is trying to fuck with you. Everything gets distorted by that lens. Did she leave out the trash because she was distracted, or because she wanted to bicker about chores?
“That mistrust is the most corrosive thing. Back when I was in default, I was in this protest group, an affinity group loosely connected to the Anonymous Party, doing data-analysis of regulators’ social graphs to show their decisions favored the industries they regulated, such a fucking no-brainer, but it was good to have facts when you met someone who hadn’t figured out the game was rigged.
“There was a guy in our group, Bill. Bill was weird. Standoffish. Always looking at you from the corner of his eye. Always listening, not talking, like he was taking notes. We worried. We knew there were plants in our group. Whenever we found something juicy—some minister’s wife’s brother running the oil company the minister handed a fat exemption to—the government was always out in front, managing the news cycle before we published, which was overkill, given how little attention the news paid to us. The powers that be are thorough. Anything that might rise to a threat gets neutralized because it costs peanuts to clobber us, and there’s zottabucks moving around they do not want disrupted.
“We isolated Bill. Created distribution lists and passworded forums he wasn’t invited to. Stopped inviting him to pizza nights. Forgot to tell him when we went out for beers.
“Bill wasn’t a plant. Bill was clinically depressed. Bill hanged himself with his belt. His roommates didn’t find him for two days. When they put Bill into the fire, no one was there to take his ashes, so I took them. I kept them by my bedside until I walked away. They reminded me that I’d helped isolate Bill. I’d helped make him so alone that when darkness ran up on him, he didn’t have anywhere safe to run. I helped kill Bill. So did my pals. What killed Bill was our suspicion about plants. The worst thing a plant could do wasn’t leak our shit or stir up shit. We leaked our own shit. We were argumentative enough that we didn’t need plants to make us fight with each other. Worrying about plants was a million times worse than the worst thing a plant could do.”
There had been tears in her eyes.
Her father said, “Things aren’t what you think. You think you’ve found a way everyone can get along without bosses. There are always bosses—if you don’t know who the boss is, you can’t question her leadership. A system of secret bosses is a system without accountability or consent. It’s a manipulocracy.”
She looked at the merc, wondering if she was following this, whether she appreciated the irony of her father—her father—criticizing society on the grounds that it was run from behind the scenes by shadowy fixers and string-pullers.
He caught her look. He nodded and made a charming face. “Takes one to know one, daughter-mine. If I can’t recognize a conspiracy, who could?”
“When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” She regretted saying it. Why argue with her fucking father? He won as soon as you acknowledged there was a debate.
He knew it. He smiled wider, put on a frowny, thinky face. “I understand what you’re saying. We all see ourselves reflected in data. Analysis is subjective. But Natalie, I’m not asking you to take what I’m saying at face value. I want you to look at the data yourself, see if what I’m saying is true. That’s not monstrous, is it?”
“No. Kidnapping and administration of pain-weapons is monstrous. This is just bullshit.”
“I get you’re angry. I’d be angry. But if I was brainwashed by a cult—if I couldn’t understand what was going on—I would want you to do everything you could to get me to understand what was happening. You have my permission to do everything I’ve done here, to me, if I am ever in the grips of some irrational impulse that puts me in imminent and grave danger.”
Natalie restrained herself from snorting. Not to spare his feelings, but because derision was acknowledgement, another chance for him to argue. Give him a millimeter, he’d take a parsec. That’s how you became a zotta. It’s how he’d been raised. It was how she’d been raised, which scared the shit out of her, especially these days. She was back in her father’s demesne. In this house, there was so much pressure to accept the easy justifications. Some people had to be on top, some on the bottom, big and little cornflakes. Besides, the Redwaters weren’t really rich; not rich rich, not like Jacob’s cousin Tony Redwater.
“Believe me, if there was any other way, I would take it. I don’t want this. I want my daughter back. I know what you’re capable of. It’s why I kept you close to home, made sure you knew what went on behind the scenes. You could put it all together.”
Even though she knew he was flattering her, it worked. Goddamn him, and goddamn her, too. She knew her dad’s bullshit. Even so, something inside her rolled over and preened when Daddy said nice things.
“That’s what I want you to do. Pull it together.” He twiddled his interface surfaces and a piece of wall slid away, revealing a huge touchscreen, stretching across the room’s width. It was showing a screen saver, the manufacturer’s loop of kids playing lacrosse, blond and lanky, with muscular legs and horsey white teeth. Not zottas, because zottas didn’t need to pose for screensaver photos. But they looked like zottas. Maybe they were actors. Or CGI.
Her dad made the image go away and replaced it with a social graph. In the graph’s middle, like a gas giant surrounded by a thousand moons, was a circle labeled LIMPOPO [Luiza Gil], a circular cameo of Limpopo, looking younger and scowling ferociously, like she wanted to kick the photographer’s ass. Around her, the moons of various sizes were labeled with the names of her friends, all the walkaways. Just seeing those names made her mist with unbearable nostalgia. The feeling of being away from her true family was a clawed thing gnawing at her guts.
“Look at it, okay?” He turned to go. The merc followed, contriving to keep an eye on Natalie without walking out backwards. Natalie hardly noticed, because she was trying not to smile, because she’d just noticed Etcetera’s disc, and the minuscule type the system used to render his name in full.
She drifted over to the wall and caressed Etcetera’s circle, as though she were caressing him, and the graph jumped into life, helpfully arranging itself to better convey its meaning.