“Get out of my way, please.” Her eyes locked on the mild, disinterested gaze of the small woman. “Please.” She sounded so weak. She remembered how she’d faked out the woman, broken her grasp before. Strong and fast, but not invincible. Let her think Natalie was weak.
Cordelia’s hand on her shoulder. “Come on, Natalie. She’s not going to let you past, and if she did, you wouldn’t be able to leave the house.”
Still looking into the woman’s mild eyes. “What if I had you as a hostage?”
“I’d incapacitate both of you.” The woman spoke for the first time. She had a sweet voice, girlish, the voice that went with Cordelia’s face (Cordelia had spent a lifetime cultivating a husky voice because it was too much otherwise), and a bit of an accent that Natalie thought might be Quebecois or possibly, weirdly, Texan.
“Natalie, please?” Cordelia said.
“They murdered people,” Natalie said. “In front of me. I helped the wounded. I carried the dead.” Tears on her cheeks, but her voice was steady. “Keep your fucking ‘please.’” There was that fuck again. Fuck it. “Get out of my way, killer, or get ready to incapacitate me, whatever that little asshole euphemism means.”
The woman didn’t speak. Cordelia’s grip tightened on her shoulder, would not be shrugged away. The woman wore stuff that was almost walkaway: seamless, printed as a single piece, a bitmap woven into it: conservative dark stripes on a darker background. The stripes did something to her perception of the woman’s stance and movement, made it harder to predict where she’d go and when she’d get there. More dazzle.
Without windup, without letting the thought percolate to her fore-brain, she took a rough step, bulling into the woman, bodies colliding and she was already ready to take another step.
Then she was lying on her back, winded, the woman standing back a step. Her expression was unchanged. Small teeth.
“Natalie,” Cordelia said. “This isn’t going to get anywhere. You can’t solve this with force. You’re out-gunned.”
Walkaways walk away. But what if you’re confined? Natalie considered another staring contest with the woman, spitting in her face. Doing it over and over. She had a deep intuition the woman would take it. The vivid image of the woman with Natalie’s spit spattered across her face was entertaining in a way she identified as a Jacob Redwaterish feeling.
She got to her feet, back to the woman, like she was furniture, and refused Cordelia’s help. She went back into the room. The cell. Her shoulder hurt.
They fed her by dumbwaiter, her favorite girlhood foods. It was worse than slop or moldy bread. The dumbwaiters ran through the house, a way to fulfill desire without the bothersome politesse of dealing with human servants. She and Cordelia called it Redwater Prime, after the Amazon service, because they knew somewhere in the chain were people earning nowhere near enough to buy the things they dispatched.
Cordelia visited the next two days. The house – her father – listened to them. Natalie knew this because when she asked for things they’d sometimes arrive in the dumbwaiter. But she couldn’t directly access interfaces.
Her father didn’t visit.
The meals and the fulfilled wishes came at irregular intervals. She knew it was intermittent reinforcement. Give a rat a pellet every time it presses a lever, it will press the lever whenever it’s hungry. Give the rat a pellet on random lever-presses, it will press and press, past satiety, as the pattern matching part of its brain tried to find the pattern in the randomness. You could produce superstitious rats, it was one of Limpopo’s favorite epithets for people who were specifically stupid in the superstitious rattish way. Superstitious rats noticed a certain combination of actions prior to a lever-press produced a pellet a few times, decided this needed to be done every time, and though it didn’t change the pellet distribution frequency, every pellet was accompanied by the superstitious dance, reinforcing the ritual.
The woman outside her door never seemed to sleep. Maybe she was twins, or a robot. She was always there, neutral, small teeth bared, blocking the hall. Natalie had explicit, violent torture-fantasies about the woman, what she’d do if she had a gun or a taser or the power to move things with her mind.
Her mind. The room had: a chair, a bed, remains of her meals – whatever she hadn’t put into the dumbwaiter – dirty laundry, and four walls, two doors, one window. The bathroom: toilet roll, toothbrush – self-pasting – the earthy-smelling probiotic cleanser that put her in mind of her mom, though she didn’t really know if her mom ever used it, and lethally strong peppermint soap she thought of as her father’s, in silicone squeeze-bottles that felt like the skin of a sex-toy.
The door wasn’t locked. But the woman wouldn’t let her out, and, as Cordelia reminded her during their increasingly infrequent visits, even if she got down the stairs, the door wouldn’t let her out into the wider world.
“Have you spent a lot of time in zottaland?” she asked the woman. She’d taken to sitting in the corridor, studying her. Before that, she’d been talking to herself in the room/cell as a performance for the hidden watchers or algorithms. That made her so self-conscious that she’d come to conduct her monologue with the woman, who might have been a statue.
“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.