“What happens if you ditch your bodies, upload, and it turns out the human race can’t survive without whatever makes us terrified of losing our bodies?”
“That is perverse.”
“It’s not. It’s not hard to think of an aversion to having a body-ectomy as pro-survival. What if you’re engineering the mass suicide of the human race?”
“All you’ve got is a hypothetical. I’ve got a concrete risk: we are in the midst of mass suicide. If it turns out turning off our existential terror makes us give up hope and switch ourselves off, we’ll deal with that when it arrives. Come on, Limpopo, be serious.”
The rebuttal was so hot, so different from the argument thus far, Limpopo knew she’d touched something tender. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling. When people got like this, you couldn’t convince them of anything. She wished for a way to turn off Sita’s anxiety, a slider she could dial to a middle ground where Sita could confront her anxieties without freaking. Sita wished she had one, too.
[VII]
“HELLO, JACOB,” NATALIE said. She hadn’t called him that before, but Dad wouldn’t cut it. Her father gripped the foot of her bed while the door’s locks cycled, clunk-clunk.
“I don’t like this, you know.”
“Then let’s stop it. You untie me and let me go, and we’ll part ways. Not every family stays a family forever. I’ll send you a Christmas card every year and I’ll come to the funeral. No hard feelings.”
He looked wounded. That might have been partly genuine, which was amazing, considering that she was in four-point restraint. The moment passed.
“Your mother and sister want to visit.”
She rolled her eyes. Dis had been her constant companion since she’d awoken in the bolt hole. Without her, Natalie imagined she would have been in quite a weakened state, desperate for company. Solitary confinement was officially torture. She ping-ponged between a conviction Dis was a traitor and the possibility that Dis was genuinely on her side, but even that state of indeterminacy was a chewy mental problem that kept her sane.
“It’s not like I could stop them.”
He pursed his lips. “Don’t be difficult” – she suppressed a snort – “I can’t bring them in while you’re like this.”
She couldn’t suppress the second snort. “You make it sound like I tied myself up.”
“What the fuck else was I supposed to do? Natalie, I’m being gentle with you. Do you know what other parents do with kids who run away with your friends? Do you have any idea what that kind of de-programming looks like?”
“I have a pretty good idea. I remember Lanie.”
Lanie Lieberman was her best friend until the year they turned thirteen, when Lanie went off-piste, sneaking away for daring encounters with boys, booze, and the kind of club where the bouncers let a thirteen-year-old in if she dressed right and came with the right louche rich boy. They’d grounded her, put trackers on her, droned her, put a bodyguard on her, then two, but Lanie was a Houdini – especially with help from scumbag kid-fiddling older boys from families even richer than hers, who had their own money for the countermeasures Lanie needed to get away.
After that, it had been private school, then military school, then a place for troubled kids, and finally a place whose name Lanie never spoke. It was the only one she couldn’t escape from. Judging from her pallor when she returned, it had been underground or somewhere far north. In Natalie’s imagination it was an abandoned mine or a stretch of tundra. The Lanie who came back from it was... hinky. Not just wounded, but cross-wired in a terrifying, mystifying way. Sad things sometimes made her laugh. When other people laughed, she’d get a look of concentration and anger, she had to keep her rage in check.
They stopped pretending they were friends by fifteen. At sixteen, Lanie got early admission to a university no one had heard of in Zurich, supposed to be an amazing boot up in the finance industry, where even math dumbos could learn to be high-flying quants. The last Natalie heard of her was a hand-delivered invitation to her father’s funeral, a neat ink signature below the engraving. Natalie didn’t go to the funeral and couldn’t imagine the database cross-section that spit out her name as a potential attendee.
Her dad smiled wanly. “Things have come a long way since the days of Lanie Lieberman. There’s trade shows for what we could be doing right now. I made two discreet queries and now I get brochures on rag paper so thick it could shingle the roof. Natalie, you’re a growth industry, and the methodology is faster, more ruthless and more effective than anything from back then. Thumbscrews versus psychoanalysis.”
Curious in spite of herself: “But you didn’t ship me off.”
“Not yet. Natalie, hard as you might find this to believe, I respect you in addition to loving you as your father. I would like the part of you that makes you you to survive this adventure. I don’t want an automaton with a superficial resemblance to my daughter. I want you to realize all this pissing around with radical politics and camp-outs with dropouts is not a long-term strategy. I understand you feel guilty about having so much when everyone else has so little, but what good do you think it does to turn your back on reality? You can’t wish inequality away. In my ideal world, you’d run the family foundation, oversee our good works. There’s a lot of poor people out there who owe their vaccinations, water and education to the Redwater Foundation. Take some of that energy you put into anarchy and channel it into something productive. You could even set aside a little brownfield for experimental communities based on walkaway principles.”
She just stared at him. She knew if she’d really been in solitary all that time, this would have sounded like a hell of an offer. If not for Dis, she’d beg for this. She knew how susceptible she was to isolation. It wasn’t just being alone. It was being alone with herself. Did this mean Dis wasn’t working for her father? Or was this a subtle, super-Machiavellian Jacob Redwater deal that made him the stuff of legend, even in zotta circles?
“When are Mom and Cordelia going to visit?”
He shook his head. It was so patronizing. “Your mother isn’t going to bail you out. She’s more upset than I am. Cordelia, well, she’s afraid of you. Wants to put you on anti-psychotics. Thinks you’re going to attack her.”
“When are they coming for a visit?”
“Do you want to see them?”
She stared him down. He’d tilted her bed up to a forty-five-degree angle, so she could look at him over the rumpled white hill-scape of her sheet-draped body.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
When he was gone, Dis whooped loudly enough that she winced.
“Jesus, keep it down!”
“This place is so shockproof you could use it to print holograms,” Dis said.
“My head isn’t shockproof.”
“Sorry. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but your dad is a colossal asshole.”
“I’d apologize for him, but fuck that.”
“Yeah.”
“If it matters, I’m more convinced you’re not working for him.”
“What a relief.”
“That voice sim is getting better at sarcasm.”
“I’ve been sneaking updates to my local copy. The voice synth people are good – merging normalized speech recordings from MMOs and voice-response systems, getting incredible stuff out of it. I’ve been playing around with some of the possibilities.” The last sentence came out in a growl of predatory menace, so scary Natalie jerked in her bonds.