Cory Doctorow - Walkaway. A novel

Walkaway

Cory Doctorow

doctorow@craphound.com

Cover by Will Staehle

US: Tor Books (9780765392763)

UK: Head of Zeus (9781786693044)

Global edition: Cordoc-Co LLC

Copyright 2017, Cordoc-Co LLC

All rights reserved, fair use and other limitations and exceptions to copyright respected.

Is Doctorow's fictional Utopia bravely idealistic or bitterly ironic? The answer is in our own hands. A dystopian future is in no way inevitable; Walkaway reminds us that the world we choose to build is the one we'll inhabit. Technology empowers both the powerful and the powerless, and if we want a world with more liberty and less control, we're going to have to fight for it.

-Edward Snowden

The darker the hour, the better the moment for a rigorously-imagined utopian fiction. Walkaway is now the best contemporary example I know of, its utopia glimpsed after fascinatingly-extrapolated revolutionary struggle. A wonderful novel: everything weve come to expect from Cory Doctorow and more.

-William Gibson

Cory Doctorow is one of our most important science fiction writers, because hes also a public intellectual in the old style: he brings the news and explains it, making clearer the confusions of our wild current moment. His fiction is always the heart of his work, and this is his best book yet, describing vividly the revolutionary beginnings of a new way of being. In a world full of easy dystopias, he writes the hard utopia, and what do you know, his utopia is both more thought-provoking and more fun.

-Kim Stanley Robinson

Cory Doctorow has authored the Bhagavad Gita of hacker/maker/burner/open source/git/gnu/wiki/99%/adjunct faculty/Anonymous/shareware/thingiverse/cypherpunk/LGTBQIA*/squatter/upcycling culture and zipped it down into a pretty damned tight techno-thriller with a lot of sex in it.

-Neal Stephenson

For Erik Stewart and Aaron Swartz. First days, better nations. We fight on.

Table of Contents

Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Wilson Alva Anton Jeff Harley Timothy Curtis Cleveland Cecil Ollie Edmund Eli Wiley Marvin Ellis Espinoza was too old to be at a Communist party. At 27, he had seven years on the next oldest partier. He felt the demographic void. He wanted to hide behind one of the enormous filthy machines that dotted the floor of the derelict factory. Anything to escape the frank, flat looks from the beautiful children of every shade and size who couldn't understand why an old man was creepering around.

"Let's go," he said to Seth, who'd dragged him to the party. Seth was terrified of aging out of the beautiful children demographic and entering the world of non-work. He had an instinct for finding the most outre, cutting edge, transgressive goings on among the children who'd been receding in their rearview mirrors. Hubert, Etc, Espinoza only hung out with Seth because part of his thing about not letting go of his childhood was also not letting go of childhood friends. He was insistent on the subject and Hubert, Etc, was a pushover.

"This is about to get real ," Seth said. "Why don't you get us beers?"

That was exactly what Hubert, Etc didn't want to do. The beer was where the most insouciant adolescents congregated, merry and weird as tropical fishes. Each more elfin and tragic than the last. Hubert, Etc remembered that age, the certainty that the world was so broken that only an idiot would deign to acknowledge it or its inevitability. Hubert, Etc, often confronted his reflection in his bathroom screen, stared into his eyes in their nest of bruisey bags and remembered being someone who spent every minute denying the world's legitimacy and now he was enmeshed in it. Hubert, Etc couldn't self-delude the knowledge away. Anyone under 20 would spot it in a second.

"Go on , man, come on. I got you into this party. Least you can do."

Hubert, Etc didn't say any obvious things about not wanting to come in the first place and not wanting beer in the second place. There were lots of pointless places an argument with Seth could go. He had his Peter Pan face on, prepared to be ha-ha-only-serious until you wore down and Hubert, Etc started the night worn.

"I don't have any money," Hubert, Etc, said.

Seth gave him a look.

"Oh, yeah," Hubert, Etc said. "Communist party."

Seth passed him two red party cups, their color surely no accident.

As Hubert, Etc drew up to the taps -- spoodged onto a vertical piece of structural steel that shot out of the floor and up to the rafters, skinned with checkered safety yellow bar-codes and smudges of entropy and dancing lights of the DJ -- and tried to figure out which of the beautiful children was bartender, factum factotum, or commissar. No one moved to help him or block him as he edged closer, though three of the children stopped to watch with intense expressions.

All three wore Marx glasses with the huge, bushy beards hanging, like in the vocoder videos, full of surreal menace. These ones were dyed bright colors and one had something in it -- memory wire? -- that made it crawl like tentacles.

Hubert, Etc clumsily filled a cup, and the girl held it while he filled the other. The beer was incandescent, or bio-luminescent, and Hubert, Etc worried about what might be in the transgenic jesus microbes that could turn water into beer but the girl was looking at him from behind those glasses, her eyes unreadable in the flickering dance-lights. He drank.

"Not bad." He burped, burped again. "Fizzy, though?"

"Because it's fast-acting. It was ditch water an hour ago. We sieved it, brought it up to room temp, dumped in the culture. It's live, too -- add some precursor, it'll come back. Survives in your urine. Just save some, you want to make more."

"Communist beer?" Hubert, Etc said. The best bon mot he could scrounge. He was better when he had time to think.

"Nazdarovya." She clicked her cup against his and drained it, loosing a bone-rattling belch when she finished. She gave her chest a thump and scared out smaller burps, refilled the glass.

"If it comes out in pee," Hubert, Etc, said, "what happens if someone adds the precursor to the sewers? Will it turn to beer?"

She gave him a look of adolescent scorn. "That would be stupid. Once it's diluted it can't metabolize precursor. Flush and it's just pee. The critters die in an hour or two, so a latrine won't turn into a reservoir of long-lived existential threats to the water supply. It's just beer." Burp. "Fizzy beer."

Hubert, Etc, sipped. It was really good. Didn't taste like piss at all. "All beer is rented, right?" he said.

"Most beer is rented. This is free. You know: 'free as in free beer.'" She drank half the cup, spilling into her beard. It beaded on the crinkly refugee stuff. "You don't come to a lot of Communist parties."

Hubert, Etc, shrugged. "I don't," he said. "I'm old and boring. Eight years ago, we weren't doing this."

"What were you doing, Gramps?" Not in a mean way, but her two friends -- a girl the same shade as Seth and a guy with beautiful cat-eyes -- sniggered.

"Hoping to get jobs on the zeppelins!" Seth said, slinging an arm around Hubert, Etc,'s neck. "I'm Seth, by the way. This is Hubert, Etc."

"Etcetera?" the girl said. Just a little smile. Hubert, Etc, liked her. He thought that she was probably secretly nice, probably didn't think he was a dork just because he was a few years older, and hadn't heard of her favorite kind of synthetic beer. He recognized this belief was driven by a theory of humanity that most people were good, but also by a horrible, oppressive loneliness and nonspecific horniness. Hubert, Etc, was bright, which wasn't always easy, and had a moderate handle on his psyche that made it hard to bullshit himself.