Walkaway

[I]

SUNDAYS AT THE Belt and Braces were the busiest, and there was always competition for the best jobs. The first person through the door hit the lights and checked the infographics. These were easy enough to read that anyone could make sense of them, even noobs. But Limpopo was no noob. She had more commits into the Belt and Braces’ firmware than anyone, an order of magnitude lead over the rest. It was technically in poor taste for her to count her commits, let alone keep a tally. In a gift economy, you gave without keeping score, because keeping score implied an expectation of reward. If you’re doing something for reward, it’s an investment, not a gift.

In theory, Limpopo agreed. In practice, it was so easy to keep score, the leaderboard was so satisfying that she couldn’t help herself. She wasn’t proud of this. Mostly. But this Sunday, first through the door of the Belt and Braces, alone in the big common-room with its aligned rows of tables and chairs, all the infographics showing nominal, she felt proud. She patted the wall with a perverse, unacceptable proprietary air. She helped build the Belt and Braces, scavenging badlands for the parts its drone outriders had identified for its construction. It was the project she’d found her walkaway with, the thing uppermost in her mind when she’d looked around the badlands, set down her pack, emptied her pockets of anything worth stealing, put extra underwear in a bag, and walked out onto the Niagara escarpment, past the invisible line that separated civilization from no-man’s-land, out of the world as it was and into the world as it could be.

The codebase originated with the UN High Commission on Refugees, had been field-trialled a lot. You told it the kind of building you wanted, gave it a scavenging range and it directed its drones to inventory anything nearby, scanning multi-band, doing deep database scrapes against urban planning and building-code sources to identify usable blocks for whatever you were making. This turned into a scavenger hunt inventory, and the refugees or aid workers (or, in shameful incidents, the trafficked juvenile slaves) fanned out to retrieve the pieces the building needed to conjure itself into existence.

These flowed into the job site. The building tracked and configured them, a continuously refactored critical path for its build plan that factored in the skill levels of workers or robots on-site at any moment. The effect was something like magic and something like ritual humiliation. If you installed something wrong, the system tried to find a way to work around your stupid mistake. Failing that, the system buzzed your haptics with rising intensity. If you ignored them, it tried optical and even audible. If you squelched that, it started telling the other humans that something was amiss, instructed them to fix it. There’d been a lot of A/B splitting of this – it was there in the codebase and its unit-tests for anyone to review – and the most successful strategy the buildings had found for correcting humans was to pretend they didn’t exist.

If you planted a piece of structural steel in a way that the building really couldn’t work with and ignored the rising chorus of warnings, someone else would be told that there was a piece of “misaligned” material and tasked to it, with high urgency. It was the same error that the buildings generated if something slipped. The error didn’t assume that a human being had fucked up through malice or incompetence. The initial theory had been that an error without a responsible party would be more socially graceful. People doubled down on their mistakes, especially when embarrassed in front of peers. The name-and-shame alternate versions had shown hot-cheeked fierce denial was the biggest impediment to standing up a building.

So if you fucked up, soon someone would turn up with a mecha or a forklift or a screwdriver and a job-ticket to unfuck the thing you were percussively maintaining into submission. You could pretend you were doing the same job as the new guy, part of the solution instead of the problem’s cause. This let you save face, so you wouldn’t insist you were doing it right and the building’s stupid instructions (and everything else in the universe) was wrong.

Reality was chewily weirder in a way that Limpopo loved. It turned out that if you were dispatched to defubar something and found someone who was obviously the source of the enfubarage, you could completely tell the structural steel wasn’t three degrees off true because of slippage: it was three degrees off true because some dipshit flubbed it. What’s more, Senor Dipshit knew that you knew he was at fault. But the fact that the ticket read “URGENT RETRUE STRUCTURAL MEMBER -3’AT 120° NNE” not “URGENT RETRUE STRUCTURAL MEMBER -3’ AT 120° NNE BECAUSE SOME DIPSHIT CAN’T FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS” let both of you do this mannered kabuki in which you operated in the third person passive voice: “The beam has become off true” not “You fucked up the beam.”

That pretense – researchers called it “networked social disattention” but everyone else called it the “How’d that get there?” effect – was a vital shift in the UNHCR’s distributed shelter initiative. Prior to that, it had all been gamified to fuckery, with leader boards for the most correct installs and best looters. Test builds were marred by angry confrontations and fist-fights. Even this was a virtue, since every build would fissure into two or three subgroups, each putting up their own buildings. Three for the price of one! Inevitably, these forked-off projects would be less ambitious than the original plan.

Early sites had a characteristic look: a wide, flat, low building, the first three stories of something that had been planned for ten before half the workers quit. A hundred meters away, three more buildings, each half the size of the first, representing forked and reforked buildings revenge-built by alienated splitters. Some sites had Fibonacci spirals of ever-smaller forks, terminating in a hostility-radiating Wendy House.

The buildings made the leap from the UNHCR repo to the walkaways and mutated into innumerable variations beyond the clinic/school/shelter refugee pantheon. The Belt and Braces was the first tavern ever attempted. Layouts for restaurant kitchens weren’t far off from the camp kitchens, and big common spaces were easy enough, but the actual zeitgeist of the thing was substantially different, tweaked in a thousand ways so that you’d never walk into it and say, “This is a refugee residence that’s been converted to a restaurant.”

But you’d never mistake the Belt and Braces for a normal restaurant. Its major feature was the projection-mapped lighting that painted surfaces and items throughout its interior with subtle red/green tones telling you where something needed human attention. This was the UNHCR playbook, but again, there was a world of difference between dishing up M.R.E.s to climate refus and serving fancy dry-ice cocktails made from wet-printers and powdered alcohol. No refugee camp ever went through quite so many cocktail parasols and perfect-knot swizzle sticks.

On an average day, the Belt and Braces served a couple hundred people. On Sundays, it was more like five hundred. The influx of noobs brought scouts for talent, sexual partners, bandmates, playmates, and, of course, victims. Being the first one through the door meant that Limpopo would get to play maître d’.

The assays showed last night’s beer had come up well. The hydrogen cells were running 45 percent, which would run the Belt and Braces for two weeks flat out – the eggbeaters on the roof had been running hard, electrolyzing waste water and pumping cracked hydrogen into the cells. There were fifty cells in the basement, harvested out of abandoned jets the drones had spotted. The jets hadn’t been airworthy in a long time, but had yielded quantities of matériel for the Belt and Braces, including dozens of benches made from their seats. The hard-wearing upholstery came clean, its dirt-shedding surfaces revealing designs with each wipe of their rags like reappearing disappearing ink.

But the hydrogen cells had been the biggest find of all; without them, the Belt and Braces would have been very different, prone to shortages and brownouts. Limpopo fretted that they’d be stolen; it took all her self-control not to install surveillanceware all around the utility hatches.

The pre-prep stuff on the larders showed green, but she still made a point of personally sniffing the cheese cultures and prodding the dough through its kneading-film. The sauce precursors smelled tasty, and the ice-cream maker hummed as it lazily aerated the frozen cream. She called for coffium and sat skewered on a beam of light in the middle of the commons as the delicious, fruity, musky aroma wafted into the room.

The first cup of coffium danced hot in her mouth and its early-onset ingredients percolated into her bloodstream through the mucous membranes under her tongue. Her fingertips and scalp tingled and she closed her eyes to enjoy the effects the second-wave substances brought on as her gut started to work. Her hearing became preternatural, the big muscles in her quads and pecs and shoulders got a fiery feeling like dancing while standing still.

She took another deep draught and closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, she had company.

They were such obvious noobs they could have come from central casting. Worse, they were shleppers, their heavy outsized packs, many-pocketed trekking coats and cargo pants stuffed to bulging. They looked overinflated. Shleppers were neurotic and probably destined to walkback within weeks, leaving behind lingering interpersonal upfuckednesses. Limpopo had gone walkaway the right way, with nothing more than clean underwear, which turned out to be superfluous. She tried not to prejudge these three, especially in that giddy first five minutes of her coffium buzz. She didn’t want to harsh her mellow.

“Welcome to the B and B!” she shouted, louder than intended. They flinched, then rallied.

“Hi there,” the girl said, and walked forward. Her clothes were beautiful, bias-cut and contrast stitched. Limpopo immediately coveted them. She’d pull the girl’s image from the archives later and decompose the patterns and run a set for herself. She’d be the envy of all who saw her, until the design propagated and became old news. “Sorry to just walk in, but we heard—”

“You heard right.” Limpopo’s voice was quieter but still too shouty. Either the coffium had to burn down so she could control her affect, or she needed to drink a lot more so she could stop giving a shit. She thumped the refill zone and put her cup under the nozzle. “Open to everyone, all day, every day, but Sundays are special, our way of saying hello to our new neighbors and getting to know them. I’m Limpopo. What do you want to be called?”

The phrasing was particular to the walkaways, an explicit invitation to remake yourself. It was the height of walkaway sophistication to greet people with it, and Limpopo used it deliberately on these three because she could tell they were tightly wound.

The shorter of the two guys, with a scruffy kinked beard and a stubbly shaved head, stuck his hand out. “I’m Gizmo von Puddleducks. This is Zombie McDingleberry and Etcetera.” The other two rolled their eyes.

“Thank you, ‘Gizmo,’ but actually, you can call me Stable Strategies,” the girl said.

The other guy, tall but hunched over with an owlish expression and exhaustion lines on his face, sighed. “You might as well call me Etcetera. Thanks, ‘Herr von Puddleducks.’”

“Very pleased to meet,” Limpopo said. “Why don’t you put your stuff down and grab a seat and I’ll get you some coffium, yeah?”

The three looked at each other and Gizmo shrugged and said, “Hell yeah.” He shrugged out of his pack and let it fall to the floor with a thump that made Limpopo jump. Jesus fuck, what were these noobs hauling over hill and dale? Bricks?

The other two followed suit. The girl took off her shoes and rubbed her feet. Then they all did it. Limpopo wrinkled her nose at the smell of sweaty feet and made a note to show them the sock exchange. She squeezed off three coffiums, using the paper-thin ceramic cups printed with twining, grippy texture strips. She set the cups down onto saucers and added small carrot biscuits and pickled radishes and carried them to the noobs’ table on a tray that clicked into a squared-off dock. She got her jumbo mug and brandished it: “To the first days of a better world,” she said, another cornball walkaway thing, but Sundays were the day for cornball walkaway things.

“The first days,” Etcetera said, with surprising (dismaying) sincerity.

“First days,” the other two said and clicked. They drank and were quiet while it kicked off for them. The girl got a cat-with-canary grin and took short, loud breaths, each making her taller. The others were less demonstrative, but their eyes shone. Limpopo’s own dose was optimal now, and she suddenly wanted these noobs to be as welcome as possible. She wanted them to feel awesome and confident.

“You guys want brunch? There’s waffles with real maple syrup, eggs as you like ’em, some pork belly and chicken ribs, and I’m pretty sure croissants, too.”

“Can we help?” Etcetera said.

“Don’t sweat that. Sit there and soak it in, let the Belt and Braces take care of you. Later on, we’ll see if we can get you a job.” She didn’t say they were too noob to have earned the right to pitch in at the B&B, that walkaways for fifty clicks would love to humblebrag on helping at the Belt and Braces. The B&B’s kitchen took care of everything, anyway. It had taken Limpopo a while to get the idea that food was applied chemistry and humans were shitty lab-techs, but after John Henry splits with automat systems, even she agreed that the B&B produced the best food with minimum human intervention. And there were croissants, which was exciting!

She did squeeze the oranges herself, but only because when she peaked she liked to squeeze her hands and work the muscles in her shoulders and arms, and could get the orange hulls nearly as clean as the machine. They were blue oranges anyway, optimized for northern greenhouse cultivation, and yielded their juice eagerly. She plated everything – that, at least, was something humans could rock – and delivered it.

By the time she came out of the kitchen, there were more noobs, and one of them needed medical attention for heat exhaustion. She was just getting to grips with that – coffium was great for keeping your cool when multitasking – when more old hands came in and efficiently settled and fed everyone else. Before long, there was a steady rocking rhythm to the B&B that Limpopo fucking loved, the hum of a complex adaptive system where humans and software co-existed in a state that could be called dancing.

The menu evolved through the day, depending on the feedstocks visitors brought. Limpopo nibbled around the edges, moving from one red light to the next, till they went green, developing a kind of sixth sense about the next red zone, logging more than her share of work units. If there had been a leaderboard for the B&B that day, she’d have been embarrassingly off the charts. She pretended as hard as she could that her friends weren’t noticing her bustling activity. The gift economy was not supposed to be a karmic ledger with your good deeds down one column and the ways you’d benefited from others down the other. The point of walkaways was living for abundance, and in abundance, why worry if you were putting in as much as you took out? But freeloaders were freeloaders, and there was no shortage of assholes who’d take all the best stuff or ruin things through thoughtlessness. People noticed. Assholes didn’t get invited to parties. No one went out of their way to look out for them. Even without a ledger, there was still a ledger, and Limpopo wanted to bank some good wishes and karma just in case.

The crowd slackened around four. There were enough perishables that the B&B declared a jubilee and put together an afternoon tea course. Limpopo moved towards the reddening zones in the food prep area and found that Etcetera guy.

“Hey there, how’re you enjoying your noob’s day here at the glorious Belt and Braces?”

He ducked. “I feel like I’m going to explode. I’ve been fed, drugged, boozed, and had a nap by the fire. I just can’t sit there any more. Please put me to work?”

“You know that’s something you’re not supposed to ask?”

“I got that impression. There’s something weird about you – I mean, us? – and work. You’re not supposed to covet a job, and you’re not supposed to look down your nose at slackers, and you’re not supposed to lionize someone who’s slaving. It’s supposed to be emergent, natural homeostasis, right?”

“I thought you might be clever. That’s it. Asking someone if you can pitch in is telling them that they’re in charge and deferring to their authority. Both are verboten. If you want to work, do something. If it’s not helpful, maybe I’ll undo it later, or talk it over with you, or let it slide. It’s passive aggressive, but that’s walkaways. It’s not like there’s any hurry.”

He chewed on that. “Is there? Is there really abundance? If the whole world went walkaway tomorrow would there be enough?”

“By definition,” she said. “Because enough is whatever you make it. Maybe you want to have thirty kids. ‘Enough’ for you is more than ‘enough’ for me. Maybe you want to get your calories in a very specific way. Maybe you want to live in a very specific place where a lot of other people want to live. Depending on how you look at it, there’ll never be enough, or there’ll always be plenty.”

While they’d gabbed, three other walkaways prepped tea, hand-finished scones and dainty sandwiches and steaming pots and adulterants arranged on the trays. She consciously damped the anxiety at someone doing “her” job. So long as the job got done, that’s what mattered. If anything mattered. Which it did. But not in the grand scheme of things. She recognized one of her loops.

“Well that settles that,” she said, jerking her chin at the people bringing out the trays. “Let’s eat.”

“I don’t think I can.” He patted his stomach. “You guys should install a vomitorium.”

“They’re just a legend,” she said. “‘Vomitorium’ just means a narrow bottleneck between two chambers, from which a crowd is vomited forth. Nothing to do with gorging yourself into collective bulimia.”

“But still.” He looked thoughtful. “I could install one, couldn’t I? Login to your back-end, sketch it out and start looking for material, taking stuff apart and knocking out bricks?”

“Technically, but I don’t think you’d get help with it, and there’d be reverts when you weren’t around, people bricking back the space you’d unbricked. I mean, a vomitorium is not only apocryphal – it’s grody. Not the kind of thing that happens in practice.”

“But if I had a gang of trolls, we could do it, right? Could put armed guards on the spot, charge admission, switch to Big Macs?”

This was a tedious, noob discussion. “Yeah, you could. If you made it stick, we’d build another Belt and Braces down the road and you’d have a building full of trolls. You’re not the first person to have this little thought-experiment.”

“I’m sure I’m not,” he said. “I’m sorry if it’s boring. I know the theory, but it seems like it just couldn’t work.”

“It doesn’t work at all in theory. In theory, we’re selfish assholes who want more than our neighbors, can’t be happy with a lot if someone else has a lot more. In theory, someone will walk into this place when no one’s around and take everything. In theory, it’s bullshit. This stuff only works in practice. In theory, it’s a mess.”

He giggled, an unexpected, youthful sound.

“I’ve got a bunch of questions about that, but you had that so ready I’d bet you can bust out as many answers like it as you need.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” she said. She liked him, despite him being a shlepper. “Does it scale? So far, so good. What happens in the long run? As a wise person once said—”

“In the long run, we’re all dead.”

“Though who knows, right?”

“You don’t believe that tuff, do you?”

“You call it tuff, I call it obvious. When you’re rich, you don’t have to die. That’s clear. Put together the whole run of therapies – selective germ plasm optimization, continuous health surveillance, genomic therapies, preferential transplant access... If I believed in private property, I’d give you odds that the first generation of immortal humans are alive today. They will outrace and outpace their own mortality.”

She watched him try to disagree without being rude and remembered how she’d worried about offending people when she’d first gone walkaway. It was adorable.

“Just because money can be traded for lifespan to a point, it doesn’t follow that it scales,” he said. “You can trade money for land, but if you tried to buy New York City one block at a time, you’d run out of money no matter how much you started with, because as the supply decreased—” He shook his head. “I mean, not to say that there’s supply and demand when it comes to your health, but, diminishing returns for sure. Believing that science will advance at the same rate as mortality is mumbo jumbo.” He looked awkward. She liked this guy. “It’s an act of faith. No offense.”

“No offense. You missed the most important argument. Life-extension comes at the expense of quality of life. There’s a guy about two hundred miles that way—” she pointed south – “worth more than most countries, who is just organs and gray matter in a vat. The vat’s in a fortified clinic and the clinic’s in a walled city. Everyone who works in that city shares that guy’s microbial nation. It’s a condition of employment. You’ve got one hundred times more nonhuman cells in your body than human ones. The people who live in that city are 99 percent immortal rich-guy, extensions of his body. All they do is labor to figure out how to extend his life. Most of them went tops in their classes at the best unis in the world. Recruited out of school. Paid a wage that can’t be matched anywhere else.

“I met someone who used to work there, gave it up and went walkaway. He said the guy in the vat is in perpetual agony. Something tricked his pain perception into ‘continuous, non-adapting peak load’. He’s feeling as much pain as is humanly possible, pain you can’t get used to. He could tell them to switch off the machines – and he’d be dead. But he’s hanging in. He’s making a bet that some super-genius in his city who’s thinking about the bounty on the bugs in this guy’s personal bug-tracker will figure out how to solve this nerve thing. There’ll be breakthroughs, if everything goes to plan. So the vat will just be his larval phase. You don’t have to believe it, but it’s the truth.”

“It’s not weirder than other stories I’ve heard about zottas. The only unlikely thing is that your buddy was able to go walkaway at all. Sounds like the kind of deal where you’d get hunted down like a dog for violating your NDA.”

She remembered the guy, who’d gone by Langerhans, all weird tradecraft stuff – dead drops and the lengths he went to in order to avoid leaving behind skin-cells and follicles, wiping down his used glasses and cutlery. “He kept a low profile. As for that NDA, he had weird shit to tell, but nothing that I could have used to kickstart my own program or sabotage the man in the vat. He was shrewd. Absolutely raving bugfuck. But shrewd. I believed him.”

“It’s just like I was saying. This guy is enduring unimaginable pain because of his superstitious belief that he can spend his way out of death. The fact that this guy believes it doesn’t have any connection with its reality. Maybe this guy will spend a hundred years trapped in infinite hell. Zottas are just as good at self-delusion as anyone. Better – they’re convinced they got to where they are because they’re evolutionary sports who deserve to be exalted above baseline humans, so they’re primed to believe anything they feel must be true. What, apart from blind, self-serving faith by this zotta leads you to believe that there’s anything other than wishful thinking?”

Limpopo remembered Langerhans’s certainty, his low, intense ranting about the coming age of immortal zottas whose familial dynasties would be captained by undying tyrants.

“I admit I don’t have anything to prove it. Everything I know I learned second-hand from someone scared out of his skin. This is one of those things where it’s worth behaving as though it was true, even if it never comes to pass. The zottas are trying to secede from humanity. They don’t see their destiny as tied to ours. They think that they can politically, economically and epidemiologically isolate themselves, take to high ground above the rising seas, breed their offspring by Harrier jets.

“I’d been walkaway for nearly a year before I understood this. That’s what walkaway is – not walking out on ‘society,’ but acknowledging that in zottaworld, we’re problems to be solved, not citizens. That’s why you never hear politicians talking about ‘citizens’; it’s all ‘taxpayers,’ as though the salient fact of your relationship to the state is how much you pay. Like the state was a business and citizenship was a loyalty program that rewarded you for your custom with roads and health care. Zottas cooked the process so they get all the money and own the political process, pay as much or as little tax as they want. Sure, they pay most of the tax, because they’ve built a set of rules that gives them most of the money. Talking about ‘taxpayers’ means that the state’s debt is to rich dudes, and anything it gives to kids or old people or sick people or disabled people is charity we should be grateful for, since none of those people are paying tax that justifies their rewards from Government Inc.

“I live as though the zottas don’t believe they’re in my species, down to the inevitability of death and taxes, because they believe it. You want to know how sustainable Belt and Braces is? The answer to that is bound up with our relationship to the zottas. They could crush us tomorrow if they chose, but they don’t, because when they game out their situations, they’re better-served by some of us ‘solving’ ourselves by removing ourselves from the political process, especially since we’re the people who, by and large, would be the biggest pain in the ass if we stayed—”

“Come on.” He had a good smile. “Talk about self-serving! What makes you think that we’re the biggest pains? Maybe we’re the easiest of all, since we’re ready to walk away. What about people who’re too sick or young or old or stubborn and demand that the state cope with them as citizens?”

“Those people can be most easily rounded up and institutionalized. That’s why they can’t run away. It’s monstrous, but we’re talking about monstrous things.”

“That’s creepy,” he said. “And cinematic. Do you really think zottas sit around a star chamber plotting how to separate the goats from the sheep?”

“Of course not. Shit, if they did that, we could suicide-bomb the fuckers. I think this is an emergent outcome. It’s even more evil, because it exists in a zone of diffused responsibility: no one decides to imprison the poor in record numbers, it just happens as a consequence of tougher laws, less funding for legal aid, added expense in the appeals process... There’s no person, decision, or political process you can blame. It’s systemic.”

“What’s the systemic outcome of being a walkaway, then?”

“I don’t think anyone knows yet. It’s going to be fun finding out.”

[II]

THE GUY’S FRIENDS woke from their nap while Limpopo and he were clearing dishes, which meant filing bugs where the dish-clearing routines failed. The tricky thing was that half the bugs were already tracked, but it wasn’t clear whether they were the same bugs, and it was dickish to create duplicate bugs when you could spend time to determine whether the bug was already there. Plus, adding more validations to an existing bug made it more likely to get fixed. If you wanted your bug fixed, you should really check it in depth.

They wandered over, gummy-eyed and torpid, whiffy of unwashed skin. Limpopo suggested they visit the onsen in the back. Everyone was amenable. They gave up on the bugs – let the other B&Bers get a crack at filing bugs of their own – and shouldered their shlepper packs and headed, staggering, to the back of the tavern.

“How’s this work?” the girl said. “Give us the FAQ” – she pronounced it “fack” – “for this kinky soapy thing of yours.” Limpopo thought she was putting up a front and the “kinky soapy” snark was a tell for anxiety about being inducted into a walkaway orgy.

“It’s co-ed, but there’s no sexytime, don’t worry. It’s 30 percent walkaway, 70 percent Japanese in approach. Just enough formalism that everyone can enjoy themselves, not so much that you worry about doing it wrong. The thing to remember is that baths are for relaxing, not washing. You don’t want to get anything except clean skin into them. No bathing suits, and you sit down at the shower stall for a hardcore scrubadub and a decontam stage before you get in. The hot water is limitless – it’s solar pasteurized in barrels on the roof, then there’s a three-stage filter through printed charcoal with the surface area of Jupiter’s moons.

“Once you’re clean, do your own thing. Some of the baths will parboil you in ten minutes, some are cold enough to give you hypothermia if you stay in them, and the rest are in between. Go where the mood takes you. I like outdoor baths, but the fish in them may creep you out. They’ll eat your dead skin, which tickles, but something deep-seated rejects being something else’s snack, so wave them away if you don’t want them nibbling. I like ’em, though. The little towels are all-purpose: keep them handy but don’t wring them out in the pools.”

“Is that it?” the smartass guy said.

“That’s it.”

“What about the dirty stuff?”

She rolled her eyes. “If you meet someone of your preferred gender and want to do something, get showered, get dressed and get a room. We don’t do dirty in the onsen. Strictly platonic.”

“If you say so.”

“So say we all.”

“Where do we leave our stuff?” That was Etcetera, and her mental assessment of him dropped a notch. Shleppers and stuff.

“Anywhere.”

“Will it be safe?”

“Dunno.”

The noobs exchanged easy to read glances: That’s not cool. I’m sure it’s safe, don’t be such a tourist. This is all our stuff. Don’t embarrass us.

“Ready?”

They followed her. They all changed together in the dry-room, and she didn’t bother being subtle about peeking, that was the deal when you were a walkaway. Skin is skin – interesting, but everyone’s got some. These three were young and firm, but not offensively so, and the smartass had totally depilated, which had been a style when she went walkaway, but had since atrophied, judging from the lush bushes the other two sported.

The funny thing about not caring if you get caught peeking is you get to watch everyone peek, and these three did, in a way that made her sure that they weren’t a sex thing with each other – yet. The other thing about not caring about peeking is you catch other people peeking at you, which all three did in turn, and she held each of their eyes in turn, frankly and unsexually. It was her duty to these noobs to help them go walkaway in their minds, the sex and scarcity death-cult they’d grown up with and turned their backs upon.

She needed to do it for herself, too. She knew it was possible to be in the presence of naked people without it being about sex – she knew that stuff was a liability, not an asset; she knew that work was not a competition – she still needed to remind her psyche. Habits didn’t die easy, they were so closely tied to her fear and fear was hardest to ignore. Taking noobs into the onsen was occupational therapy for her own walkaway.

“Let’s hit the showers.” She led them into the cleanup room, pretending not to notice their anxious glances at their packs in the unguarded room, which were no more subtle than their looks at her bare ass as she led them onward.

She started in the hottest pool, a trick to get her mind out of her muscles. That heat made thought impossible, all she could do was be, willing each muscle in turn to unclench, breathing the mineral-scented steam, until she melted beneath the water, legs, arms, ass, back, the soles of her feet, and the palms of her hands going soft as perfect barbecue, flesh just about ready to fall off her bones, relaxation lapping up her spine. The panic of the heat oozed down from her brain, warring in tiny neck muscles and in her occiput, until they gave way, and the last centimeter of stress that she’d not known was there gave. She was sensation, play of muscles and heat, pleasure balanced upon the knife-edge of pain. She relaxed deeper, the postural muscles that kept her in a Z loosened, her butt floated one increment off the porous stone step, and the sudden occurrence of a gracious interval between flesh and unyielding rock caused a deeper loosening, starting with the criss-crossing muscles of her butt, working deep into her pelvis and core. She was so relaxed her tummy bulged as the girdle of tissues that wrapped from ribs to hips gave. She felt like sous-vide meat, muscle fibers unraveling, underlying tissues sloughing away from the bag of elastic fascia that wrapped them. She let out a bass groan that hummed in her loose vocal cords. “I’m cooking.”

Someone was next to her in the water, probably Etcetera to judge from the amount of displaced water. He panted as he struggled with his body’s instinct to flee the remorseless heat. She listened to his breath deepen, heard the sighs as he unwound. There was a sympathy between their bodies as the ripples carried the signals of relaxation between them.

You can’t stay in that kind of heat forever, no matter how much you’d like to. She stayed right to the last instant, then stood up quickly, cool air tingling everywhere it kissed her. She gasped. The heat cooked away all self-consciousness. She could stand naked and gasping on the pool’s steaming edge without even the awareness of not being self-conscious. She walked in measured steps, smooth flagstones sensual against her feet’s half-boiled soles, to the edge of the coldest pool. She dipped a nearby pail into it, then used the pail to wet her small towel, squeezing it on her skin, starting on the top of her head and nearly choking as the icy water sluiced down her shaven scalp and behind her ears and into her eyes, nose and mouth.

She dipped the towel, scrubbed her skin, clenching her jaw to keep from gasping. She forced herself to scour her skin with the water, dipping the towel again and again, lashing herself with the cold until the pail was empty. She contemplated another pailful – sometimes she did two or three – but couldn’t bear the thought.

She stepped into the coldest pool, up to her ankles, and made herself descend the steps, keeping her hand light on the grab-rail despite the death-grip she wanted. One more step and she was in the water to her knees, another step and she was up to her thighs, and the water lapped at the bottom of her butt and her vulva. The thought of taking one more step was impossible, no sane person would plunge their tenderest places into icy hell. She knew from experience that if she didn’t go for it, she’d lose her nerve. She brought her weight forward until she had no choice but to plunge chest-first into the water, head dipping under for a moment that made her ears go instantly numb and the skin on her eyeballs and forehead feel like it was being pulled to her hairline.

She refused, by iron will, to allow herself to gasp. She made herself stay in that punishing water for one long breath, and then walked out in measured steps. The air, chilly before, now felt hot. She took her small towel back to the hottest pool and filled a fresh bucket and started the process in reverse. The water was blister-raising, scorching, scalding, but she made herself wash down with it before sinking back into the hottest pool.

Five minutes before, she’d thought every muscle had released its reservoirs of tension. This time, as the hot water boiled her, the feeling was transcendent. She closed her eyes and there was nothing behind them, no flickering worries, nothing but animal joy.

The sensation ended with a shocked cry from the coldest pool. She turned placidly, saw Etcetera in the cold water, face a rictus, nostrils flared so wide they looked horsey, and he snorted down them with steam-train intensity. To his credit, he stayed for a five-count and came back to the hottest pool with a measured pace. She smiled lazily as he washed himself with his small towel. He stepped into the hottest pool and their eyes met.

She held his gaze as he let the heat and his muscles and nerves do their dance.

“Oh, wow.”

“Yeah.”

“Wow.”

She waited for him on the next cold plunge, and they locked eyes as they stepped into the cold, a playful dare. Neither of them made a sound, not even when the water touched his scrotum, though he gave the smallest jolt. They waded in up to their necks, and, without saying a word, dipped their heads, surfaced. Neither wanted to be the first to get out. They stared, then glared, until he muttered “you’re crazy” between gritted teeth and started for the stairs. She followed. He had a cute butt, she noticed, in the most abstract way.

She had to admit that it wasn’t all that abstract.

Back into the hot, giggling as they silently dared each other to sluice the scalding water over themselves, to step into the bubbling heat, quickly sink in. The third immersion in the heat took her to places she had forgot, driving out all conscious thought, turning her into a thermotropic organism that reacted to the convection currents through a process below her brain stem.

Once again, her body told her she couldn’t stay in this heat much longer. It was a return to awareness from that blissful no-place, eyes opening to cracks, then fully, head lifting out of the water. He joined her a moment later, just long enough that he might have been proving some macho point about his ability to withstand pain. She banished the thought. If it was true he was only hurting himself. His business, not hers. If it wasn’t true, she was being needlessly mean.

They stood beside the pool beside each other, stress wrung out of their flesh, faces falling into unconscious bliss.

“Now what?” he asked.

“Now we go for the normal pools.” She pointed to the onsen’s other pools where a dozen bathers sat, chatting quietly or contemplating their eyelid-backs. His friends sat in a warm, bubbly bath with an awkward distance between them.

They ambled over, and as always happened in the baths, Limpopo found the stimulus had dissolved any sense of nudity. Even their eyes on her body didn’t awaken any feeling of nakedness. It was the psychological equivalent of the ringing in your ears after a long-humming refrigerator compressor shut down. The baseline hum of worry about her appearance, where she was hairy, what the hair looked like, where she had fat, where her bones protruded, where her skin was striated with stretch marks and where it was curdled with burn-scars, all ceased to matter.

She slid into the water beside the noobs. Seen from this side of hot/cold treatment, they were gnarled by years in default reality. Being in the death-cult of money and status marked you. They bore the marks. She hoped to erase her own someday.

“Can we join you?”

“You already have,” the sarcastic one said, good natured. He was between her and Etcetera – who’d followed her into the water – and Etcetera gave him a brotherly elbow in the ribs. They were at ease side by side, like brothers but not, pink arm by brown arm, hairless chest next to Etcetera’s thick mat.

“Herr Von Puddleducks,” she said, “what say you to our humble baths?”

“Decadent,” he sniffed. “Sure to be a breeding ground for something entirely unsavory.”

“Don’t listen,” the girl said. “It’s amazing.”

Etcetera said, “You’ve got to try that hot/cold thing. It’s consciousness-alteringly good.”

“Maybe later,” the sarcastic one said.

“Definitely later,” the girl said. “How’d you get your scar?”

Which was very forward of her and a good walkaway kind of question, in that it violated every norm of default. Limpopo levered her torso out of the water and torqued to look at the mess of burn-scar from her ribcage down her thigh. She ran her fingers over it, the tightness and its irregular surface merely sensations now, no longer horrors.

“Happened not long after I first went walkaway. We’d built rammed-earth houses on the escarpment, two dozen of them. Real refu-luxury: power, water, fresh hydroponics and soft beds. Took about three hours a day each to keep the whole place running. Spent the rest of the time re-creating a Greek open-air school, teaching each other music and physics and realtime poetry. It was sweet. I helped build a pottery and we were building weird wheels that did smart adaptive eccentric spinning in response to your hands and mass, so that it was impossible to throw a non-viable pot.

“We were right up on the edge of default, close to the border. It was nice because we’d get day-trippers we could talk to about what was going on in the world. Tell the truth, I liked being on the border because it was an escape hatch. If things got bad, I could throw it in, walkback. Call my mom.

“The day-trippers weren’t always nice. There was a group of guys, neighborhood watch, who’d show up whenever anything went wrong in their fortress-condos. Someone got robbed: it must have been a walkaway. Graffiti? Gotta be walkaways. Murder? One of us, can’t possibly be one of those civilized types.

“For people living with continuous surveillance, they had a lot of crime. The property violations were their kids, who’d figured out how to turn off daddy’s spyware so they could get busy. If you think drones are going to stop teenagers from fucking, you’re out of your mind.

“I don’t know who did the murder. I heard it was horrible. Arson. Someone pwned a whole block of houses and did something with the safety sensors and the gas and whoof. Twenty-plus dead, including kids. Including a baby. I can’t imagine someone doing that, and I know it wasn’t anyone from our settlement. Something like that, it’s got to be personal.”

The three watched raptly, looks of horror dawning as they realized where the story was going. But Etcetera, bless his earlobes, spoke up, “Maybe totally sociopathic. A six-sigma event in someone’s neurotypicality. Not saying that a stranger doing that wouldn’t be totally fucked up and shit, but don’t discount the school-shooter/bad brains hypothesis outright.”

“I’ve wondered about that. I thought it might be provocateurs, because of what happened.” She traced the scar with her fingers. “Those rammed-earth houses, they’re really easy to instrument. The standard build has environmental sensors and fail-safes and alarms. They used the earthworks machines near the camp to mound up dirt on the façade and back lane of a whole row of houses, shifting tons of dirt and gravel in front of the doors. They walked down the line, calm as you like, smashing out windows and throwing Molotovs in each. Then they walked around the other side and tried the same for the back windows.

“But those windows were shatterproof, which is what saved us. They had a big argument about the best way to get through them. While that was happening, we were inside, organizing. The rammed-earth houses were two-up/two-downs, a family room and kitchen on the ground floor, an upper loft with two small bedrooms and a toilet. They were built to be thermostatic, cool in the summer, warm in the winter, circulation channels cut into each connecting wall, with nautilus-chambered noise-labyrinths that let air through but dampened sound.

“My house – I shared it with three other people – was at the end where they were arguing about smashing the windows. I knew that I had to get out, the place was full of smoke and fire. We were on the top floor, in the sleeping rooms, because it was the middle of the night. That meant that we weren’t in the flames, but the smoke was congregating on that floor. My friend kicked out the noise-labyrinth and we were able to squeeze through it into the next house, where there were five people, with the walls knocked out between their bedrooms to make one big sleep pit. They were in a panic because one of them had already passed out from the smoke. They wanted to try for the door. We calmed them, explained what was going on outside, sent them through the noise-guard into the next place.

“I had to get the word going, get people moving to that last place, so I hung back and messaged everyone, sipping at the pocket of fresh air until it got too rank, then I followed them. The next place was already cleared out and so was the next, and the fire in that place wasn’t so bad, so I paused to do some more messaging.

“I misjudged the smoke. Passed out. One of my friends figured I was missing and came back, pushed me through three more noise-guards until I was with the rest of the group. They split into two teams, one group downstairs to fight the fire and the other trying to bust through the end wall. The rammed earth was really good at deflecting blows, but you could claw and dig it away, and I thought there was enough crew working on that to get the job done.

“I went downstairs to fight the fire. The walls were impervious to flames, of course, but the Molotovs had their own fuel, and there was plenty of paper furniture and plastic kitchen appliances that burned if you got them hot enough. I had a wet cloth around my face, but it had dried, and I could hardly see or breathe. I didn’t even notice that my shirt was on fire until one of the other women in my crew tackled me and rolled me on the ground.

“By then they’d scraped a good-sized hole in the top floor, and thrown a pile of bedding and clothes onto the ground outside and we hang-dropped into it as fast and as quietly as we could.

“The vigilantes figured out what was going on, and came to ride us down. They had a lot of macho A.T.V. shit, plus drones. We had the clothes on our backs, and some of us were nearly naked. We scattered. I let the woman who’d put out my fire lead me into the brush, to a muddy culvert where we lay with just our mouths and noses out of the mud, so we wouldn’t have an IR signature. I had to get up first, all my body heat gone, the hypothermia setting in. I knew what it was, knew I’d be dead soon if I didn’t get warm.

“My friend tried to keep me from going, but I knew I was right. Whatever else was going on, I was going to die if I didn’t get warm. I stood. I shivered, and there was this pain here—” she traced the scar. “My friend cursed me back to the settlement, convinced we were going to get shot. But she came. Safety in numbers.

“Safety in numbers is a powerful idea. By the time we straggled to the smoking ruins, nearly everyone was there. The walkaways were in bad shape, hurting and coughing and cold. Staring at us from the other end of the houses were the vigilantes, hostile and unsure of themselves. They’d had a group madness that let them burn their neighbors’ homes. They’d been a mob, with diffused responsibility, the whole thing an emergent property of social mass, and now it had dissipated.

“My group set up an infirmary, right in front of them, treating our wounded with whatever we had. There were some people who’d hurt themselves jumping, some who’d gotten hurt in the scramble through the woods. It wasn’t until dawn broke and we did a head-count and a network sweep that we discovered four people were missing. Two of them straggled in later. Two were found in one of the houses, charred to bone, missed in that scramble. One of the dead was fifteen years old, and no one knew how to get in touch with his parents, somewhere out there in default.

“Word got out about the fire. There was a lot of U.A.V. traffic, not just copters and gliders, but bumbling zepps with medical relief and food. Soon there were people, more walkaways, and the straights freaked out and started to arm up, build a rampart to defend themselves from reprisals.

“There was no revenge. The straights had stolen our earthmoving gear for their defensive rampart, but there were new diggers within a couple of days. Don’t know who brought it. I was laid up with bad fever, infection. When I came to my senses, they told me they hadn’t expected me to make it. I was too poorly to help for weeks. It was only once we had some wet-printers running that I had pharma for the infection – some silver-doped antibiotics that knocked it out.”

They listened raptly. Then the girl shook her head like there was a bee in her ear. “Am I getting this right? You got burned out by insane vigilantes who killed your friends and nearly killed you, personally, and you hung around?”

“We didn’t hang around.” She smiled at the memory. “We rebuilt. The normals watched from their ramparts, like a militia, but we didn’t fight. First thing, we built a kitchen, then we baked, because rammed-earth construction is hungry work. Every time cookies or granola bars came out, we brought a tray over to them under a white flag and left it. The trays piled up, untouched, until one day they were gone. Don’t know if they ate them or not.

“It was very Gandhi-ey, though I had an itchy neck from the thought of all those scopes trained on me. They’d dial their laser-sights up to visible and make the dots dance on our foreheads, or over our hearts. But when we put out videos – including a red dot over the breast of a very pregnant woman who’d come to help – there was such a flood of net-rage for the vigilantes they quit it.

“We dozed the old houses when the new ones were done. We’d lived in hexayurts and tents, because our old places were uninhabitable. Having them there, the mummies of our dead, kept us working and shamed the vigilantes. Once the old places were down, we planted wildflowers and grasses that would have been beautiful when they grew out.

“The new settlement was three times as big. A lot of our volunteers wanted to stick around, and then there were new walkaways, so disgusted with the vigilantes they left the gate-guarded town. Some were double agents, but that was okay, since we didn’t have any secrets. Secrets were just overhead.

“As we got nearer to move-in, the atmosphere got festive. There were movie nights on the sides of the buildings, which we’d painted white. We always tried to paint our stuff white, just to do our bit for the planet’s albedo. We turned our excavation site into a swimming hole with water from the creek. The earthworks machines turned into rope-swings and dive platforms.

“I was in the pool when the vigilantes moved in again. They HERFed our drones and used pain-rays and sonic flashlights to herd us all into the square between the four rows of houses. Then a guy with a semi-military private security badge used a loudtalker to warn us that he was deputized by the county to clear the land and we had ten minutes to vacate. There was a EULA after that, about how they could just blow us away under the Anti-Terror Act of such-and-such if we engaged in conduct likely to represent a threat to life or property. As soon as he was done, he cranked up that fucking pain-ray. No one even thought about going back for their stuff. It was like your face was melting. There were kids in our group, under ten, and they screamed like they were being sawn to pieces. You hear stories about parents lifting a car off their kids, but that’s nothing – I saw parents walk straight into the pain-ray to get their kids. One of them fell down seizing, and her partner lifted her in a fireman’s carry with a kid under the other arm. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more impressive physical feat.

“We couldn’t hide in the woods. They had their U.A.V.s flying overlapping coverage, following us in flocks until we were twenty klicks away. I limped all day and all night, and every time I slowed down, babycopters would drop out of the sky and ram me, nudging me along like cattle. I stuck with a couple who were carrying their kid. They stopped and tried to camp because their little boy couldn’t take another step and none of us had it in us to carry him anymore, and I stood guard over them, batting the copters with a leafy branch. More and more of the little bastards descended on us and eventually we moved on. They begged bicycles from a noncombatant couple on the road, and then I was slowing them down. I moved off on my own.

“I eventually dropped, and I must have been out of the copters’ enforcement range, because they hovered off on the horizon, making that cricket-noise, but I drifted off even so and when I awoke they’d gone. Must have needed a recharge and the vigilantes didn’t think I warranted a relief squadron.”

“What happened next?” the girl said. Of the three, she was most horrified. Limpopo guessed that this was because she was the richest of them, the one for whom this was the most inconceivable.

Limpopo shrugged, felt a tightness in her shoulders, realized she’d harshed her mellow by reliving the experience. It was three years before, and she still got some PTSDish moments, but not for a while. This telling made it come strong. These three reminded her of who she’d been, a fresh walkaway and yes, a bit of a shlepper. The fire and the forced march had burned shlepper instinct out, made her realize the uselessness of getting attached to stuff.

“I walked away. That’s what it comes down to. It’s a big world, and most of it is fungible. Doesn’t matter where you are or what’s around you, if you can cover your basic needs and find something productive to do. I ended up with this crew, and forked a tavern off the UNHCR refugee design, and that’s how you find me today.”

“What about the rest of your old camp?”

“Here and there. Some worked on the Belt and Braces. Some went somewhere else. A couple dropped off the walkaway grid, and I’m guessing they walkbacked, it was too much for them, which is ‘totally their business and absolutely cool with me,’ as the song goes. I checked in on the site itself. It’s got a high-security perimeter. The buildings have been bulldozed. My meadow’s still growing, and the wildflowers are as beautiful as I thought they’d be. I made the world a measurably better place, which is more than you can say for the assholes who chased us off.”

“Amen,” said Etcetera. “That was an insane story and I am very glad you told it to us. Now I want to go and try a different pool. You coming?”

“Hell yeah,” said the sarcastic one. “Did you say there’s a pool where the fish will come and give you oral pleasure?”

“Follow me,” she said, and led a parade of dripping, naked people outside into the chill of the early evening and the gorgeous heat of the water. The fish came and ate away their dead skin while they lolled back and became creatures of pure nerves and breath again.

[III]

SOMEONE SAID A whisky would be perfect, someone else said a toasted cheese sandwich would be incredible, someone said she could barely keep her eyes open and wanted to find something soft to crash on, or somewhere horizontal. Limpopo called time on the onsen. “Let’s find a midnight feast and a bed.” She thought of the cushions in the big room on the third floor, ideal for cuddle-puddles, just what she needed at that moment.

They showered again in the communal antechamber, floatingly relaxed. Without saying a word – without it being overtly sexual – they scrubbed one another’s backs. Sexual or not, there was animal pleasure in being groomed by someone, and it deepened the feeling of sweet, tazzy decadence.

They were so boneless that it took five minutes for anyone to realize that the noobs’ stuff had been stolen.

Before that, there was just an ambling wobble as they looked for their clothes. Then mounting alarm, and finally the girl said, “We’ve been robbed.” The two boys said, “Shit.” They looked at Limpopo. Her clothes were right where she’d left them. They were the kind of clothes you could get anywhere that walkaways gathered.

Limpopo took a breath. “Well, that happened.”

“Come on. We’ve got to go and look for our stuff—” the girl said.

“You’ll need clothes first,” Limpopo said. “I hate to say it, but I think it’d be a waste. When stuff gets stolen, it disappears fast.”

“Funny how you’d know that,” the girl said. “Funny how you’d know why it wouldn’t be any use to try and track down the stuff you told us to leave here.”

“I never told you to leave it here,” Limpopo said. “I just said you couldn’t bring it in there. I specifically said I didn’t know if it’d be safe.” She looked at them. They were upset, suspicious of her. The girl most of all, but the guys looked like she was to blame, too. They’d want someone to blame, because the alternative was to blame themselves. Limpopo felt sad. She’d been looking forward to that cuddle-puddle.

“I know this sucks. It happens out here. Not everyone is a nice person in the world.”

“So why didn’t you build lockers?” the girl said. “If not everyone is as nice as you, why wouldn’t you provide for your guests with a minimum standard for security? How about footage? There’s cameras around, right? Let’s get some fucking forensics, make wanted posters—”

Limpopo shook her head, and the girl looked more furious. “I’m sorry,” Limpopo said again. “There are sensors in the B&B, of course, but nothing that buffers for more than a few seconds. That’s in the building’s firmware, and anyone who tries to change it will be reverted in milliseconds. The people who use this place decided they would rather be robbed than surveilled. Stuff is just stuff, but being recorded all the time is creepy. As for lockers, you’re free to put some in, but I don’t think they’d last. Once you’ve got lockers, you’re implicitly saying that anything that’s not in a locker is ‘unprotected’—”

“Which it was,” Etcetera pointed out.

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s a perfectly valid point. But you won’t win the argument with it.”

Etcetera sat. They were all naked, but Limpopo felt bad about putting her clothes on when no one else had theirs. She grabbed big, fluffy towels from the stack and passed them around.

“Thank you,” Etcetera said.

“Yeah, thanks,” the sarcastic one said. “Sounds like your friends wouldn’t be convinced by anything. What if we just went and took their stuff?”

She smiled. “That was what I was about to suggest. No one’s going to be happy about this. Ripoff shit sucks, and whoever did it was a colossal asshole. If we caught someone doing it, we’d probably throw him out.”

“What if he tried to come back in?”

“We’d tell him to leave.”

“What if he didn’t listen?”

“We’d ignore him.”

“What if he brought back a bunch of friends and started to fuck up all your shit? Pissed in your hot tubs and drank all your booze?”

She turned to Etcetera. “You know this one, right?”

“They’d leave, Seth,” he said.

“That’s my slave name,” he said. “Call me, uh...” He looked lost.

“Gizmo von Puddleducks,” Limpopo said. “I’m good at name-space management.”

“Call me Gizmo,” he said. “Yeah, I get that. They’d leave. They’d build another one of these somewhere else, and then someone would come along and take that one, or burn it down, or whatever.”

“Or they wouldn’t,” she said. “Look, there are as many walkaway philosophies as there are walkaways, but mine is, ‘the stories you tell come true.’ If you believe everyone is untrustworthy, you’ll build that into your systems so that even the best people have to act like the worst people to get anything done. If you assume people are okay, you live a much happier life.”

“But your shit gets jacked.”

“I don’t have anything to get ripped off. It makes life easier. I haven’t carried a pack in years. Walks are a lot more pleasant. No one bothers to rob me.”

“I had everything in that bag,” the girl said, morosely.

“Let me guess,” Limpopo said. “Money. ID. Food. Water. Spare wearable stuff. Clean underwear.”

The girl nodded.

“Right. Well, you don’t need money or ID here. Food and water, we got. Clean underwear and wearables, easy. We’ll get you back on the grid, you can recover your backups—” She saw their faces fall.

“You were backed up on the walkaway grid, right?”

“Not yet,” Etcetera said. “It was on the list. I guess I still have stuff in the cloud, out there in ‘default reality.’” He still said “default reality” with self-conscious, audible quote-marks.

“Well, we can exfiltrate it for you. There’s still some places where the walkaway grid peers with default, deep tunnels and lots of latency. Or you could walkback if you want. Some people do. Walkaway isn’t for everyone. Sometimes they go walkaway again. No one will judge you for it.” Except you, she didn’t say because it was obvious.

The girl looked distraught. “I can’t fucking believe this. I can’t believe that you’re not taking any responsibility. You brought us here. We’re completely fucked, we have nothing and you’re just busting out smug little bohemian aphorisms like hipster buddha.”

Limpopo remembered when this would have pissed her off and allowed herself to be proud that she wasn’t angry. She wished she could also avoid pride, but everyone’s a work in progress. “I’m sorry this happened. I’ll help you get set again. Getting ripped off happens to everyone who goes walkaway. It’s a rite of passage. Owning something that isn’t fungible means that you’ve got to make sure someone else doesn’t take it. Once you let go of that, everything gets easier.”

The girl looked ready to go for Limpopo. She hoped it wouldn’t get physical.

“Look, take it easy. It’s just stuff. I know you had some cool clothes. I even snuck photos of them so I could make my own and put ’em up on a version-server for the B&B. You can sit and fume, you can run into the night looking for some rip-off asshole who’s more addicted to owning things than you, or you can get past it and come with me and get new kit. We can make you a dupe of the stuff you were wearing, or you can pick something out of the catalog. Or you can run home wearing a towel. Entirely up to you.”

“You copied her clothes?” the sarcastic one said.

“Why, you want a set? They were unisex. We could mod ’em for you, or you could rock something genderbendy. I think it’d suit you.” Now that she said it, she realized it was true. She liked the other one, Etcetera, more as a person, but this Herr von Picklepants was pretty in a way that she had a weakness for, she could see the virtue of playing dress-up with him, if he would just stop talking.

“You know? Maybe,” he said. He knew exactly how pretty he was, which was a huge turnoff.

“Let’s go and get you suited and booted.”

Out of solidarity, she left her clothes on the bench and wore a towel out of the onsen, just as they had, and led them back into the Belt and Braces.

The B&B’s fablab was in an outbuilding called the stables, but there had never been livestock near them. She found them robes and slippers, showing the noobs how to query the B&B’s inventory for the location of unclaimed stuff and leading them around the first couple of floors to paw through alcoves and chests until they were set. “You can keep those,” she said, “or just put ’em back in any chest and tell B&B about them. If you ditch them somewhere, someone’ll moop them for you anyway, but it’s considered rude.”

“Moop?” Etcetera said. He’d brightened up during the hunt for robes. He was getting into the spirit. She was glad for him.

“Matter out of place. Litter. If you see clutter, you can recycle it, drop it in a storage bin, or commandeer it. The B&B keeps track of the unclaimed moop in its storages and flags stuff that’s more than a couple months old to the bug-reporter and someone’ll pick up the chore and decompose them.”

“Did our bags get mooped then?”

“Not a chance. They hadn’t been there long enough, and bags in a changing room aren’t moop unless they’re abandoned. They were just ripped off.” She hauled open the door to the stables. “Let it go.”

The fablab smelled like lasers, charred wood, VOCs, textile dye, and machine oil. Its hydrogen cells – separate from the tavern cells – were topped off, and it was nearly empty, apart from giggling teenaged boys almost certainly printing ridiculous hand-guns. She bookmarked them for a stern talking-to, before throwing a screen up on a wall.

“Easiest way to get started is to ask for an inventory of traveling stuff – warm-weather, cold-weather, wet-weather, shelter, food, first aid – cross-referenced by available feedstocks and rated by popularity.” She twiddled her interface surfaces as she worked, and soon they had a multi-columnar layout. “Fill your baskets, and when you’re done, drill down for sizes and options.”

They immediately grasped it and tapped and poked and suggested. She watched, weighing their choices against her criteria. When she’d been a shlepper, she’d had an Army of One mentality, everything she could need at her side. Once she’d lost that madness, she’d pared away that everyday carry until it was the minimum she would need to survive a typical set of difficulties between wherever she was and the next place. When she’d lived in default, she’d treated her home and school locker and workplace as extensions of her everyday carry, not worrying about hauling everything that fit those places with her all the time. It was enough to know that they were there when she’d need them.

The reason she’d become a shlepper after she went walkaway was she’d drawn her perimeter around her body. If she wasn’t carrying a thing, she couldn’t use it. The cure had been the realization that everything was everywhere, stuff in walkaway was a normalized cloud of potential, on-demand things. The opportunity cost of not having the right salad fork when she wanted a salad was lower than the opportunity cost of not being able to go where she wanted to go, without hauling mountains of pain-in-the-back stuff.

A priori, she’d bet Etcetera would have the smallest shopping basket, and the girl would have the biggest. She guessed wrong. The girl went so minimal it shamed Limpopo.

“Don’t you think you should pack more than that?” She gave in to the temptation to put her thumb on reality’s scales.

“All I need is enough to get me to some place like this. Meanwhile, these bozos are going to be carrying a mountain. On the one hand I’ll always have someone to borrow from, and on the other I’ll probably end up helping them with their kitchen sinks.”

The girl raised an expressive eyebrow at her and smirked. “You think you’re the only one around here who gets this stuff? We’re noobs, not idiots. I’ve been throwing Communist parties for years. I’ve liberated enough matériel to furnish your whole enterprise. Yeah, I took too much shit with me when I left, but that was only because I didn’t know what I’d be getting into. If it’s like this—” she waved an arm around the stables – “who needs it?”

“You’re right, I assumed you were bourgie kids who needed to be led to the greater glory of walkaway philosophy. It’s easy to feel more less-is-more than thou. I’m sorry about your stuff, too. Even though I think you were carrying more shit than you needed, getting jacked feels terrible. It makes you feel unsafe; no one is at their best when they feel that way.” One piece of walkaway-fu was to apologize quickly and thoroughly when you fucked up. It was a hard lesson for Limpopo to learn, but she made the most of it.

The boys were surreptitiously taking items out of their baskets, and she noticed the girl noticing, and they shared a knowing smile and pretended not to notice. Making other people feel like assholes was a terrible way to get them to stop acting like assholes.

“Not every place is like this,” Limpopo said. “The B&B is the biggest walkaway place I’ve seen, maybe the biggest in this part of Canada. It’s got a lot of material wealth. Most walkaway settlements have fablab. No one will ever tell you you’re not allowed to use it, but if all you do is drift around, draining hydrogen cells and feedstock, everyone will think you’re a dick.”

The guys rearranged their baskets. “I’m not supposed to trade anything for anything else, it’s all a gift, like the Communist parties. That part I understand. But when we do our parties, we don’t care how much you take because at any second the cops are going to chase us out and destroy whatever’s left over, so you can have whatever you can carry. Out here, you want people to magically not take too much but also not earn the right to take more by working harder and also to work because it’s a gift but not because they expect anything in return?”

They stared at her. She shrugged. “That’s the walkaway dilemma. If you take without giving, you’re a mooch. If you keep track of everyone else’s taking and giving, you’re a creep scorekeeper. It’s our version of Christian guilt – it’s impious to feel good about your piety. You have to want to be good, but not feel good about how good you are. The worst thing is to be worrying about what someone else is doing, because that has nothing to do with whether you’re doing right.” She shrugged. “If it was easy, everyone would do it. It’s a project, not an accomplishment.”

Etcetera stretched and his back cracked. His robe fell open, which was revealing in a way that his total nudity hadn’t been. He tucked everything back in. “It’s hard to get your head around because it’s unfamiliar. Back out there in ‘default reality’” – again, she could hear the quote-marks – “you’re supposed to be doing things because they’re right for you. ‘What do you expect me to do, pass on this dirty salary money because there was something nasty in its history? I don’t see you lining up to pay my bills.’ Generosity is a folk tale about what happens when people look out for themselves. We’re supposed to ‘just know’ that selfishness is natural.

“Out here, we’re supposed to treat generosity as the ground state. The weird, gross, selfish feeling is a warning we’re being dicks. We’re not supposed to forgive people for being selfish. We’re not supposed to expect other people to forgive us for being selfish. It’s not generous to do nice things in the hopes of getting stuff back. It’s hard not to fall into that pattern, because bribery works.

“My folks had this problem all the time when I was growing up. Dad would come up with all these long explanations for why I could only do something I wanted if I did something boring first that didn’t make it into a bribe. He’d say, ‘You have to eat a balanced diet so you’ll be healthy. Eating dessert without eating vegetables and protein isn’t balanced. So you can’t have dessert unless you clear your plate.’ Mom rolled her eyes and when he was out of earshot, she’d whisper, ‘Finish everything on your plate and I’ll give you a slice of cake.’ Out-and-out bribery.”

The sarcastic one chuckled. “I’ve met your folks. They were both bribing you, but your dad was trying to make himself feel better.”

Etcetera shook his head. “It’s more complicated. Dad wanted me to want to do the right thing for the right reason. Mom only wanted me to do the right thing. I get Dad. But it’s easier to get people to do stuff if you don’t care why they’re doing it.”

Limpopo surveyed the boys’ baskets, trimmed to more modest proportions. She nodded. “This discussion usually gets to parenting and friendship. Those are the places where everyone agrees that being generous is right. Your chore list is to ensure that everything gets done. The kid who spends her time watching her sisters to make sure they have the same number of chores is either getting screwed, or is screwed up. It sounds corny, but being a walkaway is ultimately about treating everyone as family.”

The girl shuddered. Limpopo thought she had her number. “Okay, treating everyone like you’d want your family to treat you.”

“Christianity, basically,” the sarcastic one said, making a cross of his body, drooping his head to one side, and rolling his eyes up.

“Christianity if it had been conceived in material abundance,” Limpopo said. “You’re not the first to make the comparison. Plenty of these places have grad students – poli sci, soc, anthro – trying to figure out if we’re ‘post-scarcity Fabian socialists’ or ‘secular Christian communists,’ or what. Most are funded by private-sector spooks that want to know if we’re going to burn down their offices, and whether they can sell us anything. A third of them go walkaway. Meanwhile, we’re ready to do measurements and styles, right?”

They did, letting the stables’ cams image them and then sanity-checking the geometry the algorithms inferred. The system rendered them in new clothes and let them play with colors and prints. You got this in default, consumerist clicktrances of perpetual shopping and they clearly knew it. They whipped through options quickly and hit commit and marveled at the timers.

“Six hours?” the girl said. “Seriously?”

“You can do it in less,” Limpopo said, “but this rate allows us to use feedstock with more impurities by adding error-correction passes. Look at this—” She held out her sleeve and showed them a place where a seam had been resealed during fab. “No one said abundance was easy.”

[IV]

WHEN ETCETERA FINALLY hit on her, she surprised herself by saying yes.

The three of them had stuck around the B&B long after they’d gotten everything they needed to hit the road. That hadn’t surprised her. They were a good fit. The sarcastic one – he’d kept up the Gizmo von Puddleducks business and everyone called him “Ducky” – was a great storyteller and a fun opponent at board games. Both were highly prized skills in the B&B’s common-room, and he’d become a fixture. The girl joined a survey crew that was chasing up feedstock sites IDed by the drone-flock. She’d come back from a hard day in some ghost-town, grimed and wiry in a tank-top and work-boots, leading a train of walkers that crashed into the stables with their load of textiles, metals, and plastics, the sad remnants of collapsed industry and the people who’d slaved for it.

But Etcetera hadn’t fit in, no matter what he tried. None of the work captivated him. None of the leisure caught his interests. He had no stack of books he’d been meaning to read, no skill he’d planned on practicing, no project he’d put off. He was either a slack loser or a Zen master.

At least he wasn’t a pest. He did chores, got checked out on everything in the Stables and did maintenance, laughed at Ducky’s jokes and went out on crew with the girl – he called her Natalie, though she’d switched from “Stable Strategies” to “Iceweasel.” But he clearly didn’t give a shit about any of it.

One dawn, she went into the onsen and found him there, reclining in an outdoor pool with his nose and mouth above water, plumes of steam rising as he exhaled. She slid into the water next to him, anxious to get her feet off the icy paving stones and into the warmth. He raised his head, cracked an eye, nodded minutely, and sank back. She nodded at his vapor-plume, reclined too. Within moments the fish were on her, nibbling here and there. She closed her eyes and let her face sink beneath the water until only her own mouth and nose stuck out.

A fish brushed against her hand, then did it again. It wasn’t a fish. It was his hand, casually laid alongside hers, pinky-edge against pinky-edge. She checked her own internal instruments and decided she was happy about this. She picked up her hand and set it atop his.

They were still for a long while, fish tickling them. The fish made it weird. She and Etcetera were the main attractions at someone else’s orgy, their own contact saintly in its chastity. Their fingers moved in the tiniest of increments, spreading, entwining. It may have taken thirty minutes. Each of their hands was saying, “Is this okay?” and waiting for the other’s to move, “Yes, it’s okay,” before moving again. They were sending pulsed SYN/ACK/SYNACKs over a balky network.

When their hands entwined, it was anticlimactic. Now what? The tentative physical contact beneath the waters had been magic, but they weren’t going to give each other hand jobs in the pool. Oh, Etcetera that was a romantic gesture, but now what?

She got tired of wondering and disentangled her hand and went inside. She wasn’t often up this early, but when she was, she liked to come to the onsen because she had it to herself. It was empty. She stood by the hottest pool, chilled from the walk through the frosty air to the steaming door. The door behind her opened and Etcetera came in with a distracted smile. He dipped a bucketful of near-scalding water and soaked his small towel, then drew it out in a cloud of steam.

She smiled back, liking where this was going. She turned her back and looked over her shoulder, giving him a head-tilt invitation. It was enough. He rubbed the near-scalding towel on her back tentatively, and she rocked her weight towards him. He rubbed harder, soaked the towel. He knelt to do her butt and legs, and she turned around when he got to her ankles and he started to work his way back up. As he got back to his feet, she met him with her towel, steaming from the pail, rubbed his chest and arms. They held hands again and stepped into the hottest pool, water so hot that it obliterated all thought except for the hand squeezed in hers. They lowered themselves, hands so tight that their knuckles ground. Hand in hand, they went to the coldest pool, took towels in hand and washed one another down.

Back and forth, his left hand in her right, washing one another down, clinging tight to one another, alone in the onsen and merging into one being of flesh, nerves, heat, and cold. When they were done, they sat at the showers and soaped each other, sprayed each other with the shower wands. They went into the changing room and put their robes on, separating briefly. When they did, she felt the ghost of his hand in hers. When they clasped again, it felt like something missing had returned.

Hand in hand, they walked through the dim corridors. They skirted the common-room and the groggy voices they heard over the gurgle of coffium. They took the stairs slowly, gaits matched, feet rasping on the gritty laminate on the treads. On the first landing, and she used her free hand to ask a touchable surface about empty rooms, located one on the uppermost fourth floor, which had the smallest rooms – coffins, almost.

Wordless, breathing heavily, they ascended, hearing the building waking around them: a baby crying, someone peeing, a shower. One more floor, a few deft turns through the twisty little maze of the fourth floor, he put his hand on the doorplate and it rolled aside. The lights came on, revealing the bare cell whose loft-bed was neatly made up with fresh sheets. Beneath it was a desk and chair and some homey touches – a few books, a handful of sculptural prints of mathematical solids. Some part of Limpopo’s brain remembered putting them there, because this was one of the rooms she’d finished. She hadn’t been to it in more than a year, and she was pleased the B&B had kept it up. Either its tenants had been conscientious, or the B&B noticed the room getting moopy and had it on the chore list, and someone had taken care of it.

Now they were in the room, and the door was rolling shut behind them and clicking. He reached out to dim the lights but she cranked them back to full. She found she liked looking at his face in full light. Staring straight at a relative stranger’s face in full light, without pretending to be looking at something else, while that stranger looked back at you – it was something she hardly ever got to do. It was as intimate, in its own way, as anything physical.

He had a confused smile. She liked the curve of his lip.

“Is this okay? I mean—”

“I just want to get a good look.” She was pleased at how quickly he grasped this, how thoroughly he reciprocated, pupils shiny as his eyes saccaded over her face, gaze roaming in a frank way that reminded her of their firm grip.

This was what she loved about being a walkaway. She’d seduced and been seduced in default, but there’d always been a sense of time slipping away. We’d better stop this romantic stuff, get fucking because there’s a meeting, a job, a protest, a meal to cook or a chore. Even at the B&B, it was hard to escape that feeling. But now she reveled in its absence, infinite time. She recalled Etcetera’s unwillingness to commit to a routine in the B&B, his inability to naturally fall into a role or job. It meant that he was hers for as long as they wanted.

She inserted her thumbs between his robe and flesh and ran them slowly down, pushing the robe open one agonizing millimeter at a time, marveling at how the skin that she had seen and touched in the onsen could be so private when partially clothed. He put his hands on her robe and pulled it apart and it slid over her breasts as they popped free, one and two. In default, she’d fussed about them, they weren’t the right size or shape. Her critical eye wanted more from her imperfect flesh. Walkaway had liberated her from inchoate anxiety, but more, the burn had ended it, fully occupying her self-consciousness.

Her robe parted over the burn. His hand grazed the scar. She jolted and he jerked his hand back. He said “sorry” as she took hold of his hand and put it on the scar. The scar didn’t hurt, exactly, but it pulled and when she did yoga she felt her torso’s skin distorting around its gravity. For the longest time she hadn’t been able to touch the alien thing where her skin had been – only washing it with a sponge. Her hand went to it in her sleep, and she’d wake with its snake-segments of collagen beneath her fingertips. She’d come to détente, no longer feeling it was alien.

His hands were on the scar now, its rises and depressions. His eyes were distant, his breath shallow. She panted, too; their breath was mingling in their mouths, they were that close. They hadn’t kissed yet. She pulled his robe off of his shoulders and forced his hands off her while she yanked it down. His hands went back to her. The movement brought them close enough he could reach around and touch her shoulder-blades, her spine, the satellites of her burn, like the debris field of a meteor impact. He was close enough that his erection bobbed insistently at her thigh, warm elastic touch that made her smile. He smiled back and she knew he knew what she was smiling about.

His palms reached her butt. She put her hands in the same place and reeled him in, his erection sandwiched between them, her breasts crushed against his chest. Her lips formed into a kiss and found his collarbone. She worried at the bone with her teeth, then nipped his skin. He gasped, crushed her harder. He rolled his head and bared his throat to her and she darted kisses on it, loving his stubble on her lips, that boy-skin feeling. Her lips rested on the artery in his throat and she relished his pulse, and sucked insistently, daring him to push her off before she gave him a hickey, but he hissed and his trapped penis throbbed in time with his pulse against her stomach.

He ground his hips against her. She let his thigh slide between hers, nestle against her vulva. She ground against the muscle of his leg, hairs pulling, everything too dry at first, and then, moment by delicious moment, wetter. Her nostrils flared. She breathed the sex from their armpits and groins. She sucked at the vulnerable place where his jaw and throat and ear met.

They still hadn’t kissed.

He pulled her ass harder, his hands strong. She remembered the way his hand had squeezed hers. He lifted her to her tiptoes, crushing her pussy against his leg. She found his quadriceps and mashed her clit against them, let go and leaned back, feeling his quads jump out as he braced to support her. She bent until her hands reached the wall and she pushed back, and they played with muscle and gravity, and he hauled her back and staggered.

Back on her feet, she bulled him to the bedside, put one foot on the ladder and hoisted herself up. He leapt in behind her.

And still, they hadn’t kissed. She twisted, caught his ankle, popped his little toe in her mouth, biting down when he tried to pull away. She dug her fingernails into the arch of his foot and reached blindly and caught his erection, making a fist and squeezing just hard enough to feel that pulse again. His hips bucked and she held, then let go and reversed herself, sliding up his body and pinioning his torso beneath hers. Her hands caught his and she used her hard-won construction muscles to yank his wrists over his head and push them into the mattress. His armpits smelled of clean sweat. His breath was on her face. Her breath was on his.

She made a kiss of her lips again and poised, pulling her face back when he tried to kiss. She wanted this to last. She let one lip brush his, then both. Then some tongue. His mouth parted. His face strained toward hers and she pulled back, started over. He got the message. He lay there, let her control him, choose how the kiss would unfold. She made it very slow.

It was wonderful.

It didn’t stop.

Mouths locked, he reached for her ass, and she pressed it into his hands, willing him to knead, incidentally mashing his cock into her scar, which had never happened before. She noted it absently and groaned into his mouth. He groaned back.

She ground on his leg again, crushed his cock between them. His fingers worked around her ass to where the hair was slick. He rhythmically kneaded the length of her groin, explored her opening. She moaned into his mouth. Shivers chased up her back and stomach. The explosive feeling built and she bucked, urging him to dig deeper, move faster, and he ground in return. She hadn’t been with a man in more than a year. This one stirred up nostalgic eroticism, calling to mind all the men before, every shiver, every screaming orgasm. These images played through her mind as she moved. The familiar flush spread up her neck.

He surprised her by coming from the friction. The sudden heat between them set her off into convulsions that culminated with the kinds of loud noises that had once embarrassed her.

She rolled half off him – making him oof as she inadvertently drove an arm into his solar plexus – grabbed his robe off the desk beneath them and used it to wipe up.

“Whew,” she said.

“More.”

She looked down, incredulous. “Already?”

He licked his lips.

He was a good lover. It shone through the heart-thumping roar of a long-frustrated fuck. She couldn’t put her finger on it – metaphorically, anyway – but as she came again, clamping her thighs around his ears, she realized it: the lack of hurry. Even after years of walkaway, she was used to slicing time into rice-paper slices thin enough for one discrete thing, before moving onto the next. Most of the time, she rushed to complete this current moment before the next thumped the door. Every adult she’d known matched that rhythm, the next thing almost upon them, the current one had best be taken care of in haste.

Etcetera sliced his time thick. He’d slide along her body to her breasts and rest his face on them for an unmeasured pause before nibbling. It went on longer than she expected. It was better than nice. Her own body-clock synchronized, metronome tick slowing to a languorous heartbeat that felt like there was all the time in the world. It was more decadent than the sticky juices on her fingers, livid hickey on her left breast, the turgid boy-nipple she was rolling between her fingers.

When they were done, she had no idea how late it was. It might be sunset, or later, though they’d come upstairs at daybreak. She wiped interface surface on the wall and brought up a clock, was surprised to see it was only mid-day. Not hurrying all the time had not meant not losing all the time. The difference between glorious languor and endless hustle was an hour or two. It felt like she’d just been given a day.

She kissed him at the junction of throat and earlobe and worked her way around to his lips. He embraced her in that unhurried way, enfolding her in the robe he’d donned.

“That was very nice,” she said.

“It was very nice over here, too.”

They twined fingers. She opened the linen hatch and they stripped the bed and put new sheets on, wiped the surfaces and turned on the air-scrubbers. A green check-mark glowed on the back of the door as the room acknowledged that it had been adequately reset. They left, hands twined and dirty linens in their free arms. These went down a laundry chute by the stairs, and they went to the stables to make some new clothes.

[V]

THE FUCK DIDN’T discombobulate their relationship, thank goodness. He hugged her and kissed her cheek instead of shaking her hand in the common-room, and his two friends – who, she thought, were doing something along the same lines – shot her knowing looks. He wasn’t all over her every time they met, nor did he give her the studied ignorance treatment. A week later, they ran into each other in a corridor and stopped to chat. He leaned against the wall with his hand splayed against it. She laid hers alongside of it, and he took the hint, and they went back to the fourth floor for another unhurried, easy play session.

“How are you liking it here?” she asked during one of their pauses.

He looked uncomfortable. “Honestly, I don’t think this is my thing. We left default because I wanted to be part of something where I was more than an inconvenient surplus labor unit. I know I can work here and there’s plenty to do, but it feels contrived. The other day, I totally fucked up some linen processing, ruined thirty sheets. The system just assigned someone else to make new ones and push the blown-out ones through the feedstock processor. The whole thing fails so safe that it doesn’t really matter what I do. If I worked my brains out or did nothing, it would be the same, as far as the system is concerned. I know it’s fucked up and egocentric, but I want to know that I, personally, am important to the world. If I left tomorrow, nothing around here would change.”

She chewed her lip. She’d wrestled with this herself for many years, but admitting it was in bad taste. Everyone talked about special snowflakes, and it was the kind of thing that was an insult from a stranger but not from a friend. You weren’t supposed to need to be a special snowflake, because the objective reality was that, important as you were to yourself and the people immediately around you, it was unlikely that anything you did was irreplaceable. As soon as you classed yourself as a special snowflake, you headed for the self-delusional belief that you should have more than everyone else, because your snowflakiness demanded it. If there was one thing that was utterly uncool in walkaway, it was that self-delusion.

“You know that this is the love that dare not speak its name around here? There have been one hundred billion humans on the planet over the years, and statistically, most of them didn’t make a difference. The anthropocene is about collective action, not individuals. That’s why climate change is such a clusterfuck. In default, they say that it’s down to individual choice and responsibility, but reality is that you can’t personally shop your way out of climate change. If your town reuses glass bottles, that does one thing. If it recycles them, it does something else. If it landfills them, that’s something else too. Nothing you do, personally, will affect that, unless it’s you, personally, getting together with a lot of other people and making a difference.”

“But it’s hard to pretend that you’re not the protagonist in the movie of your life. Normally it doesn’t matter, but being around here rubs your nose in it.”

“Everything’s got contradictions. I sometimes wonder if someone is doing something that makes everything better because I wrote a specific line of code. To really thrive out here, you have to want to make a difference and know you’re totally replaceable.”

“Beats default. There you’re not supposed to make a difference and you’re totally surplus.”

This discussion killed her horniness. The thought that her sensations were the same ones innumerable people had felt before and during and after that moment made it feel like a cheap trick, a way of tickling her reward circuits for a drip of this and a sneeze of the other. Normally, sex made her feel like the universe revolved around her sensations. Now they felt like a meaningless flare of light in an uncaring void.

She sat up and pulled on clothes. Etcetera didn’t seem put out, which was a relief and kind of worrying.

“You okay?”

“I’m okay,” she said. “Just not in the mood so much.”

“Sorry about that.” He got into his underwear and pants, turned his shirt right-side-out. “Despite whatever orthodoxy I’m supposed to embrace and no matter how uncool this is, I want to say that I actually do think you’re special. Better than special. Glorious, actually. And beautiful. But mostly glorious.”

Her heart thudded. “Listen, dude—”

“Don’t worry. I’m not going to go love-sick. But I’ve met dozens of people since I went walkaway and you are the first one who made me welcome, and not just because you fucked my brains out, though that did make me feel welcome. But because I can talk about this with you and you don’t roll your eyes like it’s the stupidest thing to ask about, and because you don’t go wide-eyed doctrinaire either. You’re like the only person around here who’s thinking about being a walkaway and doing walkaway. Without you, I would have moved on. This place is amazing, but it’s too finished, if you get what I mean.”

She pulled her dress on. It gave her a moment. When her head emerged, he was staring frankly at her. He had very nice eyes, a nice smile. A little tentative, but she liked that.

“I think you’re great, too.”

“We should go to the stables and print up some mutual admiration society membership badges.”

“You laugh, but I’m sure those exist as premades in walkaway thingiverse.”

“Well, that’s sweet,” he said. They laughed and a distant alarmed part of herself told her this was a lovers’ laugh, and she was falling in love.

[VI]

FALLING IN LOVE is wonderful. Once she gave in, she amused herself finding ways to be nice to Etcetera – making him a jacket in a color and cut that suited him better than anything he wore; waking him with a coffium and dragging him upstairs for a quickie while it burned through their veins; washing his back in sensuous strokes in the onsen.

He reciprocated in a hundred ways, saving her a seat in the common-room; greeting her after a hike with iced tea and a cool towel, or taking her hand below the table – or above it – as they chatted with the others into the night.

The old B&B hands took notice, but were too polite to ask outright. Instead, they’d say, “Oh, did Etcetera give that to you?” (He had, a garland of winter twigs worked into a ridiculous fairy crown that she wore for a day until it fell apart but treasured all the more for that.) There were walkaway couples, even walkaway families with kids and one or more parents, but she’d never joined them. Coupledom felt like an artifact of default, not anything she wanted any part of, a mess of jealousy and coordination problems.

But this was different. Emotions sang in her thoughts, sweeter than any she remembered. Lying beside him, even in a cuddle-puddle, looking at his lips and the dimple in his chin made something warm spread through her chest and belly.

They took long walks, not talking, listening to birdsong and the crunch of their footsteps in the snow. There were deer in the woods, usually far away, but once, a doe came close enough to touch, stared at them with spellbinding animal frankness.

One day, they set out at first light, full of porridge and bubbling with coffium, following a trail from a B&B drone that had found a cache of electronics full of recoverable coltan derivatives – an abandoned illegal e-waste dump. They brought a mulebot, and helping it with way-finding slowed them down to a frigid crawl. They bickered a little; she’d remember that later.

The cache was inaccessible. The ground had frozen solid in an overnight cold-snap that turned an earlier thaw into treacherous ice. Even with cleats, they couldn’t get any footing, and the mulebot got fatally stuck out of arms’ reach, unable to find enough traction to return. After abandoning trying to lasso it, they headed back in a bad mood.

They both got an offline buzz at the same moment as the walkaway network failed. She could tell, because they both stopped at the same moment.

“Does that happen often?” Etcetera said.

“It shouldn’t happen period. The network’s got redundant failovers, including a blimp. And we’ve got clear skies.”

She got out a screen and prodded with gloved fingers, squinting through the steam of her exhalations. She didn’t use diagnostic stuff often and it took her a while to get it up. “That’s weird,” she said. “Even if everything went blooey, you’d expect it to be a cascading failure. Node A goes dark, node B gets overwhelmed by traffic from it, falls over, then node C gets a double-whack and so on. But look, it lost contact with everything, all at once. That’s like a power-cut, but they’re all on independent power-cells.”

“What do you think it is?”

“I think it’s serious. Let’s go.”

Give this to Etcetera: when things got serious, he got serious. She saw a new side of him, nervy and alert. It comforted her. She could stop unconsciously worrying about taking care of him.

They hustled through the tramped-down snow trails, moving silently, with an unspoken dimension of stealth. She heard a whir and spotted a B&B drone, which gave her comfort. Then she saw that it wasn’t one of their models.

“Shit,” she said, as it came back for another pass. She gave it the finger as it buzzed meters over their heads. “Fuck it. Let’s go.”

They ran.

The path was well-groomed with a clever series of turns and strategic trees that let you emerge suddenly into the compound with the rambling buildings and the windmills proud overhead. Before they’d been spotted, she’d planned on coming out through the woods to one side, bushwhacking a new trail to get there. But now there was no point.

They stepped into the clearing and she saw a clutch of bulky dudes in intimidating tactical bullshit standing around the main entrance. They bristled with utility belts with gun-shaped stuff that could do terrible things to them, and they didn’t need to reach for them to make it clear who had the upper hand.

“Hello there,” one called. He even had the tough-guy mustache, like a wrestler. “Welcome to the Belt and Braces.”

“Yeah, thanks,” she said.

“I’m Jimmy,” he said. “Would you two be wanting some lodgings?”

“Suppose we are,” Limpopo said.

He smiled a lazy, wolfish smile, then looked more closely. “Oh,” he said. “It’s you, is it?”

She looked more closely at him, remembered. “Yeah, it’s me.” She sighed.

“Well shit. This is your lucky day, Limpopo.”

She nodded. He hadn’t been going by Jimmy when she’d slung his ass out of the B&B. What had it been? Jockstrap? Jackstraw? Something. It had been years.

“Bet you didn’t expect to see me.” He turned to his friends. “This lady right here put more lines of code into this place than anyone. She’s done more to build it than anyone. This place is full of this girl’s blood and treasure.” He turned back. “This really is your lucky day.”

“Yeah?” She knew where this was going.

“From now on, this place is on a quid-pro-quo basis. Everyone gets out what they put in. You’ve put in so much, well, you could stay for years without lifting a finger. You’ve got reputation capital to burn.”

“Oh brother,” she said.

You couldn’t be a walkaway without encountering the reputation economy freaks. At first, she’d hated them in the abstract. Then this guy had come along and given her some damned good, concrete reasons to hate them. The B&B had been a third built when he came and tried to install leaderboards in everything. Actually, he’d done it, checking in the code and then coming to her with her hands covered in sealant paste to demand to know why she’d reverted him.

“That’s not something we want.”

“What do you mean? You don’t have a constitution. I checked.”

“We don’t. But this issue’s been discussed and the consensus was that we didn’t want leaderboards. They produce shitty incentives.” She held up her gloppy hands. “I’m in the middle of something. Why don’t you put it on the wiki?”

“Is that the rule?”

“Nope,” she said.

“So why should I do it?”

“Because that’s worked before.”

“Maybe I should just revert your reverts.”

“I hope you don’t.” She knew how to have this argument. She kept eye contact. He was young, a recent walkaway, with pent-up freak that went with the territory. There was no percentage in meeting his freak with her own.

“Why not?”

“It wouldn’t be constructive. The point is to find something we can be happy with. Revert-wars don’t produce that. At best, that’ll get us to spending all our time reverting each other. At worse, it’ll turn into a war to see who can make the codebase harder for the other to modify.” She had a sheet of insulating honeycomb on her workbench and the sealant was drying lumpy. She grabbed a spongy brush and spread the lumps. “You want to see this place get built? Me too. Let’s figure out how. You could start by reviewing the old discussions and checking out how the decision got made. Then make your own arguments. I promise to read them in good faith.” This was a mantra, but she tried to imbue it with sincerity. He was tweaky. She didn’t want to freak him. She didn’t even want to talk to him.

He sea-lioned her at dinner. That was before the kitchen was finished and they made do with primitive stuff, flavored, extruded cultured UNHCR refu-scops. Scop-slop on a shingle, with everything you needed to keep going and a wide variety of flavors, but no one mistook it for food. She made space for him on the bench beside her and passed him the water-jug – they were using solar pasteurizers, big black barrels that used heat-exchanging coatings to get the water up to pathogen-killing temperatures. It gave the water a flat taste. She used sprigs of mint to cover it. She offered him some from a plant she’d picked before the dinner-bell rang.

He swirled it around her water and ate scop, which he’d taken in a chewy nacho-cheese briquette, so sharp-smelling it almost masked his sweaty funk. Baths were hard to come by in those days but not that hard. She tried to think of a polite way to show him how the wash-up worked, without creating any interpretive room to construe it as a sexual invitation.

“You get that reading done?”

He nodded and chewed. “Yeah,” he said. “I ran stats on the repos. You’re an order of magnitude head of the pack, massive power-law curve. I had no idea. Seriously, respect.”

“I don’t look at stats. Which is the point. I couldn’t write the whole thing on my own, and if I could, I wouldn’t want to, because this place would suck if it was just a contest to see who could add the most lines of code or bricks to the structure. That’s a race to build the world’s heaviest airplane. What does knowing that one person has more commits than others tell you? That you should work harder? That you’re stupid? That you’re slow? Who gives a shit? The most commits in our codebase come from history – everyone who wrote the libraries and debugged and optimized and patched them. The most commits on this building come from everyone who processed the raw materials, figured out how to process the raw materials, harvested the feedstock, and—”

He held up his hands. “Okay. But come on, maybe you didn’t do all the work, but you’re doing more than anyone. Why shouldn’t the community honor that?”

“If you do things because you want someone else to pat you on the head, you won’t get as good at it as someone who does it for internal satisfaction. We want the best-possible building. If we set up a system that makes people compete for acknowledgment, we invite game-playing and stats-fiddling, even unhealthy stuff like working stupid hours to beat everyone. A crew full of unhappy people doing substandard work. If you build systems that make people focus on mastery, cooperation, and better work, we’ll have a beautiful inn full of happy people working together well.”

He nodded but wasn’t convinced. She thought about saying, “I put in more work than anyone, so by your lights that means I should be in charge. As the person in charge, I say that the person who does the most shouldn’t be in charge, so there.” It made her smile, and she saw him looking embarrassed and remembered being a noob who didn’t know what she was doing or if she should be doing it, feeling judged.

“Don’t take my word for it,” she said. “Reopen the discussion, make your arguments, see if you can convince other people. Shift the consensus.”

“I’ll think about it.” She knew he wouldn’t. The idea that there wouldn’t be leaders in the race to build a leaderless society offended him in ways he wouldn’t let himself understand.

Three weeks later, they were locked in a revert-war that shook the B&B down to its literal foundations.

Jackstraw trawled every collaborative building project on the net for gamification modules. There were plenty – badges and gold stars, the works of amateur Skinners, convinced you could build the ideal society the way you toilet-trained a toddler: a chart on the wall with a smiley sticker next to every poopy-diaper-free day.

The results from these experiments were impressive. If you wanted to motivate people at their most infantile level, all you needed was to hand out sweeties for good children, and make naughty ones stand in the corner. He’d put together links to videos and analytics reports from the most successful.

At first, Limpopo was careful to keep her rebuttal style to the non-antagonistic “good faith” voice that was the sure-fire winner in walkaway arguments. She’d carefully ignore the emotional freight of his words, reading them three times to ensure she caught every substantive crumb in the screeds, and replied briefly, comprehensively and without a hint of contempt.

He didn’t know when he was beat. It was like arguing with a chatbot whose Markov chains were entangled in the paternalistic argot of prison wardens and unlicensed daycare operators. She’d calmly demolish his arguments every day from Monday to Friday, and on Saturday morning, he’d pull out Monday’s arguments again, like she wouldn’t notice.

This all happened in the commentary of code-pulls and reverts, making it more stupid. The audience for the debate grew as word spread. There was global attention, and not just from walkaways. Back in default, some people kept an eye on walkaway nets, treating them as exotic spectacle, like listening in on Al Shabaabbies complaining about the cumbersome reimbursement procedure their Wahabi paymasters imposed.

With this global audience kibitzing and sniping, Limpopo tore Jackstraw a comprehensive new asshole. She called him on every crumb of bullshit, found crashed projects where gamification had run wild, so financialized that every incentive distorted into titanic frauds that literally left structures in ruins, rotten to the mortar. They were existence proof of the terribleness of his cherished ideas. She pointed out that getting humans to “do the right thing” by incentivizing them to vanquish one another was stupid. She found videos of Skinner-trained pigeons who’d been taught to play piano through food-pellet training and pointed out that everyone who liked this envisioned himself as the experimenter – not the pigeon.

It got ugly. She’d bruised his ego, met his condescension by treating him to a slice of the assholery he’d directed her way. He lost it. Comprehensively bested, he went negative.

The problem was Limpopo’s vagina. It made her unable to understand the competitive fire that was the true motive force that kept humans going. Competition carved the gazelle as a perfect complement to the leopard. Competition whittled the fangs and leaps of the leopard into the gazelle’s inverse. Competition sorted the performers from the takers. It let the visionaries whittle their project into a masterpiece.

Limpopo’s femininity made her too weak to grasp this. She wasted time with talk-talk about making everyone happy, when the right answer was there in the data, objectively showing which path to take. He wrote about this “weakness” of hers, like it was a mental illness, conjuring imaginary “four-sigma hackers” who wouldn’t contribute to the B&B if they were prohibited from publishing performance stats.

He located the origin of this dysfunction in Limpopo’s sex. She had a clutch of “alpha bitches” who kept the group in check. Her cult-like leadership of this coven extended to control over their menstrual cycles, which had undoubtedly converged on the powerful uterine signals from Limpopo’s unspeakable wet places.

Limpopo was proud of herself in that moment. She distinctly felt her mind split in two as she read the vicious attacks. One half, “Limbic Limpopo,” hyper-violent unfiltered id, snarled. It literally made her heart thud and her hands and jaws clench. When she consciously stopped it, she ached all down her neck. Limbic Limpopo wanted to kick Jackstraw in the balls. It wanted to wikify every vicious line and add [citation needed] tags to the insults, signposting them as indefensible ad hominems. Limbic Limpopo wanted to haul Jackstraw out of his bed –a bed that she had assembled and painted – and throw him out buck naked, locking the door and burning his stinky pack of gear.

But that was only half of her reaction. Long-Term Limpopo was just as insistent in her internal chorus. This made her proud. Long-Term Limpopo had always been there, but usually Limbic Limpopo shouted so loudly that she couldn’t hear Long-Term Limpopo until stupid Limbic had made a mess.

Long-Term Limpopo pointed out that the debate was a huge time-sink because the issues were complicated and boring. Getting people who wanted to build an inn to care about the reward-strategy philosophy was like getting people who were excited about a pot-luck dinner to care about whether the room was painted with acrylic or oil. Dinner, not the box it came in, was the point.

This was different. Getting people to care about substantive stuff was hard, but procedural issues were much simpler. As esoteric as the subject of debate was, the form of the debate – the frank misogyny, the crude insults – could be parsed from orbit. When they were arguing about applied motivational psychology, it was hard to tell whom to root for. Once he outed himself as an asshole, the issue clarified.

Long-Term Limpopo pointed out that she’d already won. All she had to do was refrain from descending to Jackstraw’s level. Even as Limbic Limpopo made her blood thunder, she gave the wheel to Long-Term Limpopo, who pointed out that this wasn’t an appropriate way to conduct a technical discussion.

The reaction was swift. Even the people who’d taken Jackstraw’s side in earlier debate hastily moved to distance themselves. The denunciations followed, and within an hour, someone called an emergency f2f meeting for on-site B&B contributors. Limpopo looked out her window and saw people grimly erecting a big spring-open tent they used when they had to shelter raw materials, while a bucket brigade passed chairs from within the half-built B&B.

One of the B&B’s game-changing tools was “lovedaresnot,” which they’d imported from a long-defunct ***-leaks collective that imploded when its leadership got outed taking money from a media conglomerate to give it preferential access to stories. The leakers had had terrible leadership, but they had a good dispute-resolution system in lovedaresnot.

The core idea was that radical or difficult ideas were held back by the thought that no one else had them. That fear of isolation led people to stay “in the closet” about their ideas, making them the “love that dares not speak its name.” So lovedaresnot (shortened to “Dare Snot”) gave you a way to find out if anyone else felt the same, without forcing you to out yourself.

Anyone could put a question – a Snot Dare – up, like “Do you think we should turf that sexist asshole?” People who secretly agreed signed the question with a one-time key that they didn’t have to reveal unless a pre-specified number of votes were on the record. Then the system broadcast a message telling signers to come back with their signing keys and de-anonymize themselves, escrowing the results until a critical mass of signers had de-cloaked. Quick as you could say “I am Spartacus,” a consensus plopped out of the system.

Poor Jackstraw hadn’t known what hit him. Dare Snot was widely publicized at the B&B but Jackstraw lacked the humility to understand why you might use it, rather than just blamming out your Big Stupid Idea and trying to rally everyone to the barricades. There was a lot Jackstraw lacked the humility to understand. He was one of those people – almost all of them young men, though not every young man – who was so smart that he couldn’t figure out how stupid he was.

She put on fresh clothes – the new goretex printer/cutter was up, and it was a treat to step into something dry, breathable and perfectly fitting whenever you wanted. She went to the meeting.

She didn’t have to say a word.

Ten minutes later, sputtering Jackstraw was shown the door and politely asked not to return. They filled his pack and gave him two sets of goretex top-and-bottoms. Anything less would have been unneighborly.

[VII]

LIMPOPO’S DIRTY SECRET was that she had been scraping the B&B’s production logs and dumping them into a homebrewed analytics system she frankensteined from the world of gamified motivational bullshit. Every now and again, she’d run the logs and look at how far ahead of everyone else she was. She especially liked to look at the stats charts when she lost an argument about how something could be done.

Not because it soothed her ego. It was weirder. When Limpopo lost an argument, the fact that she’d done more than the person she lost to felt great. Being a walkaway meant honoring everyone’s contributions and avoiding the special snowflake delusion. So losing to someone over whom, in default, she’d have rank to pull made her a fucking saint. No one was a special snowflake, but she was better at not being a special snowflake than everyone.

Looking at those charts gave her almost exactly the same feeling of shame and pleasure that she got from looking at porn. It was raw self-indulgence, something that exclusively fed her most immature and selfish desires. It was catnip for Limbic Limpopo, and the more she fed that greedy maw, the more she was able to tell it to shut up and let Long-Term Limpopo drive the bus. At least, that’s what she told herself.

Now he was called Jimmy and decked out in stuff that made goretex look like uncured rat-hides stitched with dried grasses. He was enjoying himself.

“You should see the numbers,” he said to his buddies. Unlike the B&B, who came in every shade, all of his friends were whities, except for one guy, who might have been Korean. “She’s the queen of this place.” He shook his head – his neck was bull-like, to match his cartoon biceps. “Shit, Limpopo, you really are the queen. From now on, you and a guest can stay here whenever, any room in the house. Full kitchen and workshop privileges. I want you to join our board. We need someone like you.”

Etcetera had been hanging back, breathing fast at first, then slowing. She wondered if he’d do something stupidly physical. That would be a waste.

There was a narrative she was supposed to participate in, a hole Jimmy made for her to step into. Either she threw her lot in and legitimized his coup – she doubted that he’d put store in that happening – or, better, make a stand, let him humiliate her the way she’d supposedly humiliated him. The only way to win was not to play.

She stood.

He tried to draw her by talking about how they’d expand capacity by separating leeches from leaders, take care of the craphounds by giving some beds to charity every month. She stood mute.

The longer she stood, the more freaked Jimmy was. The longer she stood, the more people drifted out to find out what was up. It was like a physical replay of the old online showdown.

“He just showed up and declared it a done deal,” said Lizzie, who’d been with the B&B since the beginning, hammering surveying stakes where the network told her. “No one wanted to fight, right? He had a stupid powerpoint with our stats, scraped off the public repos, showing everyone here would go on having the same privileges we’d always had, because we were putting enough work in.”

“Yeah,” said Grandee, who was short, old, and weird, but whom Limpopo liked because he was a good listener, with something broken inside that she’d never asked about but felt protective about nonetheless. “He talked about waves of new walkaways headed this way, a massive uptick that would overwhelm us unless we had some system to allocate resources. He had videos about places where it had happened.”

She nodded. She’d heard about places where numbers had swollen faster than could be absorbed; well-established taverns becoming crowded, then overcrowded, then catastrophic. There’d even been violence – rare, but luridly reported in default press that trickled back into walkaway. Lurid or not, it was disgusting. There was an arson, with a miraculous body-count of zero (the photos had been such a strong trigger for Limpopo that she’d told her readers to filter any more reports of it).

“Okay,” she said. More people trickled out.

It was cold. Their breath fogged, reminded her of the onsen’s steam.

The crowd on Limpopo’s side grew. An invisible switch flipped and anyone who didn’t stand with Limpopo’s group implicitly stood against it – not just going with Jimmy’s group because it was easiest and what did it matter, really – but actually standing against Limpopo’s group and everything they’d stood for.

Limpopo’s pack had survival gear that could keep her alive for a day in the woods, come the worst. She fired up her stove, feeding it twigs until the fan drove the heat from their combustion to gas-phase transition and the dynamo that powered the battery whirred and the idiot-light came on, telling her the stove was doin’ it for itself.

She made tea. She had a book of fold-up teacups, semi-rigid plastic pre-scored for folding into mugs with geometrical handles. She loved them, they looked like low-resolution renders of a cup, leapt off a screen into physical space. The teapot was a pop-up cylinder she filled with snow, trekking to an untouched fall on the clearing’s edge, watched suspiciously by Jimmy and his crew, and with bemusement by her people.

Once the tea was brewed, she poured and passed it around. It turned out there were others with folding cups, some with super-dense seed-bars glued with honey from the B&B’s apiary, rock-hard and dense as ancient suns, the delicious taste of home for anyone who lived at the B&B.

Why did they have this stuff squirreled about their persons? Because as soon as someone started talking about rationing, the urge to hoard became irresistible.

As soon as she shared, the hoarding impulse melted. You got the world you hoped for or the world you feared – your hope or your fear made it so. She emptied her pack, found moon-blankets and handed them to people without coats. She took off her coat so she could get at her fleece and gave it to a shivering pregnant woman, a recent arrival whose name she hadn’t gotten, then put her coat back on before she started to freeze. The coat was enough, even standing still. It had batteries for days and for temperatures more hazardous than this.

This triggered a round of normalization of outerwear, a quiet crowd-wide check-in – at least fifty, nearly the full complement of B&B long-termers – and swapping of gear. The impromptu ritual started off solemnly but turned hilarious, laughter in the face of Jimmy and his tactical meathead greedhead assholes.

They didn’t know what to make of this. Jimmy had a trapped-animal look she recognized from earlier, a near-breaking-point face she didn’t like at all. Time to make a move.

“Okay.” Though she spoke quietly, her voice carried. There was an instant hush. “Where do we build? Anyone?”

“Build what?” Jimmy demanded.

“The Belt and Braces II,” she said. “But we’ll need a better name. Sequels suck.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Definitely close to the breaking point.

“You’ve taken this one away. We’ll make a better one.”

“Are you shitting me? You’re going to give up, without a fight?”

“We’re called walkaways because we walk away.” She didn’t add, you dipshit. It didn’t need to be said. “It’s a huge world. We can make something better, learn from the errors we made here.” She stared. His mouth was open. She had his fucking number. Any second later, he would talk –

“That’s—”

“Of course,” she steamrollered over him as only someone who has to work in every conversation not to interrupt can, “there’s a good chance that you and your friends will crash this place. When you abandon it, we’ll come back and use it for feedstock and raw materials.” She did her pausing trick again, waiting –

“You’ve—”

“Assuming you don’t burn it down or loot it.” Would he fall for a third time? Yes, he would –

“I wouldn’t—”

“You probably plan on keeping our personal effects, now that you’ve nationalized our home for the People’s Republic of Meritopia?” If you bite down the sarcasm every time it rises, it gets crafty. This one hit him so square in his mental testicles you could hear it. Four times she’d stepped on his words before he could get them out and then, wham, pasted him. That felt so good it was indecent. But fuck it. The prick had stolen her house.

“Look—” This time he did it to himself, couldn’t believe that he would get a word in, tripped over his tongue. His own douchebros sniggered. He was comprehensively pwned, metaphorical pants down. He turned bright red. “We don’t have to do this—”

“I think we do. You’ve made it clear that you’re so obsessed with this place that you’ll impose your will on it. You have shown yourself to be a monster. When you meet a monster, you back away and let it gnaw at whatever bone it’s fascinated with. There are other bones. We know how to make bones. We can live like it’s the first days of a better world, not like it’s the first pages of an Ayn Rand novel. Have this place, but you can’t have us. We withdraw our company.”

A bright idea occurred to him. “I thought there was no leader. What’s this ‘we’ shit? Can’t you see she’s manipulating you all—”

She raised her hand. He fell silent. She didn’t say anything, kept her hand up. Etcetera, bless him, put his hand up next. Moments later, everyone had one hand up.

“We took a vote,” she said. “You lost.”

One of his skeezoids – what must he have promised them, she wondered, about this place – gave a heartfelt “Daaaamn.” Had she ever won.

“Do we get our stuff, Jimmy?”

Bless his toes and ankles, he said: “No.” Set his jaw, made a mutinous chin. “No. Fuck all y’all.”

It would be a cold night, but not too cold. They knew where the half-demolished buildings they could shelter in were, and were carrying lots of this and that. Once they got into range of walkaway net, they would tell the story – the video was captured from ten winking lenses she could count – and rely on the kindness of strangers. They’d rebuild.

Figures, she didn’t have to say. However awful things got that night. However much work they’d do in the years that followed. However many sore muscles and blistered hands and busted legs they endured, everyone would remember Jimmy. Remember what happened when the special snowflake disease ran unchecked. They’d build something bigger, more beautiful. They’d avoid the mistakes they’d made the last time, make exciting new ones instead. The onsen would be amazing. Their plans had been forked a dozen times since they’d shipped, some of the additions were gorgeous. As she started putting one foot in front of the other, her mind went to these thoughts, the plans took form.

The girl, Iceweasel, fell into step. They walked, crunch, crunch, huff, huff, through the woodland. “Limpopo?”

“What’s on your mind?”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but are you fucking kidding me?”

“Nope.”

“But this is crazy! You made that place. You just let him take it!”

“Wasn’t mine, I didn’t make it. I didn’t let him take it.”

She practically heard the very refined eye-roll with breeding, money and privilege behind it. Someone like Iceweasel never had to walk away from anything she had a claim to. The army of lawyers and muscle saw to it. This was a horizon-expanding journey for her. Practically a good deed. Limpopo yawned to cover her smile before it could embarrass Iceweasel.

“You and I both know that you put more work into that place than anyone else.”

She shrugged. “Why does that make it mine?”

“Come on. So it’s not yours-yours, but it’s still yours. Yours and everyone else’s or however the orthodox high church of walkaway insists that we discuss it, but don’t be ridiculous. Mr Tough Guy didn’t do shit for that place, you guys did everything, and you handed it over without a fight.”

“Why would fighting have been preferable to making something else like the Belt and Braces, but better?”

“This is the world’s most pointless Socratic dialog, Limpopo. All right: if you’d fought, you’d have had the Belt and Braces. Then, if you wanted somewhere else, someplace better, you could have built that too.”

Limpopo looked over her shoulder. They’d fallen into a ground-eating stride while talking, left the column of refugees behind. She unrolled the insulated seat of her coat and settled down on a snowy rock, making sure the flexible foamcore spread below her butt and legs, ensuring the snow didn’t touch anything except it. Iceweasel followed, and did a good job. Limpopo liked to see people who were good at stuff, who paid attention and practiced, which is all the world really asked.

“I’m not trying to be a jerk,” she said. She pulled a vaper out and loaded it with decaf crack, which would keep her going for the three hours she’d need to reach the next walkaway settlement. Iceweasel took two hits, then she took one more, even though everything after that first bump was inert, wouldn’t do anything except turn your pee incandescent orange. The psychological effect of hitting the pipe was comforting. She did one more.

“I’m not trying to be a jerk,” she said again, admired the puffs of crispy fog that floated before her face, thrilled at the weight that lifted from her muscles, the sense of coiled power. Both of them giggled with stoned acknowledgment of the inherent comedy. “You have to understand that if I put this into your frame of reference, the frame of reference you want me to put it in, it doesn’t make any sense.

“The only way this makes sense is if I insist that I can’t ‘have’ more than one B&B. The only claim I can have is that I’m doing it good by staying there and vice versa. What good do I do to the B&B once I leave? What good does it do me? If I’ve got somewhere to stay, I’m good.”

“Yeah, yeah. What about other people who want to stay at the B&B, but have to deal with Captain Asshole and his League of Prolapses to get a bed?”

“I plan on building somewhere else. I hope they help build it. I hope you stay and help.”

“Of course. We’re all going to build it. But when they come and take that away—”

“Maybe I’ll go back to the B&B. It doesn’t matter. The important thing is to convince people to make and share useful things. Fighting with greedy douches who don’t share doesn’t do that. Making more, living under conditions of abundance, that does it.”

The look she got from the younger woman was so shrewd that she came clean. Or maybe it was the crack. “I’ll admit it. I felt the B&B was ‘mine,’ like my work on it entitled me to it. The truth is even if you’re right and I did more than others, that doesn’t mean I could have built it without them. The B&B is more than any one person could build, even in a lifetime. Building the B&B, running it, that’s a superhuman task, more than a single human could do. There are lots of ways to be superhuman. You can trick others into thinking that unless they do what you tell them, they won’t eat. You can cajole people into doing what you want by making them fear god or the cops, or making them feel guilty or angry.

“The best way to be superhuman is to do things that you love with other people who love them too. The only way to do that is to admit you’re doing it because you love it and if you do more than everyone, you’re still only doing that because that’s what you choose.”

Iceweasel stared at her gloves, flexing her fingers minutely, which made Limpopo want to do the same, sympathetic fidgeting. “Doesn’t it depress you? All that work?”

“A little. But it’s exciting. The thing about starting over is you get to see the thing grow in leaps. Once it’s built, all you get is tweaks, new paint and minor redecorations. Seeing a piece of blasted ground and a pile of scavenge leap into the sky and become a place, having its software get into you and you get into it, so wherever you are, no matter what you’re doing, there’s something you can do to make it better, that’s amazing.” The crack was fizzling, and as always, she felt fleeting melancholy as it bade her farewell. “Not to change the subject, but—”

The rest of the group was coming. In a minute or two they’d be marching.

“You know this,” she said, hefting her vaper, which Iceweasel deftly relieved her of, taking another bump and blowing a plume of fragrant steam, like pine tar and burned plastic, a homey smell. “That feeling of happiness and intensity you get? Did you ever wonder whether it was something we were meant to experience more than fleetingly? Take orgasms. If you had an orgasm that didn’t stop, it’d be brutal. There’d be a sense in which it was technically amazing, but the experience would be terrible. Take happiness now, that feeling of having arrived, having perfected your world for a moment – could you imagine if it went on? Why would you ever get off your ass? I think we’re only equipped to experience happiness for an instant, because all our ancestors who could experience it for longer blissed out until they starved to death, or got eaten by a tiger.”

“You’re still high,” Iceweasel said.

She checked. “Yup.” The group was on them. “It’s going away. Let’s move.”

They fell into the column and marched.