Walkaway

[I]

THE WEIRDEST THING about getting old was not sleeping. Tam routinely found herself awake at hours that she hadn’t seen since she was a teenager. Weird hours when you could spot unsuspected urban wildlife: foraging raccoons, stealthy foxes, bats. Seth, that asshole, didn’t suffer from this problem. Slept like a rock. A bald rock, didn’t have the decency to admit being self-conscious about his receding hair line (“what do you call one hundred rabbits running backwards?” he’d say whenever she raised the subject). She’d had a freak when her hair started going, did several consultations with walkaway docs around the world, found one in Thailand who specialized in trans people, got a file for printable pills she took every day. They did the trick.

The weirdest thing about sleeplessness was the friendships she’d kindled with people awake and chattering in exotic timezones. The second weirdest thing about growing old was being with Seth. She’d always been saddened by old couples who never spoke to one another. Those long silences felt desperate. She’d promised herself she’d never end up like that, decades of aging, falling apart in the company of a silent, farting lump of a man, racing to see who reached the grave first.

But as an actual old lady with gray hair and wrinkles, she understood the silences. She didn’t have to talk to Seth about most things, because she had him modeled so well in her mind, she knew what he would say to practically anything she might say to him – and vice versa. They could sit together, not speaking. The silence wasn’t distance, it was closeness. She’d catch him looking and grinning sometimes. She’d grin back. Those grins might be charged with more sexual innuendo than the horniest moment of her entire – admittedly confused – teen years.

The third weirdest thing was Seth himself, who – for all he could sleep like he was in the world championships – didn’t feel old. She’d come on him once, sitting on the bedside, staring at his bare legs, bare lap, the gray, wiry hair, the veins, the sagging, wrinkled skin. She’d realized with a start he was practically in tears, which was not like the Seth she modeled so well in her own mind.

“What is it?”

“This isn’t me. I’m a young man. When I see myself in the mirror, I double-take. This isn’t how I see myself.”

“Is this about your hair? Because I could introduce you to Dr Wibulpolprasert—”

“It’s not the fucking hair. I don’t give a shit about my hair – it’s this.” He slapped his thigh viciously.

“Easy.” She smoothed his hand.

“You don’t understand, it’s like there’s a different person looking out of the mirror at me—”

“Seth?”

“What?”

She looked at him for a long moment. Saw realization slowly dawn.

“Oh. You understand.”

“I understand.” She lowered him gently to the bed, held him until, goddamn him, he fell asleep.

Now it was 3:15 in the morning. He was asleep again. She caught him mid-freak more than ever. She worried. She knew what it was not to recognize the person in the mirror. She understood the nagging sense of wrongness. Part of her wanted to go upside his head and tell him to grow up, if he wanted to feel dysphoria, he should try being born trans, try a whole world telling him that he was something he wasn’t.

She knew it was pointless. Pain was pain. He was being told by everyone around him, in ways subtle and gross, he wasn’t the young man he felt like. Worst of all, she knew, was his body stubbornly insisting on being an old man’s body.

She’d felt traces of whatever Seth was going through. They’d passed. She’d been through this when she was younger. She could handle it with grace. She could work through it with better thoughts and changes to her hormone regimes. She wasn’t in denial like Seth. Seth had been very boyish looking until, suddenly, he wasn’t.

She padded the hall, ear cocked for other people moving around the house, tugging her robe shut. The hall lights were muted and the skylight revealed a cloudless night tinged with city lights, not so many to drown out the swollen moon, the spray of stars. There were walkaways up there, some old farts from the Thetford days. She chatted them sometimes, though high latency made it more novelty than social occasion.

No one was up. The lights dialed up when she drifted into the kitchen, brighter over the prep-surfaces, dimmer over tables, the house guessing she wanted to prep something before sitting, nudging her. There were pink glows in places where there was work to do – some cooling leftovers needed to go into the fridges, a few out-of-place pans set upside-down to dry on the big prep-surface and forgotten. The house knew who’d forgotten them. If they wanted, they could have live leaderboards of “chore heroes” and “mess miscreants” splashed on surfaces around the place. Some houses put them on bathroom mirrors. You’d confront the stark reality of the division of labor while you were swishing your morning tooth-juice.

Tam and Seth were B&B people. Limpopo people. People who’d been touched by Limpopo refused to turn on leaderboards. The reason to clean up after yourself was you respected your house-mates and wanted a place where anyone could walk up to anything and use it, without having to put away someone else’s shit first. When spots were consistently under-maintained, the solution was to figure out why it was hard to get that spot reset, not figure out how to shame people who weren’t doing something that inevitably turned out to be more of a pain in the ass than it had any right to be.

The other houses swore by their “reputation economies.” Limpopo-descended households were the ones where the good designs for living that worked well and failed well came from. They had the nicest house spirits, literally and figuratively. In a Limpopo house, the fact that you were pissed off at your housemates signaled a design opportunity.

She put away the pans and stuck the leftovers in the fridge. Contemplated the imposing wall of sealed tubs of food and ingredients.

“I’m snackish.”

The house knew what that meant. The lazy-Susan shelves spun, presenting her with three options: ginger and honeycomb ice-cream with so much ginger it could blow your head off, which she loved more than was decent; jerk goat and lentils; weird freeze-dried almond cakes that were doped with chili and cardamom so fiendishly addictive that they’d made the collective decision to remove their files from the house repo. Eventually temptation always won out and someone mirror-pulled the latest version. The recipe kept getting better.

“Like you even had to ask.” She picked up the almond cookies, squeezing the rim to pop the seal and smelling the mouth-watering almond smell as she crossed through the archway, around the carp pool that bubbled softly in the cooler, wetter air, into the small lounge.

She flumfed on a pile of cushions and picked out a single cake and bit, savoring the crunch, the sweetness and fire that spread through her mouth. She whimpered at the deliciousness. She knew she’d finish the whole batch.

She fired her finger at the far wall. It screened, showed her favorite hangouts, queued messages for her, news items from feeds judged likely to please. A few higher-priority reminders from people she liked and trusted bounced to let her know they were waiting. She crunched a second cake. Goddamn they were good.

“Who’s awake?” She repeated herself because the house misapprehended her through her mouthful of food. The screened wall showed faces, avs and handles, highlights from rooms where stuff was happening, pulsing things closer and further as conversations waxed and waned. She had the contradictory feeling of wanting to talk to someone but not wanting to talk to anyone, a stuck-in-a-rut 3:00 A.M. feeling.

She flumfed again, waved away the screen. There were books, movies, but that 3:00 A.M. wanting-something-but-nothing feeling went for those. She was nostalgic for the excitement of near-death.

“How do you deal with it?”

“You mean me?” Limpopo’s voice hadn’t aged, though there were algorithms for making the voice age as the years went by.

“Who do you think? The house?”

“I just deal. I’ve got bumpers. When I get to the edge, they knock me back.”

“Do you ever turn yourself off? Go into watch-cursor mode?”

“Haven’t been tempted. I think it’s the trauma of my wakeup, all those years—”

It took fourteen years before anyone figured out how to stabilize Limpopo’s sim. That reflected the long gap between World War Default and the Walkaway Decade, which was a dumb name everyone hated, but at least it had a built-in expiry date. It was also Limpopo’s idiosyncrasies, her weird neuroanatomy. That weirdness was practically normal. When they’d succeeded in bringing up Dis and then, briefly, CC, there was going to be a set of categories you could sort imaged human brains into, like blood types, and each used different sim parameters.

Scans were more like fingerprints than blood types, each with distinctive and uncooperative wrinkles (literally and figuratively). Stabilization of sims was resistant to overarching systematization, pigheadedly insisting on remaining art, not science.

Between chaos and the intractability of human brains, Limpopo lay dormant for a long time. When she woke, she immediately grasped the situation. It helped that Etcetera was there. For a time the two had been fast friends. They’d even conducted a famous set of discussions on the years Limpopo had missed, all-important years of chaos when no one had been sure what was going on, posting an hour of voice every day, then running on huge clusters that let them absorb millions of replies to their discussion and integrate it into the next day’s debate. The Limpopo/Etcetera Talks were as famous in their own way as the Feynman Lectures.

Neither ever publicly explained their falling out – nor had either told Tam what it was about (not that she’d asked, though she’d burned with curiosity). They’d kept it secret as long as possible – it wasn’t like house spirits went out to dinner together – but eventually someone produced a signed email from Limpopo to Etcetera in which she told him to go fuck himself forever. That was it, instant viral gossip evil that went around the world.

The gossip lasted longer than most scandals, because of the questions it raised about sims. If Limpopo and Etcetera had been soul-mates when made of meat, how could an accurate simulation get to a point where they hated each other and never wanted to speak again?

Tam wished there was a graceful way to raise it with Limpopo, explain she thought it was bullshit, most relationships came to an end, the fact that two people fell out of love could be cited as proof the sim was faithful as much as proof it was inaccurate. People grew and changed. A true sim was true to its originator, and what kind of freak wouldn’t be changed by waking up inside a computer?

“A lot of years,” is what she said.

“Not aging gracefully, is he? It’s ironic that he looked so young for so long; it let him pretend that he was immune.”

“None of us can be exactly the person we want to be. I’m not delighted about my hips, don’t like that I’ve lost my night-vision—”

“Sometimes, it’s something you can get used to, sometimes it’s not. You know there are some kinds of body–mind mismatch that people just can’t—”

She sighed. “How do you cope?”

“Being a head in a jar? Bumpers. While I never go into suspension, I sometimes dial myself way slow, let myself dream. It wouldn’t be the worst thing to switch off for another decade. It was refreshing to get that time-lapse view. Imagine if I suspended and left instructions not to wake me for a century.”

“Sounds awful.”

“Think it through. Pretty much everyone you loved would be around, in some form. The world would be an amazing new place, jetpacks and shit—”

“Maybe gone back to default. There’s plenty of walled cities, the Harrier-jet-and-mountaintop set. They spent a hell of a long time on top, who’s to say they won’t get there again?”

“That’s what you lazy assholes are for, fighting that shit. Wake me when it’s over. I like the sound of that.”

“They’re right, you’re not Limpopo, she’d never have wanted to sit out the action.”

There was a longer pause than was comfortable. Tam worried she’d offended Limpopo. She was about to apologize, then –

“No, there was action the old Limpopo would have wanted to sit out. No one is pure. You guys give me so much sainthood for never wanting leaderboards, never letting anyone keep track of the fact that I was doing all that heavy lifting – but it wasn’t because I didn’t crave the brownie points. It was precisely because I was jonesing for recognition that I refused it. Every day was a struggle to squash the part of me that wanted to be seated on a golden throne and carried around the town square.”

“Everyone craves recognition, Limpopo. Look at the kids—” There were eleven kids in the house, from six mothers: two dribble-factories that had only just started sleeping through the night, then a smooth bell-curve that tapered off at twelve or thirteen (she could never keep track, they had the contradictory property of being impossibly young and always much older than she remembered). “They’re always wanting credit for their work.”

“They also want to monopolize their parents’ attention, are clutter-blind, and the small ones are incontinent. There are many virtues to the state of childhood, but just because children do something, it doesn’t follow we should aspire to it.”

“You’ve had this discussion before.”

“There’ve been kids around as long as there’ve been walkaways. There were always parents who found the risk of taking their kids out of default was less than the risk of leaving them in. The ‘accountability’ stuff in schools accelerated it – once they started paying teachers based on test-scores, parents saw their kids getting crammed relentlessly by the system, no room for helping them with their problems or passions. Then they threatened parents with jail for not sending their kids to school—”

“They didn’t really do that!”

“Tam, I know you never paid attention to parenting and children, but this can’t have escaped your notice. It was a huge scandal, even by the standards of the day. A bridge too far for lots of parents. There were some big lawsuits. Ever hear of the Augurs?”

“Rings a bell, ish?”

“Both parents raised by residential school survivors, saw that their daughter was miserable, decided to take her out for home-schooling, wanted to get her in touch with her First Nations heritage, but refused to buy official home-schooling materials or pay for home-schooling standardized tests. They put ’em in jail.”

“I sort of remember.”

“It was huge. The number of parents who walked away – it was when we got the first nursery at B&B, had to adapt refugee-ware from the third Arab Spring, get all the fabbers doing toy-safety checks and mounting changing tables all over the place.”

“Before my time. I was at the university then.”

“Right.”

“There were kids there, but not in my group. The LGBT crowd, I guess it was kinda toxic to people who wanted kids, that bullshit about ‘breeders’ that seems funny when you’re a kid but is shitty in hindsight. Imagine how Gretyl and Iceweasel would have felt if they’d had to hear us talking that way.”

Iceweasel had delivered two kids, both boys, without much drama, though Gretyl was a bundle of nerves through both labors and had to leave the room, both times. The boys were, what, six and eight? Five and eight? She was a shitty honorary aunt, though she loved both of them in an abstract, cautious way that kept its distance from their penumbra of boogers, spit, and destruction.

“It’s Stan’s birthday next week.”

“How do you do that?”

“What?”

“Keep track of everyone’s birthday?”

“I’m the house spirit. Comes with the job. Setting reminders, triggering them when any subject comes up, adding context around the corner. Everyone’s house does it.”

“But you’re not a bunch of code, you’re a person. It’s different when you’re conversing with someone and that person just happens to recall, perfectly, all the minutiae context brings up.”

“You could have that. Just get your eyes done.” She was almost totally night-blind now, had to magnify text to extra-huge to read it. Lots of people had the surgery, got displays implanted at the same time, all the tickers and augmented reality bullshit the goggleheads lived for, without the goggles. She hadn’t yet, because the tech got better fast. If she was going to let a laser-cutter near her eyeballs, she wanted to make sure it was for the first and last time and not have to go back next year for a crucial upgrade. She was holding off until her vision was unbearable. “For the record, ‘not code, a person’ is a philosophical point we could run for hours, though I’m tired of it.”

“Not my thing, either.” Though it was something she often thought about. “Talking to you isn’t like talking to someone who’s getting dribs fed to a HUD by some dumb algorithm. With you, it feels natural.”

“If there’s one thing I’m not, it’s natural, but thank you.”

She yawned, checked the time. “4:00 A.M. Shit. Well, the sleepies are finally arriving, I should get my head down and make them welcome.”

“You gotcha. Love you, Tam.”

“Love you, too.” She meant it, knew Limpopo meant it. She’d loved and been loved in every walkaway place, but this was the first house that loved her.

She snuggled up to Seth and put her arms around his paunch, kissed his back where the sparse gray hairs tickled her nose. Her hips ached. She closed her eyes, found her sleep.

She roused a bit when Seth got up a few hours later. She half-parsed the sounds of him putting on slippers and jim-jams and getting a hint about the closest free toilet, felt him come back in, sit on the bed, looking at her. She smiled a little. He murmured, “It’s okay, you sleep,” and squeezed her hand, leaned over slowly and with a grunt and kissed her on the forehead, then on the lips, stubble rasping her skin.

He rubbed her back and she groaned appreciatively, just for the joy of human contact on a drowsy morning.

“Gonna get breakfast,” he murmured. She turned her head and kissed his fingers.

“Kay.”

“Another bad night, huh?”

“Just sleepless. Not bad.”

“Sleep in. Doesn’t matter when you sleep.”

“Right.” She pulled the covers over her head.

Stories helped lull her to sleep. She cracked one eye, wiped a surface onto the headboard, and tapped a recording of an old Terry Pratchett novel, the one about the founding of the Discworld newspaper. She’d listened to it a thousand times and could listen to it a thousand times more, and let the reader carry her sleepwards.

She drifted on words and buttery sun that leaked around the edges of the windows’ polarization film, sometimes waking herself a little with her own soft snores, and then –

“Tam?”

She sat bolt upright. Seth’s voice did not often reach that panicked level. She was wide awake, looking at him, standing in their doorway, breathing hard, eyes wide, sparse hair sticking out at mad-professor angles. He held a forgotten piece of toast.

“Jesus, what is it?”

“Limpopo is on the phone.”

She blinked, confused.

“Seth?”

“The real Limpopo. Sorry, the living Limpopo. She’s alive, is what I’m saying. She’s alive. She’s on the phone.”

She brought her hands to her cheeks, a silly way to register surprise, but there you had it.

“Limpopo is alive?”

“She’s talking to Limpopo.” He noticed the toast in his hand, stared at it, put it down. She took it away and bit it. It was slathered in butter, brewer’s yeast, and tabasco – Seth’s Platonic ideal breakfast.

“Jesus.” She found her robe on the floor, put on slippers, finished Seth’s toast. “Come on.”

The biggest common-room had five others in it already, looking stunned and excited, silently listening.

“They never let you write to anyone?” That was Limpopo’s voice – their Limpopo. The house spirit.

“Never. I wasn’t the only one. There are – there were? – a bunch of us in policy-segregation, no visitors, no messaging anyone outside. Held under other names.” That voice was Limpopo, too, but older, an old lady’s voice, the voice of a Limpopo that had lived – where? – for more than a decade.

“But now—”

“Now the inmates run the asylum.” She sounded giddy. “There were three days when it was really bad. Almost no guards showed up. The ones that did were too scared to do anything except huddle in their control rooms and bark at us over the speakers. Not even that on the third day.

“At midnight yesterday, click-clunk, all the doors opened. No guards. No admin staff. Nothing. Everyone was starving, of course. We found our way to the caf, once we figured out what was going on. Some of us ad-hocced a kitchen committee, got the fabbers running and fed everyone. Then someone called for volunteers to check out the clinics and started seeing to the sick best as they could. Lot of nurses in here and – sorry, I guess that doesn’t matter. No one here knows what happened out in default. When they used the comms room to call their lawyers, they said Corrections Canada had some kind of internal coup and no one there was talking to the outside world. They say it’s not the first ministry this happened to – apparently Veterans Affairs Canada did this last month? I don’t get a lot of high-quality news and analysis in jail—”

Tam started to make sense of what she was saying. She’d been in jail. The jails had ruptured. Ruptured was the word they were using for government institutions that fell apart, turned into walkaway-style co-ops that gave away office supplies and opened up the databases for anyone who wanted a crack. She’d heard of ruptured hospitals, police departments, public housing – but jails were a new one. A big one.

“Limpopo,” she said.

Both of them answered, which would have been funny and might be later.

“Sorry, not the house spirit, the living one.”

“Who’s this?”

“It’s Tam.”

“Tam? No fucking way! Tam! You’re still there? Still with Seth?”

She smiled and squeezed Seth’s hand.

“Yes, he’s here too.”

“You poor fucker.” Everyone knew she was kidding, even Seth.

“I’ve got him trained. He’s gotten old and slow, and I’m mean.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Where are you, Limpopo? I mean, physically?”

“Near Kingston, north a bit. Past Joycetown. Kingston Prison for Women.”

“Are you safe?”

“You mean, are there murderers about to come and kill me? Not that I can see. I’m not worried about that. There are plenty of sketchy people in here, but there are plenty of sketchy people out there. Most of these women are my friends. Some are like sisters.”

“Can we come and get you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, can we come and bring you here? Pocahontas is still here, and Gretyl and Iceweasel, and their kids, and Big Wheel, and Little Wheel, and even Kersplebedeb, though she calls herself Noozi now—”

“Hold up a sec. I don’t know who half those people are. Shit, I don’t even know where you people are—”

“Gary.”

“I don’t know who that is either.”

“Gary, Indiana. Nice place. World leaders in bringing back buildings from the dead. Colonized brickwork, smart trusses, big old places that haven’t been maintained in fifty, seventy-five years.”

“A state that begins and ends with a vowel? You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

“You’d love it here, Limpopo. You’re a hero.”

“It’s true,” said Limpopo-the-House-Spirit. “You’re a saint around here.”

The other Limpopo groaned. “You’re killing me.”

“Sorry, Limpopo,” Seth said. “We thought you were dead. Martyrdom was in order.”

She groaned again.

“Seriously,” Tam said. “Come and see us. Or we’ll all come see you. I don’t care which. We love you. We’ve missed you.”

“Hey!” said house-spirit Limpopo.

“Missed hugging and holding you,” Tam said. “And you should meet this other Limpopo, our Limpopo, she’s wonderful.”

“Don’t suck up,” said the house spirit. “You’re getting mouse turds in your cornflakes for a week, asshole.”

The other Limpopo laughed. “She sounds like my kind of person. Literally, I suppose. Fuck, who knew this week could get any weirder.”

There was a crash and thunder of feet on the stairs, and Gretyl and Iceweasel burst into the room, preceded by their boys, who were comets of snot and destruction, squabbling over a toy even as they came through the door, the little one pulling the big one’s hair. Gretyl fluidly pried his fingers out of the curly mop, hauled him into the air and set him down away from his big brother.

“She’s alive?” Iceweasel said, grabbing the bigger one and swinging him around – he laughed and flung his head back.

“We’re talking to her now,” Tam said. “Limpopo, Iceweasel and Gretyl are here.”

“Iceweasel is alive?”

Iceweasel laughed. “I guess we have a lot to catch up on.”

The younger boy suddenly looked at her seriously and pushed his hair out of his eyes. “You aren’t dead, Mommy.”

“I’m not dead. Don’t worry, Jacob.”

“Mommy?”

“There’s two of them,” Gretyl said. “Boys. Jacob’s seven and Stan is ten. Say hello to Limpopo, boys.”

“Limpopo?” Jacob screwed his face up. “The house spirit?”

“No, another Limpopo. She’s a long way away and we haven’t seen her in a long time. We love her.”

Jacob shrugged. Stan rolled his eyes at his younger brother’s slow uptake. “Hi, Limpopo! Hi, other Limpopo!”

Far away, Limpopo cursed imaginatively, which made both boys’ eyes go wide and put smiles on their faces. Tam could see them storing away the language for future deployment. “Hello, boys. Hello, Gretyl. Hello, Iceweasel. It’s good to hear everyone’s alive and thriving.”

“What’s it going to be,” Tam said. “Are we coming to you or are you coming to us? Because, darling, we have some catching up to do, and for all we know, default is going to get its shit together and come in there and kill or lock up every last one of you.”

“That’s a possibility we’ve considered. There’s one more thing – the root auth tokens were left in the control center by a guard, that’s what we figure. We have this place pwned from asshole to appetite. Thing about a jail, it’s just as good at keeping people out as it is at keeping people in. Anyone who wants to take this place away is going to have a hell of a time.”

Tam bit her lip. Everyone looked at everyone. Even the boys were quiet. “Limpopo. We don’t want you hurt. We’re walkaways. There are plenty of big, dumb institutional buildings you and your friends can occupy.”

“Bullshit.” She surprised them with her vehemence. “They stole our lives. Locked us up. We earned this place. It’s ours. If we walk away, if we fragment, they’ll pick us off, one at a time. We’re never going to be anyone’s captive, never.”

“You’re going to stay in jail to stop yourself from being a captive?” Seth’s mouth, as always, ran ahead of his sense.

“It’s no joke. We bought this place with blood, with our lives. It’s ours. It was our captivity. Now it’s our freedom.”

“Limpopo,” Iceweasel said, softly. “It’s not like that anymore. Default isn’t the default. I know what it was like. It looked like war, they were going to lock us away or kill us. It changed. The zottas went to war against each other, fought for control over countries whose people refused to fight for any side, walked away with us, turned refugee living into the standard. It was the people who stayed in one place and claimed some chunk of real-estate was no one else’s became weirdos. Everyone else hit the road when those people showed.”

“Bullshit,” Limpopo said. “Maybe in your corner of the world. The state doesn’t just wither away. Someone paid those guards’ salaries for all those years, kept the slop coming into our fabbers’ ingesters. Victory isn’t a thing that walkaways will ever have. Walking away isn’t victory, it’s just not losing.”

“We haven’t lost,” Iceweasel said. “There are enclaves of people who pretend that it’s normal and things will go back the way they were or were supposed to be soon. These days, it’s not about armed conflict, it’s war of norms, which of us is normal and who are the crazy radicals.” She paused. “Did you hear about the Iraqi invasion?”

“A new one or one of the old ones?”

“A totally new one. Iran was supposed to be invading Iraq because, shit, that’s been going on for a long time. Except this time, it didn’t. The pilots they sent into Iraq didn’t drop their bombs – they landed on Kurdish airstrips. The infantrymen, soon as they hit the battle lines, they refused to fight. Bunch of officers, too. Everyone’s kind of freaked. The Iraqi side gives the order to kill the shit out of these weird-ass invaders. Instead, those soldiers refuse, too. The ones that try to fight, their buddies take away their guns. Seriously!”

“That’s too weird to be true.”

“Only because she didn’t tell you the best part,” Gretyl said.

“They were all walkaways,” Jacob shouted. “Just like us!”

“Way to clobber my punchline, kiddo.” Iceweasel swung him onto her hip and kissed the tip of his nose. “It’s a legend around here. There’s a Gulf-wide walkaway affinity group, running over the same nets everyone else uses to get around their national firewalls, so there’s cover. Once the walkaways on both sides figured they were about to be sent to kill each other, they decided, fuck that noise, and made a plan.”

“Fuck that noise!” Jacob punched the air. Stan rolled his eyes. Tam was sure he wished he’d seized the opportunity to detonate an f-bomb with impunity. Gretyl and Iceweasel insisted the boys would never learn to swear properly unless they had good role models. So they were enjoined to closely observe swearing, not attempting it until they were sure they had it right. When they tried it, they were subjected to embarrassing judging and coaching on swear-expertise. This was more effective at curbing their language than anything the other parents tried on their kids.

“That’s amazing, all right,” Limpopo said. “Why didn’t the generals drone them all? Stop the rot from spreading?”

“There’s a rumor both sides gave the order and the drone operators refused and no one wanted to make an issue out of it. Last thing a general wants is to discover that he’s in charge of an army of one, in the middle of an army of everyone else.”

“How long ago did this happen?”

“What was it, a year ago?” Iceweasel said.

“Eight months,” Tam said.

“Well, shit. That’s impressive. We don’t get a lot of news in here.”

“The point is you don’t know what’s going to happen, we can’t know, but there’s reason to be optimistic. People are tired of shooting each other.”

Tam chuckled. “I don’t know if I’d go that far. There’s a—” She fished for the word. “Credibility for walkaways. A sense we’ve got it figured. Once you realize there’s a world that wants what you have to give, well, it’s hard to convince people to kill each other.”

“Fuck my ass,” Limpopo said, sending Stan and Jacob into giggles. There was some background noise from her end, a muffled conversation. “I need to think, and there’s not a lot of interface stuff here so I’ve got to give someone else a turn. Sit tight and I’ll call tomorrow, okay?”

“Sure,” Tam said, and the house spirit echoed her an instant later. Everyone shouted good-bye and Limpopo said good-bye. The room went silent except for the whistling of breath in and out of Jacob’s snotty nose.

“You’re not going to wait for her to call back, are you?” the house spirit said.

“Are you shitting me? No way,” Iceweasel said.

“You want to pack for the kids or should I?” Gretyl said. The boys figured it out a moment later and exchanged excited looks and began to run in circles.

“You do it. I’ll look around for berths on a train.”

“Check the bumblers.” Seth was also bouncing. “Winds are favorable to the northeast lately, I bet we can snag a ride a long way.”

“Good thinking,” Iceweasel said. “Boys, you want to ride in a zeppelin?”

Both boys babbled and shouted. Then Jacob got so excited he punched Stan, because reasons. They tumbled on the floor, punching and shouting.

Their moms exchanged a look, shook their heads apologetically at the rest of the adults. “We’re trying to let them sort these out on their own,” Gretyl said. “Sorry.”

Everyone else was in too good spirits to be bothered. Tam looked in amazement at her house-mates, her extended family, and realized she was about to start walking again.

[II]

THE TRAIN SCHEDULES sucked. There was a complex algorithm that figured out how many cars to put on which lines when. It was endlessly wrangled by wonks with different models that weighted priorities differently. Gretyl got sucked into the math, disappearing into a set of accountable-anonymity message boards where this was being hammered out, and Iceweasel messaged Tam to say that she was probably going to be stuck in that rat-hole for the foreseeable. So Tam should start exploring alternatives.

There were rideshares heading that way, but they’d have to split into sub-groups and re-form at waystations. This was something that you could automate (Tam helped Iceweasel with a kids’ field trip to the Akron Memorial last year and they’d found it easy), but surface vehicles were slow.

“You need to find a bumbler,” Seth said.

“Yeah,” Tam said. She tapped her interface surfaces, made sure that the house spirit was locked out. “But it’s uncomfortable.”

“Etcetera is my friend,” Seth said. “My oldest buddy. Just because he and Limpopo can’t stand each other, doesn’t mean we have to take sides. You’re not betraying her by being friends with him. If you asked her, she’d tell you.”

“If I asked her, I’d put her in a position where she’d have to tell me she didn’t mind, even if she did. Which is why I’m not asking her. Friends don’t put friends in that position.”

“If she knew you were holding off on talking to him because you were worried about upsetting her, she’d be outraged.”

“I don’t doubt it. That’s why I don’t tell her.”

“Don’t you think that’s all... twisted? Especially since there’s the Other Limpopo” – they’d settled on this because, despite its least-worst awkwardness, all of them agreed “Real Limpopo” was a shitty, most-worst solution – “who was in love with Etcetera and would be glad to talk to him again.”

She sighed and scrubbed her eyes. She’d been staring at screens for a long time. “It sucks. So what? Lots of things suck. Life isn’t improved by being a dick to people who love you.”

“Etcetera loves you.”

“Fuck off.” She let him rub her shoulders. “Argh.” He found the knot in her right shoulder, a gnarl of stubborn pain that felt so good-bad when his thumbs dug into it.

“Right there.” She lolled her head.

“You’re a pushover. I could win every fight by sticking my thumb in this knot.”

“It’s my kryptonite. Don’t abuse your powers.”

“I am gonna call Etcetera.”

“Fuck you.” She snuggled her head against his belly, pushing her sore shoulder knot back into his thumb.

Five minutes later, he called Etcetera.

“Been a while,” Etcetera said.

“Fair enough. It’s all you-know around here.”

“Missed you. Both of you. All of you. It sucks being the pariah.”

“Sorry,” Seth said. This made him miserable. Freezing out his oldest friend was hard on him, but he’d never complained.

Awkward silence.

“We need your help.”

More silence.

“You’re going to like this.”

“We got a phone call. From a prison. In Canada. From an inmate who’d been held there for more than fourteen years, only just got free because the guards unlocked the cell doors and walked away.”

“Seth—” Something in Etcetera’s voice, an emotion as unmistakable as it was unintelligible. Some hybrid human–machine feeling. Deeply felt. Unnameable.

“Limpopo,” Seth said.

There was the weirdest sound Tam had ever heard. It went on and on. She thought it was laughter. With horror, she realized it was sobbing. The only time she’d heard a sim sob, it was in the tunnels at Walkaway U, before they’d figured out how to make them stable. It was a sound sims made before they collapsed.

“Etcetera? It’s okay, buddy.”

He cried a long time.

“You going to be okay?” Seth said, during a lull. “I can get Gretyl, she can help with your guard-rails—”

“I don’t need help. Is she okay?”

He didn’t mean Gretyl. “She sounds amazing. Fiery. Angry. Wants a fight.”

“I want a fight, too. What do you need?”

“You still have contacts who can get a bumbler?”

“You’re going to her?”

“She won’t come to us – if they come to lock her back up, she’s going to fight.”

“Fuckin’ a.”

“Can you help?”

“I’m coming. Find me a cluster and carry it on. I’m going with.”

“You could just phone in,” Tam said. She had enough complications.

“Not if they kill the network. I’ll leave a backup here. But I’m going with.”

“Etcetera,” Tam said, in her most reasonable voice.

“I’m going with.”

Seth shook his head at her, mouthed go with it.

“You’re going with,” she said.

“Get packed,” he said.

[III]

THE BUMBLER TOUCHED down in the parking lot of an old mall on the west side of town the next day, crewed by a grinning gang of old Brazilians, men with dreads in their thinning hair, women with surefooted rolling walks like sailors. Stan and Jacob were immediately adopted by the crew’s kids, whose status was somewhat mysterious – they were from an orphanage in Recife which had run out of funding. The kids ended up in a makeshift camp, which hadn’t gone well, and these aerialists took them in and brought them into their enormous, beautiful zeppelins, decorated like the legendary baloeiro balloons that had plied the Brazilian skies for centuries.

However these kids ended up in the sky, they took to it like fish to water. Within minutes, Stan and Jacob were barefoot and climbing rigging, barely shouting good-bye at their mothers, who watched them go with trepidation and pride.

They’d struggled with packing. It had been so long since they’d been voluntary refugees, even longer since they’d been involuntary ones. They’d conferenced their common-rooms. Marshalled their minimum carry, using the house spirits to keep track of who was bringing what to cut down on duplication. Spouses, kids and house-mates piled ever-more stuff into the to-be-packed pile. They laughed nervously. They hadn’t become shleppers, had they?

Seth and Iceweasel shared hilarity and horror. They told the story of Limpopo engineering the divestment of their worldly possessions on their first day in the B&B. Limpopo the House Spirit sputtered and objected she’d done no such thing. They’d had a mock-fight that was slightly deadly serious. They hawed and horse-traded their way down to a small pack each, plus another bag for the two boys, whose prodigious aptitude for enfilthening even the dirt-sheddingest fabrics was balanced by indifference to their own cleanliness.

“They’ll be dirty,” Gretyl said. “They’ll survive. Good for the immune system.”

Once aboard the Gilbert Gil, they realized they could have brought ten times as much. The Brazilians had just dumped a load of high-quality plastics polymerized out of a toxic swamp in Florida by smart bacteria. All that was left of the cargo was the smell, not exactly unpleasant. It reminded Iceweasel of the wrapping on the really high-end cosmetics her mother favored.

They bustled around the huge, hangar-sized hold, working with the aerialists to reconfigure it for sleeping quarters, clicking panels into grooves in the floor and fitting roof sections over them to build a village of hexayurts. Iceweasel was glad they hadn’t brought more. There was every chance that they’d do some walking – real walking, walkaway walking – on this trip. The boys were going to be trouble enough without a lot to carry. The bumbler had favorable winds to take it all the way to Niagara Falls or even Toronto. But they were called “bumblers” for a reason. If Old Man Climate Change handed them one of his quotidian thousand-year storms, they’d have to find other arrangements.

Gretyl went for bedrolls, using the Gil’s house spirit to tell her where everything was stashed. The house spirits were descended from wares that powered the B&B, a mix of quartermaster, scorekeeper, and confessor, designed to help everyone know everything as needed. She’d been so taken with the B&B’s paleolithic version of this stuff. Now it was everywhere, some of it even powered by the living dead, like Limpopo in Gary. That was too weird, even for her. She could talk with sims, provided that she didn’t think about it too hard. But the idea of having one as a haunt who wore your house like its body, that was just fucked up.

Etcetera gabbled in machine-Portuguese with the aerialists, who snapped together dining tables for their welcoming feast, with help from Seth and Tam. She’d had an earbud implanted a couple years before, when she’d started to have trouble with her hearing after a bad fever that crossed the country. The bud murmured a translation to her that only sometimes entered the realm of machine-trans garble.

The Brazilians bragged on the Gil, its lift and handling characteristics; the strength and resilience of the redundant graphene cells; their prowess as navigators, able to find fair winds where no algorithm predicted. Etcetera gave every sign of being delighted, spoke knowledgeably about the ships that preceded the Gil, wonderful things coming out of Thailand, where airships were different in some important, highly technical way she didn’t understand.

The kids arrived in time for food, though judging from the food already smudged around their faces they had been introduced to a kitchen fabber somewhere in the ship’s deeps. She collected jammy kisses from both, resisted the urge to clean their faces with spit, was introduced to new friends, a range of ages and genders. An older boy named Rui – old enough to have a bit of a mustache, an adam’s apple, and a mix of self-assuredness with kids and awkwardness with adults, told her in accented English how great her boys were and how he would teach them all they needed to be fliers. She thanked him in absolutely awful Portuguese, prompted by the implanted bud. He smiled and blushed and ducked his head in a way that made her want to take him home and raise him.

“You boys ready for lunch?” Gretyl asked, coming up with a fan of plates bearing scop meat-ite skewers that smelled amazing, garnished with feijoada and heaps of hydroponic vegetables. The boys looked guiltily at one another and Gretyl instantly clocked the sweet, sticky stuff around their mouths.

“Looks like you’ve already had dessert. Hope that doesn’t mean you think you’re not going to eat lunch, too.” Gretyl was the family disciplinarian. If it was up to Iceweasel, the kids would eat ice-cream and candy three meals a day. She’d join them. Gretyl kept them from dying of malnutrition. Her word was law.

The boys nodded and took plates. Rui took in all the salient details of their family arrangements and led the kids to a spot at the table, promising they’d eat every bite.

Gretyl handed Iceweasel one of the remaining plates and they found a spot at a table, surrounded by crew-members who joked and made them feel at home.

“This is amazing food,” Iceweasel said, chasing the last curly carrot with her forkchops.

“We got new starter cultures from Cuba,” a crewwoman explained. She was beautiful, tall, with a shaved head, a wasp-waist, and wide hips and skin the color of burnt sugar. Iceweasel and Gretyl had both snuck looks at her when they thought the other wasn’t looking, then caught each other. Her name was Camila. Her English was excellent. “You program it with lights during division-cycle, causes it to express different flavor- and texture-profiles.”

“It’s incredible,” Gretyl said.

“We’ll give you some to take when you go. The Cubans eat like kings.”

There was white pudding for dessert, made with the last of the ship’s supply of real coconut and tapioca cultured from Cuban scop. Neither Gretyl nor Iceweasel had enough experience of tapioca to say whether it was faithful, but it was just as tasty as lunch and Camila assured them that even a tapioca farmer couldn’t tell the difference.

“Do you need any more crew?” Iceweasel said, jokingly. “I want to eat like this every day.”

Camila looked grave. “We have no more crew berths, sorry to say.” She contemplated the crowded tables. “It’s something we’re arguing about. It’s a good crew, a good ship. Some of us want to bud off a new one, start another crew. We’ve got something so wonderful, it should grow. Others say there’s something in the chemistry of this group, and if we split up, it would go. The children are growing, many of them think they will be aerialists. We’ll need more ships.”

“Is that why you’re heading to Ontario?”

Camila nodded. “The zeppelin bubble was a long time ago, but there’s still many comrades there who know how to build and want to help. Your Etcetera has been putting us in touch with others. He’s a hero to many, for his valor with the Better Nation.”

Now Iceweasel and Gretyl looked grave. Neither of them talked about that day often, though it was a rallying cry for walkaways all over the world, eventually. Camila understood.

“What a time to be alive. If we do make another ship, we should call it The Next Days of a Better Nation.”

“That’s a terrible name for a ship,” Etcetera said. His voice was tinny and clipped from the acoustic properties of their table which he used for a speaker.

“No one asked you, dead man,” Iceweasel said.

“‘Better nation’ talk needs to die in a fire. We’re not doing nations anymore. We’re doing people, doing stuff. Nations mean governments, passports, borders.”

Camila rapped on the table with her knuckles. “There’s nothing wrong with a border, so long as it isn’t too rigid. Our cells hold in the lift gas, they make borders with the atmosphere. My skin is a border for my body, it lets in the good and keeps out the bad. You have your borders, like all sims, which keep you stable and running. We don’t need no borders, just good ones.”

They were off, arguing intently, a discussion familiar to the aerialist world. It turned into jargon about “airspace priority” and “wind immunity” and “sovereign rights of way,” lost on Iceweasel and Gretyl. They bussed their plates into a hopper that slurped them out of their hands, made sure that Rui made good on his promise to get the boys to eat their protein and veg. Lay down in each other’s arms in their hexayurt for a nap. It had been a busy couple of days.

Gretyl nuzzled her throat. “No leaving me for hot Brazilian aerialists.”

Iceweasel arched her neck. “It’s mutual.”

They were asleep in minutes.

[IV]

THE ZEPP TOOK just over a day to reach Toronto, circling to avoid the city’s exclusion zone, trailing aggro drones that zoomed up to the portholes to scan them and take pictures. The winds over Lake Ontario sucked. They had to rise and sink and putter and bumble for most of the rest of a day until they caught a breeze that’d take them to Pickering. Everyone agreed that it was the best place for a landing, far from paranoid zottas holed up in Toronto, insistent their nation had plenty of days to go before it was ready to make way for another, better or not.

They touched down amid a crowd: aerialists and onlookers who helped stake down the guy-lines and fix the ramp in place (making “safety third” jokes, but ensuring that it was solid before anyone descended the gangway).

The Limpopo reunion party hit the ramp blinking. Seth staggered under the weight of Etcetera’s cluster, which he wore in eleven chunks about his body – wrist-bands, a backpack, a belt, bandoleer-slung bricks, some rings. The aerialists followed, led by the children, Jacob and Stan among them, wearing fresh-printed air-pirate gear, head scarves, and blousy shirts and tights patterned with photo-realistic trompe l’oeil chain mail. They collected hugs and complicated handshakes and kisses from their new friends, and returned them with gusto, speaking more Portuguese than they had any right to have acquired in such a short journey.

The touchdown area was a school’s field. The school was a low-slung brick thing, a century old, abandoned for decades and reopened by force majeure, judging from the gay paint job and the banners, the solar skins and wind-sails on the roof.

Tam squinted at it, remembering her own school, built on the same template but run by a private services company that shut down half the building to save facilities costs, putting steel shutters over the windows and leaving it to glower at the paved-over play-areas.

“Nice, huh?” The girl was not more than sixteen, cute as a cute thing, round face and full, purplish lips. Tam thought she might be Vietnamese or Cambodian. She had a bit of acne. Her jet-black, straight hair was chopped into artful mess.

“This your school?”

“It’s our everything. Technically, it belongs to a bullshit holding company that bought the town out of bankruptcy. Happened when I was little, we got a special administrator everyone hated, next thing, it’s bankruptcy and they were shutting it down, putting up fences. Final straw was when they stopped the water. Town went independent automatically after that. Kids did the school.”

“Cool.” Tam enjoyed the girl’s obvious pride. “You go to classes in there?”

The girl grinned. “Don’t believe in ’em. We do peer workshops. I’m a calculus freak of nature, got a group of freaklings I’m turning into my botnet.”

Tam nodded. “Never got calculus. That lady over there with the little boy under each arm is a hero of mathematics.”

The girl bugged her eyes out. “Duh. No offense. Why do you think I’m here? Chance to meet Gretyl? Shit. Biggest thing to hit this town since forever.” She stared intently at Gretyl. “Her proofs are so beautiful.”

“Want to meet her?”

The girl crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue, so perfectly adorable it had to have been practiced at great length. Tam barked a laugh, covered her mouth and, to her hard-bitten horror, giggled.

“She’ll like you,” Tam said.

“She’d better,” the girl said, and took her arm.

Gretyl lost her grip on Jacob as they neared, and, sensing the tide, released Stan to tear-ass after his little brother and bring him to the ground. Tam waved her down. “Yo,” she said.

Gretyl dramatically facepalmed at the kids’ retreating backs, then smiled at Tam and the girl.

“Gretyl, this is—”

The girl, who had blushed to the tips of her ears, murmured Hoa.

“Hoa. She’s a fan. Loves calculus. Came here to meet you.”

Gretyl beamed at the girl and threw open her big arms and enfolded her in a hug. “Pleasure to meet you.”

The girl’s blush was all-encompassing.

“It’s nice to meet you too, Gretyl. I use your calculus slides in my workshops.”

“Glad to hear it!”

“I made some improvements.” Her voice was a whisper.

“You did?” Gretyl roared. The girl shrank and might have run off if Gretyl hadn’t caught her hands. “I insist you show them to me, right now.”

The girl lost her shyness. She shook out a screen and took Gretyl through her changes. “The kids kept getting mixed up when we did derivative applications at the end, because without applications when we did the rest of it, limits and derivatives, it was going in one ear and out the other, just rote. When I started to mix in applications as we went, they were better at putting it together at the end.”

Gretyl’s jolly-old-lady act slipped away. She brought down her huge eyebrows.

“Aren’t applications without theory confusing? Without theory, they can’t solve the applications—”

The girl cut her off with a shake of head, crazy hair all over the place. “You just need to be careful which applications you choose. You see...” She produced charts showing how she’d assessed examples with each group. Tam could tell Gretyl was loving this. She was also sure the girl was right about everything. She liked this town.

“Ready to go?” Seth said. He’d tightened the straps on the cluster and wore a speaker on a necklace for Etcetera to use. Tam made herself not stare at it – it was tempting to think of that as Etcetera’s face. But his visual input came from thirty vantage-points.

“Soon.” She pointed. “Gretyl’s got an admirer.”

Etcetera made an impatient noise. “That’s great, but we need to hit the road. It’s three, four days’ walk from here, assuming we don’t get bikes or a ride.”

“I know. We still have to say good-bye to the Gil, hello to these people, and good-bye to them. It’s called sociability, Etcetera. Accommodate yourself.”

Seth snorted. Etcetera was silent, possibly sulking. Tam imagined that he was saying unkind things about the living in his internal monologue. She recalled his on-the-record statements about Limpopo’s choice to live as a house spirit. She crossed her eyes and stuck her tongue out, and heard Hoa and Gretyl laugh and turned to see them looking.

She gave them the face, making a Harpo googie of it. Hoa responded with her own, and rubber-faced Gretyl made one that put theirs to shame.

“You win. You two made the world safe for calculus yet?”

“Done.” They grinned.

“When do we start?” Tam looked at the boys, now in a relatively zeppelin-free corner of the field with some local kids and some aerialists, kicking a ball around in a game that involved a lot of screaming and tackling and possibly no rules.

“You’re covered,” Hoa said. “We’ve got bikes coming out of our assholes here.”

“Sounds painful,” Seth said. Hoa made her face.

“We’re into deconstructed bikes, minimal topologies.”

Tam saw Gretyl and Seth nodding. She suppressed her irritation. She tried to understand the attraction of minimal topology, but it just looked... unfinished. The drive to reduce overall material volume of mechanical solids had been a project in both default and walkaway for decades, minimizing feedstock use in each part, getting better at modeling the properties of cured feedstock. Familiar things grew more improbably gossamer. Everything was intertwingled tensegrity meshes that cross-braced themselves when stressed, combining strength and suppleness. It was scary enough in bookcase or table form, everything looking like it was about to collapse all the time. When applied to bicycles, the technique nauseated her with fear, as the bike deformed and jiggled through the imperfections in the roads.

“Great,” she managed.

Hoa nodded. “We’re ahead of everyone else. I did one last month that only weighs ninety grams! Without the wheels. You’d get seven hundred kay out of it before it flumfed.”

That was the other thing about minimal topology. It had catastrophic failure modes. A single strut giving way caused a cascade of unraveling chaotic motion that could literally reduce a bike frame to a pile of 3D-printed twigs in thirty seconds. People swore the bike’s self-braking mechanisms would bring it to a safe halt before it disintegrated. But if they could model the cataclysmic collapse so well, why couldn’t they prevent it?

“Great.” She caught Gretyl and Seth playing sarcastic eyeball hockey. She glared at them and Seth gave her a squeeze.

“You’ll love it. Worse come to worst, we’ve got your scan on file, right?”

“It’s a hell of an afterlife,” Etcetera said. “I’ll show you the ropes.”

She considered her options – epic grump, sarcasm, capitulation – grinned and said, “Looks like we’re riding!” Seth hugged her. She heard Etcetera whisper praises of his choice in romantic partners.

[V]

THEY ARRAYED THE bikes in the field, ranged smallest to tallest, and scrounged a trailer the boys could sit in that their half-sized bikes could clip to. There was general hilarity while they tried and swapped helmets, taking group photos. The aerialists, unloaded, looked on, gave advice, and tinkered with the bikes.

They reached a moment when everyone was impatient to go and no one could name a reason not to – everyone’s bladder emptied and so on. They formed up and rode. Tam grit her teeth as she started to ride, but it was smooth. The bike had the combination of rigidity and springiness of tensegrity designs, absorbing shocks with ease, but still rigid enough for steerability.

Stan and Jacob set the pace for the first eight kilometers, a slow ride. Hoa and her friends kept up, hanging on Gretyl’s every word. When Stan and Jacob ran out of steam (red-faced, panting) they climbed into the trailer. The rest of the party took the opportunity to pee, drink water, snack, kibitz, trade bikes and adjust helmets. When they started again, Hoa and friends made their good-byes and turned back.

They pushed themselves hard, three abreast, sometimes passed by the odd car – most of the vehicle traffic rode on the 401, which was pure default and heavily patrolled – stopping early in a Mohawk reservation where there was a diner with pressure-cooked potato wedges served with cheese-curds. The proprietor was second-generation Idle No More. They quickly figured out which friends they had in common.

The sun was low. They agreed that if they pushed it, they could be in Kingston by nightfall, maybe even have a midnight feast with Limpopo, a prospect that fired their imaginations and enthusiasms, except for Jacob and Stan, who were already asleep in their trailer, curled like a yin-yang. Iceweasel loosened their clothes and popped a shade over them and then stared at them smiling in a way that Tam could understand, but not relate to.

Seth caught her and gave her a hug and a smoldering kiss, adding sneaky tongue and an earlobe nibble; she got one hand up his sweaty back and then slid it over his butt and gave it a squeeze.

“Quickie in the bushes?” he whispered.

“Jeez, you two,” Etcetera said. She remembered he was a cyborg today and jerked away.

“You sure know how to enhance a mood.” Seth gave her one more hug. “Sorry, darling.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Let’s get this show rolling.”

She was a walkaway, had been a walkaway since she was fourteen, though she’d come and gone from default – back to her parents, then an aunt, then her parents – until she was seventeen, when she’d gone for good. She had big thigh muscles and calves that bulged, even now she was saggy and middle-aged. There had been a time when she thought nothing of walking ten hours a day, day after day. In those days, a bicycle was practically cheating. She could have ridden without breaking a sweat. It was a luxury reserved for the confluence of great roads and good fortune.

Muscles or no, those days were behind her. After the first hour, she was panting. The wicking fabric of her shirt felt sticky. There were times when her calves and feet cramped and she had to do awkward stretches while riding, grimacing and suppressing groans. She could have called a stop, but there was the thought of dinner with Limpopo. Besides, Seth was grimacing too, and so were Iceweasel and Gretyl. None of them was calling stops. She wouldn’t be the first one to cry off.

“Goddamnit!” Seth howled and shook his leg, laid down the bike and rolled in the grass on the verge. He clutched his leg. They all got off and stretched and complained and sheepishly smiled at each other. Jacob and Stan woke from their naps and ran circles around them and demanded to be allowed to ride. They all agreed it would be unfair not to let the boys ride, so there were hours of slower-paced riding. It was much better.

The sun was a bloody blob on the horizon behind them, staining the road red, when Jacob and Stan climbed back into their trailer. Iceweasel checked their helmet straps. Gretyl did it again. The two women shot each other daggers and laughed at themselves. They were all old, and were on a long journey together. Something was changing. One era giving way to another. The sense of a change crackled through the cooling air. They ate mushy watermelon slices and squeezy pouches of chocolate scop and electrolyte. They checked the distance and by unspoken consensus got on their machines and started cranking.

There were no streetlights on the road. They switched to headlights, then nightscopes, then back to headlights when the lights of Kingston brightened the horizon. They circled the city, warned off by hovering police drones and the signs warning of OPP checkpoints. They headed for 15 north, the strip of private prisons built one after another.

The moon was up and it was getting cold when they reached the exit off the highway to the prisons, a theme-park of jailhouses built by TransCanada as part of its diversification strategy. The juvie hall. The men’s prison. The minimum-security pen. As word went round that change had arrived, each acquired rings of tents and yurts. The phenomenon followed a template that was developed and formalized in the stupidly named “Walkaway Decade”. Some walls came down, others went up. They’d build rammed-earth machines and add sprawling wings and ells, almost certainly an onsen, because that was de rigueur at anything walkaway bigger than a few people.

The rhythm of the place would change. On days when the sun shone or the wind blew, they’d run coolers with abandon, heat huge pools of water for swimming and bathing, charge and loose drones and other toys. When neither were around, the buildings would switch to passive climate control, the people would switch activities to less power-hungry ones.

More people would drift in and out, there’d be arguments over what to do and what to make, if anything. Some people would farm scop, others would tend gardens. Or not – some communities never gelled, became ghost-towns within months of being established. Sometimes worse things happened. There were dark stories about rapes, murder sprees, cults of personality where charismatic sociopaths brainwashed hordes into doing their bidding. There’d been a mass-suicide, or so they said. Everyone argued about whether these stories were real, minimized by credulous walkaways or stoked to a fever pitch by default psy-ops.

Ahead of them was the women’s prison. Around it, the most carnival-like camp, a county fair for refugees. They had to dismount – none of the bikes had catastrophically failed – and walk the bikes into the thick of things, criss-crossing guy-wires and fragrant coffium parlors that rocked even at this late hour. Halfway, they abandoned the bikes and shared around Gretyl and Iceweasel’s packs as each woman picked up a sound-sleeping boy.

The prison gates yawned wide. There were a few women on plush armchairs dragged out from some office. They broke off their conversations to inquire casually about who these people were and where they were going. At the mention of Limpopo’s name, their faces lit and they offered to show the group inside.

“We knew her as G, of course. That’s what they booked her under. They punished her bad when she used her outside name, so she stopped. Everyone’s changing names now we’re wide open.” “Wide open” was what default press said when the prison guards stopped showing up for work, the kind of thing that you could use to terrorize people about the marauders about to rush out of the prisons and start hacking up people. As they’d ridden through the TransCanada parks, she’d seen banners celebrating “wide open.”

They were led inside, through wide open – ahem – scanning vestibules and yards and chambers where visitors or inmates could be contained. All the doors were flung back or removed and set on trestles and piled with assortments of clothes and other things that were either shared by or with the prisoners. The cellblock was made up of huge, high-ceilinged, bar-walled rooms ranked with three-high bunk beds, festooned with banners and hung with privacy blankets (maybe they’d been there before wide open, but Tam didn’t think prisons ran that way). The lighting was dim, the sound of whispered conversations around them and the snoring and breathing of hundreds – thousands? – of women made the place sound like a huge, muttering tunnel.

“This way,” their guide whispered. They went single-file down a narrow corridor between bunks, deep into the maze. Tam felt a minute’s default-ness, worry that these women were criminals, some of them had surely done unforgivable violence to land here. There were violent people everywhere. Most of the time, most of them didn’t do anything particularly violent, because even psychos needed to get along and have a life. These people had been nothing but sweet to them since their arrival. Limpopo was one of these people. She made the default part shut up.

Limpopo was asleep in her bunk, face a grayscale silhouette in dim light, but lined and older than Tam remembered. All of them clustered around her bunk and Tam flashed on the dwarfs clustered around Snow White’s bier.

“This is awkward,” Etcetera stage-whispered from Seth’s chest. Limpopo stirred. She scrunched her face – so many wrinkles! Tam’s hand went to her own face. Limpopo blinked her eyes twice, opened them and looked around. They must have appeared as silhouettes, faceless, but who else would be at her bedside?

“D,” their guide whispered. “I brought you some friends.” Her voice was thick with tears.

“Thanks,” Limpopo whispered back. “Thanks, Testshot. Thanks a lot.” She propped herself on her elbows.

“God damn, it’s good to see you.” Tam thought Limpopo said it, but it was Etcetera again, his voice weirdly modulated with machine emotion.

Limpopo half-smiled, lips quivering. Tears ran down her face. No one knew what to do. Iceweasel passed Stan to Seth and put her arms around Limpopo’s neck and pulled her into a long hug. “I love you, Limpopo,” she whispered.

“We all do.” Gretyl handed Jake to Tam and wrapped her arms around Limpopo and Iceweasel, half sliding onto the bed to do it. Tam looked at Jake’s sleepy face, saw he was waking, even though he clung like a monkey in a tree, strong arms and dirty hair and sweet/sour unbrushed-teeth breath. “Mama?” he mumbled.

“Right there.” Tam turned so he could see both mothers hugging the strange old lady in the weird dark room. Strangely, this comforted him. “Can you stand?” He thought about it, nodded. She put him down and joined the hug, squashing Limpopo’s leg as she jockeyed for position. A minute later, Seth’s arms were around her.

They hugged and cried in the dark. Jake said, with shocking loudness, “I have to pee, Mom!” They laughed and untangled themselves and shushed the boy and whispered apologies to the women roused by the noise. Limpopo led them back through the cellblock, into the courtyard, lit by flood lamps and populated with small conversational groups sitting on blankets and chairs from inside. They got folding chairs and blankets out of their packs, bottles of delicious whiskey from a fabber on the Gil. The ritual was so normal and so weird that Tam kept getting buffeted by it, until they were back in their conversational circle. The boys were mothered by Iceweasel and Gretyl, staring wide-eyed from one grown-up to the next, sleepy and cranky and excited at once. Tam knew how they felt.

Limpopo told them the story of her incarceration in fits and starts, with many interruptions. It wasn’t a nice story. She’d spent a lot of time in solitary – it was a routine punishment for the mildest infractions. Walkaways were particularly singled out for it. Her longest stretch in solitary was two years, during which she’d had no contact with the general population. It wasn’t much better the rest of the time: for years on end, prisoners were given an hour out of their cells per day. For six months, no one had been allowed out of her cellblock except for medical emergencies – no showering, no exercise. Tam thought about the huge, echoing barracks and tried to imagine being stuck in there with hundreds of women for half a year. She shivered and drank more whiskey.

At first, they all listened, rapt. But it was late. They’d had a long day. Starting with Gretyl and Iceweasel and the boys, they trickled away and found empty bunks in the cellblock. Finally, it was just her and Seth – and Etcetera. She could barely keep her eyes open.

Limpopo and Etcetera were engaged in a verbal mind-meld, conversation increasingly intimate, shaded with private nuances Tam couldn’t decode, though that might have been exhaustion.

Tam realized Seth had fallen asleep in his chair. Limpopo was engaged in conversation with the box on his chest to the exclusion of all else. She shook Seth awake and he gummed his eyes. “Come on. Take off the dead guy and leave him with Limpopo, we’re hitting the sack.”

Limpopo giggled and Etcetera laughed with her. It felt very conspiratorial between those two as they headed to bed.

Breakfast was a fun affair, a scavenger hunt through the prisons and tent-cities of the TransCanada park to find fabbers with power and stock, nibbling treats given by passers by and giving back treats, either things they’d brought or things they were gifted along the way. By the time Tam and Seth caught up with the scavenging party, it had spread out and re-formed, using the built-out walkaway net to find one another. It was sunny and muggy. The boys were down to matching bright orange shorts and horned Viking helmets, and flip-flops that made fart noises, to their evident delight.

Seth looked naked without Etcetera distributed over his body. They reveled in the privacy of being able to talk and cuddle without involving the deceased. It felt like a figurative new day, as well as a literal one. They’d completed their quest, reunited with their lost friend and reunited their dead friend with that lost friend. Their arms were around each other’s waists, they were well-fed, and the sun was shining. It was a new day, they were surrounded by walkaways. They had nothing and everything to do.

Limpopo found them sitting in the grass of an overgrown meadow across the highway, watching the big drones make lazy circles overhead. Some were default, some were walkaway, some might have escaped from a farm and flocked on general principles.

“Good morning, beautiful people.” She nearly sang. In the daylight, she looked even older. She had a stoop, and Tam thought she saw tremor in her hands. She wasn’t much older than Tam, either – she’d had a much harder life. Whatever the differences between their circumstances, Tam knew this was her future. It made her feel indescribably nostalgic for the young, certain woman she’d been.

“Good morning!” they called. Iceweasel tackled her with a hug. Tam winced, worried about Limpopo’s frailty. But Limpopo laughed and hugged her back and demanded to be reintroduced to the boys, had a solemn conversation with each about their fondest interests – space travel and slimy things – and found sweets in her pockets for them, thousand-flavor gobstoppers the size of golf balls. Their moms nodded permission, and the golf balls disappeared into their mouths, stopping up their gobs for the duration.

“How are you?” Iceweasel’s arm was around Limpopo’s shoulders, face turned to the sun. “This must be the freakiest thing, you and your friends must be, I don’t know, just—”

“Yeah,” Limpopo said. “And no. Thing is, when you’re a prisoner, things happen to you. You don’t get a say. I know women who were inside for years – decades – who suddenly were released, without notice. Literally the guards came and got them and kicked them out. No chance to call families, no good-byes. Sometimes, you’d have prisoners who were set to go, paperwork taken care of, and then, minutes before they were supposed to go, it got canceled. No one could say why. When the doors opened, it was an order-of-magnitude bigger version of the arbitrary lives we were already living.

“We were also used to being self-reliant. We traded favors, got each other’s backs. We did most of the work around the prison. That was the way TransCanada delivered shareholder value – making the prisoners do all its work, unpaid, in the name of punishment. Once the doors opened, it wasn’t that difficult to keep the lights on. We don’t have all the consumables we need – being locked out of the power grid means we’re only able to run on what we get from the egg beaters and panels on the roofs – but all that means is we’ve had to go into the rest of the world and find people to help us and vice versa. There were so many walkaways in lockdown. The idea of running all this stuff without greed and delusion is what we’re all about.” She flashed a grin. “I’d say we’re doing fucking great.”

The speaker hung around her neck cheered and made clapping noises. “You are my total hero,” Etcetera said. “A shining example to all, dead and alive.”

That made them smile, too, and brought to mind the question Tam had been dying to ask. “I don’t mean to be weird. But are you going to go get a new scan? Just in case—”

Limpopo looked away.

“Dunh-dun-dunnnh,” Etcetera said. “The existential crisis looms.”

“I know that there’s another one of me out there, back where you live, and she sounds—”

“Like a total—”

She slapped the small speaker over her collarbone lightly. “Stop it. It’s not supportive, it’s mean. Whatever happened between you and her doesn’t excuse you being a dick about her with me. Especially with me. She is me.”

“That’s the existential crisis.” Etcetera didn’t sound wounded, though the living Etcetera would have been in anxious pretzels at the thought of being publicly awful. Did that mean he wasn’t the person he’d been? Or that he’d grown? Or that his bumpers kept his mood down the middle?

Limpopo looked fierce. “Yes, I’m getting a scan. There’s already two crews running them in the men’s prison. We’re going to set up our own. A lot of us are old now, and even more are sick. Then there’s the possibility they’ll nuke the place as an example.”

They looked up at the sky.

Gretyl shook her head. “Always a possibility. Maybe TransCanada will flip-flop and come back to lock everyone away. You got to figure this shit is panicking default. Once prisons stop running, what’s next? Their little islands of normalcy are shrinking. It would be a hearts and minds thing for you naughty children to be sent to your rooms without supper.”

That made the day dimmer.