Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

  “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. Rip-off 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 namespace 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 handguns. 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. T
he 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 into 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 folktale 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 rem
nants 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.