Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

  They hunted through the bench-boxes for rubber boots that’d fit, pawing through cataloged moop. Seth invited himself along. Tam was with him, which didn’t surprise Iceweasel. She knew they’d hooked up, though they weren’t publicly encoupled. They’d been very close in cuddle-puddles, stretching the definition of “cuddle” in a way that was mild bad taste in walkaway (though it was common).

  “Come along,” Gretyl said. “We’re escaping the grim reality of walkaway to be carefree wanderers in the virgin woods.”

  “Fifth-growth ex-tree-farm,” Seth said. “Heavy-metal contamination and a subsiding gravel pit.”

  “Come on, sunshine. Get boots on or we’ll miss your expert commentary.”

  Tam had boots for her and Seth. They struggled into the knee-high Wellingtons and set off.

  The walk was relaxing, birdcalls and volatile vegetation smells from the warming forest. But Seth was unable to relax. He punned, ran ahead and got lost, sang rude songs.

  “What is your boyfriend’s problem?” Gretyl said.

  Tam sighed. “I’m not going to confirm the ‘boyfriend’ part.”

  “Okay, but what’s up his ass?”

  Tam looked sidelong at Iceweasel. Iceweasel often wondered what Tam thought of her. She and Seth had never been official, just an indefinitely drawn-out hookup. Even though love wasn’t a game and there were no points, she’d definitely won her round with Seth, going without a backward glance, while he’d been moody when she split, sending jokey-stupid email to the underground campus. He’d hardly caught her eye since her return. She thought he and Tam had a lot of conversations about what a total bitch she was. Boys did that. They didn’t know when you told a girl that she was less crazy than all other girls, she knew that when you split, he’d tell the next one about what a crazy cow you were.

  “Is it me?”

  Tam’s eyes widened. “Not at all! He’s cool with you. He seems really, uh, happy on the romantic front.” She blushed, out of character for her.

  Iceweasel laughed, and Gretyl’s chuckle was dirty, which made Iceweasel laugh harder even as she squirmed. “That’s good. Seriously.” They smiled at each other. Tam had been right about deadheading, had been the only other nontechnical after the attack. It was an unspoken bond and distance between them.

  “It’s this.” She waved an arm around.

  “Canada?” Iceweasel said.

  Gretyl said, “Walkaway?”

  “The countryside. He misses cities. He’s been reading about Akron, getting ideas.”

  Akron kicked off as she was leaving for the WU campus. Walkaways did a coordinated mass squat on the whole downtown, 85 percent of which was boarded up and underwater, the bonds based on their mortgages in escrow with the Federal Financial Markets Service in Moscow while the Gazprom meltdown played out. They’d flown under the radar, smooth and coordinated. One day, Akron was haphazardly squatted by homeless people, the next, a walkaway army reopened every shuttered building, including fire stations, libraries, and shelters. Factories turned into fabs, loaded with feedstock, powered by eggbeater fields that sprung up overnight, electrolyzing hydrogen from sludge flowing in the Little Cuyahoga River, feeding hydrogen cells that walkaways wrestled around in wheelbarrows.

  Default was caught off guard. Connecticut flooding had FEMA and the National Guard tied up. The contractors who backstopped FEMA couldn’t use their normal practice of hiring local talent as shock troops. By the time they mobilized, their entire recruiting pool was walkaway.

  It gave the Akron walkaways—they called themselves an “ad-hoc,” said they were practicing “ad-hocracy”—a precious week to consolidate. By the time default besieged Akron, they were a global media sensation, source of endless hangouts demonstrating a happy world of plenty salvaged from a burned husk with absentee owners.

  Iceweasel said, “It’s exciting.”

  “More than exciting. It’s a city. Not a village or a camp. The first, but not the last. They’re fighting over Liverpool now—Liverpool—and Ivrea, somewhere in Italy, and Minsk, which is fucking crazy because the little Lukashenkos would happily behead them and hang their guts around the central square. You might have missed it because things have been insane around here, but it’s kicking off out there.”

  Gretyl made a face Iceweasel recognized as polite disbelief and said, “It is very exciting.”

  Tam knew that face, too. “Gretyl, there’s more than the stuff happening in the campuses. People who aren’t scientists can also get shit done.”

  Limpopo said, “Engineers, too, right?”

  Tam folded her arms.

  “Kidding. I’ve followed it. It’s exactly the kind of thing we fantasized about ten years ago, before we had the word ‘walkaway.’ But there’ve been other attempts. There’s a reason walkaway stuff tends to be a building or two, a wasp’s nest wedged in a crack in default. Anything over that scale goes from entertainingly weird to a threat they can burn in self-defense.”

  Iceweasel nodded. It was the calculus they’d made when planning Communist parties, the sweet spot between something big enough to matter but not so big it’d get stomped.

  “Anyway, our young man has it in his head that we should pull our own Akron. Not walkaway: walk towards. Fuck, run towards.”

  Limpopo snorted. “He’s going to get himself killed. They’ll nuke Akron before they let us keep it.”

  Tam’s quick anger surprised Iceweasel. “Seriously, fuck that. The point of walkaway is the first days of a better nation. Back when that was more than an eye roll, it was a serious idea. Someday, walkaway and default will swap places. There’s not enough people who own robots to buy the things the robots make. We’re ballast.” She glanced at Iceweasel, maybe for backup, and not indicating the sort of person who wasn’t ballast.

  Limpopo’s angry retort: “I’ve heard all about better nations. There’s stuff that’s serious, like they were doing in the university, that gives us power to truly walk away, even from death; and there’s grandstanding bullshit like seizing cities. The very best thing I can say about Akron is it might distract default’s armies from us. I think there’s an even chance the news that we’re taking cities and storming the afterlife will give them cover to hunt us down like dogs.”

  They would have said more, gotten angrier, but Seth charged through the brush with a sloppy grin, gamboling like an oversized dog. She didn’t like dogs.

  “What’d I miss?”

  They looked away. He shook his head, more dog-like. “It’s a wonderful day to be alive! Look at that sky!”

  There was a boom, more felt than heard; a roar, a wave of hot air that picked them up and hurled them into the trees.

  [xi]

  When they got back, the B&B was in flames. It seemed the fire was everywhere, but it became clear it was centered on the stables and the power plant. A fire in the hydrogen cells was supposed to be impossible, they were engineered for five kinds of fail-safe, the design was so widely used that flaws were quickly spotted and fixed. Judging from the wreckage, though, they’d gone up.

  The inn was also on fire, but seemed under control, water coursing out of windows where automated systems had kicked in. It was Iceweasel’s third disaster in weeks, and there was a curious doubling feeling as she took in the infirmary, the mechas stomping in and out of the burning building with armloads of salvaged gear.

  “Shit.” Limpopo snapped into motion. Iceweasel watched in awe. Limpopo took in the same details in an eyeblink, but while Iceweasel had been frozen, Limpopo was spurred into motion. She jogged to the infirmary, head swiveling. Her presence was enough to call three of those tending the injured to her. She gestured forcefully at the blaze from the stables and all nodded and moved, shifting the wounded further away. The blaze intensified in seconds. Now she was heading for a mecha pilot and—

  “Come on,” Gretyl said. “Let’s go help.”

  Iceweasel was grateful to be told what to do.

  * * *

  They lost it al
l. For a while, the fires were under control, just a little mopping up to extinguish the last flames in the inn, but as they swapped power-cells in the mechas and brought up new hoses, there was a fresh explosion from the back, another concussion wave and then flaming debris. They had congregated on the front lawn or they would have all died.

  The B&B’s drone outriders scouted surrounding territory, bridging network service over the holes in the mesh left behind by the fallen B&B. Fed by their intelligence, the B&B crew fell back and back again, heading west, towards the built-up outer perimeter of default, where the wilds ended and Toronto began. It was the least hospitable direction to go, but there was a hamlet up the road where the Better Nation could tie off. The zeppelin crew threw everything into the impellers, though bumblers were not supposed to be steered except in emergencies. This qualified.

  There were no deaths. It was miraculous, but Limpopo had a theory: “I think the bombers lost their nerve. The stables went up during their maintenance cycle, when there’d be no one there. The power plant went up ten minutes later, plenty of time for everyone to be on the lawn, staring at the stables, far from the blast. The inn’s explosives, going off hours later? Either we’re dealing with a terrorist who sucks at timers, or they wanted to be sure of minimal casualties. It’s what you’d do if you wanted to convince your bosses you’d been a good little mad bomber, but didn’t want too much blood on your hands.”

  “Limpopo, it’s been a long day and you’ve been amazing,” Iceweasel said. They were huddled in a tent, seven in a sleeping space intended for two, rain thudding on the tent’s skin overhead and lashing at its sides. They’d made camp right in the middle of the road, using the highway’s cracked tarmac as a base. The road was domed, just enough to provide drainage into the choked ditches on either side. The insulating cells on the tent floor rucked up over the dome’s apex, crinkling like bubblewrap when they moved. They were dead tired, hungry, and hurt, but no one in their tent was going to sleep anytime soon.

  “But that sounds like bullshit. The university got attacked by mercs, and we got hit by mercs again on our way back. Why assume these bombs were set by double agents? Sentimental double agents? Ask yourself if it wouldn’t make you happier to imagine the bad guys were blackmailed into infiltrating us, but found us so wonderful they couldn’t bring themselves to kill us?”

  A scary flash of anger on Limpopo’s normally calm face. Iceweasel had been pleased when Limpopo joined their tent, anointed the cool-kids’ club by her presence. When Limpopo’s eyes flashed, it was like being trapped with a dangerous animal. She pulled back, and, to her embarrassment, whimpered. Limpopo mastered herself.

  “That is not entirely stupid. It’s hard to know when you’re kidding yourself. Figuring that out has been my life’s major project. But.” She turned and listened to the wind lash the tent, touched the cool fabric. “Okay, yeah. Maybe they wanted us on the road and they’re sending a snatch-squad for anyone who understands uploading for real. Maybe they knew the B&B had real-time monitors that would make them look like monsters if there were a lot of bodies, but if they kill us out here, they can shove us into the ditches and—”

  “I get it,” Iceweasel said. She couldn’t stand anymore. The self-recrimination after meeting the campus crew had finally given way to fear. It was almost a relief to be tortured by something external, rather than her internal nagging voice. Gretyl had a tattoo around one of her biceps that read FEAR IS THE MIND-KILLER, but as far as Iceweasel was concerned, her mind could use some killing.

  She wished she and Gretyl could be alone. Something about being enfolded in Gretyl soothed her in a deep place, switched off the voice that knew all her weaknesses. She’d never had that, not with boys or girls. Sometimes she’d had fleeting moments of peace after fucking, but with Gretyl, it came easily, even without sex.

  As the voice liked to remind her, the psychology of falling in love with an older woman when your own mother all but abandoned you wasn’t difficult. All the peace Iceweasel got from being engulfed in Gretyl’s embrace led to wondering whether she was giving Gretyl back anything in exchange.

  She really wanted some time alone with Gretyl.

  Limpopo slumped and Iceweasel saw something even rarer than Limpopo’s anger: exhaustion. “It may be self-serving bullshit that living walkaway will soften the hardest heart and convert pigopolist despoilers to post-scarcity Utopians, but it keeps me going, sometimes. Part of me wants to stay up doing forensics on the B&B’s log files, finding the sellout, but the rest of me wants to live with the fantasy of unstoppable moral suasion. I know we don’t need everyone in the world to agree for this to work, but there’s got to be a critical mass of covered-dish people or we’ll never win.”

  “Okay.” Gretyl broke her silence—she’d been prodding the screen in a way that radiated leave-me-alone-I’m-working (Gretyl was good at this). “What’s a ‘covered dish’ person?”

  “Oh. If there’s a disaster, do you go over to your neighbor’s house with: a) a covered dish or b) a shotgun? It’s game theory. If you believe your neighbor is coming over with a shotgun, you’d be an idiot to pick a); if she believes the same thing about you, you can bet she’s not going to choose a) either. The way to get to a) is to do a) even if you think your neighbor will pick b). Sometimes she’ll point her gun at you and tell you to get off her land, but if she was only holding the gun because she thought you’d have one, then she’ll put on the safety and you can have a potluck.”

  “Game theory,” Gretyl said. “That’s the stag hunt. Two hunters together can catch a stag, the top prize. Either hunter alone can only catch rabbits. Both of them want to get stags, but unless they trust each other, they’ll have coney surprise for supper.”

  “I didn’t know there was a name for it. Good to know. Once things have settled, I’ll have to do some reading. When things go bad, the stag is rebuilding something better than whatever’s burned down; the rabbit is huddling in a cave in terror, eating shoe-leather soup, hoping you don’t die of TB because there aren’t any hospitals anymore. I’ve always thought the whole walkaway project was a way to turn people into covered-dish types. There’s not any reason not to be one when we can all have enough, so long as we’re not fucking each other over.”

  Iceweasel smiled for the first time in a long time. “Put like that, it’s beautiful.”

  Limpopo didn’t smile back. She looked too exhausted to smile. “I’d settle for plausible. Once you’ve been a shotgun person for a while, it’s hard to imagine anything else, and you start using stupid terms like ‘human nature’ to describe it. If being a selfish, untrusting asshole is human nature, then how do we form friendships? Where do families come from?”

  “You’re assuming that families aren’t about acting like selfish, untrusting assholes,” Iceweasel said.

  “The fact that your family is so fucked up is not proof that being fucked up is natural—it’s proof that shotgun people rot from the inside and their lives turn to shit.” She closed her eyes. “No offense.”

  “None taken.” Iceweasel was surprised to discover it was true. The words were liberation, a framework for understanding what had made her, what she could become.

  “Limpopo,” Gretyl said, “you look like chiseled shit. No offense.”

  “None taken,” Limpopo said with a ghost of a smile.

  “What would it take to make you sleep?”

  Limpopo shrugged. “I don’t think I could at this point. I’ve gone through sleep and come out the other side.”

  “I think that’s macho bullshit,” Gretyl said. She moved around, asked some others to move, rearranged packs and bags until there was a Limpopo-shaped space on the floor. “Lie down.” She patted her hands on her lap.

  Limpopo looked from her to Iceweasel, the others, shrugged. “I’m not going to fall asleep, you know. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just—”

  “Silence, fool. Lie down.”

  She did, her head settling into Gretyl’s lap. S
he locked eyes with Iceweasel, a nonverbal “Is this okay?” and Iceweasel smiled and stroked her greasy hair, a tousled short mess of spun sugar in pink and blue. They’d been in plenty of cuddle-puddles, but that was different. She and Gretyl locked eyes, they shared a smile. Her fear melted. Miraculously, it was not replaced by self-doubt. The rain, the breathing, the dim light, the cozy closeness made her feel, against all odds, safe.

  Gretyl tilted her head at one soft shoulder and Iceweasel shinnied around until she could rest her head on it. Gretyl put an arm around her and she put an arm around Gretyl, and the three women were quiet.

  * * *

  They rendezvoused with the Better Nation at sunset the next day. Limpopo watched the crew descend on tether lines and harnesses, toes grazing the ground. There was a brief moment of excited reunion as they related their adventures to one another. Etcetera was right in there, regaling his buds with tales of their near-death, oohing and aahing as the aviators recounted their own experiences with drones, chaff, weather, and infowar harassment.

  The Better Nation had been tethered in deep Mohawk territory, and had been generously resupplied with venison, corn, chapatis, and ice cream in amazing flavors from rose water to marzipan. Some Mohawk kids came along for the flight, not quite walkaways, but certainly not default. They stuck together and looked on solemnly as food sizzled on the grills the aviators set out and more crew touched down. Then one of them—a girl, with long straight hair and a loose-fitting t-shirt with the word LASAGNE in huge letters across it—stepped out of their tight pack. She wandered over to the grill to kibbitz, and Tam, who was cooking, cracked a joke Iceweasel couldn’t hear, but made the girl smile so radiantly it transformed her into something out of a painting (or maybe a stock-art catalog: “Smiling indigenous woman, suitable for brochures on diversity policy”) and the two groups merged.