The submission from this woman, who could kill a hundred ways with her bare hands, electrified the room.
Slowly, teasingly, she moved her hand and went to work. Nadie’s hips worked and bucked, and she stopped, pulled away, looked in her eyes. “Do you want this?”
“Please,” Nadie said. “Please, please.”
More kissing movement. Nadie’s hips writhed. She stopped again.
“Do you want this?”
“I want it. Please. Yes. Please, Iceweasel, please. Please don’t stop.”
They locked eyes again. Iceweasel held her gaze, fingers dug into those incredible ass-muscles, and she waited. Nadie chewed her lip and her eyes shone. Her skin shone, sheened with sweat.
“Please, oh please, don’t stop. Please?”
Slowly, she lowered her face. This time, she didn’t stop, rode the bucking of Nadie’s hips, used her whole body to follow as Nadie reared up shuddered, screaming and tearing at the sheets with clawed hands.
When she was done, Iceweasel daintily licked her fingers and flopped beside Nadie, whose chest heaved like a bellows. Her skin was clammy with drying sweat, and Iceweasel flung a leg and an arm across her and nipped at a scar on her collarbone, at the base of her throat.
“Mmmm,” Nadie purred. “Very nice. Quite a going-away present. I didn’t get you anything.”
“You said something about directions to my friends?”
“That’s hardly a favor. They’re not in good shape, even if they think they are. Your ‘default’ world gets less stable every day. The existence of walkaways is seen as a prime cause, destabilizing influence beyond all others. Don’t imagine just because you can run away once or twice they won’t decide to take you all again, someday.”
“We can rebuild. Look at Akron.”
The new Akron, built on the site of the leveled buildings, refused to be a graveyard. The people who’d flocked to it to rebuild after the army and the mercs and the guardsmen had joined returning locals to build new kinds of buildings, advanced refugee housing straight out of the UNHCR playbook, designed to use energy merrily when the wind blew or the sun shone, to hibernate the rest of the time. The multistory housing interleaved greenhouses and hydroponic market-gardens with homes, capturing human waste for fertilizer and wastewater for irrigation, capturing human CO2 and giving back oxygen. They were practically space colonies, inhabited by some of the poorest people in the world, who adapted and improved systems so many other poor people had improved over the disasters the human race had weathered. The hexayurt suburbs acted as a kind of transition zone between default and the new kind of permanent walkaway settlement, places where people came and went, if they decided that Akron wasn’t for them.
Akron wasn’t the first city like this—there was ?ód?, Capetown, Monrovia. It was the first American city, the first explicitly borne of the crackdown on walkaways. It put the State Department in the awkward position of condemning a settlement that was functionally equivalent to many it had praised elsewhere.
“I hear a lot about Akron. Once is a fluke. It’s only months old. It could fall down tomorrow. I was in ?ód? when it happened there. ?ód? wasn’t the first city where it was tried. It failed in Kraków, badly. There were deaths, many. A terrible sickness, fevers in the water, no one could make the dispensaries print the right medicine. You have heard about the successes of these cities, but there are so many failures.”
“People walk away because the world doesn’t want them. We’re a liability. I’ve heard my father talk about it: the people who want to come to Canada, people who want to have children, people who dream of having their children learn all they need to get by in the world, dream of health care and old age without misery. As far as he’s concerned, those people are redundant, except when they represent a chance to win a government contract to feed them as cheaply as possible, or house them in prison camps. Do you know how much money my father makes from his share of the Redwater private prisons? He calls it his gulag wealth fund.”
Nadie chuckled and smacked her thigh. “I forgot how funny your old man was. You don’t have to worry, little girl, you don’t have that blood on your hands.”
“It’s on yours now.”
“I’ve had real blood on my hands. I can live with metaphorical blood.”
“But why? Can’t you see it’s insane? Why should the world go on when its system doesn’t need people anymore? Our system should serve us, not the other way around. Look at walkaways: if you show up in walkaway, there will be things you can do to make room for yourself. Walkaway is based on the idea anyone should be able to pitch in with her work and provide everything she needs to live well, bed and roof and food, and extra for people who can’t do so much. In stable walkaway places, the problem is there aren’t enough humans.”
“Congratulations, you’ve made virtue of inefficiency. Taking more hours to do the same work isn’t an ideological triumph.”
This was familiar turf for Iceweasel, a discussion that often roiled dinner tables in walkaway.
“You’re right, that’s fucking ridiculous. If that were the case, we’d be idiots. But it’s not. In default, unwanted humans work their asses off, scrounging money, scrounging shitty-ass jobs, getting their kids using interface surfaces for whatever learnware they can find and trust. The one thing they’re not allowed to do is put all those labor hours into growing food for themselves, or building themselves a permanent home, or building community centers. Because the system that organizes the land where the homes and the food and the community center would go has decided that these are better used for other purposes.”
“If you tell me about the uselessness of nice restaurants, I may giggle. You should know I have reservations at six of the seven best restaurants in the world next week, and the S.S.T. tickets to get me to them.”
“Restaurants are nice. We have places where you can eat nice meals in walkaway. Sometimes, they might ask you to help cook. At B&B, that was a hot job, people fought for it. It would be an honor to let a stranger at the kitchen. Default is organized so that only some people can eat at restaurants, so only some people must work at restaurants. In walkaway, everyone can eat whenever they want, and there’s plenty to do as a result—cooking and growing things and clearing things away. New walkaways always struggle to find enough to do, worrying they’re not keeping busy enough to make up for all the stuff they’re consuming. We do more automation than default, not less, and the number of labor-hours needed to keep you fat and happy for a day is a lot less than the inefficient system over in default where you have to scramble just to scrape by.”