“Can we help?” Etcetera said.
“Don’t sweat that. Sit there and soak it in, let the Belt and Braces take care of you. Later on, we’ll see if we can get you a job.” She didn’t say they were too noob to have earned the right to pitch in at the B&B, that walkaways for fifty clicks would love to humblebrag on helping at the Belt and Braces. The B&B’s kitchen took care of everything, anyway. It had taken Limpopo a while to get the idea that food was applied chemistry and humans were shitty lab techs, but after John Henry splits with automat systems, even she agreed that the B&B produced the best food with minimum human intervention. And there were croissants, which was exciting!
She did squeeze the oranges herself, but only because when she peaked she liked to squeeze her hands and work the muscles in her shoulders and arms, and could get the orange hulls nearly as clean as the machine. They were blue oranges anyway, optimized for northern greenhouse cultivation, and yielded their juice eagerly. She plated everything—that, at least, was something humans could rock—and delivered it.
By the time she came out of the kitchen, there were more noobs, and one of them needed medical attention for heat exhaustion. She was just getting to grips with that—coffium was great for keeping your cool when multitasking—when more old hands came in and efficiently settled and fed everyone else. Before long, there was a steady rocking rhythm to the B&B that Limpopo fucking loved, the hum of a complex adaptive system where humans and software coexisted in a state that could be called dancing.
The menu evolved through the day, depending on the feedstocks visitors brought. Limpopo nibbled around the edges, moving from one red light to the next, till they went green, developing a kind of sixth sense about the next red zone, logging more than her share of work units. If there had been a leaderboard for the B&B that day, she’d have been embarrassingly off the charts. She pretended as hard as she could that her friends weren’t noticing her bustling activity. The gift economy was not supposed to be a karmic ledger with your good deeds down one column and the ways you’d benefited from others down the other. The point of walkaways was living for abundance, and in abundance, why worry if you were putting in as much as you took out? But freeloaders were freeloaders, and there was no shortage of assholes who’d take all the best stuff or ruin things through thoughtlessness. People noticed. Assholes didn’t get invited to parties. No one went out of their way to look out for them. Even without a ledger, there was still a ledger, and Limpopo wanted to bank some good wishes and karma just in case.
The crowd slackened around four. There were enough perishables that the B&B declared a jubilee and put together an afternoon tea course. Limpopo moved toward the reddening zones in the food prep area and found that Etcetera guy.
“Hey there, how’re you enjoying your noob’s day here at the glorious Belt and Braces?”
He ducked. “I feel like I’m going to explode. I’ve been fed, drugged, boozed, and had a nap by the fire. I just can’t sit there anymore. Please put me to work?”
“You know that’s something you’re not supposed to ask?”
“I got that impression. There’s something weird about you—I mean, us?—and work. You’re not supposed to covet a job, and you’re not supposed to look down your nose at slackers, and you’re not supposed to lionize someone who’s slaving. It’s supposed to be emergent, natural homeostasis, right?”
“I thought you might be clever. That’s it. Asking someone if you can pitch in is telling them that they’re in charge and deferring to their authority. Both are verboten. If you want to work, do something. If it’s not helpful, maybe I’ll undo it later, or talk it over with you, or let it slide. It’s passive aggressive, but that’s walkaways. It’s not like there’s any hurry.”
He chewed on that. “Is there? Is there really abundance? If the whole world went walkaway tomorrow would there be enough?”
“By definition,” she said. “Because enough is whatever you make it. Maybe you want to have thirty kids. ‘Enough’ for you is more than ‘enough’ for me. Maybe you want to get your calories in a very specific way. Maybe you want to live in a very specific place where a lot of other people want to live. Depending on how you look at it, there’ll never be enough, or there’ll always be plenty.”
While they’d gabbed, three other walkaways prepped tea, hand-finished scones and dainty sandwiches and steaming pots and adulterants arranged on the trays. She consciously damped the anxiety at someone doing “her” job. So long as the job got done, that’s what mattered. If anything mattered. Which it did. But not in the grand scheme of things. She recognized one of her loops.
“Well that settles that,” she said, jerking her chin at the people bringing out the trays. “Let’s eat.”
“I don’t think I can.” He patted his stomach. “You guys should install a vomitorium.”
“They’re just a legend,” she said. “‘Vomitorium’ just means a narrow bottleneck between two chambers, from which a crowd is vomited forth. Nothing to do with gorging yourself into collective bulimia.”
“But still.” He looked thoughtful. “I could install one, couldn’t I? Log in to your back-end, sketch it out and start looking for material, taking stuff apart and knocking out bricks?”
“Technically, but I don’t think you’d get help with it, and there’d be reverts when you weren’t around, people bricking back the space you’d unbricked. I mean, a vomitorium is not only apocryphal—it’s grody. Not the kind of thing that happens in practice.”
“But if I had a gang of trolls, we could do it, right? Could put armed guards on the spot, charge admission, switch to Big Macs?”
This was a tedious, noob discussion. “Yeah, you could. If you made it stick, we’d build another Belt and Braces down the road and you’d have a building full of trolls. You’re not the first person to have this little thought experiment.”
“I’m sure I’m not,” he said. “I’m sorry if it’s boring. I know the theory, but it seems like it just couldn’t work.”
“It doesn’t work at all in theory. In theory, we’re selfish assholes who want more than our neighbors, can’t be happy with a lot if someone else has a lot more. In theory, someone will walk into this place when no one’s around and take everything. In theory, it’s bullshit. This stuff only works in practice. In theory, it’s a mess.”
He giggled, an unexpected, youthful sound.
“I’ve got a bunch of questions about that, but you had that so ready I’d bet you can bust out as many answers like it as you need.”
“Oh, I’m sure,” she said. She liked him, despite him being a shlepper. “Does it scale? So far, so good. What happens in the long run? As a wise person once said—”
“In the long run, we’re all dead.”