“I walked away. That’s what it comes down to. It’s a big world, and most of it is fungible. Doesn’t matter where you are or what’s around you, if you can cover your basic needs and find something productive to do. I ended up with this crew, and forked a tavern off the UNHCR refugee design, and that’s how you find me today.”
“What about the rest of your old camp?”
“Here and there. Some worked on the Belt and Braces. Some went somewhere else. A couple dropped off the walkaway grid, and I’m guessing they walkedback, it was too much for them, which is ‘totally their business and absolutely cool with me,’ as the song goes. I checked in on the site itself. It’s got a high-security perimeter. The buildings have been bulldozed. My meadow’s still growing, and the wildflowers are as beautiful as I thought they’d be. I made the world a measurably better place, which is more than you can say for the assholes who chased us off.”
“Amen,” said Etcetera. “That was an insane story and I am very glad you told it to us. Now I want to go and try a different pool. You coming?”
“Hell yeah,” said the sarcastic one. “Did you say there’s a pool where the fish will come and give you oral pleasure?”
“Follow me,” she said, and led a parade of dripping, naked people outside into the chill of the early evening and the gorgeous heat of the water. The fish came and ate away their dead skin while they lolled back and became creatures of pure nerves and breath again.
[iii]
Someone said a whisky would be perfect, someone else said a toasted cheese sandwich would be incredible, someone said she could barely keep her eyes open and wanted to find something soft to crash on, or somewhere horizontal. Limpopo called time on the onsen. “Let’s find a midnight feast and a bed.” She thought of the cushions in the big room on the third floor, ideal for cuddle-puddles, just what she needed at that moment.
They showered again in the communal antechamber, floatingly relaxed. Without saying a word—without it being overtly sexual—they scrubbed one another’s backs. Sexual or not, there was animal pleasure in being groomed by someone, and it deepened the feeling of sweet, tazzy decadence.
They were so boneless that it took five minutes for anyone to realize that the noobs’ stuff had been stolen.
Before that, there was just an ambling wobble as they looked for their clothes. Then mounting alarm, and finally the girl said, “We’ve been robbed.” The two boys said, “Shit.” They looked at Limpopo. Her clothes were right where she’d left them. They were the kind of clothes you could get anywhere that walkaways gathered.
Limpopo took a breath. “Well, that happened.”
“Come on. We’ve got to go and look for our stuff—” the girl said.
“You’ll need clothes first,” Limpopo said. “I hate to say it, but I think it’d be a waste. When stuff gets stolen, it disappears fast.”
“Funny how you’d know that,” the girl said. “Funny how you’d know why it wouldn’t be any use to try and track down the stuff you told us to leave here.”
“I never told you to leave it here,” Limpopo said. “I just said you couldn’t bring it in there. I specifically said I didn’t know if it’d be safe.” She looked at them. They were upset, suspicious of her. The girl most of all, but the guys looked like she was to blame, too. They’d want someone to blame, because the alternative was to blame themselves. Limpopo felt sad. She’d been looking forward to that cuddle-puddle.
“I know this sucks. It happens out here. Not everyone is a nice person in the world.”
“So why didn’t you build lockers?” the girl said. “If not everyone is as nice as you, why wouldn’t you provide for your guests with a minimum standard for security? How about footage? There’s cameras around, right? Let’s get some fucking forensics, make wanted posters—”
Limpopo shook her head, and the girl looked more furious. “I’m sorry,” Limpopo said again. “There are sensors in the B&B, of course, but nothing that buffers for more than a few seconds. That’s in the building’s firmware, and anyone who tries to change it will be reverted in milliseconds. The people who use this place decided they would rather be robbed than surveilled. Stuff is just stuff, but being recorded all the time is creepy. As for lockers, you’re free to put some in, but I don’t think they’d last. Once you’ve got lockers, you’re implicitly saying that anything that’s not in a locker is ‘unprotected’—”
“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?”