“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. The 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.”