“We should go to the stables and print up some mutual admiration society membership badges.”
“You laugh, but I’m sure those exist as premades in walkaway thingiverse.”
“Well, that’s sweet,” he said. They laughed, and a distant alarmed part of herself told her this was a lovers’ laugh, and she was falling in love.
[vi]
Falling in love is wonderful. Once she gave in, she amused herself finding ways to be nice to Etcetera—making him a jacket in a color and cut that suited him better than anything he wore; waking him with a coffium and dragging him upstairs for a quickie while it burned through their veins; washing his back in sensuous strokes in the onsen.
He reciprocated in a hundred ways, saving her a seat in the common room; greeting her after a hike with iced tea and a cool towel, or taking her hand below the table—or above it—as they chatted with the others into the night.
The old B&B hands took notice, but were too polite to ask outright. Instead, they’d say, “Oh, did Etcetera give that to you?” (He had, a garland of winter twigs worked into a ridiculous fairy crown that she wore for a day until it fell apart but treasured all the more for that.) There were walkaway couples, even walkaway families with kids and one or more parents, but she’d never joined them. Coupledom felt like an artifact of default, not anything she wanted any part of, a mess of jealousy and coordination problems.
But this was different. Emotions sang in her thoughts, sweeter than any she remembered. Lying beside him, even in a cuddle-puddle, looking at his lips and the dimple in his chin made something warm spread through her chest and belly.
They took long walks, not talking, listening to birdsong and the crunch of their footsteps in the snow. There were deer in the woods, usually far away, but once, a doe came close enough to touch, stared at them with spellbinding animal frankness.
One day, they set out at first light, full of porridge and bubbling with coffium, following a trail from a B&B drone that had found a cache of electronics full of recoverable coltan derivatives—an abandoned illegal e-waste dump. They brought a mulebot, and helping it with way-finding slowed them down to a frigid crawl. They bickered a little; she’d remember that later.
The cache was inaccessible. The ground had frozen solid in an overnight cold snap that turned an earlier thaw into treacherous ice. Even with cleats, they couldn’t get any footing, and the mulebot got fatally stuck out of arms’ reach, unable to find enough traction to return. After abandoning trying to lasso it, they headed back in a bad mood.
They both got an offline buzz at the same moment as the walkaway network failed. She could tell, because they both stopped at the same moment.
“Does that happen often?” Etcetera said.
“It shouldn’t happen period. The network’s got redundant failovers, including a blimp. And we’ve got clear skies.”
She got out a screen and prodded with gloved fingers, squinting through the steam of her exhalations. She didn’t use diagnostic stuff often, and it took her a while to get it up. “That’s weird,” she said. “Even if everything went blooey, you’d expect it to be a cascading failure. Node A goes dark, node B gets overwhelmed by traffic from it, falls over, then node C gets a double-whack, and so on. But look, it lost contact with everything, all at once. That’s like a power cut, but they’re all on independent power cells.”
“What do you think it is?”
“I think it’s serious. Let’s go.”
Give this to Etcetera: when things got serious, he got serious. She saw a new side of him, nervy and alert. It comforted her. She could stop unconsciously worrying about taking care of him.
They hustled through the tramped-down snow trails, moving silently, with an unspoken dimension of stealth. She heard a whir and spotted a B&B drone, which gave her comfort. Then she saw that it wasn’t one of their models.
“Shit,” she said, as it came back for another pass. She gave it the finger as it buzzed meters over their heads. “Fuck it. Let’s go.”
They ran.
The path was well-groomed with a clever series of turns and strategic trees that let you emerge suddenly into the compound with the rambling buildings and the windmills proud overhead. Before they’d been spotted, she’d planned on coming out through the woods to one side, bushwhacking a new trail to get there. But now there was no point.
They stepped into the clearing and she saw a clutch of bulky dudes in intimidating tactical bullshit standing around the main entrance. They bristled with utility belts with gun-shaped stuff that could do terrible things to them, and they didn’t need to reach for them to make it clear who had the upper hand.
“Hello there,” one called. He even had the tough-guy mustache, like a wrestler. “Welcome to the Belt and Braces.”
“Yeah, thanks,” she said.
“I’m Jimmy,” he said. “Would you two be wanting some lodgings?”
“Suppose we are,” Limpopo said.
He smiled a lazy, wolfish smile, then looked more closely. “Oh,” he said. “It’s you, is it?”
She looked more closely at him, remembered. “Yeah, it’s me.” She sighed.
“Well shit. This is your lucky day, Limpopo.”
She nodded. He hadn’t been going by Jimmy when she’d slung his ass out of the B&B. What had it been? Jockstrap? Jackstraw? Something. It had been years.
“Bet you didn’t expect to see me.” He turned to his friends. “This lady right here put more lines of code into this place than anyone. She’s done more to build it than anyone. This place is full of this girl’s blood and treasure.” He turned back. “This really is your lucky day.”
“Yeah?” She knew where this was going.
“From now on, this place is on a quid-pro-quo basis. Everyone gets out what they put in. You’ve put in so much, well, you could stay for years without lifting a finger. You’ve got reputation capital to burn.”
“Oh brother,” she said.
*
You couldn’t be a walkaway without encountering the reputation economy freaks. At first, she’d hated them in the abstract. Then this guy had come along and given her some damned good, concrete reasons to hate them. The B&B had been a third built when he came and tried to install leaderboards in everything. Actually, he’d done it, checking in the code and then coming to her with her hands covered in sealant paste to demand to know why she’d reverted him.
“That’s not something we want.”
“What do you mean? You don’t have a constitution. I checked.”
“We don’t. But this issue’s been discussed and the consensus was that we didn’t want leaderboards. They produce shitty incentives.” She held up her gloppy hands. “I’m in the middle of something. Why don’t you put it on the wiki?”
“Is that the rule?”
“Nope,” she said.
“So why should I do it?”
“Because that’s worked before.”