[vii]
Limpopo’s dirty secret was that she had been scraping the B&B’s production logs and dumping them into a homebrewed analytics system she frankensteined from the world of gamified motivational bullshit. Every now and again, she’d run the logs and look at how far ahead of everyone else she was. She especially liked to look at the stats charts when she lost an argument about how something could be done.
Not because it soothed her ego. It was weirder. When Limpopo lost an argument, the fact that she’d done more than the person she lost to felt great. Being a walkaway meant honoring everyone’s contributions and avoiding the special snowflake delusion. So losing to someone over whom, in default, she’d have rank to pull made her a fucking saint. No one was a special snowflake, but she was better at not being a special snowflake than everyone.
Looking at those charts gave her almost exactly the same feeling of shame and pleasure that she got from looking at porn. It was raw self-indulgence, something that exclusively fed her most immature and selfish desires. It was catnip for Limbic Limpopo, and the more she fed that greedy maw, the more she was able to tell it to shut up and let Long-Term Limpopo drive the bus. At least, that’s what she told herself.
*
Now he was called Jimmy and decked out in stuff that made goretex look like uncured rat-hides stitched with dried grasses. He was enjoying himself.
“You should see the numbers,” he said to his buddies. Unlike the B&B, who came in every shade, all of his friends were whities, except for one guy, who might have been Korean. “She’s the queen of this place.” He shook his head—his neck was bull-like, to match his cartoon biceps. “Shit, Limpopo, you really are the queen. From now on, you and a guest can stay here whenever, any room in the house. Full kitchen and workshop privileges. I want you to join our board. We need someone like you.”
Etcetera had been hanging back, breathing fast at first, then slowing. She wondered if he’d do something stupidly physical. That would be a waste.
There was a narrative she was supposed to participate in, a hole Jimmy made for her to step into. Either she threw her lot in and legitimized his coup—she doubted that he’d put store in that happening—or, better, make a stand, let him humiliate her the way she’d supposedly humiliated him. The only way to win was not to play.
She stood.
He tried to draw her by talking about how they’d expand capacity by separating leeches from leaders, take care of the craphounds by giving some beds to charity every month. She stood mute.
The longer she stood, the more freaked Jimmy was. The longer she stood, the more people drifted out to find out what was up. It was like a physical replay of the old online showdown.
“He just showed up and declared it a done deal,” said Lizzie, who’d been with the B&B since the beginning, hammering surveying stakes where the network told her. “No one wanted to fight, right? He had a stupid powerpoint with our stats, scraped off the public repos, showing everyone here would go on having the same privileges we’d always had, because we were putting enough work in.”
“Yeah,” said Grandee, who was short, old, and weird, but whom Limpopo liked because he was a good listener, with something broken inside that she’d never asked about but felt protective about nonetheless. “He talked about waves of new walkaways headed this way, a massive uptick that would overwhelm us unless we had some system to allocate resources. He had videos about places where it had happened.”
She nodded. She’d heard about places where numbers had swollen faster than could be absorbed; well-established taverns becoming crowded, then overcrowded, then catastrophic. There’d even been violence—rare, but luridly reported in default press that trickled back into walkaway. Lurid or not, it was disgusting. There was an arson, with a miraculous body count of zero (the photos had been such a strong trigger for Limpopo that she’d told her readers to filter any more reports of it).
“Okay,” she said. More people trickled out.
It was cold. Their breath fogged, reminded her of the onsen’s steam.
The crowd on Limpopo’s side grew. An invisible switch flipped and anyone who didn’t stand with Limpopo’s group implicitly stood against it—not just going with Jimmy’s group because it was easiest and what did it matter, really—but actually standing against Limpopo’s group and everything they’d stood for.
Limpopo’s pack had survival gear that could keep her alive for a day in the woods, come the worst. She fired up her stove, feeding it twigs until the fan drove the heat from their combustion to gas-phase transition and the dynamo that powered the battery whirred and the idiot light came on, telling her the stove was doin’ it for itself.
She made tea. She had a book of fold-up teacups, semirigid plastic pre-scored for folding into mugs with geometrical handles. She loved them, they looked like low-resolution renders of a cup, leapt off a screen into physical space. The teapot was a pop-up cylinder she filled with snow, trekking to an untouched fall on the clearing’s edge, watched suspiciously by Jimmy and his crew, and with bemusement by her people.
Once the tea was brewed, she poured and passed it around. It turned out there were others with folding cups, some with super-dense seed-bars glued with honey from the B&B’s apiary, rock-hard and dense as ancient suns, the delicious taste of home for anyone who lived at the B&B.
Why did they have this stuff squirreled about their persons? Because as soon as someone started talking about rationing, the urge to hoard became irresistible.
As soon as she shared, the hoarding impulse melted. You got the world you hoped for or the world you feared—your hope or your fear made it so. She emptied her pack, found moon-blankets and handed them to people without coats. She took off her coat so she could get at her fleece and gave it to a shivering pregnant woman, a recent arrival whose name she hadn’t gotten, then put her coat back on before she started to freeze. The coat was enough, even standing still. It had batteries for days and for temperatures more hazardous than this.
This triggered a round of normalization of outerwear, a quiet crowd-wide checkin—at least fifty, nearly the full complement of B&B long-termers—and swapping of gear. The impromptu ritual started off solemnly but turned hilarious, laughter in the face of Jimmy and his tactical meathead greedhead assholes.
They didn’t know what to make of this. Jimmy had a trapped-animal look she recognized from earlier, a near-breaking-point face she didn’t like at all. Time to make a move.
“Okay.” Though she spoke quietly, her voice carried. There was an instant hush. “Where do we build? Anyone?”
“Build what?” Jimmy demanded.