[x]
GRETYL AND ICEWEASEL poked their noses around the rooms where the university took place. The small rooms on the top floor were commandeered by research teams, who crammed three to five people into them, hacking different models. Most of them were working on CC’s sim, because CC had been beloved, and they were freaked by the possibility that the scientist who’d known and done most on simulation, was secretly too freaked to be brought back. If he couldn’t come back, would any of them?
Other people wanted to use those rooms. The scientists’ work lost some of its urgency as the days stretched. There was talk of renovating the ruins of the original B&B as a new campus, a hint to stop hogging the good stuff.
The university crew didn’t give a shit.
“Why should they?” Gretyl said, as she and Iceweasel tapped fruitlessly at a surface, looking for a private place to chat. “Let’s walk, it’s nice out for a change.” A week of shitting-down frozen custard and hail had finally passed by. Weak sun poked from fluffy clouds in a sky that showed signs of blue.
They hunted through the bench-boxes for rubber boots that’d fit, pawing through cataloged moop. Seth invited himself along. Tam was with him, which didn’t surprise Iceweasel. She knew they’d hooked up, though they weren’t publicly encoupled. They’d been very close in cuddle-puddles, stretching the definition of “cuddle” in a way that was mild bad taste in walkaway (though it was common).
“Come along,” Gretyl said. “We’re escaping the grim reality of walkaway to be carefree wanderers in the virgin woods.”
“Fifth-growth ex-tree-farm,” Seth said. “Heavy-metal contamination and a subsiding gravel-pit.”
“Come on, sunshine. Get boots on or we’ll miss your expert commentary.”
Tam had boots for her and Seth. They struggled into the knee-high Wellingtons and set off.
The walk was relaxing, bird-calls and volatile vegetation smells from the warming forest. But Seth was unable to relax. He punned, ran ahead and got lost, sang rude songs.
“What is your boyfriend’s problem?” Gretyl said.
Tam sighed. “I’m not going to confirm the ‘boyfriend’ part.”
“Okay, but what’s up his ass?”
Tam looked sidelong at Iceweasel. Iceweasel often wondered what Tam thought of her. She and Seth had never been official, just an indefinitely drawn-out hookup. Even though love wasn’t a game and there were no points, she’d definitely won her round with Seth, going without a backward glance, while he’d been moody when she split, sending jokey-stupid email to the underground campus. He’d hardly caught her eye since her return. She thought he and Tam had a lot of conversations about what a total bitch she was. Boys did that. They didn’t know when you told a girl that she was less crazy than all other girls, she knew that when you split, he’d tell the next one about what a crazy cow you were.
“Is it me?”
Tam’s eyes widened. “Not at all! He’s cool with you. He seems really, uh, happy on the romantic front.” She blushed, out of character for her.
Iceweasel laughed, and Gretyl’s chuckle was dirty, which made Iceweasel laugh harder even as she squirmed. “That’s good. Seriously.” They smiled at each other. Tam had been right about deadheading, had been the only other non-technical after the attack. It was an unspoken bond and distance between them.
“It’s this.” She waved an arm around.
“Canada?” Iceweasel said.
Gretyl said, “Walkaway?”
“The countryside. He misses cities. He’s been reading about Akron, getting ideas.”
Akron kicked off as she was leaving for the WU campus. Walkaways did a coordinated mass squat on the whole downtown, 85 percent of which was boarded up and underwater, the bonds based on their mortgages in escrow with the Federal Financial Markets Service in Moscow while the Gazprom meltdown played out. They’d flown under the radar, smooth and coordinated. One day, Akron was haphazardly squatted by homeless people, the next, a walkaway army reopened every shuttered building, including fire stations, libraries, and shelters. Factories turned into fabs, loaded with feedstock, powered by eggbeater fields that sprung up overnight, electrolyzing hydrogen from sludge flowing in the Little Cuyahoga River, feeding hydrogen cells that walkaways wrestled around in wheelbarrows.
Default was caught off guard. Connecticut flooding had FEMA and the National Guard tied up. The contractors who backstopped FEMA couldn’t use their normal practice of hiring local talent as shock troops. By the time they mobilized, their entire recruiting pool was walkaway.
It gave the Akron walkaways – they called themselves an “ad hoc,” said they were practicing “ad-hocracy” – a precious week to consolidate. By the time default besieged Akron, they were a global media sensation, source of endless hangouts demonstrating a happy world of plenty salvaged from a burned husk with absentee owners.
Iceweasel said, “It’s exciting.”
“More than exciting. It’s a city. Not a village or a camp. The first, but not the last. They’re fighting over Liverpool now – Liverpool – and Ivrea, somewhere in Italy, and Minsk, which is fucking crazy because the little Lukashenkos would happily behead them and hang their guts around the central square. You might have missed it because things have been insane around here, but it’s kicking off out there.”
Gretyl made a face Iceweasel recognized as polite disbelief and said, “It is very exciting.”
Tam knew that face too. “Gretyl, there’s more than the stuff happening in the campuses. People who aren’t scientists can also get shit done.”
Limpopo said, “Engineers too, right?”
Tam folded her arms.
“Kidding. I’ve followed it. It’s exactly the kind of thing we fantasized about ten years ago, before we had the word ‘walkaway.’ But there’ve been other attempts. There’s a reason walkaway stuff tends to be a building or two, a wasps’ nest wedged in a crack in default. Anything over that scale goes from entertainingly weird to a threat they can burn in self-defense.”
Iceweasel nodded. It was the calculus they’d made when planning Communist parties, the sweet spot between something big enough to matter but not so big it’d get stomped.
“Anyway, our young man has it in his head that we should pull our own Akron. Not walkaway: walk towards. Fuck, run towards.”
Limpopo snorted. “He’s going to get himself killed. They’ll nuke Akron before they let us keep it.”
Tam’s quick anger surprised Iceweasel. “Seriously, fuck that. The point of walkaway is the first days of a better nation. Back when that was more than an eye-roll, it was a serious idea. Someday, walkaway and default will swap places. There’s not enough people who own robots to buy the things the robots make. We’re ballast.” She glanced at Iceweasel, maybe for backup, and not indicating the sort of person who wasn’t ballast.
Limpopo’s angry retort: “I’ve heard all about better nations. There’s stuff that’s serious, like they were doing in the university, that gives us power to truly walk away, even from death; and there’s grandstanding bullshit like seizing cities. The very best thing I can say about Akron is it might distract default’s armies from us. I think there’s an even chance the news that we’re taking cities and storming the afterlife will give them cover to hunt us down like dogs.”
They would have said more, gotten angrier, but Seth charged through the brush with a sloppy grin, gamboling like an oversized dog. She didn’t like dogs.
“What’d I miss?”
They looked away. He shook his head, more dog-like. “It’s a wonderful day to be alive! Look at that sky!”
There was a boom, more felt than heard; a roar, a wave of hot air that picked them up and hurled them into the trees.