At first, they all listened, rapt. But it was late. They’d had a long day. Starting with Gretyl and Iceweasel and the boys, they trickled away and found empty bunks in the cellblock. Finally, it was just her and Seth – and Etcetera. She could barely keep her eyes open.
Limpopo and Etcetera were engaged in a verbal mind-meld, conversation increasingly intimate, shaded with private nuances Tam couldn’t decode, though that might have been exhaustion.
Tam realized Seth had fallen asleep in his chair. Limpopo was engaged in conversation with the box on his chest to the exclusion of all else. She shook Seth awake and he gummed his eyes. “Come on. Take off the dead guy and leave him with Limpopo, we’re hitting the sack.”
Limpopo giggled and Etcetera laughed with her. It felt very conspiratorial between those two as they headed to bed.
Breakfast was a fun affair, a scavenger hunt through the prisons and tent-cities of the TransCanada park to find fabbers with power and stock, nibbling treats given by passers by and giving back treats, either things they’d brought or things they were gifted along the way. By the time Tam and Seth caught up with the scavenging party, it had spread out and re-formed, using the built-out walkaway net to find one another. It was sunny and muggy. The boys were down to matching bright orange shorts and horned Viking helmets, and flip-flops that made fart noises, to their evident delight.
Seth looked naked without Etcetera distributed over his body. They reveled in the privacy of being able to talk and cuddle without involving the deceased. It felt like a figurative new day, as well as a literal one. They’d completed their quest, reunited with their lost friend and reunited their dead friend with that lost friend. Their arms were around each other’s waists, they were well-fed, and the sun was shining. It was a new day, they were surrounded by walkaways. They had nothing and everything to do.
Limpopo found them sitting in the grass of an overgrown meadow across the highway, watching the big drones make lazy circles overhead. Some were default, some were walkaway, some might have escaped from a farm and flocked on general principles.
“Good morning, beautiful people.” She nearly sang. In the daylight, she looked even older. She had a stoop, and Tam thought she saw tremor in her hands. She wasn’t much older than Tam, either – she’d had a much harder life. Whatever the differences between their circumstances, Tam knew this was her future. It made her feel indescribably nostalgic for the young, certain woman she’d been.
“Good morning!” they called. Iceweasel tackled her with a hug. Tam winced, worried about Limpopo’s frailty. But Limpopo laughed and hugged her back and demanded to be reintroduced to the boys, had a solemn conversation with each about their fondest interests – space travel and slimy things – and found sweets in her pockets for them, thousand-flavor gobstoppers the size of golf balls. Their moms nodded permission, and the golf balls disappeared into their mouths, stopping up their gobs for the duration.
“How are you?” Iceweasel’s arm was around Limpopo’s shoulders, face turned to the sun. “This must be the freakiest thing, you and your friends must be, I don’t know, just—”
“Yeah,” Limpopo said. “And no. Thing is, when you’re a prisoner, things happen to you. You don’t get a say. I know women who were inside for years – decades – who suddenly were released, without notice. Literally the guards came and got them and kicked them out. No chance to call families, no good-byes. Sometimes, you’d have prisoners who were set to go, paperwork taken care of, and then, minutes before they were supposed to go, it got canceled. No one could say why. When the doors opened, it was an order-of-magnitude bigger version of the arbitrary lives we were already living.
“We were also used to being self-reliant. We traded favors, got each other’s backs. We did most of the work around the prison. That was the way TransCanada delivered shareholder value – making the prisoners do all its work, unpaid, in the name of punishment. Once the doors opened, it wasn’t that difficult to keep the lights on. We don’t have all the consumables we need – being locked out of the power grid means we’re only able to run on what we get from the egg beaters and panels on the roofs – but all that means is we’ve had to go into the rest of the world and find people to help us and vice versa. There were so many walkaways in lockdown. The idea of running all this stuff without greed and delusion is what we’re all about.” She flashed a grin. “I’d say we’re doing fucking great.”
The speaker hung around her neck cheered and made clapping noises. “You are my total hero,” Etcetera said. “A shining example to all, dead and alive.”
That made them smile, too, and brought to mind the question Tam had been dying to ask. “I don’t mean to be weird. But are you going to go get a new scan? Just in case—”
Limpopo looked away.
“Dunh-dun-dunnnh,” Etcetera said. “The existential crisis looms.”
“I know that there’s another one of me out there, back where you live, and she sounds—”
“Like a total—”
She slapped the small speaker over her collarbone lightly. “Stop it. It’s not supportive, it’s mean. Whatever happened between you and her doesn’t excuse you being a dick about her with me. Especially with me. She is me.”
“That’s the existential crisis.” Etcetera didn’t sound wounded, though the living Etcetera would have been in anxious pretzels at the thought of being publicly awful. Did that mean he wasn’t the person he’d been? Or that he’d grown? Or that his bumpers kept his mood down the middle?
Limpopo looked fierce. “Yes, I’m getting a scan. There’s already two crews running them in the men’s prison. We’re going to set up our own. A lot of us are old now, and even more are sick. Then there’s the possibility they’ll nuke the place as an example.”
They looked up at the sky.
Gretyl shook her head. “Always a possibility. Maybe TransCanada will flip-flop and come back to lock everyone away. You got to figure this shit is panicking default. Once prisons stop running, what’s next? Their little islands of normalcy are shrinking. It would be a hearts and minds thing for you naughty children to be sent to your rooms without supper.”
That made the day dimmer.
7
PRISONER’S DILEMMA
[I]
GRETYL CAME FROM the fabber with everything they needed to build shelter – flexible frames and connectors the boys quickly assembled, photo-reactive film they stretched over each piece, clicking it together to make a half-dome with a vertical face and a doorway. They set it up in the field where they’d watched the drones. The area in front of the prison’s gates was crowded, no room for new structures big enough for a family of four. It was quieter. The rest of their crew were setting up there, too.
Limpopo wasn’t ready to go and might never be. She wanted to build an onsen. The mention of this put a gleam in the eyes of those who’d known her at the B&B, including Iceweasel. They emerged a consensus that they’d stay and help. The boys had never seen an onsen – they’d gone out of fashion in Gary – and avidly watched videos about them. They were committed to the project. Gretyl could have headed home, but there was no reason to be there as opposed to here. She could teach her classes anywhere. The little serious math work she did with colleagues was geography independent.