“Welcome to the B and B!” she shouted, louder than intended. They flinched, then rallied.
“Hi there,” the girl said, and walked forward. Her clothes were beautiful, bias-cut and contrast stitched. Limpopo immediately coveted them. She’d pull the girl’s image from the archives later and decompose the patterns and run a set for herself. She’d be the envy of all who saw her, until the design propagated and became old news. “Sorry to just walk in, but we heard—”
“You heard right.” Limpopo’s voice was quieter but still too shouty. Either the coffium had to burn down so she could control her affect, or she needed to drink a lot more so she could stop giving a shit. She thumped the refill zone and put her cup under the nozzle. “Open to everyone, all day, every day, but Sundays are special, our way of saying hello to our new neighbors and getting to know them. I’m Limpopo. What do you want to be called?”
The phrasing was particular to the walkaways, an explicit invitation to remake yourself. It was the height of walkaway sophistication to greet people with it, and Limpopo used it deliberately on these three because she could tell they were tightly wound.
The shorter of the two guys, with a scruffy kinked beard and a stubbly shaved head, stuck his hand out. “I’m Gizmo von Puddleducks. This is Zombie McDingleberry and Etcetera.” The other two rolled their eyes.
“Thank you, ‘Gizmo,’ but actually, you can call me Stable Strategies,” the girl said.
The other guy, tall but hunched over with an owlish expression and exhaustion lines on his face, sighed. “You might as well call me Etcetera. Thanks, ‘Herr von Puddleducks.’”
“Very pleased to meet,” Limpopo said. “Why don’t you put your stuff down and grab a seat and I’ll get you some coffium, yeah?”
The three looked at each other and Gizmo shrugged and said, “Hell yeah.” He shrugged out of his pack and let it fall to the floor with a thump that made Limpopo jump. Jesus fuck, what were these noobs hauling over hill and dale? Bricks?
The other two followed suit. The girl took off her shoes and rubbed her feet. Then they all did it. Limpopo wrinkled her nose at the smell of sweaty feet and made a note to show them the sock exchange. She squeezed off three coffiums, using the paper-thin ceramic cups printed with twining, grippy texture strips. She set the cups down onto saucers and added small carrot biscuits and pickled radishes and carried them to the noobs’ table on a tray that clicked into a squared-off dock. She got her jumbo mug and brandished it: “To the first days of a better world,” she said, another cornball walkaway thing, but Sundays were the day for cornball walkaway things.
“The first days,” Etcetera said, with surprising (dismaying) sincerity.
“First days,” the other two said and clicked. They drank and were quiet while it kicked off for them. The girl got a cat-with-canary grin and took short, loud breaths, each making her taller. The others were less demonstrative, but their eyes shone. Limpopo’s own dose was optimal now, and she suddenly wanted these noobs to be as welcome as possible. She wanted them to feel awesome and confident.
“You guys want brunch? There’s waffles with real maple syrup, eggs as you like ’em, some pork belly and chicken ribs, and I’m pretty sure croissants, too.”
“Can we help?” Etcetera said.
“Don’t sweat that. Sit there and soak it in, let the Belt and Braces take care of you. Later on, we’ll see if we can get you a job.” She didn’t say they were too noob to have earned the right to pitch in at the B&B, that walkaways for fifty clicks would love to humblebrag on helping at the Belt and Braces. The B&B’s kitchen took care of everything, anyway. It had taken Limpopo a while to get the idea that food was applied chemistry and humans were shitty lab-techs, but after John Henry splits with automat systems, even she agreed that the B&B produced the best food with minimum human intervention. And there were croissants, which was exciting!
She did squeeze the oranges herself, but only because when she peaked she liked to squeeze her hands and work the muscles in her shoulders and arms, and could get the orange hulls nearly as clean as the machine. They were blue oranges anyway, optimized for northern greenhouse cultivation, and yielded their juice eagerly. She plated everything – that, at least, was something humans could rock – and delivered it.
By the time she came out of the kitchen, there were more noobs, and one of them needed medical attention for heat exhaustion. She was just getting to grips with that – coffium was great for keeping your cool when multitasking – when more old hands came in and efficiently settled and fed everyone else. Before long, there was a steady rocking rhythm to the B&B that Limpopo fucking loved, the hum of a complex adaptive system where humans and software co-existed in a state that could be called dancing.
The menu evolved through the day, depending on the feedstocks visitors brought. Limpopo nibbled around the edges, moving from one red light to the next, till they went green, developing a kind of sixth sense about the next red zone, logging more than her share of work units. If there had been a leaderboard for the B&B that day, she’d have been embarrassingly off the charts. She pretended as hard as she could that her friends weren’t noticing her bustling activity. The gift economy was not supposed to be a karmic ledger with your good deeds down one column and the ways you’d benefited from others down the other. The point of walkaways was living for abundance, and in abundance, why worry if you were putting in as much as you took out? But freeloaders were freeloaders, and there was no shortage of assholes who’d take all the best stuff or ruin things through thoughtlessness. People noticed. Assholes didn’t get invited to parties. No one went out of their way to look out for them. Even without a ledger, there was still a ledger, and Limpopo wanted to bank some good wishes and karma just in case.
The crowd slackened around four. There were enough perishables that the B&B declared a jubilee and put together an afternoon tea course. Limpopo moved towards the reddening zones in the food prep area and found that Etcetera guy.
“Hey there, how’re you enjoying your noob’s day here at the glorious Belt and Braces?”
He ducked. “I feel like I’m going to explode. I’ve been fed, drugged, boozed, and had a nap by the fire. I just can’t sit there any more. Please put me to work?”
“You know that’s something you’re not supposed to ask?”
“I got that impression. There’s something weird about you – I mean, us? – and work. You’re not supposed to covet a job, and you’re not supposed to look down your nose at slackers, and you’re not supposed to lionize someone who’s slaving. It’s supposed to be emergent, natural homeostasis, right?”
“I thought you might be clever. That’s it. Asking someone if you can pitch in is telling them that they’re in charge and deferring to their authority. Both are verboten. If you want to work, do something. If it’s not helpful, maybe I’ll undo it later, or talk it over with you, or let it slide. It’s passive aggressive, but that’s walkaways. It’s not like there’s any hurry.”
He chewed on that. “Is there? Is there really abundance? If the whole world went walkaway tomorrow would there be enough?”