Before that, there was just an ambling wobble as they looked for their clothes. Then mounting alarm, and finally the girl said, “We’ve been robbed.” The two boys said, “Shit.” They looked at Limpopo. Her clothes were right where she’d left them. They were the kind of clothes you could get anywhere that walkaways gathered.
Limpopo took a breath. “Well, that happened.”
“Come on. We’ve got to go and look for our stuff—” the girl said.
“You’ll need clothes first,” Limpopo said. “I hate to say it, but I think it’d be a waste. When stuff gets stolen, it disappears fast.”
“Funny how you’d know that,” the girl said. “Funny how you’d know why it wouldn’t be any use to try and track down the stuff you told us to leave here.”
“I never told you to leave it here,” Limpopo said. “I just said you couldn’t bring it in there. I specifically said I didn’t know if it’d be safe.” She looked at them. They were upset, suspicious of her. The girl most of all, but the guys looked like she was to blame, too. They’d want someone to blame, because the alternative was to blame themselves. Limpopo felt sad. She’d been looking forward to that cuddle-puddle.
“I know this sucks. It happens out here. Not everyone is a nice person in the world.”
“So why didn’t you build lockers?” the girl said. “If not everyone is as nice as you, why wouldn’t you provide for your guests with a minimum standard for security? How about footage? There’s cameras around, right? Let’s get some fucking forensics, make wanted posters—”
Limpopo shook her head, and the girl looked more furious. “I’m sorry,” Limpopo said again. “There are sensors in the B&B, of course, but nothing that buffers for more than a few seconds. That’s in the building’s firmware, and anyone who tries to change it will be reverted in milliseconds. The people who use this place decided they would rather be robbed than surveilled. Stuff is just stuff, but being recorded all the time is creepy. As for lockers, you’re free to put some in, but I don’t think they’d last. Once you’ve got lockers, you’re implicitly saying that anything that’s not in a locker is ‘unprotected’—”
“Which it was,” Etcetera pointed out.
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s a perfectly valid point. But you won’t win the argument with it.”
Etcetera sat. They were all naked, but Limpopo felt bad about putting her clothes on when no one else had theirs. She grabbed big, fluffy towels from the stack and passed them around.
“Thank you,” Etcetera said.
“Yeah, thanks,” the sarcastic one said. “Sounds like your friends wouldn’t be convinced by anything. What if we just went and took their stuff?”
She smiled. “That was what I was about to suggest. No one’s going to be happy about this. Ripoff shit sucks, and whoever did it was a colossal asshole. If we caught someone doing it, we’d probably throw him out.”
“What if he tried to come back in?”
“We’d tell him to leave.”
“What if he didn’t listen?”
“We’d ignore him.”
“What if he brought back a bunch of friends and started to fuck up all your shit? Pissed in your hot tubs and drank all your booze?”
She turned to Etcetera. “You know this one, right?”
“They’d leave, Seth,” he said.
“That’s my slave name,” he said. “Call me, uh...” He looked lost.
“Gizmo von Puddleducks,” Limpopo said. “I’m good at name-space management.”
“Call me Gizmo,” he said. “Yeah, I get that. They’d leave. They’d build another one of these somewhere else, and then someone would come along and take that one, or burn it down, or whatever.”
“Or they wouldn’t,” she said. “Look, there are as many walkaway philosophies as there are walkaways, but mine is, ‘the stories you tell come true.’ If you believe everyone is untrustworthy, you’ll build that into your systems so that even the best people have to act like the worst people to get anything done. If you assume people are okay, you live a much happier life.”
“But your shit gets jacked.”
“I don’t have anything to get ripped off. It makes life easier. I haven’t carried a pack in years. Walks are a lot more pleasant. No one bothers to rob me.”
“I had everything in that bag,” the girl said, morosely.
“Let me guess,” Limpopo said. “Money. ID. Food. Water. Spare wearable stuff. Clean underwear.”
The girl nodded.
“Right. Well, you don’t need money or ID here. Food and water, we got. Clean underwear and wearables, easy. We’ll get you back on the grid, you can recover your backups—” She saw their faces fall.
“You were backed up on the walkaway grid, right?”
“Not yet,” Etcetera said. “It was on the list. I guess I still have stuff in the cloud, out there in ‘default reality.’” He still said “default reality” with self-conscious, audible quote-marks.
“Well, we can exfiltrate it for you. There’s still some places where the walkaway grid peers with default, deep tunnels and lots of latency. Or you could walkback if you want. Some people do. Walkaway isn’t for everyone. Sometimes they go walkaway again. No one will judge you for it.” Except you, she didn’t say because it was obvious.
The girl looked distraught. “I can’t fucking believe this. I can’t believe that you’re not taking any responsibility. You brought us here. We’re completely fucked, we have nothing and you’re just busting out smug little bohemian aphorisms like hipster buddha.”
Limpopo remembered when this would have pissed her off and allowed herself to be proud that she wasn’t angry. She wished she could also avoid pride, but everyone’s a work in progress. “I’m sorry this happened. I’ll help you get set again. Getting ripped off happens to everyone who goes walkaway. It’s a rite of passage. Owning something that isn’t fungible means that you’ve got to make sure someone else doesn’t take it. Once you let go of that, everything gets easier.”
The girl looked ready to go for Limpopo. She hoped it wouldn’t get physical.
“Look, take it easy. It’s just stuff. I know you had some cool clothes. I even snuck photos of them so I could make my own and put ’em up on a version-server for the B&B. You can sit and fume, you can run into the night looking for some rip-off asshole who’s more addicted to owning things than you, or you can get past it and come with me and get new kit. We can make you a dupe of the stuff you were wearing, or you can pick something out of the catalog. Or you can run home wearing a towel. Entirely up to you.”
“You copied her clothes?” the sarcastic one said.
“Why, you want a set? They were unisex. We could mod ’em for you, or you could rock something genderbendy. I think it’d suit you.” Now that she said it, she realized it was true. She liked the other one, Etcetera, more as a person, but this Herr von Picklepants was pretty in a way that she had a weakness for, she could see the virtue of playing dress-up with him, if he would just stop talking.
“You know? Maybe,” he said. He knew exactly how pretty he was, which was a huge turnoff.
“Let’s go and get you suited and booted.”
Out of solidarity, she left her clothes on the bench and wore a towel out of the onsen, just as they had, and led them back into the Belt and Braces.
The B&B’s fablab was in an outbuilding called the stables, but there had never been livestock near them. She found them robes and slippers, showing the noobs how to query the B&B’s inventory for the location of unclaimed stuff and leading them around the first couple of floors to paw through alcoves and chests until they were set. “You can keep those,” she said, “or just put ’em back in any chest and tell B&B about them. If you ditch them somewhere, someone’ll moop them for you anyway, but it’s considered rude.”