“Moop?” Etcetera said. He’d brightened up during the hunt for robes. He was getting into the spirit. She was glad for him.
“Matter out of place. Litter. If you see clutter, you can recycle it, drop it in a storage bin, or commandeer it. The B&B keeps track of the unclaimed moop in its storages and flags stuff that’s more than a couple months old to the bug-reporter and someone’ll pick up the chore and decompose them.”
“Did our bags get mooped then?”
“Not a chance. They hadn’t been there long enough, and bags in a changing room aren’t moop unless they’re abandoned. They were just ripped off.” She hauled open the door to the stables. “Let it go.”
The fablab smelled like lasers, charred wood, VOCs, textile dye, and machine oil. Its hydrogen cells – separate from the tavern cells – were topped off, and it was nearly empty, apart from giggling teenaged boys almost certainly printing ridiculous hand-guns. She bookmarked them for a stern talking-to, before throwing a screen up on a wall.
“Easiest way to get started is to ask for an inventory of traveling stuff – warm-weather, cold-weather, wet-weather, shelter, food, first aid – cross-referenced by available feedstocks and rated by popularity.” She twiddled her interface surfaces as she worked, and soon they had a multi-columnar layout. “Fill your baskets, and when you’re done, drill down for sizes and options.”
They immediately grasped it and tapped and poked and suggested. She watched, weighing their choices against her criteria. When she’d been a shlepper, she’d had an Army of One mentality, everything she could need at her side. Once she’d lost that madness, she’d pared away that everyday carry until it was the minimum she would need to survive a typical set of difficulties between wherever she was and the next place. When she’d lived in default, she’d treated her home and school locker and workplace as extensions of her everyday carry, not worrying about hauling everything that fit those places with her all the time. It was enough to know that they were there when she’d need them.
The reason she’d become a shlepper after she went walkaway was she’d drawn her perimeter around her body. If she wasn’t carrying a thing, she couldn’t use it. The cure had been the realization that everything was everywhere, stuff in walkaway was a normalized cloud of potential, on-demand things. The opportunity cost of not having the right salad fork when she wanted a salad was lower than the opportunity cost of not being able to go where she wanted to go, without hauling mountains of pain-in-the-back stuff.
A priori, she’d bet Etcetera would have the smallest shopping basket, and the girl would have the biggest. She guessed wrong. The girl went so minimal it shamed Limpopo.
“Don’t you think you should pack more than that?” She gave in to the temptation to put her thumb on reality’s scales.
“All I need is enough to get me to some place like this. Meanwhile, these bozos are going to be carrying a mountain. On the one hand I’ll always have someone to borrow from, and on the other I’ll probably end up helping them with their kitchen sinks.”
The girl raised an expressive eyebrow at her and smirked. “You think you’re the only one around here who gets this stuff? We’re noobs, not idiots. I’ve been throwing Communist parties for years. I’ve liberated enough matériel to furnish your whole enterprise. Yeah, I took too much shit with me when I left, but that was only because I didn’t know what I’d be getting into. If it’s like this—” she waved an arm around the stables – “who needs it?”
“You’re right, I assumed you were bourgie kids who needed to be led to the greater glory of walkaway philosophy. It’s easy to feel more less-is-more than thou. I’m sorry about your stuff, too. Even though I think you were carrying more shit than you needed, getting jacked feels terrible. It makes you feel unsafe; no one is at their best when they feel that way.” One piece of walkaway-fu was to apologize quickly and thoroughly when you fucked up. It was a hard lesson for Limpopo to learn, but she made the most of it.
The boys were surreptitiously taking items out of their baskets, and she noticed the girl noticing, and they shared a knowing smile and pretended not to notice. Making other people feel like assholes was a terrible way to get them to stop acting like assholes.
“Not every place is like this,” Limpopo said. “The B&B is the biggest walkaway place I’ve seen, maybe the biggest in this part of Canada. It’s got a lot of material wealth. Most walkaway settlements have fablab. No one will ever tell you you’re not allowed to use it, but if all you do is drift around, draining hydrogen cells and feedstock, everyone will think you’re a dick.”
The guys rearranged their baskets. “I’m not supposed to trade anything for anything else, it’s all a gift, like the Communist parties. That part I understand. But when we do our parties, we don’t care how much you take because at any second the cops are going to chase us out and destroy whatever’s left over, so you can have whatever you can carry. Out here, you want people to magically not take too much but also not earn the right to take more by working harder and also to work because it’s a gift but not because they expect anything in return?”
They stared at her. She shrugged. “That’s the walkaway dilemma. If you take without giving, you’re a mooch. If you keep track of everyone else’s taking and giving, you’re a creep scorekeeper. It’s our version of Christian guilt – it’s impious to feel good about your piety. You have to want to be good, but not feel good about how good you are. The worst thing is to be worrying about what someone else is doing, because that has nothing to do with whether you’re doing right.” She shrugged. “If it was easy, everyone would do it. It’s a project, not an accomplishment.”
Etcetera stretched and his back cracked. His robe fell open, which was revealing in a way that his total nudity hadn’t been. He tucked everything back in. “It’s hard to get your head around because it’s unfamiliar. Back out there in ‘default reality’” – again, she could hear the quote-marks – “you’re supposed to be doing things because they’re right for you. ‘What do you expect me to do, pass on this dirty salary money because there was something nasty in its history? I don’t see you lining up to pay my bills.’ Generosity is a folk tale about what happens when people look out for themselves. We’re supposed to ‘just know’ that selfishness is natural.
“Out here, we’re supposed to treat generosity as the ground state. The weird, gross, selfish feeling is a warning we’re being dicks. We’re not supposed to forgive people for being selfish. We’re not supposed to expect other people to forgive us for being selfish. It’s not generous to do nice things in the hopes of getting stuff back. It’s hard not to fall into that pattern, because bribery works.
“My folks had this problem all the time when I was growing up. Dad would come up with all these long explanations for why I could only do something I wanted if I did something boring first that didn’t make it into a bribe. He’d say, ‘You have to eat a balanced diet so you’ll be healthy. Eating dessert without eating vegetables and protein isn’t balanced. So you can’t have dessert unless you clear your plate.’ Mom rolled her eyes and when he was out of earshot, she’d whisper, ‘Finish everything on your plate and I’ll give you a slice of cake.’ Out-and-out bribery.”