“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.
[XI]
WHEN THEY GOT back, the B&B was in flames. It seemed the fire was everywhere, but it became clear it was centered on the stables and the power plant. A fire in the hydrogen cells was supposed to be impossible, they were engineered for five kinds of fail-safe, the design was so widely used that flaws were quickly spotted and fixed. Judging from the wreckage, though, they’d gone up.
The inn was also on fire, but seemed under control, water coursing out of windows where automated systems had kicked in. It was Iceweasel’s third disaster in weeks, and there was a curious doubling feeling as she took in the infirmary, the mechas stomping in and out of the burning building with armloads of salvaged gear.
“Shit.” Limpopo snapped into motion. Iceweasel watched in awe. Limpopo took in the same details in an eye-blink, but while Iceweasel had been frozen, Limpopo was spurred into motion. She jogged to the infirmary, head swiveling. Her presence was enough to call three of those tending the injured to her. She gestured forcefully at the blaze from the stables and all nodded and moved, shifting the wounded further away. The blaze intensified in seconds. Now she was heading for a mecha pilot and –
“Come on,” Gretyl said. “Let’s go help.”
Iceweasel was grateful to be told what to do.
They lost it all. For a while, the fires were under control, just a little mopping up to extinguish the last flames in the inn, but as they swapped power-cells in the mechas and brought up new hoses, there was a fresh explosion from the back, another concussion wave and then flaming debris. They had congregated on the front lawn or they would have all died.
The B&B’s drone outriders scouted surrounding territory, bridging network service over the holes in the mesh left behind by the fallen B&B. Fed by their intelligence, the B&B crew fell back and back again, heading west, towards the built-up outer perimeter of default, where the wilds ended and Toronto began. It was the least hospitable direction to go, but there was a hamlet up the road where the Better Nation could tie off. The zeppelin crew threw everything into the impellers, though bumblers were not supposed to be steered except in emergencies. This qualified.