“Sounds like a good idea.” She’d worked with shared secrets for the B&B’s various incarnations, establishing committees of trusted parties who could collectively institute sweeping changes in the codebase, but only once a quorum agreed.
“Yes but no. Good in the sense that you need to kidnap and torture a lot more people to unlock someone’s sim without permission, but from a complexity perspective it’s worse – you’re multiplying the number of interlocking relationships necessary to retrieve a sim by ten. As in: now you’ve got ten problems.”
“What’s the answer?”
“That’s what I’m worried about – the answer is going to be no answer. There’s urgency, it’s all going to blow up soon. Back in default, they’re treating Akron like an ISIS stronghold, like the fucking end-times. I’d be surprised if they didn’t nuke it.”
“Fallout.”
“They’ll blame us for it and set up a contract to treat radiation sickness with some zotta’s emergency services company. You don’t know what it’s like out there.”
“I know some things.”
“I guess you do. Sorry, I didn’t mean to, you know—”
“Mansplain.”
He looked awkward. She could tell he wished they’d had an argument. He was so easy to outmaneuver, because he couldn’t imagine the people around him weren’t trying to outmaneuver him.
“Limpopo, it’s been rough for me, the last couple years. After the B&B, uh—”
“Imploded.”
“I was angry for a long time. I was angry at you, though I knew it was my fault. Who else’s fault could it be? I chased you out.”
“You did worse than that.”
“I did worse than that. I threw you out.”
“No. You never did that.” You couldn’t do that.
“I couldn’t do that.” He wasn’t as dumb as he looked. “I took things from you because I thought it would make me strong, because I thought what you were doing was making people weak. But all that stuff, strong and weak—”
“Bullshit.”
“Entirely. Strong and weak isn’t what you do, it’s why you do it.” He paused. She was about to say something. “Also what you do. It’s not charity or noblesse oblige to treat people like they’re all equally worthy, even if they aren’t all equally ‘useful’ – whatever useful means.” He looked ready to cry. The medic stopped working on his toes and watched him intently. He looked at her, at Limpopo, sighed. Then he went on, which impressed Limpopo, because this confession would be all over Thetford by the time he’d found a place to sleep.
“I told myself I was making the world better. I thought there were ‘useful’ and ‘useless’ people and if you didn’t keep the useful people happy, the useless ones would starve. Of course I put myself in the useful group. I knew this important secret thing about useless and useful people, and if that’s not useful, what is? I told myself I was making more of everything for everyone. We just needed to let people who were worth the most do whatever they wanted. It was fucked up. I fucked up. That’s what I’m trying to say sorry for.”
“Your problem is you think ‘useless’ and ‘useful’ are properties of people instead of things people do. A person can perform usefulness, or anti-usefulness, depending on circumstances. Evolutionary winnowing didn’t somehow pass over the people who don’t contribute the way you want them to, leaving a backlog of natural selection for you to take care of. The reason everything about us is distributed on a normal curve, with a few weirdos way off in the long tails at the right and left and everyone else lumped together under the bulge is that we need people who get on with stuff, and a few fire-fighters who are kinked just the right way to sort out the weirdest shit happening around the edges. We assume someone who puts out a fire is a one-hundred-meter-tall superhero fated to save the universe, as opposed to someone who got lucky, once, and has been given lots more opportunities to get lucky since.”
“That’s what I’m trying to say, yeah. It’s hard to figure this shit. It twists my head that I only started disbelieving in useful and useless people when I proved to be useless. Then I had this revelation that the scale I’d judged people on – the scale I was failing on – was irrelevant. That’s one of those convenient things that reeks of bullshitting yourself.”
“I happen to agree the old scale was bullshit, so I’m giving you a pass.”
He winced as the medic did something to his toes. Two of them looked bad, black at the tips. Limpopo looked away, grimacing.
“Thanks,” he grunted, though whether he was talking to her or the medic, she couldn’t say.
[IX]
THE PARTY WASN’T Pocahontas’s idea, but she took off with it. At first, Etcetera was horrified at the thought. He couldn’t imagine anything worth celebrating amid the death and anxiety. Iceweasel was disappeared and Gretyl was buried in secret projects. He was convinced everyone would be offended, from spacies to late arrivals to aviators to the B&B crew who mourned their dead, but as Pocahontas posted notices of the party’s progress to the spacies’ social hub, it was clear the only anxiety anyone felt about a party was that someone else might hate it.
Pocahontas was a force of nature. She’d been the first of their crew to figure out how to run the space-suit fabbers, made herself a gorgeous suit she wore on a series of epic, multi-day treks, establishing contact with nearby First Nations bands. Though they weren’t as political as she, none had any use for default and all were curious about the weird spacies who’d taken over Thetford, so many years after it was abandoned. Pocahontas had used the Thetford fab to print parts for a new space-suit fabber, stacking them outside a utility corridor, ready to be hauled to her new friends by anyone who could make a vehicle capable of the run. Gretyl was working on refurbing the engine of their cargo train, which limped into Thetford. They’d have scrapped it if there hadn’t been so many wounded who couldn’t finish the voyage on their own legs.
Gretyl was better than Etcetera had any right to expect. Seth told him what she’d done, and though she rarely heard from Dis – the sim was running on the safe-room’s own servers, to avoid the risk of discovery through mountains of traffic where none was expected – the terse messages made her stoic, if not cheerful. According to Dis, Iceweasel was sane and intact despite torture. She was made of indomitable steel. “If she’s not losing her shit, how could I?” Gretyl said, one morning, as Limpopo brought them coffium and fresh rolls.
“You going to sing?” Limpopo said. Etcetera looked sharply at her. Gretyl had a beautiful voice, torchy. Back in the ancient days of the B&B common-room, she’d passed evenings singing songs from her deep repertoire, accompanied by zero or more B&B musicians. A capella, she was astounding; with a band, she was transcendent. But she hadn’t sung since Iceweasel was taken from her.
“At the party?” Gretyl said.
“At the party.”
“Is there a band?” Etcetera thought she was looking for an out – I don’t think I could do it unaccompanied or we don’t have time to practice – but her eyes glinted –.
“The spacies have a couple of bands, but I don’t know if they’re any good.”
Pocahontas – who’d flitted through the common-space, directing people as they set up for the party – homed in on them, having followed this conversation on the hoof.