“They’re definitely the gateway drug,” Limpopo said. “I got into it through crusty cypherpunks who’d try and get party kids to use better opsec, handing out bootable sticks at underground parties.”
Jimmy said, “Someone gave me one, but it wouldn’t work on the standalone machine we kept for diagnostics in the basement. Then someone I knew – stoner guy, always had the best shit – got me a connection to a dude who got me a little thing, disguised as a box of breath mints, with a false bottom with a little contact switch that would man-in-the-middle your network connections through an anonymizer.”
“After my time,” Limpopo said.
“Sounds slick,” Etcetera said.
“I guess so. But the breath-mints tin thing was a cheap disguise. It was printed shittily so after a week in my pocket, all the writing smudged. It looked like I was carrying around a piece of garbage.
“But it worked. Slow, but it worked. From there, I got jailbreaks for my interface surfaces so I could get online with a less sketchy connection – faster, too. Then I started reading up on walkaways, their boards, the FAQs, reports from people who’d gone walkaway.
“From this side of my history, I can see I was gone by the time I got that dumb breath-mints tin. It was just a matter of time. Back then, I agonized about it, felt like I was walking out on life itself. I’d never see my family again, I’d end up dead in a ditch.
“It was like that up to the moment I hit the road, taking my bike on the train to Ithaca and riding into the mountains, heading for a place where there was an established group. They were gone by the time I got there, but I met someone who’d lived with them, an old woman who didn’t seem quite... there... and she pointed me north, so I headed upstate. I found a different group, older people, ex-military and people whose pensions ran out. They were more paranoid than you guys, more American – the gun thing. But they made me welcome and didn’t laugh at my weird ideas about what was happening in walkaway land.
“They had basic fabs, could source feedstock from stuff around them – a lot of it was sunk carbon they sucked straight out of the air. There were about fifty of them. People came and went... slowly. Maybe one or two a month, in either direction.
“They’d found a way to stay still, on default’s periphery, without making much fuss. They kept their heads down, kept to themselves. They were walkaways because there was nothing for them in default – no rent money, no health care, no food. Their kids visited them sometimes, rendezvousing in the state parks on fake ‘camping trips’ that were the only way to hook up with grandma and grandpa without ending up in an ankle cuff. Some of them talked about finding some zotta who’d let them come and live on his land, be pet bohemians. There are lots of places like that. Walkaways make great fashion accessories.
“This bored my nuts off. I wasn’t the first young dude to rock up in their bohemian retirement village with my heart full of fire. One guy took me aside while I was trying to get their fab to output the parts for a more ambitious fab, kind of thing you use for heavy machinery. That was the project I’d set for myself. He tried to lay out the facts of life for me.
“‘Sonny, you have to understand, all we want is to be left alone. We don’t want everyone to drop out like us. We’re not proud of where we ended up. We want better for our kids and grandkids than we got. We did worse than our parents, and they did worse than their parents. All we want is to arrest that, make things better for them.
“‘By coming here, we make ourselves independent. We’re like the tribal elders in the north pole, who’d go out on ice floes when they couldn’t hunt anymore, getting out of the way and not being a burden on the productive ones.’
“He wasn’t dumb. Reminded me of my grandpa, who’d died when I was a kid. Cancer, he didn’t get it treated, opted to go fast with a pump button for pain, cremated and scattered to the wind, not one mark on the world, like he’d never lived. My grandpa – Zaidy Frank – wasn’t slow, but he’d never amounted to anything. He’d tried to do his best for Mom, tried to save a little to get her started, had borrowed to put her through school, worked two jobs most of his life. Never got forty whole hours a week unless it was rush-time and he was pulling eighty-hour weeks, spending most of the extra money on cabs to rush from one shift to another and to eat at company cafeterias because he couldn’t get home to pack breakfast, lunch and dinner.
“This guy wasn’t in bad physical shape, but he was seventy, wasn’t going to get any kind of job anywhere. He had been there for ten years. He liked working with his hands and checked me out on the fabs when I arrived, showed me their docs and buried expert menus. Almost a mentor, except a mentor is someone who leads and this guy couldn’t lead an expedition to the ice-cream store.
“We got into an argument. It started friendly, got heated. Whether not making trouble meant default would leave them alone. ‘Well, we’re not hurting anyone, we’re not trying to get welfare or insisting on Medicare or VA benefits or Social Security. We’re living off grid, staying out of the way.’ Just waiting to die and trying not to breathe too loudly in the meantime. ‘Why would they come after us? Why would they put us in jail, which costs them money, when they can just leave us?’
“I tried hard to get him to understand. To get him to see if they don’t push back when pushed, default will just know they can be pushed harder next time. Trying to get him to see the superfund site they squatted would someday be something that someone wanted, minerals or a right of way or just a view not blighted by used humans. If default understood there was no one who’d put up any kind of fight, they’d be first to go. Default wouldn’t even notice, it’d just send the bulldozers to plow them under.
“He didn’t believe me. Was patronizing about it. He’d been around the block, seen things. Recited a poem, ‘The old crow is getting slow, the young crow is not. The only thing the old crow knows that the young crow doesn’t know is where to go.’ Perfect self-serving bullshit, rationalizing the least-frightening action as the most prudent. There’s two ways of thinking about it: either the squeaky wheel gets the grease or the nail that stands up highest gets hammered.
“To be fair, he was tired, had a tiring run, was old and sore and slow and all he wanted was to be left alone.”
“You didn’t stay?” They were almost at the rise where they’d left the tractor. His limp was worse. He took a few steps, rested for a few breaths, took a few more. The pain must have been incredible, Limpopo knew, but he was lost in his story. She’d seen this on the road: conversation made distance vanish, especially the opportunity to open something difficult and meaningful. Something about talking while staring into the middle-distance created a confessional intimacy to rival post-coital cuddling.
“Kept working on that fab, having these increasingly passive-aggressive talks with my friend, until he made it clear that if I kept on doing what I was doing, everyone would hate my guts. They were working with a local zotta, the guy who technically owned the land, to get permission to stay, a kind of do-gooder gesture from him. They would be tame. Pets.
“So I walked away, found another place in New Hampshire, with enough guns to make that Ithaca bunch look tame. They were old, too – never expected to find so many old walkaways, but it makes sense, nothing left to lose. It’s gotta be clear there’s zilch chance of leveling up in default if you reach sixty-seven and you’ve never been anything but a temp.