Walkaway Read online

  He reciprocated in a hundred ways, saving her a seat in the common room; greeting her after a hike with iced tea and a cool towel, or taking her hand below the table—or above it—as they chatted with the others into the night.

  The old B&B hands took notice, but were too polite to ask outright. Instead, they’d say, “Oh, did Etcetera give that to you?” (He had, a garland of winter twigs worked into a ridiculous fairy crown that she wore for a day until it fell apart but treasured all the more for that.) There were walkaway couples, even walkaway families with kids and one or more parents, but she’d never joined them. Coupledom felt like an artifact of default, not anything she wanted any part of, a mess of jealousy and coordination problems.

  But this was different. Emotions sang in her thoughts, sweeter than any she remembered. Lying beside him, even in a cuddle-puddle, looking at his lips and the dimple in his chin made something warm spread through her chest and belly.

  They took long walks, not talking, listening to birdsong and the crunch of their footsteps in the snow. There were deer in the woods, usually far away, but once, a doe came close enough to touch, stared at them with spellbinding animal frankness.

  One day, they set out at first light, full of porridge and bubbling with coffium, following a trail from a B&B drone that had found a cache of electronics full of recoverable coltan derivatives—an abandoned illegal e-waste dump. They brought a mulebot, and helping it with way-finding slowed them down to a frigid crawl. They bickered a little; she’d remember that later.

  The cache was inaccessible. The ground had frozen solid in an overnight cold snap that turned an earlier thaw into treacherous ice. Even with cleats, they couldn’t get any footing, and the mulebot got fatally stuck out of arms’ reach, unable to find enough traction to return. After abandoning trying to lasso it, they headed back in a bad mood.

  They both got an offline buzz at the same moment as the walkaway network failed. She could tell, because they both stopped at the same moment.

  “Does that happen often?” Etcetera said.

  “It shouldn’t happen period. The network’s got redundant failovers, including a blimp. And we’ve got clear skies.”

  She got out a screen and prodded with gloved fingers, squinting through the steam of her exhalations. She didn’t use diagnostic stuff often, and it took her a while to get it up. “That’s weird,” she said. “Even if everything went blooey, you’d expect it to be a cascading failure. Node A goes dark, node B gets overwhelmed by traffic from it, falls over, then node C gets a double-whack, and so on. But look, it lost contact with everything, all at once. That’s like a power cut, but they’re all on independent power cells.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “I think it’s serious. Let’s go.”

  Give this to Etcetera: when things got serious, he got serious. She saw a new side of him, nervy and alert. It comforted her. She could stop unconsciously worrying about taking care of him.

  They hustled through the tramped-down snow trails, moving silently, with an unspoken dimension of stealth. She heard a whir and spotted a B&B drone, which gave her comfort. Then she saw that it wasn’t one of their models.

  “Shit,” she said, as it came back for another pass. She gave it the finger as it buzzed meters over their heads. “Fuck it. Let’s go.”

  They ran.

  The path was well-groomed with a clever series of turns and strategic trees that let you emerge suddenly into the compound with the rambling buildings and the windmills proud overhead. Before they’d been spotted, she’d planned on coming out through the woods to one side, bushwhacking a new trail to get there. But now there was no point.

  They stepped into the clearing and she saw a clutch of bulky dudes in intimidating tactical bullshit standing around the main entrance. They bristled with utility belts with gun-shaped stuff that could do terrible things to them, and they didn’t need to reach for them to make it clear who had the upper hand.

  “Hello there,” one called. He even had the tough-guy mustache, like a wrestler. “Welcome to the Belt and Braces.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” she said.

  “I’m Jimmy,” he said. “Would you two be wanting some lodgings?”

  “Suppose we are,” Limpopo said.

  He smiled a lazy, wolfish smile, then looked more closely. “Oh,” he said. “It’s you, is it?”

  She looked more closely at him, remembered. “Yeah, it’s me.” She sighed.

  “Well shit. This is your lucky day, Limpopo.”

  She nodded. He hadn’t been going by Jimmy when she’d slung his ass out of the B&B. What had it been? Jockstrap? Jackstraw? Something. It had been years.

  “Bet you didn’t expect to see me.” He turned to his friends. “This lady right here put more lines of code into this place than anyone. She’s done more to build it than anyone. This place is full of this girl’s blood and treasure.” He turned back. “This really is your lucky day.”

  “Yeah?” She knew where this was going.

  “From now on, this place is on a quid-pro-quo basis. Everyone gets out what they put in. You’ve put in so much, well, you could stay for years without lifting a finger. You’ve got reputation capital to burn.”

  “Oh brother,” she said.

  * * *

  You couldn’t be a walkaway without encountering the reputation economy freaks. At first, she’d hated them in the abstract. Then this guy had come along and given her some damned good, concrete reasons to hate them. The B&B had been a third built when he came and tried to install leaderboards in everything. Actually, he’d done it, checking in the code and then coming to her with her hands covered in sealant paste to demand to know why she’d reverted him.

  “That’s not something we want.”

  “What do you mean? You don’t have a constitution. I checked.”

  “We don’t. But this issue’s been discussed and the consensus was that we didn’t want leaderboards. They produce shitty incentives.” She held up her gloppy hands. “I’m in the middle of something. Why don’t you put it on the wiki?”

  “Is that the rule?”

  “Nope,” she said.

  “So why should I do it?”

  “Because that’s worked before.”

  “Maybe I should just revert your reverts.”

  “I hope you don’t.” She knew how to have this argument. She kept eye contact. He was young, a recent walkaway, with pent-up freak that went with the territory. There was no percentage in meeting his freak with her own.

  “Why not?”

  “It wouldn’t be constructive. The point is to find something we can be happy with. Revert-wars don’t produce that. At best, that’ll get us to spending all our time reverting each other. At worse, it’ll turn into a war to see who can make the codebase harder for the other to modify.” She had a sheet of insulating honeycomb on her workbench and the sealant was drying lumpy. She grabbed a spongy brush and spread the lumps. “You want to see this place get built? Me too. Let’s figure out how. You could start by reviewing the old discussions and checking out how the decision got made. Then make your own arguments. I promise to read them in good faith.” This was a mantra, but she tried to imbue it with sincerity. He was tweaky. She didn’t want to freak him. She didn’t even want to talk to him.

  He sea-lioned her at dinner. That was before the kitchen was finished and they made do with primitive stuff, flavored, extruded, cultured UNHCR refu-scops. Scop-slop on a shingle, with everything you needed to keep going and a wide variety of flavors, but no one mistook it for food. She made space for him on the bench beside her and passed him the water jug—they were using solar pasteurizers, big black barrels that used heat-exchanging coatings to get the water up to pathogen-killing temperatures. It gave the water a flat taste. She used sprigs of mint to cover it. She offered him some from a plant she’d picked before the dinner bell rang.

  He swirled it around her water and ate scop, which he’d taken in a chewy nacho-cheese b
riquette, so sharp-smelling it almost masked his sweaty funk. Baths were hard to come by in those days, but not that hard. She tried to think of a polite way to show him how the wash-up worked, without creating any interpretive room to construe it as a sexual invitation.

  “You get that reading done?”

  He nodded and chewed. “Yeah,” he said. “I ran stats on the repos. You’re an order of magnitude head of the pack, massive power-law curve. I had no idea. Seriously, respect.”

  “I don’t look at stats. Which is the point. I couldn’t write the whole thing on my own, and if I could, I wouldn’t want to, because this place would suck if it was just a contest to see who could add the most lines of code or bricks to the structure. That’s a race to build the world’s heaviest airplane. What does knowing that one person has more commits than others tell you? That you should work harder? That you’re stupid? That you’re slow? Who gives a shit? The most commits in our codebase come from history—everyone who wrote the libraries and debugged and optimized and patched them. The most commits on this building come from everyone who processed the raw materials, figured out how to process the raw materials, harvested the feedstock, and—”

  He held up his hands. “Okay. But come on, maybe you didn’t do all the work, but you’re doing more than anyone. Why shouldn’t the community honor that?”

  “If you do things because you want someone else to pat you on the head, you won’t get as good at it as someone who does it for internal satisfaction. We want the best-possible building. If we set up a system that makes people compete for acknowledgment, we invite game-playing and stats-fiddling, even unhealthy stuff like working stupid hours to beat everyone. A crew full of unhappy people doing substandard work. If you build systems that make people focus on mastery, cooperation, and better work, we’ll have a beautiful inn full of happy people working together well.”

  He nodded but wasn’t convinced. She thought about saying, “I put in more work than anyone, so by your lights that means I should be in charge. As the person in charge, I say that the person who does the most shouldn’t be in charge, so there.” It made her smile, and she saw him looking embarrassed and remembered being a noob who didn’t know what she was doing or if she should be doing it, feeling judged.

  “Don’t take my word for it,” she said. “Reopen the discussion, make your arguments, see if you can convince other people. Shift the consensus.”

  “I’ll think about it.” She knew he wouldn’t. The idea that there wouldn’t be leaders in the race to build a leaderless society offended him in ways he wouldn’t let himself understand.

  Three weeks later, they were locked in a revert-war that shook the B&B down to its literal foundations.

  Jackstraw trawled every collaborative building project on the net for gamification modules. There were plenty—badges and gold stars, the works of amateur Skinners convinced you could build the ideal society the way you toilet-trained a toddler: a chart on the wall with a smiley sticker next to every poopy-diaper-free day.

  The results from these experiments were impressive. If you wanted to motivate people at their most infantile level, all you needed was to hand out sweeties for good children, and make naughty ones stand in the corner. He’d put together links to videos and analytics reports from the most successful.

  At first, Limpopo was careful to keep her rebuttal style to the non-antagonistic “good faith” voice that was the sure-fire winner in walkaway arguments. She’d carefully ignore the emotional freight of his words, reading them three times to ensure she caught every substantive crumb in the screeds, and replied briefly, comprehensively, and without a hint of contempt.

  He didn’t know when he was beat. It was like arguing with a chatbot whose Markov chains were entangled in the paternalistic argot of prison wardens and unlicensed daycare operators. She’d calmly demolish his arguments every day from Monday to Friday, and on Saturday morning, he’d pull out Monday’s arguments again, like she wouldn’t notice.

  This all happened in the commentary of code-pulls and reverts, making it more stupid. The audience for the debate grew as word spread. There was global attention, and not just from walkaways. Back in default, some people kept an eye on walkaway nets, treating them as exotic spectacle, like listening in on Al Shabaabbies complaining about the cumbersome reimbursement procedure their Wahabi paymasters imposed.

  With this global audience kibitzing and sniping, Limpopo tore Jackstraw a comprehensive new asshole. She called him on every crumb of bullshit, found crashed projects where gamification had run wild, so financialized that every incentive distorted into titanic frauds that literally left structures in ruins, rotten to the mortar. They were existence proof of the terribleness of his cherished ideas. She pointed out that getting humans to “do the right thing” by incentivizing them to vanquish one another was stupid. She found videos of Skinner-trained pigeons who’d been taught to play piano through food-pellet training and pointed out that everyone who liked this envisioned himself as the experimenter—not the pigeon.

  It got ugly. She’d bruised his ego, met his condescension by treating him to a slice of the assholery he’d directed her way. He lost it. Comprehensively bested, he went negative.

  The problem was Limpopo’s vagina. It made her unable to understand the competitive fire that was the true motive force that kept humans going. Competition carved the gazelle as a perfect complement to the leopard. Competition whittled the fangs and leaps of the leopard into the gazelle’s inverse. Competition sorted the performers from the takers. It let the visionaries whittle their project into a masterpiece.

  Limpopo’s femininity made her too weak to grasp this. She wasted time with talk-talk about making everyone happy, when the right answer was there in the data, objectively showing which path to take. He wrote about this “weakness” of hers like it was a mental illness, conjuring imaginary “four-sigma hackers” who wouldn’t contribute to the B&B if they were prohibited from publishing performance stats.

  He located the origin of this dysfunction in Limpopo’s sex. She had a clutch of “alpha bitches” who kept the group in check. Her cult-like leadership of this coven extended to control over their menstrual cycles, which had undoubtedly converged on the powerful uterine signals from Limpopo’s unspeakable wet places.

  Limpopo was proud of herself in that moment. She distinctly felt her mind split in two as she read the vicious attacks. One half, “Limbic Limpopo,” hyper-violent unfiltered id, snarled. It literally made her heart thud and her hands and jaws clench. When she consciously stopped it, she ached all down her neck. Limbic Limpopo wanted to kick Jackstraw in the balls. It wanted to wikify every vicious line and add [citation needed] tags to the insults, signposting them as indefensible ad hominems. Limbic Limpopo wanted to haul Jackstraw out of his bed—a bed that she had assembled and painted—and throw him out buck naked, locking the door and burning his stinky pack of gear.

  But that was only half of her reaction. Long-Term Limpopo was just as insistent in her internal chorus. This made her proud. Long-Term Limpopo had always been there, but usually Limbic Limpopo shouted so loudly that she couldn’t hear Long-Term Limpopo until stupid Limbic had made a mess.

  Long-Term Limpopo pointed out that the debate was a huge time-sink because the issues were complicated and boring. Getting people who wanted to build an inn to care about the reward-strategy philosophy was like getting people who were excited about a potluck dinner to care about whether the room was painted with acrylic or oil. Dinner, not the box it came in, was the point.

  This was different. Getting people to care about substantive stuff was hard, but procedural issues were much simpler. As esoteric as the subject of debate was, the form of the debate—the frank misogyny, the crude insults—could be parsed from orbit. When they were arguing about applied motivational psychology, it was hard to tell whom to root for. Once he outed himself as an asshole, the issue clarified.

  Long-Term Limpopo pointed out that she’d already won. All
she had to do was refrain from descending to Jackstraw’s level. Even as Limbic Limpopo made her blood thunder, she gave the wheel to Long-Term Limpopo, who pointed out that this wasn’t an appropriate way to conduct a technical discussion.

  The reaction was swift. Even the people who’d taken Jackstraw’s side in earlier debate hastily moved to distance themselves. The denunciations followed, and within an hour, someone called an emergency f2f meeting for on-site B&B contributors. Limpopo looked out her window and saw people grimly erecting a big spring-open tent they used when they had to shelter raw materials, while a bucket-brigade passed chairs from within the half-built B&B.

  One of the B&B’s game-changing tools was “lovedaresnot,” which they’d imported from a long-defunct *-leaks collective that imploded when its leadership got outed taking money from a media conglomerate to give it preferential access to stories. The leakers had had terrible leadership, but they had a good dispute-resolution system in lovedaresnot.

  The core idea was that radical or difficult ideas were held back by the thought that no one else had them. That fear of isolation led people to stay “in the closet” about their ideas, making them the “love that dares not speak its name.” So lovedaresnot (shortened to “Dare Snot”) gave you a way to find out if anyone else felt the same, without forcing you to out yourself.

  Anyone could put a question—a Snot Dare—up, like “Do you think we should turf that sexist asshole?” People who secretly agreed signed the question with a one-time key that they didn’t have to reveal unless a pre-specified number of votes were on the record. Then the system broadcast a message telling signers to come back with their signing keys and de-anonymize themselves, escrowing the results until a critical mass of signers had de-cloaked. Quick as you could say “I am Spartacus,” a consensus plopped out of the system.

  Poor Jackstraw hadn’t known what hit him. Dare Snot was widely publicized at the B&B, but Jackstraw lacked the humility to understand why you might use it, rather than just blamming out your Big Stupid Idea and trying to rally everyone to the barricades. There was a lot Jackstraw lacked the humility to understand. He was one of those people—almost all of them young men, though not every young man—who was so smart that he couldn’t figure out how stupid he was.