Walkaway

Set in a near-future world where automation and extreme wealth inequality have rendered most people economically surplus, the novel follows a group of friends who abandon mainstream society, called "default," to join the "walkaways," people who leave behind jobs, money, and property to build self-sustaining communities in abandoned territories using open-source technology and gift economies.

Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Wilson Alva Anton Jeff Harley Timothy Curtis Cleveland Cecil Ollie Edmund Eli Wiley Marvin Ellis Espinoza, known as Hubert, Etc or Etcetera, attends a "Communist party," an illegal gift-economy rave in a derelict Toronto factory, with his friend Seth. These events repurpose abandoned industrial equipment to produce free goods, violating corporate trademarks. Etcetera meets Natalie Redwater, a young woman from one of Canada's wealthiest families. When police drones raid the party, a partygoer named Billiam suffers a fatal head injury, and Etcetera, Seth, and Natalie flee together. Natalie's father, Jacob Redwater, who tracks his daughter through purchased surveillance data, arrives the next morning and takes them to his estate. A heated debate follows: Natalie condemns inherited wealth as unearned, and Etcetera dismantles the "tragedy of the commons" argument, the idea that shared resources are inevitably ruined by selfish individuals, calling it a justification for concentrating public assets in private hands. By evening, what started as an intellectual exercise becomes a real plan, and the three decide to walk away from default for good.

The narrative shifts to Limpopo, a veteran walkaway who runs the Belt and Braces (B&B), a walkaway tavern on the Niagara Escarpment constructed using adapted UN refugee-camp software. She welcomes the three newcomers, who now use walkaway names: Natalie first calls herself Stable Strategies before later adopting Iceweasel, Seth begins as Gizmo von Puddleducks before being nicknamed Ducky, and Hubert, Etc keeps Etcetera. Limpopo explains walkaway philosophy: Abundance is a matter of perspective, and the gift economy works in practice even when it seems impossible in theory. She takes them to the B&B's communal Japanese-style baths, the onsen. When their belongings are stolen during the bath, Limpopo helps them fabricate replacements and explains that the community prefers being robbed to being surveilled.

Etcetera and Limpopo develop a romantic relationship. Jimmy, a former B&B member previously expelled for trying to install gamified contribution-tracking leaderboards, arrives with armed followers and seizes the building, imposing a reputation-based economy. Rather than fight, Limpopo leads the entire community in walking away to build something better, demonstrating the movement's core philosophy: People, not places, are what matter.

Months later, Iceweasel rides to the ruins of Walkaway University, a research campus on the Niagara Peninsula destroyed by a missile strike. She discovers a hidden underground campus in abandoned supercollider tunnels, where surviving researchers, including mathematician Gretyl and a scientist called Citizen Cyborg (CC), have achieved a breakthrough in digital consciousness uploading. A researcher named Dis, killed in the bombing, has been revived as a simulated consciousness running on a computer cluster, though her simulation periodically crashes in existential crises. Iceweasel becomes an intuitive "bot-whisperer," able to steer conversations with Dis to keep her stable. Dis eventually discovers a way to self-regulate, a generalizable advance that could allow anyone who has been brain-scanned to be brought back.

When two mercenaries infiltrate the campus, the community scans their brains and places them into "deadheading," a form of suspended animation. Tam, a trans woman who serves as the group's moral conscience, warns that scanning prisoners without consent makes them war criminals, but the community proceeds. Iceweasel and Gretyl grow closer through intellectual debates and physical attraction.

The survivors evacuate but are ambushed by hijacked construction mechas and military drones. A vintage zeppelin called The First Days of a Better Nation, crewed by walkaway aviators including Etcetera, arrives and shoots down the drones. CC is rescued but dies of his injuries. Back at the rebuilt B&B, Dis goes online as a popular digital presence, but attempts to revive CC's simulation fail.

While alone in the woods, Iceweasel is seized by camouflaged operatives and injected with a sedative. She wakes restrained in her father's panic room beneath the Redwater estate. Jacob attempts to deprogram her by presenting surveillance data on Limpopo's hidden influence within walkaway communities, framing walkaway egalitarianism as a lie. Dis infiltrates the panic room's outdated computer network and becomes Iceweasel's secret companion, though Iceweasel cannot determine whether this Dis is genuinely autonomous or a version controlled by her father. Iceweasel's mother, Frances, forces Jacob to remove the restraints, but he fits Iceweasel with a pain-inducing compliance bracelet.

Meanwhile, the walkaway refugees relocate to Thetford, an abandoned asbestos-contaminated mining town in Quebec, where space-colonization enthusiasts have built a sealed compound. Jimmy, now humbled and genuinely converted, arrives and raises an unsolved problem: Anyone who gains access to a person's brain scan could torture or impersonate them indefinitely. Coordinated military attacks strike walkaway settlements worldwide. When Canadian special forces attack Thetford, the walkaways evacuate, but Limpopo, Etcetera, and Jimmy fall behind. Soldiers murder Etcetera and Jimmy and kidnap Limpopo.

Iceweasel negotiates with Nadie, the Belarusian mercenary guarding her, offering her entire family trust fund in exchange for help escaping. Nadie arranges the legal transfer, and Dis opens a hidden escape tunnel from the panic room. Nadie hides Iceweasel for months in a walkaway factory, disguising her appearance, until the transfer is finalized and they part ways.

Limpopo is imprisoned in Kingston Prison for Women under a false name, spending more than fourteen years in captivity and enduring prolonged solitary confinement. Her captors demand her cryptographic pass-phrases to access walkaway networks, but she refuses.

Years later, the narrative reconvenes in Gary, Indiana, where an aging Seth, Tam, Gretyl, and Iceweasel have settled with Iceweasel and Gretyl's two sons, Jacob and Stan. Limpopo exists as two entities: the imprisoned flesh-and-blood woman and a simulated version running on the community's computers. Etcetera, brain-scanned before his death, also persists as a digital simulation. When the real Limpopo calls from Kingston, where the guards have walked away and the inmates have organized using walkaway principles, the group travels to visit her by zeppelin and bicycle, carrying Etcetera's simulation on a portable cluster. Limpopo refuses to leave the prison, insisting she has earned the place with fourteen years of her life.

Default forces assault the prison complex, but the walkaways counter by publicly exposing each cop's identity, locating walkaway relatives, and broadcasting personalized appeals through the prison speakers. Cops begin stripping off their armor and walking away. Jacob Redwater arrives at the prison to plead for access to Iceweasel, who has already escaped with the boys by helicopter. When hundreds of walkaways and deserting cops sit down between the prison and the remaining forces, the assault becomes untenable and the private security contractors withdraw.

In an epilogue set decades later, Iceweasel wakes in a new, young body. She had entered deadheading years earlier because of terminal cancer. Etcetera, also restored physically, explains that thirty years of research produced the technology to grow bodies and transfer consciousness into them. Gretyl died five years before but is expected to be restored soon. Their sons exist as distributed digital consciousnesses, mostly off-world. Both versions of Limpopo wait at a newly built B&B with an onsen. Etcetera leads Iceweasel to its door and tells her, "Welcome home."