Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

The new Akron, built on the site of the leveled buildings, refused to be a graveyard. The people who’d flocked to it to rebuild after the army and the mercs and the guardsmen had joined returning locals to build new kinds of buildings, advanced refugee housing straight out of the UNHCR playbook, designed to use energy merrily when the wind blew or the sun shone, to hibernate the rest of the time. The multi-story housing interleaved greenhouses and hydroponic market-gardens with homes, capturing human waste for fertilizer and waste-water for irrigation, capturing human CO2 and giving back oxygen. They were practically space-colonies, inhabited by some of the poorest people in the world, who adapted and improved systems so many other poor people had improved over the disasters the human race had weathered. The hexayurt suburbs acted as a kind of transition-zone between default and the new kind of permanent walkaway settlement, places where people came and went, if they decided that Akron wasn’t for them.