Backed into a different kind of corner.
What more could I have asked for?
PART TWO
9
The living, artificial island of Stateless was anchored to an unnamed guyot—a submerged, flat-topped, extinct volcano—in the middle of the South Pacific. At thirty-two degrees latitude, it lay outside the ocean resource zones of the Polynesian nations to the north, in uncontested international waters. (Laughable ambit claims by Antarctic squatters aside.) It sounded remote—but it was only four thousand kilometers from Sydney; a direct flight would have taken less than two hours.
I sat in the transit lounge in Phnom Penh, trying to unknot the muscles in the back of my neck. The air-conditioning was icy, but the humidity seemed to penetrate the building unchecked. I thought about wandering out into the city—which I’d never seen firsthand—but I only had forty minutes between flights, and it would probably have taken half that time to obtain the necessary visa.
I’d never understood why the Australian government was such a vehement supporter of the boycott against Stateless. For twenty-three years, successive Ministers of Foreign Affairs had ranted about its “destabilizing influence on the region"—but in fact it had acted to relieve tensions considerably, by accepting more Greenhouse refugees than any nation on the planet. And it was true that the creators of Stateless had broken countless international laws, and used thousands of patented DNA sequences without permission… but a nation founded by invasion and mass-murder (acts demurely regretted in a treaty signed two hundred and fifty years later) could hardly claim to be on higher moral ground.
It was clear that Stateless was being ostracized for purely political reasons. But no one in power seemed to feel obliged to make those reasons explicit.
So I sat in the transit lounge, stiff from a four-hour flight in the wrong direction, and tried to read the sections of Sisyphus’s physics lesson which I’d skimmed over the first time. They were highlighted in accusing blue, eyeball-track analysis gallingly right on every count.
At least two conflicting generalised measures can be applied to T, the space of all topological spaces with countable basis. Perrini’s measure [Perrini, 2012] and Saupe’s measure [Saupe, 2017] are both defined for all bounded subsets of T, and are equivalent when restricted to M—the space of n-dimensional para-compact Hausdorff manifolds—but they yield contradictory results for sets of more exotic spaces. However, the physical significance (if any) of this discrepancy remains obscure—
I couldn’t concentrate. I gave up, closed my eyes and attempted to doze off—but a siesta appeared to be biochemically impossible. I blanked my mind and tried to relax. Eventually, my notepad chimed and announced my connection to Dili—picking up the news from the room’s IR broadcast a few seconds before the multilingual audio began. I headed for the security gate—and, stepping through, recalled the scanner in Manchester, extracting poetry from a student’s brain. No doubt in twenty years’ time, weaponless hijackers would have their intentions exposed as easily as any explosive or knife. My passport file carried details of my suspicious internal anomalies, to reassure nervous security officials that I wasn’t wired to explode… and maybe people who were plagued by unwanted dreams of running amok at twenty thousand meters would need analogous certificates of innocuousness in future.
There were no flights to Stateless from Cambodia. China, Japan and Korea were all pro-boycott, so Cambodia fell into line with its major trading partners to avoid causing offense. As did Australia—but its enthusiastic punishment of the “anarchists” went above and beyond the call of realpolitik. There were flights from Phnom Penh to Dili, though, and from there I could finally reach my destination.
It was no mystery why Sydney-to-Dili was out of the question. After Indonesia annexed East Timor in 1976, they’d split the profits—the Timor Gap oilfields—with their silent partner, Australia. In 2036, with half a million East Timorese dead, and the oil wells irrelevant—hydrocarbons being molecules which engineered algae made from sunlight, in any shape and size, for a tenth of the cost of milk—the Indonesian government, under pressure more from its own citizens than from any of its allies, had finally, reluctantly acceded to demands for autonomy for the province of Timor Timur. Formal independence had followed in 2040. But fifteen years later, the lawsuits against the oil thieves still hadn’t been settled.
I boarded through the umbilical, and took my seat. A few minutes later, a woman in a bright red sarong and white blouse sat down beside me. We exchanged nods and smiles.
She said, “You wouldn’t believe the rigmarole I'm going through. Once in a blue moon my people hold a conference off the nets—and they had to choose the most difficult place in the world to reach.”
“You mean Stateless?”
She regarded me sympathetically. “You too?”
I nodded.
“You poor man. Where have you come from?”
“Sydney.”
Her accent was almost certainly Bombay but she said, “I'm from Kuala Lumpur. So you’ve had it worse. I'm Indrani Lee.”
“Andrew Worth.”
We shook hands. She said, “Of course, I'm not giving a paper myself. And the proceedings will be on-line the day after the conference finishes. But… if you don’t turn up, you miss all the gossip, don’t you?” She smiled conspiratorially. “People grow so desperate to talk off the nets knowing there’ll be no record, no audit trail. By the time each face-to-face meeting comes around, they’re ready to tell you all their secrets in five minutes. Don’t you find?”
“I hope so. I'm a journalist—I'm covering the conference for SeeNet.” A risky confession, but I wasn’t about to try imitating a TOE specialist.
Lee showed no obvious signs of disdain. The plane began its almost vertical ascent; I was in the cheap center aisle, but my screen showed Phnom Penh as it receded beneath us—an astonishing jumble of styles, from vine-covered stone temples (real and faux) to faded French colonial (ditto) to gleaming black ceramic. Lee’s screen began to display an emergency procedures audiovisual; my recent-enough spate of flights on identical planes qualified me for an exemption.
When the AV was over, I said, “Do you mind if I ask what your field is? I mean, TOEs, obviously, but which approach—?”
“I'm not a physicist. What I do is much closer to your own line of work.”
“You’re a journalist?”
“I'm a sociologist. Or if you want my full title: I study the Dynamics of Contemporary Ideas. So… if physics is about to come to an end, I thought I’d better be on hand to witness the event.”
“You want to be there to remind the scientists that they’re ’really just priests and story-tellers'?” I’d meant that as a joke—her own comment had been tongue-in-cheek, and I’d tried to match her tone—but my words came out sounding like an accusation.
She gave me a reproving glare. “I'm not a member of any Ignorance Cult. And I'm afraid you’re twenty years out of date if you think sociology is some kind of hotbed for Humble Science! or Mystical Renaissance. In academia, they’re all in the History Departments now.” Her expression softened to a kind of weary resignation. “We still get all the flak, though. It’s unbelievable: a couple of badly-framed studies from the nineteen eighties still get thrown in my face by medical researchers, as if I was personally responsible.”
I apologized; she waved the offense away. A robot trolley offered us food and drink; I declined. It was absurd, but the first leg of my zig-zag path to Stateless had left me feeling worse than any non-stop flight across the entire Pacific.