I sat on my suitcase and rested for a while, then dutifully commenced recording. Whether the evacuation had been rehearsed or not, the island itself collaborated with the refugees so fully as they set up camp that the process looked more like the smooth slotting into place of missing components in an elaborate machine—the logical completion of a function the bare rock had always implied—than any kind of desperate attempt to improvise in an emergency. One tear-sized droplet of signaling peptide was enough to start the cascade which instructed the lithophiles to open a shaft to a buried freshwater artery—and by the time I’d seen the third pump installed, I’d learned to recognize the characteristic swirl of green-and-blue trace minerals which marked the sites where wells could be formed. Sewerage took a little longer—the shafts were wider and deeper, and the access points rarer.
This was the flipside of Ned Landers’ mad, tire-eating survivalist nightmare: autonomy-through-biotech, but without the extremism and paranoia. I only hoped that the founders and designers of Stateless— the Californian anarchists who’d worked for EnGeneUity all those decades ago—were still alive to see how well their invention was serving its purpose.
By noon, with royal blue marquees providing shade for the water pumps, bright red tents erected over the latrines, and even a rudimentary first-aid center, I believed I understood what the medic had meant when she’d warned me not to think that I knew better than the locals. I checked the damage map of the city; it was no longer being updated, but at the last recorded count, over two hundred buildings—including the hotel—had been leveled.
Maybe technoliberation could never transform the unforgiving rock of the continents into anything as hospitable as Stateless—but in a world accustomed to images of squalid refugee camps, choking on dust or drowning in mud… maybe the contrasting vision of the renegades’ village could still symbolize the benefits of an end to the gene patent laws, more persuasively than the island at peace ever had.
I recorded everything, and dispatched the footage to SeeNet’s news room with narration which I hoped would limit the perverse downside: the less dramatic the anarchists’ plight, the less chance there was of any grass roots political backlash against the invasion. I didn’t want to see Stateless discredited, with commentators tutting wisely that it had always been destined to slide into the abyss—but when it took a thousand corpses a day to raise a flicker of interest from the average viewer, if I painted too sanguine a picture the exodus would be a non-story.
The first truck from the coast which I sighted ran out of food long before it came near us. By three p.m., though, with the sixth delivery, two market tents had been set up near one of the water pumps and an ad hoc “restaurant” was under construction. Forty minutes later, I sat on a folding chair in the shade of a photovoltaic awning, with a bowl of steaming sea urchin stew on my lap. There were a dozen other people eating out, forced to flee without their own cooking equipment; they eyed my camera suspiciously, but admitted that, of course, there’d been plans for leaving the city—first drafted long ago, but discussed and refined every year.
I felt more optimistic than ever—and more out of synch with the mood of the locals. They seemed to be taking the success of the exodus (a small miracle, in my eyes) for granted—but now that they’d come through it unscathed, as they’d always expected, and were waiting for the mercenaries to make the next move, everything had become less certain.
“What do you think will happen in the next twenty-four hours?” I asked one woman with a small boy on her lap. She wrapped her arms around the child protectively, and said nothing.
Outside, someone roared with pain. The restaurant emptied in seconds. I managed to penetrate the crowd which had formed in the narrow square between the markets and the restaurant—and then found myself forced back as they drew away in panic.
A young Fijian man had been lofted meters above the ground by invisible machinery; he was wide-eyed with terror, crying out for help. He was struggling pitifully—but his arms hung at his sides, bloody and ruined, white bone protruding through the flesh of one elbow. The thing which had taken him was too strong to be fought.
People were wailing and shouting—and trying to force their way out of the crowd. I resisted too long, transfixed with horror, and I was shoved to my knees. I covered my head and crouched down, but I was still an obstacle to the stampede. Someone heavy tripped on me, jabbing me with knees and elbows, then leaning on me to regain his balance, almost crushing my spine. I cowered on the ground as the buffeting continued, wishing I could rise to my feet, but certain that any attempt would only see me knocked flat on my back and trampled in the face. The man’s desperate pleading was like a second rain of blows; I tucked my head deeper into my arms, trying to blot out the sound. Somewhere nearby, a tent wall collapsed gently to the ground.
Long seconds passed, and no one else collided with me. I raised my head; the square was deserted. The man was still alive, but his eyes were rolling up into his skull intermittently, his jaw working feebly. Both his legs had been shattered now. Blood trickled down onto his invisible torturer—each droplet halting in mid fall and spreading out for a moment, hinting at a tangible surface before vanishing into the hidden carapace. I searched the ground for my camera, emitting soft angry choking noises. My throat was knotted, my chest constricted; every breath, every movement felt like a punishment. I found the camera and attached it, then rose shakily to my feet and began recording.
The man stared at me in disbelief. He looked me in the eye and said, “Help me.”
I stretched a hand in his direction, impotently. The insect ignored me—and I knew I was in no danger, it wanted this to be seen—but I was giddy with rage and frustration, sweating cold stinking rivulets down my face and chest.
A delicate sheen of interference fringes raced over the robot’s form as it raised the man higher. The camera followed my gaze upward, until I knew it was framing only the broken body and the uncaring sky.
I heard myself bellowing, “Where’s the fucking militia now? Where are your weapons? Where are your bombs? Do something!”
The man’s head lolled; I hoped he’d lost consciousness. Invisible pincers snapped his spine, then flung him aside. I heard the corpse thud against the marquee above the water pumps, then slide to the ground.
The whole camp of ten thousand seemed to be wailing in my skull, and I was screaming incoherently, but I kept my eyes locked on the place where the robot had to be.
There was a loud scrabbling sound from the space in front of me. A sickening hush descended in the alleys around the square. The insect played with the light, sketching its own outline for us, in reef-rock gray against the heavens, in sky blue against the rock. The body hanging from its six upturned-V legs was long and segmented; a blunt restless head at each end swiveled curiously, sniffing the air. Four lithe tentacles slithered in and out of sheaths in the carapace, tipped with sharp claws.
I stood swaying in the silence, waiting for something to happen—for someone with a jacket full of plastic explosives to burst out of an alley and run straight at the machine in the hope of a kamikaze embrace… though ve would not have come within ten meters before being blasted back into the crowd to incinerate a dozen friends, instead.
The thing arched its body and raised a pair of limbs, spreading them wide in a gesture of triumph.
Then it lurched toward a gap between the tents, sending people tripping into the walls and frantically clawing at the fabric, trying to tear a way out of its path.