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The selfreps were nearly autonomous, and with proper programming, sufficient materials feed, and good troubleshooting, they rolled over evacuated portions of the shantytowns like enormous blimp hangars, leaving behind a new strip of buildings, whitewashed and impressively practical and homey. As the gigantic barns slowly grumbled over targeted neighborhoods, the hopeful residents cheered them on. That the barns themselves grew longer and longer in the process and finally split into two units went almost unremarked upon. It was an excellent tech and had built many a fine city-state in the asteroid belt and on the big moons of Jupiter. It had been a crucial component of the Accelerando, in fact.

But on Earth it wasn’t working out. The transformations involved were too great; there grew furious objections, often from elsewhere than the areas being renovated. Only if residents voted for the project by a very large majority would it happen in something close to concord, and it was best when they themselves were programming the selfrep AIs.

Then a selfrep in Uttar Pradesh was blown up; no one knew why. The state government that should have investigated refused to do so, and there were signs that they might even have supported the attack. News of the attack created copycat crimes; it would take only a few more to make the project collapse worldwide.

This made Swan furious. “They attacked us when we didn’t help, and now when we do,” she said bitterly.

Wahram, feeling uneasy as he watched her get more and more tightly wound, said, “Even so, we must persevere.”

It was happening all over Earth, Wahram saw on the screens; their restoration projects were getting tangled in dense networks of law and practice and landscape, and the occasional sabotage or accident didn’t help. One couldn’t change anything on Earth without several different kinds of mess resulting, some of them paralyzing. Every square meter of the Earth’s land was owned in several different ways.

In space it was different. On Venus if a single roomful of planners agreed, then you could blast most of the atmosphere into space. On Titan it was similar, around Jupiter the same; throughout the solar system massive terraforming projects were proceeding. Excavate ocean beds, change out atmospheres, heat up or chill things by hundreds of K… But not on Earth. In many places the selfreps were forbidden, even reviled.

No matter what they did, it seemed that the misery of the forgotten ones would keep pulling civilization down, like an anchor they had tied around their own neck. Terran elites would stay on top of an artificial Great Chain of Being until it snapped and everyone fell into the void. A pathetic Gotterdammerung, stupid and banal, and yet still horrible.

The prospect of that was making Swan angry. Wahram, more and more aware of her bitterness, more and more the target of her anger, watched her one morning abuse one of the Harare women who helped run their operation-saw the woman’s face as she was chastised-realized that if he stayed, he was going to end up crossing Swan in some catastrophic way, or simply not liking her. So that afternoon he excused himself, and the next day flew to America to join a Saturnian crew, newly arrived to help raise Florida back above the sea. On the day he left, Swan, distracted by some vexing problem of the moment, only waved him away like a mosquito.

F lorida had been an unusually low-lying peninsula, it turned out, with only a thin spine down the center of the state higher than the eleven-meter rise of the oceans. One could still see the state in outline from the air, as a dark reef under a shallow sea, a reef that still bled yellow into the slightly deeper waters around it. The skyscrapers of the Miami corridor had been occupied, like those in Manhattan and elsewhere, but by and large the state had had to be abandoned. However, as most of its soil was still there, topping the reef as a layer of mud that was not particularly damaged by inundation, the opportunity existed to scoop it up, then raise the rock foundation of the peninsula with rock trained down from the Canadian Rockies, and after that put the soil back in place on top of the newly raised bedrock platform.

In other words, it was like Greenland: one of the few places on Earth where terraforming could be performed without too much collateral damage. Naturally there were defendants of the new reefs and fishing grounds to protest, but they had been mollified or steamrolled, and the project approved in Atlanta and Washington, D.C., which itself existed in a polder behind a giant system of barrier dams on the Potomac. Washington’s vestigial but still powerful government, now itself located largely below sea level, was sympathetic to the idea of “raising Florida from the drowned.”