Distress

I said, "Plan A is to hope very hard that they're answering the phones. Because I really don't want to have to walk into the airport and negotiate in person."

Most of the island's center still appeared untouched by the invasion— but four streets away from the airport, everything changed. There were no barricades, no warning signs—and no people at all. It was early evening, and the streets behind me were abuzz, with shops and restaurants open for business just five hundred meters from the occupied buildings—but once I'd crossed that invisible line, it was as if Stateless had suddenly given birth to its own Ruins, an imitation in miniature of the dead hearts of the net-slain cities.

There were no bullets flying, this was not a war zone, but I had no experience to guide me, no idea of what to expect. I'd kept away from battlefields; I'd chosen science journalism happy in the knowledge that I'd never be required to film anything more dangerous than a bioethics conference.

The entrance to the passenger terminal was a wide rectangle of blackness. The sliding doors lay ten meters away, in fragments. Windows had been broken, plants and statues scattered; the walls were strangely scarred, as if something mechanically clawed had scaled them. I'd hoped for a sentry, signs of order, evidence of a coherent command structure. This looked more like a gang of looters were waiting in the darkness for someone to wander in.

I thought: Sarah Knight would have done this—for the story alone.

Yeah. And Sarah Knight was dead.

I approached slowly, scanning the ground nervously, wishing I hadn't told Sisyphus fourteen years before to lose all junk mail from weapons manufacturers looking for technophile journalists to provide free publicity for their glamorous new anti-personnel mines. Then again… there'd probably been no helpful tips in those media releases for avoiding being on the receiving end—short of spending fifty thousand dollars on the matching sweepers.

The interior of the building was pitch black, but the floodlights outside bleached the reef-rock white. I squinted into the maw of the entrance, wishing I had Witness to rejig my retinas. The camera on my right shoulder was virtually weightless, but it still made me feel skewed and misshapen—about as comfortable, centered, and functional as if my genitals had migrated to one kneecap. And—irrationally or not—the invisible nerve taps and RAM had always made me feel shielded, protected. When my own eyes and ears had captured everything for the digital record, I'd been a privileged observer right up to the moment of being disemboweled or blinded. This machine could be brushed off like a speck of dandruff.

I'd never felt so naked in my life.

I stopped ten meters from the empty doorway, arms stretched out and hands raised. I yelled into the darkness: "I'm a journalist! I want to talk!"

I waited. I could still hear the crowds of the city behind me, but the airport exuded silence. I shouted again. And waited. I was almost ready to give up fear for embarrassment; maybe the passenger terminal was abandoned, the mercenaries had set up camp on the farthest corner of the runway, and I was standing here making a fool of myself to no one.

Then I felt a gentle stirring of the humid air, and the blackness of the entrance disgorged a machine.

I flinched, but stood my ground; if it had wanted me dead, I would never have seen it coming. The thing betrayed a flickering succession of partial outlines as it moved—faint but consistent distortions of the light which the eye seized upon as edges—but once it halted, I was left staring at nothing but afterimages and guesswork. A six-legged robot, three meters high? Actively computing my view of its surroundings, and programming an optically active sheath to match luminosities? No—more than that. It stood protruding halfway into the floodlit forecourt, without even casting a shadow—which meant it was realtime holographing the blocked light sources, its polymer skin lasing out a perfectly matched substitute beam, wavefront by wavefront. I had a sudden, sickening realization of what the people of Stateless were facing. This was alpha military tech, costing millions. EnGeneUity weren't messing around with cheap aggravation, this time. They wanted their intellectual property back, product reputation unscathed—and anything which stood above the reef-rock would be cut down if it got in the way.

The insect said, "We've already chosen the journalists' pool, Andrew Worth. You're not on the invasion hit parade." It spoke English, perfectly inflected right down to a hint of amusement, but with an unnerving geographical neutrality. Whether its speech was autonomous, or whether I was talking real-time to the mercenaries—or their PR people—I had no idea.

"I don't want to cover the war. I'm here to offer you a chance to avoid some… undesirable publicity."