Distress

Some three hours' slow march from the city, I caught sight of a multi-colored blur in the distance, which soon resolved itself into a vast patchwork of vivid green and orange squares, scattered across the rock a few kilometers ahead. We'd just left the central plateau behind, and the ground now sloped gently down all the way to the coast; whether it was that modest gradient, or the end of the march coming into view, the going seemed suddenly easier. Thirty minutes later, the people around me stopped and began to pitch their own tents.

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 I checked the damage map of the city; it was no longer being updated, but at the last recorded count, over two hundred buildings—including the hotel—had been leveled.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.