The Caryatids

Camp people badly needed reasons to be. Before being rescued by the Acquis, they'd been desolated. These city women, like many city women, had no children and no surviving parents. They'd been uprooted by massive disasters, fleeing the dark planetary harvest of droughts, fires, floods, epidemics, failed states, and economic collapse.

These women, blown across the Earth as human flotsam, were becoming pioneers here. They did well at adapting to circumstance-because they were women. Refugee women-women anywhere, any place on Earth-had few illusions about what it meant to be flotsam.

Vera herself had been a camp refugee for a while. She knew very well how that felt and what that meant. The most basic lesson of refugee life was that it felt bad. Refugee life was a bad life.

With friends and options and meaningful work, camp life improved. Then camp life somewhat resembled actual life. With time and more structure and some consequential opportunities, refugee life was an actual life. Whenever strangers became neighbors, whenever they found commonalities, communities arose. Where there were communities, there were reasons to live.

Camp user statistics proved that women were particularly good at founding social networks inside camps. Women made life more real. Men stuck inside camps had a much harder time fending off their despair. Men felt dishonored, deprived of all sense and meaning, when culture collapsed.

Refugee men trapped in camp thought in bitter terms of escape and vengeance. "Fight or flight." Women in a camp would search for female allies, for any means and methods to manage the day. "Tend and befriend."

So: In a proper modern camp like this one, the social software was designed to exploit those realities.

First, the women had to be protected from desperate male violence until a community emerged. The women were grouped and trained with hand tools.

The second wave of camp acculturation was designed for the men. It involved danger, difficulty, raw challenge, respect, and honor, in a bitter competition over power tools. It acted on men like a tonic.

Like any other commons-based peer-production method, an Acquis attention camp improved steadily with human usage. Exploiting the spex, the attention camp tracked every tiny movement of the user's eyeballs. It nudged its everyware between the users and the world they perceived.

Comparing the movements of one user's eyeballs to the eyeballs of a thousand other users, the system learned individual aptitudes.

A user who was good with an ax would likely be good with a water saw. A user quick to learn about plants could quickly learn about soil chemistry and hydrology. Or toxicity. Or meteorology. Or engineering. Or any set of structured knowledge that the sensorweb flung before the user's eyes.

The attention camp had already recorded a billion things that had caught the attention of thousands of people. It preserved and displayed the many trails that human beings had cut through its fields of data. The camp was a search engine, a live-in tutoring machine. It was entirely and utterly personal, full of democratically trampled roads to human redemption. By design, it was light, swift, glorious, brilliant.

Vera had spent time in attention camps. So had Karen. This initiation was required of all the Acquis cadres on Mljet. At first, they'd been bewildered. Soon they had caught on. Within a matter of weeks, they were adepts. Eventually, life became elite.

The graduates of Mljet attention camps lived in boneware; they'd become human power tools.

"The camp people are happier today," judged Karen, consulting her faceplate.

Vera shrugged. It was prettier weather. Better weather was always better for morale.

Karen flexed her slender arms within their bony pistons. "I'll knock down that big patch of casuarina. Watch them worshipping me."

"Don't be such a glory hog, Karen."

"It takes five minutes!" Karen protested.

"Karen, you need to cultivate a more professional perspective. This is not an entertainment. Neural scanning and ubiquitous mediation are our tools. An attention camp is a trade school."

Karen stared down at her from the towering heights of her boneware. "Listen to you talking like that," she said. "You're so nervous about that rich banker, and his kid is driving you wild."

MLJET'S TINY GROUP of Dispensation people were a discreet minority on the island. They'd been living on Mljet since the project's first days.

The Dispensation people were a tolerated presence, an obscure necessity, imposed through arrangements high above. They never made any fuss about themselves or their odd political convictions.

Now, however, those quiet arrangements were visibly changing in character. The local Dispensation activists were highly honored by the visit of Montalban and his daughter. Their leader, and Montalban's official host on the island, was Mljet's archaeologist: good old Dr. Radic.