Bruce Sterling - The Caryatids

Vera knew that the Dispensation feared Acquis attention camps. The Dispensation had their own camps, of course, but not attention camps—and besides, the Dispensation never called them “refugee camps,” but used smoothly lying buzzwords such as “new housing projects,” “enter­tainment destinations,” and “sustainable suburbs.”

Attention camps were a particularly brilliant Acquis advance in human rehabilitation. So the other global civil society glumly opposed them. That was typical of the struggle. The Dispensation dug in their heels about advanced Acquis projects that couldn’t fit their crass, mate­rialist philosophy. They scared up popular scandals, they brought their “soft-power” pressure… They were hucksters with all kinds of tricks.

A bluebottle fly buzzed Vera’s bare face—the pests were bad in sum­mer. No, she wouldn’t attack Montalban and evict him while wearing her armor. That was a stupid emotional impulse, not coolheaded diplo­macy. Vera had limited experience outside Mljet, but she was an Acquis officer. The word got around inside the corps. There were professional ways to handle bad situations like this. Annoying and slow ways, but pro­fessional ways.

When some Dispensation snoop showed up at an Acquis project to “verify,” the sophisticated tactic was to “counterverify.” Fight fire with fire. The big operators handled it that way. She could watch whatever Montalban did, watch him like a hawk. Stick to him like glue, be very “helpful” to him, help him to death. Get in his way; interfere; quibble, quibble, quibble; work to rules; mire him in boring procedures. Make a passive-aggressive pest of herself.

There was certainly no glory in that behavior. Spying on people was the pit of emotional dishonesty. Itwas likely to make her into the shame of the camp. Vera Mihajlovic: the spy. Everyone would know about it, and how she felt about it.

Yet someone had to take action. Vera resolved to do it.

Through handing her this difficult assignment, Herbert was testing her again. Herbert knew that her troubled family past was her biggest flaw as an officer. He knew that her dark past limited her, that it harmed her career potential in the global Acquis. Herbert had often warned her that her mediated knowledge of the world was deep, yet too narrow. By never leaving Mljet, she had never outgrown her heritage.

Herbert’s tests were hard on her, but never entirely unfair. Whenever she carried the weight of those burdens, she always grew stronger.

VERA SHARED HER BARRACKS with sixty-two other Acquis cadres. Their rose-pink, rectangular barracks was a warm, supportive, comforting environment. It had been designed for epidemic hunters.

These rapid-deployment forces, the shock troops of the global civil societies, pounced on contagious diseases emerging around the world. The medicos were particularly well-equipped global workers, thanks to the dreadful consequences of their failures. This meant they left behind a lot of medical surplus hardware: sturdy, lightweight, and cheap.

So Vera’s barracks was a foamy puff of pink high-performance fabric, perched on struts on a slope above the breezy Adriatic gulf. Out in the golden haze toward distant Italy, minor islets shouldered their way from the ocean like the ghosts of Earth’s long-extinct whales.

Nearby, the derelict village of Pomena had been scraped up and briskly recycled, while its old harbor was rebuilt for modern shipping. A vast, muscular Acquis crane, a white flexing contraption like a giant arm, plucked cargo containers from the ferries at the dock. Then the huge crane would simply fling that big shipping box, with one almighty, unerring, overhand toss, far off into the hills, where nets awaited it and cadres in boneware would unpack and distribute the goods.

Next to the docks sat a squat, ratcheting fabricator, another pride of the Acquis. This multipotent digital factory made tools, shoes, struts, bolts, girders, spare parts for boneware—a host of items, mostly jet­spewed from recycled glass, cellulose, and metal.

Karen suddenly towered over Vera’s cot, an apparition still wearing boneware from the toxin mine, ticking and squeaking. “Are you sad? You look so sad, lying there.”

Vera sat up. “Aren’t you on shift?”

“They’re fabbing new parts for my drill,” Karen said. “Down in that mine, they’re so sorry about the way they treated you. I gave them all such a good talking-to about their insensitivity.”

“I had a hard brainstorm. That was a bad day for me, all my fault, I’m sorry.”

“It’s hard work,” said Karen. “But the way you ran up your favorite hill afterward, to feel your way through your crisis… ? Your rapport with this island was so moving and deep! Your glory is awesome this morning. It’s because you find so much meaning in the work here, Vera. We’re all so inspired by that.”

“Herbert gave me a new assignment.”

Karen made a sympathetic face. “Herbert is always so hard on you. I’ll power down now. You tell me all about it. You can cry if you want.”

“First can you find me a toenail clipper?”

Karen stared through her faceplate at the thousands of tagged items infesting their barracks. Karen found a tiny, well-worn community clip­per in twenty seconds. Karen was a whiz at that. She commenced climb­ing out of her bones.

As Karen recharged her bones, Vera picked at her footsore toes and scowled at the bustling Acquis barracks. New cadres were graduating from the attention camps almost every week. They bounded proudly over the island in their new boneware, each man and woman heaving and digging with the strength of a platoon—but inside their warm pink barracks, their bones and helmets laid aside, they flopped all over each other like soft-shelled crabs.

The cadres shaved scanner patches on their skulls. They greased their sores and blisters. They griped, debriefed, commiserated, joked, wept. It often looked and sounded like a madhouse.

These were people made visible from the inside out, and that visibil­ity was changing them. Vera knew that the sensorweb was melting them inside, just as it was melting the island’s soil, the seas, even the skies…

Karen returned from her locker, swaying in her pink underwear. Karen had a sweet, pleasant, broad-cheeked face under the shaven spots in her black hair. Karen’s sweetness was more in her sunny affect than in the cast of her features. Karen’s ancestors were European, South Asian, African… Karen was genetically globalized.

Karen’s family had been jet-setting sophisticates from upper-class Nairobi, until their city had imploded in the climate crisis. Australia: A very bad story, the world’s most vulnerable continent for climate change. India, China—always so crowded, so close to epic human disasters— catastrophic places. Yet disaster always somehow seemed worse in Africa. There was less attention paid to people like Karen, their plight always fell through the cracks. One would think that African sophisticates didn’t even exist.

Karen had lost everyone she knew. She had escaped the bloody ruin of her city with a single cardboard suitcase.

Some Acquis functionary had steered Karen toward Mljet. That de­cision had suited Karen. Today, Karen was an ideal Acquis neural so­cialite. Because Karen was a tireless chatterer, always deep into everybody else’s business. Yet Karen never breathed a word about her painful past, or anyone else’s past, either. Vera liked and trusted her for that.

Life inside an Acquis brain scanner had liberated Karen. She’d ar­rived on the island so bitterly grieved that she could barely speak, but the reformed Karen was a very outgoing, supportive woman. She was even a brazen flirt.

“The boss never treats you like a woman should be treated around here,” Karen told her. “I have something that will change your mood, though.” Karen handed over a box with a handwritten card and a curly velvet ribbon.