The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [12]
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 jet-spewed 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