The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [40]
So the women were indeed talking, exchanging their names and some private bits and pieces of their broken lives. And one humble woman said, in her meek yet hopeful little voice, that maybe the lost island of Mljet could be redeemed someday. Maybe (said another woman) by “sensorwebs.”
“Sensorwebs” were a foreign idea these women knew practically nothing about, but they’d heard that word and knew that webs were supposed to be important and powerful. There, in the midst of their loss, hungry and wounded and drowning in woe, that was their straw of hope.
Vera knew better. Because she’d grown up in a seething, private bunker full of webs and sensors. Vera knew about event streams, burst rates, delta-change criteria, glitches, and collisions. Ubiquity had been installed in their bunker, as their nanny, and their spy, and their crèche, and their test bed for tomorrow’s superwomen: a nest of clones, who, just like their mother, would hunger always to put the world to rights.
And, inside that wicked fairy tale, that black deception of false righteousness, they had grown up, believing that it was manifest destiny. While it was nothing of the kind. It was a snare, a delusion, a monstrosity.
So Vera had lost her senses.
She screamed at the startled women that it made no sense to cover the world with scanners and sensors, unless you also had scanners for the heads of the evil fools who had wrecked the world in the first place. Vera did not know why she had to scream that, except that she felt it, and it was the truth.
The truth, of course, caused a big, hateful commotion among all the women, who screamed back at her and scolded her for talking that way … but then something strange happened. Some Acquis person, most likely a woman, had been watching the proceedings on the web.
For some reason, maybe a deep, tender sympathy, maybe some bureaucratic quirk, this woman had web-searched ideas … busily exploring and linking tags and concepts, correlating things and events, “refugees,” “reconstruction,” “sensors,” “brain scanners.”
Somehow, from the tangled glassy depths of global webdom, up popped some Australians, busily losing their own fierce battle to save their island continent. These distant Australians, so painfully familiar with refugee camps, knew a lot about scanners, neural tech, and heavy machinery.
World-spanning, instant connectivity was the stuff of being for a global civil society. So, somewhere up in the Acquis administrative stratosphere, cogwheels turned, galactic and distant.
Six weeks later, Vera found herself meeting Herbert Fotheringay, an Australian geoengineer.
A small Acquis neural corps was formed to redeem Mljet. Vera thought that Herbert had done that, while Herbert had always said that she had inspired it.
Now, sitting years later in the sagging deck chair in an old boat with the island sinking into darkness, Vera knew that no single person had ever done that. Mljet was a web of emerging technologies, around which people accreted.
Nothing much had been “invented” on Mljet. The brain scanners, the attention tracking, the neural software, the social software inside the camps, the sensors, the everyware, the communal property, even the heavy-duty exoskeletons—they all had years of development behind them, somewhere else.
The one innovation was the way they’d been brought to life by people willing to believe in them, wanting to believe in them.
Herbert had always claimed that she, Vera, had “inspired” his efforts. Maybe. There was no way for any woman to deny that she had “inspired” a man. It was true that she had been a girl in distress, demanding rescue.
What if a man came to the rescue? What if an army came? What if the army launched a thousand ships? What if they won? What then?
“You’re very lost in your own thoughts,” he said tenderly.
“I am,” she