The Caryatids

Attention camps were built to house the planet's "displaced," which, in a climate crisis, could mean well nigh any person at almost any time. Attention camps were the cheapest and most effective way that the twenty-first century had yet invented to turn destitute people into agents of a general salvation.

Mljet was an experimental effort by a technical avant-garde, so its camps were small in scope compared with, say, the vast postdisaster slums of the ceaselessly troubled Balkans. So far, the island's camps held a mere fifteen hundred refugees, most in the little districts of Govedjari and Zabrijeze.

The refugees in Zabrijeze and Govedjari were among the wretched of the Earth, but with better tech support, they would transit through their unspeakable state to a state that was scarcely describable.

Herbert's newest campsite was a six-hectare patch of scalded, sloping bedrock that had once been an island dump. The dump had leaked toxins and methane, so it had been catalogued and obliterated.

Vera walked into the camp's humming nexus of construction cranes, communication towers, fabricators, heat-pump pipes, and bioactive sewage tanks.

Seen with the naked eye-she wore no helmet today-the camp was scattered around her like the toys of a giant child. Their arrangement looked surreal, nonsensical. It was only through the sensorweb that every object, possession, and mechanism found its proper destination. One might say that the new camp was systematically networked...or one might say, more properly, that the sensorweb was becoming a camp.

Vera stared through the camp's apparent confusion, out to sea. Morning on the Adriatic. How pure and simple that sea looked...Although, when Vera had learned analysis, she had come to see that the famous "Adriatic blue" was spectrally nuanced with cloudy gray, plankton green, mud brown, and reflective tints of sky; that apparently "simple and natural" blue emerged from a wild melange of changing cloud cover, solar angles, seasonal changes in salinity, floods, droughts, currents, storms, even the movements of the viewer...

The sea had no "real" blue. And the camp was no "real" camp. There was a melange of potent forces best described as "futurity." They were futuring here, and the future was a process, not a destination.

Feeling meek and frail without her helmet and boneware, Vera quietly slid into Herbert's saffron-colored tent. Herbert was shaving his head with one hand, eating his breakfast with another.

Herbert was ugly, red-faced, and in his early fifties. The dense meat of his stout body was as solid as a truck tire. He ran a buzzing shaver over his skull, which bore seven livid dents from his helmet's brain scanner.

Herbert's exoskeleton, bone-white, huge, and crouching in a powered support rack, filled almost half his modest tent. Vera's personal exoskeleton was a pride of the Acquis and had cost as much as a bulldozer, but Herbert's boneware was a local legend: when Herbert climbed within its curved and crooked rack, he wore full-scale siege machinery.

The burdens of administration generally kept Herbert busy, but when Herbert launched himself into direct action, he shook the earth. Herbert could tear up a brick house like a man breaking open a bread loaf; he could level a dead village like a one-man carnival.

Herbert smiled on her with unfeigned loving-kindness.

"Vera, it was kind of you to come so early. There have been some important developments, a new project. I've had to reassign you."

Vera's eyes welled up. "I knew you'd pull me out of that mine. I disgraced myself."

"Well, yes," Herbert admitted briskly. Naturally Herbert had read the neural reports from all the personnel on-scene. Everyone felt regret, unhappiness, embarrassment, shame..."Mining work is not your bliss, Vera. A mishap can happen to anyone."

There was a long, thoughtful silence.

People who had never worn boneware had such foolish ideas about brain scanners and what they did. Brain scanners could never read thoughts. Telepathy was impossible. That was a fairy tale.

Still, neural scanners were very good at the limited things that real-life scanners could do. Mostly, they read nerve impulses that left the brain and ran the body's muscles. That was why a neural scanner was part of any modern exoskeleton.

Brain scanners also read emotions. Emotions, unlike thoughts, lingered deep within the brain and affected the entire nervous system.

Grand passions were particularly strong, violent, and machine-legible.

Acquis neural scanners could easily read ecstasy and dread. Murderous fury. Pain and injury. Lassitude, grief, hatred, exaltation, bursting pride, bitter guilt, major depression, suicidal despair, instinctive loathing, sly deception, abject terror, burning resentment, a mother's love, and unstoppable tears of sympathy.