by PJ Manney
“And what’s the captain’s name again?” asked Tom 1.
Gottbetter grinned with big white teeth. “That’s Captain Anonymous to you, Dreamboat! Can’t get me with that one. He pays me.”
Inside, the ship looked remarkably like a hospital, down to the linoleum floors; sound-paneled ceilings; and clever wall-mounted storage and deployment solutions, portable imaging machines, and operating tables. But the ceilings were lower, barely eight feet high, to accommodate as many floors, beds, and operating rooms as possible inside the ship’s frame.
They continued up metal stairs and met the captain in a small, spartan conference room off the bridge, painted the same dull white as the rest of the ship and strangely bare. He could see pinholes on the wall that might once have held thumbtacks. And an empty bookcase.
“Captain,” said Tom 1, “thank you for taking me to the Meropis with you.” Meropis was the mythical island invented by Theopompis of Chios as a parody of Plato’s Atlantis. According to the ancient Greek writer, life there was bigger, crazier, and more contradictory than the utopian perfection of Atlantis, like an ancient Athenian’s idea of Texas.
“The right money talks. Especially now,” said Captain.
“When will we get there?” asked Tom 1.
“A day,” said Captain. “Give or take.”
Major Tom had already calculated their arrival to be in 23.4 hours. Captain was not giving anything away.
“And what exactly will you be doing there?” asked Tom 1.
“We got messages that they were attacked. Pirates. There are survivors, but no more food, medical supplies, or working medical equipment. We’re there to pick the survivors up and care for them.”
“And when and where exactly did you receive the messages?”
“A week ago,” said Captain.
“Captain,” said Tom 1, “I understand the necessity of your secrecy, both politically and as medical personnel. But I’m here to play a bigger game, and the more I know, the more I might help you, too. And maybe prevent more of these attacks.”
Gottbetter shared a look with his captain. “Cap, he’s got a point.”
The captain got up and began pacing. He looked out the only small window. Tom 1 could tell he wasn’t made for quiet reflection and felt claustrophobic in the small room. “We were still off Lima, Peru, providing care offshore after the food riots. Local hospitals had been looted and burned. No supplies. Doctors in hiding, trying to survive. Complete disaster.” The captain’s face reflected the tragedy he had witnessed. “Before that, we were providing abortions off the coast of Brazil. Women die there all the time from dangerous pregnancies and self-abortions. With no birth control, they’re saddled with sick or dying children. We had a ship full of desperate women. Wish we could have taken them with us.”
“Why didn’t you?” asked Tom 1.
“Brazil threatened us with kidnapping charges and a declaration of war,” said Captain. “Said they’d fire on us if we tried.”
“Don’t seasteads provide abortions?” asked Tom 1.
“Too far away and still expensive. Women need vessels and fuel money to get there. And most seasteads are profit-centers. Rich women can always get the medical attention they need. Poor women can’t.”
“And Meropis still needs you after all this time?” asked Tom 1. “Aren’t you worried there will be no one left?”
“We hope we can help save some survivors,” said Captain. “Regardless, they’re finished. We’re the cleanup crew. And I don’t understand how you can help.”
“I think I know who’s attacking the seasteads. It’s a single group. Since the Sovereign and others were destroyed and sunk, I need any evidence that remains to confirm it. The Meropis is the most likely to give it to me. Only then do we have a hope of stopping more atrocities like these. And making less work for you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Precisely 23.4 hours later, the hospital ship made anchor next to the Meropis. Until the last few weeks, seasteads numbered in the hundreds around the globe. Some were close to national shores and in cooperation with their local governments. Others, far out at sea, were independent. These were the victims of recent attacks.
Seasteads attracted the same people who, for hundreds of years, had immigrated to the New World: the restless, persecuted, ambitious, subjugated, antisocial, antigovernment, dreamers, builders, and wanderers of every stripe. Seasteads were the new frontier, where pioneers could try out or reboot political systems, economic and business models, and lifestyles. None was big enough to prove that any particular model would work once it was replicated at a large enough scale, but that didn’t stop the experimentation.
Unlike the Sovereign, which was a self-contained, fully functional, permanent facility and community, Meropis was an “archipelago” of attached and semiattached vessels, changeable by design. A central core provided power, desalinated water, IT support, computing power, and first aid, but the rest was essentially building blocks at sea. Participants could motor or sail their vessel in, then join or leave. Ships and barges could link to specially built midocean anchorages. Seasteaders who bought matching modular units could join them to the larger modular community. It was a quirky, do-it-yourself, libertarian’s wet dream, the central facilities owned and operated by a core group of investors as a profit-making venture. Who came and went, and what they did while they were there, was completely up to the individual vessels’ owners.
As a reasonably successful Pacific seastead, they were busy. Beyond cryptocurrency and blockchain generation, they produced generic and custom pharmaceuticals, away from nations’ pharma bureaucracies. Algae farms produced biofuel. Servers for meshnet-based economic markets innovated outside of government regulations. Meropis also functioned as a tax haven for companies whose addresses could change with the hoisting of an anchor. If neighbors’ disagreements were intractable, aggrieved parties were urged to pick up their toys and find more hospitable waters. Meropis represented only one of a few successful archipelago arrangements afloat. None of the ad hoc ventures grew too large for too long, though. Dunbar’s Number postulated that the members of any community larger than 100–250 ceased to know one another directly, and so social pressure could not exert enough force to encourage fair dealing. If you couldn’t trust someone you didn’t know, they probably didn’t trust you, either. Good faith was hard to scale. When groups grew too large, governments, “trusted” middlemen, or verification systems like blockchains came in to recreate trust. Those already attracted to such an independent lifestyle were averse to notions of bureaucratic oversight or law enforcement. So there was no authority, for better and for worse.
Unfortunately, despite the connectivity of seemingly endless social media, humans still had neolithic brains. Seasteads worked if the ’steaders cared about their immediate tribe. And the Meropis was a tribe, though there wasn’t much of it left.
The reconnaissance dinghy from the Savior approached the Meropis. On board, Tom 1, Gottbetter, Captain, and a triage doctor named Joanne took in the destruction. Only two ships floated at an attached anchor. The first was a 174-foot ketch motor-sailor yacht, with Independent painted on its stern. Once a famous luxury craft worth about $100 million, its two masts, booms, all its rigging, and most of the top deck were gone. The other was a large ocean barge retrofitted with prefab buildings atop it, but it now looked like a floating, blackened brick with a drizzling of burnt wreckage.
They motored to the central core, careful to be as quiet as possible. Tom 1 saw no sign of survivors at the surface, and no bodies. He assumed they had been dumped overboard, or taken by the sea or its animals. At the central hub, Gottbetter jumped off the boat to lash the dinghy to an exposed beam of a partially wrecked dock. Captain helped the robot out of the boat and he, Joanne, and Gottbetter grabbed a bunch of duffel and tech bags, including medical kits, Tom 1’s backpack, and portable emergency supplies. Tom 1 still didn’t have reliable sea legs, although he was learning. They stood arou
nd a locked metal door, which they suspected would lead down into the central underwater core of the facility.
Picking up a piece of loose, twisted metal, Captain used it to knock on a sealed metal hatch. The rhythm was —.—.— —.—, the international Morse code for “calling.” He did it again. No response. Then a third time. And a fourth.
Joanne, her triage kits loaded on her back, looked worried. “Cap, we could be too late.”
They heard scraping of metal on metal from behind the door. The great bolt moved, and the hatch swung open slowly. A shaking, emaciated hand emerged, holding a gun. Tom 1 could see the safety was off, and the trigger finger was too twitchy not to be a threat.
Captain spoke calmly and quickly, “Code name, Deliverance. I’m the captain of the Savior. Permission to come aboard and begin patient transport.”
The gun trembled in place for a moment, then lowered and disappeared. The door opened wide, and a young man emerged, midtwenties, with long brown hair and a long beard, shirtless and barefoot, wearing only filthy, ripped jeans and a furious visage.
“Took you long enough!” the survivor barked at them.
“We did the best we could,” said Captain. “How many of you are there?”
“Down to fourteen. We had three more die after we called you,” said the survivor.
“I am truly sorry,” Captain said. He nodded to Gottbetter, who stepped aside and contacted the ship to send more medical staff and a larger transport for the patients. The dinghy would hold only six beyond themselves.
The young man saw Tom 1 for the first time. “What the fuck is that?”
Captain deadpanned, “Wish I knew. But he’s here to help. What’s your name?”
“Tanner Delaney.”
“Thank you for your help, Tanner. Can you lead us to them?” asked Captain.
They descended into the bowels of the platform. This seastead design relied on old oil-platform technologies, paired with new sustainable-energy generation from sun and waves. Like many seasteads, it was built like an iceberg: a tiny bit exposed on top, much more space below. The steps were covered in debris. It was dark, so they lit their bodylamps on their hats and vests. Tom 1 couldn’t smell, but by all the decomposition of sea life and possible human remains, he assumed it would have reeked. Captain, Joanne, and Gottbetter seemed inured to it, although Gottbetter squinted.
“Elevators are out,” said Tanner. “Too dangerous. We have to carry them up. Shut down all unnecessary systems. There’s a little power that’s reliable since the batteries were damaged. Today’s okay, lots of sun and current, but we try to use only what’s needed for survival.”
Fifty feet below the surface, they reached a reinforced metal door. Tanner knocked in a code. The door unlocked and opened.
Inside it must have smelled even worse. Tom 1 saw Gottbetter involuntarily recoil and wrinkle his nose. Captain remained unaffected and resolute. Joanne rushed in to assess the patients.
There were thirteen men and women locked inside. A thirty-something man in a bloody T-shirt that read Why not me? was missing his right arm at the bicep, its tourniquet black-red from blood loss. He looked sweaty and gray in pallor. A younger woman had her head wrapped in bloody gauze. Her breath came haltingly, and her eyes looked vacant. Others had a variety of wounds that would prove equally fatal if they didn’t get care soon. Six survivors seemed functional, moving about, tending the others. A woman in her forties, who if she hadn’t been as filthy as Tanner would have looked like a Silicon Valley executive on a tropical vacation, complete with floral print dress, came forward quickly.
“Are you doctors?” she asked.
Joanne said, “I am. And he’s an aide.” She pointed to Gottbetter. “And there’s several more coming in a few minutes.”
“I think she needs help first,” she said, pointing to the woman with the head wound.
Tom 1 gently touched Tanner on the shoulder and gestured to him to talk privately. “Do you know who did this?”
“Who the fuck do you think? Pirates!”
Tom 1 walked him slowly away from the patients. “Shhh . . . What did they take?”
“Fuck knows! They tried to kill us all.”
“Is there anyone here who’s IT?” asked Tom 1.
Tanner tried hard to hold back tears. “Just me. Toni died a week ago. Amir died in the attack.”
“While the Savior crew evacuates your friends, can you take me to your hub?”
“It’s dead. No communications in or out.”
“Can it be powered up?” asked Tom 1.
“The core, yes, but to nothing. Transmitter is gone.”
Tom 1 was both surprised and excited. “I just need to access your hard drives and servers.”
“But—”
“Please. I’m trying to help figure out who did this so we can stop them.”
Tanner stared blankly, as if he had finally lost his mind. After all the death and destruction he’d witnessed, he was arguing with a robot. He leaned against the steel wall, as though he might faint.
Tom 1 reached out to steady him. “We can do this. Just take it slow.”
Trudging through dark corridors and staircases lit only by Tom 1’s bodylamps, Tanner let them into a large compartment with monitors and servers. The server farm was not here. It was in a separate compartment further down, cooled by pipes of icy seawater. Some of these communities could be amazingly low-tech, but as Ruth always said, the older and simpler ways were often best. Too complex a system could fall apart without the means to repair it.
He wondered what that meant for his future.
“I need you to direct power back to the system,” said Tom 1. “Can you do that?”
“Yeah, but you won’t have power for long,” said Tanner. He went to the wall of switches and breakers.
“Don’t need it long. We’ll all be out of here soon.”
Tanner’s last bit of willpower finally left him, and he slid down the steel wall into a fetal heap on the floor.
“Are you okay?” asked Tom 1.
“Am I hallucinating?” asked Tanner.
Tom 1 continued to work. “What do you see?”
“A robot operating my trashed system?”
“Not hallucinating,” said Tom 1. “There are energy bars in the front zipper of my bag. Please eat.”
Tanner had no strength to disobey. Between mouthfuls, he asked, “Why do you have food? You don’t eat, do you?”
“No, I don’t. But my human friends do.”
Major Tom dove into the data on the monitor, searching for patterns, signs, clues. He found plenty of sequestered and malware-ridden files for cryptocurrencies, identity, and the complete history of the seastead. They contained hideous viruses designed to download and send all data to a hidden source. Tom 1 visually cataloged all he could. Unlike the Sovereign, this facility didn’t have enough cryptocurrency or identity clientele for the “pirates” to keep up the appearance of its continuing to operate.
Among the data, he found sequences, commands, protocols, and malware that could have been the same as what Dr. Who would have dealt with on the Sovereign. Security camera footage showed the attack from the Meropis’s point of view, with a waterspout, laser lightning, and a microboat swarm, just like the Sovereign, except that the attackers hadn’t killed all the occupants. The mercenaries had disabled the seastead enough to copy files, infect the hell out of the IT, and ruin satellite communications. Then they left the Meropis—and its survivors—to rot in the Pacific. Their mistake was leaving an old-school hobbyist’s HAM radio transmitter intact in a seasteader’s bedroom. The survivors had used it to send the SOS received by the Savior. They should have been discovered for sending a signal, but few paid any attention to HAM radios anymore. Luckily, ships like the Savior still maintained fully operational radio rooms for this type of emergency.
Tom 1’s eyes recorded what he needed to send back to the team for analysis. But he was looking for something more. He found a verbal conversat
ion recorded moments before the seastead was destroyed. It sounded similar to what Dr. Who had described. And he recognized both voices.
“Tanner,” he said, “you took a call before the attack. What do you remember?”
“That guy was a total asshole,” Tanner said. “Wanted to do business. But so stuck up and full of himself. I only figured he was trying to distract me when it was too late.”
The other voice was Carter’s, and Tom 1 had the distinct feeling that he was meant to find it.
But why, with the valuable Dr. Who captured from the Sovereign, would they hit all the seasteads? The only threats that seastead culture posed were decentralization, a renewal of nanomanufacturing, lack of regulations, and a belief in the value of individuals over nations. But the movement was still scattered around the globe, on a much smaller scale than nation-states, so what or whom could the seasteads threaten? How were they worth all this coordinated killing and destruction?
Tom 1 sent a message to Captain’s GO: After this, I’ll arrange to leave you. Your money is in the account, but I’ve quadrupled it for additional food and supplies. There will be more midocean seasteads attacked, especially if they’re run by Westerners. They may all be hit by now. If there are survivors, they’ll need help. I’m sending you the coordinates and contact information. If you need anything else, let me know.
On it, replied Captain. And thank you for caring.
Tom 1 added, Thank you, Captain. And good luck. We’re all going to need it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
A crate marked Companibots had made its way onto a container ship headed from Los Angeles to the Wenzhou Longwan International Airport, south of Shanghai. In hibernation mode, Tom 2 had been tracked by GPS and monitored until the crate was opened. Standing in nothing more than a covered shed, two import workers—hired by Miss Gray Hat to supervise the crate as it made its way through customs—opened the top with power drills. Under layers of packing material, they found a Mr. Handsome/James Bond model, predressed in a black T-shirt, black jeans, and black boots.
