I said numbly, “I don’t remember asking to be told this.”
“August 7th last year. 9:43 p.m.” The hotel room in Manchester. “You said, ‘Let me know if the numbers ever really take off.'”
“Okay. Go on.”
“There have also been twenty-seven new journal articles published on the topic since you last inquired.” A list of titles appeared. “Do you want to hear their abstracts?”
“Not really.”
I glanced up from the screen, and noticed a man working at an easel on the far side of the square. He was a stocky Caucasian, probably in his fifties, with a tanned, lined face. Since I wasn’t eating, I should have been making good use of my time by replaying Henry Buzzo’s lecture to myself, or diligently plowing through some relevant background material. After a few minutes contemplating this prospect, I got up and walked around to take a look at the work-in-progress.
The picture was an impressionistic snapshot of the square. Or partly impressionistic; the palms and the grass looked like patches of green light caught reflected on an uneven windowpane, through which the rest of the scene was viewed—but the buildings and pavement were rendered as soberly as they would have been by any architect’s computer. The whole thing was executed on Transition—a material which changed color under the influence of an electric stylus. Different voltages and frequencies made each type of embedded metal ion migrate toward the surface of the white polymer at a different rate; it looked almost like oil paint appearing from nowhere —and I’d heard that creating a desired color could be as much of an art as mixing oils. Erasure was easy, though; reversing the voltage drove all the pigments back out of sight.
Without pausing to glance at me, the artist said, “Five hundred dollars.” He had a rural Australian accent.
I said, “If I'm going to get ripped off, I think I’ll wait for a local to do it.”
He gave me a mock-wounded glare. “And ten years doesn’t qualify me? What do you want?
“Ten years? I apologize.” Ten years meant he was practically a pioneer;
Stateless had been seeded in 2032, but it had taken almost a decade to become habitable and self- sustaining. I was surprised; the founders, and most of the earliest settlers, had come from the US.
I said, “My name’s Andrew Worth. I'm here for the Einstein Conference.
“Bill Munroe. Here for the light.” He didn’t offer his hand.
“I can’t afford the picture. But I’ll buy you lunch, if you’re interested.”
He looked at me sourly. “You’re a journalist.”
“I'm covering the conference. Nothing else. But I'm curious about… the island.”
“Then read about it. It’s all on the nets.”
“Yes—and it all contradicts itself. I can’t decide what’s propaganda and what isn’t.”
“So what makes you think anything I might tell you would be any more reliable?”
“Face to face, I’ll know.”
He sighed. “Why me?” He put down his stylus. “All right. Lunch and anarchy. This way.” He started to walk across the square.
I hung back. “You’re not going to leave this—?” He kept walking, so I caught up with him. “Five hundred dollars—plus the easel and the stylus—and you’re willing to trust people to leave it untouched?”
He glanced at me irritably, then turned and waved his notepad at the easel; it emitted a brief ear-splitting squeal. A few people turned to stare. “Don’t you have alarm tags where you come from?” I felt my face redden.
Munroe chose a cheap-looking open-air cafe, and ordered a steaming white concoction from the instant- serve display counter. It smelled nauseatingly fishy—although here that didn’t necessarily imply that it had once been the flesh of any vertebrate. Still, I lost whatever faint hint of an appetite I might have been working up.
As I thumbed approval of the payment for the meal, he said, “Don’t tell me: you’re deeply perplexed by our use of international credit as a means of exchange, the existence of free-enterprise eating establishments, my shameless attachment to private property, and all the other trappings of capitalism which you see around you.”
“You’ve done this before. So what’s the stock answer to the stock question?” Munroe carried his plate out to a table which gave him a clear view of his easel.
He said, “Stateless is a capitalist democracy. And a liberal socialist democracy. And a union of collectives. And several hundred others things for which I have no name.”
“You mean… people here choose to act as they would in those kinds of societies?”
“Yes, but it goes deeper than that. Most people join syndicates which effectively are those kinds of societies. People want freedom of choice, but they also want a degree of stability. So they enter into agreements which give them a framework in which to organize their lives—agreements which allow for release, of course… but then, most democracies permit emigration. If sixty thousand people in one syndicate agree to pay a portion of their income— subject to audit—into a fund used for health, education, and welfare, disbursed according to policies fleshed out in detail by committees of elected delegates… they may not have a parliament or a head of state, but that still sounds like a socialist democracy to me.”
I said, “So freely chosen ‘government’ isn’t forbidden. But—overall—are you anarchists, or not? Aren’t there universal laws here, which everyone is forced to obey?”
“There are a handful of principles endorsed by a large majority of residents. Basic ideas about freedom from violence and coercion. They’re widely promulgated and anyone who disagrees with them would be better off not coming here. I won’t split hairs, though; they might as well be laws.
“So are we anarchists, or not?” Munroe mimed indifference. “
“Personally, I think the word carries too much historical baggage to be salvaged. No great loss. Most of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century anarchist movements were bogged down, as much as the Marxists, by the question of seizing power from the ruling class. On Stateless that issue was dealt with very simply. In 2025, six employees of a Californian biotech company called EnGeneUity absconded with all the information they needed to make the seed. Much of which was their own work, if not their own property. They also took some engineered cells from various cultures, but too few to be missed. By the time anyone knew that Stateless was growing, there were a few hundred people living here in shifts, and it would have been bad PR to summarily sterilize the place.
“That was our ’revolution.’ Beats measuring out your life in Molotov cocktails.”
“Except that the theft means you’re saddled with the boycott.”
Munroe shrugged. “The boycott is a great pain. But Stateless under the boycott is still better than the alternative: a company island, every square meter privately owned. It’s bad enough when every decent food crop on the planet is licensed; imagine the ground beneath your feet being the same.”
I said, “Okay. So the technology gave you a shortcut to a new society; all the old models were irrelevant. No invasion and genocide, no bloody uprising, no glacial democratic reforms. But getting there’s the easy part. I still don’t understand what holds the place together.”
“Small invertebrate organisms.”
“I meant politically.”
Munroe looked baffled. “Holds the place together against
“Violence. Looting. Mob rule.”
“Why bother traveling to the middle of the Pacific for something you can do in any city in the world? Or do you think we went to all this trouble just for a chance to play
“Not intentionally. But when it happens in Sydney, they send in the riot squad. When it happens in Los Angeles, they send in the National Guard.”
“We have a trained militia, who have near-universal consent to use reasonable force to protect people and vital resources in an emergency.” He grinned. “‘Vital resources.’ ‘Emergency powers.’ Sounds just like home, doesn’t
