Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling

Author:Bruce Sterling
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9781497686519
Publisher: Open Road Media

8

A monsoon breeze whipped at her hair. Laura looked over the city from the roof of the Rizome godown. The Net was a broken spider-web. No phones at all. Television shut down, except for a single, emergency government channel. Laura felt the dead electric silence in her bones.

The dozen Rizome associates were all on the roof, morosely spooning up breakfasts of seaweed and kashi. Laura rubbed her bare, phoneless wrist, nervously. Below her, three stories down by the loading docks, a gang of Anti-Labourites practiced their morning Tai Chi Chuan. Soft, languorous, hypnotic movements. No one led them, but they moved in unison.

They had barricaded the streets, their bamboo rickshaws laden with stolen sacks of cement and rubber and coffee beans. They were defying the curfew, the government’s sudden and draconic declaration of martial law, which lay over Singapore like a blanket of lead. The streets were the army’s now. And the skies, too.… Tall monsoon clouds over the morning South China Sea, a glamorous tropic gleam like puffed gray silk. Against the clouds, the dragonfly cutouts of police helicopters.

At first, the Anti-Labourites had claimed, as before, that they were “observing for civil rights.” But as more and more of them had gathered during the night of the fourteenth, the pretense had faded. They had broken into warehouses and offices, smashing windows, barricading doors. Now the rebels were swarming through the Rizome godown, appropriating anything they felt was useful.…

There were hundreds of them, up and down the waterfront, viper-eyed young radicals in blood-red headbands and wrinkled paper clothes, wearing disposable surgical masks to hide their identities from police video. Grouping on street corners, exchanging elaborate ritual handshakes. Some of them muttering into toy walkie-talkies.

They had gathered here deliberately. Some kind of contingency plan. The docklands of East Lagoon were their stronghold, their natural turf.

The docks had been depressed for years, half abandoned from the global embargoes inflicted on Singapore. The powerful Longshoreman’s Union had protested to the P.I.P. rulership with increasing bitterness. Until the troublesome union had been simply and efficiently disemployed, as a deliberate act, by a government investment in industrial robots.

But with the embargoes, even the robots were idle much of the time. Which was why Rizome had been able to buy into the shipping business cheaply. It was hard for Singapore to turn down such a sucker bet: even knowing that Rizome’s intentions were political, an industrial beachhead.

The P.I.P.’s attack on the union, like most of their actions, was smart and farsighted and ruthless. But none of it had worked out quite the way the Government had planned. The union hadn’t broken, but bent, twisted, mutated, and spread. Suddenly they had stopped demanding work at all, and started demanding permanent leisure.

Laura could see them down there now, in the streets. A few were women, a few older men, but mostly classic young troublemakers. She’d read somewhere once that 90 percent of the world’s havoc was committed by men between fifteen and twenty-five. They were branding the walls and streets with neat stenciled slogans.

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