by A. Smoothness

1.

I died the way farm children used to die, suffocating at the bottom of a grain elevator. My last breaths were cut by corn kernels dried to commodity grade 15 percent moisture. It was not a work accident. It had been a long time since human hands had touched grain bins. Remote-controlled tractors and robotic machinery performed the entirety of production. But human labor still existed in concentrated pockets across the vast agricultural expanse, exhausted and exploited in climate-controlled slaughterhouses. The lives of the slaughterers persisted only marginally longer than those of the cows and hogs. Due to a rapid rise in evapotranspiration rates it was now too hot to maintain the corn and soybean plants that had dominated the landscape during my childhood. New forms of GM-adapted sorghum had replaced corn. Cotton fields stretched northward towards the Canadian border. Motivated by land prices and cooler temperatures, stockyards had moved to the tundra. In a stretch of dire years before the large relocations, catastrophic heat waves had caused massive cattle die-offs. Gates swung listlessly and feeding pens crumbled with rust and faded paint. Traveling across the production zone, piles of skeletons the size of garbage dumps lay bleached by the sun. The calcareous heaps in the brown dust mimicked the shimmery mirages of buffalo bones in the 1850s, a time when bookish boys from the East Coast would venture West to join in ritual slaughter with frontiersman. These were the idealistic foot soldiers of Indian removal treaties authored in Washington living rooms. The youth mindlessly constructed immense piles of desiccated vertebras, femurs, and skulls that gleamed like mirages in the boundless prairie. For several months the mob of maggots, buzzards, and coyotes was so thick that the carcasses would be invisible, a crawling mass of decomposers and parasites enshrouding the slain buffalo.

A long time ago. Not really long ago at all. Periods of killing separated by other moments. Without future, without sense.

Most visitors were now agri-tourists taking an air-conditioned trip to the evacuated, sticky cotton wastelands of central Iowa or southwestern Minnesota¹. The clientele were mostly sad, bland men on ostensibly ‘morale boosting’ work trips traversing the landscapes of their grandfathers, celebrating the progressive depopulation and acceleration into remote management from tech centers. With the right credentials, they could move seamlessly among Bismarck, Santiago, and Nairobi. Apart from the flavorful decoration of local customs and the recreational offerings beyond the expansive slums, hyper-connectivity and global capital created interchangeable, interconnected, and identical spaces. The trips – ‘historical encounters’, ‘rugged adventures’, ‘team-building retreats’ – pulled the transnational merchants of machine-operated agriculture back to the soil. Their yearly ritual honored the wit and sweat of their ancestors and the superiority of modern science. The men would descend in the cooler months of October to April, silently crawling through the rainy gray mud in repurposed military tanks outfitted for luxury vacations. Inside the spacious cabins, the men kept tabs on grain futures and their children’s drug rehab programs. They exercised in pools and ate reheated cream of broccoli and ham dinners. The tanks stuck to fixed tracks easily navigated by satellites that changed the course according to weather and soil conditions. Occasionally they would pause to commemorate the vacated homesteads, corn breeding laboratories, and tractor dealerships. They never disembarked. The hazards were many – airborne pathogenic bacteria, scorching temperatures, automated harvesters – and the men were simply uninterested. It had been several generations since people walked outside, let alone in the production zone. 

I close my eyes and see the thin stalks of cotton plants, leftover wisps along gravel roadsides. The overly ripe, chemical stench of enzymatic digestion spilling from factories begins to make me nauseous. My esophagus burns from the hydrochloric acid rising from my stomach. Each time I try to roll over or prop myself up, the pit of corn shifts slightly and I sink deeper.

It is night and the pulsating light from nearby turbines creates beams on the interior of the silo. The red light mixes with the silo’s neon green elastomeric sealant to create a diffuse, sickly pink. My throat is dry and I am still drunk from the night before. I push my face against the cold car window, inhaling the pungent smoke curling from the front seat. The road is dark and the headlights are off. We crawl along, at any turnout an immigration checkpoint or patch of ice. Occasionally the car swerves to avoid deer fleeing the early morning shots of the slaughterhouse supervisors and county sheriffs. Cops and managers spend their vacation from their daily hunt to engage in a recreational one. My body rejects its insides and a thin smear of shit drips into my jeans. I roll onto my hip. I try to keep sleeping. We are headed towards the brightening sky. I toss over, accept a smoke, feel it mix with suspended ice crystals. Instantly my vision blackens. I vomit a slurry of mucus and blood onto the truck floor beneath me. I take another drag. Why do I feel so horny at moments of such total despair? I silently slip my hand under my belt buckle, calmly touching myself. I am myopically groping, coughing, squeezing, red, black, the faint beeping of a body cam, the flash of hazard lights, the lingering hangover of solar retinopathy from a lifetime of crushingly disappointing days spent wandering in and out of corn rows. I hear the small talk of colleagues and peers recounting ‘trips up north’, cheerily oblivious to the social turmoil, the policed meatpacking plants, the lurching line of cars at shift change. The temperature oscillates between 10 degrees below zero and 110 above. A trailer door clangs on its loose hinges at 4:30 AM. At all hours, cars snake to and from the fortress of death. The miles and miles of cattle chutes and rural traffic are visible from space, parallel traps colliding. In the single grocery store people are whatsappeando con sus tios and if you want to see a doctor you need to video chat with them. It’s just transnational company towns persisting on death.

From the bank buildings and boarded gas stations I see the maniacal ghost of General Sheridan screaming, “Kill, skin, sell, until the buffalo is exterminated, civilize!” Except what I hear is the optimistic voice of a colleague at a remote research site documenting the silent extinction of soil microbes and bubbling “innovate, digitize, synthesize”.

2.

I breathe in, cough and ingest bits of corn. A few I manage to spit out, others stay lodged in my throat. I am conscious of the small cuts the corn are making and wonder I have ever fully inhabited a reality. My mind wanders and I spit shards of corn in the place of memory. It had all been part of a plan, botched or misunderstood, that ultimately led me to sliding under barbed wire and towards the grain bin. The last grain bin, I guess. I had momentarily glanced at a text message on a burner phone at a lurid bar on the outskirts of Des Moines where the protected bubble cracked into fields of outdated farm machinery and trailers. Tidal pools of time colliding and mixing together across minute distances. All the surfaces of the bar were covered in screens. Years ago, a previous owner had ambitiously converted the private lap-dancing booths into VIP VR clubs with bottle service. Now, only the truly desperate used the cum-smeared headsets to momentarily get off. Wisps of peanut shells littered the floor. Maybe there had been a plan or maybe the excitement of moving the wrong direction in the grid and feeling the scrape of roadside plants against my softened, alcohol-soaked skin had brought me this far. Driving along crop rows desperately hunting for a pocket of loose gravel along an unplanned curve, a rotting hog carcass, but never anything of the sort.

A muscular man, maybe 70 years old and sweaty, reeking from days spent slurping warm cans of Natural Ice grabs my arm and tells me about being 19, heading to a state college in a larger farming town. He performed a few Tennessee Williams plays in a drama class. And then? Now I’m sitting next to you, kid. He slides his thick fingers over my city wrists and I want to lick the pooled, boozy sweat from his cheekbones and the folds of his neck. I want to suck the rows and rows of a single crop and the shiny leased truck and grain futures out of him and spit it into a roadside ditch where mutated frogs croon in painful harmony. But instead I lurch through hangovers pretending to visit production sites, my own reconnaissance for a project I never got around to conceptualizing. I’m a “technical assistant” and a cheap date for professors jostling for lunar agricultural extension positions and cattle breeding jobs north of Saskatchewan. We just pretend to breathe intention into this infernal heat, competing for oxygen with the few remnants of life on the American prairie.

The corn dust seeps into my eyelids, maddeningly itchy. Unable to move, I see myself from the rafters, receding into the mass of kernels and mycelial decay. I am being silently engulfed while my immobile flesh writhes inside. Was there a time when I actually managed to taste his sweat? Only a few disjointed images remain. I remember a few scenes from a summer long past when hordes rendered air-conditioned tractors inoperable across the fields. Night-time break-ins, fucking, pants bunched around ankles and work boots, enjoying the burn of neonicotoid seed coating transferred from fingers to genitals and into the wet interiors of our bodies. We shivered and spasmed and secretly smashed GPS units and automatic steering controls. What else did I suppress as I amnesically descended into the safe blinders of the scientific project?  

I struggle to breath and become hypoxic. I can’t keep my eyes open. I am in an airport where the walls are crawling with advertisements for FieldVision, a cloud computing software extolling the virtues of digital liberation for rural African farmers. Images of peasants in their cotton and bean fields are flashed at airport travelers. The colors are inverted. Bright red crops emerge from an indigo soil, bloody stalks moving rhythmically in a nighttime sea.

Suddenly the distinctions of the cloud and the terminal and the field all disintegrate. The contradictions maintained in virtual space spill out onto the clean airport corridors. Glyphosate runs through automatic soda machines and the stained soils overflow from computer projections and onto runways. A swirling dust storm descends. Eager vacationers, blistering scalps covered in corn-rows, are stranded on runways far from their securitized enclaves in suburban Atlanta. The orgiastic celebration of a thinly-veiled seizure of generational assets and communal modes of exchange. Apps that allow insurance companies to seep into shared life from the moments of planting and harvest to the deepest imagined intimacy. But now one could see the nefarious data pathways lighting the night sky, an acre of corn equalized as a particular data bit to be spent on Adderall or ski vacations in Dubai. 

3.

I can’t fucking breathe and the dust creates the deafening sensation of tinnitus in my ears. I crave a bump of cocaine underneath a bronze bust of Norman Borlaug. I want a strapping, bald geneticist to lightly tickle my prostrate while he bubbles bubblegum breath about gene assays and actionable partnerships. Each corn kernel surrounding my appendages becomes an enthusiastic conference-goer draped in lanyards. Pack your bags and roll up your posters! Plant-based jet fuel spews into the skies to transport the pragmatic, hard-working intellectual class to the massive annual Conference. I trip on a teal carpet unable to tell the moving walkway apart from the hordes of pale legs stuffed into dress pants and power suits. It’s fall in Florida and a hurricane warning has been issued outside. Winds lash at stormproof windows but the concrete bunker is impervious to climatic forces except for the drip-drip-drip from the ceilings. The noise of thousands of dress shoes splorching across  saturated carpets interrupt dry presentations on amalgamating Big Data for on-farm precision. Buckets overflow with tepid water warmed by the carbonated, dead oceans. The miasma of whale carcasses competes with the stench of Yankee Candle sour apple wafting through the HVAC system. My eyes tear and then bleed, the slides disappearing behind the flicker of lights.

Announcements sputter overhead to ONLY TAKE UNDERGROUND TUNNELS, TIKI BAR ON 3^RD FLOOR CLOSED, SEVERE WEATHER WARNING but no-one seems to notice. People are in solution space. People are connecting. People are outlining meta-analyses. People are eating $18 pre-made tuna salad shipped in from a warehouse in Elizabeth, New Jersey. People are solving global problems. Weather insurance companies sponsor the meetings, host wine and cheese dinners, and raffle off vacations to gated mountainous islands where waves lap against the remnants of colonial fortresses, reclaiming fossilized rock. Underwater, the progressive myth of science reverts into a bubbling heap of pre-Cambrian forms metamorphosed into hydrocarbon. The gyre quickens. Trade booths advertise fertilizer sourced from seawater plastics. Scientists figure out new ways to accelerate the production of more calories. Extra soybeans are transported to coastal communities to fill sandbags stymying storm surges. Corn is pulverized and spread across icy highways and runways. Critical studies sub-committees have a place here too. Underground conference halls full of students exercise critique as normalization, critique as diverse viewpoint, critique as long as it is well-compensated and well-fed.

Science’s chief achievements are the consumption of artisanal cheeses and lukewarm Tinder hook-ups in the suburban hotels of sinking cities.

At the Conference, the most valuable currency is verbally promoting the pathological Project of keeping the landscape clean and controlled. Science’s chief achievements are the consumption of artisanal cheeses and lukewarm Tinder hook-ups in the suburban hotels of sinking cities. Students churn out studies on the contingent social basis of markets and the long-term impacts of conflict on female productivity. Thousands of technicians and masterminds, well-versed and brilliant, pontificate on polyurethane adhesion, lumber quality, and winches and grommets, except the ship has already sunk to the bottom of a toxic, turbulent sea, and the oxygen is running out.

Numb hands flail at substance. Resilience is the constant buzzword. Resilience for breakfast. Resilience for lunch. Resilience shapeshifts. A perfect ideological match for a capitalism tunneling through chaos, briefly adapting and consuming. A notion, a reference, a vocabulary in which the entire terrain of life can be collapsed. Static Newtonian physical models, state-based ecological energy flows, the tight cybernetic machinations of Cold War game theory giving way to complexity science, Big Data, machine learning normalizing the juxtaposition of slums drowning in saline wastewater and claw-foot tubs filled with reverse osmosis inside high-rise condos, the chaotic dynamism of the market, and the wealth of possibilities under mutant ecosystems well-guarded by planetary surveillance, yuppie urban regeneration, microloans, and participatory soil health solutions all tagged as ‘resilience’ to cloak the totalitarianism, economic precarity, the meaningless waiting game between no possibility and worst possibility.

As the elevator’s thick sea of grain engulfs the last parts of my body, the pressure creates a near boiling slime against my skin. I am rotting. The ink from my tattoos are infected and bubbling beneath pale skin. Threadbare jeans, the last beads of hypersaline sweat, cells atrophying. Or maybe a longer, more comfortable death. Hemorrhoidal discomfort while listening to slide shows on statistical regressions and machine learning revolutions to explore microbiological frontiers. Eating bland meals alone night after night, scrolling through transgressive online articles and YouTube grindcore channels and wringing my hands at the ever-constricted lives of what I used to call friends, confidants. Cops, parking tickets, skyrocketing rents in toxic cities, living gloriously defaulting on financial obligations stealing time esoteric wormholes and throaty kisses. On the other side sleepless nights hollowly masturbating chafed skin while working on a model to capture stochastic variability in soil bacterial populations, fried dinners at the craft breweries sponging up the un-taste of the new urban middle class. But now I’m just choking, having wandered off, it feels so small in here.

A. Smoothness flails in the academy by day and plays saxophone by night. He squandered most of his twenties in rural and urban parts of the West and Midwest and now lives in New York City. Most days, A. Smoothness dreams about the Cloud vaporizing in boiling seawater, mass cellular disintegration as collective politics, and saving money for drugs by cannibalizing Mark Zuckerberg for dinner. Some musical collages can be found here: https://soundcloud.com/repeatoffender

Photo by the author.

by Martin Hensher

The fence looked somehow smaller. Francis was sure it was the same— standard chain-link and razor wire, and slightly faded “Australian Government: Prohibited Area” signs every twenty-five metres. Yet smaller —if only in the scale of the threat it promised, even if not in its physical dimensions. As their car pulled up at the gate, he realised it wasn’t the fence that had changed, but the entrance. The concrete strongpoint that had long guarded the only access route had gone, replaced by a neatly painted weatherboard guardroom and a matching sentry box by the barrier. They looked rather like they might be hired out for low-budget historical movies.  However, the figure that emerged from the sentry box was not an extra from a colonial scene, but an Australian Federal Police officer for whom admitting their vehicle was clearly the highlight of an uneventful morning.

She chatted as she checked his and the driver’s ID and filled in her register, so he felt bold enough to ask her, ‘What happened to the old bunker?’

The policewoman chuckled. ‘They broke it up last year.  The plumbing was crook, and when they came to fix it, they realised some genius had laid the drains under the concrete base.  No dunny, no guard house. So they thought they’d get ahead of the game and replace it with something that might be useful once the Island’s decommissioned. Been here before then?’

‘Yes. A few times.’ As he said the words, Francis suddenly felt much older than could reasonably be attributed to the jet lag he was still feeling. The truth was that he had been here twelve times in twenty years. The Island had become a constant in his life, a destination of strange, regular pilgrimage, as he travelled from London to this prison island at the ends of the Earth. And now the block house was gone, and they were thinking ahead to shutting up shop. Of course they were. There was only one prisoner left, and he would not live forever. But where did that leave Francis?

‘Better get going.’ said the policewoman.  ‘Boat’s leaving soon.’

He could have kissed her for breaking that particular train of thought.

***

Francis O’Riordan was sixty-five years old. Almost exactly. In fact, one of the particular benefits of this trip had been the chance it offered to spend his birthday with his daughter Annie and her family in Melbourne, a day of joyfully befuddled celebration that had started as soon as his grandchildren saw him walking out of the arrivals gate at the airport. The pleasure of seeing the children and Annie was intense, driving out all the fatigue of his long journey, and punctuated only occasionally by the stabbing pain of the remembrance that his wife Sylvie would never see them again. This wasn’t like his other trips to or from the Island, stopping to see Annie on the way, knowing that her mother was safely but jealously back in London, waiting to hang on Francis’ every word describing their growing band of grandchildren.  Now Sylvie was dead, and when the official government flight eventually took him back to Heathrow, he would return to an empty house, with no one to tell about the rampaging horde of hooligans clattering around the old rectory on the other side of the world. He had lain awake that night in a dry river of grief, from which he had thought he had escaped months earlier.  Only the clank and crash of the first tram of the morning in the Melbourne street outside had returned him gratefully to the world of the living. 

There was no space for grief the following night, as an angry Bass Strait crossing focused every waking thought on not losing the rather good dinner Francis had unwisely tucked into before the ferry had left its moorings in Melbourne.  The next morning, he had slept for most of the train ride from Devonport, waking as the train slowed to cross the Derwent on its way into Hobart’s northern suburbs. His tiredness and sadness were gone, his mind clear now. He spent the afternoon re-reading the case files he had brought with him from London, and reviewing the prison intelligence and psychologists’ reports that had awaited him at his Hobart hotel. O’Riordan had time to attend choral evensong at St. David’s Cathedral before enjoying a deep and uninterrupted sleep. Next day, the journey out to Triabunna was a pleasure to him – the paddocks green from the winter’s rains, and the rolling hillsides of forest rich and deeply shadowed in the spring sunshine.

So the realisation that the work of the Island might slowly and inexorably be coming to an end —and with it, his own relationship with this place —was deeply jarring. Francis couldn’t help but feel angry with himself for not having considered the obvious possibility that this might be his last trip to the Island. This bad mood was still with him as the catamaran docked at Darlington and he stepped onto the jetty.

***

This visit, the United Nations contingent guarding the facility were South Africans. It was something of a polite fiction; in truth, Australia operated the facility and provided the backbone of its staff — whether that was the correctional services officers and domestic staff who travelled across from Triabunna every day, or the navy and air defence units who quietly watched the waters and skies around Maria. Nevertheless, every six months a new detail of forty guards rotated through from another nation, visibly maintaining the world’s commitment to human-centred development. Being paid in Australian dollars for the duration of their tour helped make this an appealing posting for military prison staff the world over, needless to say.  

Francis was searched and screened by two guards who did a passable act as a comedy duo — a short and wiry coloured Capetonian with three gold teeth, and a tall, beefy Afrikaaner whose face looked like he’d had one too many rapid impacts on the rugby pitch. Their banter and childish double entendre cleared away the mood that had earlier seized him, and their elision of English with choice Afrikaans expletives transported him through the decades to the years he and Sylvie had spent in Pretoria when their children were tiny.

Processing complete, he stepped through the control door and was inside the prison. A woman of about forty in a Correctional Services uniform was waiting for him.

‘Professor O’Riordan? I’m Kylie Dunbar, the deputy psychologist for CST Maria.  May I?’

‘Thank you’, Francis said as he gratefully passed her the large folder of briefing documents he had been juggling with his bag after the Cape Town comics had finished searching him. He paused. You’re not Don Dunbar’s daughter, are you?’

She laughed. ‘Yes, I am. Dad said to say hello when he heard there was a Panel hearing coming up.’

‘How is he? Retired yet?’

‘A year ago. He’s good, thanks — making a nuisance of himself to Mum and generally not catching as many fish as he’d like to think he does.’

‘What made you go into the family business?’

Kylie laughed again. ‘The stylish uniform? No, there’s only one place on the East Coast of Tasmania with a job for an unemployed forensic psychologist who wants her kids to be close to family.  I studied psychology because I thought it would get me out of Triabunna forever, but after I graduated I realised that my dad worked at the world’s most interesting natural experiment. Take a group of certified geniuses who used to own the world and lock them up on a rock no one has successfully escaped from in two hundred years. Observe and discuss!’

Dunbar paused and looked at her watch. ‘We’d best get over to the Superintendent’s dining room. The rest of the Panel arrived last night, so there’s going to be some lunch and then the pre-Hearing discussion starts at 2.30. We’ll have your bag taken over to your room.’

***

He always enjoyed the lunches on Maria.  Running the facility was a curious mix of tedium and readiness, and the pattern had been set early that the staff needed to be well looked after. He was very pleased to see that the signs of winding down had not extended to the kitchens, and the food did not disappoint. Nor did the company.

Collins had been the Australian Superintendent for a good few years. He was a dour-looking man who defied expectations with his dry but sympathetic humour.  Next to him sat Mkhize, the South African Commandant. There were four other Panel members alongside O’Riordan, two of whom he knew well of old — Anand George, the Indian Supreme Court Justice, and Mariam Petrossian, chief of threat assessment from the Office of the UN Secretary General. The third was Jens Olstrom, a Danish behavioural psychologist whom Francis knew by reputation. Collins introduced him to the fourth — who, by convention, was furnished by the nation on rotation at the time of each Hearing.

‘This is Nonkonzo Mda, our South African member this year.’

‘Professor O’Riordan, it’s a pleasure to meet you after reading so much of your work.’

Mda was a small, slight woman, perhaps in her late fifties. Her face had a sleepy look, and her tightly locked hair was pepper-potted with grey. Yet her eyes twinkled slyly and she moved with a precision that spoke of anything  but sleepiness. She was seated next to him at the lunch table, so they chatted as the food was served.

‘Your accent, Nonkonzo – where is it from?’ Francis asked, not quite able to place the South African’s speech pattern.

She chuckled. ‘All over, Professor. I’m a child of exile. I was born in Zambia, primary school in Moscow, high school in London, university in Jo’burg when we returned after Democracy, doctorate in Heidelberg. I confuse myself if I’m not careful.’

‘And how did that road end up here?’

‘Ah’ She chuckled again, in a way that Francis found unaccountably pleasing.  ‘An unusual combination of specialisations and a very poor eye for the career choices that would get you to the top in Pretoria.’

He laughed, recognising the pattern of his own life in her description. They chatted about Pretoria and London for a while, before being drawn into an animated discussion between Kylie Dunbar and Olstrom on the merits of predictive profiling.  The Danish psychologist was clearly nostalgic for some of the tools no longer available to his trade.

After lunch they moved to the Hearing Room.  It was a large boardroom, internally like any other corporate meeting space — yet it was screened and insulated to make it impervious to penetration by any known eavesdropping technique. Not that anyone was trying now, to the best of their knowledge, but maintaining the old disciplines had served the facility well over the years.

Collins called them to order after they had taken their allotted places behind their name plaques around the table.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, let us commence the pre-Hearing procedures for the fourth parole application for Mark Franklin Rothko, prisoner number GZ037. Please identify yourselves for the record.’

After the Panel and the other attending officers had done so, the Australian continued. 

‘You all appreciate the significance of this hearing. Rothko is the last prisoner on the Island, since Wei Xu and Davenant’s deaths last year. I would remind you that — much as the Australian Government might be pained by my saying so — issues of cost must play no part in your deliberations. This facility was established by international treaty to incarcerate those convicted of crimes against humanity until they pose no further threat. That is the only factor you should give decisive weight in your discussions. There are those who argue Rothko’s continued detention is wasteful, and who would ask what possible threat a seventy-three year old man could pose to the world today. You, however, have the fullest possible evidence at your disposal, and are able to make the most informed decision on the real risks at play here.’

And so their discussion began. They had all consumed many hundreds of pages of briefing, and three of the five Panel members had, of course, heard at least one of Rothko’s previous parole applications. But the basic facts of Rothko’s case always made O’Riordan experience a flush of angry disbelief at his sheer arrogance.

Rothko had made an immense fortune in tech. At first, he had done so the traditional way – a social media start-up sold for a record price, and the establishment of a lavishly endowed foundation. Yet, unlike most of his peers, Rothko had quickly parlayed his first fortune into a set of companies that continued to make massive profits year after year, pumping ever more money into his “foundation for the future human”. So far, so good. But after the signing of the Dushanbe Protocols, rather than terminating his work on Artificial Intelligence, Rothko had doubled down on it — scarcely even in secrecy. More than that, when the police finally raided his Transcentis laboratories in five different countries, not only did they find AI installations that showed every sign of being fully active and connected off-site, but also human subjects with wetware connections to his AI networks. They were all willing and handsomely paid — mainly migrant workers sending large remittances home — but they had undergone neurosurgery and ongoing drug treatment, sometimes for years. And all were significantly changed, in ways that left their interviewers and investigators disturbed.

It was the human subject work which had really resulted in Rothko, Davenant and Wei Xu receiving the longest sentences of all the transhumanists. Surprisingly many firms had continued with AI research after Dushanbe, confident their will would prevail. It had been a great shock to them when coordinated raids across the globe had pulled them from their beds or their boardrooms; still more salutary when one corporation — perhaps tipped off in advance — chose to lock down their facility and resist arrest. The level of lethal force used by the Canadian authorities that day left no one in any doubt that the rules had changed beyond recognition. Yet only the owners of Transcentis could be shown to have used human surgical alteration in their illegal AI work. The Special Tribunal had reflected these ethics violations in its sentencing, handing down an additional ten years for each beyond the basic sentences all had received for (in the familiar words of the Tribunal’s verdict) ‘…defying international law while knowingly and willfully exposing all humanity to existential risk for the purposes of private profit.’

Ultimately, though, they all knew that Rothko, Davenant and Wei Xu had remained on the island far longer than the forty two others originally sentenced with them another reason — their defiance. All the others had settled in the end. They had recanted, publicly renounced the goals of Artificial Intelligence and transhumanism, and agreed to parole terms that essentially forbade them from any contact with anything remotely resembling a computing device for the rest of their lives. By the time most of them left Maria this hadn’t been hard; twenty years of degrowth and  ecological stabilisation had relegated their kinds of technology to niche functions in key public services — dull, utilitarian, and under tight, if discreet, control by the authorities to avoid unduly tempting enquiring minds.

These men had a hope; that they could return the world to its rightful path towards the Singularity and immortality.

The three old men of the island had been made of different stuff. They had refused to concede any wrongdoing. They railed at their confinement. They wrote prolifically and worked together every day on grand projects, doubling and redoubling their efforts as the number of their fellow convicts dwindled. They raged with contempt at each new parolee who accepted the inevitable and left Maria to make his or her peace with a new reality. Once only the three of them remained, their rage had settled, and they had established a way of life that might have been best described as monastic in its routines. Yet they remained incarcerated not because the authorities wished to punish their defiance, but because they feared it. Not in its spirit, but its implication. These men had a hope; they appeared to remain utterly convinced that they could return the world to its rightful path towards the Singularity and immortality. They shrugged off the delay caused by the Great Transition and its absurd insistence on the equality and beauty of unaugmented, unadorned humans as if it were nothing more than the irritating bites of insects. Of course, to the intelligence specialists who monitored their conversations and writings, this raised the very worrying question of why they remained so resolute. Did they know of secret resources, hidden away to await their release? Was there some remnant movement at large, biding its time until its leaders emerged from prison? Could there, almost inconceivably, still be AIs running quietly, sequestered out of sight, far better able to hide in a world of limited connectivity than their forebears had been before the Great Transition? The only possible risk management strategy must be to keep these anti-human prophets safely under lock and key.

Davenant and Wei Xu’s deaths had been unexpected. Davenant had succumbed to a highly aggressive brain cancer in just a few months, which autopsy suggested must have metastasised even before his first symptoms were visible. Some of the medical staff had insinuated that it may have been related to the unconventional anti-ageing therapies he had enthusiastically partaken of in the years before his conviction, but this assertion did not find its way into any official records. Wei Xu, by contrast, appeared almost to have chosen to die, retreating into himself after Davenant’s death and suffering a massive stroke only six weeks after his friend and former start-up partner had died. The emergency facilities on Maria were as good as any teaching hospital’s (better, as the Principal Medical Officer liked to joke, because there were no trainees to get in the way), but Wei Xu was dead within eight hours of collapsing.

That left only Rothko. But did it change the risk calculus?

***

The Panel was not without compassion. For ten months, Rothko had effectively been in solitary confinement, an old man whose last friends were now dead. But that in itself posed them a problem. There were no longer any transcripts of unguarded conversations between prisoners to provide insights. Kylie Dunbar and the prison psychologists noted an increasing withdrawal from his previous activities, and some evidence of depression, although Rothko was wholly unwilling to participate in any form of therapeutic regime. News of the birth of a grandchild appeared initially to have caused excitement, but this had rapidly given way to despondency. Rothko’s writings had decreased greatly in number and length, falling back to little more than weekly notes to his wife and daughter. Where once he was haughty and defiant with prison guards and welfare staff, now he was compliant and quiet.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Panel split down professional lines. George, the Indian judge, and Olstrom, the psychologist, clearly saw a broken man who had been incarcerated for twenty years, and had lost his only remaining friends. Patrossian and Mda, the intelligence specialists, saw a man who had nothing to lose, whose release might allow one last throw of the dice in the game of madness which had only narrowly been thwarted years before. And that, of course, left the decision to O’Riordan, as chair.

During afternoon tea, Francis left the Hearing Room for some fresh air.  He stood outside and breathed in the warm, dampening air. The sky to the East darkened over the Tasman Sea as a storm birthed itself, and the great mass of Bishop and Clerk brooded over him. O’Riordan wished he could slip past the chain-link fence and make his way up the mountain to hide as the cloud rolled in from the sea. He felt someone touch his arm, and turned slightly to see Mda standing beside him.

She looked up into his face, her eyes now sad rather than twinkling as they had at lunchtime. ‘This is hard’, she said.  ‘But it was hard when we fought them. You remember how hard. I know your story, Francis. It is the same as mine.  Neither of us chose to be revolutionaries, I think. Rather the Revolution chose us. And because we fought them hard and early, the Revolution was able to become a Transition, and not a river of blood.’

‘That old man in there is sad and suffering. But he is powerful too. We cannot let that power out when there is any chance his machines remain in the world. We do not speak of that risk in public any more, yet you and I both know we did not find all their machines, or even all their wetware. Just because he is old and filled with grief, does not mean he is safe. There is only one thing we can do.’

Her fingers brushed his as she turned and walked away. O’Riordan stood for several minutes, not wishing to release the memory of the comfort of her touch. As the first drops of rain hit his face, he realised that this would perhaps not be his last visit to the Island after all. Tomorrow he would tell that to Rothko. Then he might take that walk up Bishop and Clerk.

Martin Hensher has recently swapped the life of a public servant for full time academia, with a particular focus on preparing health care systems for the challenges of the Anthropocene. Born and educated in England, he has also spent many years in South Africa and, more recently, Australia, where he lived with his family for seven years in the island state of Tasmania. They have recently moved to Melbourne. Only you can judge whether his writing is dystopian or utopian, and his family would probably suggest he is able to hold simultaneously the positions of miserable bastard and incurable optimist with apparent effortlessness.

by Anya Verkamp

Victor and Violeta were sitting on their cots in a gymnasium 20 km from home when they got the news that everything was gone. 

They had lived in that farmhouse for nearly 30 years, since the economic crisis of 2020. The mud womb of the house cocooned them from the decay that spread across civilization. 

After the crisis, their friends had fled Barcelona for opportunities elsewhere; many human pawns on the chessboard of capital, hoping to catch falling crumbs of cash and get from them some kind of satisfaction. Barcelona had become too much for the couple anyway. The city fed their anxieties, as the people on the streets hunted for the next quick dopamine rush: the next touristic spectacle, the next purchase, the next digital notification. An addiction to stimulation and gratification ruined the city, like it had ruined the rest of the planet, and like it had corrupted the very soul of humanity. Luckily, Violeta’s elderly parents had a vineyard outside of Valencia, and were growing too old to tend to it. 

The wine became their blood. The grapes swelled every spring with the promise only fruit can offer. The rising temperatures didn’t make for fine wine, but it made for higher alcohol concentration in the grapes, and so much the better. Even as the Spanish economy crashed, as Catalonia seized independence via civil war, as the European Union broke up, and as the climate crisis brought refugees across the Mediterranean and wreaked havoc on global supply chains, people still needed to drink. 

Their farmhouse was a stage on which to improvise their dance through the song of collapse.

Their farmhouse was a stage on which to improvise their dance through the song of collapse. Disturbances to the electrical grid prompted them early on to invest in a wind generator, solar panels, and a wood-burning stove. They could exchange wine for the few staple foods they couldn’t grow. Violeta’s parents and the neighbors taught them what medicines they could make with the herbs around, how to preserve food, how to build and fix things by hand.

And they were not alone in their learning. After the crisis followed rural life. Groups of young, overeducated, and underemployed Europeans arrived to squat and fix up abandoned farmhouses in what historians would call the ‘urban exodus’ of the 2020s. Collectives popped up here and there, collectives of doctors, of carpenters, of mechanics; the farmers started tool and seed banks. Some of the couples had the courage to bring a few children into this challenging world, and the parents divided the days of child watching and teaching at the village school. It was almost too late for Violeta to have children when the couple finally had enough faith in the future of the community. Her belly swelled like a grape in spring, and Alazne was born in 2029.

The people of the Valencian countryside trusted and supported each other, because they had to, because they couldn’t do it alone. It was a great return to the collective way of life of the anarchist rural communities of Spain, and as their material lives became always more humble, their hands calloused, their fashions old, the people could take pride in knowing they had found the source of strength of their ancestors: the land and each other. Victor and Violeta were well loved wherever they went across the valleys around their home. “Victor i Violeta del vi!” the neighbors would greet them, as they pulled up to farms and taverns by horse drawn cart with bottles in the back. 

This had not been the first time they had been evacuated. As they had left the house, all they had grabbed were the suitcases that always sat ready in the closet with documents, cash, and the necessities for a few days.

A volunteer hung the map showing the path of the wildfire on the wall of the gymnasium. Violeta and Victor held hands as they watched their friends and neighbors approach the map. The people walked up all shoulders and straight backs; resilient women and men who had seen civilizations fall in their lifetimes. Violeta gasped; her neighbors’ faces aged in seconds when they saw their homes were gone. She held Victor’s hand, pulling him to stay seated next to her, but Victor shook with the need for certainty, and walked up to the map to confirm what he already knew. Where the sustenance of life once was, there was now an ashy vacuum. 

Under the empty weight of the loss, the people collapsed into each other’s arms. In embracing they could remember they still had their living bodies, ageing though they were, homeless and penniless though they were.

The next days in the shelter were a blur. The neighbors would gather to talk through their pain, to sing old songs. Some went back to where their houses once were to see what was left. It was mid July and the crops had been high, but there was nothing to salvage. For most, their preparation ended with the suitcases. The unthinkable had happened. No one plans for the end of their own world. 

Within a few days, as resources at the shelter grew scarce, they began to whisper to each other of what to do next. They were split between leaving to start life anew elsewhere and returning to rebuild. Many of the younger people were leaving to stay with nearby family for the winter, planning to sell their labor at larger farms for the rest of the season, and return next year to replant. The elders were stagnating in indecision, without the energy to rebuild the homes, and without the vision of a future anywhere else.

“Victor, I want to be with Alazne. We’ve lost everything. She’s the only thing in this world we haven’t lost.” said Violeta through a throat tight with longing for her daughter in the south of France.

“You know how far that journey is. We know this land, these people. Next year we will plant again and rebuild,” Victor thought himself the voice of reason.

“She’s written to us that life is good there. It rains often enough. She has found a good house with other young people. We can be of use to them; we can work for our keep.”

“We will be nothing but a burden to her. Let’s at least write to her first, to ask if they will take us.”

“It will take months for a letter to come back. What are we to do in the meantime? We will burn through our savings every day we wait for a reply.”

“And the borders?” Victor said it like he was asking, but he was really stating the situation. 

Border policy between the ex-EU countries changed often, and was subjectively enforced. The Spanish-French border required a visa, which could take years to grant, and the older the applicant, the less likely they would be granted one. Every country in Europe had too many old people, and not enough youth. Human labor was needed everywhere now that fossil fuels were banned and the capacities of renewables had failed to meet the energy demand. When Alazne was 18 years old with the happy feet and horizon gaze of every youth, her parents greatest concern was that she wouldn’t come back.

“We can try our luck through Catalonia. We must.” Violeta said. Catalonia issued temporary visas at the border for visiting Spaniards. They could apply at the border. 

“Victor, everything is gone. It’s gone. I just want to be with her. Next year we can come back with her and she can help us rebuild.”

Victor knew the tone of voice his wife was using. When she was this sure, it was like she had a compass in her gut, directing every atom in her body. She would go, with or without him. The next morning they said goodbye to their friends of 30 years and got on a train to Fraga, a small town on the Spanish border with Catalonia.

* * *

“Documents?” The clerk at the customs desk did not look up as he asked.

Victor and Violeta handed over their Spanish passports. The clerk shifted his eyes to their birthdays.

“What is the nature of your visit to Catalonia?”

“We’re visiting my sister, near Lleida.” Said Violeta. Victor turned to her incredulously. Violeta’s sister was near Lleida, but she was buried there. 

“I must see your proof of residency in Spain, and please write here your sister’s full name and address” the clerk asked. Violeta presented the deed to the vineyard first, as Victor began to write the information on the form they were given.

The clerk looked at the deed, and he gave them a sad smile. “Senyores, I’m sorry, but I can’t help you, we are no longer issuing travel visas for residents of this region of Spain over 50.”

“What, why?” Violeta spat.

“Do you want to see the decree?”

“No, I want to know why! Do you know my sister died so you can have this border?” Victor put his hand on her back. “Ungrateful little machine cog, do you know what’s happened to us?” she spat.

“Yes, and I’m sorry.”

“Oh, yes, very sorry.” She picked up their suitcases and walked out, Victor trailing behind her.

By the train station there was an inn. The patio had plastic chairs that looked like they were from before the collapse of the EU. They ordered red wine. When they looked up, they saw a familiar face staring down at them.

“How do I know you?” Violeta asked. It was a face she remembered from before Alazne was born; a foreign face.

“Oh senyora Violeta, hello, I’m Sayed. When I arrived to Europe I was a teenager then. You were very patient with me. Without you I would not have learned Spanish.”

The surreal spiral of old memories brought a hesitant affirmation to her. She remembered the flags they waved from the farmhouses that read “Volem Acollir” – we want to welcome – to signal to the climate refugees that the farms offered shelter and work. She didn’t quite remember this youth, but he remembered her. 

“Did I then? I taught you Spanish?” 

“But yes! I even speak Catalan now.” She smiled as he switched languages to show off. He was right to be proud. He was one little human of seven billion, and he had crossed the vast distance of cultures over the bridge of language. 

“Is this your inn?” She asked.

“Si, senyora. I fought in the civil war. ”

“You fought for the independence of Catalonia?” she asked with a disbelieving smile.

“No” Sayed looked down. He mumbled it, seeming nervous anticipating their reaction, but it was Violeta who was embarrassed. She had forgotten how the Spanish government had suddenly reversed its policy on refugees when Catalonia took up arms for independence. They promised refugees citizenship after a certain number of years of military service, offering a decent life to the desperate if they agreed to kill in the crown’s favor. Now she’d gone and forced this poor man to remember his war trauma.  

“Well, come now, Sayed.” Victor offered. “Tell us where you get your wine.”

The three of them talked into the night of their families, of the war, of how they’d gotten by these years, and of the situation at the border. Victor and Violeta told Sayed why they were there. 

“You lost your home to a wildfire?” Sayed repeated the thought to himself, mulling it over. 

Victor and Violeta held hands under the table. “Yes” she said. It was their turn to remember trauma. Violeta breathed deeply. The summer night air was heavy and humid. She imagined the crickets sounded the same as they had one thousand years ago.

“There is a path across the borders and even through France, a safe path, but it is secret. My brother took it to meet family in Marseille.”

Violeta must have had a look of doubt on her face. Sayed went on, “It’s only for people like us, people who are on the move because of the heat.”

“They only help climate refugees cross?” Victor clarified.

Sayed nodded, he looked pensive. 

“How will they believe us, that we are what we say we are?” Victor asked.

“It doesn’t work like that. They will trust you. They trust those who know of the path to only share it with others like them. It’s like… they call it an underground railroad.”

Los Del Vi smiled. 

“But it’s not a train, ah. You will have to walk very far.”

“We aren’t as old and useless as the border guards think” Victor said.

* * *

A few hours later, Victor and Violeta stood by the Ebro river in the dawn light, squinting through sleepy eyelids at the water. A boat pulled up. They gave a final hug to Sayed, wishing him well, and got on board. 

The fisherman that took them along explained the path. “You’re lucky. They’re people just like you, people who took to the countryside after the crash. Are you Catalans?”

“We’re Valencian” Violeta said. “But my sister died fighting for Catalonia.”

“Ah you’re fine then. They wouldn’t care if you were bullfighters, but some of the safe houses don’t take in neo-fascists.” 

Violeta laughed, a dry dark laugh. “Just some of them?”

“Some of them will take pity on anybody. Some don’t tolerate intolerance. Don’t worry about it. The point is that you will be expected to stick around a bit, stay a few days at each house to help out, pay your way for food and shelter, fix things, pick herbs. If you had a farm you must be good at some of that?” They nodded. 

While the fisherman navigated, their two grey heads hovered over a map of the paths between the safe houses. Some of the houses were two days’ walk from each other. Some were just a few hours. “How much do you think you can walk per day?” the fisherman sized them up with a look.

“Five hours but not going too fast. Not up and down hills.” Violeta said. The fisherman paddled forward, looking into the water like it was infinite. “You’ll have two options, to try to cross the border into the Spanish enclave at Llívia, or closer to the coast, towards Perpignan. It should take you 6-8 weeks. Depending on the conditions at the border, they’ll give you advice once you get here.” He set down the oar to point to a house marked in the middle of some lakes west of Vic. 

“It will help keep you covered that you speak Catalan. They aren’t patrolling for migrants really. It’s the French border that will be trickiest. Just don’t walk through fields in harvest, especially at night. Some farmers will shoot if they think you’re stealing food.”

The boat finally arrived at a humanless stretch along the river shore, no houses, just trees. The river itself marked the border here. Once it pulled up to the eastern side, they stepped onto Catalan territory. 

“This is what we could get ya. You’re lucky you’re fleeing in summer.” From under a seat of the boat the fisherman pulled a big hiking backpack. Inside it was a tent and two sleeping bags, empty canteens, a compass, and several lighters. The camping material looked very old and cheap to begin with. “It’s what we had last minute.” Violeta saw a mild embarrassment on the fisherman’s face that he couldn’t offer them something better. “Gracias” She said. She could say no more. She took his weathered hand with both of hers and kissed it. Her throat was hot and itchy. They had nothing in the world but a suitcase, and a stranger whose name they didn’t even know had just given them a place to sleep. The humble fisherman glanced at her husband and grew red in the face, shifting awkwardly as if to dodge the attention. Victor hugged the man, speechless as well. “But of course, but of course. There’s nothing to thank,” mumbled the fisherman into Victor’s shoulder. He got back on his boat, and waved to them as he paddled off.

There was only one overgrown path from this spot on the river shore, stomped and cleared before by people like them. Violeta imagined Alazne walking just in front, calling her parents along into the unknown land. The water behind them, there was no turning back. 

Anya Verkamp (@avercampo) is an American Peruvian professional communicator on political ecology and a rebel in the Extinction Rebellion. She is currently based in Brussels.