Read Online The Caryatids by Bruce Sterling - Free Book Online Page B

in the open fields of an Adriatic island. They'd never planned to meet such a fate. They'd simply known that, as refugees without options, they were being offered a radically different life.
    When they had docked at Mljet in their slow-boat refugee barges, they'd been given their spex and their ID tags. As proper high-tech pio-neers, they soon found themselves humbly chopping the weeds in the bold Adriatic sun.
    The women did this because of the architecture of participation. They worked like furies. As the camp women scoured the hills, their spex on their kerchiefed heads, their tools in their newly blistered hands, the spex recorded what-ever they saw, and exactly how they went about their work. Their labor was direct and simple: basically, they were gardening. Middle-aged women had always tended to excel at gardening.
    The sensorweb identified and labeled every plant the women saw through their spex. So, day by day, and weed by weed, these women were learning botany. The system coaxed them, flashing imagery on the insides of their spex. Anyone who wore camp spex and paid close atten-tion would become an expert.
    The world before their eyeballs brimmed over with helpful tags and hot spots and footnotes. As the women labored, glory mounted over their heads. The camp users who learned fastest and worked hardest achieved the most glory. "Glory" was the primary Acquis virtue. Glory never seemed like a compelling reason to work hard—not when you simply heard about the concept. But when you saw glory, with your own two eyes, the invisible world made so visible, glory every day, glory a fact as inescapable as sunlight, glory as a glow that grew and waned and loomed in front of your face—then you understood.
    Glory was the source of communion. Glory was the spirit of the corps. Glory was a reason to be. Camp people badly needed reasons to be. Before being rescued by the Acquis, they'd been desolated. These city women, like many city women, had no children and no surviving parents. They'd been uprooted by mas-sive disasters, fleeing the dark planetary harvest of droughts, fires, floods, epidemics, failed states, and economic collapse.
    These women, blown across the Earth as human flotsam, were becom-ing pioneers here. They did well at adapting to circumstance-because they were women. Refugee women — women anywhere, any place on Earth—had few illusions about what it meant to be flotsam.
    Vera herself had been a camp refugee for a while. She knew very well how that felt and what that meant. The most basic lesson of refugee life was that it felt bad. Refugee life was a bad life. With friends and options and meaningful work, camp life improved.
    Then camp life somewhat resembled actual life. With time and more structure and some consequential opportunities, refugee life was an ac-tual life. Whenever strangers became neighbors, whenever they found commonalities, communities arose. Where there were communities, there were reasons to live. Camp user statistics proved that women were particularly good at founding social networks inside camps. Women made life more real. Men stuck inside camps had a much harder time fending off their de-spair. Men felt dishonored, deprived of all sense and meaning, when culture collapsed. Refugee men trapped in camp thought in bitter terms of escape and vengeance. "Fight or flight." Women in a camp would search for female allies, for any means and methods to manage the day. "Tend and be-friend."
    So: In a proper modern camp like this one, the social software was de-signed to exploit those realities. First, the women had to be protected from desperate male violence until a community emerged. The women were grouped and trained with hand tools.
    The second wave of camp acculturation was designed for the men. It involved danger, difficulty, raw challenge, respect, and honor, in a bit-ter competition over power tools. It acted on men like a tonic. Like any other commons-based peer-production method, an