Some three hours’ slow march from the city, I caught sight of a multicolored blur in the distance, which soon resolved itself into a vast patchwork of vivid green and orange squares, scattered across the rock a few kilometers ahead. We’d just left the central plateau behind, and the ground now sloped gently down all the way to the coast; whether it was that modest gradient, or the end of the march coming into view, the going seemed suddenly easier. Thirty minutes later, the people around me stopped and began to pitch their own tents.

I sat on my suitcase and rested for a while, then dutifully commenced recording. Whether the evacuation had been rehearsed or not, the island itself collaborated with the refugees so fully as they set up camp that the process looked more like the smooth slotting into place of missing components in an elaborate machine – the logical completion of a function the bare rock had always implied – than any kind of desperate attempt to improvise in an emergency. One tear-sized droplet of signaling peptide was enough to start the cascade which instructed the lithophiles to open a shaft to a buried freshwater artery – and by the time I’d seen the third pump installed, I’d learned to recognize the characteristic swirl of green-and-blue trace minerals which marked the sites where wells could be formed. Sewerage took a little longer – the shafts were wider and deeper, and the access points rarer.

This was the flipside of Ned Landers’ mad, tire-eating survivalist nightmare: autonomy-through-biotech, but without the extremism and paranoia. I only hoped that the founders and designers of Stateless – the Californian anarchists who’d worked for EnGeneUity all those decades ago – were still alive to see how well their invention was serving its purpose.

By noon, with royal blue marquees providing shade for the water pumps, bright red tents erected over the latrines, and even a rudimentary first-aid center, I believed I understood what the medic had meant when she’d warned me not to think that I knew better than the locals. I checked the damage map of the city; it was no longer being updated, but at the last recorded count, over two hundred buildings – including the hotel – had been leveled.

Maybe technolibération could never transform the unforgiving rock of the continents into anything as hospitable as Stateless – but in a world accustomed to images of squalid refugee camps, choking on dust or drowning in mud … maybe the contrasting vision of the renegades’ village could still symbolize the benefits of an end to the gene patent laws, more persuasively than the island at peace ever had.