I couldn’t concentrate. I gave up, closed my eyes and attempted to doze off – but a siesta appeared to be biochemically impossible. I blanked my mind and tried to relax. Eventually, my notepad chimed and announced my connection to Dili – picking up the news from the room’s IR broadcast a few seconds before the multilingual audio began. I headed for the security gate – and, stepping through, recalled the scanner in Manchester, extracting poetry from a student’s brain. No doubt in twenty years’ time, weaponless hijackers would have their intentions exposed as easily as any explosive or knife. My passport file carried details of my suspicious internal anomalies, to reassure nervous security officials that I wasn’t wired to explode … and maybe in the future people who were plagued by unwanted dreams of running amok at twenty thousand meters would need analogous certificates of innocuousness.

There were no flights to Stateless from Cambodia. China, Japan and Korea were all pro-boycott, so Cambodia fell into line with its major trading partners to avoid causing offense. As did Australia – but its enthusiastic punishment of the “anarchists” went above and beyond the call of realpolitik . There were flights from Phnom Penh to Dili, though – and from there I could finally reach my destination.

It was no mystery why Sydney-to-Dili was out of the question. After Indonesia annexed East Timor in 1976, they’d split the profits – the Timor Gap oilfields – with their silent partner, Australia. In 2036, with half a million East Timorese dead, and the oil wells irrelevant – hydrocarbons being molecules which engineered algae made from sunlight, in any shape and size, for a tenth of the cost of milk – the Indonesian government, under pressure more from its own citizens than from any of its allies, had finally, reluctantly acceded to demands for autonomy for the province of Timor Timur . Formal independence had followed in 2040. But fifteen years later, the lawsuits against the oil thieves still hadn’t been settled.

I boarded through the umbilical, and took my seat. A few minutes later, a woman in a bright red sarong and white blouse sat down beside me. We exchanged nods and smiles.

She said, “You wouldn’t believe the rigmarole I’m going through. Once in a blue moon my people hold a conference off the nets – and they had to choose the most difficult place in the world to reach.”

“You mean Stateless?”

She regarded me sympathetically. “You too?”

I nodded.

“You poor man. Where have you come from?”

“Sydney.”

Her accent was almost certainly Bombay – but she said, “I’m from Kuala Lumpur. So you’ve had it worse. I’m Indrani Lee.”

“Andrew Worth.”