Inland, a sprinkling of lights hinted at a city’s orderly grid. I felt a sudden rush of unease. Stateless was as beautiful as any atoll, as spectacular as any ocean liner … with none of the reassuring qualities of either. How could I trust this bizarre artifact not to crumble into the sea? I was accustomed to standing on solid rock a billion years old – or riding machines of a suitably modest human scale. In my own lifetime, this whole island had been nothing but a cloud of minerals adrift over half the Pacific – and from this vantage, it didn’t seem beyond belief that the ocean might surge in through a thousand invisible pores and channels to dissolve it all, reclaim it all, at any moment.

As we descended, though, the land spread out around us, streets and buildings came into view, and my insecurity faded. One million people had made this their home, staking their lives on its solidity. If it was humanly possible to keep this mirage afloat, then I had nothing to fear.

Chapter 10

The plane emptied slowly. Passengers pressed forward, sleepy and irritable; many were clutching cushions and small blankets, looking like children up past their bed time. It was only about nine p.m. here – and most people’s body clocks would have agreed – but we were all still dazed and cramped and weary. I looked around for Indrani Lee, but I couldn’t spot her in the crowd.

There was a security gate at the end of the umbilical, but no airport staff in sight, and no obvious device for interrogating my passport. Stateless placed no restrictions on immigration, let alone the entry of temporary visitors – but they did prohibit certain imports. Beside the gate was a multilingual sign which read:

Feel free to try to bring through weapons.

We’ll feel free to try to destroy them.

STATELESS AIRPORT SYNDICATE

I hesitated. If my passport wasn’t read, and the seal of approval for my implants taken into account … what would this machine do to me? Incinerate a hundred thousand dollars worth of hardware – and fry a large part of my digestive tract in the process?

I knew that was paranoid: I could hardly have been the first journalist to set foot on the island. And the message was probably aimed at visitors from certain privately-owned South American islands – “libertarian havens” established by self-styled “political refugees” from the US gun law reforms of the twenties – some of whom had tried to bring Stateless around to their special way of thinking on a number of occasions.