Vera stared through the camp’s apparent confusion, out to sea. Morning on the Adriatic. How pure and simple that sea looked… Although, when Vera had learned analysis, she had come to see that the famous “Adriatic blue” was spectrally nuanced with cloudy gray, plankton green, mud brown, and reflective tints of sky; that apparently “simple and natural” blue emerged from a wild melange of changing cloud cover, solar angles, seasonal changes in salinity, floods, droughts, currents, storms, even the movements of the viewer…
The sea had no “real” blue. And the camp was no “real” camp. There was a melange of potent forces best described as “futurity.” They were futuring here, and the future was a process, not a destination.
Feeling meek and frail without her helmet and boneware, Vera quietly slid into Herbert’s saffron-colored tent. Herbert was shaving his head with one hand, eating his breakfast with another.
Herbert was ugly, red-faced, and in his early fifties. The dense meat of his stout body was as solid as a truck tire. He ran a buzzing shaver over his skull, which bore seven livid dents from his helmet’s brain scanner.
Herbert’s exoskeleton, bone-white, huge, and crouching in a powered support rack, filled almost half his modest tent. Vera’s personal exoskeleton was a pride of the Acquis and had cost as much as a bulldozer, but Herbert’s boneware was a local legend: when Herbert climbed within its curved and crooked rack, he wore full-scale siege machinery.
The burdens of administration generally kept Herbert busy, but when Herbert launched himself into direct action, he shook the earth. Herbert could tear up a brick house like a man breaking open a bread loaf; he could level a dead village like a one-man carnival.