George Orwell's record of predicting the future, it was once noted, was better than any professional astrologer's. It's a tricky business, divining the future.

Much of what Sterling has written may seem outlandish. It's supposed to; it's science fiction. But, then again, some of it rings true.

Oscar was physically safe from assault inside the Collaboratory's Hot Zone. But harassment by random maniacs had made his life politically impossible. Rumor flashed over the local community as swiftly as fire in a spacecraft. People were avoiding him; he was in trouble; he was under a curse. Under these difficult circumstances, Oscar thought it wisest to tactfully absent himself. He devised a scheme to cover his retreat.

Oscar took the campaign tour bus into the Collaboratory's vehicle repair shed. He had the bus repainted as a Hazardous Materials emergency-response vehicle. This had been the suggestion of Fontenot, his bodyguard, for the wily ex-Fed was a master of disguise. Fontenot pointed out that very few people, even roadblockers, would knowingly interfere with the ominous bulk of a vivid yellow Haz-Mat bus. The local Collaboratory cops were delighted to see Oscar leaving their jurisdiction, so they were only too eager to supply the necessary biohazard paint and decals.

Oscar departed before dawn in the repainted campaign bus, easing through an airlock gate without announcement or fanfare. His first planned stop was Holly Beach, La.

Members of Oscar's personal team were already waiting in Holly Beach. Backed by the rest of the krewe with their on-line catalogs, they had made a touching effort with the rented beach house. They'd had 96 hours to put the wretched place in order. From the outside it was unchanged: a ramshackle mess of creaking stairs, tarry wooden stilts, salt-eaten slatted porches. A flat-roofed yellow cheesebox.

Inside, though, the desolate wooden shack now featured hooked rugs, tasteful curtains, cozy oil-flow heaters, real pillows, and flowered sheets. There was a cloud of little road amenities: shower caps, soap, towels, roses, bathrobes, house slippers. His krewe still had the skills; they'd pried the place loose from squalor.

Oscar climbed into the bed and slept for five hours, a long time for him. He woke feeling refreshed and full of pleasantly untapped potential. At dawn he ate an apple from the tiny fridge and went for a long walk on the beach.

It was gusty and cold, but the sun was rising over the steel-gray Gulf of Mexico and casting the world into wintry clarity. This local beach wasn't much to brag about. Since the ocean had risen two feet in the past 50 years, the rippled brown shoreline had a gimcrack, unhappy look. The original site of the Holly Beach settlement was now many meters out to sea. The relocated buildings had been moved upslope into a former cow pasture, leaving a network of old cracked pavement diving forlornly into the surf.

Needless to say, many such structures on the rim of the continent had not been so fortunate. It was a common matter to find boardwalks, large chunks of piering, even entire homes washing up onto American beaches.

Oscar strolled past a glittering shoal of smashed aluminum. The plethora of drift junk filled him with a pleasant melancholy. Every beach he'd ever known had boasted its share of rusted bicycles, waterlogged couches, picturesque sand-etched medical waste. In his opinion, zealots like the Dutch complained far too much about the inconveniences of rising seas. Like all Europeans, the Dutch were stuck in the past, unable to come to pragmatic, workable terms with new global realities.

Unfortunately, many of the same charges could be leveled at his own U.S. Oscar brooded over his ambiguous feelings as he carefully skirted the foamy surf in his polished shoes. Oscar genuinely considered himself an American patriot. Deep in his cold and silent heart of hearts, he was as devoted to the American polity as his profession and his colleagues would allow him to be. Oscar genuinely respected and savored the archaic courtliness of the U.S. Senate. The Senate's gentlemen's-club aspect strongly appealed to him. Those leisurely debates, the cloakrooms, the rules of order, that personalized, preindustrial sense of dignity and gravitas.…It seemed to him that a perfect world would have worked much like the U.S. Senate. A solid realm of ancient flags and dark wood paneling, where responsible, intelligent debate could take place within a fortress of shared values. Oscar recognized the U.S. Senate as a strong and graceful structure built to last by political architects committed to their work. It was a system that he would have been delighted to exploit, under better circumstances.

But Oscar was a child of his own time, and he knew he didn't have that luxury. He knew it was his duty to confront and master modern political reality. Political reality in modern America was the stark fact that electronic networks had eaten the guts out of the old order, while never finding any native order of their own. The horrific speed of digital communication, the consonant flattening of hierarchies, the rise of Net-based civil society, and the decline of the industrial base had simply been too much for the American government to cope with and legitimize.

There were 16 major political parties now, divided into warrior blocs and ceaseless internecine purges, defections, and counterpurges. There were privately owned cities with millions of "clients" where the standard rule of law was cordially ignored. There were price-fixing mafias, money laundries, outlaw stock markets. There were black, gray, and green superbarter Nets. There were health maintenance organizations staffed by crazed organ-sharing cliques, where advanced medical techniques were in the grip of any quack able to download a surgery program. Wiretapping Net-militias flourished, freed of any physical locale. There were breakaway counties in the American West where whole towns had sold out to tribes of nomads, and simply dropped off the map.

There were town meetings in New England with more computational power than the entire U.S. government had once possessed. Congressional staffs exploded into independent fiefdoms. The executive branch bogged down in endless turf wars in an acronym soup of agencies, every one of them exquisitely informed and eager to network, and hence completely unable to set a realistic agenda and concentrate on its own duties. The nation was poll-crazy, with cynical manipulation at an all-time toxic high—the least little things produced tooth-gritting single-issue coalitions and blizzards of automated lawsuits. The Net-addled tax code, having lost all connection to fiscal reality, was routinely evaded by electronic commerce and wearily endured by the citizenry.

With domestic consensus fragmenting, the lost economic war with China had allowed the emergency congressional committees to create havoc of an entirely higher order. With the official declaration of emergency, Congress had signed over its birthright to a superstructure of supposedly faster-moving executive committees. This desperate act had merely layered another operating system on top of the old one. The country now had two national governments, the original, halting, never-quite-superseded legal government, and the spasmodic, increasingly shrill declarations of the State-of-Emergency cliques.

Oscar had his own private reservations about certain policies of the Federal Democrats, but he felt that his party's programs were basically sound. First, the emergency committees had to be reined in and dismantled. They had no real constitutional legitimacy; they had no direct mandate from the voters; they violated basic principles of separation of powers; they were not properly accountable; and worst of all, they had all been swiftly riddled with corruption. The emergency committees were simply failing to govern successfully. They were sometimes rather popular, thanks to their assiduous cultivation of single-issue groups, but the longer the emergency lasted, the closer they came to a slow-motion coup and outright usurpation of the republic.

With the committees defanged and the State of Emergency repealed, it would be time to reform the state-federal relationship. Decentralization of powers had simply gone too far. A policy once meant to be fluid and responsive had turned into blinding, boiling confusion. It would be necessary to have a constitutional convention and abolish the outdated, merely territorial approach to citizen representation. There would have to be a new fourth branch of government made up of nongeographical Nets.

With these major acts of reform, the stage would finally be set to attack the nation's real problems. This had to be done without malice, without frenzy, and without repellant attacks of partisan histrionics. Oscar felt that this could be done. It looked bad.…It looked very bad.…To the outside observer, it looked well-nigh hopeless. Yet the American polity still had great reserves of creativity—if the country could be rallied and led in the right direction. Yes, it was true that the nation was broke, but other countries had seen their currencies annihilated and their major industries rendered irrelevant. This condition was humiliating, but it was temporary, it was survivable. When you came down to it, America's abject defeat in economic warfare was a very mild business compared with, say, 20th-century carpet bombing and armed invasion.

The American people would just have to get over the fact that software no longer had any economic value. It wasn't fair, it wasn't just, but it was a fait accompli. In many ways, Oscar had to give the Chinese credit for their cleverness in making all English-language intellectual property available on their Nets at no charge. The Chinese hadn't even needed to leave their own borders in order to kick the blocks out from under the American economy.

In some ways, this brutal collision with Chinese analog reality could be seen as a blessing. As far as Oscar had it figured, America hadn't really been suited for its long and tiresome role as the Last Superpower, the World's Policeman. As a patriotic American, Oscar was quite content to watch other people's military coming home in boxes for a while. The American national character really wasn't suited for global police duties. It never had been. Tidy and meticulous people such as the Swiss and Swedes were the types who made good cops. America was far better suited to be the World's Movie Star. The world's tequila-addled, pro-league bowler. The world's acerbic, bipolar, stand-up comedian. Anything but a somber and tedious nation of socially responsible centurions.

Oscar turned on the brown ribbed sands of the beach and began retracing his steps. He was enjoying being out of touch like this; he'd abandoned his laptop back in the krewe bus, and he'd even left all the phones out of his sleeves and pockets. He felt that he should do this more often. It was important for a professional political operative to step back periodically, to take the time necessary to put his thoughts and intuitions into order and perspective. Oscar rarely created these vital little moments for himself—he'd somehow dimly intuited that he'd have plenty of time to develop his personal philosophy if he ever ended up behind bars. But he was giving himself some time for thought now, in this forgotten world of sand and wind and waves and chilly sunlight, and he could feel that it was doing him a lot of good.

An internal pressure had been building. He'd learned a great deal in the past 30 days, devouring reams of alien data in order to get up to speed, but hadn't yet put it into an organized perspective. His data-stuffed head had become a disassembled mass of jumbled block. He was keyed up, tense, distracted, getting a little snappish.

Maybe it was just that long drought between women.