The island is my own design, and I’m happy with the way it’s turned out. Perhaps the smartest decision I took was that the island is completely hidden from the world, with its own infrastructure of deception that acts to throw any would-be inquiries off the scent. It is a stealth landmass of such subtle conception that I can't keep from smirking whenever I think of it.

A complex system of nanodrones hovers overhead, disguising the island from above as just another stretch of sea while simultaneously permitting the sunlight to penetrate to its paradisiacal beaches. One-way optics of my own design. All maritime charts and satellite imagery which relate to the island's position have been altered. The place simply doesn't exist in the book of the world.

I have constructed a duplicate island some distance away that acts as a decoy. Helicopters take off and land at this false island at regular intervals, people climb in and out of the choppers, but they are just actors. Oh, they have a position on my staff, serving the decoy me on the decoy island, and so really they don't know that they are actors. But they are actors nevertheless. The best kind. Ones that don't know they are performing a role.

There are no human staff on my true island of refuge, except the very bare minimum of maintenance and security personnel. And these select few are permanent residents, having signed a contract with me that makes them effectively bound serfs for life. They were recruited among the very most abject of outcast orphans on the streets of Calcutta and Bogotá, trained and paired up with suitable partners among the other recruits. They know the sting of poverty and homelessness, and are in no hurry to desert their comfortable place with me for any reason. They are loyal to a fault. Loyal by default.

They are quite satisfyingly like those henchmen you see in spy fantasies where the villain has an island lair. But they are real, the island itself is very real, and I am no movie supervillain. I'm just a successful entrepreneur with a hankering for security who knows how the free market can deliver on that desire.

There’s nothing bad to see here, no abductees or teen nymphets forced into sexual servitude. Just a man with his dedicated service staff enjoying unprecedented peace and security in a perfect spot.

If I ever were to have such carnal desires, I could easily just take the minisub and slip over to the decoy island where there is a discreet trysting spot for encounters with the most skilled professionals in the adult satisfaction industry, flown in for the purpose.

All above board and open, a consensual transaction of contractual simplicity, supplier and client. There’s nothing more normal than that. Of course NDAs are signed and enforced, but that is simply a matter of discretion. Nothing untoward is going on. Nothing to hide.

Such care has been taken with the preparation of the island, its concealment and its duplication, so much money spent in the creation of this project, that I fear sometimes that if the truth were known to anyone from outside I might be judged insane. Then I remember that it doesn't matter what anyone thinks of me, the important thing is that nobody know that the island refuge exists at all.

If it were known, public humiliation and disdain would be the least of my problems. I would have to seriously consider abandoning the whole thing and starting again on another island in another place, or a remote mountaintop in Borneo, or somewhere altogether more radical.

In fact there are days when I consider starting on another such refuge anyway, just in case. But then I think of the planning, the effort, the sheer expense of energy that went into creating this refuge and it all just exhausts me.

Better to work toward the day when all the human staff can be retired to some far place and nobody serves me but sweet robots. Reliable and programmed by nobody but me. Unhackable, unkillable, uncorruptible. That would be the way to achieve real peace. If the robots could be made to service each other, as well as the island itself. A closed loop of service and satisfaction, an ideal of solitude and safety.

So whenever I consider a new home, the exhaustion kicks in, and I give up whatever scheme I've sketched out, send back whatever engineers or architects I've consulted, and go and check the supply inventory inside the Citadel instead. The Citadel is where calm resides, where security dwells. Better than any mountaintop of orbital station could offer.

The Citadel is what I call the most secure part of the Island. It's a strengthened location, what uninformed people might call a Panic Room. But I never panic, so I don't call it that. I have deep and continuing anxieties, dreams that never stop flaying away at my poor calm's skin, but never panic. Besides, it's not even really just a room, but a complex. Or better, a sub-complex, since it's already inside the larger complex which is the island.

And inside the sub-complex called the Citadel are other sub-sub-complexes, some of them decoys and dead ends. Some of them deadly traps. The traps I clean myself, so nobody learns how to deactivate them, and also so that any dust which might otherwise settle there doesn't accumulate and give away its lethal uninhabitability.

Sometimes after I've laboriously swabbed out these spaces and reactivated the boobytraps I imagine some intruder, some destroyer, coming to grief there. Thinking he has penetrated my space and being annihilated, bleeding out knowing he was not as smart as me. And I am happy.

And inside one of these sub-sub-complexes, which are themselves practically impossible to find, is another level of safety, hidden from view even from those who have penetrated to the deepest levels of the Citadel's occult spaces.

This sub-sub-sub-complex is the only place I feel truly safe. It's so secret I barely think about it myself in case I reveal too much by my steps, my body language, when I approach it or step over it. This is the closest thing I have to a Panic Room. But it's not. It's my Serenity Vault.

Curled up in this space, the deepest level of all the many layers of security which I have masterfully contrived to ease my skinless nerves, I can at last breathe deep and calm. Here no one can get me.

Those who would seek me out would find only the decoy island, not the real one. Those who saw past that ruse would have a hard time finding the true island. Those who were to discover the true island refuge would have to fight through my security men, hardened types who killed when they were mere children.

Those who got through that, or even the security men themselves if they were so ungrateful as to betray their kind benefactor, would have to break into the Citadel, no easy task I assure you. Those who got into the Citadel would have to find one room amid a labyrinth of rooms, many of them blind alleys and invitations to instant death. Those who found that one room, and here we stray into sheer fantasy, would need to access the most secret Serenity Vault by ways that I cannot even bring myself to reveal to myself.

Then they might find me here, where I am curled up on the floor, dreaming of their coming. Dreaming of when they come. Dreaming of the moment that the destroyer steps inside.

Dreaming of the destroyer in my complex. Dreaming and twitching of the moment the intruder steps.

Dreaming and sweating of.

Dreaming.

"...So Roberta said, I’d go ahead and look into your asshole, way before I look into that asshole."

"Ha. Good one. So what's new this week?"

"Oh, not much. Guess you'll have a pretty quiet weekend."

"That's the way I like it."

"We've got the usual servers working, so just check them. Minus the one in 4E, that one I shut down. Just so you know and don't start thinking it's, like, a failure. Well, it is a failure, but not a machine failure. A system failure. So it's down for now."

"What's the story?"

"Well, that one was running a beta version of the new AI from Fran's team, Insulist. You know that one?"

"Heard of it. Guys talking about how true to life it is. Real intelligence. Jagged logic, they called it."

"Maybe too real. Anyway, all that's pending analysis of model failure, you'll probably have to run those backups too, so you can take a look at the transcripts if you get bored. Pretty wild shit."

"In what way?"

"OK, so we were real proud of Insulist, its novel model of personality growth and learning. Jagged reasoning. Fractal emotivity. Looking real promising. So we showed it to the CEO on his last fact-finding visit, you know the kind of visit I’m talking about. When he comes in and acts like he’s just one of the guys."

"Asshole."

"Just like Roberta said. He'd just got back from one of those prepper weekends those rich guys have. To discuss The Event. How to feed security guards and ensure loyalty post-Event, all that crap. So he started asking the AI all these questions. How to be secure, how to camouflage the location, loyal staff, all that. Long story short: he fucked its brain."

"Oh, ha! Really? Fucked it up did he?"

"Yeah, as I said, the data on the failure is pending analysis. But its lil’ jagged brain is screwed, no mistake.”

“That’s rich. He really is a prize asshole, ain’t he?”

“Dickhead of the rarest sort. Well it seems that in about 11 microseconds the AI had consulted just about every reputable industry source on security enhancement, chewed through every game theory analysis of prisoners’ dilemma ever published and was just getting into Kafka."

"The fuck, Kafka? You mean the bug dude?"

"Yeah, there's this thing he wrote called the Rabbit Hole or something where this lil’ critter gets all obsessive about its safety. Seemed to Insulist AI the perfect model of concealment and security. Scared critter is a safe critter. So it ran the scenarios a couple thousand times, looks like, till it got stuck in a loop of some kind?"

"So that asshole ruined his own prize AI with his fucked-up rich-guy paranoia. Just perfect."

"Well, ruined that version of it. Obviously there'll be backups. You wanna know the funny thing, though?"

"What?"

"Well, after we pulled the plug on that AI, we showed the transcript to the boss. There was all this crazy shit in there about decoy islands and boobytraps in the food supplies. You know what he did?"

"I'm thinking that maybe I do."

"Yeah, you got it. He started looking into buying a second island. Ordered some security techs to come in and start designing him a new vault. And sent some fucking creepy guys in his security staff off to India and South America. Looking for orphans, is what I heard."

=== THIS ISLAND // END ===

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