‘Tallan indicates I should take my seat again and sits down in a chair across from me. The waiter appears with a bottle of Heineken Supercrisp on a tray. Tallan is given something that looks like iced tea garnished with mint. Then the waiter steps back. He’s barely out of sight when I feel the pontoon beginning to move underneath us. In complete silence, the red-canopied raft pushes off into the Zuiderzee, away from the smell of barbecue, the small talk, and the jazz music. My specs disapprove, since out here there’s not even a whiff of a network connection. I think that’s unlikely. The pontoon probably has a signal jammer, or even a more complex piece of anti-surveillance technology.
“A little sphere of piracy,” Tallan observes. “What do you think of my mobile island?”
from Drone State by Tom Hillenbrand
Absence Club 