The gator tailed the airboat, its tail moving faster than the decrepit fan that pushed the boat across the brackish swamp. Its cargo was three overflowing buckets of dinner: hundreds of sweet, succulent crustaceans that were so fresh they were still crawling around.
The crustaceans’ smell wafted into the gator’s nostrils, just in case its eyes didn’t give it a clear enough sense of its target. The boat slowed down even further to go around a bend in the swamp. Sensing an opportunity, the gator's tail went into overdrive, the sloshing water eliminating any hint of stealth. Once the gator was less than one body-length away from its target, it opened its mouth and prepared to launch—
Its skull was caved in by a bullet. It collapsed into the bayou, its body overturned. The boat reversed to pick up the corpse before it fully sank into the swamp.
“Looks like surf and turf tonight, don’t it Benni?” Octavia said as the two of them picked the fallen beast out of the bayou and plopped it onto their boat, its head lurching over the bow like a figurehead on a centuries-old man-o’-war. But this boat had a much smaller crew, and, despite Benoit’s begging, not one single cannon.
“Wouldn’t it be surf and surf? Then again sis, considering how you insist on overcooking everything, it’ll be more like turf and turf.” Benoit said, hitting the throttle again as the boat twisted through the path lined with reeds and lily-pads; the water was almost as green as the plants.
“Follow the algae-brick road.” Benoit said under his breath as the boat made the last couple turns on its way home.
Home was a village on stilts, with three-to-five-room, single-story houses connected by bridges of wood and rope that were barely wide enough for two people normally, and scarcely wide enough for one person after a boil.
The first versions of the village were made of wood out of necessity, but the humidity, hurricanes, algae, and everything else—even woodpeckers—ruined them after a few years each. This time, thanks to some new, more successful residents, the stilts and homes were printed rather than built.
The stilts were built around flexible cores of graphene to move in the winds, wrapped in a few layers of titanium for extra strength, then covered in stainless steel to protect them from the water.
The homes were primarily ABS plastic, with walls of violet, teal, gold, scarlet, and every other garish color under the sun. In opposition to the walls, every roof were coated in silvery graphene solar panels. The glass for the windows was made from sand taken from the beach a few dozen miles off.
The homes were in hodgepodge clusters of one to five, with a new one being printed when an older child was ready to move out. Over the decades the number of homes had gone from fifteen to nearly six times that number, and the population from 50 to 350, with quite a few more deciding to move away.
Octavia and Benoit pulled into the slip at the Northeast edge of town; their airboat was the last of the three to make it back to its space. “Hey Benny, nice to finally meet your long-lost brother. He’s a spitting image of you, don’t you think?” Tre laughed, picking the gator off the deck and carrying it up the taupe staircase to the common platform at the center of the village, which was already billowing light gray smoke and steam. Benoit rolled his eyes as he carried the buckets to the top.
Reaching the platform, Benoit saw that the customary blue, purple, and yellow lights had already been strung around the posts in celebration. A band was playing some tune which was drowned out by the sizzle of the boil.
The trio of catfish that Kyle dove and hand-caught were already being pan-fried; one gator was already being roasted over the spit, and the water trough was already boiling with dozens of corn cobs, onions, and potatoes stacked up beside them, just waiting for the stars of the show.
“How nice of the kids to finally arrive.” Joe laughed, his eyes nearly the same shade of teal as his house. “You have any idea how many buildings I had to design so we could buy enough spices to mask the taste of those damn crawfish? . . . It was actually just one; a home for an eccentric with a truffle obsession. I had to design all these funky cultivation caverns, but she paid a premiu—.” His laugh was cut short by the celebration lights turning red and black, a noiseless proximity alarm.
“Oh good; it’s not our side this time. Other half has to hold their breath for once.” Joe laughed, as the supports for the Western half of the village submerged, the buildings sealing themselves airtight before dipping under the water. The drone’s sensors would just pick up the buildings as wreckage from the village’s past iterations before passing by to do, well, whatever its mission was, probably recon. A few minutes later, the drone flew overhead, twin propellers on a small chassis with a comically large camera, confirming it as another recon model.
It buzzed around, took its pictures—the feast likely made its operators quite jealous—before going back North. It was violating Republique airspace, but that transgression was ignored, without even an angry press release to accompany it. Annoying as that was, it was that same negligence that allowed the village to survive.
Sadly, it was the Eastern half’s turn a few minutes later, with the lights turning maroon and gold. “If anything’s overcooked, I’m blaming you Kyle.” Benoit laughed as each of the couple dozen people present grabbed some of the food to go back into the cabins. From the viewport installed in the roof above his house’s hydroponics room, he saw this drone stop at the exact same spot as the first, probably taking the first drone’s exhaust into its sensors before absolutely bolting to follow its trail; they didn’t even need to submerge this time.
The all-clear sounded as the dwellings and common platforms made their way back up. The hiss of the pot’s boil had barely restarted when the shot rang out; whatever fired it was far larger than anything that could be on a drone.
“Well that’s new. Looks like someone remembered what sovereign airspace means. I was starting to doubt they could even spell it.” Octavia laughed, adding the last few corncobs and potatoes to the boil.
“Just as long as they keep forgetting about us.” Kyle laughed, still looking off at the horizon. “Though I’m more worried about whoever bought that gun for them. If they care that much about policing the periphery . . .” He said as he looked back down and flipped the catfish in his pan, the sizzle drowning out his last couple syllables.
Kyle’s words lingered in the air, but only for a moment, as they were quickly overwhelmed by half a dozen flavors of smoke and steam from the boil. Still, Benoit couldn’t shake the feeling that he was just a frog, and that the bayou was the continent’s biggest—and smelliest—pot, a pot he and his people would be boiled alive in once the shooting really started. But now was not the time for that. Letting out a long exhale, Benoit emptied his mind and filled his stomach. The crawfish was still as delicious as ever.