I’d have come here just for the smell of the forest, if I’d known. There weren’t many of us on that stolen starship. “Not many” is one thing for a ship, but for a whole planet? That makes us rare. Precious, even. The way it should be. [hr] It was impossible to sleep through the rain coming down on the wood shingle roof, so we both sat on the front porch, staring into the darkness where the kerosene lamplight failed to reach the trees. It was impossible to talk, too, but we were comfortable together in the drumming silence. I leaned back and felt the chair creak beneath me. I couldn’t hear it, but I knew its aches as well as my own bones. The old oak was smooth beneath my fingers and slightly sticky with the humidity of a summer storm. It was a humidity that wasn’t doing my lungs any favors, nor the lever-action carbine slowly rusting where it leaned against the door. Across the porch, the old woman with a quilt over her lap looked as tired as I felt. Still, though, I couldn’t help but smile when I closed my eyes and saw the ever-present red light blinking in the lower corner of my vision that said: [color="red"][b]NO CONNECTION[/b][/color] [hr] When I sat up, my wife was already looking at me, with eyes only a worried wife can have. She must have seen it before I did. [color="orange"][b]CONNECTING…[/b][/color] Watching the dots appear one by one at the end of the word was the most terrifying thing I knew. Waking up to a bear between you and your gun was scary, but a bear could only kill you, and eat you, and shit you out, and then you would be a source of nutrients for the trees. You would be something that’s scarce in the universe. You would be [i]valuable.[/i] Though the processor was still embedded deep in my brain, I knew it would never connect. Pulling the graphene transmitting antenna out of my scalp was the second most painful thing I’d ever experienced. Pulling the damn thing out of [i]her[/i] head was the worst. My hands were shaking so bad it took me three tries to light my pipe. My wife stood up and put her hand on my shoulder before kissing me on the forehead. Neither of us needed to say a word. She had her chores, and I had mine. [hr] A post-scarcity society, they called it. I’d read in one of the old economics books - the kind they banned - that as a resource becomes more plentiful, it becomes less valuable. After the molecular makers and scavengers had become cheaper than plumbing and ovens, nobody was willing to pay any amount of money for gold, calories, or clean water. Every resource was plentiful, and its value - [i]marginal utility[/i] was the term the books used - was nothing. And there was no resource as plentiful as people. Numberless, valueless, [i]worthless[/i]. People had filled up their first planet and poured into the stars, ever searching for more planets to make just like Earth. Colonized planets became ubiquitous. They were always finding new planets, and occasionally, they found this one. I leaned against a tree and watched them. Little Columbuses and Armstrongs, they fancied themselves. The “first” explorers of a new planet, and every one of them had the glassy, unfocused eyes that told me they were watching data feeds. They didn’t see the trees, didn’t feel the damp on their skin, and they didn’t smell the living green growing around them. I took another puff on my pipe and blew the smoke in a ring toward the nearest one. He was looking right at me. Or through me. Without my data link, his eyebrain didn’t realize I was a person. It didn’t highlight me in green or red. I was translucent to him, as the others in his group scanned the woods behind me with a dozen different wavelengths and overlaid the three-dimensional map onto his vision. This planet was a paradise, an unspoiled Eden. The kind of place that everyone wants to go to honeymoon or retire. And he couldn’t see it. He didn’t see the pristine forest, or the deer across the way, or the crystal stream, or the rifle I raised toward him. And his “friends” didn’t hear the shot. The audio sensors installed from birth in their ear canals didn’t detect the signature of a laser discharge, and they automatically cut out any sounds louder than the pain threshold. As far as their eyebrains were concerned, it was just another thunderclap from the quaint weather above. Everyone wanted to escape to a nicer place. And when they got there, they promptly did their best to turn paradise into the hell they just escaped from. But this was [i]our[/i] paradise, and true, sometimes we went hungry here, or got sick. Sometimes the rain and thunder kept us awake at night. But this planet wasn’t like the rest of the billions in the galaxy. It wasn’t covered in swarms of humans. We had to work for food and shelter and tools. This planet was unique. Valuable. I jacked another round into the chamber and took aim at the last of the walking, breathing network nodes. [i]People[/i] should be valuable. [color="red"][b]NO CONNECTION[/b][/color]