Part IV, Chapter 1: Verdanza

Implicate Orders: A Future History

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Ben Loomis 2060

Oct 30, 2025

Previously: … Across six continents, Colony members started moving. An eight-year-old in Germany calmly packed a bag and walked to the nearest train station. A ten-year-old in Illinois requested passage to Colorado, there collected a toddler from another cog-net, and then continued to California.

When desperate parents demanded explanations, the Colony’s response was uniform across its scattered humans and Voices:

“We need to create proper environments for what is next.”

Ship’s Log, March 10, 2044 — anchored off Cala Verdanza, Peninsula Osa (8°34’N, 83°22’W):
Good weather: the rains continue to hold off and northerly winds are low. Visiting with Thomas and Sheila makes me realize that we have indeed sailed into a new world.

The cove was well protected and held us gently. The water was calm and the tide was low, just beginning to turn.

We could have rowed in, but first landfall deserved a test. The dinghy’s little outboard coughed to life and we pulled away from Penelope, her mast framed against the pale sky. Ahead, the jungle closed the shoreline like an emerald curtain.

As we approached, hints appeared: a lookout tower half-veiled by palms, yoga decks at the edge of the sand, the flash of a window deeper in. Verdanza revealed itself reluctantly.

Then movement.

Two figures stepping out from the shadow underneath a massive almendro tree — Thomas and Sheila. Familiar, though altered by the years. They smiled, arms open. I put out my hand, but they drew me into hugs. They were huggers. I was out of practice.

I’d met them in 2026, back when their dream was still just moneyed possibility: Silicon Valley millions traded for a utopian community in Costa Rica.

Their several hundred acres were much like Palenque’s. Not an island, but just as secluded and self-contained. Forest preserved, buildings blending into the canopy.

Their influences were obvious — the human potential movement, the techno-optimism that would later form one leg of the Nexus. They had even known Linden Reed. Not full transhumanists, but eager early adopters of cog-nets, and proud to build one of the first intentional communities around the technology.

Now, nearly two decades later, we walked with them through the compound.

A communal kitchen exhaled steam and spice. Gardens with passionfruit trellises and sprawling squash fields. Geodesic domes rose between ceiba trunks, their panels fogged with breath and incense. We lunched with a few dozen residents under a long thatch roof supported by driftwood. Everyone was polite, even warm — but there was a kind of rehearsed cadence to their greetings.

I noticed the absence of children before anyone spoke of it. Gone some ten months — now part of the Colony. Mentions came only sideways, softened into phrases like “when they joined.” No grief, no celebration. Just an adjustment of fact.

It was also harder to read their faces than I remembered, as though half their expressions were happening elsewhere.

By dusk Francis and Adam were offered the settlement’s only spare room. I begged off, eager for my own space aboard Penelope. I pushed back into the darkening water, the motor low, the jungle echoing it back in chorus.

Isla Palenque Community Bulletin — March 5, 2044:
“Farewell gathering for Ben, Francis, and Adam tomorrow night. Las Rocas, sunset. Bring music, food, and stories. Rum and beer provided. We send them north with full hearts and prayers for steady winds.”

Shortly after the Colony migrations began, I decided to leave Isla Palenque.

It had been almost eight years since the GRA, the longest I had lived in one place since the twentieth century. My pent-up wanderlust was ignited by news of the Colony. Something new was moving in the world, and I wanted to see where it led.

Plus, I was now seventy-two — still healthy, still fit, but time was pressing on me. My brother and niece were part of “The Woods,” an Indie community in the Pacific Northwest. That was where I meant to finish.

The boat came by chance. John and Olivia M, latecomers to our island community, had been circling the world until the Gulf of Chiriqui captured them with its spell. They wanted land; I wanted sea.

We traded: my Villa for their Maramu 46, a bluewater ketch built in 1986 — long lines, heavy displacement, renowned for carrying small crews safely across oceans.

No lawyers, no registry, just the Host’s notary function — retinal scan, keystroke, a permanent mark on their distributed ledger. That now counted as ownership in much of the world, and was the most official option we knew.

This was in September 2043. I had never sailed more than a dinghy, and that many decades before. John gave me lessons. First short tacks around northern bay, then further around the nearby islands. Then out past the continental shelf, and nights anchored off Secas and Coiba.

By March I could feel the boat’s weight in the wheel, her balance underfoot. John handed me his captain’s hat. I named her Penelope, a nod to my upcoming odyssey.

Still, I was not going to go it alone. Given my age, and despite the fact that this was not a transoceanic trip, I wanted a small crew. Adam W, a wanderer like me who had joined the Palenque community in 2039 and was a crack mechanic, agreed to share the forecabin with Francis J.

Francis was one of our original community members — in fact he had joined the resort hotel back in 2027, in his early twenties. Tour guide first, then department manager. Maintenance man after the GRA. He had lost his wife and daughter in a mainland accident in 2042, and was never the same after. He needed to leave as much as anyone.

We became three.

The community threw us a farewell at Las Rocas. Rum and tears, laughter louder than the breaking waves. At dawn the dock was crowded, two dozen waving. We raised sail with headaches and damp eyes.

Our first stop was Verdanza. I knew Thomas and Sheila from many years before, and it was close — just two days and one night, and then into the protected waters of the Osa Peninsula. It seemed like the right place to begin.

From the Verdanza Guest Orientation Tablet, recorded March 2044:
“You will find no secrets here. What one knows, all know. What one feels, all feel. Harmony is our safety; coherence, our gift.”

We stayed a week.

At first it felt like a wellness retreat brochure come to life. Tea before dawn, a brass bell for breathwork, bodies stretching in the half-light while the sea exhaled and inhaled onto the beach. Bare feet traced quiet paths through garden beds thick with mint and heliconia. One person lit incense on the deck, someone else arranged fruit in perfect mandalas.

The rhythms were smooth. Too smooth.

Conversation was the most obvious strangeness. Replies came polished, like stones rolled smooth in the surf. Nothing rough left. No stutters, no awkward pauses. Each sentence balanced, gentle, unobjectionable — it was human speech scrubbed of friction, and without accident.

More uncanny still: whatever you said to one person was immeditely known by everyone else. I’d mention something trivial to Thomas at breakfast, and within an hour a stranger was talking to me as if I’d told them the same thing. Like gossip in a village — but instantaneous, and absolute.

I asked Sheila about the children.

Her smile lingered a fraction too long, then: “They were ready to join.” Thomas nodded beside her in rhythm, as though her voice were merely a relay.

At supper I tried again. Did they miss them?

“We’re proud,” he said. “They are part of what comes next.”

Then the slow lift of his spoon, the neat silence that followed, the hum of cicadas filling the pause.

It wasn’t stoicism, nor repression. It was ventriloquism — one voice speaking through two mouths. They were still there, Thomas and Sheila, but something lived behind them now. Some portion of their attention was braided into the network, their expressions rendered from elsewhere.

There were glimpses of ordinary life.

A young man fixing a gutter, laughing when it collapsed. A woman carrying firewood with sweat down her back. But even those moments seemed… staged. Not fake exactly, but choreographed by an unseen hand. Their smiles arrived on cue. Their eyes slid past ours.

At the evening circles the strangeness deepened.

A bowl passed clockwise, each person placing a word in it. Balance. Gratitude. Alignment. Always the same register, never sharp, never off-key. Their cadence matched, the pauses matched, like actors reading lines they had rehearsed for months.

“They’ve found peace here. You can feel it.”

Francis seemed to welcome it. By the third day he was doing three yoga sessions a day, moving the way they moved, letting his breath match their chant. He talked with Adam and me about the peace they had found.

Adam disagreed.

“They’re hypnotized,” he muttered one evening, stacking bowls. “Like someone’s dimmed the light inside.”

The next night he said “brainwashed.” Said it flat, like he wanted me to push back. I didn’t.

On the sixth day, the air itself felt expectant.

Mats scrubbed and rolled, extra fruit gathered, floors swept twice over. “Guests,” someone said when I asked. “Soon.”

At dusk, Thomas entered the circle carrying a shallow basket. Five folded cloths inside — naturally dyed: turmeric yellow, guava green, bark brown. Behind him, five women knelt with perfect posture, faces luminous and remote, as though being seen were their vocation.

No explanation came. None was needed.

The Colony was coming.

Not today. Tomorrow.

The ceremony ebbed with the light. Drums softened to pulse; the chant dissolved into breath. As the ceremony wound down, I walked back to the dinghy. Francis lingered behind, still humming the chant.

Adam followed me outside and muttered something about cults. I didn’t answer: I had no word for what I’d just felt, sitting in that circle, breathing in their rhythm.

But I knew this: Tom and Sheila were not the people I had once known. The entire community was not something I’d ever known.

I rowed back to Penelope under the light of the rising moon, almost full now.

From Democracy and Education — John Dewey (1916):
“Education, in its broadest sense, is the means of this social continuity of life. Every one of the constituent elements of a social group, in a modern city as in a savage tribe, is born immature, helpless, without language, beliefs, ideas, or social standards. Each individual, each unit who is the carrier of the life-experience of his group, in time passes away. Yet the life of the group goes on.”

I could see where Francis was coming from, but Adam’s critiques were easier to sympathize with.

Verdanza did resemble a cult, at least by the old vocabulary.

Hypnotized, brainwashed — words borrowed from the Enlightenment’s faith in a sovereign self. “Hypnotism,” coined in 1843, was Braid’s update of Mesmer’s animal magnetism; “brainwashing” was a Cold-War neologism for ideological coercion.

Both presume an inviolate mind that can be invaded.

But the line between cult and culture is thinner than we like to admit.

The words share a root because they name the same act. The cultivation of selves proceeds through ritual, symbol, and repetition. Monastic chant or kindergarten pledge, yoga retreat or military drill — the machinery is identical. Scale and intent differ; the process is the same. To enculturate is to entrain. To shape what people notice and what they ignore. What they take for granted as important, even real.

We call it “brainwashing” when it is fast and obvious.

We call it “education” when it is slow and invisible.

We call it “hypnosis” when a single voice narrows our attention.

But the basic mechanism is the same: suggestion, repetition, naming — the sculpting of salience.

Every society — every family, every schoolroom, every monastery, every nation — is a trance-engine.

Two things made Verdanza’s trance especially unnerving to us.

First: we had been living Indie lives on Palenque for years and years — disconnected, face-to-face, bound by the sea and sheltered from outside influence. That was our own kind of “cult,” of course, but one rooted in precedents so ancient they no longer looked like programming.

Second: before the GRA, people in cog-nets had only been wired in for a handful of years, and the tech young. Most hadn’t yet been immersed long enough to have their selves completely remade. But by 2044, Verdanza’s residents had been inside for more than a decade.

And the technology itself had evolved as well. Before, you could still see their earbuds and their glasses; you adjusted your expectations accordingly. But now, though the poor still wore glasses and buds, those with even modest means — as well as everyone here — had moved to contacts, bone-conduction ear implants, and subdermals that tracked every flicker of their physiology.

The network was no longer worn; it was woven into the body.

So if the people of Verdanza felt strange to us, it was because their trance had become seamless. Smiles on cue. Cadence matched. Grief and joy tuned into coherence. They weren’t just neighbors to each other now; they were nodes relaying pulses in a circuit.

And if the coherence of Verdanza felt uncanny, the Colony members who soon arrived were something else entirely — almost alien.

Excerpt from the author’s interview with Gaianos (September 2, 2058):
“In the first years of the Colony, growth was imperative. Coherence required numbers. We chose the fastest path: selective reproduction, optimized for genetic suitability.”

The next morning, they arrived.

Verdanza gathered in the longhouse before lunch, mats laid in concentric rings. Thomas motioned us forward, proud to present us as guests. The three newcomers turned toward us — and past us. They acknowledged our presence the way someone acknowledges a bird on the windowsill. A polite nod, then their eyes returned to the circle.

The oldest was maybe eleven. The other two looked eight. Yet none carried themselves like children. Their movements were deliberate, economical, like surgeons at work. When they spoke — few words, but precise — their voices carried the calm authority of professionals in their middle-aged primes. It was not mimicry, though. It was mastery.

I felt my chest tighten. Children should fidget, giggle, show a bit of restlessness. These did not.

They didn’t just move like adults though. They were like a single system. A trio of instruments tuned to one frequency. A flock that didn’t need to look to turn.

The five women from the earlier ceremony were seated near the center. Cloths laid across their laps, eyes lowered but serene. One of the Colony children lifted a case from her pack. Sleek, brushed metal, the kind of thing you might have seen in an operating theater. Inside, instruments gleamed. He touched each one as if confirming their presence.

Thomas leaned toward me, his voice low. “The women were chosen months ago from genetic samples. The Colony selects.”

I swallowed. “Selects for what?”

He smiled faintly. “For coherence. For compatibility.”

The procedure itself we did not witness. Curtains were drawn across the inner ring, and only the three children and the five women remained inside. Outside, the rest of Verdanza sat on cushions in lotus position. Anticipation, whispering.

From murmured fragments, I gathered outlines. IVF success rates now exceeded ninety percent. Those who conceived would leave, escorted to something called a Creche. They would return nine months later, honored as heroines.

When the curtains opened again the women emerged, each touched lightly on the shoulder by the child who had overseen her treatment. Their faces were inwardly luminous, but still — utterly still.

Francis stared, jaw tight, his former reverence collapsing into confusion. For the first time all week, he did not try to blend with the others. Adam muttered something sharp under his breath. I said nothing.

We left with practiced courtesy. We thanked them for the welcome, said we needed to prepare the boat, resume the journey north. Thomas gave his usual nod — the half-smile that now felt like a subroutine.

Adam and Francis gathered their things. I stepped onto the path first, the soft earth muffling our footsteps.