Ted sent a happy new year message out via his internet modem, addressing all internet users in the world, but most especially those who, like him, lived or worked in a micronation. The most famous micronation, the precursor to the other current-day micronations that dot not only the face but also the upper regions and the depths of the earth, is Sealand—the Principality of Sealand (www.sealandgov.org). In 1967, Roy Bates, owner of a pirate radio station in England called Radio Essex, along with 240 other people took possession of an abandoned British World War II military base. A platform half the length of a soccer field, it rested on two cylindrical cement-and-steel pillars that rose vertically up from the greenish gray English coastal waters. The platform is bare except for a small number of sheet metal constructions, heavily rusted, tiny in the overall space. Aside from the 185 “macronations” with their nuclear capabilities and their UN memberships, and the 60 nations without that formal recognition, there are dozens of overlooked micronations. The website http://micronations.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_micronations lists more than 100 micronations, each with its own currency, flags, capital cities, founding fathers, and legal systems. Ted, who is currently 200 feet beneath the Nevada desert, installed in a large hall—once the government’s Radioactive Waste Management Center—uncorks a bottle of champagne and toasts his 177 fellow citizens of the Isotope Micronation. Although, the toast has two motivations today, because they suspect there’s been a death. Isotope Micronation can be described as a large subterranean cube, 250,000 square feet in volume: a cement intestine that, if laid out flat, would be almost 400 miles long. A couple of micronation pioneers acquired it from the government, which had failed to get rid of it in an auction, due to people’s reticence, bordering on the irrational, when it comes to anything to do with radioactivity. They’ve modified the stretch of desert at the surface so they can keep cattle; the variables of the small ranch are kept under constant control using a computer program they themselves developed and installed in the so-called Agriculture Hub, down in the depths of Isotope: mineral levels, photosynthesis rates, the stress levels of each of the beasts, insemination schedules. There’s also an old helipad on the surface, a large expanse of solar panels for their energy, and a small hut like a gunner’s nest that gives access to Isotope Micronation’s true, below-earth location: the school, restaurants, and living spaces, the shops, water deposits, and electric transformers, et cetera, spread throughout hundreds of halls and galleries of all shapes and sizes, from 0 to 300 feet in depth. So vast is the oversized subterranean cube that the 178 inhabitants can go as long as a month without seeing another soul, and then when they finally do it’s an excuse to really catch up. When the day comes that one of them dies unexpectedly in transit between the halls or galleries, they know it will probably take a while to find out, but this is yet to happen: the micronation is barely ten years old and, from this point of view, for the time being, this makes immortals of them all. One of the micronational entertainments, controlled by the Microstate Betting Module, an offshoot of the Economy and Revenue Hub, is a bet on who will die first. Sheets are printed each week with tick boxes next to the names of each citizen. Over time whoever puts the most X’s beside the name of the first unfortunate person to go will be the winner, and as their prize they get to take on all of the dead person’s assets. Everyone is constantly on the watch for sickly children, adults engaging in high-risk activities, or the smell of the soup at the fast-food place in case they suspect the waiter of having placed x amount of X’s beside their name.