He woke just before dawn on his second day, with a question unrelated to sovereignty.
The question was: where, exactly, was the bathroom?
He lay on his back in the gray early light, listening to the wind in the scrub outside the tarp.
He’d spent two months planning his sovereign claim, but in all his careful revisions of the founding document, he’d never thought about something as basic as where to go to the bathroom.
“Outside,” he said aloud, to nobody.
“The answer is outside.
Like camping.
You’re camping.
You used to camp.” He’d never really camped before.
He grew up in a city apartment with reliable plumbing and a doorman.
The closest he’d come was a friend’s bachelor weekend in the Catskills before law school, which meant a cabin with running water and a hot tub.
Now he saw he had a lot to learn.
He climbed out of the bedroll, attended to his morning needs, and found the Atlantic, as always, indifferent at dawn.
Back at the shelter, he started the camp stove and put on water for coffee, and as the kettle ticked toward a boil, he stood with his hands in his jacket pockets and watched the morning come up over the water.
He noticed how beautiful the morning was.
There was something different about an October sunrise over the Atlantic, something he’d never seen before.
Usually, he spent his Octobers in libraries.
The light rose in slow layers—gray that almost looked blue, then blue that almost looked pink, then pink that finally turned into the real color of the sky.
The rocks went from dark to wet to bright in about ten minutes.
Alaric had never thought of himself as someone who watched sunrises, but he watched this one.
The kettle whistled.
He made the coffee.
He drank it standing.
He already had the day’s plan written out in his legal pad, page seven with notes.
Walk the perimeter at low tide.
Note anything unusual.
Start drafting in the afternoon.
He had a list of laws to write, ranked by priority.
The top one was something he’d been thinking about since the first declaration.
For him, the morning’s perimeter walk was a professional courtesy to himself, the kind of survey work a lawyer’s instincts required before finalizing any deed.
He clipped the legal pad to a board he’d brought for this.
He slung the pad over his shoulder and set out.
Walking the perimeter took about forty minutes at low tide, depending on how often he stopped to write.
The shoreline changed a bit each day with the weather and the moon, and Alaric wanted to know exactly where his territory ended every morning.
He noticed a piece of driftwood that hadn’t been there yesterday.
He saw a bird’s nest in a sheltered spot, hinting at a tenant he hadn’t made laws for yet.
He also saw that the angle of a line of weeds at the eastern edge had changed, showing the current was moving differently than the chart predicted.
The walk took him past the spot where he thought the cutter had dropped its dinghy the day before.
No, that was wrong—the cutter was coming tomorrow.
He passed the place where he’d set the flag, the slab of rock he’d picked as his workspace, around the eastern edge where the wind was coldest, and along the south shore where the pebble beach made walking easy.
Finally, he returned to the shelter.
The whole loop took him just under an hour, including the notes.
By the time he got back to the slab with a fresh cup of coffee and his legal pad open to a clean page, the sun was up over the eastern horizon.
The day had settled into what it would be: clear, cold, and windy.
The sea kept working steadily against the rocks.
He sat down and started drafting.
The projectile-weapons law took two days.
He wanted to write it right there on the slab, just like he would write a brief in a law firm bullpen.
He made three drafts before settling on anything.
That was his process.
He threw out the first draft almost immediately.
It only covered firearms, which would have left loopholes for things like railguns, slingshots, thrown spears, and other types of harm he’d read about in his first-year torts class.
The second draft was broader: any weapon.
That was better, but weapon was a debated legal term, and he didn’t want to write a law that would force him to argue about the definition of weapon while someone was shooting at him.
The third draft solved the problem from the other direction.
He didn’t regulate the source.
He regulated the result.
He read the third draft twice.
Every word mattered.
A projectile meant anything in flight.
Discharged from outside, covered someone on the mainland firing in.
Achieve harmful velocity addressed a bullet crossing the airspace at lethal speed and then slowing down.
The bullet didn’t have to stop at the border; it just couldn’t stay dangerous once it was inside.
He liked the phrasing.
He was, in a way, proud of it.
He stood up.
He spoke the declaration.
It settled.
He’d started to notice that the settling felt different each time.
The founding declaration had been the strongest—a deep, full-body feeling that made him sit down on the rocks.
The shelter declaration was small, almost like flipping a light switch.
This one was somewhere in between, a clear, confirming weight, like a spirit level finding balance.
He sat back down on the slab.
And waited.
He didn’t have to wait long.
He had been listening to maritime traffic and the SHIELD operational channels for some days now, using a small radio at the eastern edge of the shelter.
The radio’s receivability had been the work of a small declaration spoken between chapters of his life, in the days before he’d left the hospital.
It had been doing quiet work for him ever since.
He had a reasonable picture of the surveillance protocol.
The drone wasn’t aggressive; it was just doing intelligence-gathering.
It was also, he suspected, going to test him today.
That suspicion proved correct about an hour after he sat back down.
Gerald fired a warning shot.
Alaric had expected it in theory, but the real moment still made him jump.
He flinched, even while sitting still, at the crack of a small-caliber round fired from above.
The shot was aimed downward at a steep angle, the way you’d fire a warning shot to mark a perimeter without hitting anything.
In operational terms, it was the most polite way of saying, ‘We are still here.’ The round entered the airspace at lethal speed.
It crossed the boundary.
At that moment, it lost everything that made it dangerous, becoming just a piece of falling metal.
It hit the rocks below the shelter at the slow speed gravity gave it.
There was a clear, small sound, as a coin dropped on a flagstone, and then silence.
Alaric got up and walked over to it.
The round sat in a small dip between two rocks.
He picked it up using a piece of paper folded around his thumb, since the chain of evidence mattered; you didn’t want to put your fingerprints on the first piece of physical evidence in your country’s founding archive if you could avoid it.
He photographed it from three angles.
The round went into a small evidence bag he’d labeled the night before.
The bag was placed in a plastic box set aside for physical records.
He recorded the time, location, and trajectory.
His thoughts, as he watched the round drop into the bag, were very dry.
Thanks, Gerald.
The second law was harder.
Laws about objects were easy because physics was reliable.
A declaration just had to describe a result.
Laws about people were harder, since they had to deal with intent, and careless drafting could get people killed.
He spent the afternoon working on the wording, with his legal pad on his knees and his back against a flat rock warmed by the late sun.
The first version read: any person crossing the border with the intent to cause harm to a resident is incapable of doing so until they leave the country.
He read it over and listed three problems in the pad, then crossed them out.
Any intent could include law enforcement responding to a crime.
Harm was undefined and might include medical procedures.
Incapable of doing so was vague.
Did it mean their muscles wouldn’t move, they couldn’t find their target, or the harm just didn’t happen?
He revised.
Any person crossing the border with the primary intent to cause bodily harm to a resident is physically incapable of doing so until they depart.
The primary intent part covered law enforcement.
An officer entering to stop a crime had the main goal of stopping the crime, not harming the suspect.
Bodily harm left out medical procedures and other agreed-upon contact.
Physically incapable made the effect the result, not just a rule.
He ran it through his head three more times.
He couldn’t find a hole.
Up.
Speak.
Settle.
Done.
There was no way to test this one.
He couldn’t summon anyone who wanted to harm him to verify that the law worked.
He wasn’t going to invite one onto the island for that purpose.
He noted the absence of a test in the pad.
He also noted that he was now in the position of having declared a defensive law he could not empirically verify.
He had to decide whether that bothered him enough to find a controlled way to test it.
It didn’t.
He’d trust the declaration and find out the first time it mattered.
The thought arrived dryly: most lawyers don’t have this kind of trust in their own work.
The third law was the one he’d never tell anybody about.
He’d been thinking about it since the first declaration.
He’d felt the cost of founding in his chest, a kind of low pressure that took hours to fade.
The smaller laws cost less.
Still, he noticed that each new law took a bit of his energy.
If this effect grew with the size of the declared space, and there was reason to think it might, any future expansion could drain him a lot.
He needed room to grow.
He drafted the personal law over the course of an afternoon, with the pad balanced on his knees.
It was harder to write than the others.
The others had been about the world.
This one was about him.
The language stated, formally, that within the sovereignty, a particular biological expression—his own—would not cause the deep fatigue that usually came with large-scale declarative work.
He read it through three times.
Choose every word with the care a person uses when drafting a document that binds them and cannot easily be revised.
He stood.
He spoke it.
It settled harder than any declaration before.
The settling was not pleasant.
It was like the difference between writing a contract that involved someone else and writing one that bound only yourself.
The second felt heavier because it was harder to change.
He sat on the slab for a long time, drinking water.
His hands shook a little.
He wrote that down in the pad.
He also noted that declaring something about himself felt very different from declaring something about the world.
He saved that thought for later.
He slept early that night.
He slept heavily and without dreams, through most of the night and into the morning.
When he woke, the trembling was gone; he was hungry; the air felt normal again; and the law had taken effect.
The next morning, he made coffee on the camp stove and drank the first cup standing, watching Gerald’s slow circular orbit at altitude.
The drone was alive and circling, and unaware that it had been used the day before as a test instrument.
The list was long.
Most of it was procedural and minor: everyday laws, residency rules for a population that didn’t exist yet, and ways to handle edge cases.
He picked a small one for the morning.
He declared, in formal language, that within the area called a kitchen—even though there was no kitchen yet, just a camp stove on a rock—water would boil at the right temperature for whatever drink he was making.
He considered this a luxury declaration.
He noted it as Law 4.
For the first time on the island, he smiled.