The dense wet air along the Huang Pu was supporting millions of tons of 
air buoys, and Nell felt every kilogram of their weight pressing upon her ribs 
and shoulders as she skated up and down the main waterfront thoroughfare, 
trying to maintain her momentum and her false sense of purposefulness. This was 
the Coastal Republic, which appeared to have no fixed principles other than 
that money talked and that it was a good thing to get rich. Every tribe in the 
world seemed to have its own skyscraper here. Some, like New Atlantis, were not 
actively recruiting and simply used the size and magnificence of their 
buildings as a monument to themselves. Others, like the Boers, the Parsis, the 
Jews,
went for the understated approach, and in Pudong anything understated was more 
or less invisible. Still others—the Mormons, the First Distributed 
Republic, and the Chinese Coastal Republic itself—used every square inch 
of their mediatronic walls to proselytize.