Laura’s statement on all that happened to her and sends it on the Net. Laura and Gresham get romantically involved, but this feeling has no future as she has to go back to the States while Gresham will continue to help Inadins. Laura arrives at Galveston and takes part in an official Rizome party organized for her. Her husband David had lost hope that she was alive and gotten involved with Emily Donato, her closest friend, and Laura and David’s daughter Loretta is raised by Laura’s mother Margaret. Laura continues to work for Rizome and tries to improve the world by doing so. The last scene in the novel describes Hiroshima being bombed by F.A.C.T. Fortunately, this time the bomb did not explode. Lawrence’s doctrine In the fictional world of Islands there exists a book titled The Lawrence Doctrine and Postindustrial Insurgency by Colonel Jonathan Gresham. It is banned by Vienna and widely read in the political underground. It draws on the example of T. E. Lawrence, who during the First World War helped the Arabs, who were fighting the Ottoman Turks. Lawrence convinced them, instead, to block the Ottomans' expansion by destroying their communication lines, which at the time were railway tracks and telegraphs. Although the Arabs were successful in fighting the Turks, they became dependent on the British Empire to provide them with industrial products such as explosives and canned food. Gresham calls the First World War “a proto-Net civil war”. In Sterling's 21st century, the Tuaregs' enemy is the Net. But whereas the Arabs were colonized by the British with industrial products such as guns, cotton, dynamite, and canned food, for Sterling's Tuaregs the necessary products of the Networld are solar power, plastique, and single-cell protein. Gresham’s book shows a pessimistic view of globalization and its mechanisms. It takes the view that it is impossible for small and economically weaker nations to stay completely independent; global influence will always be present with its positive and negative aspects. Political order of the world in Islands In the world of the novel the USA and the Soviet Union are still the world powers. The international political order, which is guarded by the Vienna Convention and uses censorship as a means of keeping the world order, is weak and divided, and to avoid world panic protects the terrorists from F.A.C.T. Countries that grow in power are Grenada, Singapore and Luxemburg,