Atlas Outtake #14: Small Ambitions

In the world's smallest state there are no births and the guards' wives travel over the border to bear their children on foreign territory.* All citizens of the world's smallest state are immigrants selected by members of the existing population, and their citizenship is revoked when they have fulfilled the duties for which they were selected. There is no space for embassies, for countrysides, forests, or rivers. The landscape is overwhelmingly stone and concrete. The borders are protected by men hired from the neighboring country; one border guard is hired for every six citizens. The border is marked by a white stripe painted on the ground. Only in one area—three meters by sixty—is there disputed territory, at the edge of the public square. The world's smallest state and its neighbor cannot agree on ownership of these three by sixty meters, but there is no incentive to fight about it, having fought over much larger pieces of land many times in the past: the world's smallest state is the vestige of a much larger state that used to contain more forests and rivers and women than its administrators could ever properly count, until the borders were pushed back by neighboring armies intent on creating the smallest state the world could ever imagine, a state within a state and city within a city whose territorial ambitions could be kept to a manageable three by sixty meters, so small there wasn't even room for a child to be born or any new territorial ambitions to be conceived.

* Only six percent of the population are women and most of these are not guards' wives: most of them will never bear children at all. Most of the citizens prefer the company of other men anyways.