EVERY REGION HAS ITS PARTICULAR threats and allures. There is, in itself, nothing exceptional about the scale of natural obstacles to human settlement in Houston. What's interesting is how people here have kept the weather and the wilds at bay: the confluence and the lack of it between human development and nature's insistent patterns.

Implants: precious, foreign bastions seated in a new environment. In a rough frontier, where the hold on the land is tenuous and constant vigilance is necessary to fend off threats, the notion of a settlement as an implant is perhaps laughably grandiose, but it fits nevertheless. Today's implants are inserted with surgical precision; insulating and maintaining them is the normal course of business.