Technomad (I)

The technomad was cornered, flushed, and breathing hard. He flung his hands up in front of his face, and muttered something that none of the children could make out.
“Kick him!”, “Hit him!”, “Make him take a bath!” The cries mixed up together as the braver children pressed forward and the less-brave egged them on. A stick, too thin to hurt, bounced off his forearm, and he crouched, trying to hide himself behind himself.
“OK kids, that’s enough.” The voice was deep, masculine. The technomad stayed crouching though, now peering out from behind his hands. The children were crying out in dismay, but they were milling around a little now, less sure of themselves now another adult was present. “That’s enough, I said. Put those stones down, and get on. Leave it alone, it hasn’t hurt you.” Some of the stones that were dropped looked like housebricks to the technomad, but he wasn’t about to say anything now.
When the sounds of footsteps had fallen away he lowered his arms and looked around. There was a small rockery of stones and bricks lying around, and he realised he’d come close to being stoned to death. A little distance off a man in a tight green sweater stood looking at him.
“You know you’re not welcome here,” said the man. “We made that clear last time. Why have you come back?”
“We’re nomads,” said the technomad. “Technological nomads. We roam from village to tow--”
“Yes, I know all that. You substitute technology for living and you expect other people to support you while you make ‘art’.” There was a lot of disgust in that last word, and the man in the green sweater spat after saying it. “We’re not stopping you roaming, in fact, we want to keep on roaming. There’re no jobs for you here, we don’t want to see your art, and we definitely don’t have any bandwidth to spare.”
“Uh....”
“So tell your little friends to pack themselves up and get going again, or we’ll be staging an art installation of our own: think Burning Man but with a little more realism.”
The technomad licked his lips, and kept his head ducked down. “We have one art piece to present; perhaps you could all come and see it this evening. We’ll leave immediately after.”
“You’ll leave now. We monitor our networks, we know you’ve been trying to hack our wifi since you arrived. We’ve hacked you back, but you haven’t noticed. You’re not much of a technomad really, are you?”
“You’ve what?”
“Giving birth is not art, no matter how you photograph it. Take yourselves off, find someone who’ll donate medical care to you. You’ll get none here.”
“Charity begins at home,” said the technomad.
“And stays there, as far as you’re concerned.”
“Does this remind you of a Bible story?”
“It might, if there were such a thing as a god.”
The technomad sighed, and shuffled past the green-sweatered man. The lifestyle had seemed like such a good idea once.