Distress

I’d gone on to another appointment at the university: an afternoon with the famous Manchester MIRG— Medical Imaging Research Group. It had seemed like too good a chance to miss—and imaging, after all, lay behind the definitive identification of partial autism.

I skimmed through the footage. A lot of it was good—and it would probably make a worthwhile five-minute story of its own, for one of SeeNet’s magazine programs—but it was clear now that Rourke’s own concise notepad demonstration had supplied all the brain scans Junk DNA really needed.

The main experiment I’d filmed involved a student volunteer reading poetry in silence, while the scanner subtitled the image other brain with each line as it was read. There were three independently-computed subtitles, based on primary visual data, recognized word-shapes, and the brain’s final semantic representations… the last sometimes only briefly matching the others, before the words’ precise meanings diffused out into a cloud of associations. However eerily compelling this was, though, it had nothing to do with Lament’s area.

Toward the end of the day, one of the researchers—Margaret Williams, head of the software development team—had suggested that I climb into the womb of the scanner, myself. Maybe they wanted to turn the tables on me—to scrutinize and record me with their machinery, just as I’d been doing to them for the past four hours. Williams had certainly been as insistent as if she’d believed it was a matter of justice.

She said, “You could record the subject’s-eye view. And we could get a look at all your hidden extras.”

I’d declined. “I don’t know what the magnetic fields would do to the hardware.”

“Nothing, I promise. Most of it must be optical—and everything else will be shielded. You get on and off planes all the time, don’t you? You walk through the normal security gates?”

“Yes, but—”

“Our fields are no stronger. We could even try reading your optic nerve activity, via the scanner—and then comparing the data with your own direct record.”

“I don’t have the download module with me. It’s back at the hotel.”

She pursed her lips, frustrated—obviously dying to tell me to shut up, do as I was told, and get inside the scanner. “That’s a pity. And I suppose you’d have problems with the warranty if we improvised something—our own cable and interface…?”

“I'm afraid so. The software would log the use of non-standard equipment, and then I’d be in deep trouble at the next annual service.”

But she still wasn’t ready to give up. “You were talking about the Voluntary Autists, before. If you wanted something spectacular to illustrate that… we could image your own Lament’s area—while you brought to mind a sequence of different people. We could record it all, and play it back for you. Then you could show your viewers a real-time working copy of the thing itself. Not some glossy animation: flesh and blood, caught in the act. Neurons pumping calcium ions, synapses firing. We could even transform the neural architecture into a functional diagram, calibrate it, identify trait symbols. We have all the software—”

I said, “It’s very kind of you to offer. But… what kind of tenth-rate journalist would I be, if I started resorting to using myself as the subject of my own stories?”

7

Two weeks before the Einstein Centenary conference was due to begin, I signed a contract with SeeNet for Violet Mosala: Symmetry’s Champion. As I scrawled my name on the electronic document with my notepad’s stylus, I tried to convince myself that I’d been given the job because I’d do it well—not merely because I’d pulled rank and begged for a favor. There was no doubt that Sarah Knight was inexperienced—she was five years younger than me, and she’d spent most of her career in political journalism. Being a self-confessed ‘fan’ of Mosala might even have worked against her; no one at SeeNet would have wanted a gushing hagiography. But for all my alleged professionalism, I’d still only glanced at Sisyphus’s briefing, I still had no real idea what I was taking on.

The truth was, I didn’t care about the details; all that mattered was putting Junk DNA behind me, and running as far away from Distress as I could. After twelve months drowning in the worst excesses of biotechnology, the pristine world of theoretical physics shone in my mind’s eye like some anesthetized mathematical heaven, where everything was cool and abstract and gloriously inconsequential… an image which merged seamlessly with the white coral snowflake of Stateless itself, growing out into the blue Pacific like a perfect fractal star. Part of me understood full well that if I took these beautiful mirages to heart, I was certain to be disappointed—and I even struggled to imagine the most unpleasant ways in which I might be brought back down to Earth. I could suffer an attack of multiple-drug-resistant pneumonia or malaria, a strain to which the locals were immune. High-level pharms which could analyze the pathogenic organisms and design a cure on the spot would be unavailable, thanks to the boycott, and I’d be too weak for the flight back to civilization… It wasn’t an impossible scenario; the boycott had killed hundreds of people over the years.

Still, anything had to be better than coming face-to-face with a victim of Distress.

I left a message for Violet Mosala. I assumed she was still at her home in Cape Town, though the software which answered her number was giving nothing away. I introduced myself, thanked her for generously agreeing to give her time to the project, and generally spouted polite cliches. I said nothing to encourage her to call me back; I knew it wouldn’t take much real-time conversation to reveal my total ignorance of her life and work. Pneumonia, malaria… making a complete fool of myself. I didn’t care. All I could think of was escape.

I’d psyched myself up to be “forced to relive” Daniel Cavolini’s revival—but I should have known all along how absurd that was. Editing never re-created the past; it was more like performing an autopsy on it. I worked on the sequence dispassionately—and every hour I spent reshaping it made the job of imagining the responses of a viewer, seeing it all for the first time, more and more a matter of calculation and instinct—and less and less connected to anything I felt about the events myself. Even the final cut, superficially fluid and immediate, was for me a kind of post-mortem revival of a post-mortem revival. It had happened, it was over; whatever brief illusion of life the technology managed to create, it was no more capable of climbing out of the screen and walking down the street than any other twitching corpse.

Daniel’s brother, Luke, had been charged with the murder—and had already pleaded guilty. I logged on to the court records system and skimmed through footage of the three hearings which had taken place so far. The magistrate had ordered a psychiatric report, which had concluded that Luke Cavolini suffered from occasional bouts of “inappropriate anger” which had never quite put him far enough out of touch with reality to have him classified as mentally ill and treated against his will. He was competent, and culpable, and understood precisely what he’d done—and he’d even had a “motive': an argument the night before, about a jacket of Daniel’s which he’d borrowed. He’d end up in an ordinary prison, for at least fifteen years.

The court footage was public domain, but there was no time to use any of it in the broadcast version. So I wrote a brief postscript to the revival story, stating the bare facts: the charges laid, the guilty plea. I didn’t mention the psychiatric report; I didn’t want to muddy the waters. The console read the words over a freeze-frame of Daniel Cavolini screaming.

I said, “Fade-out. Roll credits.”

It was Tuesday, March 23rd, 4:07 p.m.

Junk DNA was over.

I left a note in the hall for Gina and walked up to Epping to get myself inoculated for the journey ahead. Scientists on Stateless broadcast local “weather reports'—both meteorological and epidemiological—into the net, and despite all the other bizarre acts of political ostracism, the relevant UN bodies treated this data just as if it had emerged from a sanctified member state. As it turned out, neither pneumonia nor malaria shots were indicated— but there’d been recent outbreaks of several new strains of adenovirus—none of them life-threatening, but all of them potentially debilitating enough to ruin my stay. Alice Tomasz, my GP, downloaded sequences for some small peptides which mimicked appropriate viral surface proteins, synthesized their RNA, and then spliced the fragments into a tailored—harmless—adenovirus. The whole process took about ten minutes.

As I inhaled the live vaccine, Alice said, “I liked Gender Scrutiny Overload.'