Distress

“Junk DNA is going to have to be re-edited, with the Landers story removed. If you had time, of course I’d ask you to do it yourself, but I'm assuming that’s not possible. So I’ll give it to Paul Kostas; he used to be one of our news room editors, but he’s freelance now. I’ll send you his final cut, and if you strongly disagree with anything, you’ll have an opportunity to change it. Just remember that it’s being screened in less than a fortnight.”

I said, “That’s fine, that’s all… fine.” I knew Kostas; he wouldn’t mutilate the program. “Why, though? Was there some legal glitch? Don’t tell me Landers is suing?”

“No. Events have overtaken us. I won’t try to explain; I’ve sent you a trailer from the San Francisco bureau —it’ll all be public by morning, but…” She was too tired to elaborate, but I understood; she didn’t want me to learn about this as just another viewer. A quarter of Junk DNA, and some three months’ work on my part, had just been rendered obsolete, but Lydia was doing her best to salvage some vestige of my professional dignity. This way, at least I’d stay a few hours ahead of the masses.

I said, “I appreciate that. Thank you.”

We bid each other goodnight, and I viewed the “trailer'—a hastily assembled package of footage and text, alerting other news rooms to the story, and giving them the choice either to wait for the polished item soon to follow, or to edit the raw material themselves and put out their own version. It consisted mainly of FBI news releases, plus some archival background material.

Ned Landers, his two chief geneticists, and three of his executives, had just been arrested in Portland. Nine other people—working for an entirely separate corporation—had been arrested in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Laboratory equipment, biochemical samples, and computer records had been taken from both sites in pre-dawn raids. All fifteen people had been charged with violating federal biotechnology safety laws—but not because of Landers’ highly publicized neo-DNA and symbiont research. At the Chapel Hill laboratory, according to the charges, workers had been manipulating infectious, natural-RNA viruses—in secret, without permission. Landers had been footing the bills, circuitously.

The purpose of these viruses remained unknown; the data and samples were yet to be analyzed.

There were no statements from the accused; their lawyers were counseling silence. There were some external shots of the Chapel Hill laboratory, sealed off behind police barricades. All the footage of Landers himself was relatively old material; the latest was cannibalized from my interview with him (not completely wasted, after all).

The lack of detail was frustrating, but the implications already seemed clear. Landers and his collaborators had been constructing perfect viral immunity for themselves beyond the specific powers of any one vaccine or drug, beyond the fear of mutant strains out-evolving their defenses… while engineering new viruses capable of infecting the rest of us. I stared at the screen, which was frozen on the last frame of the report: Landers, as I’d seen him in the flesh, myself, smiling at the vision of his brand new kingdom. And though I balked at accepting the obvious conclusion… what possible use could he have had for a novel human virus except for some kind of thinning?.

I sprinted to the bathroom, and brought up the meager contents of my stomach. Then I knelt by the bowl, shivering and sweating—lapsing into microsleeps, almost losing my balance. The melatonin wanted me back, but I was having trouble convincing myself that I was through vomiting. Pampered hypochondriac that I was, I would have consulted my pharm at once if I’d had it, for a precise diagnosis and an instant, optimal solution. With visions of choking to death in my sleep, I contemplated tearing off my shoulder patch—but the symbolic attempt to surrender to natural circadian forces would have taken hours to produce any effect at all—and then it would have rendered me, at best, a zombie for the rest of the conference.

I retched, voluntarily, for a minute or two, and nothing more emerged, so I staggered back to bed.

Ned Landers had gone further than any gender migrant, any anarchist, any Voluntary Autist. No man is an island? Just watch me. And yet, apparently, it still hadn’t been far enough. He’d still felt crowded, threatened, encroached-upon. A biological kingdom wasn’t enough; he’d aspired to more elbow room than even that unbridgeable genetic gulf could provide.

And he’d almost attained it. That was what species self-knowledge had given him: a precise, molecular definition of the H-word… which he could personally transcend, before turning it against everyone who remained in its embrace.

Vive la technoliberation! Why not have a million Ned Landers? Why not let every solipsistic lunatic and paranoid, self-appointed ethnic-group-savior on the planet wield the same power? Paradise for yourself and your clan—and apocalypse for everyone else.

That was the fruit of perfect understanding.

What’s wrong, don’t you like the taste?

I clutched my stomach and slid my knees toward my chin; it changed the character of the nausea, if not exactly removing it. The room tipped, my limbs grew numb, I strived for absolute blankness.

And if I’d dug deeper, done my job properly, I might have been the one to find him out, to stop him…

Gina touched my cheek, and kissed me tenderly. We were in Manchester, at the imaging lab. I was naked, she was clothed.

She said, “Climb inside the scanner. You can do that for me, can’t you? I want us to be much, much closer, Andrew. So I need to see what’s going on inside your brain.”

I started to comply—but then I hesitated, suddenly afraid of what she’d discover.

She kissed me again. “No more arguments. If you love me, you’ll shut up and do what you’re told.”

She forced me down, and closed the hatch of the machine. I saw my body from above. The scanner was more than a scanner—it raked me with ultraviolet lasers. I felt no pain, but the beams prised away layer after layer of living tissue with merciless precision. All the skin, all the flesh, which concealed my secrets dissolved into a red mist around me, and then the mist began to part…

I dreamed that I woke up screaming.

At seven-thirty, I interviewed Henry Buzzo in one of the hotel meeting rooms. He was charming and articulate, a natural performer, but he didn’t really want to talk about Violet Mosala; he wanted to recount anecdotes about famous dead people. “Of course Steve Weinberg tried to prove that I was wrong about the gravitino, but I soon straightened him out…” SeeNet alone had devoted three full-length documentaries to Buzzo, over the years, but it seemed that there were still more names he desperately needed to drop, on camera, before dying.

I wasn’t in a charitable mood; the three hours’ sleep I’d had after Lydia’s call had been about as refreshing as a blow to the head. I went through the motions, feigning fascination, and trying half-heartedly to steer the interview in a direction which might produce some material I could actually use.

“What kind of place in history do you think the discoverer of the TOE will attain? Wouldn’t that be the ultimate form of scientific immortality?”

Buzzo became self-deprecating. “There’s no such thing as immortality, for a scientist. Not even for the greatest. Newton and Einstein are still famous today—but for how long? Shakespeare will probably outlast them both… and maybe even Hitler will, too.”

I didn’t have the heart to break the news to him that none of these were exactly household names anymore.

I said, “Newton’s and Einstein’s theories have been swallowed whole, though. Absorbed into larger schemes. I know, you’ve already carved your name on one TOE which turned out to be provisional—but all of the SUFT’s architects said at the time that it was just a stepping stone. Don’t you think the next TOE will be the real thing: the final theory which lasts forever?”

Buzzo had given the question a lot more thought than I had. He said, “It might. It certainly might. I can imagine a universe in which we can probe no further, in which deeper explanations are literally, physically, impossible. But…”

“Your own TOE describes such a universe, doesn’t it?”

“Yes. But it could be right about everything else, and wrong about that. The same is true of Mosala’s and Nishide’s.”

I said sourly, “So when will we know, one way or the other? When will we be sure that we’ve struck bottom?”