Distress

need to see a doctor, straight away.”

I screamed at her hoarsely, “Just listen! Listen to me!”

People around us were staring. Mosala opened her mouth, outraged, ready to put me in my place—but then she changed her mind. “Go ahead. I'm listening.”

“You need blood tests, a full… micropathology report… everything. You’re asymptomatic, now, but… however you feel… do it… there’s no way of knowing what the incubation period might be.” I was dripping sweat, and swaying on my feet; every breath felt like a lungful of fire. “What did you think they were going to do? Send in a hit squad with machine guns? I doubt… I wasn’t meant to get sick… at all… but the thing must have mutated on the way. Keyed to your genome… but the lock fell off, en route.” I laughed. “In my blood. In my brain.”

I sagged, and dropped to my knees. A convulsion passed through my whole body, like a peristaltic spasm trying to squeeze the flesh right out of my skin. People around me were shouting, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. I struggled to lift my head—but when I succeeded, briefly, black and purple bruises flowered across my vision.

I stopped fighting it. I closed my eyes and lay down on the cool, welcoming tiles.

In the hospital ward, for a long time, I paid no attention to my surroundings. I thrashed about in a knot of sweat-soaked sheets, and let the world remain mercifully out of focus. I sought no information from the people around me; in my delirium, I believed I had all the answers:

Ned Landers was behind everything. When we met, he’d infected me with one of his secret viruses. And now, because I’d traveled so far to escape it… although Helen Wu had proved that the whole world was nothing but a loop, and everything led back to the same point… now I was coming down with Landers’ secret weapon against Violet Mosala, Andrew Worth, and all his other enemies.

I was coming down with Distress.

A tall Fijian man dressed in white poked a drip into my elbow. I tried to shake it out; he held me still. I muttered triumphantly, “Don’t you know there’s no point? There’s no cure!” Distress was nowhere near as bad as I’d imagined; I wasn’t screaming like the woman in Miami, was I?

I was nauseous and feverish—but I felt sure that I was headed for some form of beautiful, painless oblivion. I smiled up at the man. “I'm gone forever now! I’ve gone away!”

He said, “I don’t think so. I think you’ve been there, and you’re coming back.”

I shook my head defiantly, but then cried out in surprise and pain. My bowels had gone into spasm, and I was emptying them, uncontrollably, into a pan I hadn’t even noticed beneath me. I tried to stop. I couldn’t. But it wasn’t the incontinence that horrified me, as much as the… consistency. This wasn’t diarrhea; it was water.

The motion stopped eventually, but I kept shuddering. I pleaded for an explanation. “What’s happening to me?”

“You have cholera. Drug-resistant cholera. We can control the fever, and keep you hydrated—but the disease is going to have to run its course. So you’re in for a long haul.”

19

As the first wave of delirium subsided, I tried to assess my position dispassionately, to arm myself with the facts. I was not an infant, I was not old. I was not suffering from malnutrition, parasite infestation, an impaired immune system, or any other complicating factor. I was in the care of qualified people. My condition was being monitored constantly by sophisticated machines. I told myself that I was not going to die. Fever and nausea, absent in “classical” cholera, meant that I had the Mexico City biotype—first seen in the aftermath of the quake of ’15, long since distributed globally. It entered the bloodstream as well as the gut, producing a wider range of symptoms, a greater risk to health. Nevertheless, millions of people survived it every year—often in much worse circumstances: without antipyritics to control the fever, without intravenous electrolytes, without any antibiotics at all—making drug resistance academic. In the largest metropolitan hospitals, in Santiago or Bombay, the particular strain of Vibrio cholerae could be sequenced completely, and a de novo drug designed and synthesized in a matter of hours. Most people who contracted the disease, though, had no prospect whatsoever of receiving this luxurious miracle cure. They simply lived through the rise and fall of the bacterial empire inside them. They rode it out.

I could do the same.

There was only one small flaw in this clear-eyed, optimistic scenario:

Most people had no reason to suspect that their guts were full of a genetic weapon which had detonated one step short of its target. Engineered to mimic a natural strain of cholera as closely as possible—but engineered to push the envelope of plausible symptoms far enough to kill a healthy, twenty-seven-year-old woman, receiving the best care that Stateless could provide.

The ward was clean, bright, spacious, quiet. I spent most of my time screened off from the other patients, but the white translucent partitions let the daylight through—and even when my skin was on fire, the faint touch of radiant warmth reaching my body was strangely comforting, like a familiar embrace.

By late afternoon on the first day, the antipyritics seemed to be working. I watched the graph on the bedside monitor; my temperature was still pathological, but the immediate risk of brain damage had passed. I tried to swallow liquids, but nothing stayed down—so I moistened my parched lips and throat, and let the intravenous drip do the rest.

Nothing could stop the cramps and the bowel spasms. When they came, it was like demonic possession, like being ridden by a voodoo god: an obscene bear-hug by something powerful and alien constricting inside my flesh. I couldn’t believe that any muscle in my own rag-doll body could still be so strong. I tried to stay calm—to accept each brutal convulsion as inevitable, to keep my mind fixed on the sure and certain knowledge that this too would pass—but every time, the surge of nausea swept away my laboriously composed stoicism like a house of matchsticks beneath a tidal wave, and left me shuddering and sobbing, convinced that I was finally dying, and half-believing that that was what I wanted more than anything else: instant release.

My melatonin patch had been removed; the abyssal sleep it generated was too dangerous, now. But I couldn’t begin to tell the difference between the erratic rhythms of melatonin withdrawal, and my otherwise natural state: long stretches of half-sensate paralytic stupor, broken up by brief, violent dreams—and moments of panic- stricken clarity each time I believed my intestines were about to rupture and wash out of me in a red and gray tide.

I told myself that I was stronger and more patient than the disease. Generations of bacteria could come and go; all I had to do was hang on. All I had to do was outlive them.

On the morning of the second day, Mosala and De Groot came to visit. They seemed like time travelers to me; my previous life on Stateless had already receded into the distant past.

Mosala seemed shocked by my appearance. She said gently, “I’ve taken your advice; I’ve been examined thoroughly. I'm not infected, Andrew. I’ve spoken to your doctor, and he thinks you must have caught this from food on the plane.”

I croaked, “Has anyone else, on the same flight—?”

“No. But one sealed package might have missed being irradiated, and ended up imperfectly sterilized. It can happen.”

I didn’t have the strength to argue. And this theory made a certain amount of sense: a random glitch had breached the technological barrier between Third World and First, momentarily scrambling the impeccable free- market logic of employing the cheapest caterers on the planet and then blasting away the risks with an equally cheap burst of gamma rays.

That evening, my temperature began rising again. Michael—the Fijian man who’d greeted me when I first woke, and who’d since explained that he was “both doctor and nurse, if you insist on using those archaic foreign words here'—sat by my bed for most of the night… or at least, he was there in the flesh during every brief window of lucidity I experienced; the rest of the time, for all I knew, I hallucinated his presence.

I slept three straight hours from dawn to mid-morning—long enough for my first coherent dream. Clawing my way up toward consciousness, I clung defiantly to the happy ending: The disease had run its course, it