Distress

spent rehearsing the most seductive denials.

I watched a schematic of the worst-case scenario. “If antibiotic-resistant, Mexico City V. cholerae succeed in crossing the blood-brain barrier, immunosuppressants can limit the fever—but bacterial toxins themselves are likely to cause irreversible damage.”

Mutant choleragen molecules fused with neural membranes. The cells collapsed like punctured balloons.

I still feared death as much as ever—but the truth had lost its sting. If the TOE had taken me in its fist and squeezed… at least it had proved that there was solid ground beneath me: the final law, the simplest pattern, holding up the world in all its strangeness.

I’d hit bottom. Once you’d touched the bedrock of the underworld, the foundations of the universe, there was nowhere else to fall.

I said, “That’s enough. Now find something to cheer me up.”

“How about the Beat poets?”

I smiled. “Perfect.”

Sisyphus ransacked the libraries, and played them reading their own works. Ginsberg howling “Moloch! Moloch!” Burroughs rasping “A Junkie’s Christmas'—all severed limbs in suitcases, and scoring the immaculate fix.

And best of all, Kerouac himself, wild and melodic, stoned and innocent: “What If The Three Stooges Were Real?”

Afternoon sunlight slanted across the ward and brushed the side of my face, bridging distance, energy, scale, complexity. This was not a reason for terror. It was not a reason for awe. It was the most ordinary thing imaginable.

I was as ready as I’d ever be. I closed my eyes.

Someone prodded my shoulder, and said for the fourth or fifth time, “Wake up, please.”

I’d lost all choice in the matter. I opened my eyes.

A young woman stood beside me, no one I’d seen before. She had serious, dark brown eyes. Olive skin, long black hair. She spoke with a German accent.

“Drink this.” She held out a small vial of clear liquid.

“I can’t keep anything down. Didn’t they tell you?”

“This, you will.”

I was past caring; vomiting was as natural to me as breathing. I took the vial and tipped the contents down my throat. My esophagus spasmed, and acid hit the roof of my mouth—but nothing more.

I coughed. “Why didn’t someone offer me that sooner?”

“It only just arrived.”

“From where?”

“You don’t want to know.”

I blinked at her. My head cleared slightly. “Arrived? What kind of drug wouldn’t be in stock already?”

“What do you think?”

The flesh at the base of my spine went cold. “Am I dreaming? Or am I dead?”

“Akili had samples of your blood smuggled out to… a certain country, and analyzed by friends. You just swallowed a set of magic bullets for every stage of the weapon. You’ll be on your feet in a matter of hours.”

My head throbbed. The weapon. My worst fear had just been confirmed and banished in the same sentence; it was disorienting. “Every stage? What would have come next? What have I missed out on?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“I think you’re right.” I still wasn’t convinced that any of this was happening. “Why? Why did Akili go to all that trouble just to save me?”

“We had to find out exactly what you were carrying. Violet Mosala might still be at risk, even though she’s showing no symptoms. We had to have a cure for her, ready, here on the island.”

I absorbed that. At least she hadn’t said: We don’t care who is or isn’t the Keystone. We’re all prepared to risk our lives to protect just about anyone.

“So what was I carrying? And why did it detonate prematurely?”

The young AC frowned solemnly. “We still haven’t worked out all the details—but the timing fell apart. It looks like the bacteria generated confused internal signals, due to a disparity between intracellular molecular clocks and the host’s biochemical cues. The melatonin receptors were choked, saturated—” She stopped, alarmed. “I don’t understand. Why are you laughing?”

By the time I left the hospital, on Tuesday morning, I had my strength back—and I was enraged. The conference was half over, but TOEs were no longer the story—and if Sarah Knight, for whatever unfathomable reasons, had abandoned the war over Mosala to sit by Yasuko Nishide’s bedside, incommunicado… I’d finally have to start unraveling the whole complicated truth for myself.

Back in my hotel room, I plugged in my umbilical fiber, passed Kuwale’s eighteen mug shots to Witness, and flagged them for constant real-time search.

I called Lydia. “I need five thousand dollars extra for research: database access and hacking fees. More is going on here than I can begin to describe. And if you don’t agree that it’s worth every cent in a week’s time, I’ll refund it all.”

We argued for fifteen minutes. I improvised; I dropped misleading hints about PACDF and an impending political storm, but I said nothing about Mosala’s planned emigration. In the end, Lydia caved in. I was astonished.

I used the software Kuwale had given me to send ver a deep-encrypted message. “No, I haven’t spotted one of your goons. But if you expect any more help from me—beyond acting as a living culture medium—you’re going to have to give me all the details: who these people are, who employed them, your analysis of the weapon… everything. Take it or leave it. Meet me at the same place as last time, in an hour.”

I sat back and took stock of what I knew, what I believed. Biotech weapons, biotech interests! Whether or not that was true, the boycott itself had almost killed me. I’d always seen both sides of the gene patent laws, I’d always been equally suspicious of the corporations and the renegades—but now the symmetry was broken. I had a long history of apathy and ambivalence—and I was ashamed to admit that it had taken so much to politicize me—but now I was ready to embrace technoliberation, I was ready to do everything I could to expose Mosala’s enemies and help her cause.

The Beach Boys never lied, though. I couldn’t believe that a weapon from EnGeneUity and their allies would have failed because of anything as simple as my distorted melatonin cycle. That sounded more like the work of brilliant, resourceful amateurs making do with limited knowledge, limited tools.

PACDF? The Ignorance Cults? Hardly.

Other technoliberateurs, who’d decided that Mosala’s original scheme would benefit greatly from a Nobel-prize-winning martyr? Unaware that they were pitted against people who largely shared their goals—but who weren’t merely averse to treating people as expendable, but who had elevated the sacrificial celebrity in question to the status of creator of the universe?

There was an irony there, somewhere: the cool, pragmatic realpolitik faction of technoliberation seemed to be infinitely more fanatical than the quasi-religious Anthrocosmologists.

An irony, or a misunderstanding.

Kuwale’s reply arrived while I was in the shower, scouring away the dead skin and the sour odor I’d been unable to remove in the hospital bathroom.

“The data you insist on seeing can’t be unlocked at the place you’ve specified. Meet me at these coordinates.”

I checked a map of the island. There was no point arguing.

I dressed, and set out for the northern reefs.