Distress

Anthrocosmologists? She’s a brilliant theorist in her own right—not some pseudoscientific hanger-on! I can understand how… a certain kind of person might think there’s something mystical about working on TOEs, when they find they can’t grasp the details, themselves… but Helen understands my work almost better than I do!” I didn’t think it was a good time to point out that that was half the problem. “As for these other thugs, who you think killed Yasuko… I’ll be giving a media conference this afternoon, outlining the problems with Henry Buzzo’s choice of measure and what it means for his TOE. That should concentrate their tiny minds.” Her voice was almost calm—but she held her arms crossed in front of her, one hand clasped around the other wrist, trying to mask the faint tremor of rage. “And when I announce my own TOE on Friday morning… they can kiss their transcendence goodbye.” “Friday morning?”

“Serge Bischoff’s algorithms are working wonders. All my calculations will be finished by tomorrow night.”

I said carefully, “If it turns out that you’ve been infected with a bioweapon—and if you become too sick to work—is there anyone else who could interpret these results, and put the whole thing together?”

Mosala recoiled. “What are you asking me to do? Anoint a successor to be targeted next?”

“No! But if your TOE is completed and announced, the moderates will have to admit that they’ve been proven wrong—and there’s a chance they might hand over the antidote. I'm not asking you to publicize anyone’s name! But if you can arrange for someone to put the finishing touches—”

Mosala said icily, “I have nothing to prove to these people. And I'm not risking someone else’s life, trying.”

Before I could pursue the argument any further, De Groot’s notepad chimed. The head of security for the conference, Joe Kepa, had viewed the copy De Groot had sent him of my call from the fishing boat, and he wanted to talk to me. In person. Immediately.

In a small meeting room on the top floor of the hotel—with two large umale associates looking on—Kepa grilled me for almost three hours, questioning everything right back to the moment when I’d begged SeeNet to give me the documentary. He’d already seen reports from some of the farmers about events on the ACs’ boat (they’d posted their accounts directly onto the local news nets), and he’d seen the cholera analysis—but he was still angry and suspicious, he still seemed to want to tear my story to pieces. I resented the hostile treatment, but I couldn’t really blame him. Until the seizure of the airport, his biggest problem had been buskers in clown suits; now it was the threat of anything up to a full-scale military engagement around the hotel. Talk of information theorists armed with amateur bioweapons targeted at the conference’s highest profile physicists must have sounded like either a sick hoax, or proof that he’d been singled out for divine punishment.

By the time Kepa told me the interview was over, though, I believed I’d convinced him. He was angrier than ever.

My testimony had been recorded to international judicial standards: each frame stamped with a centrally generated time code, and an encrypted copy lodged with Interpol. I was invited to scan through the file to verify that there’d been no tampering, before I electronically signed it. I checked a dozen points at random; I wasn’t going to view the whole three hours.

I went to my room and took a shower, instinctively shielding the freshly bandaged wound although I knew there was no need to keep it dry. The luxury of hot water, the solidity of the plain elegant decor, seemed surreal. Twenty four hours before, I’d planned to do everything I could to help Mosala smash the boycott, reshaping the documentary around the news of her emigration. But what could I do for technoliberation, now? Buy an external camera, and proceed to document her meaningless death, while Stateless collapsed in the background? Was that what I wanted? To claw back my delusions of objectivity, and calmly record whatever fate befell her?

I stared at myself in the mirror. What use was I to anyone now? The room had a wallphone; I called the hospital. There’d been no problems with the operation, but Akili was still sleeping off the anesthetic. I decided to visit ver anyway.

I walked through the hotel lobby just as the morning sessions were breaking up. The conference was still running on schedule—although screens announced a memorial for Yasuko Nishide later in the day—but the participants were visibly nervous and subdued, talking quietly in small groups, or looking around furtively as if hoping to overhear some vital piece of news about the occupation, however unreliable.

I spotted a group of journalists, all people I knew slightly, and they let me join in as they swapped rumors. The consensus seemed to be that foreigners would be evacuated by the US (or New Zealand, or Japanese) navy within a matter of days, although no one could offer any firm evidence for this belief. David Connolly—Janet Walsh’s photographer— said confidently, “There are three US Nobel prize-winners here. Do you really think they’re going to be left stranded, indefinitely, while Stateless goes to hell?”

The other consensus was that the airport had been taken by “rival anarchists'—the infamous US gun law “refugees.” Biotech interests didn’t rate a mention, and if Mosala’s plan to migrate was common knowledge on the island, nobody here had bothered to talk to the locals long enough to find out.

These people would be reporting everything that happened on Stateless to the world—and none of them had the slighest idea of what was really going on.

On my way to the hospital, I spotted an electrical retailer. I bought a new notepad and a small, shoulder- mounted camera. I typed my personal code into the notepad, and the last satellite backup from the old machine flowed down from deep freeze and started catching up with real-time. The screen was a blur of activity for several seconds—and then Sisyphus announced, “Reported cases of Distress have exceeded three thousand.”

“I do not wish to know that.” Three thousand? That was a sixfold increase in a fortnight. “Show me a case map.” It looked more like the plot for a spontaneous cancer than any kind of infectious disease: a random scatter across the globe, ignoring every social and environmental factor, concentrated only by population density itself.

How could the numbers be increasing so rapidly—without any localized outbreaks? I’d heard that models based on airborne transmission, sexual contact, water supplies, parasites, had all failed to match the epidemiology—

“Any other news on this?”

“Not officially. But footage logged in SeeNet’s library by your colleague John Reynolds includes the first reports of coherent speech by sufferers.”

“Some people are recovering?”

“No. But some new sufferers have shown an intermittent change in the pathology.”

“Change, or reduction?”

“The speech is coherent, but the subject matter is contextually inappropriate.”

“You mean they’re psychotic? When they finally stop screaming, and calm down long enough to string two words together… it’s only to pass on the news that they’ve gone insane?”

“That’s a matter for expert opinion.”

I was almost at the hospital. I said, “Okay, show me some of this changed pathology. Show me some of the joys I’ve missed out on.”

Sisyphus raided the library and brought me a clip. It was questionable etiquette to peek at other people’s unfinished work, but if Reynolds had wanted the footage to be inaccessible to his colleagues, he would have encrypted it.

I watched the scene in the hospital elevator, alone—and I felt the blood draining from my face. There was no explanation for this, no possible way to make sense of it.

Reynolds had archived three other scenes of “coherent speech” from Distress patients. I viewed them all, unwinding the notepad’s headset so I could listen in private as I made my way along the busy corridors. The exact words the patients used were different in every case—but the implications were the same.

I suspended judgment. Maybe I was still in shock or still affected by the drugs I’d been given on the boat. Maybe I was seeing connections which simply weren’t there.

By the time I reached the ward, Akili was awake. Ve smiled ruefully when ve saw me—and I knew I had it bad. It wasn’t just the fact that vis face seemed to have burned itself into my brain so deeply that I could no longer believe that I’d ever been attracted to anyone else. Beauty, after all, was the shallowest thing. But ver dark eyes showed a depth of passion, humor, and intelligence that no one else I’d known had ever possessed…