Distress

“You could always go and hunt for coins on the beach with a metal detector.” She saw my face, and softened. Slightly. “There’s another project about to go into pre-production. Although I’ve very nearly promised it to Sarah Knight.”

“Tell me.”

“Ever heard of Violet Mosala?”

“Of course. She’s a… physicist? A South African physicist?”

“Two out of two, very impressive. Sarah’s a huge fan, she chewed my ear off about her for an hour.”

“So what’s the project?”

“A profile of Mosala… who’s twenty-seven, and won the Nobel Prize two years ago—but you knew that all along, didn’t you? Interviews, biography, appraisals by colleagues, blah blah blah. Her work’s purely theoretical, so there’s nothing much to show of it except computer simulations—and she’s offered us her own graphics. But the heart of the program will be the Einstein Centenary conference—”

“Wasn’t that in nineteen seventy-some thing?” Lydia gave me a withering look. I said, “Ah. Centenary of his death. Charming.”

“Mosala is attending the conference. On the last day of which, three of the world’s top theoretical physicists are scheduled to present rival versions of the Theory of Everything. And you don’t get three guesses as to who’s the alpha favorite.”

I gritted my teeth and suppressed the urge to say: It’s not a horse race, Lydia. It might be another fifty years before anyone knows whose TOE was right.

“So when’s the conference?”

“April 5th to 18th.”

I blanched. “Three weeks from Monday.”

Lydia looked thoughtful for a moment, then pleased. “You don’t really have time, do you? Sarah’s been prepared for this for months—”

I said irritably, “Five seconds ago you were talking about me starting pre-production on Distress in less than three weeks.”

“You could walk straight into that. How much modern physics do you know?”

I feigned indignation. “Enough! And I'm not stupid. I can catch up.”

“When?”

“I’ll make time. I’ll work faster; I’ll finish Junk DNA ahead of schedule. When’s the Mosala program going to be broadcast?”

“Early next year.”

Which meant eight whole months of relative sanity—once the conference was over.

Lydia glanced at her watch, redundantly. “I don’t understand you. A high-profile special on Distress would be the logical endpoint of everything you’ve been doing for the last five years. After that, you could think about switching away from biotech. And who am I going to use instead of you?”

“Sarah Knight?”

“Don’t be sarcastic.”

“I’ll tell her you said that.”

“Be my guest. I don’t care what she’s done in politics; she’s only made one science program—and that was on fringe cosmology. It was good— but not good enough to ramp her straight into something like this. She’s earned a fortnight with Violet Mosala, but not a primetime broadcast on the world’s alphamost virus.”

Nobody had found a virus associated with Distress; I hadn’t seen a news bulletin for a week, but my knowledge miner would have told me if there’d been a breakthrough of that magnitude. I was beginning to get the queasy feeling that if I didn’t make the program myself, it would be subtitled: How an escaped military pathogen became the 21st-century AIDS of the mind.

Pure vanity. What did I think—that I was the only person on the planet capable of deflating the rumors and hysteria surrounding Distress?

I said, “I haven’t made any decision yet. I need to talk it over with Gina.”

Lydia was skeptical. “Okay, fine. ‘Talk it over with Gina,’ and call me in the morning.” She glanced at her watch again. “Look, I really have to go. Some of us actually have work to do.” I opened my mouth to protest, outraged; she smiled sweetly and aimed two fingers at me. “Gotcha. No sense of irony, you auteurs. ‘Bye.”

I turned away from the console and sat staring down at my clenched fists, trying to untangle what I was feeling—if only enough to enable me to put it all aside and get back to Junk DNA.

I’d seen a brief news shot of someone with Distress, a few months before. I’d been in a hotel room in Manchester, flicking channels between appointments. A young woman—looking healthy, but disheveled—was lying on her back in a corridor in an apartment building in Miami. She was waving her arms wildly, kicking in all directions, tossing her head and twisting her whole body back and forth. It hadn’t looked like the product of any kind of crude neurological dysfunction, though: it had seemed too coordinated, too purposeful.

And before the police and paramedics could hold her still—or still enough to get a needle in—and pump her full of some high-powered court-order paralytic like Straitjacket or Medusa—they’d tried the sprays, and they hadn’t worked—she’d thrashed and screamed like an animal in mortal agony, like a child in a solipsistic rage, like an adult in the grip of the blackest despair.

I’d watched and listened in disbelief—and when, mercifully, she’d been rendered comatose and dragged away, I’d struggled to convince myself that it had been nothing out of the ordinary: some kind of epileptic fit, some kind of psychotic tantrum, at worst some kind of unbearable physical pain the cause of which would be swiftly identified and dealt with.

None of which was true. Victims of Distress rarely had a history of neurological or mental illness, and bore no signs of injury or disease. And no one had the slightest idea how to deal with the cause of their suffering; the only current “treatment” consisted of sustained heavy sedation.

I picked up my notepad and touched the icon for Sisyphus, my knowledge miner.

I said, “Assemble a briefing on Violet Mosala, the Einstein Centenary conference, and the last ten years’ advances in Unified Field Theories. I’ll need to digest it all in about… a hundred and twenty hours. Is that feasible?”

There was pause while Sisyphus downloaded the relevant sources and scrutinized them. Then it asked, “Do you know what an ATM is?”

“An Automatic Teller Machine?”

“No. In this context, an ATM is an All-Topologies Model.”

The phrase sounded vaguely familiar; I’d probably skimmed through a brief article on the topic, five years before.

There was another pause, while more elementary background material was downloaded and assessed. Then: “A hundred and twenty hours would be good enough for listening and nodding. Not for asking intelligent questions.”

I groaned. “How long for…?”

“A hundred and fifty.”

“Do it.”

I hit the icon for the pharm unit, and said, “Recompute my melatonin doses. Give me two more hours of peak alertness a day, starting immediately.”

“Until when?”

The conference began on April 5th; if I wasn’t an expert on Violet Mosala by then, it would be too late. But… I couldn’t risk cutting loose from the forced rhythms of the melatonin—and rebounding into erratic sleep patterns— in the middle of filming.

“April 18th.”

The pharm said, “You’ll be sorry.”

That was no generic warning—it was a prediction based on five years’ worth of intimate biochemical knowledge. But I had no real choice—and if I spent the week after the conference suffering from acute circadian arrhythmia, it would be unpleasant, but it wouldn’t kill me.

I did some calculations in my head. Somehow, I’d just conjured up five or six hours of free time out of thin