Distress

The camp was in jubilant disarray. There were thousands of people out in the moonlight, checking each other for injuries, raising collapsed tents, celebrating victory, mourning the city—or soberly reminding anyone who’d listen that the war might not be over. No one knew for certain what forces, what weapons, might have been concealed far from the city, safe from the devastation of the center’s collapse—or what might yet crawl out of the lagoon.

I found Akili, unharmed, helping with the marquee which had fallen onto the water pumps. We embraced. I was bruised all over, my face was caked with blood, and my thrice re-opened wound was sending out flashes of pain like electric arcs—but I’d never felt more intensely alive.

Akili pulled free of me gently. “At six a.m., Mosala’s TOE will be posted on the nets. Will you sit up with me and wait?” Ve looked me in the eye, hiding nothing—afraid of the plague, afraid effacing it alone.

I squeezed vis arm. “Of course.”

I went to the latrines to clean up. Mercifully, the sewage conduits remained open and the raw waste previously discharged hadn’t been forced back up to the surface by the compression waves of the quake. I washed the blood off my face, and then cautiously unbandaged my stomach.

The wound was still bleeding thinly. The cut from the insect’s laser ran deeper than I’d realized; when I bent over the washbasin, I could feel the two walls of flesh on either side of the gash—some seven or eight centimeters long—slide against each other, disconnected except at the ends. The burn had cauterized tissue all the way through the abdominal wall—and now the dead seam had split open.

I looked around; there was no one else in sight. I thought: This is not a good idea. But I’d already been pumped full of antibiotics against the risk of internal infection…

I closed my eyes and forced three fingers deep into the wound. I touched the small intestine, blood-warm not snake-cold, resilient, muscular and unslick beneath my fingertips. This was the part of me which had almost killed me—subverted by foreign enzymes, mercilessly wringing me dry. But the body is not a traitor: it only obeys the laws it must obey in order to exist at all.

Pain caught up with me, and I almost froze—I imagined spending my life as a Bonaparte, or a self-doubting Thomas—but I jerked my hand free and then leaned against the plastic barrel of the washbasin, punching the side.

I wanted to stare into a mirror and proclaim: This is it. I know who I am, now. And I accept, absolutely, my life as a machine driven by blood, as a creature of cells and molecules, as a prisoner of the TOE.

There were no mirrors, though. Not in the latrines of a refugee camp, not even on Stateless.

And if I waited a few more hours, the words would carry more weight—because by dawn, I’d finally know the whole truth about the TOE which enabled me to speak them.

On my way back to meet Akili, I took out my notepad and scanned the international nets. The anarchists’ strike against the mercenaries was being talked about, breathlessly, everywhere.

SeeNet’s coverage was the best, though.

It started with a view of the lagoon itself, huge and eerily calm in the moonlight, almost a perfect circle—like some ancient flooded volcanic crater, an echo of the hidden guyot below. I felt, in spite of everything, a pang of sorrow at the death of the mercenaries whose faces I’d never seen, who’d been betrayed by solid rock, and had drowned in terror for nothing but money and the rights of EnGeneUity’s shareholders.

The journalist spoke—a woman, out-of-shot, a professional with optic nerve taps. “It may take decades to reveal exactly who funded the invasion of Stateless, and why. It’s not even clear, as I speak, whether or not the desperate sacrifice the residents of this island have made will save them from the aggressors.

“But I do know this. Violet Mosala—the Nobel laureate who was evacuated from Stateless in a critical condition, less than twenty-four hours ago—had intended to make this island her new home. She had hoped to lend the renegades enough respectability to enable a group of nations opposed to the UN boycott to speak their minds, at last. And if the invasion was an effort to silence those dissenting voices, it now seems doomed to failure. Violet Mosala is in a coma, fighting for her life after an attack by a violent cult—and the people of Stateless will be struggling harder than ever to survive the next few years, even if peace has come to them tonight—but the astonishing courage of both will not be easily forgotten.”

There was more, with some of my footage of Mosala at the conference, and this journalist’s own coverage of the shelling, the dignified exodus from the city, the establishment of the camps, and an attack by one of the mercenaries’ robots.

It was all immaculately shot and edited. It was powerful, but never exploitative. And from start to finish, it was unashamed—but absolutely honest—propaganda for the renegades.

I could not have done it half as well.

The best was yet to come, though.

As the view returned to the dark waters of the lagoon, the journalist signed off.

“This is Sarah Knight, for SeeNet News, on Stateless.”

As far as the personal com nets were concerned, Sarah Knight was still incommunicado in Kyoto. Lydia wouldn’t take my call—but I found a SeeNet production assistant willing to pass on a message to Sarah. She called me half an hour later, and Akili and I dragged the story out of her.

“When Nishide became ill in Kyoto, I told the Japanese authorities exactly what I thought was happening— but his pneumococcus sequenced as an unengineered strain, and they refused to believe that it had been introduced by a trojan.” Trojans were bacteria which could reproduce themselves and their hidden pathogenic cargo—without symptoms or an immune response—for dozens of generations… and then self-destruct without a trace, leaving behind a massive but apparently natural infection to swamp the body’s defenses. “After making so much of a stink —and no one believing me, not even Nishide’s family—I thought it would be wise to keep a low profile.”

We weren’t able to talk for long, Sarah had to get to an interview with one of the militia’s divers, but just as she was about to break the connection, I said haltingly, “The Mosala documentary. You deserved the commission. You should have got it.”

She made as if to laughingly dismiss the whole question as ancient history—but then she stopped herself, and said calmly: “That’s true. I spent six months making sure I was better prepared than anyone else— and you still came along and stole it in a day. Because you were Lydia’s blue-eyed boy, and she wanted to keep you happy.”

I couldn’t believe how hard it was to get the words out. The injustice was blindingly obvious—and I’d admitted it to myself a thousand times—but some splinter of pride and self-righteousness resisted every step of the way.

I said, “I abused my power. I'm sorry.”

Sarah nodded slowly, lips pursed. “Okay. Apology accepted, Andrew. On one condition: you and Akili agree to be interviewed. The invasion is only half the story here—and I don’t want the fuckers who put Violet in a coma to get away with anything. I want to hear exactly what happened on that boat.”

I turned to Akili. Ve said, “Sure.”

We exchanged coordinates. Sarah was on the other side of the island, but she was working her way around to all of the camps, hitching rides with the militia.

“At five a.m.?” she suggested.

Akili laughed, flashing a conspiratorial glance at me. “Why not? No one’s sleeping tonight, on Stateless.”

The camp was full of the sounds of celebration. People streamed past the tent, laughing and shouting, shrunken silhouettes against the moonlight. Music from the satellites—from Tonga, from Berlin, from Kinshasa— blasted out of the main square—and someone, somehow, had found or made firecrackers. I was still intoxicated with adrenaline, but ragged with fatigue—I wasn’t sure if I wanted to join the party, or curl up and hibernate for a fortnight. I’d promised to do neither.

Akili and I sat on the sleeping bag—warmly dressed, with the tent flap closed; the electricity was fading. We passed the hours talking, scanning the nets, lapsing into awkward silences. I longed to bring ver, somehow, inside the aura of invulnerability I felt, having survived my own imagined apocalypse. I wanted to comfort ver in any way I could. My judgment was paralyzed, though; vis body language had become opaque to me, and I had no sense of how or when to touch ver. We’d lain together naked, but I couldn’t keep that memory, that image, from signifying