Distress

more to me than it could ever mean to ver. So we sat apart.

I asked why ve hadn’t mentioned the mixing plague to Sarah.

“Because she might have taken it seriously enough to spread word, start a panic.”

“Don’t you think people might panic less if they knew the cause?”

Akili snorted. “You don’t believe what I’ve told you about the cause. Do you think people would react to the news with anything but incomprehension or hysteria? Anyway, after the Aleph moment, the ‘victims’ will know far more than anyone who hasn’t mixed could ever tell them. And there’ll be no question of panic, then: Distress itself will have vanished.” Most of this was said with absolute conviction; it was only with the last pronouncement that ve seemed to waver.

I asked tentatively, “So why did the moderates get it so wrong? They had their own supercomputers. They seemed to know as much about Anthrocosmology as anyone. If they could be mistaken about the unraveling…”

Akili gave me a long, hard look—still trying to judge how far ve could trust me. “I don’t know that they’re mistaken about the unraveling. I hope they are but I don’t know it for sure.”

I thought that over. “You mean the distortion in the mixing before the Aleph moment could be enough to have prevented the unraveling, so far—but once the TOE is completed…?”

“That’s right.”

I felt a chill, more of incomprehension than fear. “And you still tried to protect Mosala? Believing there was a chance that she could end everything?”

Akili stared at the floor, trying to find the right words. “If it does happen, we won’t even have time to know it—but I still think it would have been wrong to kill her. Unless the unraveling was absolutely certain, and there was no other way to stop it. No one can deal with an unknown chance of the end of the universe. How many people can you kill, for a cause like that? One? A hundred? A million? It’s like… trying to manipulate an infinitely heavy weight, on the end of an infinitely long lever. However fine your judgment is, you know it can’t be good enough. All you can do is admit that, and walk away.”

Before I could reply, Sisyphus said, “I think you’ll want to see this.”

The fishing boat with the moderates had been intercepted off the coast of New Zealand. The news footage showed people in handcuffs being herded ashore from a patrol boat onto floodlit docks, eyes downcast. “Five,” Giorgio, who’d lectured me on the unraveling. “Twenty,” who’d refused to let me leave the boat with their confession in my gut. Others were missing, though.

Then sailors followed, carrying the bodies on stretchers. They were covered in sheets—but the umale, Three, was unmistakable. The journalist spoke of suicide pacts. Helen Wu was mentioned by name, dead from poison.

The first scenes of the arrest had filled me with a buzz of righteous euphoria at the prospect of these fanatics facing justice—but I felt nothing but enervating horror as I tried to understand what had gone on in their minds, in the last moments. Maybe they’d seen the reports of ranting Distress victims—and some had concluded that the unraveling was inevitable, others that it was now impossible. Or maybe the whole convoluted logic of their actions had simply unwound, leaving them staring at the unadorned truth of what they’d done.

I couldn’t judge them. I didn’t know how I could have clawed my way up, if I’d spiraled down into the nightmare of believing what they’d believed. I might have struggled hard to reason all of Anthrocosmology out of existence—but if I’d failed, would I have had the humility (or the genocidal irresponsibility) to walk away from the implications, to refuse to intervene?

Outside, people were roaring with laughter. In the square, someone turned the music up insanely loud for a second, distorting it into booming bass static, shaking the ground.

Akili held conference with the other mainstream ACs. Someone was hacking into a WHO computer, to get the unofficial latest figures for reported cases of Distress.

“Nine thousand and twenty.” Ve turned to me with a sharp intake of breath; I didn’t know if it was panic, or the exhilaration of free fall. “Tripled in two days. And you still think it’s a virus?”

“No.” Even without this inexplicable burst of contagion, I knew my targeted neuroactive mutant bioweapon theory wouldn’t stand up to any scrutiny at all. “But we can still both be wrong, can’t we?”

“Maybe.”

I hesitated. “If it’s this fast now, then after the Aleph moment…?”

“I don’t know. It could sweep the planet in a week. Or an hour. The faster the better—less suffering for the people who see it coming, but don’t yet understand.” Akili closed vis eyes, began to put vis face in vis hands, stopped, clenched vis fists. “When it comes, it better be good. The truth you can’t escape had better be sweet.”

I moved closer and put my arm around ver, and swayed our bodies gently together from side to side.

Sarah arrived, barely a minute later than promised. She sat on my suitcase, and we talked for her camera eyes. Sometimes we had to shout to make ourselves heard—but software would bring the noise of the celebrations down to an atmospheric murmur.

Sarah and I had never been more than casual acquaintances—I’d only spoken to her in person a dozen times before—but for me, she came from the world beyond Stateless, the time before the conference; she was living proof of that era of sanity. And it only took one third party, there in the flesh, to anchor me to normality—to render me certain, again, that Akili was wrong. Distress was a mundane horror, no different from cholera. The universe was oblivious to human explanation. The laws of physics always had been and always would be solid—all the way down to the bedrock of the TOE—whether or not they were understood.

And—though we weren’t going out in real-time—she’d brought her audience with her. Under the potential scrutiny of ten million people, what else could I do but think what they expected me to think, give in to their consensus, conform?

Akili, too, seemed to relax—but whether Sarah’s presence anchored ver in the same way, or merely served as a welcome distraction, I couldn’t tell.

Sarah guided us deftly through our roles in Violet Mosala: Victim of Anthrocosmology. The deposition I’d made for Joe Kepa had stuck to the legally pertinent facts; this interview pretended to probe the moral and philosophical depths of the ACs’ conspiracy. But Akili and I both talked of the fishing boat, and the moderates’ insane beliefs, as if we had no doubt that their whole world view—as much as their violent methods—deserved only contempt; as if nothing remotely similar could have crossed our own minds in a thousand years.

And it all became news. It all became history. Sarah was doing her job flawlessly—but for the record, the three of us willingly steam-rollered flat every unspoken fear, every qualm, every trace of doubt that the world could ever be different from the nets’ pale imitation of it.

We were almost finished—I was on the verge of recounting the events in the ambulance—when my notepad chimed. It was a coded trill for a call to be taken only in private. If I answered, the communications software would shift to deepest encryption, automatically—but if the notepad sensed other people within earshot, it would refuse to maintain the connection.

I excused myself, and left the tent. The sky showed a faint wash of gray over the stars. Music and laughter still flooded out of the square behind the markets, and people were still roaming the camp, but I found a secluded spot nearby.

De Groot said, “Andrew? Are you all right? Can you talk?” She looked haggard and tense.

“I'm fine. A little bruised by the quake, that’s all.” I hesitated; I couldn’t bring myself to ask the question.

“Violet died. About twenty minutes ago.” De Groot’s voice faltered, but she steeled herself and pushed on wearily. “No one knows exactly why, yet. Some kind of trap sprung by one of the anti-viral magic bullets—maybe an enzyme in concentrations too weak to detect, which converted it into a toxin.” She shook her head, disbelieving. “They turned her body into a minefield. What did she ever do to deserve that? She tried to find a few simple truths, a few simple patterns to the world.”

I said, “They’ve been caught. They’ll stand trial. And Violet will be remembered… for centuries.” It was all hollow comfort, but I didn’t know what else to say.

And I’d thought I’d been prepared for this news, ever since I’d heard she was in coma—but it still came like a sudden blow to the head… as if the anarchists’ astonishing reversal of fortune, and Sarah’s miraculous