Distress

air.

It was a Friday. I phoned Gina at work. Rule number six: Be unpredictable. But not too often.

I said, “Screw Junk DNA. Want to go dancing?”

5

It was Gina’s idea to go deep into the city. The Ruins held no attraction for me—and there was far better nightlife closer to home—but (rule number seven) it wasn’t worth an argument. When the train pulled into Town Hall station, and we took the escalators up past the platform where Daniel Cavolini had been stabbed to death, I blanked my mind and smiled.

Gina linked arms with me and said, “There’s something here I don’t feel anywhere else. An energy, a buzz. Can’t you feel it?”

I looked around at the station’s black-and-white tiled walls, graffiti-proof and literally antiseptic.

“No more than in Pompeii.”

The demographic center of greater Sydney had been west of Parra-matta for at least half a century—and had probably reached Blacktown, by now—but the demise of the historical urban core had begun in earnest only in the thirties, when office space, cinemas, theatres, physical galleries and public museums had all become obsolete at more or less the same time. Broadband optical fibers had been connected to most residential buildings since the teens, but it had taken another two decades for the networks to mature. The tottering edifice of incompatible standards, inefficient hardware, and archaic operating systems thrown together by the fin-de-siecle dinosaurs of computing and communications had been razed to the ground in the twenties, and only then—after years of premature hype and well-earned backlashes of cynicism and ridicule—could the use of the networks for entertainment and telecommuting be transmuted from a form of psychological torture into a natural and convenient alternative to ninety percent of physical travel.

We stepped out onto George Street. It was far from deserted, but I’d seen footage from days when the country’s population was half as much, and it shamed these meager crowds. Gina looked up, and her eyes caught the lights; many of the old office towers still dazzled, their windows decorated for the tourists with cheap sunlight- storing luminescent coatings. “The Ruins” was a joke, of course—vandalism, let alone time, had scarcely made a mark—but we were all tourists, here, come to gawk at the monuments left behind, not by our ancestors, but by our older siblings.

Few buildings had been converted for residential use; the architecture and economics had never added up— and some urban preservationists actively campaigned against it. There were squatters, of course—probably a couple of thousand, spread throughout what was still referred to as the Central Business District—but they only added to the post-apocalyptic mood. Live theatre and music survived, out in the suburbs—with small plays in small venues, or crowd-pulling colosseum bands in sports stadia—but mainstream theatre was performed in realtime VR over the networks. (The Opera House, foundations rotting, was currently predicted to slide into Sydney Harbor in 2065—a delightful prospect, though I suspected that some group of saccharine-blooded killjoys would raise the money to rescue the useless icon at the last moment.) Walk-in retailing, such as it was, had long ago moved entirely to regional centers. There were a few hotels still open on the fringes of the city, but restaurants and nightclubs were all that remained in the dead heart, spread out between the empty towers like souvenir stalls scattered amongst the pyramids in the Valley of the Kings.

We headed south into what had once been Chinatown; the crumbling decorative facades of deserted emporia still attested to that, even if the cuisine didn’t.

Gina nudged me gently and directed my attention to a group of people strolling north, on the opposite side of the street. When they’d passed, she said, “Were they…?”

“What? Asex? I think so.”

“I'm never sure. There are naturals who look no different.”

“But that’s the whole point. You can never be sure—but why did we ever think we could discover anything that mattered about a stranger, at a glance?”

Asex was really nothing but an umbrella term for a broad group of philosophies, styles of dress, cosmetic-surgical changes, and deep-biological alterations. The only thing that one asex person necessarily had in common with another was the view that vis gender parameters (neural, endocrine, chromosomal and genital) were the business of no one but ver-self, usually (but not always) vis lovers, probably vis doctor, and sometimes a few close friends. What a person actually did in response to that attitude could range from as little as ticking the “A” box on census forms, to choosing an asex name, to breast or body-hair reduction, voice timbre adjustment, facial resculpting, empouchment (surgery to render the male genitals retractable), all the way to full physical and/or neural asexuality, hermaphroditism, or exoticism.

I said, “Why bother staring at people and guessing? En-male, en-fem, asex… who cares?”

Gina scowled. “Don’t make me out to be some kind of bigot. I'm just curious.”

I squeezed her hand. “I'm sorry. That’s not what I meant.”

She pulled free. “You got to spend a year thinking about nothing else—being as voyeuristic and intrusive as you liked. And getting paid for it. I only saw the finished documentary. I don’t see why I should be expected to have reached some final position on gender migration just because you’ve rolled credits on the subject.”

I bent over and kissed her on the forehead.

“What was that for?”

“For being the ideal viewer, above and beyond all your many other virtues.”

“I think I'm going to throw up.”

We turned east, toward Surry Hills, into an even quieter street. A grim young man strode by alone, heavily muscled and probably facially sculpted… but again, there was no way to be sure. Gina glanced at me, still angry, but unable to resist. “That—assuming he was umale—I understand even less. If someone wants a build like that… fine. But why the face, as well? It’s not as if anyone would be likely to mistake him for anything but an en-male, without it.”

“No—but being mistaken for an en-male would be an insult, because he’s migrated out of that gender as surely as any asex. The whole point of being umale is to distance yourself from the perceived weaknesses of contemporary natural males. To declare that their ‘consensual identity'— stop laughing—is so much less masculine than your own that you effectively belong to another sex entirely. To say: no mere en-male can speak on my behalf, any more than a woman can.”

Gina mimed tearing out hair. “No woman can speak on behalf of all women, as far as I'm concerned. But I don’t feel obliged to have myself sculpted ufem or ifem to make that point!”

“Well… exactly. I feel the same way. Whenever some Iron John cretin writes a manifesto ‘in the name of all men', I’d much rather tell him to his face that he’s full of shit than desert the en-male gender and leave him thinking that he speaks for all those who remain. But… that is the commonest reason people cite for gender migration: they’re sick of self-appointed gender-political figureheads and pretentious Mystical Renaissance gurus claiming to represent them. And sick of being libeled for real and imagined gender crimes. If all men are violent, selfish, dominating, hierarchical… what can you do except slit your wrists, or migrate from male to imale, or asex? If all women are weak, passive, irrational victims—”

Gina thumped me on the arm admonishingly. “Now you’re caricaturing the caricaturists. I don’t believe anyone talks like that.”

“Only because you move in the wrong circles. Or should I say the right ones? But I thought you watched the program. There were people I interviewed who made exactly those assertions, word for word.”

“Then it’s the fault of the media for giving them publicity.”

We’d arrived at the restaurant, but we lingered outside. I said, “That’s partly true. I don’t know what the solution is, though. When will someone who stands up and proclaims, ‘I speak for no one but myself’ get as much coverage as someone who claims to speak for half the population?”