Distress

technoliberation!'

'Vive.'

She said seriously, 'Okay: there are rumors. Maybe half of Stateless knows exactly what's going on—but I still don't want those rumors confirmed until certain arrangements, certain agreements, are much more solid.'

'I understand.' And I realized, with a kind of astonishment, that somewhere along the way I'd won some measure of trust from her. Of course she was using me—but she must have believed that my heart was in the right place, that I'd let myself be used.

I said, 'Next time you're arguing circularity with Helen Wu deep into the night, do you think I could…?'

'Sit in? And record it?' She seemed to find the prospect dubious, but she said, 'All right. Just so long as you promise not to fall asleep before we do.'

She walked me to the door, and we shook hands. I said, 'Be careful.' She smiled serenely, slightly amused at my concern, as if she didn't have an enemy in the world. 'Don't worry. I will.'

17

I was woken by a call just after four, the ringing growing louder and more shrill until it reached into my melatonin dreams and turned the darkness of my skull inside-out. For an instant, the mere fact of consciousness was shocking, unspeakable; I was outraged as a newborn child. Then I stretched out an arm and groped around on the bedside table for my notepad. I squinted at the screen, blinded for a moment by its brightness.

The call was from Lydia. I almost refused to take it, assuming that she'd somehow miscalculated the time zones, but then I woke sufficiently to realize that it was the middle of the night for her, too. Sydney was only two hours behind Stateless. Geographically, if not politically.

She said, 'Andrew, I'm sorry to disturb you, but I thought you had a right to hear this in realtime.' She looked uncharacteristically grim, and though I was still too groggy even to speculate about what was coming next, it was obvious that it wasn't going to be pleasant.

I said hoarsely, 'That's okay. Go ahead.' I tried not to imagine what I looked like, gaping bleary-eyed at the camera. Lydia seemed to be in a darkened room, herself, her face lit only by the image on the screen… of me, lit only by the image other. Was that possible? I suddenly realized that I had a pounding headache.

'Junk DNA is going to have to be re-edited, with the Landers story removed. If you had time, of course I'd ask you to do it yourself, but I'm assuming that's not possible. So I'll give it to Paul Kostas; he used to be one of our news room editors, but he's freelance now. I'll send you his final cut, and if you strongly disagree with anything, you'll have an opportunity to change it. Just remember that it's being screened in less than a fortnight.'

I said, 'That's fine, that's all… fine.' I knew Kostas; he wouldn't mutilate the program. 'Why, though? Was there some legal glitch? Don't tell me Landers is suing?'

'No. Events have overtaken us. I won't try to explain; I've sent you a trailer from the San Francisco bureau—it'll all be public by morning, but…' She was too tired to elaborate, but I understood; she didn't want me to learn about this as just another viewer. A quarter of Junk DNA, and some three months' work on my part, had just been rendered obsolete, but Lydia was doing her best to salvage some vestige of my professional dignity. This way, at least I'd stay a few hours ahead of the masses.

I said, 'I appreciate that. Thank you.'

We bid each other goodnight, and I viewed the 'trailer'—a hastily assembled package of footage and text, alerting other news rooms to the story, and giving them the choice either to wait for the polished item soon to follow, or to edit the raw material themselves and put out their own version. It consisted mainly of FBI news releases, plus some archival background material.

Ned Landers, his two chief geneticists, and three of his executives, had just been arrested in Portland. Nine other people—working for an entirely separate corporation—had been arrested in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Laboratory equipment, biochemical samples, and computer records had been taken from both sites in pre-dawn raids. All fifteen people had been charged with violating federal biotechnology safety laws—but not because of Landers' highly publicized neo-DNA and symbiont research. At the Chapel Hill laboratory, according to the charges, workers had been manipulating infectious, natural-RNA viruses—in secret, without permission. Landers had been footing the bills, circuitously.

The purpose of these viruses remained unknown; the data and samples were yet to be analyzed.

There were no statements from the accused; their lawyers were counseling silence. There were some external shots of the Chapel Hill laboratory, sealed off behind police barricades. All the footage of Landers himself was relatively old material; the latest was cannibalized from my interview with him (not completely wasted, after all).

The lack of detail was frustrating, but the implications already seemed clear. Landers and his collaborators had been constructing perfect viral immunity for themselves beyond the specific powers of any one vaccine or drug, beyond the fear of mutant strains out-evolving their defenses… while engineering new viruses capable of infecting the rest of us. I stared at the screen, which was frozen on the last frame of the report: Landers, as I'd seen him in the flesh, myself, smiling at the vision of his brand new kingdom. And though I balked at accepting the obvious conclusion… what possible use could he have had for a novel human virus except for some kind of thinning?.

I sprinted to the bathroom, and brought up the meager contents of my stomach. Then I knelt by the bowl, shivering and sweating—lapsing into microsleeps, almost losing my balance. The melatonin wanted me back, but I was having trouble convincing myself that I was through vomiting. Pampered hypochondriac that I was, I would have consulted my pharm at once if I'd had it, for a precise diagnosis and an instant, optimal solution. With visions of choking to death in my sleep, I contemplated tearing off my shoulder patch—but the symbolic attempt to surrender to natural circadian forces would have taken hours to produce any effect at all—and then it would have rendered me, at best, a zombie for the rest of the conference.

I retched, voluntarily, for a minute or two, and nothing more emerged, so I staggered back to bed.

Ned Landers had gone further than any gender migrant, any anarchist, any Voluntary Autist. No man is an island? Just watch me. And yet, apparently, it still hadn't been far enough. He'd still felt crowded, threatened, encroached-upon. A biological kingdom wasn't enough; he'd aspired to more elbow room than even that unbridgeable genetic gulf could provide.

And he'd almost attained it. That was what species self-knowledge had given him: a precise, molecular definition of the H-word… which he could personally transcend, before turning it against everyone who remained in its embrace.

Vive la technoliberation! Why not have a million Ned Landers? Why not let every solipsistic lunatic and paranoid, self-appointed ethnic-group-savior on the planet wield the same power? Paradise for yourself and your clan—and apocalypse for everyone else.

That was the fruit of perfect understanding.

What's wrong, don't you like the taste?

I clutched my stomach and slid my knees toward my chin; it changed the character of the nausea, if not exactly removing it. The room tipped, my limbs grew numb, I strived for absolute blankness.

And if I'd dug deeper, done my job properly, I might have been the one to find him out, to stop him…

Gina touched my cheek, and kissed me tenderly. We were in Manchester, at the imaging lab. I was naked, she was clothed.

She said, 'Climb inside the scanner. You can do that for me, can't you? I want us to be much, much closer, Andrew. So I need to see what's going on inside your brain.'

I started to comply—but then I hesitated, suddenly afraid of what she'd discover.

She kissed me again. 'No more arguments. If you love me, you'll shut up and do what you're told.'

She forced me down, and closed the hatch of the machine. I saw my body from above. The scanner was more than a scanner—it raked me with ultraviolet lasers. I felt no pain, but the beams prised away layer after