by Greg Egan
(Lofty sentiments … and here I was peddling frankenscience, because that was the niche that had needed filling. I salved my conscience – or numbed it for a while – with platitudes about Trojan horses, and changing the system from within.)
I took the Delphic Biosystems graphics of assayin in action, and had the console strip away the excessive decoration so it was possible to see clearly what was going on. I threw out the gushing commentary and wrote my own. The console delivered it in the diction profile I’d chosen for all of Junk DNA ’s narration, cloned from samples of an English actor named Juliet Stevenson. The long-vanished “Standard English” pronunciation – unlike any contemporary UK accent – remained easily comprehensible across the vast Anglophone world. Any viewer who wished to hear a different voice could cross-translate at will, though; I often listened to programs redubbed into the regional accents I had most trouble following – US south-east, northern Irish, and east-central African – hoping to sharpen my ear for them.
Hermes – my communications software – was programmed to bounce almost everyone on Earth, while I was editing. Lydia Higuchi, SeeNet’s West Pacific Commissioning Executive Producer, was one of the few exceptions. It was my notepad that rang, but I switched the call through to the console itself; the screen was larger and clearer – and the camera stamped its signal with the words AFFINE GRAPHICS EDITOR MODEL 2052-KL, and a time code. Not very subtle, but it wasn’t meant to be.
Lydia got straight to the point. She said, “I saw the final cut of the Landers stuff. It’s good. But I want to talk about what comes next.”
“The HealthGuard implant? Is there some problem?” I didn’t hide my irritation. She’d seen selections of the raw footage, she’d seen all my post-production notes. If she wanted anything significant changed, she’d left it too damn late.
She laughed. “Andrew, take one step back. Not the next story in Junk DNA . Your next project.”
I eyed her as if she’d casually raised the prospect of imminent travel to another planet. I said, “Don’t do this to me, Lydia. Please. You know I can’t think rationally about anything else right now.”
She nodded sympathetically – but said, “I take it you’ve been monitoring this new disease? It’s not anecdotal static anymore; there are official reports coming out of Geneva, Atlanta, Nairobi.”
My stomach tightened. “You mean Acute Clinical Anxiety Syndrome?”
“A.k.a. Distress .” She seemed to savor the word, as if she’d already adopted it into her vocabulary of deeply telegenic subjects. My spirits sank even further.
I said, “My knowledge miner’s been logging everything on it, but I haven’t had time to stay up to date.” And frankly, right now—
“There are over four hundred diagnosed cases, Andrew. That’s a thirty per cent rise in the last six months.”
“How can anyone diagnose something when they don’t have a clue what it is?”
“Process of elimination.”
“Yeah, I think it’s bullshit, too.”
She mimed brief sarcastic amusement. “Get serious. This is a brand new mental illness. Possibly communicable. Possibly caused by an escaped military pathogen—”
“Possibly fallen from a comet. Possibly a punishment from God. Amazing how many things are possible, isn’t it?”
She shrugged. “Whatever the cause, it’s spreading. There are cases everywhere now but Antarctica. This is headline news – and more. The board decided last night: we’re going to commission a thirty-minute special on Distress. High profile, blitz promotion, culminating in synchronous primetime broadcasts, worldwide.”
Synchronous didn’t mean what it should have, in netspeak; it meant the same calendar date and local time for all viewers. “Worldwide? You mean Anglophone world?”
“I mean world world. We’re tying up arrangements to on-sell to other-language networks.”
“Well … good.”
Lydia smiled, a tight-lipped impatient smile. “Are you being coy, Andrew? Do I have to spell it out? We want you to make it. You’re our biotech specialist, you’re the logical choice. And you’ll do a great job. So…?”
I put a hand to my forehead, and tried to work out why I felt so claustrophobic. I said, “How long do I have, to decide?”
She smiled even more widely, which meant she was puzzled, annoyed, or both. “We’re broadcasting on May 24th – that’s ten weeks from Monday. You’ll need to start pre-production the minute Junk DNA is finished. So we need your answer as soon as possible.”
Rule number four: Discuss everything with Gina first. Whether or not she’d ever admit to being offended if you didn’t.
I said, “Tomorrow morning.”
Lydia wasn’t happy, but she said, “That’s fine.”
I steeled myself. “If I say no, is there anything else going?”
Lydia looked openly astonished now. “What’s wrong with you? Primetime world broadcast! You’ll make five times as much on this as on Gender .”
“I realize that. And I’m grateful for the chance, believe me. I just want to know if there’s … any other choice.”
“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-something?” 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 wa
s 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 – 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 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?”
Chapter 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 Parramatta 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, theaters, 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-siècle 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 per cent of physical travel.
We stepped out on to 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 theater and music survived, out in the suburbs – with small plays in small venues, or crowd-pulling colosseum bands in sports stadia – but mainstream theater 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 o
ut between the empty towers like souvenir stalls scattered amongst the pyramids at Giza.
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 verself, 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.
