Distress

by Greg Egan

  I had the console show me a diagram of the segments I’d used in the edited version, slivers scattered throughout the long linear sequence of the raw footage. Each take – each unbroken sequence of filming – was clearly “slated”: labeled with time and place, and a sample frame at the start and end. There were a few takes from which I’d extracted nothing at all; I played them through one last time, to be sure I hadn’t left out anything important.

  There was some footage where Rourke was showing me into his “office” – a corner of the two-room flat. I’d noticed a photograph of him – probably in his early twenties – with a woman about the same age.

  I asked who she was.

  “My ex-wife.”

  The couple stood on a crowded beach, somewhere Mediterranean-looking. They were holding hands and trying to face the camera – but they’d been caught out, unable to resist exchanging conspiratorial sideways glances. Sexually charged, but … knowing , too. If this wasn’t a portrait of intimacy, it was a very good imitation.

  Sometimes we can even convince ourselves that nothing’s wrong. For a while.

  “How long were you married?”

  “Almost a year.”

  I’d been curious, of course, but I hadn’t pressed him for details. Junk DNA was a science documentary, not some sleazy exposé; his private life was none of my business.

  There was also an informal conversation I’d had with Rourke, the day after the interview. We’d been walking through the grounds of the university, just after I’d taken a few minutes’ footage of him at work – helping a computer scour the world’s Hindi-speaking networks in search of vowel shifts (which he usually did from home, but I’d been desperate for a change of backdrop, even if it meant distorting reality). The University of Manchester had eight separate campuses scattered throughout the city; we were in the newest, where the landscape architects had gone wild with engineered vegetation. Even the grass was impossibly lush and verdant; for the first few seconds, even to me, the shot looked like a badly forged composite: sky filmed in England, ground filmed in Brunei.

  Rourke said, “You know, I envy you your job. With VA, I’m forced to concentrate on a narrow area of change. But you’ll have a bird’s eye view of everything.”

  “Of what? You mean advances in biotechnology?”

  “Biotech, imaging, AI … the lot. The whole battle for the H-words.”

  “The H-words?”

  He smiled cryptically. “The little one and the big one. That’s what this century is going to be remembered for. A battle for two words. Two definitions.”

  “I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.” We were passing through a miniature forest in the middle of the quadrangle; dense and exotic, as wayward and brooding as any surrealist’s painted jungle.

  Rourke turned to me. “What’s the most patronizing thing you can offer to do for people you disagree with, or don’t understand?”

  “I don’t know. What?”

  “Heal them. That’s the first H-word. Health. ”

  “Ah.”

  “Medical technology is about to go supernova. In case you hadn’t noticed. So what’s all that power going to be used for? The maintenance – or creation – of ‘health.’ But what’s ‘health’? Forget the obvious shit that everyone agrees on. Once every last virus and parasite and oncogene has been blasted out of existence, what’s the ultimate goal of ‘healing’? All of us playing our preordained parts in some Edenite ‘natural order’” – he stopped to gesture ironically at the orchids and lilies blossoming around us – “and being restored to the one condition our biology is optimized for: hunting and gathering, and dying at thirty or forty? Is that it? Or … opening up every technically possible mode of existence? Whoever claims the authority to define the boundary between health and disease claims … everything.”

  I said, “You’re right: the word’s insidious, the meaning’s open-ended – and it will probably always be contentious.” I couldn’t argue with patronizing , either; Mystical Renaissance were forever offering to “heal” the world’s people of their “psychic numbing”, and transform us all into “perfectly balanced” human beings. In other words: perfect copies of themselves, with all the same beliefs, all the same priorities, and all the same neuroses and superstitions.

  “So what’s the other H-word? The big one?”

  He tipped his head and looked at me slyly. “You really can’t guess? Here’s a clue, then. What’s the most intellectually lazy way you can think of, to try to win an argument?”

  “You’re going to have to spell it out for me. I’m no good at riddles.”

  “You say that your opponent lacks humanity .”

  I’d fallen silent, suddenly ashamed – or at least embarrassed – wondering just how deeply I’d offended him with some of the things I’d said the day before. The trouble with meeting people again after interviewing them was that they often spent the intervening time thinking through the whole conversation, in minute detail – and concluding that they’d come out badly.

  Rourke said, “It’s the oldest semantic weapon there is. Think of all the categories of people who’ve been classified as non-human , in various cultures, at various times. People from other tribes. People with other skin colors. Slaves. Women. The mentally ill. The deaf. Homosexuals. Jews. Bosnians, Croats, Serbs, Armenians, Kurds—”

  I said defensively, “Don’t you think there’s a slight difference between putting someone in a gas chamber, and using the phrase rhetorically?”

  “Of course. But suppose you accuse me of ‘lacking humanity.’ What does that actually mean? What am I likely to have done? Murdered someone in cold blood? Drowned a puppy? Eaten meat? Failed to be moved by Beethoven’s Fifth? Or just failed to have – or to seek – an emotional life identical to your own in every respect? Failed to share all your values and aspirations?”

  I hadn’t replied. Cyclists whirred by in the dark jungle behind me; it had begun to rain, but the canopy protected us.

  Rourke continued cheerfully. “The answer is: ‘any one of the above.’ Which is why it’s so fucking lazy. Questioning someone’s ‘humanity’ puts them in the company of serial killers – which saves you the trouble of having to say anything intelligent about their views. And it lays claim to some vast imaginary consensus, an outraged majority standing behind you, backing you up all the way. When you claim that Voluntary Autists are trying to rid themselves of their humanity , you’re not only defining the word as if you had some divine right to do that … you’re implying that everyone else on the planet – short of the reincarnations of Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot – agrees with you in every detail.” He spread his arms and declaimed to the trees, “ Put down that scalpel, I beseech you … in the name of all humanity! ”

  I said lamely, “Okay. Maybe I should have phrased some things differently, yesterday. I didn’t set out to insult you.”

  Rourke shook his head, amused. “No offense taken. It’s a battle, after all – I can hardly expect instant surrender. You’re loyal to a narrow definition of Big H – and maybe you even honestly believe that everyone else shares it. I support a broader definition. We’ll agree to disagree. And I’ll see you in the trenches.”

  Narrow? I’d opened my mouth to deny the accusation, but then I hadn’t known how to defend myself. What could I have said? That I’d once made a sympathetic documentary about gender migrants? (How magnanimous.) And now I had to balance that with a frankenscience story on Voluntary Autists?

  So he’d had the last word (if only in real time). He’d shaken my hand, and we’d parted.

  I played the whole thing through, one more time. Rourke was remarkably eloquent – and almost charismatic, in his own strange way – and everything he’d said was relevant. But the private terminology, the manic outbursts … it was all too weird, too messy and confrontational.

  I left the take unused, unquoted.

  I’d gone on to another appointment at the university: an afternoon with
the famous Manchester MIRG – Medical Imaging Research Group. It had seemed like too good a chance to miss – and imaging, after all, lay behind the definitive identification of partial autism.

  I skimmed through the footage. A lot of it was good – and it would probably make a worthwhile five-minute story of its own, for one of SeeNet’s magazine programs – but it was clear now that Rourke’s own concise notepad demonstration had supplied all the brain scans Junk DNA really needed.

  The main experiment I’d filmed involved a student volunteer reading poetry in silence, while the scanner subtitled the image of her brain with each line as it was read. There were three independently-computed subtitles, based on primary visual data, recognized word-shapes, and the brain’s final semantic representations … the last sometimes only briefly matching the others, before the words’ precise meanings diffused out into a cloud of associations. However eerily compelling this was, though, it had nothing to do with Lamont’s area.

  Toward the end of the day, one of the researchers – Margaret Williams, head of the software development team – had suggested that I climb into the womb of the scanner, myself. Maybe they wanted to turn the tables on me – to scrutinize and record me with their machinery, just as I’d been doing to them for the past four hours. Williams had certainly been as insistent as if she’d believed it was a matter of justice.

  She said, “You could record the subject’s-eye view. And we could get a look at all your hidden extras.”

  I’d declined. “I don’t know what the magnetic fields would do to the hardware.”

  “Nothing, I promise. Most of it must be optical – and everything else will be shielded. You get on and off planes all the time, don’t you? You walk through the normal security gates?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Our fields are no stronger. We could even try reading your optic nerve activity, via the scanner – and then comparing the data with your own direct record.”

  “I don’t have the download module with me. It’s back at the hotel.”

  She pursed her lips, frustrated – obviously dying to tell me to shut up, do as I was told, and get inside the scanner. “That’s a pity. And I suppose you’d have problems with the warranty if we improvised something – our own cable and interface…?”

  “I’m afraid so. The software would log the use of non-standard equipment, and then I’d be in deep trouble at the next annual service.”

  But she still wasn’t ready to give up. “You were talking about the Voluntary Autists, before? If you wanted something spectacular to illustrate that … we could image your own Lamont’s area – while you brought to mind a sequence of different people. We could record it all, and play it back for you. Then you could show your viewers a real-time working copy of the thing itself. Not some glossy animation: flesh and blood, caught in the act. Neurons pumping calcium ions, synapses firing. We could even transform the neural architecture into a functional diagram, calibrate it, identify trait symbols. We have all the software—”

  I said, “It’s very kind of you to offer. But … what kind of tenth-rate journalist would I be, if I started resorting to using myself as the subject of my own stories?”

  Chapter 7

  Two weeks before the Einstein Centenary conference was due to begin, I signed a contract with SeeNet for Violet Mosala: Symmetry’s Champion . As I scrawled my name on the electronic document with my notepad’s stylus, I tried to convince myself that I’d been given the job because I’d do it well – not merely because I’d pulled rank and begged for a favor. There was no doubt that Sarah Knight was inexperienced – she was five years younger than me, and she’d spent most of her career in political journalism. Being a self-confessed “fan” of Mosala might even have worked against her; no one at SeeNet would have wanted a gushing hagiography. But for all my alleged professionalism, I’d still only glanced at Sisyphus ’s briefing, I still had no real idea what I was taking on.

  The truth was, I didn’t care about the details; all that mattered was putting Junk DNA behind me, and running as far away from Distress as I could. After twelve months drowning in the worst excesses of biotechnology, the pristine world of theoretical physics shone in my mind’s eye like some anesthetized mathematical heaven, where everything was cool and abstract and gloriously inconsequential … an image which merged seamlessly with the white coral snowflake of Stateless itself, growing out into the blue Pacific like a perfect fractal star. Part of me understood full well that if I took these beautiful mirages to heart, I was certain to be disappointed – and I even struggled to imagine the most unpleasant ways in which I might be brought back down to Earth. I could suffer an attack of multiple-drug-resistant pneumonia or malaria, a strain to which the locals were immune. High-level pharms which could analyze the pathogenic organisms and design a cure on the spot would be unavailable, thanks to the boycott, and I’d be too weak for the flight back to civilization… It wasn’t an impossible scenario; the boycott had killed hundreds of people over the years.

  Still, anything had to be better than coming face-to-face with a victim of Distress.

  I left a message for Violet Mosala. I assumed she was still at her home in Cape Town, though the software which answered her number was giving nothing away. I introduced myself, thanked her for generously agreeing to give her time to the project, and generally spouted polite clichés. I said nothing to encourage her to call me back; I knew it wouldn’t take much real-time conversation to reveal my total ignorance of her life and work. Pneumonia, malaria … making a complete fool of myself. I didn’t care. All I could think of was escape.

  #

  I’d psyched myself up to be “forced to relive” Daniel Cavolini’s revival – but I should have known all along how absurd that was. Editing never recreated the past; it was more like performing an autopsy on it. I worked on the sequence dispassionately – and every hour I spent reshaping it made the job of imagining the responses of a viewer, seeing it all for the first time, more and more a matter of calculation and instinct – and less and less connected to anything I felt about the events, myself. Even the final cut, superficially fluid and immediate, was for me a kind of post-mortem revival of a post-mortem revival. It had happened, it was over; whatever brief illusion of life the technology managed to create, it was no more capable of climbing out of the screen and walking down the street than any other twitching corpse.

  Daniel’s brother, Luke, had been charged with the murder – and had already pleaded guilty. I logged on to the court records system and skimmed through footage of the three hearings which had taken place so far. The magistrate had ordered a psychiatric report, which had concluded that Luke Cavolini suffered from occasional bouts of “inappropriate anger” which had never quite put him far enough out of touch with reality to have him classified as mentally ill and treated against his will. He was competent, and culpable, and understood precisely what he’d done – and he’d even had a “motive”: an argument the night before, about a jacket of Daniel’s which he’d borrowed. He’d end up in an ordinary prison, for at least fifteen years.

  The court footage was public domain, but there was no time to use any of it in the broadcast version. So I wrote a brief postscript to the revival story, stating the bare facts: the charges laid, the guilty plea. I didn’t mention the psychiatric report; I didn’t want to muddy the waters. The console read the words over a freeze-frame of Daniel Cavolini screaming.

  I said, “Fade-out. Roll credits.”

  It was Tuesday, March 23rd, 4:07 pm.

  Junk DNA was over.

  #

  I left a note in the hall for Gina and walked up to Epping to get myself inoculated for the journey ahead. Scientists on Stateless broadcast local “weather reports” – both meteorological and epidemiological – into the net, and despite all the other bizarre acts of political ostracism, the relevant UN bodies treated this data just as if it had emerged from a sanctified member state. As it turned out, neither pneumonia nor malaria sh
ots were indicated – but there’d been recent outbreaks of several new strains of adenovirus – none of them life-threatening, but all of them potentially debilitating enough to ruin my stay. Alice Tomasz, my GP, downloaded sequences for some small peptides which mimicked appropriate viral surface proteins, synthesized their RNA, and then spliced the fragments into a tailored – harmless – adenovirus. The whole process took about ten minutes.

  As I inhaled the live vaccine, Alice said, “I liked Gender Scrutiny Overload .”

  “Thank you.”

  “That part at the end, though … Elaine Ho on gender and evolution. Did you honestly believe that?”

  Ho had pointed out that humans had spent the last few million years reversing the ancient mammalian extremes of gender dimorphism and behavioral differences. We’d gradually evolved biochemical quirks which actively interfered with ancient genetic programs for gender-specific neural pathways; the separate blueprints were still inherited, but hormonal effects in the womb kept them from being fully enacted – essentially “masculinizing” the brain of every female embryo, and “feminizing” the brain of every male. (Homosexuality resulted when the process went – very slightly – further than normal.) In the long term – even if we took an Edenite stand and refused all genetic engineering – the sexes were already converging. Whether or not we tampered with nature, nature was tampering with itself.

  “It seemed like a good way to end the program. And everything she said was true, wasn’t it?”

  Alice was noncommittal. “So what are you working on these days?”

  I couldn’t bring myself to own up to Junk DNA … but I was just as afraid to mention Violet Mosala, in case my own doctor turned out to know more about Mosala’s TOE-in-progress than I did. It wasn’t an idle fear; Alice was obscenely well-read on everything.