Distress

by Greg Egan

  I found Akili, unharmed, helping with the marquee which had fallen onto the water pumps. We embraced. I was bruised all over, my face was caked with blood, and my thrice reopened wound was sending out flashes of pain like electric arcs – but I’d never felt more intensely alive.

  Akili pulled free of me gently. “At six a.m., Mosala’s TOE will be posted on the nets. Will you sit up with me and wait?” Ve looked me in the eye, hiding nothing – afraid of the plague, afraid of facing it alone.

  I squeezed vis arm. “Of course.”

  I went to the latrines to clean up. Mercifully, the sewage conduits remained open – and the raw waste previously discharged hadn’t been forced back up to the surface by the compression waves of the quake. I washed the blood off my face, and then cautiously unbandaged my stomach.

  The wound was still bleeding thinly. The cut from the insect’s laser ran deeper than I’d realized; when I bent over the washbasin, I could feel the two walls of flesh on either side of the gash – some seven or eight centimeters long – slide against each other, disconnected except at the ends. The burn had cauterized tissue all the way through the abdominal wall – and now the dead seam had split open.

  I looked around; there was no one else in sight. I thought: This is not a good idea. But I’d already been pumped full of antibiotics against the risk of internal infection—

  I closed my eyes and forced three fingers deep into the wound. I touched the small intestine, blood-warm not snake-cold, resilient, muscular and unslick beneath my fingertips. This was the part of me which had almost killed me – subverted by foreign enzymes, mercilessly wringing me dry. But the body is not a traitor: it only obeys the laws it must obey in order to exist at all.

  Pain caught up with me, and I almost froze – I imagined spending my life as a Bonaparte, or a self-doubting Thomas – but I jerked my hand free and then leaned against the plastic barrel of the washbasin, punching the side.

  I wanted to stare into a mirror and proclaim: This is it. I know who I am, now. And I accept, absolutely, my life as a machine driven by blood, as a creature of cells and molecules, as a prisoner of the TOE.

  There were no mirrors, though. Not in the latrines of a refugee camp, not even on Stateless.

  And if I waited a few more hours, the words would carry more weight – because by dawn, I’d finally know the whole truth about the TOE which enabled me to speak them.

  #

  On my way back to meet Akili, I took out my notepad and scanned the international nets. The anarchists’ strike against the mercenaries was being talked about, breathlessly, everywhere.

  SeeNet’s coverage was the best, though.

  It started with a view of the lagoon itself, huge and eerily calm in the moonlight, almost a perfect circle – like some ancient flooded volcanic crater, an echo of the hidden guyot below. I felt, in spite of everything, a pang of sorrow at the death of the mercenaries whose faces I’d never seen, who’d been betrayed by solid rock, and had drowned in terror for nothing but money and the rights of EnGeneUity’s shareholders.

  The journalist spoke – a woman, out-of-shot, a professional with optic nerve taps. “It may take decades to reveal exactly who funded the invasion of Stateless, and why. It’s not even clear, as I speak, whether or not the desperate sacrifice the residents of this island have made will save them from the aggressors.

  “But I do know this. Violet Mosala – the Nobel laureate who was evacuated from Stateless in a critical condition, less than twenty-four hours ago – had intended to make this island her new home. She had hoped to lend the renegades enough respectability to enable a group of nations opposed to the UN boycott to speak their minds, at last. And if the invasion was an effort to silence those dissenting voices, it now seems doomed to failure. Violet Mosala is in a coma, fighting for her life after an attack by a violent cult – and the people of Stateless will be struggling harder than ever to survive the next few years, even if peace has come to them tonight – but the astonishing courage of both will not be easily forgotten.”

  There was more, with some of my footage of Mosala at the conference, and this journalist’s own coverage of the shelling, the dignified exodus from the city, the establishment of the camps, and an attack by one of the mercenaries’ robots.

  It was all immaculately shot and edited. It was powerful, but never exploitative. And from start to finish, it was unashamed – but absolutely honest – propaganda for the renegades.

  I could not have done it half as well.

  The best was yet to come, though.

  As the view returned to the dark waters of the lagoon, the journalist signed off.

  “This is Sarah Knight, for SeeNet News, on Stateless.”

  #

  As far as the personal com nets were concerned, Sarah Knight was still incommunicado in Kyoto. Lydia wouldn’t take my call – but I found a SeeNet production assistant willing to pass on a message to Sarah. She called me half an hour later, and Akili and I dragged the story out of her.

  “When Nishide became ill in Kyoto, I told the Japanese authorities exactly what I thought was happening – but his pneumococcus sequenced as an unengineered strain, and they refused to believe that it had been introduced by a trojan.” Trojans were bacteria which could reproduce themselves and their hidden pathogenic cargo – without symptoms or an immune response – for dozens of generations … and then self-destruct without a trace, leaving behind a massive but apparently natural infection to swamp the body’s defenses. “After making so much of a stink – and no one believing me, not even Nishide’s family – I thought it would be wise to keep a low profile.”

  We weren’t able to talk for long; Sarah had to get to an interview with one of the militia’s divers – but just as she was about to break the connection, I said haltingly, “The Mosala documentary. You deserved the commission. You should have got it.”

  She made as if to laughingly dismiss the whole question as ancient history – but then she stopped herself, and said calmly: “That’s true. I spent six months making sure I was better prepared than anyone else – and you still came along and stole it in a day. Because you were Lydia’s blue-eyed boy, and she wanted to keep you happy.”

  I couldn’t believe how hard it was to get the words out. The injustice was blindingly obvious – and I’d admitted it to myself a thousand times – but some splinter of pride and self-righteousness resisted every step of the way.

  I said, “I abused my power. I’m sorry.”

  Sarah nodded slowly, lips pursed. “Okay. Apology accepted, Andrew. On one condition: you and Akili agree to be interviewed. The invasion is only half the story here – and I don’t want the fuckers who put Violet in a coma to get away with anything. I want to hear exactly what happened on that boat.”

  I turned to Akili. Ve said, “Sure.”

  We exchanged coordinates. Sarah was on the other side of the island, but she was working her way around to all of the camps, hitching rides with the militia.

  “Five a.m.?” she suggested.

  Akili laughed, flashing a conspiratorial glance at me. “Why not? No one’s sleeping tonight, on Stateless.”

  #

  The camp was full of the sounds of celebration. People streamed past the tent, laughing and shouting, shrunken silhouettes against the moonlight. Music from the satellites – from Tonga, from Berlin, from Kinshasa – blasted out of the main square – and someone, somehow, had found or made firecrackers. I was still intoxicated with adrenaline, but ragged with fatigue – I wasn’t sure if I wanted to join the party, or curl up and hibernate for a fortnight – but I’d promised to do neither.

  Akili and I sat on the sleeping bag – warmly dressed, with the tent flap closed; the electricity was fading. We passed the hours talking, scanning the nets, lapsing into awkward silences. I longed to bring ver, somehow, inside the aura of invulnerability I felt, having survived my own imagined apocalypse. I wanted to comfort ver in any way I could. My judgment was paralyzed, though; vis
body language had become opaque to me, and I had no sense of how or when to touch ver. We’d lain together naked – but I couldn’t keep that memory, that image, from signifying 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 sweet. 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 steamrollered 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, b
ut 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 reappearance, had somehow rewritten the odds. I covered my eyes with my forearm for a moment, and saw her sitting in her hotel room beneath the skylight, raked by the sun, reaching out and taking my hand. Even if I’m wrong … there has to be something down there. Or nobody could even touch.

  De Groot said, “How soon can you get off the island?” She sounded more than a little concerned – which was touching, but strange. We’d hardly been that close.

  I laughed dismissively. “ Why? The anarchists have won, the worst is over. I’m sure of that.” De Groot did not look sure at all. “Have you heard something? From … your political contacts?” There was a sudden chill in my bowels, like the disbelief I’d felt before each new spasm from the cholera: It can’t be happening again.

  “This isn’t about the war. But – you’re stuck, aren’t you?”

  “For now. Are you going to tell me what this—?”

  “We had a message. Just after Violet died. A threat from the Anthrocosmologists .” Her face contorted with anger. “Not the ones on the boat, obviously. So it must have come from the ones who killed Buzzo.”

  “Saying what?”

  “Shut down all of Violet’s calculations. Present them with a verified audit trail for her supercomputer account, proving that all the records of her TOE work have been erased without being copied or read.”