Distress

1

“All right. He’s dead. Go ahead and talk to him.”

The bioethicist was a laconic young asex with blond dreadlocks and a T-shirt which flashed up the slogan SAY NO TO TOE! in between the paid advertising. Ve countersigned the permission form on the forensic pathologist’s notepad, then withdrew to a corner of the room. The trauma specialist and the paramedic wheeled their resuscitation equipment out of the way, and the forensic pathologist hurried forward, hypodermic syringe in hand, to administer the first dose of neuropreservative. Useless prior to legal death—massively toxic to several organs, on a time scale of hours—the cocktail of glutamate antagonists, calcium channel blockers, and antioxidants would halt the most damaging biochemical changes in the victim’s brain, almost immediately.

The pathologist’s assistant followed close behind her, with a trolley bearing all the paraphernalia of post-mortem revival: a tray of disposable surgical instruments; several racks of electronic equipment; an arterial pump fed from three glass tanks the size of water-coolers; and something resembling a hairnet made out of gray superconducting wire.

Lukowski, the homicide detective, was standing beside me. He mused, “If everyone was fitted out like you, Worth, we’d never have to do this. We could just replay the crime from start to finish. Like reading an aircraft’s black box.”

I replied without looking away from the operating table; I could edit out our voices easily enough, but I wanted a continuous take of the pathologist connecting up the surrogate blood supply. “If everyone had optic nerve taps, don’t you think murderers would start hacking the memory chips out of their victims’ bodies?”

“Sometimes. But no one hung around to mess up this guy’s brain, did they?”

“Wait until they’ve seen the documentary.” The pathologist’s assistant sprayed a depilatory enzyme onto the victim’s skull, and then wiped all the close-cropped black hair away with a couple of sweeps of his gloved hand. As he dropped the mess into a plastic sample bag, I realized why it was holding together instead of dispersing like barber’s shop waste; several layers of skin had come with it. The assistant glued the “hairnet"—a skein of electrodes and SQID detectors—to the bare pink scalp. The pathologist finished checking the blood supply, then made an incision in the trachea and inserted a tube, hooked up to a small pump to take the place of the collapsed lungs. Nothing to do with respiration; purely as an aid to speech. It was possible to monitor the nerve impulses to the larynx, and synthesize the intended sounds by wholly electronic means, but apparently the voice was always less garbled if the victim could experience something like the normal tactile and auditory feedback produced by a vibrating column of air. The assistant fitted a padded bandage over the victim’s eyes; in rare cases, feeling could return sporadically to the skin of the face, and since retinal cells were deliberately not revived, some kind of temporary ocular injury was the easiest lie to explain away the pragmatic blindness.

I thought again about possible narration. In 1888, police surgeons photographed the retinas of one victim of Jack the Ripper, in the vain hope that they might discover the face of the killer embalmed in the light-sensitive pigments of the human eye…

No. Too predictable. And too misleading; revival was not a process of extracting information from a passive corpse. But what were the alternative references? Orpheus? Lazarus? “The Monkey’s Paw?” “The Tell-Tale Heart?” Reanimator? Nothing in myth or fiction had really prefigured the truth. Better to make no glib comparisons. Let the corpse speak for itself.

A spasm passed through the victim’s body. A temporary pacemaker was forcing his damaged heart to beat—operating at power levels which would poison every cardiac muscle fiber with electrochemical by-products, in fifteen or twenty minutes at the most. Pre-oxygenated ersatz blood was being fed into his heart’s left atrium, in lieu of a supply from the lungs, pumped through the body once only, then removed via the pulmonary arteries and discarded. An open system was less trouble than recirculation, in the short term. The half-repaired knife wounds in his abdomen and torso made a mess, leaking thin scarlet fluid into the drainage channels of the operating table, but they posed no real threat; a hundred times as much blood was being extracted every second, deliberately. No one had bothered to remove the surgical larvae, though, so they kept on working as if nothing had changed: stitching and chemically cauterizing the smaller blood vessels with their jaws, cleaning and disinfecting the wounds, sniffing about blindly for necrotic tissue and clots to consume.

Maintaining the flow of oxygen and nutrients to the brain was essential but it wouldn’t reverse the deterioration which had already taken place. The true catalysts of revival were the billions of liposomes—microscopic drug capsules made from lipid membranes—being infused along with the ersatz blood. One key protein embedded in the membrane unlocked the blood-brain barrier, enabling the liposomes to burrow out of the cerebral capillaries into the interneural space. Other proteins caused the membrane itself to fuse with the cell wall of the first suitable neuron it encountered, disgorging an elaborate package of biochemical machinery to re-energize the cell, mop up some of the molecular detritus of ischaemic damage, and protect against the shock of re-oxygenation.

Other liposomes were tailored for other cell types: muscle fibers in the vocal fold, the jaw, the lips, the tongue; receptors in the inner ear. They all contained drugs and enzymes with similar effects: hijacking the dying cell and forcing it, briefly, to marshal its resources for one final—unsustainable—burst of activity.

Revival was not resuscitation pushed to heroic extremes. Revival was permitted only when the long-term survival of the patient was no longer a consideration, because every method which might have achieved that outcome had already failed.

The pathologist glanced at a display screen on the equipment trolley. I followed her gaze; there were wave traces showing erratic brain rhythms, and fluctuating bar graphs measuring toxins and breakdown products being flushed out of the body. Lukowski stepped forward expectantly. I followed him.

The assistant hit a button on a keypad. The victim twitched and coughed blood—some of it still his own, dark and clotted. The wave traces spiked, then became smoother, more periodic.

Lukowski took the victim’s hand and squeezed it—a gesture which struck me as cynical, although for all I knew it might have reflected a genuine compassionate impulse. I glanced at the bioethicist. His T-shirt now read CREDIBILITY IS A COMMODITY. I couldn’t decide if that was a sponsored message or a personal opinion.

Lukowski said, “Daniel? Danny? Can you hear me?” There was no obvious physical response, but the brain waves danced. Daniel Cavolini was a music student, nineteen years old. He’d been found around eleven, bleeding and unconscious, in a corner of the Town Hall railway station—with watch, notepad, and shoes still on him, unlikely in a random mugging gone wrong. I’d been hanging out with the homicide squad for a fortnight, waiting for something like this. Warrants for revival were issued only if the evidence favored the victim being able to name the assailant; there was little prospect of obtaining a usable verbal description of a stranger, let alone an identikit of the killer’s face. Lukowski had woken a magistrate just after midnight, the minute the prognosis was clear.

Cavolini’s skin was turning a strange shade of crimson, as more and more revived cells began taking up oxygen. The alien-hued transporter molecule in the ersatz blood was more efficient than hemoglobin—but like all the other revival drugs, it was ultimately toxic.

The pathologist’s assistant hit some more keys. Cavolini twitched and coughed again. It was a delicate balancing act; small shocks to the brain were necessary to restore the major coherent rhythms… but too much external interference could wipe out the remnants of short-term memory. Even after legal death, neurons could remain active deep in the brain, keeping the symbolic firing-pattern representations of recent memories circulating for several minutes. Revival could temporarily restore the neural infrastructure needed to extract those traces, but if they’d already died away completely—or been swamped by the efforts to recover them—interrogation was pointless.

Lukowski said soothingly, “You’re okay now, Danny. You’re in hospital. You’re safe. But you have to tell me who did this to you. Tell me who had the knife.”

A hoarse whisper emerged from Cavolini’s mouth: one faint, aspirated syllable, then silence. My skin crawled with predictable monkey’s paw horror—but I felt an idiotic surge of exultation, too, as if part of me simply refused to accept that this sign of life could not be a sign of hope.

Cavolini tried again, and the second attempt was more sustained. His artificial exhalation, detached from voluntary control, made it sound like he was gasping for breath; the effect was pitiful—but he wasn’t actually short of oxygen at all. His speech was so broken and tortuous that I couldn’t make out a single word, but an array of piezoelectric sensors was glued to his throat, and wired to a computer. I turned to the display panel.

Why can’t I see?

Lukowski said, “Your eyes are bandaged. There were a couple of broken blood vessels, but they’ve been repaired; there’ll be no permanent damage, I promise. So just… lie still, and relax. And tell me what happened.”

What time is it? Please. I better call home. I better tell them—

“We’ve spoken to your parents. They’re on their way, they’ll be here as soon as possible.”

That much was true—but even if they showed up in the next ninety seconds, they would not be allowed into the room.

“You were waiting for the train home, weren’t you? Platform four. Remember? Waiting for the ten-thirty to Strathfield. But you didn’t get on. What happened?” I saw Lukowski’s gaze shift to a graph below the transcript window, where half a dozen rising curves recording improved vital signs were extended by dashed computer projections. All of the projected curves hit their peaks a minute or so in the future, then swiftly declined.

He had a knife. Cavolini’s right arm began to twitch, and his slack facial muscles came to life for the first time, taking on a grimace of pain. It still hurts. Please help me. The bioethicist glanced calmly at some figures on the display screen, but declined to intervene. Any effective anesthetic would damp down neural activity too much to allow the interrogation to continue; it was all or nothing, abort or proceed.

Lukowski said gently, “The nurse is getting some painkillers. Hang in there, man, it won’t be long. But tell me: who had the knife?” The faces of both of them were glistening with sweat now; Lukowski’s arm was scarlet up to the elbow. I thought: If you found someone dying on the pavement in a pool of blood, you’d ask the same questions, wouldn’t you? And tell the same reassuring lies? “Who was it, Danny?”

My brother.

“Your brother had the knife?”

No he didn’t. I can’t remember what happened. Ask me later. My head’s too fuzzy now.

“Why did you say it was your brother? Was it him, or wasn’t it?”

Of course it wasn’t him. Don’t tell anyone I said that. I’ll be all right if you stop confusing me. Can I have the painkillers now? Please?

His face flowed and froze, flowed and froze, like a sequence of masks, making his suffering seem stylized, abstract. He began to move his head back and forth; weakly at first, then with manic speed and energy. I assumed he was having some kind of seizure: the revival drugs were over-stimulating some damaged neural pathway.

Then he reached up with his right hand and tore away the blindfold. His head stopped jerking immediately; maybe his skin had grown hypersensitive, and the blindfold had become an unbearable irritation. He blinked a few times, then squinted up at the room’s bright lights. I could see his pupils contract, his eyes moving purposefully. He raised his head slightly and examined Lukowski, then looked down at his own body and its strange adornments: the pacemaker’s brightly colored ribbon cable; the heavy plastic blood-supply tubes; the knife wounds full of glistening white maggots. Nobody moved, nobody spoke, while he inspected the needles and electrodes buried in his chest, the strange pink tide washing out of him, his ruined lungs, his artificial airway. The display screen was behind him, but everything else was there to be taken in at a glance. In a matter of seconds, he knew, I could see the weight of understanding descend on him.

He opened his mouth, then closed it again. His expression shifted rapidly; through the pain there was a sudden flash of pure astonishment, and then an almost amused comprehension of the full strangeness—and maybe even the perverse virtuosity—of the feat to which he’d been subjected. For an instant, he really did look like someone admiring a brilliant, vicious, bloody practical joke at his own expense.

Then he said clearly, between enforced robotic gasps: “I… don’t… think… this… is… a… good… id… dea. I… don’t… want… to… talk… any… more.”

He closed his eyes and sank back onto the table. His vital signs were descending rapidly.

Lukowski turned to the pathologist. He was ashen, but he still gripped the boy’s hand. “How could the retinas function? What did you do? You stupid—” He raised his free hand as if to strike her, but he didn’t follow through. The bioethicist’s T-shirt read: ETERNAL LOVE IS A LOVEPET, MADE FROM YOUR LOVED ONE'S OWN DNA. The pathologist, standing her ground, screamed back at Lukowski, “You had to push him, didn’t you? You had to keep on and on about the brother, while his stress hormone index climbed straight into the red!” I wondered who’d decided what a normal level of adrenaline was, for the state of being dead from knife wounds but otherwise relaxed. Someone behind me emitted a long string of incoherent obscenities. I turned to see the paramedic, who would have been with Cavolini since the ambulance; I hadn’t even realized that he was still in the room. He was staring at the floor, his fists clenched tight, shaking with anger.

Lukowski grabbed my elbow, staining me with synthetic blood. He spoke in a stage whisper, as if hoping to keep his words off the soundtrack. “You can film the next one. Okay? This has never happened before—never—and if you show people a one-in-a-million glitch as if it was—”

The bioethicist ventured mildly, “I think the guidelines from the Taylor committee on optional restraints make it clear—”

The pathologist’s assistant turned on her, outraged. “Who asked you for an opinion? Procedure is none of your business, you pathetic—”

An ear-splitting alarm went off, somewhere deep in the electronic guts of the revival apparatus. The pathologist’s assistant bent over the equipment, and bashed on the keypad like a frustrated child attacking a broken toy, until the noise went away.

In the silence that followed, I almost closed my eyes, invoked Witness, stopped recording. I’d seen enough.

Then Daniel Cavolini regained consciousness, and began to scream.

I watched as they pumped him full of morphine, and waited for the revival drugs to finish him off.

2

It was just after five as I walked down the hill from Eastwood railway station. The sky was pale and colorless, Venus was fading slowly in the east, but the street itself already looked exactly as it did by daylight. Just inexplicably deserted. My carriage on the train had been empty, too. Last-human-on-Earth time.

Birds were calling—loudly—in the lush bushland which lined the railway corridor, and in the labyrinth of wooded parks woven into the surrounding suburb. Many of the parks resembled pristine forest—but every tree, every shrub was engineered: at the very least drought and fire resistant, shedding no messy, flammable twigs, bark or leaves. Dead plant tissue was resorbed, cannibalized; I’d seen it portrayed in time-lapse (one kind of photography I never carried out myself): an entire brown and wilting branch shrinking back into the living trunk. Most of the trees generated a modest amount of electricity—ultimately from sunlight, although the chemistry was elaborate, and the release of stored energy continued twenty-four hours a day. Specialized roots sought out the underground superconductors snaking through the parks, and fed in their contributions. Two and a quarter volts was about as intrinsically safe as electric power could be—but it required zero resistance for efficient transmission.

Some of the fauna had been modified, too; the magpies were docile even in spring, the mosquitoes shunned mammalian blood, and the most venomous snakes were incapable of harming a human child. Small advantages over their wild cousins, tied to the biochemistry of the engineered vegetation, guaranteed the altered species dominance in this microecology—and small handicaps kept them from flourishing if they ever escaped to one of the truly wild reserves, distant from human habitation.

I was renting a small detached unit in a cluster of four, set in a zero-maintenance garden which merged seamlessly with the tendril of parkland at the end of a cul-de-sac. I’d been there for eight years, ever since my first commission from SeeNet, but I still felt like a trespasser. Eastwood was just eighteen kilometers from the center of Sydney, which—although ever fewer people had reason to travel there—still seemed to hold an inexplicable sway over real-estate prices; I couldn’t have bought the unit myself in a hundred years. The (barely) affordable rent was just a felicitous by-product of the owner’s elaborate tax evasion schemes—and it was probably only a matter of time before some quiver of butterfly wings in world financial markets rendered the networks slightly less generous, or my landowner slightly less in need of a write-off, and I’d be picked up and flung fifty kilometers west, back to the outer sprawl where I belonged.

I approached warily. Home should have felt like a sanctuary after the night’s events, but I hesitated outside the front door, key in hand, for something like a minute.

Gina was up, dressed, and in the middle of breakfast. I hadn’t seen her since the same time the day before; it was as if I’d never left.

She said, “How was filming?” I’d sent her a message from the hospital, explaining that we’d finally got lucky.

“I don’t want to talk about it.” I retreated into the living room and sank into a chair. The action of sitting seemed to replay itself in my inner ears; I kept descending, again and again. I fixed my gaze on the pattern in the carpet; the illusion slowly faded.

“Andrew? What happened?” She followed me into the room. “Did something go wrong? Will you have to reshoot?”

“I said I don’t want to—” I caught myself. I looked up at her, and forced myself to concentrate. She was puzzled, but not yet angry. Rule number three: Tell her everything, however unpleasant, at the first opportunity. Whether you feel like it or not. Anything less will be treated as deliberate exclusion and taken as a personal affront.

I said, “I won’t have to reshoot. It’s over.” I recounted what had happened.

Gina looked ill. “And was anything he said worth… extracting? Did mentioning his brother make the slightest sense or was he just braindamaged and ranting?”

“That’s still not clear. Evidently the brother does have a history of violence; he was on probation for assaulting his mother. They’ve taken him in for questioning… but it could all come to nothing. If the victim’s short-term memories were lost, he could have pieced together a false reconstruction of the stabbing, using the first person who came to mind as being capable of the act. And when he changed his story he might not have been covering up at all; he might simply have realized that he was amnesic.”

Gina said, “And even if the brother did kill him… no jury is going to accept a couple of words, instantly retracted, as any kind of proof. If there’s a conviction, it will have nothing to do with the revival.”

It was difficult to argue the point; I had to struggle to regain some perspective.

“Not in this case, no. But there have been times when it’s made all the difference. The victim’s word alone might never stand up in court— but there’ve been people tried for murder who would never have been suspected otherwise. Cases when the evidence which actually convicted them was only pieced together because the revival testimony put the investigation on the right track.”

Gina was dismissive. “That may have happened once or twice—but it’s still not worth it. They should ban the whole procedure, it’s obscene.” She hesitated. “But you’re not going to use that footage, are you?”

“Of course I'm going to use it.”

“You’re going to show a man dying in agony on an operating table—captured in the act of realizing that everything which brought him back to life is guaranteed to kill him?” She spoke calmly; she sounded more incredulous than outraged.

I said, “What do you want me to use instead? A dramatization, where everything goes according to plan?”

“No. But why not a dramatization where everything goes wrong, in exactly the way it did last night?”

"Why? It’s already happened, and I’ve already filmed it. Who benefits from a reconstruction?”

“The victim’s family. For a start.”

I thought: Possibly. But would a reconstruction really spare their feelings? And no one was going to force them to watch the documentary, in either case.

I said, “Be reasonable. This is powerful stuff; I can’t just throw it away. And I have every right to use it. I had permission to be there—from the cops, from the hospital. And I’ll get the family’s clearance—”

“You mean the network’s lawyers will browbeat them into signing some kind of waiver ‘in the public interest.'”

I had no answer to that; it was exactly what would happen. I said, “You’re the one who just declared that revival is obscene. You want to see it banned? This can only help your cause. It’s as good a dose of frankenscience as any dumb luddite could ask for.”

Gina looked stung; I couldn’t tell if she was faking. She said, “I have a doctorate in materials science, you peasant, so don’t call me—”

“I didn’t. You know what I meant,”

“If anyone’s a luddite, you are. This entire project is beginning to sound like Edenite propaganda, ‘Junk DNA!’ What’s the subtitle? ‘The biotechnology nightmare?'”

“Close.”

“What I don’t understand is why you couldn’t include a single positive story—”

I said wearily, “We’ve been over this before. It’s not up to me. The networks won’t buy anything unless there’s an angle. In this case, the downside of biotech. That’s the choice of subject, that’s what it’s about. It isn’t meant to be ‘balanced.’ Balance confuses the marketing people; you can’t hype something which contains two contradictory messages. But at least it might counteract all the hymns of praise to genetic engineering everyone’s been gagging on lately. And—taken along with everything else—it does show the whole picture. By adding what they’ve all left out.”

Gina was unmoved. “That’s disingenuous. ‘Our sensationalism balances their sensationalism.’ It doesn’t. It just polarizes opinion. What’s wrong with a calm, reasoned presentation of the facts—which might help to get revival and a few other blatant atrocities outlawed—without playing up all the old transgressions-against-nature bullshit? Showing the excesses, but putting them in context? You should be helping people make informed decisions about what they demand from the regulatory authorities. Junk DNA sounds more likely to inspire them to go out and bomb the nearest biotech lab.”

I curled into the armchair and rested my head on my knees. “All right, I give up. Everything you say is true. I'm a manipulative, rabble-rousing, anti-science hack.”

She frowned. “Anti-science? I wouldn’t go that far. You’re venal, lazy, and irresponsible—but you’re not quite Ignorance Cult material yet.”

“Your faith is touching.”

She prodded me with a cushion, affectionately I think, then went back to the kitchen. I covered my face with my hands, and the room started tipping.

I should have been jubilant. It was over. The revival was the very last piece of filming for Junk DNA. No more paranoid billionaires mutating into self-contained walking ecologies. No more insurance firms designing personal actuarial implants to monitor diet, exercise, and exposure to pollutants—for the sake of endlessly recomputing the wearer’s most probable date and cause of death. No more Voluntary Autists lobbying for the right to have their brains surgically mutilated so they could finally attain the condition nature hadn’t quite granted them…

I went into my workroom and unreeled the fiber-optic umbilical from the side of the editing console. I lifted my shirt and cleared some unnamable debris from my navel, then extracted the skin-colored plug with my fingernails, exposing a short stainless-steel tube ending in an opalescent laser port.

Gina called out from the kitchen, “Are you performing unnatural acts with that machine again?”

I was too tired to think of an intelligent retort. I snapped the connectors together, and the console lit up.

The screen showed everything as it came through. Eight hours’ worth in sixty seconds—most of it an incomprehensible blur, but I averted my gaze anyway. I didn’t much feel like reliving any of the night’s events, however briefly.

Gina wandered in with a plate of toast; I hit a button to conceal the image. She said, “I still want to know how you can have four thousand terabytes of RAM in your peritoneal cavity, and no visible scars.”

I glanced down at the connector socket. “What do you call that? Invisible?”

“Too small. Eight-hundred-terabyte chips are thirty millimeters wide. I looked up the manufacturer’s catalogue.”

“Sherlock strikes again. Or should I say Shylock? Scars can be erased, can’t they?”

“Yes. But… would you have obliterated the marks of your most important rite of passage?”

“Spare me the anthropological babble.”

“I do have an alternative theory.”

“I'm not confirming or denying anything.”

She let her gaze slide over the blank console screen, up to the Repo Man poster on the wall behind it: a motorcycle cop standing behind a dilapidated car. She caught my eye, then gestured at the caption: DON'T LOOK IN THE TRUNK!

“Why not? What’s in the trunk!”

I laughed. “You can’t bear it anymore, can you? You’re just going to have to watch the movie.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

The console beeped. I unhooked. Gina looked at me curiously; the expression on my face must have betrayed something. “So is it like sex, or more like defecation?”

“It’s more like Confession.”

“You’ve never been to Confession in your life.”

“No, but I’ve seen it in the movies. I was joking, though. It’s not like anything at all.”

She glanced at her watch, then kissed me on the cheek, leaving toast crumbs. “I have to run. Get some sleep, you idiot. You look terrible.”

I sat and listened to her bustling around. She had a ninety-minute train journey every morning to the CSIRO’s wind turbine research station, west of the Blue Mountains. I usually got up at the same time myself, though. It was better than waking alone.

I thought: I do love her. And if I concentrate, if I follow the rules, there’s no reason why it can’t last. My eighteen-month record was looming—but that was nothing to fear. We’d smash it, easily.

She reappeared in the doorway. “So, how long do you have to edit this one?”

“Ah. Three weeks exactly. Counting today.” I hadn’t really wanted to be reminded.

“Today doesn’t count. Get some sleep.”

We kissed. She left. I swung my chair around to face the blank console.

Nothing was over. I was going to have to watch Daniel Cavolini die a hundred more times, before I could finally disown him.

I limped into the bedroom and undressed. I hung my clothes on the cleaning rack, and switched on the power. The polymers in the various fabrics expelled all their moisture in a faint humid exhalation, then packed the remaining dirt and dried sweat into a fine, loose dust, and discarded it electrostatically. I watched it drift down into the receptacle; it was always the same disconcerting blue—something to do with the particle size. I had a quick shower, then climbed into bed.

I set the alarm clock for two in the afternoon. The pharm unit beside the clock said, “Shall I prepare a melatonin course to get you back in synch by tomorrow evening?”

“Yeah, okay.” I stuck my thumb in the sampling tube; there was a barely perceptible sting as blood was taken. Non-invasive NMR models had been in the shops for a couple of years, but they were still too expensive.

“Do you want something to help you sleep now?”

“Yes.”

The pharm began to hum softly, creating a sedative tailored to my current biochemical state, in a dose in accordance with my intended sleeping time. The synthesizer inside used an array of programmable catalysts, ten billion electronically reconfigurable enzymes bound to a semiconductor chip. Immersed in a small tank of precursor molecules, the chip could assemble a few milligrams of any one of ten thousand drugs. Or at least, any of the ones for which I had software, for as long as I kept paying the license fees.

The machine disgorged a small tablet, still slightly warm. I bit into it. “Orange-flavored after a hard night! You remembered!”

I lay back and waited for the drug to take effect.

I’d watched the expression on his face—but those muscles were palsied, uncontrollable. I’d heard his voice—but the breath he spoke with was not his own. I had no real way of knowing what he’d experienced.

Not “The Monkey’s Paw” or “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

More like “The Premature Burial.”

But I had no right to mourn Daniel Cavolini. I was going to sell his death to the world.

And I had no right even to empathize, to imagine myself in his place.

As Lukowski had pointed out, it could never have happened to me.

3

I’d seen a nineteen-fifties Moviola once, in a glass case in a museum. Thirty-five-millimeter celluloid traveled a tortuous path through the guts of the machine, moving back and forth between two belt-driven spools held up on vertical arms behind the tiny viewing screen. The whine of the motor, the grinding of the gears, the helicopter whir of the shutter blades—sounds coming from an AV of the machine in action, showing on a panel below the display case—had made it seem more like a shredding device than any kind of editing tool. An appealing notion. I'm very sorry… but that scene has been lost forever. The Moviola ate it. Standard practice, of course, had been to work only with a copy of the camera original (usually an unviewable negative, anyway)—but the idea of one slip of a cog transforming meters of precious celluloid into confetti had stuck in my head ever since, a glorious, illicit fantasy.

My three-year-old 2052 Affine Graphics editing console was incapable of destroying anything. Every shot I downloaded was burnt into two independent write-once memory chips—and also encrypted and sent automatically to archives in Mandela, Stockholm, and Toronto. Every editing decision that followed was just a rearrangement of references to the untouchable original. I could quote from the raw footage (and footage it was—only dilettantes used pretentious neologisms like ‘byteage') as selectively as I wished. I could paraphrase, substitute, and improvise. But not one frame of the original could ever be damaged or misplaced, beyond repair, beyond recovery.

I didn’t really envy my analog-era counterparts, though; the painstaking mechanics of their craft would have driven me mad. The slowest step in digital editing was human decision-making, and I’d learned to get most judgments right by the tenth or twelfth attempt. Software could tweak the rhythms of a scene, fine-tune every cut, finesse the sound, remove unwanted passersby; even shift whole buildings, if necessary. The mechanics was all taken care of; there was nothing to distract from the content.

So all I had to do with Junk DNA was transform one hundred and eighty hours of real-time into fifty minutes of sense.

I’d filmed four stories, and I already knew how I’d order them: a gradual progression from gray to black. Ned Landers the walking biosphere. The HealthGuard actuarial implant. The Voluntary Autists lobby group. And Daniel Cavolini’s revival. SeeNet had asked for excess, for transgressions, for frankenscience. I’d have no trouble giving them exactly what they wanted.

Landers had made his money in dry computers, not biotech, but he’d gone on to buy several R&D-intensive molecular genetics corporations to help him achieve his personal transformation. He’d begged me to film him in a sealed geodesic dome full of sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and benzyl compounds—me in a pressure suit, himself in swimming trunks. We’d tried it, but my face plate kept fogging up on the outside with oily carcinogenic residues, so we’d had to meet again in downtown Portland. Promising as the noxious dome had seemed, the immaculate blue skies of the state which was racing California to zero-emission laws for every known pollutant had turned out to be a more surreal backdrop by far.

“I don’t need to breathe at all if I don’t want to,” Landers had confided, surrounded by a visible abundance of clean, fresh air. This time, I’d persuaded him to do the interview in a small, grassy park opposite the NL Group’s modest headquarters. (There were children playing soccer in the background—but the console would keep track of any continuity problems, and offer solutions to most of them with a single keystroke.) Landers was in his late forties, but he could have passed for twenty-five. With a robust build, golden hair, blue eyes, and glowing pink skin, he looked more like a Hollywood version of a Kansas farm worker (in good times) than a rich eccentric whose body was swarming with engineered algae and alien genes. I watched him on the console’s flatscreen, and listened through simple stereo speakers. I could have fed the playback straight into my optic and auditory nerves, but most viewers would be using a screen or a headset—and I needed to be sure that the software really had constructed a steady, plausible, rectilinear grid of pixels out of my own retinas’ highly compressed visual shorthand.

“The symbionts living in my bloodstream can turn carbon dioxide back into oxygen, indefinitely. They get some energy through my skin, from sunlight, and they release any glucose they can spare—but that’s not nearly enough for me to live on, and they need an alternative energy source when they’re in darkness. That’s where the symbionts in my stomach and intestines come in; I have thirty-seven different types, and between them, they can handle anything. I can eat grass. I can eat paper. I could live off old tires, if I had a way of cutting them into pieces small enough to swallow. If all plant and animal life vanished from the face of the Earth tomorrow, I could survive off tires for a thousand years. I have a map showing all the tire dumps in the continental USA. The majority are scheduled for biological remediation, but I have court actions in progress to see that a number of them survive. Apart from my own personal reasons, I think they’re a part of our heritage which we owe to future generations to leave untouched.”

I went back and intercut some microscope footage of the tailored algae and bacteria inhabiting his blood and digestive tract, then a shot of the tire dump map, which he’d displayed for me on his notepad. I played with an animation I’d been preparing, a schematic of his personal carbon, oxygen, and energy cycles, but I wasn’t yet sure where it belonged.

I’d prompted him: “So you’re immune to famine and mass extinctions—but what about viruses? What about biological warfare or some accidental plague?” I cut my words out; they were redundant, and I preferred to intrude as little as possible. The change of topic was a bit of a non sequitur as things stood, though, so I synthesized a shot of Landers saying, “As well as using symbionts,” computed to merge seamlessly with his actual words, “I'm gradually replacing those cell lines in my body which have the greatest potential for viral infection. Viruses are made of DNA or RNA; they share the same basic chemistry as every other organism on the planet. That’s why they can hijack human cells in order to reproduce. But DNA and RNA can be manufactured with totally novel chemistry—with non-standard base pairs to take the place of the normal ones. A new alphabet for the genetic code: instead of guanine with cytosine, adenine with thymine—instead of G with C, A with Т—you can have X with Y,W with Z.”

I changed his words after “thymine” to: “—you can use four alternative molecules which don’t occur in nature at all.” The sense was the same, and it made the point more clearly. But when I replayed the scene, it didn’t ring true, so I reverted to the original.

Every journalist paraphrased his subjects; if I’d flatly refused to employ the technique, I wouldn’t be working. The trick was to do it honestly—which was about as difficult as imposing the same criterion on the editing process as a whole.

I cut in some stock molecular graphics of ordinary DNA, showing every atom in the paired bases which bridged the strands of the helix, and I color-coded and labeled one example of each base. Landers had refused to specify exactly which non-standard bases he was using, but I’d found plenty of possibilities in the literature. I had the graphics software substitute four plausible new bases for the old ones in the helix, and repeated the slow zoom-in and rotation of the first shot with this hypothetical stretch of Landers-DNA. Then I cut back to his talking head.

“A simple base-for-base substitution in the DNA isn’t enough, of course. Cells need some brand new enzymes to synthesize the new bases—and most of the proteins which interact with DNA and RNA need to be adapted to the change, so the genes for those proteins need to be translated, not just rewritten in the new alphabet.” I improvised some graphics illustrating the point, stealing an example of a certain nuclear binding protein from one of the journal articles I’d read—but redrawing the molecules in a different style, to avoid copyright violation. “We haven’t yet been able to deal with every single human gene which needs translation, but we’ve made some specific cell lines which work fine with mini-chromosomes containing only the genes they need.

“Sixty percent of the stem cells in my bone marrow and thymus have been replaced with versions using neo-DNA. Stem cells give rise to blood cells, including the cells of the immune system. I had to switch my immune system back into an immature state, temporarily, to make the transition work smoothly—I had to go through some of the childhood clonal deletion phases all over again, to weed out anything which might have caused an autoimmune response—but basically, I'm now able to shoot up pure HIV, and laugh about it.”

“But there’s a perfectly good vaccine—”

“Of course.” I cut my own words out, and made Landers say: “Of course, there’s a vaccine for that.” Then: “And I have symbionts providing a second, independent immune system, anyway. But who knows what’s coming along next? I’ll be prepared, whatever it is. Not by anticipating the specifics—which no one could ever do—but by making sure that no vulnerable cell in my body still speaks the same biochemical language as any virus on Earth.”

“And in the long term? It’s taken a lot of expensive infrastructure to provide you with all of these safeguards. What if that technology doesn’t survive long enough for your children and grandchildren?” This was all redundant, so I ditched it.

“In the long term, of course, I'm aiming to modify the stem cells which produce my sperm. My wife Carol has already begun a program of ova collection. And once we’ve translated the entire human genome, and replaced all twenty-three chromosomes in sperm and ova… everything we’ve done will be heritable. Any child of ours will use pure neo-DNA—and all the symbionts will pass from mother to child in the womb.

“We’ll translate the genomes of the symbionts as well—into a third genetic alphabet—to protect them from viruses, and to eliminate any risk of accidental gene exchange. They’ll be our crops and our herds, our birthright, our inalienable dominion, living in our blood forever.

“And our children will be a new species of life. More than a new species—a whole new kingdom.”

The soccer players in the park cheered; someone had scored a goal. I left it in.

Landers beamed suddenly, radiantly, as if he was contemplating this strange arcadia for the very first time.

“That’s what I'm creating. A new kingdom."

I sat at the console eighteen hours a day, and forced myself to live as if the world had shrunk, not to the workroom itself, but to the times and places captured in the footage. Gina left me to it; she’d survived the editing of Gender Scrutiny Overload, so she already knew exactly what to expect.

She said blithely, “I’ll just pretend that you’re out of town. And that the lump in the bed is a large hot water bottle.”

My pharm programmed a small skin patch on my shoulder to release carefully timed and calibrated doses of melatonin, or a melatonin blocker—adding to, or subtracting from, the usual biochemical signal produced by my pineal gland, reshaping the normal sine wave of alertness into a plateau followed by a deep, deep trough. I woke every morning from five hours of enriched REM sleep, as wide-eyed and energetic as a hyperactive child, my head spinning with a thousand disintegrating dreams (most of them elaborate remixes of the previous day’s editing). I wouldn’t so much as yawn until eleven forty-five—but fifteen minutes later, I’d go out like a light. Melatonin was a natural circadian hormone, far safer and more precise in its effects than crude stimulants like caffeine or amphetamines. (I’d tried caffeine a few times; it made me believe I was focused and energetic, but it turned my judgment to shit. Widespread use of caffeine explained a lot about the twentieth century.) I knew that when I went off the melatonin, I’d suffer a short period of insomnia and daytime drowsiness—an overshoot of the brain’s attempts to counteract the imposed rhythm. But the side-effects of the alternatives were worse.

Carol Landers had declined to be interviewed, which was a shame—it would have been quite a coup to have chatted with the next Mitochondrial Eve. Landers had refused to comment on whether or not she was currently using the symbionts; perhaps she was waiting to see if he’d continue to flourish, or whether he’d suffer a population explosion of some mutant bacterial strain, and go into toxic shock.

I’d been permitted to speak to a few of Landers’ senior employees— including the two geneticists who were doing most of the R&D. They were coy when it came to discussing anything beyond the technicalities, but their general attitude seemed to be that any freely chosen treatment which helped safeguard an individual’s health—and which posed no threat to the public at large—was ethically unimpeachable. They had a point, at least from the biohazard angle; working with neo-DNA meant there was no risk of accidental recombination. Even if they’d flushed all their failed experiments straight into the nearest river, no natural bacterium could have taken up the genes and made use of them.

Implementing Landers’ vision of the perfect survivalist family was going to take more than R&D, though. Making heritable changes in any human gene was currently illegal in the US (and most other places)—apart from a list of a few dozen ‘authorized repairs’ for eliminating diseases like muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis. Legislation could always be revoked, of course—although Landers’ own top biotech attorney insisted that changing the base pairs—and even translating a few genes to accommodate that change—wouldn’t actually violate the anti-eugenics spirit of the existing law. It wouldn’t alter the external characteristics of the children (height, build, pigmentation). It wouldn’t influence their IQ, or personality. When I’d raised the question of their presumed sterility (barring incest), he’d taken the interesting position that it would hardly be Ned Landers’ fault if other people’s children were sterile with respect to his own. There were no infertile people, after all—only infertile couples.

An expert in the field at Columbia University said all of this was bullshit: substituting whole chromosomes, whatever the phenotypic effects, would simply be illegal. Another expert, at the University of Washington, was less certain. If I’d had the time, I could probably have collected a hundred sound-bites of eminent jurists expressing every conceivable shade of opinion on the subject.

I’d spoken to a number of Landers’ critics, including Jane Summers, a freelance biotech consultant based in San Francisco, and a prominent member of Molecular Biologists for Social Responsibility. Six months earlier (writing in the semi-public MBSR netzine, which my knowledge miner always scrutinized diligently), she’d claimed to have evidence that several thousand wealthy people, in the US and elsewhere, were having their DNA translated, cell type by cell type. Landers, she’d said, was merely the only one to have gone public—to act as a kind of decoy: a lone eccentric, defusing the issue, making it seem like one man’s ridiculous (yet almost Quixotic) fantasy. If the research had been exposed in the media with no specific person associated with it, paranoia would have reigned: there would have been no limit to the possible membership of the nameless elite who planned to divorce themselves from the biosphere. But since it was all out in the open, and all down to harmless Ned Landers, there was really nothing to fear.

The theory made a certain amount of sense—but Summers’ evidence hadn’t been forthcoming. She’d reluctantly put me in touch with an ‘industry source’ who’d supposedly been involved in gene translation work for an entirely different employer—but the ’source’ had denied everything. Pressed for other leads, Summers had become evasive. Either she’d never had anything substantial or she’d made a deal with another journalist to keep the competition away. It was frustrating, but in the end I hadn’t had the time or resources to pursue the story independently. If there really was a cabal of genetic separatists, I’d just have to read the exclusive in the Washington Post like everyone else.

I closed with a medley of other commentators—bioethicists, geneticists, sociologists—mostly dismissing the whole affair. “Mr. Landers has the right to live his own life, and raise his own children, any way he sees fit. We don’t persecute the Amish for their inbreeding, their strange technology, their desire for independence. Why persecute him, for essentially the same ‘crimes’?”

The final cut of the story was eighteen minutes long. In the broadcast version, there’d only be room for twelve. I pared away mercilessly, summarizing and simplifying—taking care to do a professional job, but not too worried by the loss of detail. Most real-time broadcasts on SeeNet served no purpose but to focus publicity, and to guarantee reviews in some of the more conservative media, Junk DNA was scheduled for eleven P.M. on a Wednesday; the vast majority of the audience would log on to the full, interactive version at their convenience. As well as a slightly longer linear backbone, the interactive would be peppered with optional detours to other sources: all the technical journal articles I’d read for my own research (and all the articles they in turn cited); other media coverage of Landers (and of Jane Summers’ conspiracy theory); the relevant US and international statutes—and even trails leading into the quagmire of potentially relevant case law.

On the evening of the fifth day of editing—right on schedule, reason enough for minor jubilation—I tidied up all the loose ends, and ran through the segment one last time. I tried to clear away all my memories of filming, and all my preconceptions, and watch the story like a SeeNet viewer who’d seen nothing at all on the subject before (save a few misleading promotions for the documentary itself).

Landers came across surprisingly sympathetically. I’d thought I’d been harsher. I’d thought I’d at least given him every opportunity to damn himself with his earnest account of his surreal ambitions. Instead, he seemed far more good-humored than po-faced; he almost appeared to be sharing all the jokes. Living off tire dumps? Shooting up HIV? I watched, amazed. I couldn’t decide if there really was a faint undercurrent of deliberate irony, a hint of self-deprecation in his manner which I’d somehow missed before—or whether the subject matter simply made it impossible for a sane viewer to interpret his words any other way.

What if Summers was right? What if Landers was a decoy, a distraction, a consummate performing clown? What if thousands of the planet’s wealthiest people really were planning to grant themselves, and their offspring, perfect genetic isolation, and absolute viral immunity?

Would it matter? The rich had always cut themselves off from the rabble, one way or another. Pollution levels would continue to decline, whether or not algal symbionts rendered fresh air obsolete. And anyone who chose to follow in Landers’ footsteps was no great loss to the human gene pool.

There was only one small question which remained unanswered, and I tried not to give it too much thought.

Absolute viral immunity… against what?

4

Delphic Biosystems had been too generous by far. Not only had they arranged for me to interview ten times as many of their Public Relations staff as I could ever have made time for, they’d showered me with ROMs packed with seductive micrographs and dazzling animation. Software flow-charts for the HealthGuard implant were rendered as air-brushed fantasies of impossible chromed machines, jet-black conveyor belts moving incandescent silver nuggets of “data” from subprocess to subprocess. Molecular schematics of interacting proteins were shrouded with delicately beautiful—and utterly gratuitous—electron-density maps, veils of pink and blue aurorae melting and merging, transforming the humblest chemical wedding into a microcosmic fantasia. I could have set it all to Wagner—or Blake—and flogged it to members of Mystical Renaissance, to play on a loop whenever they wanted to go slack-jawed with numinous incomprehension.

I slogged my way through the whole morass, though—and it finally paid off. Buried amongst all the technoporn and science-as-psychedelia were a few shots worth salvaging.

The HealthGuard implant employed the latest programmable assay chip: an array of elaborate proteins bound to silicon, in many respects like a pharm’s synthesizer, but designed to count molecules, not make them. The previous generation of chips had used a multitude of highly specific antibodies, Y-shaped proteins planted in the semiconductor in a checkerboard pattern, like adjoining fields of a hundred different crops. When a molecule of cholesterol, or insulin, or whatever, happened to strike exactly the right field and collide with a matching antibody, it bound to it long enough for the tiny change in capacitance to be detected, and logged in a microprocessor. Over time, this record of serendipitous collisions yielded the amount of each substance in the blood.

The new sensors used a protein which was more like a Venus flytrap with brains than an antibody’s passive, single-purpose template. “Assayin” in its receptive state was a long, bell-shaped molecule, a tube opening out into a broad funnel. This conformation was metastable; the charge distribution on the molecule rendered it exquisitely sensitive, spring-loaded. Anything large enough colliding with the inner surface of the funnel caused a lightning-fast wave of deformation, engulfing and shrink-wrapping the intruder. The microprocessor, noting the sprung trap, could then probe the captive molecule by searching for a shape of the assayin which imprisoned it even more snugly. There were no more wasted, mismatched collisions—no more insulin molecules striking cholesterol antibodies, yielding no information at all. Assayin always knew what had hit it.

It was a technical advance worth communicating, worth explaining, worth demystifying. Whatever the social implications of the HealthGuard implant, they could no more be presented in a vacuum, divorced from the technology which made the device possible, than vice versa. Once people ceased to understand how the machines around them actually functioned, the world they inhabited began to dissolve into an incomprehensible dreamscape. Technology moved beyond control, beyond discussion, evoking only worship or loathing, dependence or alienation. Arthur C. Clarke had suggested that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic—referring to a possible encounter with an alien civilization—but if a science journalist had one responsibility above all else, it was to keep Clarke’s Law from applying to human technology in human eyes.

(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 miners 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 percent 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? Prime-time world broadcast! You’ll make five rimes 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-some thing?” 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 was 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—that 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?”

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-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 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?”

“When people like you give it to them.”

“You know it’s not that simple. And… imagine what would have happened with feminism—or the civil rights movements, for that matter—if no one could ever be permitted to speak ‘on behalf of any group, without their certified, unanimous consent? Just because some of the current lunatics are like parodies of the old leaders, it doesn’t mean we’d be better off now if TV producers had said: ‘Sorry Dr. King, sorry Ms. Greer, sorry Mr. Perkins, but if you can’t avoid these sweeping generalizations and confine your statements to your own personal circumstances, we’ll have to take you off the air.'”

Gina eyed me skeptically. “That’s ancient history. And you’re only arguing that position to try to squirm out of your own responsibilities.”

“Of course. But the point is… gender migration is ninety percent politics. Some coverage still treats it as a kind of decadent, gratuitous, fashionable mimicry of gender reassignment for transsexuals—but most gender migrants go no further than superficial asex. They don’t cross right over; they have no reason to. It’s a protest action, like resigning from a political party, or renouncing your citizenship… or deserting a battlefield… but whether it will stabilize at some low level, and shake up attitudes enough to remove the whole reason for migration, or whether the population will end up evenly divided between all seven genders in a couple of generations, I have no idea.”

Gina grimaced. “Seven genders—and all of them perceived as monolithic. Everyone stereotyped at a glance. Seven pigeon-holes instead of two isn’t progress.”

“No. But maybe in the long run there’ll only be asex, umale and ufem. Those who want to be pigeon-holed will be—and those who don’t will remain mysterious.”

“No, no—in the long run we’ll have nothing but VR bodies, and we’ll all be mysterious or revelatory in turns, as the mood takes us.”

“I can’t wait.”

We went inside. Unnatural Tastes was a converted department store, cavernous but brightly lit, opened up by the simple expedient of cutting a large elliptical hole in the middle of every floor. I waved my notepad at the entry turnstyle; a voice confirmed our reservation, adding, “Table 519. Fifth floor.”

Gina smiled wickedly. “Fifth floor: stuffed toys and lingerie.”

I glanced up at our fellow diners—mostly umale and ufem couples. I said, “You behave yourself, redneck, or next time we’re eating in Epping.”

The place was three-quarters full, at least, but the seating capacity was less than it seemed; most of the volume of the building was taken up by the central well. In what was left of each floor, human waiters in tuxedos weaved their way between the chromed tables; it all looked archaic and stylized, almost Marx Brothers, to me. I wasn’t a big fan of Experimental Cuisine; essentially, we’d be guinea pigs, trying out medically safe but otherwise untested bioengineered produce. Gina had pointed out that at least the meal would be subsidized by the manufacturers. I wasn’t so sure; Experimental Cuisine had become so fashionable lately that it could probably attract a statistically significant sample of diners for each novelty, even at full price.

The tabletop flashed up menus as we took our seats—and the figures seemed to confirm my doubts about a subsidy. I groaned. ‘"Crimson bean salad'? I don’t care what color they are, I want to know what they taste like. The last thing I ate here that looked like a kidney bean tasted exactly like boiled cabbage.”

Gina took her time, prodding the names of half a dozen dishes to view the finished products, and screens of data on the design of the ingredients. She said, “You can work it all out, if you pay attention. If you know what genes they moved from where, and why, you can make a fair stab at predicting the taste and texture.”

“Go ahead, dazzle me with science.”

She hit the CONFIRM ORDER button. “The green leafy stuff will taste like spinach-flavored pasta—but the iron in it will be absorbed by your body as easily as the haem iron in animal flesh, leaving spinach for dead. The yellow things which look like corn will taste like a cross between tomato and green capsicum spiced with oregano—but nutrients and flavor will be less sensitive to poor storage conditions and overcooking. And the blue puree will taste almost like parmesan cheese.”

“Why blue?”

“There’s a blue pigment, a photoactivated enzyme, in the new self-fermenting lactoberries. They could remove it during processing, but it turns out we metabolize it directly into vitamin D—which is safer than making it the usual way, with UV on the skin.”

“Food for people who never see the sun. How can I resist?” I ordered the same.

The service was swift—and Gina’s predictions were more or less correct. The whole combination was actually quite pleasant.

I said, “You’re wasted on wind turbines. You could be designing the spring collection for United Agronomics.”

“Gee, thanks. But I already get all the intellectual stimulation I can handle.”

“How is Big Harold coming along, anyway?”

“Still very much Little Harold, and likely to stay that way for a while.” Little Harold was the one-thousandth-scale prototype of a projected two-hundred-megawatt turbine. “There are chaotic resonance modes turning up which we missed in the simulations. It’s starting to look like we’re going to have to re-evaluate half the assumptions of the software model.”

“I can never quite understand that. You know all the basic physics, the basic equations of air-flow dynamics, you have access to endless supercomputer time…”

“So how can we possibly screw up? Because we can’t compute the behavior of thousands of tons of air moving through a complex structure on a molecule-by-molecule basis. All the bulk flow equations are approximations, and we’re deliberately operating in a region where the best-understood approximations break down. There’s no magical new physics coming into play—but we’re in a gray zone between one set of convenient simplifying assumptions and another. And so far, the best new set of compromise assumptions are neither convenient nor simple. And they’re not even correct, as it turns out.”

“I'm sorry.”

She shrugged. “It’s frustrating—but enough of it’s frustrating in an interesting way to keep me from going insane.”

I felt a stab of longing; I understood so little about this part of her life. She’d explained as much as I could follow, but I still had no real idea of what spun through her head when she was sitting at her work station juggling airflow simulations, or clambering around the wind tunnel making adjustments to Little Harold.

I said, “I wish you’d let me film some of this.”

Gina regarded me balefully. “Not a chance, Mister Frankenscience. Not until you can tell me categorically whether wind turbines are Good or Evil.”

I cringed. “You know that’s not up to me. And it changes every year. New studies are published, the alternatives come in and out of favor—”

She cut me off bitterly. “Alternatives? Planting photovoltaic engineered forests on ten thousand times as much land per megawatt sounds like environmental vandalism to me.”

“I'm not arguing. I could always make a Good Turbine documentary… and if I can’t sell it straight away, just wait for the tide to turn again.”

“You can’t afford to make anything on spec.”

“True. I’d have to fit it in between other shooting.”

Gina laughed. “I wouldn’t try it. You can’t even manage—”

“What?”

“Nothing. Forget it.” She waved a hand, retracting the comment. I could have pressed her, but I would have been wasting my time.

I said, “Speaking of filming…” I described the two projects Lydia had offered me. Gina listened patiently, but when I asked for her opinion, she seemed baffled.

“If you don’t want to make Distress… then don’t. It’s really none of my business.”

That stung. I said, “It affects you, too. It would be a lot more money.” Gina was affronted. “All I mean is, we could afford to take a holiday, or something. We could go overseas next time you have leave. If that’s what you wanted.”

She said stiffly, “I'm not taking leave for another eighteen months. And I can pay for my own holidays.”

“All right. Forget it.” I reached over to take her hand; she pulled away, irritated.

We ate in silence. I stared down at my plate, running through the rules, trying to decide where I’d gone wrong. Had I broken some taboo about money? We kept separate accounts, sharing the rent fifty-fifty— but we’d both helped each other out, many times, and given each other small luxuries. What should I have done? Gone ahead and made Distress—purely for the money—and only then asked if there was anything we could spend it on together that would make it worthwhile?

Maybe I’d made it sound as if I thought she expected to dictate the projects I chose—offending her by seeming to have failed to appreciate the independence she allowed me. My head spun. The truth was, I had no idea what she was thinking. It was all too hard, too slippery. And I couldn’t imagine what I could say that might begin to put it right, without the risk of making everything far worse.

After a while, Gina said, “So where’s the big conference being held?”

I opened my mouth, then realized I didn’t have a clue. I picked up my notepad and quickly checked the briefing Sisyphus had prepared.

“Ah. On Stateless.”

“Stateless?” She laughed. “You’re a burnt-out case on biotech… so they’re sending you to the world’s largest engineered-coral island?”

“I'm only fleeing Evil biotech. Stateless is Good.”

“Oh, really? Tell that to the governments who keep it embargoed. Are you sure you won’t get thrown in prison when you come home?”

“I'm not going to trade with the wicked anarchists. I'm not even going to film them.”

“Anarcho-syndicalists, get it right. Though they don’t even call themselves that, do they?”

I said, “Who’s ’they'? It depends who you ask.”

“You should have had a segment on Stateless in Junk DNA. Embargoed or not, they’re prospering—and all thanks to biotechnology. That would have balanced the talking corpse.”

“But then I couldn’t have called it Junk DNA, could I?”

“Exactly.” She smiled. Whatever I’d done, I’d been forgiven. I felt my heart pounding, as if I’d been dragged back at the last moment from the edge of an abyss.

The dessert we chose tasted like cardboard and snow, but we obligingly filled out the tabletop questionnaires before leaving.

We headed north up George Street to Martin Place. There was a nightclub called the Sorting Room in the old Post Office building. They played Zimbabwean njari music, multi-layered, hypnotic, pounding but never metronomic, leaving splinters of rhythm in the brain like the marks of fingernails raked over flesh. Gina danced ecstatically, and the music was so loud that speech was, mercifully, almost impossible. In this wordless place I could do no wrong.

We left just after one. On the train back to Eastwood, we sat in a corner of the carriage, kissing like teenagers. I wondered how my parents’ generation had ever driven their precious cars in such a state. (Badly, no doubt.) The trip home was ten minutes—almost too short. I wanted everything to unfold as slowly as possible. I wanted it to last for hours.

We stopped a dozen times, walking down from the station. We stood outside the front door for so long that the security system asked us if we’d lost our keys.

When we undressed and fell onto the bed together, and my vision lurched, I thought it was just a side-effect of passion. When my arms went numb, though, I realized what was happening.

I’d pushed myself too far with the melatonin blockers, depleting neurotransmitter reserves in the region of the hypothalamus where alertness was controlled. I’d borrowed too much time, and the plateau was crumbling.

Stricken, “I said, I don’t believe this. I'm sorry.”

“About what?” I still had an erection.

I forced myself to concentrate; I reached over and hit a button on the pharm. “Give me half an hour.”

“No. Safety limits—”

“Fifteen minutes,” I pleaded. “This is an emergency.”

The pharm hesitated, consulting the security system. “There is no emergency. You’re safe in bed, and the house is under no threat.”

“You’re gone. You’re recycled.”

Gina seemed more amused than disappointed. “See what happens when you transgress natural limits? I hope you’re recording this for Junk DNA.” Mockery only made her a thousand times more desirable—but I was already lapsing into microsleeps. I said dolefully, “Forgive me? Maybe… tomorrow, we could—”

“I don’t think so. Tomorrow you’ll be working till one a.m. And I'm not waiting up.” She took me by the shoulders and rolled me onto my back, then knelt astride my stomach.

I made sounds of protest. She bent over and kissed me on the mouth, tenderly. “Come on. You don’t really want to waste this rare opportunity, do you?” She reached down and stroked my cock; I could feel it respond to her touch, but it barely seemed to be a part of me anymore.

I murmured, “Ravisher. Necrophiliac.” I wanted to make a long earnest speech about sex and communication, but Gina seemed intent on disproving my whole thesis before I could even begin. “Talk about Bad Timing.”

She said, “Is that a yes or a no?”

I gave up trying to open my eyes. “Go ahead.”

Something vaguely pleasant began to happen, but my senses were retreating, my body was spinning off into the void.

I heard a voice, light-years away, whisper something about “sweet dreams.”

But I plunged into blackness, feeling nothing. And I dreamed of silent oceanic depths.

Of falling through dark water. Alone.

6

I’d heard that London had suffered badly from the coming of the networks, but was less of a ghost town than Sydney. The Ruins were more extensive, but they were being exploited far more diligently; even the last glass-and-aluminium towers built for bankers and stockbrokers at the turn of the millennium, and the last of the “high tech” printing presses which had “revolutionized” newspaper publishing (before becoming completely obsolete), had been labeled “historic” and taken under the wing of the tourism industry.

I hadn’t had time, though, to visit the hushed tombs of Bishopsgate or Wapping. I’d flown straight to Manchester—which appeared to be thriving. According to Sisyphus’s potted history, the balance between real-estate prices and infrastructure costs had favored the city in the twenties, and thousands of information-based companies—with a largely telecommuting workforce, but the need for a small central office as well—had moved there from the south. This industrial revival had also shored up the academic sector, and Manchester University was widely acknowledged to be leading the world in at least a dozen fields, including neurolinguistics, neo-protein chemistry, and advanced medical imaging.

I replayed the footage I’d taken of the city center—swarming with pedestrians, bicycles and quadcycles—and picked out a few brief establishing shots. I’d hired a bicycle, myself, from one of the automated depots outside Victoria Station; ten euros and it was mine for the day. It was a recent model Whirlwind, a beautiful machine: light, elegant, and nearly indestructible—made in nearby Sheffield. It could simulate a pushbike if required (a trivial option to include, and it kept the masochistic purists happy), but there was no mechanical connection between pedals and wheels; essentially, it was a human-powered electric motorbike. Superconducting current loops buried in the chassis acted as a short-term energy store, smoothing out demands on the rider, and taking full advantage of the energy-reclaiming brakes. Forty k.p.h. took no more effort than a brisk walk, and hills were almost irrelevant, ascent and descent nearly canceling each other out in energy lost and gained. It must have been worth about two thousand euros—but the navigation system, the beacons and locks, were so close to tamper-proof that I would have needed a small factory, and a PhD in cryptology, to steal it.

The city’s trams went almost everywhere, but so did the covered cycleways, so I’d ridden the Whirlwind to my afternoon appointment.

James Rourke was Media Liaison Officer for the Voluntary Autists Association. A thin, angular man in his early thirties, in the flesh he’d struck me as painfully awkward, with poor eye contact and muted body language. Verbally articulate, but far from telegenic.

Watching him on the console screen, though, I realized how wrong I’d been. Ned Landers had put on a dazzling performance, so slick and seamless that it left no room for any question of what was going on beneath. Rourke put on no performance at all—and the effect was both riveting and deeply unsettling. Coming straight after Delphic Biosystems’ elegant, assured spokespeople (teeth and skin by Masarini of Florence, sincerity by Operant Conditioning pie), it would be like being jolted out of a daydream by a kick in the head.

I’d have to tone him down, somehow.

I had a fully autistic cousin myself—Nathan. I’d met him only once, when we were both children. He was one of the lucky few who’d suffered no other congenital brain damage, and at the time he was still living with his parents in Adelaide. He’d shown me his computer, cataloguing its features exhaustively, sounding scarcely different from any other enthusiastic thirteen-year-old technophile with a new toy. But when he’d started demonstrating his favorite programs—stultifying solo card games, and bizarre memory quizzes and geometric puzzles that had looked more like arduous intelligence tests than anything I could think of as recreation—my sarcastic comments had gone right over his head. I’d stood there insulting him, ever more viciously, and he’d just gazed at the screen, and smiled. Not tolerant. Oblivious.

I’d spent three hours interviewing Rourke in his small flat; VA had no central office, in Manchester or anywhere else. There were members in forty-seven countries—almost a thousand people, worldwide—but only Rourke had been willing to speak to me, and only because it was his job.

He was not fully autistic, of course. But he’d shown me his brain scans.

I replayed the raw footage.

“Do you see this small lesion in the left frontal lobe?” There was a tiny dark space, a minuscule gap in the gray matter, above the pointer’s arrow. “Now compare it with the same region in a twenty-nine-year-old fully autistic male.” Another dark space, three or four times larger. “And here’s a non-autistic subject of the same age and sex.” No lesion at all. “The pathology isn’t always so obvious—the structure can be malformed, rather than visibly absent—but these examples make it clear that there’s a precise physical basis to our claims.”

The view tilted up from the notepad to his face. Witness manufactured a smooth transition from one rock-steady “camera angle” to another—just as it smoothed away saccades: the rapid darting movements of the eyeballs, restlessly scanning and re-scanning the scene even when the gaze was subjectively fixed.

I said, “No one would deny that you’ve suffered damage in the same part of the brain. But why not be thankful that it’s minor damage, and leave it at that? Why not count yourself lucky that you can still function in society, and get on with your life?”

“That’s a complicated question. For a start, it depends what you mean by ‘function.'”

“You can live outside of institutions. You can hold down skilled jobs.” Rourke’s main occupation was research assistant to an academic linguist—not exactly sheltered employment.

He said, “Of course. If we couldn’t, we’d be classified as fully autistic. That’s the criterion which defines ‘partial autism': we can survive in ordinary society. Our deficiencies aren’t overwhelming—and we can usually fake a lot of what’s missing. Sometimes we can even convince ourselves that nothing’s wrong. For a while.”

“For a while? You have jobs, money, independence. What else does it take to function!”

“Interpersonal relationships.”

“You mean sexual relationships?”

“Not necessarily. But they are the most difficult. And the most… illuminating.”

He touched a key on his notepad; a complex neural map appeared. “Everyone—or almost everyone—instinctively attempts to understand other human beings. To guess what they’re thinking. To anticipate their actions. To… ‘know them.’ People build symbolic models of other people in their brains, both to act as coherent representations, tying together all the information which can actually be observed—speech, gestures, past actions—and to help make informed guesses about the aspects which can’t be known directly—motives, intentions, emotions.” As he spoke, the neural map dissolved, and re-formed as a functional diagram of a “third person” model: an elaborate network of blocks labeled with objective and subjective traits.

“In most people, all of this happens with little or no conscious effort: there’s an innate ability to model other people. It’s refined by use in childhood—and total isolation would cripple its development… in the same way as total darkness would cripple the visual centers. Short of that kind of extreme abuse, though, upbringing isn’t a factor. Autism can only be caused by congenital brain damage, or later physical injuries to the brain. There are genetic risk factors which involve susceptibility to viral infections in utero—but autism itself is not a simple hereditary disease.”

I’d already filmed a white-coated expert saying much the same things, but VA members’ detailed knowledge of their own condition was a crucial part of the story… and Rourke’s explanation was clearer than the neurologist’s.

“The brain structure involved occupies a small region in the left frontal lobe. The specific details describing individual people are scattered throughout the brain—like all memories—but this structure is the one place where those details are automatically integrated and interpreted. If it’s damaged, other people’s actions can still be perceived and remembered— but they lose their special significance. They don’t generate the same kind of ‘obvious’ implications; they don’t make the same kind of immediate sense.” The neural map reappeared—this time with a lesion. Again, it was transformed into a functional diagram—now visibly disrupted, overlayed with dozens of dashed red lines to illustrate lost connections.

Rourke continued, “The structure in question probably began to evolve toward its modern human form in the primates, though it had precursors in earlier mammals. It was first identified and studied—in chimpanzees—by a neuroscientist called Lament, in 2014. The corresponding human version was mapped a few years later.

“Maybe the first crucial role for Lament’s area was to help make deception possible—to learn how to hide your own true motives, by understanding how others perceive you. If you know how to appear to be servile or cooperative—whatever’s really on your mind—you have a better chance of stealing food, or a quick fuck with someone else’s partner. But then… natural selection would have upped the ante, and favored those who could see through the ruse. Once lying had been invented, there was no turning back. Development would have snowballed.”

I said, “So the fully autistic can’t lie—or judge someone else to be lying. But the partially autistic…?”

“Some can, some can’t. It depends on the specific damage. We’re not all identical.”

“Okay. But what about relationships?”

Rourke averted his gaze, as if the subject was unbearably painful—but he continued without hesitation, sounding like a fluent public speaker delivering a familiar lecture. “Modeling other people successfully can aid cooperation, as well as deception. Empathy can act to improve social cohesion at every level. But as early humans evolved a greater degree of monogamy—at least, compared to their immediate ancestors—the whole cluster of mental processes involved in pair-bonding would have become entangled. Empathy for your breeding partner attained a special status: their life could be, in some circumstances, as crucial to the passing on of your genes as your own.

“Of course, most animals will instinctively protect their young, or their mates, at a cost to themselves; altruism is an ancient behavioral strategy. But how could instinctive altruism be made compatible with human self-awareness? Once there was a burgeoning ego, a growing sense of self in the foreground of every action, how was it prevented from overshadowing everything else?

“The answer is, evolution invented intimacy. Intimacy makes it possible to attach some, or all, of the compelling qualities associated with the ego—the model of the self—to models of other people. And not just possible—pleasurable. A pleasure reinforced by sex, but not restricted to the act, like orgasm. And not even restricted to sexual partners, in humans. Intimacy is just the belief—rewarded by the brain—that you know the people you love in almost the same fashion as you know yourself.”

The word “love” had come as a shock, in the middle of all that socio-biology. But he’d used it without a hint of irony or self-consciousness—as if he’d seamlessly merged the vocabularies of emotion and evolution into a single language.

I said, “And even partial autism makes that impossible? Because you can’t model anyone well enough to really know them at all?”

Rourke didn’t believe in yes-or-no answers. “Again, we’re not all identical. Sometimes the modeling is accurate enough—as accurate as anyone’s—but it’s not rewarded: the parts of Laments area which make most people feel good about intimacy, and actively seek it out, are missing. Those people are considered to be ‘cold,’ ‘aloof.’ And sometimes the reverse is true: people are driven to seek intimacy, but their modeling is so poor that they can never hope to find it. They might lack the social skills to form lasting sexual relationships—or even if they’re intelligent and resourceful enough to circumvent the social problems, the brain itself might judge the model to be faulty, and refuse to reward it. So the drive is never satisfied—because it’s physically impossible for it to be satisfied.”

I said, “Sexual relationships are difficult for everyone. It has been suggested that you’ve merely invented a neurological syndrome which allows you to abdicate responsibility for problems which everyone faces, as a matter of course.”

Rourke stared down at the floor and smiled indulgently. “And we should just pull ourselves together, and try harder?”

“Either that, or have autografts to correct the damage.” A small number of neurons and glial cells could be removed from the brain without harm, regressed to an embryonic state, multiplied in tissue culture, then reinjected into the damaged region. Artificially maintained gradients of embryonic marker hormones could fool the cells into thinking that they were back in the developing brain, and guide them through a fresh attempt to build the necessary synaptic connections. The success rate was unimpressive for the fully autistic—but for people with relatively small lesions, it was close to forty percent.

“The Voluntary Autists don’t oppose that option. All we’re campaigning for is the legalization of the alternative.”

“Enlargement of the lesion?”

“Yes. Up to and including the complete excision of Lament’s area.”

"Why?"

“Again, that’s a complicated question. Everyone has a different reason. For a start, I’d say that as a matter of principle, we should have the widest possible range of choices. Like transsexuals.”

That was a reference to another kind of brain surgery which had once been highly controversial: NCR. Neural gender reassignment. People born with a mismatch between neural and physical gender had been able to have their bodies resculpted—with increasing precision—for almost a century. In the twenties, though, another option had become feasible: changing the gender of the brain; altering the hardwired neural map of the body image to bring it into line with the existing flesh and blood. Many people—including many transsexuals—had campaigned passionately against legalizing NCR, fearing coercion, or surgery carried out on infants. By the forties, though, it had become generally accepted as a legitimate option, freely chosen by about twenty percent of transsexuals.

I’d interviewed people undergoing every kind of reassignment operation, for Gender Scrutiny Overload. One neural man born with a female body had proclaimed ecstatically—after being resculpted en-male—"This is it! I'm free, I'm home!” And another—who’d opted for NGR— had gazed into a mirror at her unchanged face and said, “It’s like I’ve broken out of some kind of dream, some kind of hallucination, and I can finally see myself as I really am.” Judging from audience feedback to Gender, the analogy would attract enormous sympathy—if it was allowed to stand.

I said, “The endpoint of either operation on transsexuals is a healthy man or woman. That’s hardly the same as becoming autistic.”

Rourke countered, “But we do suffer a mismatch, just like transsexuals. Not between body and brain but between the drive for intimacy and the inability to attain it. No one—save a few religious fundamentalists— would be cruel enough to tell a transsexual that they’ll just have to learn to live with what they are, and that medical intervention would be a wicked self-indulgence.”

“But no one’s stopping you from choosing medical intervention. The graft is legal. And success rates are sure to improve.”

“And as I’ve said, VA don’t oppose that. For some people, it’s the right choice.”

“But how can it ever be the wrong choice?”

Rourke hesitated. No doubt he’d scripted and rehearsed everything he’d wanted to say—but this was the heart of it. To have any hope of winning support for his cause, he was going to have to make the audience understand why he did not want to be cured.

He said carefully, “Many fully autistic people suffer additional brain damage, and various kinds of mental retardation. In general, we don’t. Whatever damage we’ve suffered to Lament’s area, most of us are intelligent enough to understand our own condition. We know that non-autistic people are capable of believing that they’ve achieved intimacy. But in VA, we’ve decided we’d be better off without that talent.”

“Why better off?”

“Because it’s a talent for self-deception.”

I said, “If autism is a lack of understanding of others… and healing the lesion would grant you that lost understanding—”

Rourke broke in, “But how much is understanding—and how much is a delusion of understanding? Is intimacy a form of knowledge, or is it just a comforting false belief? Evolution isn’t interested in whether or not we grasp the truth, except in the most pragmatic sense. And there can be equally pragmatic falsehoods. If the brain needs to grant us an exaggerated sense of our capacity for knowing each other—to make pair-bonding compatible with self-awareness—it will lie, shamelessly, as much as it has to, in order to make the strategy succeed.”

I’d fallen silent, not knowing how to respond. Now I watched Rourke waiting for me to continue. Though he appeared as awkward and shy as ever, there was something in his expression which chilled me. He honestly believed that his condition had granted him an insight no ordinary person could share—and if he didn’t exactly pity us our hardwired capacity for blissful self-deception, he couldn’t help but perceive himself as having the broader, clearer view.

I said haltingly, “Autism is a… tragic, disabling disease. How can you… romanticize it into nothing more than some kind of… viable alternative lifestyle?”

Rourke was polite, but dismissive. “I'm not doing any such thing. I’ve met over a hundred fully autistic people, and their families. I know how much pain is involved. If I could banish the condition tomorrow, I’d do it.

“But we have our own histories, our own problems, our own aspirations. We’re not fully autistic—and excision of Lamont’s area, in adulthood, won’t render us the same as someone who was born that way. Most of us have learned to compensate by modeling people consciously, explicitly—it takes far more effort than the innate skill, but when we lose what little we have of that, we won’t be left helpless. Or ‘selfish,’ or merciless,’ or ‘incapable of compassion'—or any of the other things the murdochs like to claim. And being granted the surgery we’ve asked for won’t mean loss of employment, let alone the need for institutional care. So there’ll be no cost to the community—”

I said angrily, “Cost is the least of the issues. You’re talking about deliberately—surgically—ridding yourself of something… fundamental to humanity.”

Rourke looked up from the floor and nodded calmly, as if I’d finally made a point on which we were in complete agreement.

He said, “Exactly. And we’ve lived for decades with a fundamental truth about human relationships—which we choose not to surrender to the comforting effects of a brain graft. All we want to do now is make that choice complete. To stop being punished for our refusal to be deceived.”

Somehow, I whipped the interview into shape. I was terrified of paraphrasing James Rourke; with most people, it was easy enough to judge what was fair and what wasn’t, but here I was on treacherous ground. I wasn’t even sure that the console could convincingly mimic him—when I tried it, the body language looked utterly wrong, as if the software’s default assumptions (normally used to flesh out an almost-complete gestural profile gleaned from the subject) were being pumped out in their entirety to fill the vacuum. I ended up altering nothing—merely extracting the best lines, and setting them up with other material—and resorting to narration, when there was no other way.

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 expose; 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 other 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 Lament’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 Lament’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?”

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 re-created 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 p.m.

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 shots 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.

I said, “Nothing, really. I'm on holiday.”

She glanced again at my notes on her desk screen—which would have included data from my pharm. “Good for you. Just don’t relax too hard.”

I felt like an idiot, caught out in an obvious lie—but as I walked out of the surgery, it ceased to matter. The street was dappled with leaf-shadows, the breeze from the south was soft and cool. Junk DNA was over, and I felt as unburdened as if I’d just been granted a reprieve from a fatal disease. Epping was a quiet suburban center: a doctor, a dentist, a small supermarket, a florist, a hairdresser, and a couple of (non-experimental) restaurants. No Ruins; the commercial sector had been bulldozed fifteen years before and given over to engineered forest. No billboards (though advertising T-shirts almost made up for the loss). On rare Sunday afternoons when nothing else claimed our time, Gina and I walked up here for no reason at all, and sat beside the fountain. And when I came back from Stateless—with eight whole months to edit Violet Mosala into shape—there’d be more of those days than there’d been for a long while.

When I opened the front door, Gina was standing in the hall, as if she’d been waiting for me to return. She seemed agitated. Distraught. I moved toward her, asking, “What’s wrong?” She backed away, raising her arms, almost as if she was fending off an attacker.

She said, “Andrew, I know there’s no good time. But I waited—”

At the end of the hall were three suitcases.

The world drew itself away from me. Everything around me took one step back.

I said, “What’s going on?”

“Don’t get angry.”

“I'm not angry.” That was the truth. “I just don’t understand,”

Gina said, “I gave you every chance to fix things. And you just kept right on, as if nothing had changed.”

Something odd was happening to my sense of balance; I felt as if I was swaying wildly, though I knew I was perfectly still. Gina looked miserable; I held out my arms to her—as if I could comfort her.

I said, “Couldn’t you tell me something was wrong?”

“Did I need to? Are you blind?”

“Maybe I am.”

“You’re not a child, are you? You’re not stupid.”

“I honestly don’t know what I'm supposed to have done.”

She laughed bitterly. “No, of course you don’t. You just started treating me like some kind of… arduous obligation. Why should you think there was anything wrong with that?”

I said, “Started treating you… when? You mean the last three weeks? You always knew about editing. I thought—”

Gina screamed, “I'm not talking about your fucking job.'”

I wanted to sit down on the floor—to steady myself, to regain my bearings—but I was afraid the action might be misinterpreted.

She said coldly, “Please don’t stand there blocking the way. You’re making me nervous.”

“What do you think I'm going to do? Take you prisoner?” She didn’t reply. I squeezed past her into the kitchen. She turned and stood in the doorway, facing me. I had no idea what to say to her. I had no idea where to begin.

“I love you.”

“I'm warning you, don’t start.”

“If I’ve screwed up, just give me a chance to put things right. I’ll try harder—”

“There’s nothing worse than when you try harder. The strain is so fucking obvious.”

“I always thought I’d—” I met her eyes: dark, expressive, impossibly beautiful. Even now, the sight of them cut through everything else I was thinking and feeling, and transformed part of me into a helpless, infatuated child. But I’d still, always, concentrated, I’d always paid attention. How had it come to this! What signs could I have missed… when, how? I wanted to demand dates and times and places.

Gina looked away and said, “It’s too late to change anything. I’ve found someone else. I’ve been seeing someone else for the last three months. If you really didn’t know that… what kind of message did you need? Did I have to bring him home and screw him in front of you?”

I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to hear this; it was just noise that made everything more complicated. I said slowly, “I don’t care what you’ve done. We can still—”

She took a step toward me and shouted, “I care! You selfish moron! I care!” Tears were streaming down her face. Beneath everything I was struggling to understand, I just ached to hold her; I still couldn’t believe I was the reason for all her pain.

She said contemptuously, “Look at you! I'm the one who’s just told you I’ve been screwing someone else behind your back! I'm the one who’s walking out! And it still hurts me a thousand times more than anything will ever hurt you—”

I must have thought about what I did next, I must have planned it, but I don’t remember turning to the sink and hunting for a knife, I don’t remember opening my shirt. But I found myself standing by the kitchen doorway, carving lines back and forth across my stomach with the point of the blade, saying calmly, “You always wanted scars. Here are some scars.”

Gina threw herself at me, knocking me off my feet. I pushed the knife away, under the table. Before I could get up, she sat on my chest, and started slapping and punching me. She screamed, “You think that hurts? You think that’s the same? You don’t even know the difference, do you? Do you?"

I lay on the floor and looked away from her, while she pummeled my face and shoulders. I felt nothing at all, I was just waiting for it to be over—but when she stood up and started to leave, making sniveling noises as she staggered around the kitchen, I suddenly wanted to hurt her, badly.

I said evenly, “What did you expect? I can’t cry on cue like you do. My prolactin level’s not up to it.”

I heard her dragging the suitcases along the hall. I had a vision offal—lowing her out the door, offering to carry something, making a scene. But my desire for revenge had already faded. I loved her, I wanted her back… and everything I could imagine doing to try to prove that seemed guaranteed to hurt her, guaranteed to make everything worse.

The front door slammed shut.

I curled up on the floor. I was bleeding messily and gritting my teeth as much against the metallic stench, and a sense of helpless incontinence, as against the pain—but I knew I wasn’t cut deeply. I hadn’t gone insane with jealousy and rage and severed an artery; I’d always known exactly what I was doing.

Was I meant to feel ashamed of that? Ashamed that I hadn’t broken the furniture, disemboweled myself—or tried to kill her? I could still feel the sting of Gina’s contempt—and if I’d never really known her thoughts before, I’d understood one thing as she knocked me to the floor: because I hadn’t been overwhelmed by emotion, because I hadn’t lost control… in her eyes, I was somehow less than human.

I wrapped a towel around my superficial wounds, then told the pharm what had happened. It buzzed for several minutes, then exuded a paste of antibiotics, coagulants, and a collagen-like adhesive. It dried on my skin like a tight-fitting bandage.

The pharm had no eye of its own, but I stood by the phone and showed it our handiwork.

It said, “Avoid strenuous bowel movements. And try not to laugh too hard.”

8

Angelo said glumly, “I’ve been sent.”

“Then you’d better come in.”

He followed me down the hall into the living room. I asked, “How are the girls?”

“Good. Exhausting.”

Maria was three, Louise was two. Angelo and Lisa both worked from home—in soundproof offices—taking the childcare in shifts. Angelo was a mathematician with a net-based, nominally Canadian university; Lisa was a polymer chemist with a company which manufactured in the Netherlands.

We’d been friends since university, but I hadn’t met his sister until Louise was born. Gina had been visiting mother and daughter in hospital; I’d fallen for her in the elevator, before I had any idea who she was.

Seated, Angelo said cautiously, “I think she just wants to know how you are.”

“I sent her ten messages in ten days. She knows exactly how I am.”

“She said you stopped suddenly.”

“Suddenly? Ten acts of ritual humiliation is all she gets, without a reply.” I hadn’t meant to sound bitter, but Angelo was already beginning to look like a peace envoy stranded on a battlefield. I laughed. “Tell her whatever she wants to hear. Tell her I'm devastated… but recovering rapidly. I don’t want her to feel insulted… but I don’t want her to feel guilty, either.”

He smiled uncertainly, as if I’d made a tasteless joke. “She’s taking it badly.”

I clenched my fists and said slowly, “I know that, and so am I, but don’t you think she’d feel better if you told her…” I stopped. “What did she say you should tell me if I asked if there was any chance of her coming back?”

“She said to say no.”

“Of course. But… did she mean it? What did she tell you to say if I asked if she meant it?”

“Andrew—”

“Forget it.”

A long, awkward silence descended. I considered asking where she was, who she was with, but I knew he wouldn’t tell me. And I didn’t really want to know.

I said, “I'm meant to be flying out to Stateless tomorrow.”

“Yeah, I heard. Good luck.”

“There is another journalist who’d be willing to take over the project. I’d only have to make one call—”

He shook his head. “There’s no reason to do that. It wouldn’t change anything.”

The silence returned. After a while, Angelo reached into a jacket pocket and pulled out a small plastic vial of tablets. He said, “I’ve got some Ds.”

I groaned. “You never used to take that shit.”

He glanced up at me, wounded. “They’re harmless. I like to switch off sometimes. What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing.”

Disinhibitors were non-toxic and non-addictive. They created a mild sensation of well-being, and increased the effort required for considered thought—rather like a moderate dose of alcohol or cannabis, with few of the side effects. Their concentration in the bloodstream was self-limiting—above a certain level, the molecule catalyzed its own destruction—so taking a whole bottle was exactly the same as swallowing a single D.

Angelo offered me the vial. I took out a tablet reluctantly, and held it in my palm.

Alcohol had almost vanished from polite society by the time I was ten years old, but its use as a “social lubricant” always seemed to be lauded in retrospect as unequivocally beneficial, and only the violence and organic damage it induced were viewed as pathological. To me, though, the magic bullet which had taken its place seemed like a distillation of the real problem. Cirrhosis, brain damage, assorted cancers, and the worst traffic accidents and crimes of stupefaction had been mercifully banished… but I still wasn’t prepared to concede that human beings were physically incapable of communicating or relaxing without the aid of psychoactive drugs.

Angelo swallowed a tablet and said admonishingly, “Come on, it’s not going to kill you. Every known human culture has used some kind of—”

I mimed putting the thing in my mouth, but palmed it. Screw every known human culture. I felt a momentary pang of guilt at the deception, but I didn’t have the energy for an argument. Besides, my dishonesty was well intentioned. I could imagine more or less what Gina had told her brother: Get him D’d, it’s the only way he’ll start talking. She’d sent Angelo here in the hope that I’d unburden myself, spill my guts, and be healed. It was a touching gesture—on the part of both of them—and the least I could do in return was reduce the number of lies he’d have to tell her to make her believe she’d done some good.

Angelo’s eyes glazed over slightly, as the chemical shut down various pathways in his brain. It occurred to me that James Rourke should have added a third disputed H-word to his list: honesty. Freud had saddled Western culture with the bizarre notion that the least considered utterances were always, magically, the truest—that reflection added nothing, and the ego merely censored or lied. It was an idea born more of convenience than anything else: he’d identified the part of the mind easiest to circumvent—with tricks like free association—and then declared the product of all that remained to be “honest.”

But now that my words were chemically sanctified, and would at last be taken seriously, I got straight to the point. “Look: tell Gina I'm going to be okay. I'm sorry I hurt her. I know I was selfish. I'm going to try to change. I still care about her… but I know it’s over.” I hunted for more, but there really was nothing else she needed to know.

Angelo nodded significantly, as if I’d said something new and profound. “I could never understand why you were always breaking up with women. I thought you were just unlucky. But you’re right: you’re a selfish bastard. All you really care about is your work.”

“That’s right.”

“So what are you going to do about it? Find a new career?”

“No. Live alone.”

He grimaced. “But that’s worse. That makes you twice as selfish.”

I laughed. “Really? Do you want to explain why?”

“Because then you’re not even trying!”

“What if trying is at other people’s expense? What if I'm tired of hurting people, and I choose not to do that anymore?”

This simple idea seemed to confound him. He’d taken up Ds late in life; maybe they addled his brain more than they did for someone who’d developed a tolerance for the drug in adolescence.

I said, “I honestly used to think I could make someone happy. And myself. But after six attempts, I think I’ve proved that I can’t. So I'm taking the Hippocratic oath: Do no harm. What’s wrong with that?”

Angelo gave me a dubious look. “I can’t exactly picture you living like a monk.”

“Make up your mind: first I'm being selfish, then I'm being pious. And I hope you’re not impugning my masturbatory skills.”

“No, but there’s one small problem with sexual fantasies: they make you want the real thing even more.”

I shrugged. “I could always go neural asex.”

“Very funny.”

“Well, it’s always there as a last resort.” I was already growing sick of the whole stupid ritual, but if I threw him out too soon there was the risk that he’d give Gina a less-than-satisfactory catharsis report. The details didn’t matter, he’d be allowed to keep them to himself—but he had to be able to say with a straight face that we’d kept on baring our souls right into the small hours.

I said, “You always claimed that you’d never get married. Monogamy was for the weak. Casual sex was more honest, and better for all concerned—”

Angelo laughed, but gritted his teeth. “I was nineteen when I said that. How’d you like it if I dug up a few of your wonderful films from the same era ?”

“If you’ve got copies… name your price.” It seemed inconceivable, but I’d spent four years of my life—and thousands of dollars from assorted part-time jobs—making half a dozen terminally pretentious experimental dramas. My underwater butoh version of Waiting for Godot was perhaps the single worst creation of the digital video era.

Angelo stared at the carpet, suddenly pensive. “I meant it, though. At the time. The whole idea of a family—” He shuddered. “It sounded like being buried alive. I couldn’t imagine anything worse.”

“So you grew up. Congratulations.”

He glared at me angrily. “Don’t be so fucking glib.”

“I'm sorry.” He didn’t seem to be joking; I’d struck a nerve.

He said, “No one grows up. That’s one of the sickest lies they ever tell you. People change. People compromise. People get stranded in situations they don’t want to be in… and they make the best of it. But don’t try to tell me it’s some kind of… glorious preordained ascent into emotional maturity. It’s not.”

I said uneasily, “Has something happened? Between you and Lisa?”

He shook his head apologetically. “No. Everything’s fine. Life is wonderful. I love them all. But…” He looked away, his whole body visibly tensing. “Only because I’d go insane if I didn’t. Only because I have to make it work."

“But you do. Make it work.”

“Yes!” He scowled, frustrated that I was missing the point. “And it’s not even that hard, anymore. It’s pure habit. But… I used to think there’d be more. I used to think that if you changed from… valuing one thing to valuing another, it was because you’d learned something new, understood something better. And it’s not like that at all. I just value what I'm stuck with. That’s it, that’s the whole story. People make a virtue out of necessity. They sanctify what they can’t escape.

“I do love Lisa, and I do love the girls… but there’s no deeper reason than the fact that that’s the best I can make of my life, now. I can’t argue with a single thing I said when I was nineteen years old—because I don’t know better now. I'm not wiser. That’s what I resent: all the fucking pretentious lies we were fed about growth and maturity. No one ever came clean and admitted that ‘love’ and ’sacrifice’ were just what you did to stay sane when you found yourself backed into a different kind of corner.”

I said, “You really are full of shit. I hope you don’t take Ds at parties.”

He looked stung for a moment, then he understood: I was promising to keep my mouth shut. I wasn’t going to throw a word of this back at him when he was sober.

I walked him to the station just before midnight. There was a warm breeze blowing, and ten thousand stars.

“Good luck with Stateless.”

“Good luck with your debriefing.”

“Ah. I’ll tell Gina…” He trailed off, frowning like an aphasic.

“You’ll think of something.”

“Yeah.”

I watched the train until it disappeared, thinking: She did help me, after all. I actually forgot about both of us, for a while. And she’ll survive. And I’ll survive. And tomorrow, I’ll be on a South Pacific island… trying to bluff my way through two weeks with Violet Mosala.

Backed into a different kind of corner.

What more could I have asked for?