Distress - A Novel Part 2

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 29.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 n.o.bel 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.

30.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."

n.o.body had found a virus a.s.sociated 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 subt.i.tled: 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.

31.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, "a.s.semble 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 a.s.sessed. 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 mela-tonin doses. Give me two more hours of peak alertness a day, starting immediately."

32."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 circa-dian 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 unpre' dictable. But not too often.

I said, "Screw Junk DNA. Want to go dancing?"

33.5.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 s.p.a.ce, 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-siecle 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 trans.m.u.ted 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, 34.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 pa.s.sed, she said, "Were they ... ?"

"What? As.e.x? 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?"

As.e.x 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 as.e.x person necessarily had in 35.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 att.i.tude could range from as little as ticking the "A" box on census forms, to choosing an as.e.x 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 as.e.xuality, hermaphroditism, or exoticism.

I said, "Why bother staring at people and guessing? En-male, en-fern, as.e.x . . . 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 doc.u.mentary. 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-a.s.suming 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 as.e.x. The whole point of being umale is to distance yourself from the perceived weaknesses of contemporary natural males. To declare that their 'consensual ident.i.ty'- stop laughing-is so much less masculine than your own that you effectively belong to another s.e.x entirely. To say: no mere en-male can speak on my behalf, any more than a woman can."

36.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 s.h.i.+t 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 as.e.x? If all women are weak, pa.s.sive, irrational victims-"

Gina thumped me on the arm admonis.h.i.+ngly. "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 a.s.sertions, 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 circ.u.mstances, 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, 37.fas.h.i.+onable mimicry of gender rea.s.signment for transs.e.xuals-but most gender migrants go no further than superficial as.e.x. 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 citizens.h.i.+p ... or deserting a battlefield . . . but whether it will stabilize at some low level, and shake up att.i.tudes 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 as.e.x, 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."