Greg Egan - Quarantine

Computer files had little to add. His parents were not religious. His academic record was mediocre, his classroom behaviour unremarkable, or at least unremarked upon. After finishing high school, he worked for the local water utility, performing what was described as 'unskilled and semi-skilled maintenance'. No doubt he accessed online libraries extensively in his youth, but only a few months of data is retained in most systems, and by the time anyone went looking for Duprey's formative reading, the details had been purged long ago. If he ever bought books or ROMs, he took them with him when he fled; his rented room was found empty of all possessions. (What would have explained away three thousand corpses? Books on Charles Manson and Jim Jones? A diary full of teenage alienation? A tarot pack, a zodiac chart? Pentagrams in blood on the floor?)

Duprey was captured more than six years later, hiding out in rural Quebec. By this time, he had followers worldwide, blowing up trains and buildings, poisoning canned food, gunning down crowds of shoppers. Most of the killings were random, but one group of Children had murdered six members of a European Bubble-research team, and many more such assassinations were to follow. Bubble science, to the Children, is the ultimate blasphemy; after all, any detailed understanding of The Bubble's true nature could only undermine their vision of the empty sky as a cosmic portent of the 'Age of Mayhem' which they believe they're ushering in.

Duprey was found to be sane enough to stand trial. He was no paranoid schizophrenic — he heard no voices, saw no visions, suffered no more delusions than any other religious leader. I saw the leaked transcripts of one of his psychiatric evaluations; when asked bluntly whether he thought the genocide in Hartshaw was right or wrong, he said that he understood the concepts, but believed they were no longer applicable. 'That symmetry was broken in the early universe, but now it has been restored. The two forces have become unified again — good and evil are indistinguishable.' Most of his answers were in this style: metaphors from science and religion dragged out of context and hybridized at random into eclectic non sequiturs and hollow aphorisms. Quantum mysticism, pop cosmology, radical Gaiaist eco-babble, Eastern transcendentalism, Western eschatology — Duprey, omnivorous, had swallowed it all, and had managed to unify the jargon, if not the ideas. The psychiatrists never put a name to this condition, but apparently it didn't constitute a defence of criminal insanity.

Karen and I watched the live broadcasts of the trial in the early hours of the morning; we'd finally synchronized shifts. I was trying to get promoted into a counter-terrorist unit, so I wanted to learn all I could about the Children. Karen was working as a registrar in the Casualty Department of the new NorthernSuburbsHospital — a job which often sounded more like police work than my own. Both our careers were stagnating; she was ten years out of medical school, I'd spent fourteen years in uniform. We both felt our chances were slipping away.

Neither the prosecution nor the defence wanted speeches from Duprey, or anything else which might inflame his disciples, so he was never put on the stand, and the question of motive was scarcely raised. The evidence linking him to the weapons dealer (turned prosecution witness) who'd supplied the engineered bacteria he'd used was complex and tedious, but ultimately watertight; the trial dragged on for months, but the outcome was never in doubt.

Halley's comet was no spectacle in 2061 — as seen from the Earth. The geometry was unfavourable; at its closest approach it was swamped in sunl'ght, leaving it barely visible to the naked eye anywhere on the planet. A dozen probes pursued it, though; fusion-powered craft able to match its difficult orbit, and even a couple of vintage spaceborne telescopes, commissioned prior to The Bubble, were reactivated for the occasion. The pictures from these sources were breathtaking, and throughout June and July there were two stories on the HV news almost every night, two images almost guaranteed to be shown one after the other: the comet, streaming tails of yellow-white dust and vivid blue plasma, travelling out of the darkness, out of the Abyss, towards the sun — and Marcus Duprey, sitting impassively in a courtroom in Maine.

On August 4th, Duprey was sentenced to sixty thousand, eight hundred and forty years' imprisonment. He had been tried alone for the Hartshaw massacre, but throughout 2060 and 2061, the Children had been infiltrated successfully in many cities, and a total of seventeen other key members had been imprisoned, the end of the age of mayhem! proclaimed NewsLink, beneath a picture of a voodoo doll in the image of Duprey, pierced by seventeen needles and oozing blood from every wound.

On September 4th, three ex-jurors were murdered. (The rest were immediately taken into protective custody, and subsequently given lifelong police protection; to date, though, two more have been assassinated.)

On October 4th, the trial judge survived the bombing of her home. The district attorney, and his bodyguard, were fatally shot in an elevator.

On November 4th, the courtroom where Duprey had been tried was destroyed by an explosion. Sixteen people died.

Why were so many people willing to follow Duprey, to avenge his imprisonment? Of those arrested, some were congenital psychotics who would have killed anyway; the Children had merely provided a pretext — and access to weapons and explosives. Most, though, showed a different profile: they had joined the Children because they simply couldn't accept that the stars had gone out and it meant nothing, changed nothing. Duprey had proclaimed that the Abyss marked the end of all moral order — and you can't ask for greater human relevance than that. For the sake of making sense of the world — to preserve themselves from The Bubble's indifference — they swallowed his bleak conclusions. But you can't confirm the end of all moral order by pointing a telescope at the Abyss; you can't measure it with apparatus of any kind. If you want — if you need — to believe in it, you have to go out and make it happen. You have to make it real.

As the twenty-seventh anniversary of Bubble Day approached, not a city in the world was entirely immune from the tension. Those who had imprisoned Duprey had been singled out for punishment, but in the past — and especially on November 15th — the Children had killed at random, and nobody believed that they'd abandoned that practice. Department stores X-rayed and strip-searched their customers (and home-shopping suddenly turned fashionable again). Train schedules fell apart under the burden of endless security checks (and telecommuting underwent a revival).

On November 9th, Duprey held a media conference in prison; he answered no questions, but read out a statement denouncing all acts of violence and calling on his followers to do the same. I took it for granted that he had been bribed or coerced somehow, and I doubted that anyone was in a position to know how many of the Children were likely to obey him — but the media pushed the line that the statement amounted to some kind of miraculous reprieve, and the public hysteria certainly diminished. I just hoped that Duprey's followers were as easily manipulated as the rest of us.

Four days later, the story broke: Duprey's words had not been his own; the whole thing had been staged with a puppet mod. Illegally: the US Supreme Court had reaffirmed, only months before, that the enforced application of a neural mod was unconstitutional, whatever the circumstances — and in any case, Maine had never even tried to pass a law allowing it. The prison governor resigned. The state's most senior FBI bureaucrat blew his brains out. More to the point, it was hard to imagine anything which could have enraged the Children more.