Грег Иган - Distress

She walked over to the window. I said, "Is this some kind of political gesture against traditionalists like PACDF?"

She laughed. "No, no, no! Well… maybe it will be that as well, coincidentally. But that’s not the point." She steeled herself. "I’ve had assurances. From a number of highly placed people. I’ve been promised that if I move to Stateless… not because I matter, but because it will make news , and create a pretext… the South African government will unilaterally drop all sanctions against the island, within six months."

I had goose bumps. One country might make no difference—except that South Africa was the major trading partner of about thirty other African nations.

Mosala said quietly, "The voting patterns in the UN don’t show it, but the fact is, the anti-sanctions faction is not a tiny minority. At present, there’s all kinds of bloc solidarity and surface agreement, because everyone believes they can’t win, and they don’t want to cause offense."

"But if someone gave the right little push, they might start an avalanche?"

"Maybe." She laughed, embarrassed. "Talk about delusions of grandeur. The truth is, I get sick to the core every time I think about it— and I don’t actually believe anything dramatic is going to happen."

"One person to break the symmetry. Why not?"

She shook her head firmly. "There’ve been other attempts to shift the vote, which have all fallen through. Anything’s worth trying, but I have to keep my feet on the ground."

Several things were running through my mind at once—though what might happen if the biotech patent laws ever really collapsed, globally, was almost too distant a prospect to contemplate. But the fact remained that Mosala had more use for the documentary than I’d ever imagined—and she’d told me all this to let me know as much, to give me the leverage she wanted me to employ, to ensure that her emigration did cause a stir.

It was also clear that the whole endeavor—however Quixotic—would be extremely unpopular in certain quarters.

Was that what Kuwale had had in mind? Not the Ignorance Cults, not PACDF fundamentalists, not even pro-science South African nationalists outraged by Mosala’s desertion'—but powerful defenders of the biotech status quo? And if the teenaged burglar ''paid. to frighten her hadn’t been lying, after all…

Mosala walked over to a side table and poured herself a glass of water. "Now you know all my deepest secrets, so I declare this interview over." She raised the glass and declaimed self-mockingly, "Vive la technoliberation! "

"Vive."

She said seriously, "Okay: there are rumors. Maybe half of Stateless knows exactly what’s going on—but I still don’t want those rumors confirmed until certain arrangements, certain agreements, are much more solid."

"I understand." And I realized, with a kind of astonishment, that somewhere along the way I’d won some measure of trust from her. Of course she was using me—but she must have believed that my heart was in the right place, that I’d let myself be used.

I said, "Next time you’re arguing circularity with Helen Wu deep into the night, do you think I could…?"

"Sit in? And record it?" She seemed to find the prospect dubious, but she said, "All right. Just so long as you promise not to fall asleep before we do."

She walked me to the door, and we shook hands. I said, "Be careful." She smiled serenely, slightly amused at my concern, as if she didn’t have an enemy in the world. "Don’t worry. I will."

I was woken by a call just after four, the ringing growing louder and more shrill until it reached into my melatonin dreams and turned the darkness of my skull inside-out. For an instant, the mere fact of consciousness was shocking, unspeakable; I was outraged as a newborn child. Then I stretched out an arm and groped around on the bedside table for my notepad. I squinted at the screen, blinded for a moment by its brightness.

The call was from Lydia. I almost refused to take it, assuming that she’d somehow miscalculated the time zones, but then I woke sufficiently to realize that it was the middle of the night for her, too. Sydney was only two hours behind Stateless. Geographically, if not politically.

She said, "Andrew, I’m sorry to disturb you, but I thought you had a right to hear this in realtime." She looked uncharacteristically grim, and though I was still too groggy even to speculate about what was coming next, it was obvious that it wasn’t going to be pleasant.

I said hoarsely, "That’s okay. Go ahead." I tried not to imagine what I looked like, gaping bleary-eyed at the camera. Lydia seemed to be in a darkened room, herself, her face lit only by the image on the screen… of me, lit only by the image other. Was that possible? I suddenly realized that I had a pounding headache.

" Junk DNA is going to have to be re-edited, with the Landers story removed. If you had time, of course I’d ask you to do it yourself, but I’m assuming that’s not possible. So I’ll give it to Paul Kostas; he used to be one of our news room editors, but he’s freelance now. I’ll send you his final cut, and if you strongly disagree with anything, you’ll have an opportunity to change it. Just remember that it’s being screened in less than a fortnight."

I said, "That’s fine, that’s all… fine." I knew Kostas; he wouldn’t mutilate the program. "Why, though? Was there some legal glitch? Don’t tell me Landers is suing?"

"No. Events have overtaken us. I won’t try to explain; I’ve sent you a trailer from the San Francisco bureau—it’ll all be public by morning, but…" She was too tired to elaborate, but I understood; she didn’t want me to learn about this as just another viewer. A quarter of Junk DNA, and some three months' work on my part, had just been rendered obsolete, but Lydia was doing her best to salvage some vestige of my professional dignity. This way, at least I’d stay a few hours ahead of the masses.

I said, "I appreciate that. Thank you."

We bid each other goodnight, and I viewed the "trailer"—a hastily assembled package of footage and text, alerting other news rooms to the story, and giving them the choice either to wait for the polished item soon to follow, or to edit the raw material themselves and put out their own version. It consisted mainly of FBI news releases, plus some archival background material.

Ned Landers, his two chief geneticists, and three of his executives, had just been arrested in Portland. Nine other people—working for an entirely separate corporation—had been arrested in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Laboratory equipment, biochemical samples, and computer records had been taken from both sites in pre-dawn raids. All fifteen people had been charged with violating federal biotechnology safety laws—but not because of Landers' highly publicized neo-DNA and symbiont research. At the Chapel Hill laboratory, according to the charges, workers had been manipulating infectious, natural-RNA viruses—in secret, without permission. Landers had been footing the bills, circuitously.

The purpose of these viruses remained unknown; the data and samples were yet to be analyzed.

There were no statements from the accused; their lawyers were counseling silence. There were some external shots of the Chapel Hill laboratory, sealed off behind police barricades. All the footage of Landers himself was relatively old material; the latest was cannibalized from my interview with him (not completely wasted, after all).

The lack of detail was frustrating, but the implications already seemed clear. Landers and his collaborators had been constructing perfect viral immunity for themselves beyond the specific powers of any one vaccine or drug, beyond the fear of mutant strains out-evolving their defenses… while engineering new viruses capable of infecting the rest of us. I stared at the screen, which was frozen on the last frame of the report: Landers, as I’d seen him in the flesh, myself, smiling at the vision of his brand new kingdom. And though I balked at accepting the obvious conclusion… what possible use could he have had for a novel human virus except for some kind of thinning ?