Грег Иган - Distress

I sprinted to the bathroom, and brought up the meager contents of my stomach. Then I knelt by the bowl, shivering and sweating—lapsing into microsleeps, almost losing my balance. The melatonin wanted me back, but I was having trouble convincing myself that I was through vomiting. Pampered hypochondriac that I was, I would have consulted my pharm at once if I’d had it, for a precise diagnosis and an instant, optimal solution. With visions of choking to death in my sleep, I contemplated tearing off my shoulder patch—but the symbolic attempt to surrender to natural circadian forces would have taken hours to produce any effect at all—and then it would have rendered me, at best, a zombie for the rest of the conference.

I retched, voluntarily, for a minute or two, and nothing more emerged, so I staggered back to bed.

Ned Landers had gone further than any gender migrant, any anarchist, any Voluntary Autist. No man is an island? Just watch me. And yet, apparently, it still hadn’t been far enough. He’d still felt crowded, threatened, encroached-upon. A biological kingdom wasn’t enough; he’d aspired to more elbow room than even that unbridgeable genetic gulf could provide.

And he’d almost attained it. That was what species self-knowledge had given him: a precise, molecular definition of the H-word… which he could personally transcend, before turning it against everyone who remained in its embrace.

Vive la technoliberation! Why not have a million Ned Landers? Why not let every solipsistic lunatic and paranoid, self-appointed ethnic-group-savior on the planet wield the same power? Paradise for yourself and your clan—and apocalypse for everyone else.

That was the fruit of perfect understanding.

What’s wrong, don’t you like the taste?

I clutched my stomach and slid my knees toward my chin; it changed the character of the nausea, if not exactly removing it. The room tipped, my limbs grew numb, I strived for absolute blankness.

And if I’d dug deeper, done my job properly, I might have been the one to find him out, to stop him…

Gina touched my cheek, and kissed me tenderly. We were in Manchester, at the imaging lab. I was naked, she was clothed.

She said, "Climb inside the scanner. You can do that for me, can’t you? I want us to be much, much closer, Andrew. So I need to see what’s going on inside your brain."

I started to comply—but then I hesitated, suddenly afraid of what she’d discover.

She kissed me again. "No more arguments. If you love me, you’ll shut up and do what you’re told."

She forced me down, and closed the hatch of the machine. I saw my body from above. The scanner was more than a scanner—it raked me with ultraviolet lasers. I felt no pain, but the beams prised away layer after layer of living tissue with merciless precision. All the skin, all the flesh, which concealed my secrets dissolved into a red mist around me, and then the mist began to part…

I dreamed that I woke up screaming.

At seven-thirty, I interviewed Henry Buzzo in one of the hotel meeting rooms. He was charming and articulate, a natural performer, but he didn’t really want to talk about Violet Mosala; he wanted to recount anecdotes about famous dead people. "Of course Steve Weinberg tried to prove that I was wrong about the gravitino, but I soon straightened him out…" SeeNet alone had devoted three full-length documentaries to Buzzo, over the years, but it seemed that there were still more names he desperately needed to drop, on camera, before dying.

I wasn’t in a charitable mood; the three hours' sleep I’d had after Lydia’s call had been about as refreshing as a blow to the head. I went through the motions, feigning fascination, and trying half-heartedly to steer the interview in a direction which might produce some material I could actually use.

"What kind of place in history do you think the discoverer of the TOE will attain? Wouldn’t that be the ultimate form of scientific immortality?"

Buzzo became self-deprecating. "There’s no such thing as immortality, for a scientist. Not even for the greatest. Newton and Einstein are still famous today—but for how long? Shakespeare will probably outlast them both… and maybe even Hitler will, too."

I didn’t have the heart to break the news to him that none of these were exactly household names anymore.

I said, "Newton’s and Einstein’s theories have been swallowed whole, though. Absorbed into larger schemes. I know, you’ve already carved your name on one TOE which turned out to be provisional—but all of the SUFT’s architects said at the time that it was just a stepping stone. Don’t you think the next TOE will be the real thing: the final theory which lasts forever?"

Buzzo had given the question a lot more thought than I had. He said, "It might. It certainly might. I can imagine a universe in which we can probe no further, in which deeper explanations are literally, physically, impossible. But…"

"Your own TOE describes such a universe, doesn’t it?"

"Yes. But it could be right about everything else, and wrong about that. The same is true of Mosala’s and Nishide’s."

I said sourly, "So when will we know, one way or the other? When will we be sure that we’ve struck bottom?"

"Well… if I’m right, then you’ll never be sure that I’m right. My TOE doesn’t allow itself to be proved final and complete—even if it is final and complete." Buzzo grinned, delighted at the prospect of such a perverse legacy. "The only kind of TOE which could leave any less room for doubt would be one which required its own finality—which made that fact absolutely central.

"Newton was swallowed up and digested, Einstein was swallowed up and digested… and the old SUET will go the same way, in a matter of days. They were all closed systems, they were all vulnerable. The only TOE which could be guaranteed immune to the process would be one which actively defended itself—which turned its gaze outward to describe, not just the universe, but also every conceivable alternative theory which could somehow supersede it—and then rendered them all demonstrably false, in a single blow,"

He shook his head gleefully. "But there’s nothing like that on offer, here. If you want absolute certainty, you’ve come to the wrong side of town."

The other side of town was still just outside the hotel’s main entrance; the Mystical Renaissance carnival hadn’t gone away. I headed out on to the street, anyway; I urgently needed a dose of fresh air if I was going to be more than half-conscious for the lecture on ATM software techniques which Mosala was due to attend at nine. The sky was dazzling, and the air was already warm; Stateless seemed unable to decide whether to surrender to a temperate autumn, or hold out for an Indian summer. The sunshine lifted my spirits, slightly, but I still felt crippled, beaten, overwhelmed.

I weaved my way past the stalls and small tents, dodging goldfish-bowl-jugglers and hand-stilt-walkers—impressive acts, mostly; it was only the droning songs of the buskers which really made me feel that I was running a gauntlet. While members of Humble Science! had been showing up at every press conference and doing their best to repeat the tone of Walsh’s encounter with Mosala, MR had remained endearingly innocuous by comparison. I was beginning to suspect that it was a deliberate strategy: a good cult/bad cult game, to widen their combined appeal. Humble Science! had nothing to lose by extremism; those few members who left in disgust at Walsh’s tactics (to join MR, most likely) would be more than compensated for by an influx from groups like Celtic Wisdom and Saxon Light—northern Europe’s equivalents of PACDF, only more influential.