Грег Иган - Distress

A plain white circle spun in the darkness for a second, and then the screen switched off.

The demonstration was over. Three began to untie me from the chair.

I said, "There’s something I have to tell you. I’ve kept it from everyone—SeeNet, Conroy, Kuwale. Sarah Knight never found out. No one else knows, except me and Mosala. But you really need to hear it."

Twenty said, "We’re listening." She stood by the blank display screen, watching me patiently, the model of polite interest.

This was the last chance I had to change their minds. I struggled to concentrate, to put myself in their place. Would it make any difference to their plans, if they knew that Buzzo was wrong? Probably not. With or without other candidates to take her place, Mosala would be equally dangerous. If Nishide died, his intellectual legacy could still be pursued—and they’d simply race to protect his successors, and to slaughter Mosala’s.

I said, "Violet Mosala completed her TOE back in Cape Town. The computing she’s doing now is all just cross-checking; the real work was finished months ago. So… she’s already become the Keystone. And nothing’s happened, the sky isn’t falling, we’re all still here." I tried to laugh. "The experiment you think is too dangerous to risk is already over. And we’ve survived."

Twenty continued to watch me, with no change of expression. A wave of intense self-consciousness swept over me. I was suddenly aware of every muscle in my face, the angle of my head, the stoop of my shoulders, the direction of my gaze. I felt like a barely man-shaped lump of clay, which would need to be molded, painstakingly, into a convincing likeness of a human being speaking the truth.

And I knew that every bone, every pore, every cell in my body was betraying the effort I was making to fake it.

Rule number one: never let on that there are any rules at all.

Twenty nodded at Three, and he untied me from the chair. I was taken back to the hold, lowered in with the winch, and bound to Kuwale again.

As the others began to climb out on the rope ladder, Three hesitated. He crouched down beside me and whispered, like a good friend offering painful but essential advice: "I don’t blame you for trying, man. But hasn’t anyone ever told you that you’re the worst liar in the world?"

When I’d finished my account of the killers' media presentation, Kuwale said flatly, "Don’t kid yourself that you ever had a chance. No one could have talked them out of it."

"No?" I didn’t believe ver. They’d talked themselves into it, systematically enough. There had to be a way to unravel their own supposedly watertight logic before their eyes—to force them to confront its absurdity.

I hadn’t been able to find it, though. I hadn’t been able to get inside their heads.

I checked the time with Witness; it was almost dawn. I couldn’t stop shivering; the slick of algae on the floor felt damper than ever, and the hard polymer beneath had grown cold as steel.

"Mosala will be under close protection." Kuwale had been despondent when I left ver, but in my absence ve seemed to have recovered a streak of defiant optimism. "I sent a copy of your mutant cholera genome to conference security, so they know the kind of risk she’s facing—even it she won’t acknowledge it herself. And there are plenty of other mainstream AC back on Stateless."

"No one back on Stateless knows that Wu is involved, do they? And anyway… Wu could have infected Mosala with a bioweapon days ago. Do you think they would have confessed everything, on camera, if the assassination wasn’t already a fait accompli? They wanted to ensure that they’d receive due credit, they had to get in early and avoid the rush, before everyone from PACDF to EnGeneUity comes under suspicion. But it would have to be the last thing they’d do, before confirming that she’s dead, and fleeing Stateless." Meaning that nothing I’d said above deck could have made the slightest difference? Not quite. They might still have furnished an antidote, their own pre-existing magic bullet.

Kuwale fell silent. I listened for distant voices or footsteps, but there was nothing: the creaking of the hull, the white noise of a thousand waves.

So much for my grandiose visions of rebirth through adversity as a fearless champion of technoliberation. All I’d done was stumble into a vicious game between rival lunatic god-makers—and been cut back down to my proper station in life: conveyor of someone else’s messages.

Kuwale said, "Do you think they’re monitoring us, right now? Up on deck?"

"Who knows?" I looked around the dark hold; I wasn’t even sure if the faint gray light which might have been the far wall was real, or just retinal static and imagination. I laughed. "What do they think we’re going to do? Jump six meters into the air, punch a hole in the hatch, and then swim a hundred kilometers—all dressed as Siamese twins?"

I felt a sudden sharp tug on the rope around my hands. Irritated, I almost protested aloud—but I stopped myself in time. It seemed Kuwale had made good use of an hour without vis wrists jammed between our backs. Working some slack into vis own bonds and then hiding the loop between vis hands… which in turn might have helped ver keep them slightly apart, when we were tied together again? Whatever houdini ve’d used, after a few more minutes of painstaking manipulation the tension on the rope vanished. Kuwale pulled vis arms free of the space between us, and stretched them wide.

I couldn’t help feeling a rush of pure, dumb elation—but I waited for the inevitable sound of boots on the deck. IR cameras in the hold, monitored non-stop by software, would have registered this transgression easily.

The silence stretched on. Grabbing us must have been a spur-of-the-moment decision when they intercepted my call to Kuwale—if they’d planned it in advance, they would have had handcuffs, at the very least. Maybe their surveillance technology, at short notice, was as down-market as their ropes and nets.

Kuwale shuddered with relief—I envied ver; my own shoulders were painfully cramped—then squeezed vis hands back into the gap.

The polymer rope was slippery, and knotted tight—and Kuwale’s fingernails were cut short (they ended up in my flesh several times). When my hands were finally untied, it was an anticlimax; the surge of elation had long faded, I knew we didn’t have the slightest chance of escape. But anything was better than sitting in the dark and waiting for the honor of announcing Mosala’s death to the world.

The net was made from a smart plastic which adhered selectively to its own opposite surface—presumably for ease of repair—and the join was as strong as the stuff itself. We’d been wrapped tight with our arms behind us, though; now that they were free, there was some slack—four or five centimeters. We rose to our feet awkwardly, shoes slipping on the algal slime. I exhaled, and flattened my stomach, glad of my recent fast.

The first dozen attempts failed. In the dark, it took ten or fifteen minutes of tortuous repositioning to find a way of standing which minimized our combined girth all the way down. It seemed like the kind of arduous, inane activity contestants would have to go through on game shows in Hell. By the time the net touched the floor, I’d lost all feeling in my calves;

I took a few steps across the hold and almost keeled over. I could hear the faint click of fingernails slipping over plastic; Kuwale was already working on the rope around vis feet. No one had bothered to bind my legs, the second time; I paced a few meters in the darkness, working out the kinks, making the most of the visceral illusion of freedom while it lasted.