Грег Иган - Distress

The processor emerged last, the buried head of the worm, trailing a fine gold cable which lead to my spinal cord, and the nerve taps in my brain. I snapped it off where it vanished into the chip, then rose to my feet, bent double, a fist pressed against the ragged hole.

I pushed the bloody offering toward Twenty with my foot. I couldn’t stand up straight enough to look her in the eye.

"You can go." She sounded shaken, but unrepentant. I wondered what kind of death she’d chosen for Mosala. Clean and painless, no doubt: straight into a fairytale coma, without a speck of blood or shit or vomit.

I said, "Mail it back to me, once you’re finished with it. Or you’ll be hearing from my bank manager."

In the cramped sick bay, a scan of Kuwale’s leg revealed ruptured blood vessels and broken ligaments, a trail of damage like an aircraft’s crash path leading to the bullet buried at the back of vis thigh. Ve watched the screen with grim amusement, sweat dripping from vis face as the ancient software ground away at a detailed assessment; the final line read: Probable gunshot injury."Oh, I was hit!" One of the farmers, Prasad Jwala, cleaned and dressed our wounds, and pumped us full of (off-the-shelf) drugs to limit bleeding, infection, and shock. The only strong painkillers on board were crude synthetic opiates which left me so high that I couldn’t have given a coherent account of the ACs' plans to anyone if the fate of the universe had depended on it. Kuwale lost consciousness completely; I sat beside ver, fantasizing about gathering my thoughts. It was just as well that my stomach was tightly bandaged; I had a strong urge to reach through the portal I’d made and probe the machinery which remained inside me: the tight smooth coil of the intestines, the demon snake which Kuwale’s magic bullet had tamed; the warm, blood-drenched liver, ten billion microscopic enzyme factories plugged straight into the circulation, a bootleg pharm dispensing whatever its chemical intuition desired. I wanted to drag every dark mysterious organ out into the daylight one by one, and arrange them all in front of me in their proper positions, until I was nothing but a shell of skin and muscle, face-to-face at last with my inner twin.

After about fifteen minutes, the same enzyme factories finally began degrading the opiates in my blood, and I clawed my way down from marshmallow heaven. I begged for a notepad; Jwala obliged, then left to help out on deck.

I managed to get through to Karin De Groot immediately. I stuck to the essentials. De Groot heard me out in silence; my appearance must have given the story a degree of credibility. "You have to talk Violet into heading back to civilization. Even if she’s not convinced of the danger… what has she got to lose? She can always deliver her final paper from Cape Town."

De Groot said, "Believe me, she’ll take every word of this seriously. Yasuko Nishide died last night. It was pneumonia—and he was very frail —but Violet’s still badly shaken. And she’s seen the cholera genome analysis, which was done by a reputable Bombay lab. But—"

"So you’ll fly out with her?" Nishide’s death saddened me, but Mosala’s loss of complacency was pure good news. "I know, it’s a risk, she might get sick on the plane, but—"

De Groot cut me off. "Listen. There’ve been some problems here, while you were away. No one’s flying anywhere."

"Why? What kind of problems?"

"A boatload of… mercenaries, I don’t know… arrived on the island overnight. They’ve occupied the airport."

Jwala had come back to check on Kuwale; he caught the last part of the conversation, and interjected derisively, "Agents provocateurs. Every few years a different pack of apes in designer camouflage show up, try to make trouble… fail, and go away." He sounded about as concerned as someone from an ordinary democracy, complaining about the periodic irritation of election campaigns. "I saw them last night, landing in the harbor. They were heavily armed, we had to let them pass." He grinned. "But they’re in for some surprises. I’ll give them six months, at the most."

"Six months?"

He shrugged. "It’s never been longer."

A boatload of mercenaries, trying to make trouble—the boat which had rammed the ACs? In any case, Twenty and her colleagues must have known by morning that the airport had been seized—and that my testimony would make little difference to Mosala’s chances.

The timing could not have been worse, but it was hardly surprising. The Einstein Conference was already lending Stateless too much respectability, and Mosala’s planned migration would be an even greater embarrassment. But EnGeneUity and their allies wouldn’t try to assassinate her, creating an instant martyr. Nor would they dissolve the island back into the ocean, and risk scaring off legitimate customers worth billions of dollars. All they could do was try, one last time, to bring the social order of Stateless crashing down—proving to the world that the whole naive experiment had been doomed from the start.

I said, "Where’s Violet now?"

"Talking to Henry Buzzo. She’s trying to convince him to go with her to the hospital."

"Good idea." Immersed in the schemes of the "moderates," I’d almost forgotten that Buzzo was also in danger—and Mosala was at risk on two fronts. The extremists had already triumphed in Kyoto—and whoever had infected me with the cholera, en route from Sydney, was probably on Stateless right now, looking for a chance to make up for the botched first attempt.

De Groot said, "I’ll show them this conversation immediately."

"And give a copy to security."

"Right. For what that’s worth." She seemed to be holding up under the pressure far better than I was; she added wrily, "No sign of Helen Wu in flippers, so far. But I’ll keep you posted."

We arranged to meet at the hospital. I signed off, and closed my eyes, fighting the temptation to sink back into the lingering opiate fog.

It had taken the mainstream ACs five days to smuggle in a cure for me even with the airport open. After everything I’d been through, I wasn’t ready to swallow the fact that Mosala was now a walking corpse—but short of a counter-invasion by African technoliberateurs, over a distance of tens of thousands of kilometers, in the next day or two, at the latest… I could see no hope of her surviving.

As the boat approached the northern harbor, I sat watching over Akili. I badly wanted to take vis hand, but I was afraid it would only make things worse. How could I have fallen for someone who’d surgically excised even the possibility of desire?

Easily enough, apparently: a shared trauma, an intense experience, the confusing absence of gender cues… it was no great mystery. People became infatuated with asex all the time. And no doubt it would pass, soon enough—once I accepted the simple fact that nothing I felt could ever be reciprocated.

After a while, I found I could no longer bear to look at vis face; it hurt too much. So I watched the glowing traces on the bedside monitor, and listened for each shallow exhalation, and tried to understand why the ache I felt would not go away.

The trams were reportedly still running, but one of the farmers offered to drive us all the way to the city. "Quicker than waiting for an ambulance," she explained. "There are only ten on the island." She was a young Fijian named Adelle Vunibobo; I remembered seeing her looking down into the hold on the ACs' boat.

Kuwale sat between us in the cab of the truck, half awake but still stupefied. I watched the vivid coral inlets shrinking around us, like a fast-motion view of the reefs' slow compaction.