Грег Иган - Distress

Hermes—my communications software—was programmed to bounce almost everyone on Earth, while I was editing. Lydia Higuchi, SeeNet’s West Pacific Commissioning Executive Producer, was one of the few exceptions. It was my notepad that rang, but I switched the call through to the console itself; the screen was larger and clearer—and the camera stamped its signal with the words AFFINE graphics EDITOR MODEL 2052-KL, and a time code. Not very subtle, but it wasn’t meant to be.

Lydia got straight to the point. She said, "I saw the final cut of the Landers stuff. It’s good. But I want to talk about what comes next."

"The HealthGuard implant? Is there some problem?" I didn’t hide my irritation. She’d seen selections of the raw footage, she’d seen all my post-production notes. If she wanted anything significant changed, she’d left it too damn late.

She laughed. "Andrew, take one step back. Not the next story in Junk DNA . Your next project."

I eyed her as if she’d casually raised the prospect of imminent travel to another planet. I said, "Don’t do this to me, Lydia. Please. You know I can’t think rationally about anything else right now."

She nodded sympathetically but said, "I take it you’ve been monitoring this new disease? It’s not anecdotal static anymore; there are official reports coming out of Geneva, Atlanta, Nairobi."

My stomach tightened. "You mean Acute Clinical Anxiety Syndrome?"

"A.k.a. Distress." She seemed to savor the word, as if she’d already adopted it into her vocabulary of deeply telegenic subjects. My spirits sank even further.

I said, "My knowledge miners been logging everything on it, but I haven’t had time to stay up to date." And frankly, right now…

"There are over four hundred diagnosed cases, Andrew. That’s a thirty percent rise in the last six months."

"How can anyone diagnose something when they don’t have a clue what it is?"

"Process of elimination."

"Yeah, I think it’s bullshit, too."

She mimed brief sarcastic amusement. "Get serious. This is a brand new mental illness. Possibly communicable. Possibly caused by an escaped military pathogen—"

"Possibly fallen from a comet. Possibly a punishment from God. Amazing how many things are possible, isn’t it?"

She shrugged. "Whatever the cause, it’s spreading. There are cases everywhere now but Antarctica. This is headline news—and more. The board decided last night: we’re going to commission a thirty-minute special on Distress. High profile, blitz promotion, culminating in synchronous primetime broadcasts, worldwide."

Synchronous didn’t mean what it should have, in netspeak; it meant the same calendar date and local time for all viewers. "Worldwide? You mean Anglophone world?"

"I mean world world. We’re tying up arrangements to on-sell to other-language networks."

"Well… good."

Lydia smiled, a tight-lipped impatient smile. "Are you being coy, Andrew? Do I have to spell it out? We want you to make it. You’re our biotech specialist, you’re the logical choice. And you’ll do a great job. So…?"

I put a hand to my forehead, and tried to work out why I felt so claustrophobic. I said, "How long do I have, to decide?"

She smiled even more widely, which meant she was puzzled, annoyed, or both. "We’re broadcasting on May 24th—that’s ten weeks from Monday. You’ll need to start pre-production the minute Junk DNA is finished. So we need your answer as soon as possible."

Rule number four: Discuss everything with Gina first. Whether or not she’d ever admit to being offended if you didn’t.

I said, "Tomorrow morning."

Lydia wasn’t happy, but she said, "That’s fine."

I steeled myself. "If I say no, is there anything else going?"

Lydia looked openly astonished now. "What’s wrong with you? Prime-time world broadcast! You’ll make five rimes as much on this as on Gender."

"I realize that. And I’m grateful for the chance, believe me. I just want to know if there’s… any other choice."

"You could always go and hunt for coins on the beach with a metal detector." She saw my face, and softened. Slightly. "There’s another project about to go into pre-production. Although I’ve very nearly promised it to Sarah Knight."

"Tell me."

"Ever heard of Violet Mosala?"

"Of course. She’s a… physicist? A South African physicist?"

"Two out of two, very impressive. Sarah’s a huge fan, she chewed my ear off about her for an hour."

"So what’s the project?"

"A profile of Mosala… who’s twenty-seven, and won the Nobel Prize two years ago—but you knew that all along, didn’t you? Interviews, biography, appraisals by colleagues, blah blah blah. Her work’s purely theoretical, so there’s nothing much to show of it except computer simulations—and she’s offered us her own graphics. But the heart of the program will be the Einstein Centenary conference—"

"Wasn’t that in nineteen seventy-some thing?" Lydia gave me a withering look. I said, "Ah. Centenary of his death. Charming."

"Mosala is attending the conference. On the last day of which, three of the world’s top theoretical physicists are scheduled to present rival versions of the Theory of Everything. And you don’t get three guesses as to who’s the alpha favorite."

I gritted my teeth and suppressed the urge to say: It’s not a horse race, Lydia. It might be another fifty years before anyone knows whose TOE was right.

"So when’s the conference?"

"April 5th to 18th."

I blanched. "Three weeks from Monday."

Lydia looked thoughtful for a moment, then pleased. "You don’t really have time, do you? Sarah’s been prepared for this for months—"

I said irritably, "Five seconds ago you were talking about me starting pre-production on Distress in less than three weeks."

"You could walk straight into that. How much modern physics do you know?"

I feigned indignation. "Enough! And I’m not stupid. I can catch up."

"When?"

"I’ll make time. I’ll work faster; I’ll finish Junk DNA ahead of schedule. When’s the Mosala program going to be broadcast?"

"Early next year."

Which meant eight whole months of relative sanity—once the conference was over.

Lydia glanced at her watch, redundantly. "I don’t understand you. A high-profile special on Distress would be the logical endpoint of everything you’ve been doing for the last five years. After that, you could think about switching away from biotech. And who am I going to use instead of you?"

"Sarah Knight?"

"Don’t be sarcastic."

"I’ll tell her you said that."

"Be my guest. I don’t care what she’s done in politics; she’s only made one science program—and that was on fringe cosmology. It was good— but not good enough to ramp her straight into something like this. She’s earned a fortnight with Violet Mosala, but not a primetime broadcast on the world’s alphamost virus."

Nobody had found a virus associated with Distress; I hadn’t seen a news bulletin for a week, but my knowledge miner would have told me if there’d been a breakthrough of that magnitude. I was beginning to get the queasy feeling that if I didn’t make the program myself, it would be subtitled: How an escaped military pathogen became the 21st-century AIDS of the mind.

Pure vanity. What did I think—that I was the only person on the planet capable of deflating the rumors and hysteria surrounding Distress?

I said, "I haven’t made any decision yet. I need to talk it over with Gina."

Lydia was skeptical. "Okay, fine. Talk it over with Gina, and call me in the morning." She glanced at her watch again. "Look, I really have to go. Some of us actually have work to do." I opened my mouth to protest, outraged; she smiled sweetly and aimed two fingers at me. "Gotcha. No sense of irony, you auteurs. 'Bye."