Quarantine

by Greg Egan

  When it happened, it looked as miraculous, as improbable, as something from a time-reversed movie: everything magically fitting together, like the fragments of a broken vase. Everything except one locking pin, out by some ludicrous fraction of a millimetre, stuck against the side of its hole while all the others continued to slide home. I could picture them all retracting again, the instant some idiot microprocessor gave up hope on that one jammed pin.

  I kicked it as hard as I could. It slipped into place. Primed or not, I felt a moment of dizzy jubilation. I ducked between the cables and jumped back across the aisle as the crane's lifting motors burst noisily into life. Then I clambered down the ladder and ran.

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  The container rose smoothly; the MA52, still two-thirds inside, had no choice but to rise with it. As its treads approached the height of the roof of the container which had blocked its way, I could almost imagine it making a leap for freedom - but the gap was too wide. The robot ascended helplessly to the ceiling, fifty metres above.

  I could hear sirens approaching; our reinforcements were about to arrive. I met up with Vincent at the warehouse entrance.

  I said, 'Now we wait for the army to come and blast the fucker into shrapnel.'

  Vincent shook his head. 'No need.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'The safety features of this system,' he said, 'leave a lot to be desired.' He dropped it.

  Later, weapons were found in the debris which could have demolished a suburb or two - and it was only the Children's incompetence which had kept that from happening: it turned out that they'd corrupted the security system of the wrong warehouse. If there'd been no early warning, the whole thing would have ended with the army having to take on the MA52 in the streets. In three African cities, that was exactly what had happened, with heavy loss of life. Elsewhere, of course, there'd been the usual bombings: everything from incendiary devices to chemical shells spreading neurotoxins. I didn't want to know about it; I glanced at the headlines then flipped screens, unwilling to swallow so soon the truth of how microscopic our victory had been.

  Despite having been merely lucky, Vincent and I were, predictably, portrayed as heroes. I didn't mind - it meant that I was now virtually guaranteed promotion to the counter-terrorist unit. The media attention was tiresome, but I gritted my teeth and waited for it to pass. Karen resented the whole thing, and I couldn't blame her; none of our friends seemed to want to talk about anything else, and she must have been as sick of hearing the story as I was of telling it.

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  Still worse, Karen's well-meaning brother dropped in one Sunday afternoon with recordings of every interview I'd given - primed, as the Department insisted - which we'd taken great pains to avoid when they'd been broadcast. We had to sit through them all. Karen loathed seeing me primed, almost as much as I did myself. "The zombie boy scout' she called me, and I couldn't disagree; the cop with my face on the HV was so bland, so earnest, so blinkered, so fucking sensible, it made me want to gag. (There may be people born that way, but not many, and you pity them.)

  Every cop has no less than six standard 'priming mods', PI to P6, but it's P3 which imposes the mental state appropriate for active duty, it's P3 which really makes you primed. It had always been clear to me that what P3 did was cripple the brain -efficiently, reversibly, and to great advantage, but there was no point being squeamish or euphemistic about it. The priming mods made better cops, the priming mods saved lives - and the priming mods made us, temporarily, less than human. I could live with that, so long as I didn't have my nose rubbed in it too often. The 'priming drugs' of the bad old days - a crude, purely pharmaceutical attempt to suppress emotional responses, heighten sensory awareness and minimize reaction times - had caused a number of side-effects, including unpredictable transitions between the primed and unprimed states, but the arrival of neural mods had banished all such complications. The partitioning of my life was simple, clear-cut, absolute: on duty, I was primed; off duty, I wasn't. There was no possibility of ambiguity, no question of one side contaminating the other.

  Karen had no professional mods; doctors, the eternal conservatives, still frowned upon the technology - but differential malpractice insurance premiums, amongst other things, were gradually eroding their resistance.

  On December 2nd, I learnt that my promotion had come through - a few hours before I read about it in the evening news. That was a Friday; on the Saturday, Karen

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  and I, and Vincent and his wife Maria, went out to dinner together to celebrate. Vincent had also been offered a position in the unit, but he'd declined.

  'Bad career move,' I said, only half teasing. We'd scarcely had a chance to discuss it before; primed, such topics were unmentionable. 'Counter-terrorism is a growth sector. Ten years in this unit, and I can quit the force and become an obscenely overpaid consultant to multinationals.'

  He gave me an odd look, and said, Ί guess I'm just not that ambitious.' And then he took Maria's hand, and squeezed it. It was hardly an extravagant gesture, but I couldn't get it out of my mind.

  I woke in the early hours of Sunday morning, and I couldn't get back to sleep. I climbed out of bed; Karen could always sense my wakefulness, and it always seemed to disturb her far more than my absence. I sat in the kitchen, trying to come to a decision, but only growing more angry and confused. I hated myself, because I hadn't once stopped to think that I might be putting her at risk. We should have talked it through, before I'd accepted the promotion - and yet the very idea of any such discussion seemed obscene. How could I ask her? How could I acknowledge the slightest real danger and admit in the same breath that, with her permission, yes, I'd still go ahead and take the job? And if, instead, I simply changed my mind and turned it down without consulting her, in the end she'd drag the reason out of me - and she'd never forgive me for having excluded her from the decision.

  I walked over to a window and looked out at the brightly lit street; ever since The Bubble, it seemed to me, streetlights had been growing more powerful year by year. Two cyclists rode by. The window pane shattered outwards, and I followed the shards through the empty frame.

  Unbidden, the priming mods snapped into life. I curled up and rolled as I hit the ground; P4 saw to that. I lay on the grass for a second or two, bleeding and

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  winded. I could hear the flames behind me, I could feel my heart accelerate and my skin grow cold as PI shut down peripheral circulation - a controlled version of the natural adrenalin response - but I was insulated from my body's agitation, I had no choice but to remain calmly analytic. I got to my feet and turned around to assess the situation. Tiles from the roof were scattered on the lawn; the bomb must have been in the ceiling, close to the back of the house, probably right above the bedroom. I could see patches of a bubbling, gelatinous substance sliding down the remnants of the inside walls, carrying with it sheets of blue flame.

  I knew that Karen was dead. Not injured, not in danger. With nothing to shield her from the blast, she would have died instantly.

  I've thought about it a great deal since, and I always reach the same conclusion: any ordinary person in the same situation would have run back in, would have risked their life - in shock, confused, disbelieving, would have done the most dangerous and futile thing imaginable.

  But the zombie boy scout knew there was nothing he could do, so he just turned and walked away.

  And, knowing the dead were beyond his help, he turned his attention to the needs of the survivor.

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  3

  I try, and fail, to think of a single, compelling reason why the Children can't be involved. Abducting braindamaged mental patients conceived on Bubble Day may not be something they've done before, but no doubt there's a dearth of suitable candidates - and, short of an actual precedent, the whole absurd crime does have an undeniable Child-like ring to it. It's also true that the Children aren't known to have been active in New Hong Kong, but that doesn't mean that they don't
have a cell here, a safe house somewhere in the city. As few as four or five people could have smuggled Laura in.

  I pace the room, trying to stay calm. I feel more indignation than fear - as if my client should have known about this and warned me from the start. That's absurd, but the fact remains: I'm not being paid enough to fuck with terrorists, least of all the Children. They may not have deigned to make a second attempt on my life - a policy they seem to apply to all chance survivors, as if refusing to acknowledge failure - but I have no intention of reminding them of my existence, let alone providing them with a whole new reason to put me back on their hit list.

  I call the airport; there's a flight out at six. I book a seat. I pack. It all takes a matter of minutes. Then I sit on the bed, staring at my suitcase - and gradually I start to regain a sense of perspective.

  So, Laura was conceived on - or close to - Bubble Day. But is that information, or noise? Law enforcement bodies around the world have programmed computers to tirelessly pursue the Children's obsessions - dates, numerology, heavenly conjunctions, ad nauseam - and the results have always been the same: overflowing files full of spurious correlations and meaningless

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  coincidences; terabytes of junk. One way or another, about twenty per cent of everything can be made to look potentially significant to the Children. The fraction of this that's genuine is infinitesimal; in practice, the method is about as useful as considering everyone with eyes the same colour as Marcus Duprey's to be a suspected terrorist.

  No doubt any member of the Children, if told of Laura's date of conception, would ascribe a great significance to her abduction -but to treat that as proof of their involvement is ludicrous. The question is not: what does this signify to the Children? For the Children to have played a part in every single crime, worldwide, in which they would discern some cosmic portent, Duprey's following would need to have been underestimated by a factor of about a million.

  Running away would be pathetic.

  Still. I have nothing to lose but money. I could err on the side of caution, I could drop the case, regardless. Yeah, and I could join the ranks of people so cowed by the Children's atrocities that they hunt obsessively through the patterns of their lives in search of danger signs, and lock themselves in their homes on every anniversary of every petty stage of Duprey's lukewarm bloodless martyrdom, observing the holy days of their own religion of fear.

  I unpack.

  It's almost sunrise. Lack of sleep, as it often does, has left me with a peculiar feeling of clarity, a sense of having broken free of the mind's ordinary cycle, of having reached a profound new relationship with the world. I invoke Boss to force my endocrine system back into phase, and the delusion soon evaporates.

  Compared to lightning-bolt revelations of terrorist involvement, the information I've assembled so far looks hopelessly ambiguous. But I have to start somewhere -and Biomedical Development International is the only company on the list without a blatantly innocent reason to be buying the cluster of drugs that Laura needs. And if

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  BDI has no shareholders to impress, and hacking is too risky, I'm going to have to use more direct means to find out exactly what it is that they're researching.

  I take a small box from my suitcase, and open it gently. Nestled in tissue paper, a mosquito is sleeping.

  I lack the specialist mod used to program the insect, but a second compartment of the box contains a ROM, bearing old-style sequential software which will let me do the job, albeit more slowly. I lift out the chip, and switch it on. It glows invisibly in modulated infrared, and the bioengineered IR transceiver cells, scattered throughout the skin of my hands and face, collect and demodulate the signal. RedNet (NeuroComm, $1,499) receives the nerve impulses from these cells, and decodes and buffers the data.

  I pass the program to von Neumann (Continental BioLogic, $3,150). Simulating a general-purpose computer isn't something a neural network does with great efficiency - hence the need for specialized mods, physically optimized for their tasks, instead of a single, programmable 'computer-in-the-skuH'. But nobody can afford to buy every mod on the market - and you'd probably impair normal brain function if you commandeered that many neurons. So, quaint as it may be, sometimes loading a ROM full of sequential software is the only practical solution.

  Culex explorator is purely organic, but heavily modified, both genetically and post-developmentally; most of the genetic tampering is simply to give the mature insect enough neurons for the nanomachines to rewire - plus its own IR transceivers, of course. I select the behavioural parameters I want from the menus in my head, wait five minutes while the program encodes them into the language of the mosquito's neural schemata, then cup my hand over the box for maximum signal strength and ram my decisions into the insect's tiny brain. There are endless layers of error checking in the RedNet protocol, but I run a full read-back of the data anyway, which confirms success.

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  On my way to the underground, the streets are already far from empty. Food vendors stand by steaming barrows, and customers flock to them, ignoring the seductively photographed - but olfactorily barren - holographic temptations of dispensing machines. I buy a bag of noodles and eat as I walk. Sharply dressed executives, bankers and databrokers stride past me; people who could easily work from their homes, who could operate entirely within their own skulls - and even, with the help of mods, choose to enjoy it. It's hard to admit that the sight of these umbrella-wielding infocrats hurrying by, radiating self-importance, strikes me as some kind of affirmation of the human spirit. The light suddenly dims, and I look up to see two layers of churning grey cloud racing each other across the sky. Seconds later, I'm drenched.

  The R&D heart of New Hong Kong lies twenty kilometres to the west of the city centre. I emerge from the underground into an almost deserted world of sprawling concrete buildings set in lawns so perfect that if they're real, they might as well not be. The sense of space here seems almost scandalous after the city's crowds and towers; many of the labs and factories are fifteen or twenty storeys high, but the streets are wide enough, the grounds sufficiently spacious, to keep the architecture from crowding out the sky - mercurially, already blue again from horizon to horizon.

  I pause to shake Culex out of its box onto my palm; it clings to the skin. I hold it up to my eyes; I can just make out the tiny specks of the twelve data chameleons adhering to the sides of the thorax. I curl my fingers into a loose fist before setting off again. It takes a certain effort to adopt a casual gait with twenty thousand dollars' worth of counter-security equipment in the palm of your hand.

  The maze-like region to the north of the underground bears all the hallmarks of having once consisted of a number of distinct, self-consciously constructed 'science parks', which have since overflowed into the space between. Each must have had its own orderly - if bizarre -

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  avant-garde street plan, with its own peculiar symmetries and hierarchies, and each has had some degree of success in propagating the pattern beyond its original boundaries, but where two or more incompatible designs have come into conflict, the result can only be described as pathological. BDI itself lies at the end of a cul-de-sac - which precludes a nonchalant stroll past the front entrance - but the whole area is such a capillaceous mass of tiny streets on disconnected branches that I should be able to get close enough to the rear of the building while seeming to be headed somewhere else entirely.

  The streets are quiet; I can even hear birdsong. One passing cyclist gives me a puzzled second glance; there seem to be no other pedestrians about, and I feel, prematurely, like a trespasser. These may be public streets, but they all lead to a small number of private destinations. In the unhkely event that someone stops to offer me directions, I'll just have to do my best lost-idiot-tourist act.

  Finally, I catch sight of what I hope is BDI, an off-white concrete shoe box a hundred metres away, visible through the gap between Transgenic Ecocontrol and Industrial Morphogene
sis. I can't actually see any identifying sign or logo from this angle, but I double-check against the street map in my head, and there's no doubt that I have the right building.

  I catch myself thinking: an unlikely front for the Children of the Abyss . . . and I laugh aloud at this 'reassuring' observation. The Children are not involved -and I don't need to look for excuses to believe that. The biggest 'risk' I face from BDI is that they'll turn out to have nothing to do with the kidnapping at all.

  I paste a copy of my visual field into the image buffer of the Culex program. I mark the building clearly, and then pulse this final message to the insect itself. I raise my hand and open my palm; the mosquito rises at once, circles above me a couple of times, and then vanishes.

  I spend most of the day examining the information that's

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  publicly available about BDI's owner, Wei Pai-ling. I dutifully plough through twenty-five years of news-system coverage - he averages about six articles a year - but I find nothing remarkable. The only report that's not strictly business news is the opening of a new wing of the NHK Science Museum; Wei led the consortium which raised the funds, and the article quotes from his platitudinous speech: Our children's future relies on stimulating their intellects and imaginations from the earliest age . . .'

  It strikes me that Wei has no visible interest in any company old enough to be the cause of Laura's condition; he's only in his early fifties, and he seems to have preferred founding new businesses to indulging in takeovers. Of course, that proves nothing about BDI's clients.