by Greg Egan
The official label for the condition was Systemic Fibrotic Viral Scleroderma, but SFVS was unpronounceable, and apparently people’s eyes glazed over if news readers spelt out four whole letters. I used the new name like everyone else, but I never stopped loathing it. It was too fucking poetic by far.
When the Silver Fire virus infected fibroblasts in the subcutaneous connective tissue, it caused them to go into overdrive, manufacturing vast quantities of collagen – in a variant form transcribed from the normal gene but imperfectly assembled. This denatured protein formed solid plaques in the extracellular space, disrupting the nutrient flow to the dermis above and eventually becoming so bulky as to shear it off completely. Silver Fire flayed you from within. A good strategy for releasing large amounts of virus, maybe – though when it had stumbled on the trick, no one knew. The presumed animal host in which the parent strain lived, benignly or otherwise, was yet to be found.
If the lymph-glistening sickly white of naked collagen plaques was ‘silver’, the fever, the autoimmune response, and the sensation of being burned alive was ‘fire’. Mercifully, the pain couldn’t last long, either way. The standard First World palliative treatment included constant deep anaesthesia – and if you didn’t get that level of high-tech intervention, you went into shock, fast, and died.
Two years after the first outbreaks, the origin of the virus remained unknown, a vaccine was still a remote prospect and, though patients could be kept alive almost indefinitely, all attempts to effect a cure by purging the body of the virus and grafting cultured skin had failed.
Four hundred thousand people had been infected, worldwide; nine out of ten were dead. Ironically, rapid onset due to malnutrition had all but eliminated Silver Fire in the poorest nations; most outbreaks in Africa had burned themselves out on the spot. The US not only had more hospitalised victims on life support, per capita, than any other nation; it was heading for the top of the list in the rate of new cases.
A handshake or even a ride in a packed bus could transmit the virus – with a low probability for each contact event, but it added up. The only thing that helped in the medium term was isolating potential carriers, and to date it had seemed that no one could remain infectious and healthy for long. If the ‘trail’ Brecht’s computers had found was more than a statistical mirage, cutting it short might save dozens of lives – and understanding it might save thousands.
* * *
It was almost noon when the plane touched down at the Triad airport on the outskirts of Greensboro. There was a hire car waiting for me; I waved my notepad at the dashboard to transmit my profile, then waited as the seating and controls rearranged themselves slightly, piezoelectric actuators humming. As I started to reverse out of the parking bay, the stereo began a soothing improvisation, flashing up a deadpan title: Music for Leaving Airports on 11 June 2008.
I got a shock driving into town: there were dozens of large plots of tobacco visible from the road. The born-again weed was encroaching everywhere, and not even the suburbs were safe. The irony had become clichéd, but it was still something to witness the reality first-hand: even as nicotine was finally going the way of absinthe, more tobacco was being cultivated than ever before – because tobacco mosaic virus had turned out to be an extremely convenient and efficient vector for introducing new genes. The leaves of these plants would be loaded with pharmaceuticals or vaccine antigens – and worth twenty times as much as their unmodified ancestors at the height of demand.
My first appointment was still almost an hour away, so I drove around town in search of lunch. I’d been so wound up since Brecht’s call, I was surprised at just how good I felt to have arrived. Maybe it was no more than travelling south, with the sudden slight shift in the angle of the light – a kind of beneficent latitudinal equivalent of jet lag. Certainly, everything in downtown Greensboro appeared positively luminous after NYC, with modern buildings in pastel shades looking curiously harmonious beside the gleamingly preserved historic ones.
I ended up eating sandwiches in a small diner and going through my notes again, obsessively. It was seven years since I’d done anything like this for real, and I’d had little time to make the mental transition from theoretician back to practitioner.
There’d been four new cases of Silver Fire in Greensboro in the preceding fortnight. Health authorities everywhere had long ago given up trying to establish the path of infection for every last case; given the ease of transmission, and the inability to question the patients themselves, it was a massively labour-intensive process which yielded few tangible benefits. The most useful strategy wasn’t backtracking, but rather quarantining the family, workmates and other known contacts of each new case for about a week. Carriers were infectious for two or three days at the most before becoming – very obviously – sick themselves; you didn’t need to go looking for them. Brecht’s rainbow trail either meant an exception to this rule or a ripple of new cases propagating from town to town without any single carrier.
Greensboro’s population was about a quarter of a million, though it depended on exactly where you drew the boundaries. North Carolina had never gone in much for implosive urbanisation; growth in rural areas had actually outstripped growth in the major cities in recent years, and the microvillage movement had taken off here in a big way – at least as much as on the west coast.
I displayed a contoured population density map of the region on my notepad; even Raleigh, Charlotte and Greensboro were only modest elevations against the gently undulating background of the countryside, and only the Appalachians themselves cut a deep trench through this inverted topography. Hundreds of small new communities dotted the map, between the already numerous established towns. The microvillages weren’t literally self-sustaining, but they were definitely high-tech Green, with photovoltaics, small-scale local water treatment, and satellite links in lieu of connections to any centralised utilities. Most of their income came from cottage service industries: software, design, music, animation.
I switched on an overlay showing the estimated magnitude of population flows, on the timescale relevant to Silver Fire. The major roads and highways glowed white hot, and the small towns were linked into the skein by their own slender capillaries, but the microvillages all but vanished from the scene: everyone worked from home. So it wasn’t all that unlikely for a random Silver Fire outbreak to have spread straight down the interstate, rather than diffusing in a classic drunkard’s walk across this relatively populous landscape.
Still … the whole point of being here was to find out the one thing that none of the computer models could tell me: whether or not the assumptions they were based on were dangerously flawed.
* * *
I left the diner and set to work. The four cases came from four separate families; I was in for a long day.
All the people I interviewed were out of quarantine, but still suffering various degrees of shock. Silver Fire hit like an express train: there was no time to grasp what was happening before a perfectly healthy child or parent, spouse or lover, all but died in front of your eyes. The last thing you needed was a two-hour interrogation by a total stranger.
It was dusk by the time I reached the last family, and any joy I’d felt at being back in the field had long since worn off. I sat in the car for a minute, staring at the immaculate garden and lace curtains, listening to the crickets, wishing I didn’t have to go in and face these people.
Diane Clayton taught high-school mathematics; her husband, Ed, was an engineer, working night shifts for the local power company. They had a thirteen-year-old daughter, Cheryl. Mike, eighteen, was in the hospital.
I sat with the three of them, but it was Ms Clayton who did most of the talking. She was scrupulously patient and courteous with me, but after a while it became clear that she was still in a kind of daze. She answered every question slowly and thoughtfully, but I had no idea if she really knew what she was saying, or whether she was just going through the motions on autopilot.
Mike
’s father wasn’t much help, since the shiftwork had kept him out of synch with the rest of the family. I tried increasing eye contact with Cheryl, encouraging her to speak. It was absurd, but I felt guilty even as I did it – as if I’d come here to sell the family some junk product, and now I was trying to bypass parental resistance.
‘So … Tuesday night he definitely stayed home?’ I was filling in a chart of Mike Clayton’s movements for the week before symptoms appeared – hour-by-hour. It was a fastidious, nit-picking Gestapo routine that made the old days of merely asking for a list of sexual partners and fluids exchanged seem positively idyllic.
‘Yes, that’s right.’ Diane Clayton screwed her eyes shut and ran through her memories of the night again. ‘I watched some television with Cheryl, then went to bed around … eleven. Mike must have been in his room all the time.’ He’d been on vacation from UNC Greensboro, with no reason to spend his evenings studying, but he might have been socialising electronically, or watching a movie.
Cheryl glanced at me uncertainly, then said shyly, ‘I think he went out.’
Her mother turned to her, frowning. ‘Tuesday night? No!’
I asked Cheryl, ‘Do you have any idea where?’
‘Some nightclub, I think.’
‘He said that?’
She shrugged. ‘He was dressed for it.’
‘But he didn’t say where?’
‘No.’
‘Could it have been somewhere else? A friend’s place? A party?’ My information was that no nightclubs in Greensboro were open on Tuesdays.
Cheryl thought it over. ‘He said he was going dancing. That’s all he said.’
I turned back to Diane Clayton; she was clearly upset at being cut out of the discussion. ‘Do you know who he might have gone with?’
If Mike was in a steady relationship he hadn’t mentioned the fact, but she gave me the names of three old school friends. She kept apologising to me for her ‘negligence’.
I said, ‘It’s all right. Really. No one can remember every last detail.’
She was still distraught when I left, an hour later. Her son going out without telling her – or the fact that he’d told her, and it had slipped her mind – was now (somehow) the reason for the whole tragedy.
I felt partly to blame for her distress, though I didn’t see how I could have handled things any differently. The hospital would have offered her expert counselling – that wasn’t my job at all. And there was sure to be more of the same ahead; if I started taking it personally, I’d be a wreck in a matter of days.
I managed to track down all three friends before eleven – about the latest I dared call anyone – but none of them had been with Mike on Tuesday night, or had any idea where he’d been. They helped me cross-check some other details, though. I ended up sitting in the car making calls for almost two hours.
Maybe there’d been a party, maybe there hadn’t. Maybe it had been a pretext for something else; the possibilities were endless. Blank spots on the charts were a matter of course; I could have spent a month in Greensboro trying to fill them all in, without success. If the hypothetical carrier had been at this hypothetical party (and the other three members of the Greensboro Four definitely hadn’t – they were all accounted for on the night), I’d just have to pick up the trail further on.
I checked into a motel and lay awake for a while, listening to the traffic on the interstate; thinking of Alex and Laura – and trying to imagine the unimaginable.
But it couldn’t happen to them. They were mine. I’d protect them.
How? By moving to Antarctica?
Silver Fire was rarer than cancer, rarer than heart disease, rarer than death by automobile. Rarer than gunshot wounds, in some cities. But there was no strategy for avoiding it – short of complete physical isolation.
And Diane Clayton was now torturing herself for failing to keep her eighteen-year-old son locked up for the summer vacation. Asking herself, over and over: What did I do wrong? Why did this happen? What am I being punished for?
I should have taken her aside, looked her squarely in the eye, and reminded her: ‘This is not your fault! There’s nothing you could have done to prevent it!’
I should have said: It just happened. People suffer like this for no reason. There is no sense to be made of your son’s ruined life. There is no meaning to be found here. Just a random dance of molecules.
* * *
I woke early and skipped breakfast; I was on the I-40, heading west, by seven-thirty. I drove straight past Winston-Salem; a couple of people had been infected there recently, but not recently enough to be part of the trail.
Sleep had taken the edge off my pessimism. The morning was cool and clear, and the countryside was stunning – or at least, it was where it hadn’t been turned over to monotonous biotech crops, or worse: golf courses.
Still, some things had definitely changed for the better. It was on the I-40, more than twenty years before, that I’d first heard a radio evangelist preaching the eighties’ gospel of hate: AIDS as God’s instrument, HIV as the righteous virus sent down from Heaven to smite adulterers, junkies and faggots. (I’d been young and hot-headed, then; I’d pulled off at the next exit, phoned the radio station, and heaped abuse on some poor receptionist.) But proponents of this subtle theology had fallen curiously silent ever since an immortalised cell line derived from the bone marrow of a Kenyan prostitute had proved more than a match for the omnipotent deity’s secret weapon. And if Christian fundamentalism wasn’t exactly dead and buried, its power base had certainly gone into decline; the kind of ignorance and insularity it relied upon seemed to be becoming almost impossible to sustain against the tide of information.
Local audio had long since shifted to the net, of course, evangelists and all; the old frequencies had fallen silent. And I was out of range of cellular contact with the beast with 20,000 channels, but the car did have a satellite link. I switched on my notepad, hoping for some light relief.
I’d programmed Ariadne, my knowledge miner, to scan all available media outlets for references to Silver Fire. Maybe it was sheer masochism, but there was something perversely fascinating about the distorted shadow the real pandemic cast in the shallows of media space: rumours and misinformation, hysteria, exploitation.
The tabloid angles, as always, were predictably inane: Silver Fire was a disease from space / the inevitable result of fluoridation / the reason half a dozen celebrities had disappeared from the public gaze. Three false modes of transmission were on offer: today it was tampons, Mexican orange juice, and mosquitoes (again). Several young victims with attractive ‘before’ shots and family members willing to break down on camera had been duly rounded up. New century, same old foxshit.
The most bizarre item in Ariadne’s latest sweep wasn’t classic tabloid at all, though. It was an interview on a program called The Terminal Chat Show (23.00 GMT, Thursdays, on Britain’s Channel 4) with a Canadian academic, James Springer, who was touring the UK (in the flesh) to promote his new hypertext, The Cyber Sutras.
Springer was a balding, middle-aged, avuncular man. He was introduced as Associate Professor of Theory at McGill University; apparently only the hopelessly reductionist asked: ‘Theory of what?’ His area of expertise was described as ‘computers and spirituality’ – but, for reasons I couldn’t quite fathom, his opinion was sought on Silver Fire.
‘The crucial thing,’ he insisted smoothly, ‘is that Silver Fire is the very first plague of the Information Age. AIDS was certainly post-industrial and post-modernist, but its onset predated the emergence of true Information Age cultural sensibilities. AIDS, for me, embodied the whole negative Zeitgeist of Western materialism confronting its inevitable fin-de-siècle crisis of confidence, but with Silver Fire I think we’re free to embrace far more positive metaphors for this so-called ‘‘disease’’.’
The interviewer enquired warily, ‘So … you’re hopeful that Silver Fire victims will be spared the stigmatisation and hysteria that acc
ompanied AIDS?’
Springer nodded cheerfully. ‘Of course! We’ve made enormous strides forward in cultural analysis since those days! I mean, if Burroughs’ Cities of the Red Night had only penetrated the collective subconscious more fully when it appeared, the whole course of the AIDS plague might have been radically different – and that’s a hot topic in Uchronic Studies, which one of my doctoral students is currently pursuing. But there’s no doubt that Information Age cultural forms have fully prepared us for Silver Fire. When I look at global techno-anarchist raves, trading-card tattoo body comics, and affordable desktop implementations of the Dalai Lama … it’s clear to me that Silver Fire is a sequence of RNA whose time has come. If it didn’t exist, we’d have to synthesise it!’
* * *
My next stop was a town called Statesville. A brother and sister in their late teens, Ben and Lisa Walker, and the sister’s boyfriend, Paul Scott, were in hospital in Winston-Salem. The families had only just returned home.
Lisa and Ben had been living with their widower father and a nine-year-old brother. Lisa had worked in a local store, alongside the owner, who’d remained symptom-free. Ben had worked in a vaccine-extraction plant, and Paul Scott had been unemployed, living with his mother. Lisa seemed the most likely of the three to have become infected first; in theory, all it took was an accidental brush of skin against skin as a credit card changed hands – albeit with only a 1-in-100 chance of transmission. In the larger cities, some people who dealt with the public in the flesh had taken to wearing gloves, and some (arguably paranoid) subway commuters covered every square centimetre of skin below the neck, even in midsummer, but the absolute risk was so small that few strategies like this had become widespread.