I never discovered why that wasn’t to be. Technical problems in ensuring that no embarrassing side effects would show up downriver in the sacred Amazon itself, wiping out some telegenic endangered species before the end of the present administration? Concern that some Middle Eastern warlord might somehow construe the act as license to use his own feeble, long-hoarded fission weapons on a troublesome minority, destabilizing the region in an undesirable manner? Fear of Japanese trade sanctions, now that the rabidly anti-nuclear Eco-Marketeers were back in power?
I wasn’t shown the verdicts of the geopolitical computer models; I simply received my orders—coded into the flicker of my local K-Mart’s fluorescent tubes, slipped in between the updates to the shelf price tags. Deciphered by an extra neural layer in my left retina, the words appeared blood red against the bland cheery colours of the supermarket aisle. I was to enter El Nido and retrieve Guillermo Largo. Alive.
Dressed like a local real-estate agent—right down to the gold-plated bracelet-phone, and the worst of all possible $300 haircuts—I visited Largo’s abandoned home in Bethesda: a northern suburb of Washington, just over the border into Maryland. The apartment was modern and spacious, neatly furnished but not opulent—about what any good marketing software might have tried to sell him, on the basis of salary less alimony.
Largo had always been classified as brilliant but unsound—a potential security risk, but far too talented and productive to be wasted. He’d been under routine surveillance ever since the gloriously euphemistic Department of Energy had employed him, straight out of Harvard, back in 2005—clearly, too routine by far . . . but then, I could understand how 30 years with an unblemished record must have given rise to a degree of complacency. Largo had never attempted to disguise his politics—apart from exercising the kind of discretion that was more a matter of etiquette than subterfuge; no Che Guevara T-shirts when visiting Los Alamos—but he’d never really acted on his beliefs, either.
A mural had been jet-sprayed onto his living room wall in shades of near infrared (visible to most hip 14-year-old Washingtonians, if not to their parents). It was a copy of the infamous Lee Hing-cheung’s A Tiling of the Plane with Heroes of the New World Order, a digital image which had spread across computer networks at the turn of the century. Early ’90s political leaders, naked and interlocked—Escher meets the Kama Sutra—deposited steaming turds into each other’s open and otherwise empty braincases—an effect borrowed from the works of the German satirist George Grosz. The Iraqi dictator was shown admiring his reflection in a hand mirror—the image an exact reproduction of a contemporary magazine cover in which the moustache had been retouched to render it suitably Hitleresque. The U.S. President carried—horizontally, but poised ready to be tilted—an egg-timer full of the gaunt hostages whose release he’d delayed to clinch his predecessor’s election victory. Everyone was shoe-horned in, somewhere—right down to the Australian Prime Minister, portrayed as a public louse, struggling (and failing) to fit its tiny jaws around the mighty presidential cock. I could imagine a few of the neo-McCarthyist troglodytes in the Senate going apoplectic, if anything so tedious as an inquiry into Largo’s defection ever took place—but what should we have done? Refused to hire him if he owned so much as a Guernica tea towel?
Largo had blanked every computer in the apartment before leaving, including the entertainment system—but I already knew his taste in music, having listened to a few hours of audio surveillance samples full of bad Korean Ska. No laudable revolutionary ethno-solidarity, no haunting Andean pipe music; a shame—I would have much preferred that. His bookshelves retained for sentimental reasons, and a few dozen musty literary classics and volumes of poetry, in English, Spanish and German. Hesse, Rilke, Vallejo, Conrad, Nietzsche. Nothing modern—and nothing printed after 2010. With a few words to the household manager, Largo had erased every digital work he’d ever owned, sweeping away the last quarter of a century of his personal archaeology.
I flipped through the surviving books, for what it was worth. There was a penciled-in correction to the structure of guanine in one of the texts . . . and a section had been underlined in Heart of Darkness. The narrator, Marlow, was pondering the mysterious fact that the servants on the steamboat—members of a cannibal tribe, whose provisions of rotting hippo meat had been tossed overboard—hadn’t yet rebelled and eaten him. After all:
No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out, disgust simply does not exist where hunger is; and as to superstition, beliefs, and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze.
I couldn’t argue with that—but I wondered why Largo had found the passage noteworthy. Perhaps it had struck a chord, back in the days when he’d been trying to rationalize taking his first research grants from the Pentagon? The ink was faded—and the volume itself had been printed in 2003. I would rather have had copies of his diary entries for the fortnight leading up to his disappearance—but his household computers hadn’t been systematically tapped for almost 20 years.
I sat at the desk in his study, and stared at the blank screen of his work station. Largo had been born into a middle-class, nominally Catholic, very mildly leftist family in Lima in 1980. His father, a journalist with El Comercio, had died from a cerebral blood clot in 2029. His 78-year-old mother still worked as an attorney for an international mining company—going through the motions of habeas corpus for the families of disappeared radicals in her spare time, a hobby her employers tolerated for the sake of cheap PR brownie points in the shareholder democracies. Guillermo had one elder brother, a retired surgeon, and one younger sister, a primary-school teacher, neither of them politically active.
Most of his education had taken place in Switzerland and the States; after his PhD, he’d held a succession of research posts in government institutes, the biotechnology industry, and academia—all with more or less the same real sponsors. Fifty-five, now, thrice divorced but still childless, he’d only ever returned to Lima for brief family visits.
After three decades working on the military applications of molecular genetics—unwittingly at first, but not for long—what could have triggered his sudden defection to El Nido? If he’d managed the cynical doublethink of reconciling defense research and pious liberal sentiments for so long, he must have got it down to a fine art. His latest psychological profile suggested as much: fierce pride in his scientific achievements balanced the self-loathing he felt when contemplating their ultimate purpose—with the conflict showing signs of decaying into comfortable indifference. A well-documented dynamic in the industry.
And he seemed to have acknowledged—deep in his heart, 30 years ago—that his “principles” were less than chaff in a breeze.
Perhaps he’d decided, belatedly, that if he was going to be a whore he might as well do it properly, and sell his skills to the highest bidder—even if that meant smuggling genetic weapons to a drugs cartel. I’d read his financial records, though: no tax fraud, no gambling debts, no evidence that he’d ever lived beyond his means. Betraying his employers, just as he’d betrayed his own youthful ideals to join them, might have seemed like an appropriately nihilistic gesture . . . but on a more pragmatic level, it was hard to imagine him finding the money, and the consequences, all that tempting. What could El Nido have offered him? A numbered satellite account and a new identity in Paraguay? All the squalid pleasures of life on the fringes of the Third World plutocracy? He would have had everything to gain by living out his retirement in his adopted country, salving his conscience with one or two vitrolic essays on foreign policy in some unread left-wing netzine—and then finally convincing himself that any nation which granted him such unencumbered rights of free speech probably deserved everything he’d done to defend it.
Exactly what he had done to defend it, though—what tools he’d perfected, and stolen—I was not permitted to know.
###
As dusk fell, I locked the apartment and headed south down Wisconsin Avenue. Washington was coming a
live, the streets already teeming with people looking for distraction from the heat. Nights in the cities were becoming hallucinatory. Teenagers sported bioluminescent symbionts, the veins in their temples, necks and pumped-up forearm muscles glowing electric blue, walking circulation diagrams who cultivated hypertension to improve the effect. Others used retinal symbionts to translate IR into visible light, their eyes flashing vampire red in the shadows.
And others, less visibly, had a skull full of White Knights.
Stem cells in the bone marrow infected with Mother—an engineered retrovirus—gave rise to something halfway between an embryonic neutron and a white blood cell. White Knights secreted the cytokines necessary to unlock the blood-brain barrier—and once through, cellular adhesion molecules guided them to their targets, where they could flood the site with a chosen neurotransmitter—or even form temporary quasi-synapses with genuine neurons. Users often had half a dozen or more sub-types in their bloodstream simultaneously, each one activated by a specific dietary additive: some cheap, harmless, and perfectly legitimate chemical not naturally present in the body. By ingesting the right mixture of innocuous artificial colorings, flavors and preservatives, they could modulate their neurochemistry in almost any fashion—until the White Knights died, as they were programmed to do, and a new dose of Mother was required.
Mother could be snorted, or taken intravenously . . . but the most efficient way to use it was to puncture a bone and inject it straight into the marrow—an excruciating, messy, dangerous business, even if the virus itself was uncontaminated and authentic. The good stuff came from El Nido. The bad stuff came from basement labs in California and Texas, where gene hackers tried to force cell cultures infected with Mother to reproduce a virus expressly designed to resist their efforts—and churned out batches of mutant strains ideal for inducing leukemia, astrocytomas, Parkinson’s disease, and assorted novel psychoses.
Crossing the sweltering dark city, watching the heedlessly joyful crowds, I felt a penetrating, dreamlike clarity come over me. Part of me was numb, leaden, blank—but part of me was electrified, all-seeing. I seemed to be able to stare into the hidden landscapes of the people around me, to see deeper than the luminous rivers of blood; to pierce them with my vision right to the bone.
Right to the marrow.
I drove to the edge of a park I’d visited once before, and waited. I was already dressed for the part. Young people strode by, grinning, some glancing at the silver 2025 Ford Narcissus and whistling appreciatively. A teenaged boy danced on the grass, alone, tirelessly—blissed out on Coca Cola, and not even getting paid to fake it.
Before too long, a girl approached the car, blue veins flashing on her bare arms. She leant down to the window and looked in, inquiringly.
“What you got?” She was 16 or 17, slender, dark-eyed, coffee-colored, with a faint Latino accent. She could have been my sister.
“Southern Rainbow.” All twelve major genotypes of Mother, straight from El Nido, cut with nothing but glucose. Southern Rainbow—and a little fast food—could take you anywhere.
The girl eyed me skeptically, and stretched out her right hand, palm down. She wore a ring with a large multifaceted jewel, with a pit in the centre. I took a sachet from the glove compartment, shook it, tore it open, and tipped a few specks of powder into the pit. Then I leant over and moistened the sample with saliva, holding her cool fingers to steady her hand. Twelve faces of the “stone” began to glow immediately, each one in a different colour. The immunoelectric sensors in the pit, tiny capacitors coated with antibodies, were designed to recognize several sites on the protein coats of the different strains of Mother—particularly the ones the bootleggers had the most trouble getting right.
With good enough technology, though, those proteins didn’t have to bear the slightest relationship to the RNA inside.
The girl seemed to be impressed; her face lit up with anticipation. We negotiated a price. Too low by far; she should have been suspicious.
I looked her in the eye before handing over the sachet.
I said, “What do you need this shit for? The world is the world. You have to take it as it is. Accept it as it is: savage and terrible. Be strong. Never lie to yourself. That’s the only way to survive.”
She smirked at my apparent hypocrisy, but she was too pleased with her luck to turn nasty. “I hear what you’re saying. It’s a bad planet out there.” She forced the money into my hand, adding, with wide-eyed mock sincerity, “And this is the last time I do Mother, I promise.”
I gave her the lethal virus, and watched her walk away across the grass and vanish into the shadows.
###
The Colombian air force pilot who flew me down from Bogota didn’t seem too thrilled to be risking his life for a DEA bureaucrat. It was 700 kilometres to the border, and five different guerrilla organizations held territory along the way: not a lot of towns, but several hundred possible sites for rocket launchers.
“My great-grandfather,” he said sourly, “died in fucking Korea fighting for General Douglas fucking MacArthur.” I wasn’t sure if that was meant to be a declaration of pride, or an intimation of an outstanding debt. Both, probably.
The helicopter was eerily silent, fitted out with phased sound absorbers, which looked like giant loudspeakers but swallowed most of the noise of the blades. The carbon-fiber fuselage was coated with an expensive network of chameleon polymers—although it might have been just as effective to paint the whole thing sky blue. An endothermic chemical mixture accumulated waste heat from the motor, and then discharged it through a parabolic radiator as a tightly focused skywards burst, every hour or so. The guerrillas had no access to satellite images, and no radar they dared use; I decided that we had less chance of dying than the average Bogota commuter. Back in the capital, buses had been exploding without warning, two or three times a week.
Colombia was tearing itself apart; La Violencia of the 1950s all over again. Although all of the spectacular terrorist sabotage was being carried out by organized guerrilla groups, most of the deaths so far had been caused by factions within the two mainstream political parties butchering each other’s supporters, avenging a litany of past atrocities which stretched back for generations. The group who’d actually started the current wave of bloodshed had negligible support; Ejército de Simón Bolivar were lunatic right-wing extremists who wanted to “reunite” with Panama, Venezuela, and Ecuador—after two centuries of separation—and drag in Peru and Bolivia to realize Bolivar’s dream of Gran Colombia. By assassinating President Marin, though, they’d triggered a cascade of events which had nothing to do with their ludicrous cause. Strikes and protests, street battles, curfews, martial law. The repatriation of foreign capital by nervous investors, followed by hyperinflation, and the collapse of the local financial system. Then a spiral of opportunistic violence. Everyone, from the paramilitary death squads to the Maoist splinter groups, seemed to believe that their hour had finally come.
I hadn’t seen so much as a bullet fired—but from the moment I’d entered the country, there’d been acid churning in my guts, and a heady, ceaseless adrenaline rush coursing through my veins. I felt wired, feverish . . . alive. Hypersensitive as a pregnant woman: I could smell blood everywhere. When the hidden struggle for power which rules all human affairs finally breaks through to the surface, finally ruptures the skin, it’s like witnessing some giant primordial creature rise up out of the ocean. Mesmerizing and appalling. Nauseating—and exhilarating.
Coming face to face with the truth is always exhilarating.
###
From the air, there was no obvious sign that we’d arrived; for the last 200 kilometres, we’d been passing over rain forest—cleared in patches for plantations and mines, ranches and timber mills, shot through with rivers like metallic threads—but most of it resembling nothing so much as an endless expanse of broccoli. El Nido permitted natural vegetation to flourish all around it—and then imitated it . . . which made sampling at the edges an
inefficient way to gather the true genetic stock for analysis. Deep penetration was difficult, though, even with purpose-built robots—dozens of which had been lost—so edge samples had to suffice, at least until a few more members of Congress could be photographed committing statutory rape and persuaded to vote for better funding. Most of the engineered plant tissues self-destructed in the absence of regular chemical and viral messages drifting out from the core, reassuring them that they were still in situ—so the main DEA research facility was on the outskirts of El Nido itself, a collection of pressurized buildings and experimental plots in a clearing blasted out of the jungle on the Colombian side of the border. The electrified fences weren’t topped with razor wire: they turned 90 degrees into an electrified roof, completing a chain-link cage. The heliport was in the center of the compound, where a cage within the cage could, temporarily, open itself to the sky.
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