Distress

by Greg Egan

  Some of the fauna had been modified, too; the magpies were docile even in spring, the mosquitoes shunned mammalian blood, and the most venomous snakes were incapable of harming a human child. Small advantages over their wild cousins, tied to the biochemistry of the engineered vegetation, guaranteed the altered species dominance in this microecology – and small handicaps kept them from flourishing if they ever escaped to one of the truly wild reserves, distant from human habitation.

  I was renting a small detached unit in a cluster of four, set in a zero-maintenance garden which merged seamlessly with the tendril of parkland at the end of a cul-de-sac. I’d been there for eight years, ever since my first commission from SeeNet, but I still felt like a trespasser. Eastwood was just eighteen kilometers from the center of Sydney, which – although ever fewer people had reason to travel there – still seemed to hold an inexplicable sway over real-estate prices; I couldn’t have bought the unit myself in a hundred years. The (barely) affordable rent was just a felicitous by-product of the owner’s elaborate tax evasion schemes – and it was probably only a matter of time before some quiver of butterfly wings in world financial markets rendered the networks slightly less generous, or my landowner slightly less in need of a write-off, and I’d be picked up and flung fifty kilometers west, back to the outer sprawl where I belonged.

  I approached warily. Home should have felt like a sanctuary after the night’s events, but I hesitated outside the front door, key in hand, for something like a minute.

  Gina was up, dressed, and in the middle of breakfast. I hadn’t seen her since the same time the day before; it was as if I’d never left.

  She said, “How was filming?” I’d sent her a message from the hospital, explaining that we’d finally got lucky .

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” I retreated into the living room and sank into a chair. The action of sitting seemed to replay itself in my inner ears; I kept descending, again and again. I fixed my gaze on the pattern in the carpet; the illusion slowly faded.

  “Andrew? What happened?” She followed me into the room. “Did something go wrong? Will you have to reshoot?”

  “I said I don’t want to—” I caught myself. I looked up at her, and forced myself to concentrate. She was puzzled, but not yet angry. Rule number three: Tell her everything, however unpleasant, at the first opportunity. Whether you feel like it or not. Anything less will be treated as deliberate exclusion and taken as a personal affront.

  I said, “I won’t have to reshoot. It’s over.” I recounted what had happened.

  Gina looked ill. “And was anything he said worth … extracting? Did mentioning his brother make the slightest sense – or was he just brain-damaged and ranting?”

  “That’s still not clear. Evidently the brother does have a history of violence; he was on probation for assaulting his mother. They’ve taken him in for questioning … but it could all come to nothing. If the victim’s short-term memories were lost, he could have pieced together a false reconstruction of the stabbing, using the first person who came to mind as being capable of the act. And when he changed his story he might not have been covering up at all; he might simply have realized that he was amnesic.”

  Gina said, “And even if the brother did kill him … no jury is going to accept a couple of words, instantly retracted, as any kind of proof. If there’s a conviction, it will have nothing to do with the revival.”

  It was difficult to argue the point; I had to struggle to regain some perspective.

  “Not in this case, no. But there have been times when it’s made all the difference. The victim’s word alone might never stand up in court – but there’ve been people tried for murder who would never have been suspected otherwise. Cases when the evidence which actually convicted them was only pieced together because the revival testimony put the investigation on the right track.”

  Gina was dismissive. “That may have happened once or twice – but it’s still not worth it. They should ban the whole procedure, it’s obscene.” She hesitated. “But you’re not going to use that footage, are you?”

  “Of course I’m going to use it.”

  “You’re going to show a man dying in agony on an operating table – captured in the act of realizing that everything which brought him back to life is guaranteed to kill him?” She spoke calmly; she sounded more incredulous than outraged.

  I said, “What do you want me to use instead? A dramatization, where everything goes according to plan?”

  “No. But why not a dramatization where everything goes wrong, in exactly the way it did last night?”

  “ Why? It’s already happened, and I’ve already filmed it. Who benefits from a reconstruction?”

  “The victim’s family. For a start.”

  I thought: Possibly. But would a reconstruction really spare their feelings? And no one was going to force them to watch the documentary, in either case.

  I said, “Be reasonable. This is powerful stuff; I can’t just throw it away. And I have every right to use it. I had permission to be there – from the cops, from the hospital. And I’ll get the family’s clearance—”

  “You mean the network’s lawyers will brow-beat them into signing some kind of waiver ‘in the public interest.’”

  I had no answer to that; it was exactly what would happen. I said, “You’re the one who just declared that revival is obscene. You want to see it banned? This can only help your cause. It’s as good a dose of frankenscience as any dumb luddite could ask for.”

  Gina looked stung; I couldn’t tell if she was faking. She said, “I have a doctorate in materials science, you peasant, so don’t call me —”

  “I didn’t. You know what I meant.”

  “If anyone’s a luddite, you are. This entire project is beginning to sound like Edenite propaganda. ‘ Junk DNA !’ What’s the subtitle? ‘The biotechnology nightmare?’”

  “Close.”

  “What I don’t understand is why you couldn’t include a single positive story—”

  I said wearily, “We’ve been over this before. It’s not up to me. The networks won’t buy anything unless there’s an angle. In this case, the downside of biotech. That’s the choice of subject, that’s what it’s about. It isn’t meant to be ‘balanced.’ Balance confuses the marketing people; you can’t hype something which contains two contradictory messages. But at least it might counteract all the hymns of praise to genetic engineering everyone’s been gagging on lately. And – taken along with everything else – it does show the whole picture. By adding what they’ve all left out.”

  Gina was unmoved. “That’s disingenuous. ‘Our sensationalism balances their sensationalism.’ It doesn’t. It just polarizes opinion. What’s wrong with a calm, reasoned presentation of the facts – which might help to get revival and a few other blatant atrocities outlawed – without playing up all the old transgressions-against-nature bullshit? Showing the excesses, but putting them in context? You should be helping people make informed decisions about what they demand from the regulatory authorities. Junk DNA sounds more likely to inspire them to go out and bomb the nearest biotech lab.”

  I curled into the armchair and rested my head on my knees. “All right, I give up. Everything you say is true. I’m a manipulative, rabble-rousing, anti-science hack.”

  She frowned. “Anti-science? I wouldn’t go that far. You’re venal, lazy, and irresponsible – but you’re not quite Ignorance Cult material yet.”

  “Your faith is touching.”

  She prodded me with a cushion, affectionately I think, then went back to the kitchen. I covered my face with my hands, and the room started tipping.

  I should have been jubilant. It was over. The revival was the very last piece of filming for Junk DNA . No more paranoid billionaires mutating into self-contained walking ecologies. No more insurance firms designing personal actuarial implants to monitor diet, exercise, and exposure to pollutants – for the sake of endlessly recomputing the wearer’s most proba
ble date and cause of death. No more Voluntary Autists lobbying for the right to have their brains surgically mutilated so they could finally attain the condition nature hadn’t quite granted them…

  I went into my workroom and unreeled the fiber-optic umbilical from the side of the editing console. I lifted my shirt and cleared some unnameable debris from my navel, then extracted the skin-colored plug with my fingernails, exposing a short stainless-steel tube ending in an opalescent laser port.

  Gina called out from the kitchen, “Are you performing unnatural acts with that machine again?”

  I was too tired to think of an intelligent retort. I snapped the connectors together, and the console lit up.

  The screen showed everything as it came through. Eight hours’ worth in sixty seconds – most of it an incomprehensible blur, but I averted my gaze anyway. I didn’t much feel like reliving any of the night’s events, however briefly.

  Gina wandered in with a plate of toast; I hit a button to conceal the image. She said, “I still want to know how you can have four thousand terabytes of RAM in your peritoneal cavity, and no visible scars.”

  I glanced down at the connector socket. “What do you call that? Invisible?”

  “Too small. Eight-hundred-terabyte chips are thirty millimeters wide. I looked up the manufacturer’s catalog.”

  “Sherlock strikes again. Or should I say Shylock? Scars can be erased, can’t they?”

  “Yes. But … would you have obliterated the marks of your most important rite of passage?”

  “Spare me the anthropological babble.”

  “I do have an alternative theory.”

  “I’m not confirming or denying anything.”

  She let her gaze slide over the blank console screen, up to the Repo Man poster on the wall behind it: a motorcycle cop standing behind a dilapidated car. She caught my eye, then gestured at the caption: DON’T LOOK IN THE TRUNK!

  “Why not? What’s in the trunk? ”

  I laughed. “You can’t bear it anymore, can you? You’re just going to have to watch the movie.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  The console beeped. I unhooked. Gina looked at me curiously; the expression on my face must have betrayed something. “So is it like sex – or more like defecation?”

  “It’s more like Confession.”

  “You’ve never been to Confession in your life.”

  “No, but I’ve seen it in the movies. I was joking, though. It’s not like anything at all.”

  She glanced at her watch, then kissed me on the cheek, leaving toast crumbs. “I have to run. Get some sleep, you idiot. You look terrible.”

  I sat and listened to her bustling around. She had a ninety-minute train journey every morning to the CSIRO’s wind turbine research station, west of the Blue Mountains. I usually got up at the same time myself, though. It was better than waking alone.

  I thought: I do love her. And if I concentrate, if I follow the rules, there’s no reason why it can’t last. My eighteen-month record was looming – but that was nothing to fear. We’d smash it, easily.

  She reappeared in the doorway. “So, how long do you have to edit this one?”

  “Ah. Three weeks exactly. Counting today.” I hadn’t really wanted to be reminded.

  “Today doesn’t count. Get some sleep.”

  We kissed. She left. I swung my chair around to face the blank console.

  Nothing was over. I was going to have to watch Daniel Cavolini die a hundred more times, before I could finally disown him.

  I limped into the bedroom and undressed. I hung my clothes on the cleaning rack, and switched on the power. The polymers in the various fabrics expelled all their moisture in a faint humid exhalation, then packed the remaining dirt and dried sweat into a fine, loose dust, and discarded it electrostatically. I watched it drift down into the receptacle; it was always the same disconcerting blue – something to do with the particle size. I had a quick shower, then climbed into bed.

  I set the alarm clock for two in the afternoon. The pharm unit beside the clock said, “Shall I prepare a melatonin course to get you back in synch by tomorrow evening?”

  “Yeah, okay.” I stuck my thumb in the sampling tube; there was a barely perceptible sting as blood was taken. Non-invasive NMR models had been in the shops for a couple of years, but they were still too expensive.

  “Do you want something to help you sleep now?”

  “Yes.”

  The pharm began to hum softly, creating a sedative tailored to my current biochemical state, in a dose in accordance with my intended sleeping time. The synthesizer inside used an array of programmable catalysts, ten billion electronically reconfigurable enzymes bound to a semiconductor chip. Immersed in a small tank of precursor molecules, the chip could assemble a few milligrams of any one of ten thousand drugs. Or at least, any of the ones for which I had software, for as long as I kept paying the license fees.

  The machine disgorged a small tablet, still slightly warm. I bit into it. “Orange flavored after a hard night! You remembered!”

  I lay back and waited for the drug to take effect.

  I’d watched the expression on his face – but those muscles were palsied, uncontrollable. I’d heard his voice – but the breath he spoke with was not his own. I had no real way of knowing what he’d experienced.

  Not “The Monkey’s Paw” or “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

  More like “The Premature Burial.”

  But I had no right to mourn Daniel Cavolini. I was going to sell his death to the world.

  And I had no right even to empathize, to imagine myself in his place.

  As Lukowski had pointed out, it could never have happened to me.

  Chapter 3

  I’d seen a 1950s Moviola once, in a glass case in a museum. Thirty-five-millimeter celluloid traveled a tortuous path through the guts of the machine, moving back and forth between two belt-driven spools held up on vertical arms behind the tiny viewing screen. The whine of the motor, the grinding of the gears, the helicopter whir of the shutter blades – sounds coming from an AV of the machine in action, showing on a panel below the display case – had made it seem more like a shredding device than any kind of editing tool.

  An appealing notion. I’m very sorry … but that scene has been lost forever. The Moviola ate it. Standard practice, of course, had been to work only with a copy of the camera original (usually an unviewable negative, anyway) – but the idea of one slip of a cog transforming meters of precious celluloid into confetti had stuck in my head ever since, a glorious, illicit fantasy.

  My three-year-old 2052 Affine Graphics editing console was incapable of destroying anything. Every shot I downloaded was burned into two independent write-once memory chips – and also encrypted and sent automatically to archives in Mandela, Stockholm and Toronto. Every editing decision that followed was just a rearrangement of references to the untouchable original. I could quote from the raw footage (and footage it was – only dilettantes used pretentious neologisms like “byteage”) as selectively as I wished. I could paraphrase, substitute, and improvise. But not one frame of the original could ever be damaged or misplaced, beyond repair, beyond recovery.

  I didn’t really envy my analog-era counterparts, though; the painstaking mechanics of their craft would have driven me mad. The slowest step in digital editing was human decision-making, and I’d learned to get most judgments right by the tenth or twelfth attempt. Software could tweak the rhythms of a scene, fine-tune every cut, finesse the sound, remove unwanted passersby; even shift whole buildings, if necessary. The mechanics was all taken care of; there was nothing to distract from the content.

  So all I had to do with Junk DNA was transform one hundred and eighty hours of real-time into fifty minutes of sense.

  I’d filmed four stories, and I already knew how I’d order them: a gradual progression from gray to black. Ned Landers the walking biosphere. The HealthGuard actuarial implant. The Voluntary Autists lobby group. And Daniel
Cavolini’s revival. SeeNet had asked for excess, for transgressions, for frankenscience. I’d have no trouble giving them exactly what they wanted.

  Landers had made his money in dry computers, not biotech, but he’d gone on to buy several R&D-intensive molecular genetics corporations to help him achieve his personal transformation. He’d begged me to film him in a sealed geodesic dome full of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and benzyl compounds – me in a pressure suit, himself in swimming trunks. We’d tried it, but my face plate kept fogging up on the outside with oily carcinogenic residues, so we’d had to meet again in downtown Portland. Promising as the noxious dome had seemed, the immaculate blue skies of the state which was racing California to zero-emission laws for every known pollutant had turned out to be a more surreal backdrop, by far.

  “I don’t need to breathe at all if I don’t want to,” Landers had confided, surrounded by a visible abundance of clean, fresh air. This time, I’d persuaded him to do the interview in a small, grassy park opposite the NL Group’s modest headquarters. (There were children playing soccer in the background – but the console would keep track of any continuity problems, and offer solutions to most of them with a single keystroke.) Landers was in his late forties, but he could have passed for twenty-five. With a robust build, golden hair, blue eyes, and glowing pink skin, he looked more like a Hollywood version of a Kansas farm worker (in good times) than a rich eccentric whose body was swarming with engineered algae and alien genes. I watched him on the console’s flatscreen, and listened through simple stereo speakers. I could have fed the playback straight into my optic and auditory nerves, but most viewers would be using a screen or a headset – and I needed to be sure that the software really had constructed a steady, plausible, rectilinear grid of pixels out of my own retinas’ highly compressed visual shorthand.

  “The symbionts living in my bloodstream can turn carbon dioxide back into oxygen, indefinitely. They get some energy through my skin, from sunlight, and they release any glucose they can spare – but that’s not nearly enough for me to live on, and they need an alternative energy source when they’re in darkness. That’s where the symbionts in my stomach and intestines come in; I have thirty-seven different types, and between them, they can handle anything. I can eat grass. I can eat paper. I could live off old tires, if I had a way of cutting them into pieces small enough to swallow. If all plant and animal life vanished from the face of the Earth tomorrow, I could survive off tires for a thousand years. I have a map showing all the tire dumps in the continental USA. The majority are scheduled for biological remediation, but I have court actions in progress to see that a number of them survive. Apart from my own personal reasons, I think they’re a part of our heritage which we owe to future generations to leave untouched.”