Distress

Distress

Greg Egan

Thanks to Caroline Oakley, Deborah Beale, Anthony Cheetham, Peter Robinson, Lucy Blackburn, Annabelle Ager, and Claudia Schaffer.

It is not true that the map of freedom will be complete

with the erasure of the last invidious border when it remains for us to chart the attractors of thunder

and delineate the arrhythmias of drought to reveal the molecular dialects of forest and savanna

as rich as a thousand human tongues and to comprehend the deepest history of our passions

ancient beyond mythology's reach

So I declare that no corporation holds a monopoly on numbers

no patent can encompass zero and one

no nation has sovereignty over adenine and guanine

no empire rules the quantum waves

And there must be room for all at the celebration of

understanding

for there is a truth which cannot be bought or sold imposed by force, resisted or escaped.

— From Technoliberation by Muteba Kazadi, 2019

PART ONE

1

"All right. He's dead. Go ahead and talk to him."

The bioethicist was a laconic young asex with blond dreadlocks and a T-shirt which flashed up the slogan SAY NO TO TOE! in between the paid advertising. Ve countersigned the permission form on the forensic pathologist's notepad, then withdrew to a corner of the room. The trauma specialist and the paramedic wheeled their resuscitation equipment out of the way, and the forensic pathologist hurried forward, hypodermic syringe in hand, to administer the first dose of neuropreservative. Useless prior to legal death—massively toxic to several organs, on a time scale of hours—the cocktail of glutamate antagonists, calcium channel blockers, and antioxidants would halt the most damaging biochemical changes in the victim's brain, almost immediately.

The pathologist's assistant followed close behind her, with a trolley bearing all the paraphernalia of post-mortem revival: a tray of disposable surgical instruments; several racks of electronic equipment; an arterial pump fed from three glass tanks the size of water-coolers; and something resembling a hairnet made out of gray superconducting wire.

Lukowski, the homicide detective, was standing beside me. He mused, "If everyone was fitted out like you, Worth, we'd never have to do this. We could just replay the crime from start to finish. Like reading an aircraft's black box."

I replied without looking away from the operating table; I could edit out our voices easily enough, but I wanted a continuous take of the pathologist connecting up the surrogate blood supply. "If everyone had optic nerve taps, don't you think murderers would start hacking the memory chips out of their victims' bodies?"

"Sometimes. But no one hung around to mess up this guy's brain, did they?"

"Wait until they've seen the documentary." The pathologist's assistant sprayed a depilatory enzyme onto the victim's skull, and then wiped all the close-cropped black hair away with a couple of sweeps of his gloved hand. As he dropped the mess into a plastic sample bag, I realized why it was holding together instead of dispersing like barber's shop waste; several layers of skin had come with it. The assistant glued the "hairnet"—a skein of electrodes and SQID detectors—to the bare pink scalp. The pathologist finished checking the blood supply, then made an incision in the trachea and inserted a tube, hooked up to a small pump to take the place of the collapsed lungs. Nothing to do with respiration; purely as an aid to speech. It was possible to monitor the nerve impulses to the larynx, and synthesize the intended sounds by wholly electronic means, but apparently the voice was always less garbled if the victim could experience something like the normal tactile and auditory feedback produced by a vibrating column of air. The assistant fitted a padded bandage over the victim's eyes; in rare cases, feeling could return sporadically to the skin of the face, and since retinal cells were deliberately not revived, some kind of temporary ocular injury was the easiest lie to explain away the pragmatic blindness.

I thought again about possible narration. In 1888, police surgeons photographed the retinas of one victim of Jack the Ripper, in the vain hope that they might discover the face of the killer embalmed in the light-sensitive pigments of the human eye…

No. Too predictable. And too misleading; revival was not a process of extracting information from a passive corpse. But what were the alternative references? Orpheus? Lazarus? "The Monkey's Paw?" "The Tell-Tale Heart?" Reanimator? Nothing in myth or fiction had really prefigured the truth. Better to make no glib comparisons. Let the corpse speak for itself.