Distress

The truth was, I didn't care about the details; all that mattered was putting Junk DNA behind me, and running as far away from Distress as I could. After twelve months drowning in the worst excesses of biotechnology, the pristine world of theoretical physics shone in my mind's eye like some anesthetized mathematical heaven, where everything was cool and abstract and gloriously inconsequential… an image which merged seamlessly with the white coral snowflake of Stateless itself, growing out into the blue Pacific like a perfect fractal star. Part of me understood full well that if I took these beautiful mirages to heart, I was certain to be disappointed—and I even struggled to imagine the most unpleasant ways in which I might be brought back down to Earth. I could suffer an attack of multiple-drug-resistant pneumonia or malaria, a strain to which the locals were immune. High-level pharms which could analyze the pathogenic organisms and design a cure on the spot would be unavailable, thanks to the boycott, and I'd be too weak for the flight back to civilization… It wasn't an impossible scenario; the boycott had killed hundreds of people over the years.

Still, anything had to be better than coming face-to-face with a victim of Distress.

I left a message for Violet Mosala. I assumed she was still at her home in Cape Town, though the software which answered her number was giving nothing away. I introduced myself, thanked her for generously agreeing to give her time to the project, and generally spouted polite clichés. I said nothing to encourage her to call me back; I knew it wouldn't take much real-time conversation to reveal my total ignorance of her life and work. Pneumonia, malaria… making a complete fool of myself. I didn't care. All I could think of was escape.

I'd psyched myself up to be "forced to relive" Daniel Cavolini's revival—but I should have known all along how absurd that was. Editing never re-created the past; it was more like performing an autopsy on it. I worked on the sequence dispassionately—and every hour I spent reshaping it made the job of imagining the responses of a viewer, seeing it all for the first time, more and more a matter of calculation and instinct—and less and less connected to anything I felt about the events myself. Even the final cut, superficially fluid and immediate, was for me a kind of post-mortem revival of a post-mortem revival. It had happened, it was over; whatever brief illusion of life the technology managed to create, it was no more capable of climbing out of the screen and walking down the street than any other twitching corpse.

Daniel's brother, Luke, had been charged with the murder—and had already pleaded guilty. I logged on to the court records system and skimmed through footage of the three hearings which had taken place so far. The magistrate had ordered a psychiatric report, which had concluded that Luke Cavolini suffered from occasional bouts of "inappropriate anger" which had never quite put him far enough out of touch with reality to have him classified as mentally ill and treated against his will. He was competent, and culpable, and understood precisely what he'd done—and he'd even had a "motive": an argument the night before, about a jacket of Daniel's which he'd borrowed. He'd end up in an ordinary prison, for at least fifteen years.

The court footage was public domain, but there was no time to use any of it in the broadcast version. So I wrote a brief postscript to the revival story, stating the bare facts: the charges laid, the guilty plea. I didn't mention the psychiatric report; I didn't want to muddy the waters. The console read the words over a freeze-frame of Daniel Cavolini screaming.

I said, "Fade-out. Roll credits."

It was Tuesday, March 23rd, 4:07 p.m.

Junk DNA was over.