Distress

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 sulphur 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."

I went back and intercut some microscope footage of the tailored algae and bacteria inhabiting his blood and digestive tract, then a shot of the tire dump map, which he'd displayed for me on his notepad. I played with an animation I'd been preparing, a schematic of his personal carbon, oxygen, and energy cycles, but I wasn't yet sure where it belonged.