"I do not wish to know that." Three thousand? That was a sixfold increase in a fortnight. "Show me a case map." It looked more like the plot for a spontaneous cancer than any kind of infectious disease: a random scatter across the globe, ignoring every social and environmental factor, concentrated only by population density itself.
How could the numbers be increasing so rapidly—without any localized outbreaks? I'd heard that models based on airborne transmission, sexual contact, water supplies, parasites, had all failed to match the epidemiology—
"Any other news on this?"
"Not officially. But footage logged in SeeNet's library by your colleague John Reynolds includes the first reports of coherent speech by sufferers."
"Some people are recovering?"
"No. But some new sufferers have shown an intermittent change in the pathology."
"Change, or reduction?"
"The speech is coherent, but the subject matter is contextually inappropriate."
"You mean they're psychotic? When they finally stop screaming, and calm down long enough to string two words together… it's only to pass on the news that they've gone insane?"
"That's a matter for expert opinion."
I was almost at the hospital. I said, "Okay, show me some of this changed pathology. Show me some of the joys I've missed out on."
Sisyphus raided the library and brought me a clip. It was questionable etiquette to peek at other people's unfinished work, but if Reynolds had wanted the footage to be inaccessible to his colleagues, he would have encrypted it.
I watched the scene in the hospital elevator, alone—and I felt the blood draining from my face. There was no explanation for this, no possible way to make sense of it.
Reynolds had archived three other scenes of "coherent speech" from Distress patients. I viewed them all, unwinding the notepad's headset so I could listen in private as I made my way along the busy corridors. The exact words the patients used were different in every case—but the implications were the same.
I suspended judgment. Maybe I was still in shock or still affected by the drugs I'd been given on the boat. Maybe I was seeing connections which simply weren't there.
By the time I reached the ward, Akili was awake. Ve smiled ruefully when ve saw me—and I knew I had it bad. It wasn't just the fact that vis face seemed to have burned itself into my brain so deeply that I could no longer believe that I'd ever been attracted to anyone else. Beauty, after all, was the shallowest thing. But ver dark eyes showed a depth of passion, humor, and intelligence that no one else I'd known had ever possessed…
I caught myself. This was ludicrous. To a total asex, these were the sentiments of a hormone-driven wind-up toy, a pathetic biological robot. If ve ever found out how I felt… the most I could expect in return was to be pitied.
I said, "Have you heard about the airport?"
Ve nodded, dismayed. "And Nishide's death. How's Mosala taking all this?"
"She's not falling to pieces—but I'm not sure she's thinking straight." Not like me.
I recounted my conversation with her. "What do you think? If she can be kept alive until someone announces the TOE on her behalf, would the moderates recant and hand over the cure?"
Kuwale didn't look hopeful. "They might. If there was a clear proof that the TOE really had been completed, with no room for doubt. But they're on the run, now, they can't hand over anything."
"They could still transmit the molecule's structure."
"Yeah. And then we just hope there's a machine on Stateless which can synthesize it in time."
"If the whole universe is a conspiracy to explain the Keystone, don't you think she might get lucky?" I didn't believe a word of this, but it seemed like the right thing to say.
"Explaining the Aleph moment doesn't stretch to miraculous reprieves. Mosala doesn't have to be the Keystone—even with Nishide dead, and Buzzo's TOE refuted. If she survives, it will only be because the people who struggled to save her fought harder than those who struggled to kill her." Ve laughed wearily. "That's what a Theory of Everything means: there are no miracles, not even for the Keystone. Everyone lives and dies by exactly the same rules."
"I understand." I hesitated. "There's something I have to show you. Some news that's just broken, about Distress."
"Distress?"
"Humor me. Maybe it means nothing, but I need to know what you think."
I had an obligation to Reynolds not to splash his unreleased footage around. The ward was full, but there were screens either side of us, and the man in a cast in the opposite bed appeared to be sleeping. I handed Kuwale my notepad, and had it replay one of the clips, with the volume down low.
A pale, disheveled, middle-aged woman with long black hair, restrained in a hospital bed, faced the viewer squarely. She didn't look drugged, and she certainly wasn't exhibiting the syndrome's characteristic behavior—but she regarded Reynolds with intense, horrified fascination.
She said, "This pattern of information, this state of being conscious and possessing these perceptions, wraps itself in ever-growing layers of corollaries: neurons to encode the information, blood to nourish the neurons, a heart to pump the blood, intestines to enrich it, a mouth to supply the intestines, food to pass through it, fields of crops, earth, sunlight, a trillion stars." Her gaze shifted slightly as she spoke, scanning back and forth across Reynolds' face. "Neurons, heart, intestines, cells of proteins and ions and water wrapped in lipid membranes, tissues differentiated in development, genes switched on by intersecting marker hormone gradients, a million interlocking molecular shapes, tetravalent carbon, monovalent hydrogen, electrons shared in bonds between nuclei of protons, neutrons to balance electrostatic repulsion, quarks spinning in both to partner the leptons in a hierarchy of field excitations, a ten-dimensional manifold to support them… defining a broken symmetry on the space of all topologies." Her voice quickened. "Neurons, heart, intestines, morphogenesis converging back to a single cell, a fertilized egg in another body. Diploid chromosomes requiring a separate donor. Ancestry iterates. Mutations split species from earlier lineages, unicellular life, self-replicating fragments, nucleotides, sugars, amino acids, carbon dioxide, water, nitrogen. A condensing protostellar cloud—rich in heavy elements synthesized in other stars, flung throughout a gravitationally unstable cosmos which starts and ends in singularities."
She fell silent, but her eyes kept moving; I could almost see the outline of Reynolds' face in the sweep of her gaze. And if he'd appeared to her, at first, as a bizarre apparition, flashes of intense comprehension now seemed to break through her astonishment—as if she was pushing her cosmological reasoning to its limits, and weaving this stranger, this logically necessary distant cousin, into the same unified scheme.
But then something happened to put an end to her brief remission: an upwelling of horror and panic distorted her features. Distress had reclaimed her. I halted the replay before she could begin to thrash and scream.
I said, "There are three other cases, more or less the same. So am I putting my own spin on this raving—or does it sound the same to you? Because… what kind of plague could make people believe that they're the Keystone?"
Kuwale put the notepad down on the bed and turned to face me. "Andrew, if this is a hoax—"
"No! Why would I—?"
"To save Mosala. Because if it's a hoax, you'll never pull it off."
I groaned. "If I was going to invent a Keystone to get her off the hook, I would have simulated Yasuko Nishide on his deathbed having all the cosmic revelations—not some random psychiatric case." I explained about Reynolds and the SeeNet documentary.
Ve searched my face, trying to decide if I was telling the truth. I gazed back at ver, too tired and confused now to conceal anything. There was a flicker of surprise, and then… amusement? I couldn't tell—and whatever ve felt, ve kept silent.
I said, "Maybe some other mainstream ACs faked it, hacked into SeeNet…" I was grasping at straws, but I couldn't make sense of this any other way.
Kuwale said flatly, "No. I would have heard."
"Then—?"
"It's genuine."
"How can it be?"
Ve met my eyes again, unashamed of vis fear. "Because everything we thought was true, is true—but we got the details wrong. Everyone got the details wrong. The mainstream, the moderates, the extremists: we all made different assumptions—and we were all wrong."
"I don't understand."
"You will. We all will."
I suddenly recalled the apocryphal story from the AC on the boat about Muteba Kazadi's death. "You think Distress comes from… mixing with information?"