Then it lurched toward a gap between the tents, sending people tripping into the walls and frantically clawing at the fabric, trying to tear a way out of its path.
It raced down the alley and disappeared, heading south, back toward the city.
Huddled on the ground behind the latrines, not ready to face the demoralized people of the camp, I dispatched the footage of the murder to SeeNet. I tried to compose some narration to go with it, but I was still in shock, I couldn't concentrate. I thought: War correspondents see much worse, day after day. How long will it be, before I'm inured to this?
I scanned the international coverage. Everyone was still talking about "rival anarchists"—including SeeNet, who'd broadcast nothing I'd sent them.
I spent five minutes trying to calm myself, then called Lydia. It took me half an hour to get through to her in person. All I could hear around me was people sobbing with grief. What would it be like, after the tenth attack? The hundredth? I closed my eyes and fantasized about Cape Town, Sydney, Manchester. Anywhere.
When Lydia answered, I said, "I'm here, I'm covering this—so what's happening to my footage?" She was not in charge of news, but she was the only person likely to give me a straight answer.
But Lydia was stony-faced, cold with anger. "Your 'obituary' of Violet Mosala had a whole scene cooked up out of thin air. And it said nothing about the cult which killed Yasuko Nishide—and now Henry Buzzo. I've seen your deposition to the security firm, about the cholera, about the fishing boat. So what are you playing at?"
I clutched at excuses, trying to find the right ones, knowing that Mosala would have died if I hadn't used you was not good enough. I said, "Everything I faked, she really said. Off the record. Ask her."
Lydia was unmoved. "It's still unacceptable, it still violates all the guidelines. And we can't ask her anything. She's comatose."
I didn't want to hear that; if Mosala was brain-damaged, it had all been for nothing. I said, "I couldn't tell you the rest… because I couldn't tip off the Anthrocosmologists by broadcasting everything." I was ranting; the ACs had already known exactly how much I would have told the authorities.
Lydia's expression softened—as if I was clearly so far gone, now, that I deserved to be pitied, not rebuked. "Look, I hope you find a way to get home safely. But the documentary's canceled—you've broken the terms of the contract and News isn't interested in your coverage of the political problems on the island."
"Political problems? I'm in the middle of a war being funded by the biggest biotech company on the planet. I'm the only journalist on the island who seems to have a clue what's going on. And I'm SeeNet's only journalist, period. So how can they not be interested?"
"We're negotiating coverage from someone else."
"Yeah? Who? Janet Walsh?"
"It's none of your business."
"I don't believe you! EnGeneUity are slaughtering people, and—"
Lydia held up a hand to silence me. "I don't want to hear any more of your… propaganda. Okay? I'm sorry you've been through so much unpleasantness. I'm sorry the anarchists are killing each other." She spoke with genuine sadness, I think. "But if you've taken sides, and you want to churn out… polemics against the boycott and the patent laws, full of forged material… then that's your problem. I can't help you. Be careful, Andrew. Goodbye."
As dusk fell, I wandered through the camp, filming, transmitting the signal in real-time to my console at home—guaranteeing a record of everything, for what it was worth.
The model refugee village was still intact, the pumps still working, the sanitation impeccable. Lights shone everywhere, haloed with orange and green through the fabric, and the aroma of cooking wafted out of every second doorway. The tents' stored photovoltaic electricity would last for hours, yet. No great damage had been done—no source of physical comfort had been lost.
But the people I passed were tense, fearful, silent. The robot could return at any time, night or day, and kill one more person—or a thousand.
By sending the robots out of the city to strike at random, the mercenaries could rapidly undermine morale and drive people even further away, closer to the coast. Greenhouse refugees forced to cling to the shoreline, waiting for the next big storm—the fate they'd come to Stateless to avoid—might be ready to abandon the island altogether.
I couldn't imagine what had happened to the so-called militia—maybe they'd all been slaughtered already, in some brave idiotic stand back in the city. I scanned the local nets; there were bleak reports of dozens of attacks like the one I'd witnessed, but little else. I didn't expect the anarchists to broadcast all their military secrets on the nets, but I found the absence of blustering propaganda, of morale-boosting claims of imminent victory, strangely chilling. Maybe the silence meant something, but if it did, I couldn't decipher it.
It was growing cold. I was reluctant to ask for shelter in a stranger's tent—I wasn't afraid of being turned away, but I still felt too much like an outsider, despite all my feeble gestures of solidarity. These people were under siege, and they had no reason to trust me.
So I sat in the restaurant, drinking hot thin soup. The other customers talked among themselves, keeping their voices low, glancing at me more with measured caution than open hostility, but excluding me nonetheless.
I'd destroyed my career—for Mosala, for technoliberation—but I'd achieved nothing. Mosala was in a coma. Stateless was on the verge of a long and bloody decline.
I felt numb, and paranoid, and useless.
Then a message arrived from Akili. Ve'd escaped the city unharmed, and was in another camp, less than a kilometer away.
28
"Sit down. Anywhere that looks comfortable."
The tent contained nothing but a backpack and an unrolled sleeping bag; the transparent floor looked dry, despite the hint of dew outside, but almost thin enough for the grit beneath it to be felt through the plastic. A black patch on the wall radiated gentle heat, powered by the solar energy stored in the charge-displacement polymers which were woven into every strand of the tent's fabric.
I sat on one end of the sleeping bag. Akili sat cross-legged beside me. I looked around appreciatively; however humble, it was a vast improvement on bare rock. "Where did you find this? I don't know if they shoot looters on Stateless… but I'd say it was worth the risk."
Akili snorted. "I didn't have to steal it. Where do you think I've been living for the past two weeks? We can't all afford the Ritz."
We exchanged updates. Akili had heard most of my news already, from other sources: Buzzo's death; Mosala's evacuation, and uncertain condition. But not her joke on the ACs: the automatic dissemination of her TOE around the world.
Akili frowned intensely, silent for a long time. Something had changed in vis face since I'd seen ver in the hospital; the deep shock of recognition at the news of the supposed mixing plague had given way to a kind of expectant gaze—as if ve was prepared, now, to be taken by Distress at any moment and was almost eager to embrace the experience, despite the anguish and horror all its victims had displayed. Even the few who'd been briefly calm and lucid in their own strange way had swiftly relapsed; if I'd believed that the syndrome was everyone's fate, I would not have wished to go on living.
Akili confessed, "We still can't fit our models to the data. No one I've been in contact with can work out what's going on." Ve seemed resigned to the fact that the plague would elude precise analysis, in the short term—but still confident that vis basic explanation was correct. "The new cases are appearing too rapidly, much faster than exponential growth."
"Then maybe you're wrong about the mixing. You made a prediction of exponential growth and now it's failed. So maybe you've been reading too much Anthrocosmology into four sick people's ranting."
Ve shook vis head, calmly dismissing the possibility. "Seventeen people, now. Your SeeNet colleague isn't the only one who's seen it; other journalists have begun to report the same phenomenon. And there's a way to explain the discrepancy in the case numbers."
"How?"
"Multiple Keystones."
I laughed wearily. "What's the collective noun for that? Not an arch of Keystones, surely. A pantheon? One person, with one theory, explaining the universe into existence—isn't that the whole premise of Anthrocosmology?"
"One theory, yes. And one person always seemed the most likely scenario. We always knew that the TOE would be broadcast to the world— but we always assumed that every last detail would be worked out in full by its discoverer, first. But if the discoverer is lying in a coma when the complete TOE is dispatched to tens of thousands of people, simultaneously… that's like nothing we ever contemplated. And nothing we can hope to model: the mathematics becomes intractable." Ve spread vis hands in a gesture of acceptance. "No matter. We'll all learn the truth, soon enough."
My skin crawled. In Akili's presence, I didn't know what I believed. I said, "Learn it how? Mosala's TOE doesn't predict telepathy with the Keystone—or Keystones—any more than it predicts the universe unraveling. If she's right, you must be wrong."
"It depends what she's right about."
"Everything? As in Theory of?"
"Everything could unravel tonight—and most TOEs would have nothing to say about it, one way or another. The rules of chess can't tell you whether or not the board is strong enough to hold up every legal configuration of the pieces."
"But every TOE has plenty to say about the human brain, doesn't it? It's a lump of ordinary matter, subject to all the ordinary laws of physics. It doesn't start 'mixing with information' just because someone completes a Theory of Everything on the other side of the planet."
Akili said, "Two days ago, I would have agreed with you. But TOEs which fail to deal with their own basis in information are as incomplete General Relativity—which required the Big Bang to take place, but then broke down completely at that point. It took the unification of all four forces to smooth away the singularity. And it looks like it's going to take one more unification to understand the explanatory Big Bang."
"But two days ago—?"
"I was wrong. The mainstream always assumed that an incomplete TOE was just the way things had to be. The Keystone would explain everything—except how a TOE could actually come into force. Anthrocosmology would answer that question—but that side of the equation would never be visible." Akili held out both hands, palms pressed together horizontally. "Physics and metaphysics: we believed they'd remain separate forever. They always had, in the past, so it seemed like a reasonable premise. Like the single Keystone." Ve interlocked vis fingers and tipped vis hands to a forty-five-degree angle. "It just happens to be wrong. Maybe because a TOE which unifies physics and information— which mixes the levels, and describes its own authority—is the very opposite of unraveling. It's more stable than any other possibility; it affirms itself, it tightens the knot."