Distress - A Novel Part 3

We went inside. Unnatural Tastes was a converted department store, cavernous but brightly lit, opened up by the simple expedient of cutting a large elliptical hole in the middle of every floor. I waved my notepad at the entry turnstyle; a voice confirmed our reservation, adding, "Table 519. Fifth floor."

Gina smiled wickedly. "Fifth floor: stuffed toys and lingerie."

I glanced up at our fellow diners-mostly umale and ufem couples. I said, "You behave yourself, redneck, or next time we're eating in Epping."

The place was three-quarters full, at least, but the seating capacity was less than it seemed; most of the volume of the building was taken up by the central well. In what was left of each floor, human waiters in tuxedos weaved their way between the chromed tables; it all looked archaic and stylized, almost Marx Brothers, to me. I wasn't a big fan of Experimental Cuisine; essentially, we'd be guinea pigs, trying out medically safe but otherwise untested bioengineered produce. Gina had pointed out that at least the meal would be subsidized by the manufacturers. I wasn't so sure; Experimental Cuisine had become so fas.h.i.+onable lately that it could probably attract a statistically significant sample of diners for each novelty, even at full price.

The tabletop flashed up menus as we took our seats-and the figures 38.seemed to confirm my doubts about a subsidy. I groaned. '"Crimson bean salad'? I don't care what color they are, I want to know what they taste like. The last thing I ate here that looked like a kidney bean tasted exactly like boiled cabbage."

Gina took her time, prodding the names of half a dozen dishes to view the finished products, and screens of data on the design of the ingredients. She said, "You can work it all out, if you pay attention. If you know what genes they moved from where, and why, you can make a fair stab at predicting the taste and texture."

"Go ahead, dazzle me with science."

She hit the CONFIRM ORDER b.u.t.ton. "The green leafy stuff will taste like spinach-flavored pasta-but the iron in it will be absorbed by your body as easily as the haem iron in animal flesh, leaving spinach for dead. The yellow things which look like corn will taste like a cross between tomato and green capsic.u.m spiced with oregano-but nutrients and flavor will be less sensitive to poor storage conditions and overcooking. And the blue puree will taste almost like parmesan cheese."

"Why blue?"

"There's a blue pigment, a photoactivated enzyme, in the new self-fermenting lactoberries. They could remove it during processing, but it turns out we metabolize it directly into vitamin D-which is safer than making it the usual way, with UV on the skin."

"Food for people who never see the sun. How can I resist?" I ordered the same.

The service was swift-and Gina's predictions were more or less correct. The whole combination was actually quite pleasant.

I said, "You're wasted on wind turbines. You could be designing the spring collection for United Agronomics."

"Gee, thanks. But I already get all the intellectual stimulation I can handle."

"How is Big Harold coming along, anyway?"

"Still very much Little Harold, and likely to stay that way for a while." Little Harold was the one-thousandth-scale prototype of a projected two-hundred-megawatt turbine. "There are chaotic resonance modes turning up which we missed in the simulations. It's starting to look like we're going to have to re-evaluate half the a.s.sumptions of the software model."

39."I can never quite understand that. You know all the basic physics, the basic equations of air-flow dynamics, you have access to endless supercomputer time ..."

"So how can we possibly screw up? Because we can't compute the behavior of thousands of tons of air moving through a complex structure on a molecule-by-molecule basis. All the bulk flow equations are approximations, and we're deliberately operating in a region where the best-understood approximations break down. There's no magical new physics coming into play-but we're in a gray zone between one set of convenient simplifying a.s.sumptions and another. And so far, the best new set of compromise a.s.sumptions are neither convenient nor simple. And they're not even correct, as it turns out."

"I'm sorry."

She shrugged. "It's frustrating-but enough of it's frustrating in an interesting way to keep me from going insane."

I felt a stab of longing; I understood so little about this part of her life. She'd explained as much as I could follow, but I still had no real idea of what spun through her head when she was sitting at her work station juggling airflow simulations, or clambering around the wind tunnel making adjustments to Little Harold.

I said, "I wish you'd let me film some of this."

Gina regarded me balefully. "Not a chance, Mister Frankenscience. Not until you can tell me categorically whether wind turbines are Good or Evil."

I cringed. "You know that's not up to me. And it changes every year. New studies are published, the alternatives come in and out of favor-"

She cut me off bitterly. "Alternatives? Planting photovoltaic engineered forests on ten thousand times as much land per megawatt sounds like environmental vandalism to me."

"I'm not arguing. I could always make a Good Turbine doc.u.mentary . . . and if I can't sell it straight away, just wait for the tide to turn again."

"You can't afford to make anything on spec."

"True. I'd have to fit it in between other shooting."

Gina laughed. "I wouldn't try it. You can't even manage-"

"What?"

"Nothing. Forget it." She waved a hand, retracting the comment. I could have pressed her, but I would have been wasting my time.

I said, "Speaking of filming ..." I described the two projects Lydia 40.had offered me. Gina listened patiently, but when I asked for her opinion, she seemed baffled.

"If you don't want to make Distress . . . then don't. It's really none of my business."

That stung. I said, "It affects you, too. It would be a lor more money." Gina was affronted. "All I mean is, we could afford to take a holiday, or something. We could go overseas next time you have leave. If that's what you wanted."

She said stiffly, "I'm not taking leave for another eighteen months. And I can pay for my own holidays."

"All right. Forget it." I reached over to take her hand; she pulled away, irritated.

We ate in silence. I stared down at my plate, running through the rules, trying to decide where I'd gone wrong. Had I broken some taboo about money? We kept separate accounts, sharing the rent fifty-fifty- but we'd both helped each other out, many times, and given each other small luxuries. What should I have done? Gone ahead and made Distress-purely for the money-and only then asked if there was anything we could spend it on together that would make it worthwhile?

Maybe I'd made it sound as if I thought she expected to dictate the projects I chose-offending her by seeming to have failed to appreciate the independence she allowed me. My head spun. The truth was, I had no idea what she was thinking. It was all too hard, too slippery. And I couldn't imagine what I could say that might begin to put it right, without the risk of making everything far worse.

After a while, Gina said, "So where's the big conference being held?"

I opened my mouth, then realized I didn't have a clue. I picked up my notepad and quickly checked the briefing Sisyphus had prepared.

"Ah. On Stateless."

"Stateless?" She laughed. "You're a burnt-out case on biotech ... so they're sending you to the world's largest engineered-coral island?"

"I'm only fleeing Evil biotech. Stateless is Good."

"Oh, really? Tell that to the governments who keep it embargoed. Are you sure you won't get thrown in prison when you come home ?"

"I'm not going to trade with the wicked anarchists. I'm not even going to film them."

"Anarcho-syndicalists, get it right. Though they don't even call themselves that, do they?"

41.I said, "Who's 'they'? It depends who you ask."

"You should have had a segment on Stateless in junk DNA. Embargoed or not, they're prospering-and all thanks to biotechnology. That would have balanced the talking corpse."

"But then I couldn't have called it Junk DNA, could I?"

"Exactly." She smiled. Whatever I'd done, I'd been forgiven. I felt my heart pounding, as if I'd been dragged back at the last moment from the edge of an abyss.

The dessert we chose tasted like cardboard and snow, but we obligingly filled out the tabletop questionnaires before leaving.

We headed north up George Street to Martin Place. There was a nightclub called the Sorting Room in the old Post Office building. They played Zimbabwean njari music, multi-layered, hypnotic, pounding but never metronomic, leaving splinters of rhythm in the brain like the marks of fingernails raked over flesh. Gina danced ecstatically, and the music was so loud that speech was, mercifully, almost impossible. In this wordless place I could do no wrong.

We left just after one. On the train back to Eastwood, we sat in a corner of the carriage, kissing like teenagers. I wondered how my parents' generation had ever driven their precious cars in such a state. (Badly, no doubt.) The trip home was ten minutes-almost too short. I wanted everything to unfold as slowly as possible. I wanted it to last for hours.

We stopped a dozen times, walking down from the station. We stood outside the front door for so long that the security system asked us if we'd lost our keys.

When we undressed and fell onto the bed together, and my vision lurched, I thought it was just a side-effect of pa.s.sion. When my arms went numb, though, I realized what was happening.

I'd pushed myself too far with the melatonin blockers, depleting neu-rotransmitter reserves in the region of the hypothalamus where alertness was controlled. I'd borrowed too much time, and the plateau was crumbling.

Stricken, "I said, I don't believe this. I'm sorry."

"About what?" I still had an erection.

I forced myself to concentrate; I reached over and hit a b.u.t.ton on the pharm. "Give me half an hour."

"No. Safety limits-"

"Fifteen minutes," I pleaded. "This is an emergency."

42.The pharm hesitated, consulting the security system. "There is no emergency. You're safe in bed, and the house is under no threat."

"You're gone. You're recycled."

Gina seemed more amused than disappointed. "See what happens when you transgress natural limits? I hope you're recording this for Junk DNA." Mockery only made her a thousand times more desirable-but I was already lapsing into microsleeps. I said dolefully, "Forgive me? Maybe . . . tomorrow, we could-"

"I don't think so. Tomorrow you'll be working till one a.m. And I'm not waiting up." She took me by the shoulders and rolled me onto my back, then knelt astride my stomach.

I made sounds of protest. She bent over and kissed me on the mouth, tenderly. "Come on. You don't really want to waste this rare opportunity, do you?" She reached down and stroked my c.o.c.k; I could feel it respond to her touch, but it barely seemed to be a part of me anymore.

I murmured, "Ravisher. Necrophiliac." I wanted to make a long earnest speech about s.e.x and communication, but Gina seemed intent on disproving my whole thesis before I could even begin. "Talk about Bad Timing."

She said, "Is that a yes or a no?"

I gave up trying to open my eyes. "Go ahead."

Something vaguely pleasant began to happen, but my senses were retreating, my body was spinning off into the void.

I heard a voice, light-years away, whisper something about "sweet dreams."

But I plunged into blackness, feeling nothing. And I dreamed of silent oceanic depths.

Of falling through dark water. Alone.

43.6.I'd heard that London had suffered badly from the coming of the networks, but was less of a ghost town than Sydney. The Ruins were more extensive, but they were being exploited far more diligently; even the last gla.s.s-and-aluminium towers built for bankers and stockbrokers at the turn of the millennium, and the last of the "high tech" printing presses which had "revolutionized" newspaper publis.h.i.+ng (before becoming completely obsolete), had been labeled "historic" and taken under the wing of the tourism industry.

I hadn't had time, though, to visit the hushed tombs of Bishopsgate or Wapping. I'd flown straight to Manchester-which appeared to be thriving. According to Sisyphus's potted history, the balance between real-estate prices and infrastructure costs had favored the city in the twenties, and thousands of information-based companies-with a largely telecommuting workforce, but the need for a small central office as well-had moved there from the south. This industrial revival had also sh.o.r.ed up the academic sector, and Manchester University was widely acknowledged to be leading the world in at least a dozen fields, including neu-rolinguistics, neo-protein chemistry, and advanced medical imaging.

I replayed the footage I'd taken of the city center-swarming with pedestrians, bicycles and quadcycles-and picked out a few brief establis.h.i.+ng shots. I'd hired a bicycle, myself, from one of the automated depots outside Victoria Station; ten euros and it was mine for the day. It was a recent model Whirlwind, a beautiful machine: light, elegant, and nearly indestructible-made in nearby Sheffield. It could simulate a pushbike if required (a trivial option to include, and it kept the m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic purists happy), but there was no mechanical connection between pedals and wheels; essentially, it was a human-powered electric motorbike. Superconducting current loops buried in the cha.s.sis acted as 44.a short-term energy store, smoothing out demands on the rider, and taking full advantage of the energy-reclaiming brakes. Forty k.p.h. took no more effort than a brisk walk, and hills were almost irrelevant, ascent and descent nearly canceling each other out in energy lost and gained. It must have been worth about two thousand euros-but the navigation system, the beacons and locks, were so close to tamper-proof that I would have needed a small factory, and a PhD in cryptology, to steal it.

The city's trams went almost everywhere, but so did the covered cycleways, so I'd ridden the Whirlwind to my afternoon appointment.

James Rourke was Media Liaison Officer for the Voluntary Autists a.s.sociation. A thin, angular man in his early thirties, in the flesh he'd struck me as painfully awkward, with poor eye contact and muted body language. Verbally articulate, but far from telegenic.

Watching him on the console screen, though, I realized how wrong I'd been. Ned Landers had put on a dazzling performance, so slick and seamless that it left no room for any question of what was going on beneath. Rourke put on no performance at all-and the effect was both riveting and deeply unsettling. Coming straight after Delphic Biosys-tems' elegant, a.s.sured spokespeople (teeth and skin by Masarini of Florence, sincerity by Operant Conditioning pie), it would be like being jolted out of a daydream by a kick in the head.

I'd have to tone him down, somehow.

I had a fully autistic cousin myself-Nathan. I'd met him only once, when we were both children. He was one of the lucky few who'd suffered no other congenital brain damage, and at the time he was still living with his parents in Adelaide. He'd shown me his computer, cataloguing its features exhaustively, sounding scarcely different from any other enthusiastic thirteen-year-old technophile with a new toy. But when he'd started demonstrating his favorite programs-stultifying solo card games, and bizarre memory quizzes and geometric puzzles that had looked more like arduous intelligence tests than anything I could think of as recreation-my sarcastic comments had gone right over his head. I'd stood there insulting him, ever more viciously, and he'd just gazed at the screen, and smiled. Not tolerant. Oblivious.

I'd spent three hours interviewing Rourke in his small flat; VA had no central office," in Manchester or anywhere else. There were members in forty-seven countries-almost a thousand people, worldwide-but only Rourke had been willing to speak to me, and only because it was his job.

45.He was not fully autistic, of course. But he'd shown me his brain scans.

I replayed the raw footage.

"Do you see this small lesion in the left frontal lobe?" There was a tiny dark s.p.a.ce, a minuscule gap in the gray matter, above the pointer's arrow. "Now compare it with the same region in a twenty-nine-year-old fully autistic male." Another dark s.p.a.ce, three or four times larger. "And here's a non-autistic subject of the same age and s.e.x." No lesion at all. "The pathology isn't always so obvious-the structure can be malformed, rather than visibly absent-but these examples make it clear that there's a precise physical basis to our claims."

The view tilted up from the notepad to his face. Witness manufactured a smooth transition from one rock-steady "camera angle" to another-just as it smoothed away saccades: the rapid darting movements of the eyeb.a.l.l.s, restlessly scanning and re-scanning the scene even when the gaze was subjectively fixed.

I said, "No one would deny that you've suffered damage in the same part of the brain. But why not be thankful that it's minor damage, and leave it at that? Why not count yourself lucky that you can still function in society, and get on with your life?"

"That's a complicated question. For a start, it depends what you mean by 'function.'"

"You can live outside of inst.i.tutions. You can hold down skilled jobs." Rourke's main occupation was research a.s.sistant to an academic linguist-not exactly sheltered employment.

He said, "Of course. If we couldn't, we'd be cla.s.sified as fully autistic. That's the criterion which defines 'partial autism': we can survive in ordinary society. Our deficiencies aren't overwhelming-and we can usually fake a lot of what's missing. Sometimes we can even convince ourselves that nothing's wrong. For a while."

"For a while? You have jobs, money, independence. What else does it take to function!"

"Interpersonal relations.h.i.+ps."

"You mean s.e.xual relations.h.i.+ps?"

"Not necessarily. But they are the most difficult. And the most . . . illuminating."

He touched a key on his notepad; a complex neural map appeared. "Everyone-or almost everyone-instinctively attempts to understand 46.other human beings. To guess what they're thinking. To antic.i.p.ate their actions. To ... 'know them.' People build symbolic models of other people in their brains, both to act as coherent representations, tying together all the information which can actually be observed-speech, gestures, past actions-and to help make informed guesses about the aspects which can't be known directly-motives, intentions, emotions." As he spoke, the neural map dissolved, and re-formed as a functional diagram of a "third person" model: an elaborate network of blocks labeled with objective and subjective traits.

"In most people, all of this happens with little or no conscious effort: there's an innate ability to model other people. It's refined by use in childhood-and total isolation would cripple its development... in the same way as total darkness would cripple the visual centers. Short of that kind of extreme abuse, though, upbringing isn't a factor. Autism can only be caused by congenital brain damage, or later physical injuries to the brain. There are genetic risk factors which involve susceptibility to viral infections in utero-but autism itself is not a simple hereditary disease."

I'd already filmed a white-coated expert saying much the same things, but VA members' detailed knowledge of their own condition was a crucial part of the story . . . and Rourke's explanation was clearer than the neurologist's.

"The brain structure involved occupies a small region in the left frontal lobe. The specific details describing individual people are scattered throughout the brain-like all memories-but this structure is the one place where those details are automatically integrated and interpreted. If it's damaged, other people's actions can still be perceived and remembered- but they lose their special significance. They don't generate the same kind of 'obvious' implications; they don't make the same kind of immediate sense." The neural map reappeared-this time with a lesion. Again, it was transformed into a functional diagram-now visibly disrupted, overlayed with dozens of dashed red lines to ill.u.s.trate lost connections.

Rourke continued, "The structure in question probably began to evolve toward its modern human form in the primates, though it had precursors in earlier mammals. It was first identified and studied-in chimpanzees-by a neuroscientist called Lament, in 2014. The corresponding human version was mapped a few years later.

"Maybe the first crucial role for Lament's area was to help make deception possible-to learn how to hide your own true motives, by 47.understanding how others perceive you. If you know how to appear to be servile or cooperative-whatever's really on your mind-you have a better chance of stealing food, or a quick f.u.c.k with someone else's partner. But then . . . natural selection would have upped the ante, and favored those who could see through the ruse. Once lying had been invented, there was no turning back. Development would have s...o...b..lled."