"Distress" - читать интересную книгу автора (Иган Грег)4Delphic Biosystems had been too generous by far. Not only had they arranged for me to interview ten times as many of their Public Relations staff as I could ever have made time for, they’d showered me with ROMs packed with seductive micrographs and dazzling animation. Software flow-charts for the HealthGuard implant were rendered as air-brushed fantasies of impossible chromed machines, jet-black conveyor belts moving incandescent silver nuggets of "data" from subprocess to subprocess. Molecular schematics of interacting proteins were shrouded with delicately beautiful—and utterly gratuitous—electron-density maps, veils of pink and blue aurorae melting and merging, transforming the humblest chemical wedding into a microcosmic fantasia. I could have set it all to Wagner—or Blake—and flogged it to members of Mystical Renaissance, to play on a loop whenever they wanted to go slack-jawed with numinous incomprehension. I slogged my way through the whole morass, though—and it finally paid off. Buried amongst all the technoporn and science-as-psychedelia were a few shots worth salvaging. The HealthGuard implant employed the latest programmable assay chip: an array of elaborate proteins bound to silicon, in many respects like a pharm’s synthesizer, but designed to count molecules, not make them. The previous generation of chips had used a multitude of highly specific antibodies, Y-shaped proteins planted in the semiconductor in a checkerboard pattern, like adjoining fields of a hundred different crops. When a molecule of cholesterol, or insulin, or whatever, happened to strike exactly the right field and collide with a matching antibody, it bound to it long enough for the tiny change in capacitance to be detected, and logged in a microprocessor. Over time, this record of serendipitous collisions yielded the amount of each substance in the blood. The new sensors used a protein which was more like a Venus flytrap with brains than an antibody’s passive, single-purpose template. "Assayin" in its receptive state was a long, bell-shaped molecule, a tube opening out into a broad funnel. This conformation was metastable; the charge distribution on the molecule rendered it exquisitely sensitive, spring-loaded. Anything large enough colliding with the inner surface of the funnel caused a lightning-fast wave of deformation, engulfing and shrink-wrapping the intruder. The microprocessor, noting the sprung trap, could then probe the captive molecule by searching for a shape of the assayin which imprisoned it even more snugly. There were no more wasted, mismatched collisions—no more insulin molecules striking cholesterol antibodies, yielding no information at all. Assayin always knew what had hit it. It was a technical advance worth communicating, worth explaining, worth (Lofty sentiments… and here I was peddling frankenscience, because that was the niche that had needed filling. I salved my conscience—or numbed it for a while—with platitudes about Trojan horses, and changing the system from within.) I took the Delphic Biosystems graphics of assayin in action, and had the console strip away the excessive decoration so it was possible to see clearly what was going on. I threw out the gushing commentary and wrote my own. The console delivered it in the diction profile I’d chosen for all Hermes—my communications software—was programmed to bounce almost everyone on Earth, while I was editing. Lydia Higuchi, SeeNet’s West Pacific Commissioning Executive Producer, was one of the few exceptions. It was my notepad that rang, but I switched the call through to the console itself; the screen was larger and clearer—and the camera stamped its signal with the words AFFINE graphics EDITOR MODEL 2052-KL, and a time code. Not very subtle, but it wasn’t meant to be. Lydia got straight to the point. She said, "I saw the final cut of the Landers stuff. It’s good. But I want to talk about what comes next." "The HealthGuard implant? Is there some problem?" I didn’t hide my irritation. She’d seen selections of the raw footage, she’d seen all my post-production notes. If she wanted anything significant changed, she’d left it too damn late. She laughed. "Andrew, take one step back. Not the next story in I eyed her as if she’d casually raised the prospect of imminent travel to another planet. I said, "Don’t do this to me, Lydia. Please. You know I can’t think rationally about anything else right now." She nodded sympathetically but said, "I take it you’ve been monitoring this new disease? It’s not anecdotal static anymore; there are official reports coming out of Geneva, Atlanta, Nairobi." My stomach tightened. "You mean Acute Clinical Anxiety Syndrome?" "A.k.a. Distress." She seemed to savor the word, as if she’d already adopted it into her vocabulary of deeply telegenic subjects. My spirits sank even further. I said, "My knowledge miners been logging everything on it, but I haven’t had time to stay up to date." "There are over four hundred diagnosed cases, Andrew. That’s a thirty percent rise in the last six months." "How can anyone diagnose something when they don’t have a clue what it is?" "Process of elimination." "Yeah, I think it’s bullshit, too." She mimed brief sarcastic amusement. "Get serious. This is a brand new mental illness. Possibly communicable. Possibly caused by an escaped military pathogen—" "Possibly fallen from a comet. Possibly a punishment from God. Amazing how many things are possible, isn’t it?" She shrugged. "Whatever the cause, it’s spreading. There are cases everywhere now but Antarctica. This is headline news—and more. The board decided last night: we’re going to commission a thirty-minute special on Distress. High profile, blitz promotion, culminating in synchronous primetime broadcasts, worldwide." Synchronous didn’t mean what it should have, in netspeak; it meant the same calendar date and local time for all viewers. "Worldwide? You mean Anglophone world?" "I mean world world. We’re tying up arrangements to on-sell to other-language networks." "Well… good." Lydia smiled, a tight-lipped impatient smile. "Are you being coy, Andrew? Do I have to spell it out? We want you to make it. You’re our biotech specialist, you’re the logical choice. And you’ll do a great job. So…?" I put a hand to my forehead, and tried to work out why I felt so claustrophobic. I said, "How long do I have, to decide?" She smiled even more widely, which meant she was puzzled, annoyed, or both. "We’re broadcasting on May 24th—that’s ten weeks from Monday. You’ll need to start pre-production the minute I said, "Tomorrow morning." Lydia wasn’t happy, but she said, "That’s fine." I steeled myself. "If I say no, is there anything else going?" Lydia looked openly astonished now. "What’s wrong with you? Prime-time world broadcast! You’ll make five rimes as much on this as on "I realize that. And I’m grateful for the chance, believe me. I just want to know if there’s… any other choice." "You could always go and hunt for coins on the beach with a metal detector." She saw my face, and softened. Slightly. "There’s another project about to go into pre-production. Although I’ve very nearly promised it to Sarah Knight." "Tell me." "Ever heard of Violet Mosala?" "Of course. She’s a… physicist? A South African physicist?" "Two out of two, very impressive. Sarah’s a huge fan, she chewed my ear off about her for an hour." "So what’s the project?" "A profile of Mosala… who’s twenty-seven, and won the Nobel Prize two years ago—but you knew that all along, didn’t you? Interviews, biography, appraisals by colleagues, blah blah blah. Her work’s purely theoretical, so there’s nothing much to show of it except computer simulations—and she’s offered us her own graphics. But the heart of the program will be the Einstein Centenary conference—" "Wasn’t that in nineteen seventy-some thing?" Lydia gave me a withering look. I said, "Ah. Centenary of his death. Charming." "Mosala is attending the conference. On the last day of which, three of the world’s top theoretical physicists are scheduled to present rival versions of the Theory of Everything. And you don’t get three guesses as to who’s the alpha favorite." I gritted my teeth and suppressed the urge to say: "So when’s the conference?" "April 5th to 18th." I blanched. "Three weeks from Monday." Lydia looked thoughtful for a moment, then pleased. "You don’t really have time, do you? Sarah’s been prepared for this for months—" I said irritably, "Five seconds ago you were talking about me starting pre-production on Distress in less than three weeks." "You could walk straight into I feigned indignation. "Enough! And I’m not stupid. I can catch up." "When?" "I’ll make time. I’ll work faster; I’ll finish "Early next year." Which meant eight whole months of relative sanity—once the conference was over. Lydia glanced at her watch, redundantly. "I don’t understand you. A high-profile special on Distress would be the logical endpoint of everything you’ve been doing for the last five years. After that, you could think about switching away from biotech. And who am I going to use instead of you?" "Sarah Knight?" "Don’t be sarcastic." "I’ll tell her you said that." "Be my guest. I don’t care what she’s done in politics; she’s only made one science program—and that was on fringe cosmology. It was good— but not good enough to ramp her straight into something like this. She’s earned a fortnight with Violet Mosala, but not a primetime broadcast on the world’s alphamost virus." Nobody had Pure vanity. What did I think—that I was the only person on the planet capable of deflating the rumors and hysteria surrounding Distress? I said, "I haven’t made any decision yet. I need to talk it over with Gina." Lydia was skeptical. "Okay, fine. I turned away from the console and sat staring down at my clenched fists, trying to untangle what I was feeling—if only enough to enable me to put it all aside and get back to I’d seen a brief news shot of someone with Distress, a few months before. I’d been in a hotel room in Manchester, flicking channels between appointments. A young woman—looking healthy, but disheveled—was lying on her back in a corridor in an apartment building in Miami. She was waving her arms wildly, kicking in all directions, tossing her head and twisting her whole body back and forth. It hadn’t looked like the product of any kind of crude neurological dysfunction, though: it had seemed too coordinated, too purposeful. And before the police and paramedics could hold her still—or still enough to get a needle in—and pump her full of some high-powered court-order paralytic like Straitjacket or Medusa—they’d tried the sprays, and they hadn’t worked—she’d thrashed and screamed like an animal in mortal agony, like a child in a solipsistic rage, like an adult in the grip of the blackest despair. I’d watched and listened in disbelief—and when, mercifully, she’d been rendered comatose and dragged away, I’d struggled to convince myself that it had been nothing out of the ordinary: some kind of epileptic fit, some kind of psychotic tantrum, at worst some kind of unbearable physical pain the cause of which would be swiftly identified and dealt with. None of which was true. Victims of Distress rarely had a history of neurological or mental illness, and bore no signs of injury or disease. And no one had the slightest idea how to I picked up my notepad and touched the icon for Sisyphus, my knowledge miner. I said, "Assemble a briefing on Violet Mosala, the Einstein Centenary conference, and the last ten years' advances in Unified Field Theories. I’ll need to digest it all in about… a hundred and twenty hours. Is that feasible?" There was pause while Sisyphus downloaded the relevant sources and scrutinized them. Then it asked, "Do you know what an ATM is?" "An Automatic Teller Machine?" "No. In this context, an ATM is an All-Topologies Model." The phrase sounded vaguely familiar; I’d probably skimmed through a brief article on the topic, five years before. There was another pause, while more elementary background material was downloaded and assessed. Then: "A hundred and twenty hours would be good enough for listening and nodding. Not for asking intelligent questions." I groaned. "How long for…?" "A hundred and fifty." "Do it." I hit the icon for the pharm unit, and said, "Recompute my melatonin doses. Give me two more hours of peak alertness a day, starting immediately." "Until when?" The conference began on April 5th; if I wasn’t an expert on Violet Mosala by then, it would be too late. But… I couldn’t risk cutting loose from the forced rhythms of the melatonin—and rebounding into erratic sleep patterns—in the middle of filming. "April 18th." The pharm said, "You’ll be sorry." That was no generic warning—it was a prediction based on five years' worth of intimate biochemical knowledge. But I had no real choice—and if I spent the week after the conference suffering from acute circadian arrhythmia, it would be unpleasant, but it wouldn’t kill me. I did some calculations in my head. Somehow, I’d just conjured up five or six hours of free time out of thin air. It was a Friday. I phoned Gina at work. I said, "Screw |
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