Limit of Vision (5 page)

“I’m doing an article for a global magazine,” Ela explained as she produced two Cokes from her backpack and a bag of colorful rice crackers. At a nod from Phuong, she gave the crackers to the kids. “It’s supposed to be about how the fishing was spoiled here.”

Phuong nodded. “There are not many fish.”

“I want to tell about why people live here anyway.”

“There is no other place to go.” The kids whispered over the shapes and colors of the rice crackers. “My husband and I, we come from a village close to Cambodia. We both went to satellite school in the afternoons and earned high marks, but there was no work there. So we decided to go to Can Tho. It’s said there are jobs sometimes at the factories. But at Can Tho the authorities laughed at us. ‘No work,’ they said.” Phuong’s mind seemed far away. “Have you been to Can Tho?”

Ela nodded, knowing herself to be only a step away from this woman’s plight.

Phuong sighed. “In Can Tho houses are built over the water of the canals. Laborers sleep between the trees that line the levees. Trucks run down the levee roads, and they don’t slow for straying children. All the other land belongs to the farmers, and of course they must protect it, I understand that. But we walked for three days and nights without rest before we found a bit of roadside where no one tried to stop us from lying down. So we came here. This is new land, laid down this season by the river. No one owns it.”

Ela looked out across the mudflat. Here and there sprigs of riotous green sprouted against the wet, gray soil: mangrove seedlings and salt-tolerant sedges.
New land
. Yet it would all be drowned when the monsoon returned. Phuong would know that.

Ela sighed, and thanked her. She asked if she might stay the night on the platform, and Phuong agreed. Then Ela sat for a time in silence, watching the hundreds of little boats out on the water, knowing she could not produce the article the Coastal Society wanted.

She finished the last warm sip of her Coca-Cola, then she put in a link request to her agency. Joanie’s image immediately filled the screen. “Ela! I expected to hear from you sooner than this. What did Mr. Nguyen say?”

Ela shook her head. “I can’t do the article, Joanie. At least, not the way the Coastal Society wants it done.”

Joanie looked puzzled. Then she looked angry. “Ela, what are you thinking? You agreed to a contract. You can’t afford
not
to do it.”

“Just get me something else, okay? Trash work if you have to, but I won’t do an article aimed at making these people into bad guys. It’s not their fault the ocean has been stripped.”

Joanie’s face went cold and stony. “Did Mr. Nguyen put you up to this?”

Ela did not want to admit he had frightened her. “He suggested I take a deeper look at things—and he was right.”

Joanie leaned forward, her angry face looming in Ela’s farsights. “Then Mr. Nguyen had better put his money where his mouth is. I will call him. And I will see that
he
foots the bill.”

5

Detective Kanaha decided
that both Virgil and Panwar qualified as biohazards. So he arrested them, confiscated their farsights, then left them where they were, posting two officers outside the suite door. He did agree to remove Gabrielle’s remains—encased in double plastic, with the handlers wearing environment suits. A trio of cindies was sent in to attend to the residue.

Virgil stayed in his office, curled on the couch, listening to the robots vacuum and scrub, their limbs clicking and ratcheting as they crawled over the chair. Aerostat cameras hovered in every room, even the bathroom, watching everything. Virgil wondered what would happen if he plucked a
L
ov
from his brow and flushed it down the toilet. He laughed. The plumbing had probably been switched off.

He fell asleep before the cindies finished. He knew it only when he awoke, his mind switching from sleep to wakefulness with no transition phase and no memory of dreams. Ever since he’d had the
L
ov
s he’d awakened like this. It made him wonder what went on in his head when he wasn’t there.

He reached for his farsights, then remembered: Kanaha had taken them. The detective would not be able to get anything out of them, of course. Iris would erase any data stored in the farsights as soon as it detected a stranger handling them. The
R
osa
would sever contact, biding on its anonymous server until Virgil called it out once again. Everything the
R
osa
handled, from mail to voice-links to research, was anonymous and encrypted. The police could not track its location unless Virgil gave it away, and even then, they could not decrypt the data it contained. Iris, at least, would never be a witness against him.

He sat up on the couch, feeling a hundred years old.

What time was it, anyway?

Whatever time it was, he should call his parents.

No farsights of course.

The realization came as a relief. The thought of facing his parents, of explaining to them why he had blown his existence . . . it gave him a sick feeling, and he could not bring himself to do it.

In truth he rarely felt comfortable talking about himself or his beliefs, his motivations. He knew too well that his world—an emergent world arising from the intricate, unpredictable, remorseless dance of physical laws and quantum chance—was utterly different from the world perceived by almost anyone he might pass randomly on the street.

He had spent his life gazing at life—he thought of it as Life, boldly set with a capital letter, and in his mind this Life encompassed not just those organic assemblages that were living things, but also the environment that contained them, the laws of complexity that gave them existence, the information systems that let them think and grow and reproduce, and the perpetual war they fought against entropy so that
something
could exist, instead of a homogeneous nothing. He had looked into all these aspects and what he had seen—evidenced everywhere, apparent in everything—was the common origin of all things.

Life had emerged from the plasmas of creation because life was allowed by the physical constants of the Universe. The interplay of elemental particles had led to simple atoms that became stars that in the explosive forge of supernovas created atoms more complex that led to molecules evolving into organisms that thought. Every step along the way, at every level of definition, from quantum particles to nuclear physics, chemistry, biology, astrophysics, neurology, climate, psychology, genetics, evolution, ecology, and faith, it was all one: an utterly integrated, self-contained system.

A poignantly beautiful system.

But grim, austere, and ugly, too. Virgil would never deny that. In this world so much could be lost so easily to ruthless chance. He had always known it. Now, with Gabrielle’s loss, he
felt
the precarious nature of his own existence. It made him afraid, but it made him defiant too. He knew that tragedy could demand no revision of his belief. It could elicit no angry protestations that he had been deceived or betrayed by an unseen god, because no promises had ever been made. Like the old bumper stickers used to say, shit was a thing that happened. One had to live with it, or die.

And still this was an alien philosophy on the street, where dualism lived on—the ancient idea that mind and matter were independent elements, separated from one another by a spark of the immortal. Dualism had died decades ago in the minds of most neurobiologists, but on the street it was still easy to strike offense with the proposition that the mind could be explained purely by the organization and symbol processing within the brain, with no need to call upon the magic forces of some hypothetical soul.

Virgil did not talk much about these things. Who did? But he believed in a strictly natural world, and that was enough to set him off in an isolated psychological space, to make him alien. Most of the time he could hide his alienness from those who did not want to see it. Not always.

His father was a corporate executive with secular leanings, but after the divorce he had married a devout Christian, who was quite sure Virgil was a damned soul. Virgil thought of her as sweetly disillusioned. His mother understood him better, but even she squirmed at the idea that the brain was a machine running a program that generated the Self.

Panwar understood these things. They were alike in that, as in so many ways.

So why had they not talked to each other since Kanaha left?

Virgil rubbed the sleep from his eyes. Then he forced himself up. When he looked into the hallway he was surprised to see the cindies lined up against the wall, three smooth insect carapaces each twice the size of a football. Apparently they were under quarantine too.

The scent of coffee was a blessing on the air. It led him past the open door of Panwar’s office. Panwar was there, his feet up on the desk, his
L
ov
s glittering above his dark eyes. “Have you seen the news yet?” he asked, nodding at a small flowscreen built into the wall. “It’s all public now. The first round from the op-eds is a call for our heads.”

“I’ll take responsibility for it,” Virgil said. “Don’t worry about that. It was my project.”

Panwar slipped his feet off the desk. “Shut the fuck up, okay? As soon as I can talk to my dad, he’ll get us a lawyer. Don’t give up, Virg. It doesn’t end here.”

Virgil nodded. He did not come in. “Gabrielle was engaged in a two-way visual link with the colony.”

Panwar scowled, glancing meaningfully at the aerostat floating in the corner of his office. Everything they said and did could be used as evidence against them. Aloud he said: “That’s no secret. I gave Kanaha a copy of the log before he left.”

“We need to talk about why.”

“No. We don’t.”

“I do.”

Early in their work, Virgil had proposed the idea of a cognitive circle:
Why not let our
L
ov
s interact while we brainstorm a problem?
Enhanced brain chemistry spawned fiery ideas. In a cognitive circle that effect was amplified as
L
ov
spoke to
L
ov
, communicating emotional energy across the circle in microsecond flashes of light. It was a powerful feedback loop that drove their brainstorming sessions forward with furious energy. Whenever Virgil had sat with Panwar and Gabrielle in a cognitive circle, he had felt like his mind was on fire, a sacred instrument designed to receive signals from some holy mental space.

They had talked about interacting with one of the
L
ov
colonies in the same way, but they had not done it. Not before this weekend. “She was involved in a cognitive circle with E-3,” Virgil said. “There’s no other explanation.”

The door to the suite clicked open. Virgil turned to look down the hall. Had Detective Kanaha found a cell to put them in? He could hear one of the police officers talking outside the door: “. . . under observation at all times. If there’s any trouble we’ll be inside within seconds.”

A woman’s low voice answered, sounding mildly amused. “I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

Then she stepped past the door: a slender woman of moderate height in a calf-length brown dress and matching jacket trimmed in green. Her brown hair was gathered in a loose ponytail, framing a face of uncertain age. The eyes behind her farsights were startlingly familiar.

“Summer Goforth,” Virgil said, after a second’s hesitation.

Panwar lunged out of his seat, leaning out the office door to get a look.

Summer Goforth had invented the original
L
ov
s, and then become their most vocal opponent. She looked on them now, and she did not smile. “Hello, Virgil. Randall.” She offered her hand; all very cordial. She took an extra few seconds to peer at Panwar’s
L
ov
s.

Virgil had met her only once before, less than a month after he’d joined EquaSys. He’d come up from the beach, salt dry on his skin and the sun setting behind parallel lines of docile swells. Summer had been leaning against his car. He thought he’d been cornered by a fanatic . . . but by the time she said good-bye, uneasy doubts had been stirring within him, and he’d found himself wondering just who the fanatic really was.

“Why are you here?” he asked her. “You’re not with the police.”

“You’re not in police custody anymore.” The lens of her farsights had taken on a gold-green hue. “The International Biotechnology Commission has taken over your case. They’re creating an ethics committee to advise on your actions, and to rule on the status of the
L
ov
s. I live here. I’m acquainted with the
L
ov
s. So I’m on it.”

“The status of the
L
ov
s is already defined,” Panwar said. “They’re an artificial life-form.”

Summer’s farsights flushed a deeper green as she looked at him. Mood gloss? She said: “An artificial life-form legally confined to the Hammer, but you see they’ve escaped—which makes it an IBC case.”

Virgil had not thought he could contain any more worries, but he’d been wrong. The International Biotechnology Commission had been dreamed up in the wake of the Van Nuys incident, receiving its authority as a law-enforcement agency within the United States less than six months ago—making it younger than the crime he and Panwar had committed. The IBC’s youth did not translate to weakness. Under the guidance of Director Daniel Simkin, the agency had already built a reputation for hard-nosed enforcement. A case like this would sear its existence into the consciousness of every licensed lab around the world.

Panwar looked as if he’d taken a blow. He shook his head. “You’re twisting the truth. You know the
L
ov
s didn’t escape.”

“Are you sure? The
L
ov
s were supposed to be confined to the Hammer, but they got out. You can call it kidnapped if you like, or stolen, or smuggled, the fact remains, they are here. And an artificial life-form that cannot be controlled will be sterilized. That is clearly stated in the interim guidelines.”

“Is that the position you’ll be taking?” Virgil asked.

“That’s the position I’ve taken ever since Van Nuys—because I’ve been down this road myself. I know what it feels like when you’re close to a project. So close you can’t see the stop signs. You keep telling yourself, ‘just a little farther, just a little more.’ Until reason and good judgment are left far behind.”

The color had been fading from her farsights as she spoke, until now they became a translucent white veil. “The two of you don’t have to talk to me. You don’t have to cooperate in any way. You can wait for a lawyer to show up, and you can pretend you’ve got a chance in court. But the truth is, you don’t. You’re both facing life sentences, and you are not going to have a lot of friends speaking on your behalf. This committee will include top names in biotechnology from around the world, and every one of them will be concerned foremost about one thing: saving their own projects. Your actions have conjured a wildcat mad scientist image that is going to haunt them for years if they don’t quash it now. Your hubris has put the world at risk. That’s how they’ll play it.”

“But that isn’t true,” Virgil said. “We were taking chances with ourselves. No one else.”

“Prove it. Show me your work.” She tapped her farsights. “From now on I’m recording. Make me—and the rest of the world—understand. That’s the only way you’ll buy leniency for yourselves.”