Resolution (32 page)

~ * ~

21

TERRA AD 2164

<>

[6]

Rain spattered against the windows, wind shook the bushes outside, pink petals dropping to the grass. The hummingbirds were gone. Shoulder to shoulder, Kian and Deirdre watched the storm.

‘This
is
California, right?’

‘Unless we slipped into another reality during the night.’

They were off-campus this year, sharing a house with three other students. Deirdre’s on-off lover Yvette had stayed the night, but left early to get to her job as a rising young architect in the city. Deirdre, at 8 a.m., had come into Kian’s room and sat cross-legged on his bed until he woke.

Now, drinking lemon tea, and neither of them with a lecture to attend until the afternoon, they sat and watched the falling rain.

‘Come on,’ she said finally. ‘Back to my room.’

‘At last, my luck’s changed.’

‘Ha.’ Deirdre’s reply was automatic, but sad. ‘Just work, boy.’

Kian, carrying his tea, followed her across the corridor and into her room: white-painted walls, everything stacked away, mussed bed which he tried not to stare at. Deirdre caught him looking, and turned away.

‘What’s up, sweetheart?’

‘Yvette, she ...’ Rapid eye-blinks. ‘She’s been offered a job in Toronto.’

‘Shit.’ Kian put his cup down, sat down on the floor beside Deirdre, took hold of her hand.

‘I knew something was ... God damn it, Kian. What am I gonna do? I can’t drop out of my course.’

Kian stared into her copper eyes. After a moment, he said straight-faced: ‘If only you weren’t a lesbian, I’d marry you in an instant.’

Deirdre’s fingertips brushed his lips.

‘If only you weren’t a guy, I might take you up on that.’

They remained sitting that way, holding hands, as the storm-sounds died and the sun brightened to cast abstract patterns of light glittering like diamonds on the rain-soaked glass.

The holodiagram was yellow and glowing. Every time Deirdre highlighted a particular feature, a node lit up in blue and a subsidiary image opened up at the periphery, internal details scrolling past.

Kian had work of his own to do, but today it was Deirdre who deserved his attention. An emotional analgesic: that was how he thought of her memetic engineering project ... except that, as Deirdre talked through the details of research she had shown no-one besides Professor Guillermi, Kian began to be fascinated by the intricate model for its own sake, and for what it revealed about Deirdre’s quicksilver mind.

‘You know we’re in a connected world: six-handshakes-from-the-Pope kind of connected.’

‘Not the Pope again, dear.’

‘She’s sweet, unlike some of her—Anyway, connectivity. Might’ve been seven by now, if it weren’t for the Changeling Plagues.’

‘Seven...?’

‘Steps removed from virtually any person in the world, chosen at random. Pay attention.’

‘Yes, Deirdre.’

‘See, if your closest friends and acquaintances were picked at random from the globe - like, you’re as likely to know a rice farmer in Indonesia as your own mother - then interconnectivity to this degree would be trivial. But reality ain’t like that. You know people you work with or live near.’

‘Yes, Deirdre.’

‘Another way is for
most
acquaintances to be local, but just occasionally to have a long-distance link to someone far away. Village societies are like this.’ In her holomodel, a virtual landscape showed groups of settlements: round huts with thatched roofs. ‘Highly clumped, very few travellers between them.’

‘Boring lives.’

‘Yeah, but... Watch what happens when I introduce a plague vector.’

Kian, interested now, tracked through the mortality rates over time in the simulation, as her little virtual people fell one by one, coughing up their little virtual blood as their skin erupted with virtual sores and bubuncles.

‘You’re enjoying this. Kian, you’re a disturbed man.’

‘Mm.’

Diseases which were both highly infectious and deadly killed entire settlements ... but did not spread to others. The plague wiped out its hosts, and died.

‘But... shit.’ Kian saw the unsettling implications for the real world. ‘Introduce a few globetrotting explorers from the outside ...’

‘And you get AIDS, Ebola, MelterBug and the Changeling Plagues, spread across the globe. That’s what actually happened.’

‘You’re a scary person, you know that?’

After making more lemon tea, Deirdre handed a cup to Kian, then expanded the diagram. ‘In large populations, you get a power law network. A tiny number of people have a
very
high number of connections.’

‘Deirdre, Deirdre ...’

‘Including
sexual partners, boyo. They’re the ones who spread endemic plagues. Same with airborne diseases. Sometimes one super-infecter will contaminate a whole country.’

‘Which would be good, from the disease’s point of view,’ said Kian, getting it.

‘It’s almost invulnerable to random attacks, this kind of network. The old World Wide Web was like that, with a small number of highly connected nodes ...’

Kian frowned. ‘But the anarchists—’

‘Destroyed the Web, yes. That’s why we have EveryWare. The old kind of network could cope with
random
attacks, but intelligently directed offensives ... It’s surprising the Net took an entire twenty minutes to die.’

It was impressive work, but Kian was confused.

‘I thought you were working on
memetics,
how ideas spread like viruses.’

The display collapsed in falling sheaves of light, was gone. Deirdre turned to look at Kian, odd shadows in her cupric eyes.

‘Recently, Pelkovich in Warsaw and Snyder in Beijing have worked on ways to identify highly infectious memetic nodes: the human individuals and the EveryWare loci who affect the way people
think.’’

‘They’re identifying trendsetters?’ Kian wondered why, if this was so good, strain was lining Deirdre’s face.

‘I examined the body language and oratory of the great manipulators; the use of scapegoats in driving entire populations to illogical and destructive acts; the hypnotic commands embedded in televisual adverts which linked polluting machines to sexual gratification ... It’s been going on for centuries.’