Nothing could stop the cramps and the bowel spasms. When they came, it was like demonic possession, like being ridden by a voodoo god: an obscene bear-hug by something powerful and alien constricting inside my flesh. I couldn’t believe that any muscle in my own rag-doll body could still be so strong. I tried to stay calm – to accept each brutal convulsion as inevitable, to keep my mind fixed on the sure and certain knowledge that this too would pass – but every time, the surge of nausea swept away my laboriously composed stoicism like a house of matchsticks beneath a tidal wave, and left me shuddering and sobbing, convinced that I was finally dying, and half-believing that that was what I wanted more than anything else: instant release.

My melatonin patch had been removed; the abyssal sleep it generated was too dangerous, now. But I couldn’t begin to tell the difference between the erratic rhythms of melatonin withdrawal, and my otherwise natural state: long stretches of half-sensate paralytic stupor, broken up by brief, violent dreams – and moments of panic-stricken clarity each time I believed my intestines were about to rupture and wash out of me in a red and gray tide.

I told myself that I was stronger and more patient than the disease. Generations of bacteria could come and go; all I had to do was hang on. All I had to do was outlive them.

#

On the morning of the second day, Mosala and De Groot came to visit. They seemed like time travelers to me; my previous life on Stateless had already receded into the distant past.

Mosala seemed shocked by my appearance. She said gently, “I’ve taken your advice; I’ve been examined thoroughly. I’m not infected, Andrew. I’ve spoken to your doctor, and he thinks you must have caught this from food on the plane.”

I croaked, “Has anyone else, on the same flight—?”

“No. But one sealed package might have missed being irradiated, and ended up imperfectly sterilized. It can happen.”

I didn’t have the strength to argue. And this theory made a certain amount of sense: a random glitch had breached the technological barrier between Third World and First, momentarily scrambling the impeccable free-market logic of employing the cheapest caterers on the planet and then blasting away the risks with an equally cheap burst of gamma rays.

That evening, my temperature began rising again. Michael – the Fijian man who’d greeted me when I first woke, and who’d since explained that he was “both doctor and nurse, if you insist on using those archaic foreign words here” – sat by my bed for most of the night … or at least, he was there in the flesh during every brief window of lucidity I experienced; the rest of the time, for all I knew, I hallucinated his presence.