“I do not wish to know that.” Three thousand? That was a sixfold increase in a fortnight. “Show me a case map.” It looked more like the plot for a spontaneous cancer than any kind of infectious disease: a random scatter across the globe, ignoring every social and environmental factor, concentrated only by population density itself.

How could the numbers be increasing so rapidly – without any localized outbreaks? I’d heard that models based on airborne transmission, sexual contact, water supplies, parasites, had all failed to match the epidemiology.

“Any other news on this?”

“Not officially. But footage logged in SeeNet’s library by your colleague John Reynolds includes the first reports of coherent speech by sufferers.”

“Some people are recovering?”

“No. But some new sufferers have shown an intermittent change in the pathology.”

“Change, or reduction?”

“The speech is coherent, but the subject matter is contextually inappropriate.”

“You mean they’re psychotic? When they finally stop screaming, and calm down long enough to string two words together … it’s only to pass on the news that they’ve gone insane?”

“That’s a matter for expert opinion.”

I was almost at the hospital. I said, “Okay, show me some of this changed pathology . Show me some of the joys I’ve missed out on.”

Sisyphus raided the library and brought me a clip. It was questionable etiquette to peek at other people’s unfinished work – but if Reynolds had wanted the footage to be inaccessible to his colleagues, he would have encrypted it.

I watched the scene in the hospital elevator, alone – and I felt the blood draining from my face. There was no explanation for this, no possible way to make sense of it.

Reynolds had archived three other scenes of “coherent speech” from Distress patients. I viewed them all, unwinding the notepad’s headset so I could listen in private as I made my way along the busy corridors. The exact words the patients used were different in every case – but the implications were the same.

I suspended judgment. Maybe I was still in shock – or still affected by the drugs I’d been given on the boat. Maybe I was seeing connections which simply weren’t there.

By the time I reached the ward, Akili was awake. Ve smiled ruefully when ve saw me – and I knew I had it bad. It wasn’t just the fact that vis face seemed to have burned itself into my brain so deeply that I could no longer believe that I’d ever been attracted to anyone else. Beauty, after all, was the shallowest thing. But ver dark eyes showed a depth of passion, humor, and intelligence that no one else I’d known had ever possessed—

I caught myself. This was ludicrous. To a total asex, these were the sentiments of a hormone-driven wind-up toy, a pathetic biological robot. If ve ever found out how I felt … the most I could expect in return was to be pitied .