“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 found a virus associated with Distress; I hadn’t seen a news bulletin for a week, but my knowledge miner would have told me if there’d been a breakthrough of that magnitude. I was beginning to get the queasy feeling that if I didn’t make the program myself, it would be subtitled: How an escaped military pathogen became the 21st-century AIDS of the mind.

Pure vanity. What did I think – 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. ‘Talk it over with Gina’, and call me in the morning.” She glanced at her watch again. “Look, I really have to go. Some of us actually have work to do.” I opened my mouth to protest, outraged; she smiled sweetly and aimed two fingers at me. “Gotcha. No sense of irony, you auteurs . Bye.”

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 Junk DNA .

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.