Akili stared at the floor, trying to find the right words. “If it does happen, we won’t even have time to know it – but I still think it would have been wrong to kill her. Unless the unraveling was absolutely certain, and there was no other way to stop it. No one can deal with an unknown chance of the end of the universe . How many people can you kill, for a cause like that? One? A hundred? A million? It’s like … trying to manipulate an infinitely heavy weight, on the end of an infinitely long lever. However fine your judgment is, you know it can’t be good enough. All you can do is admit that, and walk away.”

Before I could reply, Sisyphus said, “I think you’ll want to see this.”

The fishing boat with the moderates had been intercepted off the coast of New Zealand. The news footage showed people in handcuffs being herded ashore from a patrol boat onto floodlit docks, eyes downcast. “Five”, Giorgio, who’d lectured me on the unraveling. “Twenty”, who’d refused to let me leave the boat with their confession in my gut. Others were missing, though.

Then sailors followed, carrying the bodies on stretchers. They were covered in sheets – but the umale, Three, was unmistakable. The journalist spoke of suicide pacts. Helen Wu was mentioned by name, dead from poison.

The first scenes of the arrest had filled me with a buzz of righteous euphoria at the prospect of these fanatics facing justice – but I felt nothing but enervating horror as I tried to understand what had gone on in their minds, in the last moments. Maybe they’d seen the reports of ranting Distress victims – and some had concluded that the unraveling was inevitable, others that it was now impossible. Or maybe the whole convoluted logic of their actions had simply unwound, leaving them staring at the unadorned truth of what they’d done.

I couldn’t judge them. I didn’t know how I could have clawed my way up, if I’d spiraled down into the nightmare of believing what they’d believed. I might have struggled hard to reason all of Anthrocosmology out of existence – but if I’d failed, would I have had the humility (or the genocidal irresponsibility) to walk away from the implications, to refuse to intervene?

Outside, people were roaring with laughter. In the square, someone turned the music up insanely loud for a second, distorting it into booming bass static, shaking the ground.

#

Akili held conference with the other mainstream ACs. Someone was hacking into a WHO computer, to get the unofficial latest figures for reported cases of Distress.

“Nine thousand and twenty.” Ve turned to me with a sharp intake of breath; I didn’t know if it was panic, or the exhilaration of free fall. “Tripled in two days. And you still think it’s a virus?”