Before I could pursue the argument any further, De Groot's notepad chimed. The head of security for the conference, Joe Kepa, had viewed the copy De Groot had sent him of my call from the fishing boat, and he wanted to talk to me. In person. Immediately.
In a small meeting room on the top floor of the hotel—with two large umale associates looking on—Kepa grilled me for almost three hours, questioning everything right back to the moment when I'd begged SeeNet to give me the documentary. He'd already seen reports from some of the farmers about events on the ACs' boat (they'd posted their accounts directly onto the local news nets), and he'd seen the cholera analysis—but he was still angry and suspicious, he still seemed to want to tear my story to pieces. I resented the hostile treatment, but I couldn't really blame him. Until the seizure of the airport, his biggest problem had been buskers in clown suits; now it was the threat of anything up to a full-scale military engagement around the hotel. Talk of information theorists armed with amateur bioweapons targeted at the conference's highest profile physicists must have sounded like either a sick hoax, or proof that he'd been singled out for divine punishment.
By the time Kepa told me the interview was over, though, I believed I'd convinced him. He was angrier than ever.
My testimony had been recorded to international judicial standards: each frame stamped with a centrally generated time code, and an encrypted copy lodged with Interpol. I was invited to scan through the file to verify that there'd been no tampering, before I electronically signed it. I checked a dozen points at random; I wasn't going to view the whole three hours.
I went to my room and took a shower, instinctively shielding the freshly bandaged wound although I knew there was no need to keep it dry. The luxury of hot water, the solidity of the plain elegant decor, seemed surreal. Twenty four hours before, I'd planned to do everything I could to help Mosala smash the boycott, reshaping the documentary around the news of her emigration. But what could I do for
I stared at myself in the mirror.
I walked through the hotel lobby just as the morning sessions were breaking up. The conference was still running on schedule—although screens announced a memorial for Yasuko Nishide later in the day—but the participants were visibly nervous and subdued, talking quietly in small groups, or looking around furtively as if hoping to overhear some vital piece of news about the occupation, however unreliable.
I spotted a group of journalists, all people I knew slightly, and they let me join in as they swapped rumors. The consensus seemed to be that foreigners would be evacuated by the US (or New Zealand, or Japanese) navy within a matter of days, although no one could offer any firm evidence for this belief. David Connolly—Janet Walsh's photographer— said confidently, "There are three US Nobel prize-winners here. Do you really think they're going to be left stranded, indefinitely, while Stateless goes to hell?"
The other consensus was that the airport had been taken by "rival anarchists"—the infamous US gun law "refugees." Biotech interests didn't rate a mention, and if Mosala's plan to migrate was common knowledge on the island, nobody here had bothered to talk to the locals long enough to find out.
These people would be reporting everything that happened on Stateless to the world—and none of them had the slighest idea of what was really going on.
On my way to the hospital, I spotted an electrical retailer. I bought a new notepad and a small, shoulder-mounted camera. I typed my personal code into the notepad, and the last satellite backup from the old machine flowed down from deep freeze and started catching up with real-time. The screen was a blur of activity for several seconds—and then Sisyphus announced, "Reported cases of Distress have exceeded three thousand."
"I do not wish to know that."
