The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [107]
Did people die, or did you save people? People died with statistical regularity, until you found and used some power large and strong enough to avert their woe.
When that power reached a certain level of invasive ubiquity, the power of computation would directly confront and crush the power of disease. Because they were two rival powers. Diseases were everywhere, while surveillance was everyware. Everyware crushed diseases, subtly, comprehensively, remorselessly.
The sensorweb could scan the actions of bacteria invading a human body, and, like a Chinese army general, it could defeat that invading horde in real time.
Even an invading bacterium had a certain military logic: any germ had to observe its environment within the human body, orient itself, “decide” on a course of action, and then execute that strategy.
The state was far better at grasping such strategies than any bacterium could be. Once it had a human body firmly staked out in its scanners, it would wage a computational war-in-detail against internal disorders, baffling, frustrating, starving, arresting, and poisoning bacteria.
Wherever the bionational complex spread its pervasion, diseases gasped their last. Diseases simply could not compete. What the state’s nationware could do within the individual human body, it could also do at the level of streets, cities, provinces—everywhere within the Great Firewall of China.
This great feat was real, for she herself had seen it, and had done it in Harbin. It would take the world a while to understand what that accomplishment meant. It always took the world a while to comprehend such things. But it meant that infectious diseases were doomed. Diseases had been technically outclassed, they would not survive. That was a far greater medical breakthrough than older feats like sanitation, or vaccines, or antibiotics.
Bacteria would surely fight back—they always did. But this time, they were done. They could mutate against mere antibiotics, but they could never hide from the scanners. Being single-celled creatures, bacteria could never get any smarter. So epidemics, without exception, were going to be tracked down, outflanked, outperformed, and exterminated.
That was not the end of the grand story, either: that was only its beginning. One day soon there would be no hunger in China. People outside Jiuquan—outside China—they lacked basic understanding of the potential of a human gut with fully advanced, reengineered bacteria. But: Those newly farmed microbes made old-fashioned digestion, that catch-as-catch-can spew of wild internal microbes, seem as backward and primitive as hunting-and-gathering.
The new Chinese microbes turned people’s insides into booming internal factories of energy and protein: so tomorrow there would be no famine. The Chinese state was going to re-line the nation’s guts with the same seeming ease that the Chinese had once covered the planet’s feet with cheap shoes.
Never any more starving children, no more human bodies reduced to sticks of limbs and racks of protruding ribs. Obsolete. Defunct. Over. Nothing left of that vast tragedy. Not one microbial trace.
So: Two mighty Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Famine and Pestilence—they had already been shot dead in China. They were titans in scale, so it would take them maybe forty years to fall from their thundering black horses and hit the dust for good. But they were over, doomed. And she, Sonja, Angel of Harbin, ranked among the victors.
Plague and Starvation would be history. Their apocalyptic depredations would be forgotten as if such things had never occurred. In the future, they would have to be explained to people.
That still left Sonja’s two other Apocalyptic enemies, War and Death, still very much in the planetary saddle, but nevertheless, in Jiuquan—in Jiuquan!—she’d just been scorched by an antipersonnel bomb and yet she was going to be on her feet, healthy, unmarked, clear-eyed, and partially bionic, in a week. In ten days, at the most.