Intrusion

by Ken MacLeod

  ‘It’s a question of the balance of forces, innit?’ Fingal explained.

  Yeah, thought Hope, you could say that.

  Louise leaned forward to reply. Hope couldn’t catch her words, but from her tone it was clear she was giving Fingal a piece of her mind, giving as good as she got. Hope hadn’t the heart to get involved in the discussion. The candy floss suddenly tasted like paper. She tossed it in a bin, sucked her fingers and licked around her lips, careless of how unladylike this looked, and stomped off home.

  11. Another Light

  On the second of May, Geena walked to Hayes for the first time since her interrogation. For weeks now she’d been taking the bus, to and from work. She hadn’t been able to face walking the same roads. But today the weather had cleared and she was feeling better for the day off, though she wasn’t entirely sure why. She hadn’t spent it well.

  Her boyfriend Liam had worked the Bank Holiday, leaving Geena in bed. She’d dutifully trudged to the window, waved, and then retreated under the duvet. She huddled there for half the morning, dozing, until she’d really had to pee, and that was what had finally propelled her out of bed. In the bathroom she’d been overcome with weeping, and showered away most of the evidence, applying make-up to the rest. She’d then spent the best part of the day moping around the flat and shutter-shopping in Uxbridge High Street, feeling like a zombie drawn inexorably and inexplicably to a closed mall in an old movie.

  It began as another routine day in the dry lab, except that Brian made them all laugh by reading out what the Daily Mail thought of the previous day’s demos: the huge loss to the economy, the waste of police time, the outrageous misuse of public money and resources for party-political propaganda, and the shocking demagogy of what some MPs and even ministers had proclaimed from shaky platforms.

  Geena duly added this to her notes – it was one of the few scraps of directly political comment she’d observed here – wrote a little more of her thesis draft, and turned to her slow, painstaking investigation of the Morrison family’s genomes. There was plenty of software for running comparisons, but all of it assumed you knew what was significant, and Geena didn’t. Apart from some of the more common disease-linked loci, she had to look up everything as she went along. Right now she was looking at the RHO gene on chromosome 3, where Hugh Morrison and his son Nick shared a small mutation, and she had no idea of its significance. Her searches weren’t turning up anything: evidently it hadn’t been investigated or documented. This was in itself odd, in that rhodopsin mutations were associated with a number of well-known pathologies of the retina.

  The medical records for the man and his son showed no problems with vision. Geena felt a small surge of excitement. This might be something new, or at least unusual. Maybe now would be the time to ask one of the guys to run her a predictive sim of the gene’s functioning. The easiest to approach, and the one least likely to ask questions, would be Joe Goonwardeene, the shy Sri Lankan. He was working on his own at the moment, not elbow-deep in the VR rig at the table.

  At that point Geena’s eyes brimmed with tears. She turned away into the corner, dabbing with a tissue. She felt desperately guilty about Joe. Nearly as guilty as she felt about Maya, and she was going to have to face that soon. She should have faced it ages ago, the very first day, just as she had with Ahmed. But it was different with Ahmed. He was a man of the world. A made man. Ahmed could take it. He had resources. He had connections. He had nothing to worry about.

  She took a deep breath, saved her work, stood up, grabbed her jacket and walked over to Joe. She cleared her throat. Joe lowered his glasses, flexed his hands and peered at her over the top rims.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Uh, Joe, could you possibly… take a break for a few minutes? There’s something I’d like to ask you about and I don’t want to disturb the others.’

  Joe glanced at Brian, who hadn’t been too absorbed to notice. Brian nodded to him, and gave Geena a sly, questioning glance.

  ‘Just some background stuff,’ Geena said. She shrugged one shoulder. ‘Maybe a bit personal. We can go outside.’

  Brian waved. ‘Go, go.’

  Outside, on Dawley Road, Geena struck out to the right, towards the bridge over the railway. The usual traffic mumbled past. The pavement was dusty as usual, scuffed, and, most importantly, deserted. Apart from the old man sitting in a deckchair in the tiny front garden of one of the row of houses, who glared across the road at them as if their footsteps disturbed his peace. Geena had seen him do this before. He wasn’t sunbathing. He was waiting for the aliens. So the rumour went.

  ‘Well, Geena,’ said Joe after a silence of fifty yards, ‘what is it?’

  Geena glanced at him sideways. Eye to eye, a rare thing for her.

  ‘Uh, Joe,’ she said, ‘I have a confession to make. A few weeks ago I was stopped by the police and, uh, questioned.’

  Joe looked straight ahead. ‘You named me.’

  ‘I’m afraid I did,’ Geena admitted.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘The first thing that came into my head, of course. You can guess.’

  ‘Tamil Tigers?’

  ‘That’s the one,’ Geena said.

  Joe’s light laughter pealed.

  ‘You have no imagination, Geena. Neither have I.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I have confessed the same myself,’ said Joe. ‘Several times. It seems to satisfy them.’

  They walked up the curving slope to the bridge over the railway and looked down for a while at the tracks.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Geena. ‘Well, I wanted to say I’m sorry, that’s all.’

  ‘Think nothing of it,’ said Joe. Another sideways glance. ‘Was there something else? I notice you seem to be doing some… technical work.’

  ‘Well, yes actually,’ said Geena. ‘I would like you to run a predictive sim on a gene. Unofficially, of course.’

  ‘Tomorrow morning,’ said Joe. ‘About six – would that suit you?’

  It wouldn’t suit Geena at all, but she supposed she’d better agree.

  ‘Perfect!’ she said. ‘Brilliant! Thank you so much!’

  They walked back to the works entrance. At the gate, Geena hesitated.

  ‘Tell the guys I’m taking the rest of the day off,’ she said. ‘Library work, you know?’

  ‘Very good,’ said Joe. ‘Study is vital!’ He said it so enthusiastically that she half-expected him to repeat it as a shout, with his fist clenched to the sky.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, with a wan smile. ‘See you tomorrow, then.’

  ‘Six sharp,’ said Joe.

  ‘I’ll be there,’ said Geena. ‘See you then.’

  She turned around and walked quickly away, down the long canyon of Blyth Road to the high street.

  ‘You’ve left this a bit late,’ said Maya, when Geena had finished.

  ‘I know, I know!’ Geena cried, almost sobbing. ‘I’m so sorry, Maya.’

  Maya, on the other side of her desk in a tiny office in the Advice Centre that smelled faintly and (to Geena) foully of illicit smokes, looked at her with sympathetic puzzlement.

  ‘But it’s all right,’ she said. ‘It’s not too late. We’re not talking statute of limitations here. You turned down the trauma counselling, OK, not good, and you signed the chit, but we can wangle a way round that. Lemme think about this for a minute…’

  She gazed off into the distance and drummed her fingers on the desk, as if typing – which, for all Geena knew, she was.

  ‘What?’ said Geena.

  Maya gave her a look. ‘You want me to put in a complaint, yes?’

  ‘Oh no!’ said Geena. ‘No, no. I don’t want any fuss.’

  Maya’s smooth brow creased. ‘So why are you telling me all this?’

  ‘You’re not upset?’

  ‘I’m upset for you, all right,’ said Maya. ‘Good grief, it sounds horrible.’

  ‘No, I meant upset with me.’

  ‘What for?’


  ‘Maya, I betrayed you. I’m so, so sorry.’

  Maya’s expression changed. She jumped up, came around the desk and hugged Geena.

  ‘Oh, you silly girl,’ she said.

  She stepped back and sat on the edge of the desk.

  ‘Look, Geena,’ she said. ‘These guys you rushed past in the waiting room, yeah? The ones skulking around the side of the building for a smoke, too? Half the fuckers have shopped me for something. Terrorist sympathies? Hah! They’ve fingered me for a lot worse than that. Drug dealing. Corruption. Running prostitution rings. Molesting their children. Plausible stuff, you know? Then they come crying to me. “Oooh, Miss Maya, I do terrible thing, how can you forgive me?”’

  Maya’s derisive mimicry shocked Geena almost as much as what she was saying.

  ‘Half?’ she said, struggling to keep up.

  Maya waved a languid hand, like a classic film actress trailing a digitally deleted cigarette.

  ‘I exaggerate, dahling. Call it ten per cent.’ Her shoulders slumped. ‘Fuck. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t make fun of it. I’m not making fun of it. It’s just… oh, fuck.’

  And then she was sliding down and forward, and it was Geena’s shoulder being cried on.

  ‘So what happens to you?’ Geena asked, after Maya had shaken herself away and blown her nose and sat back down.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ said Maya. She looked at the damp tissue clutched in her hand, threw it in a bin, rolled her wrist under her nose, and sniffed. ‘Of course the police don’t take all these accusations seriously. They aren’t even admissible as a basis for starting an investigation, unless something else corroborates them, let alone for pressing charges.’

  ‘So why…?’ Geena took a deep breath. ‘Forget that, I already know why they do it. They don’t care what you confess, they don’t care what you think, they want you to know they can make you confess. So… what happens when you put in complaints?’

  Maya shrugged. ‘Most of my clients don’t want me to. Sad but true. And not much comes of it when they do. An apology and token compensation. Well, it’s token for the authorities; to some of these guys a few hundred quid can be life-changing, which is why I always urge them to do it. But most of them are too ashamed and too worried about making more trouble for themselves.’

  ‘But we shouldn’t be putting up with this!’ Geena said. ‘I mean, I had no idea. If it’s as common as all that, good God, it shouldn’t be just a matter of putting in complaints. There should be some kind of political campaign against it.’

  ‘There is,’ Maya pointed out. ‘Several, in fact. Amnesty, Liberty, there’s even groups inside both parties against torture. Nobody cares. It’s like the war. It’s one of those things everyone understands you can do nothing about. Come to think of it, it’s part of the war. Security. Like computer security, you know? It just runs in the background.’

  Geena laughed at the analogy, then frowned.

  ‘I’m not so sure security’s part of the war,’ she said. ‘I’m beginning to suspect the war is part of it. That’s how my supervisor sees it, anyway.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, Dr Estraguel. Heard him going on about it in lectures at Brunel. Imperialism and reaction and all that. Bloody Marxist rubbish.’

  Geena hesitated. ‘It’s a bit more complicated than that,’ she said at last. ‘Uh, actually it’s got me thinking about how we can help Hope Morrison.’

  ‘We?’ Maya teased. ‘Well I’m not sure I have helped her much, but I’m glad you think there’s something we can—’

  She was interrupted by a hesitant knock on the door.

  ‘Five minutes!’ she yelled. She turned back to Geena. ‘Well, better make it quick.’

  ‘I got the idea that there might be something in their genes that the fix would change but might actually be, you know, quite good to have. I mean, I know most mutations are deleterious, but there’s always a chance, and I’ve found one that looks sort of interesting and I was wondering if that might be a good reason she could give not to have the fix. Is there something like that in the law?’

  Maya sucked in her lower lip and slowly rolled it out again. ‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘Very naughty of you. But very interesting. I hadn’t thought of that. Because in the original legislation, it wasn’t supposed to be compulsory, so it wouldn’t be framed as an exemption, any more than all the conscience-clause stuff was. All of that was ostensibly put in as cover for doctors, so they couldn’t get sued later if the parent had refused the fix for such-and-such a reason. It would be put in as a good medical reason not to prescribe.’ She reached behind her and retrieved her glasses from the desk. ‘Let me just check.’

  She waved her arms as if pulling down a rope.

  ‘Ah!’ she said, after a few minutes. ‘I think I’ve found just the thing.’

  The sky was brightening in the east as Geena set off from Uxbridge, leaving Liam for once to sleep later than her, and the sun was well up over the factories and office towers of the blocky Hayes horizon and melting the overnight frost when she arrived at SynBioTech just before six. No one was about. Her glasses – on for the code, off for the retinal scan – got her into the building, the lift and the lab. Joe arrived just as she had the coffee going.

  ‘Good morning, Geena.’ He looked around, grinning. ‘It feels funny having the place to ourselves, eh?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Oh, very welcome indeed,’ said Joe. He took his mug to the central table. ‘Now, what was it you wanted to check?’

  Geena put on her glasses and sat down beside him.

  ‘A mutation in RHO. Undocumented, but no apparent deleterious effects in, uh, the phenotypes.’

  He shot her a look under his black brows.

  ‘I won’t ask how you know about the phenotypes.’

  ‘Wise move,’ said Geena. ‘Better you don’t know.’

  Joe laughed. ‘We both know that doesn’t matter… Very well, patch it across.’

  Geena waved hands and waggled fingers and blinked. The seaweed tangle of the virtual gene popped into existence above the table. Joe reached forward and rolled it around, this way and that.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘That’s the mutation locus. Now let’s see what protein it codes for.’

  Molecules of RNA did their thing, and the cascade began. Geena had seen this many times, but she was still struck by how mechanical it all was, at least in this representation, a matter of this fitting into that and bumping off the other. The protein formed.

  ‘Now the predictive sim,’ said Joe.

  The scale changed, from molecular to structural. A sheet of crystalline opsin rippled into view, snapped into stability. Virtual wave-packets flashed down to it like sprites. Electrons – not to scale – spun off and squirmed through the molecules. A number array, incomprehensible to Geena, built up like a spreadsheet.

  Joe leaned back and looked at it for a long time.

  ‘What?’ said Geena.

  ‘Interesting,’ said Joe. ‘It’s responsive to wavelengths outside the visible spectrum. It’s like… No!’ He laughed to himself. ‘It’s too silly.’

  ‘What?’ Geena said again.

  ‘Last year we worked on UV sensors. Built them up from insect visual-pigment analogues.’ He turned to her, with an upraised finger and intent frown. ‘Did you know, Geena, that there are species of insect whose eyes are most responsive to wavelengths that are not present in the spectrum of the Sun? It’s like they are adapted to life under another star.’

  12. Ticking Boxes

  Two weeks into May, three months into her pregnancy, Hope had her second pre-natal check-up. The appointment was at 10.30. She worked the hour after dropping Nick off – still without problems at the gate – and left the flat at ten. Though still chilly, the weather had improved since the beginning of May. No more flurries of snow. A bit of sun. She walked briskly up Stroud Green Road. The clinic was a two-storey redbrick building in a side street off Crouch Hill, overlooking the railway line. Hop
e went through the biometric scan at the door and into a reception area with the obligatory decor of plastic stackable chairs, beige walls tacked with children’s drawings and plaintive advice posters designed to look like children’s drawings, and a faint pine-and-lemon smell of disinfectant. She checked in at the desk and sat down by a table stacked with tattered glossy hard copy, which she turned over and flipped through one by one. She’d read more recent issues of all the magazines that interested her on her glasses, but it appeared to be the expected thing to do, and doing the expected thing seemed important in her situation. She wondered how many of the six other women waiting were doing it for the same reason. A big poster on the wall forbade, for privacy reasons, the use of glasses or hand-helds in the waiting room.

  Her previous check-up had passed without incident, other than the doctor’s pointed, pained look at the gap in her monitor-ring record where she’d taken it off in the open-air café. Dr Sheila Garnett had scanned and sampled and nodded and smiled and encouraged. No doubt she was aware of the sex of the foetus, but Hope knew better than to ask: that information was embargoed until it would be too late to have a legal abortion. But everything else Dr Garnett was happy to share. The foetus was normal and the pregnancy was going fine. The only mention of the fix had been that now might be a good time to take it.

  ‘Mrs Morrison to see Dr Garnett.’

  Hope looked up, flashed a quick smile at the other mums-tobe and headed off down the corridor. Dr Garnett’s office was small, with just about enough room for a desk, a couple of office chairs, the scanning equipment and the examination bed. And for Dr Garnett herself, a tall woman with ginger hair and a Canadian accent. She unfolded herself from her chair, loomed, and shook hands.

  ‘Hi, Hope. Good to see you. Feeling OK?’

  ‘Fine, thanks.’ Hope shrugged. ‘The morning sickness seems to be a bit less frequent.’