by Ken MacLeod
She loved him, but, aagh.
Hope jumped up from the table and stalked over to the sink, where she’d earlier noticed that the regularly recurring pinkish algal slime on the dish drainer was back. She dried the almost-dry plates and mugs racked there and put them away, then pulled on an apron and rubber gloves and filled the sink with hot water and started scrubbing the empty drier. When that was clean, she noticed that the sides of the sink were grubby, and scrubbed them.
That bit of displacement activity out of the way, she ambled around the flat, tidying up. Nick put away his toys every evening, or at least stacked them against the living-room wall, but it was amazing how many he could scatter around in the hour between getting up and going to nursery. She dusted the bookshelves and took books down and opened them and turned over pages of heavy, glossy exhibition catalogues of artists, photographers and designers, and thin, dense-printed textbooks of economics and business administration and management studies, each little more than a taster for the DVD or CD in a plastic envelope attached to the inside back cover, and therefore almost completely useless. Somewhere in the flat there had to be a DVD player, but she couldn’t think where. As if searching for a scientific answer to that question, she moved on to Hugh’s battered old engineering manuals and science references, some of them handed down from his father like a family Bible and likewise unchanging and full of small type, with constants and formulae defined for all time in bold black font barbed with serifs, a King James Version of truth. Then her browse took her to cookery books – again, the most used handed down, this one from Hope’s grandmother – and as she flipped through recipes whose results were appetisingly and artfully photographed in an advertising style her arts-trained eye could recognise at a glance as early 1980s, she lit upon a faded glossy pic of a beef casserole. She could almost smell the steam, and a sudden craving told her exactly what they’d be having for dinner this evening.
She went out into bright sunshine to Tesco. The New Trees had reached forty feet and their broad, overlapping leaves cast an almost unbroken shade. On East West Road Hope blinked in the glare and hastily put her glasses on, waving a hand to flip them to polarising mode. One or two people in the street gesticulated or waggled their fingers as they walked, but without glasses. Contacts, the very latest thing. The thought niggled, somehow.
In the store she bought a kilo of beef and some root vegetables – it wasn’t the weather for a casserole or anything heavy, but she was the one who was pregnant and if her body or the baby’s said it needed iron or whatever she wasn’t going to argue, and anyway Hugh would eat anything after a day’s work – and as she bagged them under the checkout scan and gazed abstractedly at the floating virtual display of the magazine downloads on offer, the niggle returned to her mind. She paused to focus on the niggle, and it vanished beneath the surface of her mind like a minnow into a deep pool as a shadow falls. Hope frowned, and deliberately turned her mind away. She knew it would come back if she didn’t concentrate; it was like letting a search run in the background, sooner or later up it would come.
Back at the flat, she tied on an old blue-and-white-striped butcher’s apron, turned the slow cooker on to high, and got to work, peeling potatoes, slicing garlic and onion, chopping carrots and a turnip, dicing meat, searing and simmering amid increasingly savoury smells. Every so often she wiped her hands on the apron, leaving smears of blood or flour or stock-cube crumbs. Just as she’d turned the cooker down to simmer and put the Pyrex lid on the pot and picked up the big knife to place it in the sink, the missing thought rose to the top of her mind’s stack and pinged for attention.
Rhodopsin, it reminded her, and tachyons.
That was it, that was what had been bugging her ever since Hugh had mentioned the word last night. Rhodopsin was the visual protein for whose gene he and Nick had a mutation, and she knew she’d come across the word before, in another context. Three months ago she’d read in The Economist that scientists at CERN had detected possible tachyon effects in a suspension of rhodopsin derivatives.
Hope put down the knife, wiped her hands again, and scanned the shelf of Hugh’s old reference books. She pulled down an encyclopedic dictionary of physics, searched, and found.
Tachyons. Hypothetical particles that moved faster than light, and, therefore, backward in time. From the future into the past.
She went over to the table and picked up her glasses carefully by the edges, nudging the earpieces open with her wrists. She ran a semantic search on the topic, and found little beyond the initial Nature paper, a small flurry of letters in New Scientist, and the same Economist article. No follow-up, no further research reported. It looked like one of those discoveries that flared for a moment then faded. But still…
It got her thinking. If something derived from rhodopsin detected particles moving backward in time, and Hugh had a mutant version of rhodopsin… was it possible that the visions he saw were caused by tachyons? Not directly, surely – no tachyon flux could behave like light, and she doubted that the particles could be focused on the retina – but stimulating the brain to form an image nonetheless. Hope knew from her art training that the visual field was mostly an internal construction anyway, a vast canvas corrected and updated piecemeal by the pencil torch of the optic nerve’s input, whose bit-rate was far too low for it to produce the whole panorama at once. So some visual reconstruction cued by odd fleeting particles didn’t strike her as impossible.
In which case, the barbarians Hugh saw weren’t from the past. They were from the future.
Which – if you followed through the logic of the wild speculation – raised the awkward question of how they saw him (and indeed, in one instance, her), as Hugh had insisted they did. Because in that case, they would be seeing into the past. Was there such a thing as an anti-tachyon? Not part of the Standard Model, that was for sure! So then, she’d have to fall back on the hypothesis that these interactions were hallucinations, construction of Hugh’s brain, in which case… why even go down the physics route; why not admit the whole thing was a hallucination? And yet, and yet – Hugh had claimed his boyhood pals had seen something real, under the hill above the house… Did these lads have the same mutant gene, or was there a quite different phenomenon involved?
She was still pondering this when, quite unexpectedly, the doorbell rang.
Hope checked on her glasses who was outside, and saw the avatar of Fiona Donnelly, the health visitor. She jumped up, took off her glasses, cast off the grubby apron and, without thinking, hastily wrapped and tied herself into the big ruffle-bordered floral-patterned pinafore. Now why had she done that? she wondered for a moment. She glanced in the mirror, tucked back a stray strand of hair, felt the slick of sweat on her brow, saw the flushed look of busy domesticity – harried, married – realised it was exactly the image she wanted to present to her visitor, then went to open the door.
Fiona Donnelly stood in sunshine amid catkins with bees crawling on them.
‘Hello, Hope. Mind if I drop by?’
‘Come in, come in,’ said Hope. She waved at the outside before she shut the door. ‘Quite a change since the last time you were here!’
‘Yes, isn’t it?’ said Fiona, heading through to the kitchen without further invitation. Hope followed, perplexed.
‘Have a seat,’ she said, but Fiona had already sat down, her back to the window, just as she’d done in March. She looked around and inhaled appreciatively. ‘Mmm, something smells good.’
‘Tonight’s dinner.’
‘Oh, well done.’ Then she just sat there.
‘Cup of tea?’ Hope asked.
‘Yes, thanks, I’m parched.’
Hope busied herself.
‘Everything all right?’ she asked, sitting down.
‘Not really, I’m afraid,’ said Fiona.
‘Oh,’ said Hope. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘You told Dr Garnett last week that you were going to take the fix, and you still haven’t,’ said Fiona.
‘Oh come on, Hope, it would show up on your monitor-ring log.’
‘Have you been checking that?’ Hope asked.
‘Why shouldn’t I? I’m concerned. I’m even more concerned that you drank alcohol last week. You tried to conceal it by taking your ring off, but there were still traces in the morning.’
‘It was only a few sips.’ Hope essayed a smile. ‘Half a dram.’
‘That’s not the point, and you know it. But what’s really concerning me, Hope, and believe me this is for your own good, is how it impacts what’s been happening recently to your personal profile. It’s coming dangerously close to affecting your parental suitability.’
Hope felt a cold clutch of dismay.
‘What?’ she said. She couldn’t think of anything other than that one lapse to make her feel guilty, but feel guilty she did, mentally flailing for anything she might have done wrong.
‘It’s all small things,’ said Fiona, in a reassuring tone, ‘but you know how these small things add up when they’re not taken in isolation but are brought together in the database and begin to form a picture.’
‘What picture?’ Hope’s tone had shifted register, from shock to anger. ‘What database?’
‘You know,’ Fiona said, with an impatient frown. ‘Your personal profile is automatically updated all the time, from surveillance and from your interactions – purchases, interpersonal connections, interactions with official bodies, social services, health, police…’ She waved a hand and repeated, ‘You know.’
‘Yes, I know!’ Hope said. ‘But I haven’t done anything wrong.’
‘Look, Hope,’ said Fiona, ‘like I say, it’s all automatic, and it hasn’t rung any warning bells yet, but I’ve been concerned about you, so I’ve been having a look. Which I’m perfectly entitled to do, by the way. And I have to say that it’s getting very close to the tipping point where social services and child protection would be required to take an interest.’
‘That’s ridiculous!’
‘Would you think it was so ridiculous if I told you that a lot of the negative situations being flagged up come from the police?’
‘The police?’ Hope heard her voice rise incredulously. ‘I haven’t had any encounters with the police.’
‘Oh yes you have, Hope. That letter you dropped into Jack Crow’s house, that brought you to police attention, even if it only wasted a lot of police time. Then you confronted him three weeks ago, at the May Day rally in the park. He was obliged to report that.’
‘Obliged?’ cried Hope, by now outraged. ‘To report me?’
Fiona nodded. ‘Yes, obliged. He uploaded the part of your conversation that took place while he had his glasses on. The word “Naxal” came up, I understand, but let’s leave that aside. He found your whole line of argument disturbing. As if you hadn’t joined the Party for any kind of sincere reason. As if you had an ulterior motive.’
‘Damn right I had an ulterior motive,’ said Hope. ‘I was hoping he would help me with this compulsory-fix business. What’s wrong with that? People join parties to advance their interests, including their bloody business interests if North Islington CLP is anything to go by.’
‘Yes, yes, Hope, I can quite see that. But you have to consider what happens when the police intelligence gets hold of something like that. It raises a little flag, you know? And then the intelligence has to cast its net wider, it has to start looking for other traces of you, using face recognition and tags and so on. And then it starts making connections. Joining dots.’
She slipped her computer out of her breast pocket and laid it on the table. ‘Here, let me show you some of the dots they joined. Just put your glasses on.’
Hope did. The devices linked. She saw a dark background spidered with red lines linking her with Maya, with a woman she didn’t know, with Hugh, Nick, Jack Crow, various sites: ParentsNet, SynBioTech, the health centre; phone and street-camera photos of all these people and locations and more… it just went on and on, the viewpoint zooming and swooping through the web, while Fiona’s murmured voice-over kept up a running commentary.
‘You see, it starts with that disturbance outside the nursery, and all of a sudden you’re part of a flash mob initiated by that woman Maya, who has lots of warning flags against her, nothing actionable but still, not good… You go skipping off with her to a dodgy little place, an unlicensed café no less, where you take off your monitor ring, and later it shows cotinine traces, very bad sign, Hope, as you should know. That links up with the alcohol incident, it adds up, you see. Then there’s the two incidents with your MP, both with some vague terrorism connection, questions raised, nothing more, and then it gets really interesting. This woman here, Geena Fernandez, is picked up and questioned about a terrorism-related offence. She’s already connected to you because she’s shown an interest in your case, she works at SynBioTech, the company that makes the fix, she’s a close friend of Maya’s, and – she visited your husband at work yesterday! So…’
Fiona disconnected Hope’s access to her personal profile. The network swirled away, to be replaced by the normal view through the glasses. Hope found the overlay distracting – right now, still tuned to Fiona’s avatar, it was telling her about all the accomplishments on the health visitor’s CV – so she took them off.
‘… that’s it, that’s what the police and social services databases are quietly thinking about you right now. Nothing strong enough yet to alert a human operative, but definitely moving in that direction. I’m sure there are perfectly innocent explanations for every one of these links and nodes, but…’
Fiona let the word hang, like a virtual link.
‘But nothing!’ Hope said. ‘It’s just ridiculous. Terrorism? Come on.’ She fluttered her hands towards herself. ‘Look at me, sitting here in my pinny! A terrorist in a frilly apron!’
‘I think the correct term for that is “domestic extremist”.’ Fiona paused, for a laugh that didn’t come. ‘Nobody’s going to say you’re a terrorist, Hope. No need to be all dramatic about it. No, the point is that it’s all building up to a profile that doesn’t look like someone capable of providing a safe environment for a child.’
Hope had a flash of fury. She had to press her hands firmly to the table, so as not to slap Fiona across the face. She took a few deep breaths, then sipped now-tepid coffee from the mug, clutching her hands around it. She had to relax her hands a little, so that the mug didn’t shatter.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘I know how these automatic systems work, they’re as mindless as the one that’s doing my job for me today while I get on with the housework. No doubt I’ll have to make some corrections and allowances for it tomorrow. And that’s how it is, you see? All that needs to happen about the profile thing is for someone with a bit of sense, someone who knows me, someone professional, to squash all that nonsense and say I’m a good mother.’
Fiona nodded soberly. ‘Yes, that would certainly weigh in the balance. But you see, once the system raises the problem to the level where it alerts the services, there are procedures in place. Wheels are set in motion. Guidelines are followed. Matters would be quite out of my hands, I’m afraid.’
Hope felt cold all over. ‘You’re saying… they could take Nick away from me?’
‘I’m sorry, Hope, but yes. Best practice might indicate intervention first, investigation later. On a precautionary basis, of course, with no aspersion cast or intended, certainly not by me. I know you’re a good mother.’
‘Well,’ said Hope, trying to keep the exasperation from putting too much steel in her voice, ‘why the heck can’t you say so now, and smack that stupid system back down where it belongs?’
‘There’s the problem,’ said Fiona, sounding genuinely sympathetic. ‘There are no procedures in place for that. All I can do is log my own reports, which are of course part of the profile. The trouble is, they’re part of your profile already. And as you’ve just seen, the
y haven’t been enough.’
‘Oh God,’ Hope groaned. ‘This is just… oh God.’
She closed her eyes and rested her forehead on her hands. Tears trickled on to her wrists. After a moment she felt Fiona’s hand on her shoulder.
‘There, there, Hope,’ she said. ‘It’s not that bad. It’s not at the danger level yet. I’m just telling you all this because I’m on your side, really I am. And, well… you know the one thing you could do that would clear all that nonsense away, without so much as a word from me. You know what to do, Hope.’
Hope didn’t look up. ‘I know, I know.’
She stood up and blundered towards the work surface by the sink, groped for the roll of paper towels, tore one off and blew her nose and wiped her eyes.
‘I’m thinking about it, all right?’ She knew she sounded defiant and petulant, like a teenager just before conceding a point.
‘Good,’ said Fiona. ‘Do please think about it, seriously.’ She stood up. ‘Thanks for the tea, Hope. Enjoy your dinner tonight! It’s all right, I’ll see myself out.’
Hope nodded, unable to say anything more. She was angry enough to smirk at the sounds of Fiona Donnelly bumping into a handlebar, and then closing the door behind her so firmly it was almost a slam.
The casserole was, indeed, good, though Nick was very picky about it, leaving a ring of carrot slices around the edge of his plate and insisting that Hope tease apart the beef chunks into strands and mash them in with the potatoes before he deigned to eat them. After dinner he wanted to play outside, and Hugh, though tired as well as replete, loyally went out with him to kick a ball about on the back grass.
By the time they came back in – Hugh with a stitch, Nick all grubby – Hope had finished washing the plates and the pan and the big heavy crock-pot and was lying feet up on the sofa, reading on her glasses. Hugh took this as a hint, and busied himself getting Nick to tidy away his toys and get ready for bed. By the time Nick came through in his pyjamas for his good-night kiss, Hope had fallen asleep herself. She woke to the boy’s voice and to text scrolling across her vision like a fragment of dream. She swung her feet to the floor and sat up, taking her glasses off.
