Intrusion

by Ken MacLeod

  Geena indulged this rescue fantasy for the minute or so it took her to recognise it as a rescue fantasy, then dismissed it. She took a certain grim satisfaction in her own lucidity and self-awareness, and then went back to wondering why she was depressed. She went through again all the possible grounds she might have for feeling down.

  No. No rational reason whatsoever. She really should get a grip on herself.

  On top of everything else, there was now a diffuse pain in her midriff, which had been growing for half an hour and was now becoming difficult to ignore. Perhaps she was going down with something, and that was why she felt so unaccountably depressed and listless and why her stomach hurt. She was about to bestir herself to look up summer-flu symptoms when she heard behind her an apologetic cough.

  She turned, almost falling off her stool, and saw Joe standing a few paces away, clutching a pad and looking at her with sympathy and concern. The lab was otherwise empty, the work table littered with sandwich containers and cardboard cups lipped with drying soup.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Joe asked.

  ‘Yes, I’m fine, thanks,’ Geena said.

  ‘You don’t look fine.’

  ‘Oh!’ Geena gave a shaky laugh. ‘I missed lunchtime, because I was so wrapped up in… my thoughts, and I’m hungry – that’s what’s the matter with me.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Joe. ‘In that case, would it not be a good idea to go to the canteen? Everyone else has had their lunch and gone out to catch the sun.’

  ‘Why didn’t they invite me?’

  Now she was feeling paranoid, as well as depressed and (now that the pain had been identified, thankfully) absolutely starving.

  ‘You seemed preoccupied, and the guys thought it best—’

  ‘They discussed this?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Joe.

  ‘Jeez.’ Geena stood up. ‘I must have been, as you say, preoccupied. Let’s go.’

  The canteen was still busy, clattering with cutlery and abuzz with talk. Geena chose a sandwich and soup, Joe a slice of meat with two veg. He noticed her puzzled look.

  ‘Synthetic,’ he said.

  Glancing at the plate, she saw that the slice had a most unnatural pattern, an intricate imbrication of different colours and textures, like a cross-section through a vertebrate thorax.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Geena. She knew vegans – Maya for one – who wouldn’t eat synthetic meat, because… well, there was an animal cell somewhere in its ancestry, and anyway it was cheating. Evidently Joe’s (presumed) Buddhism drew different lines.

  ‘I have a question,’ he said, after they’d found a vacant table and sat down facing each other. ‘Have you had any results with… the phenotype of that interesting gene?’

  Geena shook her head, munching. She swallowed and said: ‘Well, kind of. He was aggressively uninterested. Insisted he didn’t have anything unusual about his vision. Then he blurted out that the gene must be recessive.’

  Joe carefully cut a square inch of synthetic meat and slid it around in gravy.

  ‘How would he know that?’

  ‘He seemed to assume it was connected with a superstition some people in the north of this country have about, well, a hereditary capacity for, uh, precognition and other so-called psychic powers.’

  Geena felt a little embarrassed even talking about it.

  ‘That’s interesting,’ said Joe. ‘I have something to show you. Perhaps after we have eaten.’

  To her surprise, he didn’t take her back to the lab to show her. Instead, over coffee, he took out his pad and doodled with a fingertip.

  ‘Take a look.’

  She put on her glasses and made the connection. It was the same sim as he’d run before, but this time, instead of showing a response to photons, a different sequence took place. A shimmering wave propagated up through the opsin sheet, and in turn sparked an expanding shower of photons. Almost but not quite at the same moment, a massive particle slammed through the display, in a downward direction.

  ‘What’s going on here?’ Geena asked.

  ‘A few months ago,’ said Joe, ‘there was a piece about tachyon detection in a rhodopsin suspension. Some contested results at CERN…’

  ‘I remember,’ said Geena. ‘In The Economist, wasn’t it? I caught it in the trawl.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Joe. ‘After our discussion last week I ran some searches on any recent work on rhodopsin, and came across the same thing. Dug up the original paper – it has to do with cosmic rays – you know, high-velocity particles, from—’

  Geena nodded. ‘I know what cosmic rays are.’

  Joe smiled. ‘The tachyons scatter before the charged particle that causes them arrives… well, that’s one way of looking at it. Anyway, I ran a sim on the same event, but using the actual functioning rhodopsin in the retina, and… that’s the result. You only get it, though, with your mutant rhodopsin.’

  ‘So how did they get it at CERN? Were they using mutant rhodopsin?’

  Joe shook his head. ‘No, they were using a suspension of normal rhodopsin. I guess it must be the physical arrangement that makes the difference – the molecules of normal rhodopsin would be much farther apart.’

  He leaned back and sipped coffee. ‘The trouble is, of course, that the results are contested, haven’t been replicated, there’s a serious doubt that they detected tachyons in the first place… you know how it is.’

  Geena grinned mischievously. ‘You mean, the science hasn’t been socially constructed?’

  ‘That is one way of putting it,’ said Joe. ‘Not the way I would.’

  ‘It’s all right, I’m just teasing. What’s the connection with what we’ve been talking about?’

  ‘Tachyons,’ said Joe, ‘move faster than light. Which means they move backwards in time.’

  He said this with the sort of self-satisfied expression Geena was all too used to seeing from the guys when they thought they’d given her an explanation.

  ‘Yes? And?’

  ‘It could be a physical basis for precognition.’

  Geena looked away, looked around. The canteen was emptying. Its big windows showed the strip of green grass in the sunlight outside, and the wall, and the blue sky above it. The whole conversation seemed utterly unreal.

  ‘Precognition?’

  ‘You mentioned it.’

  ‘So I did.’ Geena sighed. ‘The guy I spoke to said it was involuntary.’

  Joe laughed, spluttering coffee. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, and dabbed his lips and the table with a napkin. ‘If it’s the result of cosmic rays, I should bloody well think it’s involuntary!’

  ‘How seriously do you take this?’ Geena asked.

  ‘Quite seriously,’ said Joe, frowning. ‘I would not have put in a weekend to do the research and create that sim if I did not.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Geena, somewhat abashed. ‘I see. I’ll… I’ll have to think about this. But thank you.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ said Joe. He stacked his cup and saucer on top of the empty lunch plate on a tray. ‘Oh well. Back to work.’

  Geena did think about it. She thought about it so much that she had to call Maya. They agreed to meet after work in a café on Hayes High Street. Maya tabbed her the location. When Geena arrived at five thirty, she found the place a dingy hangout for people who looked like Maya’s clients: war-zone and climate-change refugees. The walls were papered with news screens in a babel of languages and hung with black-framed portraits of bearded men, from Osama and Che to more recent martyrs who had achieved less notoriety. Somebody was smoking, out the back.

  Feeling slightly dizzy from the swaying, swooping scenes and talking heads, Geena tuned her glasses away from the views and her earpieces away from the voices, found Maya, and sat down. The coffee was vile. Geena recounted what Joe had shown her, between sips and grimaces.

  ‘This is wonderful!’ Maya cried.

  ‘Well,’ said Geena, ‘it’s also pretty sp
eculative.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter,’ said Maya. ‘The point is, there’s a very sound basis for, um, our friend to make an appeal. I mean, even the possibility that there might be something in it would have scientists and medical people absolutely falling over themselves to check it out. They’d practically forbid her to have the fix.’

  ‘Um…’ said Geena. ‘Not quite what she would want.’ Maya waved a hand. ‘Figure of speech. And as well as the scientists, all the woo-woo pedlars would be jumping up and down about it, that’s another constituency of support.’

  ‘Well, again…’

  ‘You’re being too literal,’ Maya told her. ‘Look, I’m making political calculations here. None of this actually has to happen. It just has to be understood as something that could happen, and social services and councils and all the rest of officialdom have to take it into account.’

  ‘If it goes public,’ Geena pointed out. ‘Or, OK, if there’s the possibility it could go public. Sure. But the next step from that could just as easily be to make sure it doesn’t go public.’

  She drew a finger across her throat, a rather reckless gesture in this particular venue.

  Maya snorted. ‘They don’t do things like that.’

  ‘Now you’re being literal. I mean, they could suppress the story, even disappear… the subject.’

  ‘But why?’ Maya demanded. ‘Look, despite what some people say, I’m not a conspiracy theorist, or even a dangerous radical. I don’t think the authorities are evil.’ She held up a hand. ‘I know, I know. But they don’t do these things for fun. They do them for what seem to them good reasons, pressing reasons, often even from wanting to do good. After all, the business of making the fix compulsory isn’t some evil plot to control the evolution of the human race, or whatever. It grew out of increasing the pressure to get the fix taken up, and then finding there was a tiny minority who were beyond rational persuasion.’

  ‘Who then have to be coerced for their own good? Isn’t that against everything you believe in? I seem to remember John Stuart Mill himself made that the central distinction in—’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, don’t try to… Hell, Geena, you know I don’t give an inch on that. But they have a way round the good old argument in On Liberty. They’re not coercing the recalcitrant for their own good. They’re doing it to protect the recalcitrant’s unborn children, who have nobody but the state to stand up for them.’

  ‘So it’s for the children?’ Geena sneered.

  Maya bristled. ‘I don’t buy that either, as an argument. But I’m willing to accept it as a motivation. And that motivation sure doesn’t allow for snuffing out something that is at worst harmless and at best could be… heck, a real psychic super-power!’

  She was smiling as she finished, knuckles at her forehead, forefingers waggling like antennae. Geena smiled back, thinking: you are so fucking naive. She guessed that Maya’s passionate commitments to liberty and human rights were her way of articulating her subject position – of course they were, it was her bloody job! She had to believe all this, including the fundamentally good even if misguided intentions of the human components of the repressive state apparatuses, to do her job at all, which was to ease some of the frictions resulting from population movements and spatial reconcentrations and dispersals of capital. A tiny proportion of the rent skimmed off from these impersonal, inhuman movements of human beings and alienated labour and all the rest was, for the system that generated them, a small price to pay, certainly compared to riots and crime and detention centres.

  A grease-monkey! An apprentice with an oil-can! That’s what you are, Maya, in the great scheme of things!

  Geena said none of this. Instead she said: ‘Well, why don’t you give her a call?’

  Maya nodded. ‘Good idea. Might as well do it now.’

  She fished out her phone, thumbed to the number.

  ‘Shit!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She’s screened me out.’

  ‘Same thing happened to me,’ said Geena. ‘With her husband. Let me try her.’

  Same result.

  They sat looking at each other for a moment.

  ‘Now if only,’ Maya mused aloud, ‘there was someone who understands what all this is about and how important it is to get through to our friends here, and who isn’t known to them and whose phone isn’t blocked by theirs…’

  ‘I’m not dragging Joe into this,’ said Geena.

  ‘I’m just saying,’ said Maya.

  20. Conversations

  Hope sat by the patio doors in the back room of Mairi’s shop, overlooking the shore. Through the glass panels she could keep an eye on Nick, firmly injuncted to stay within sight and at the moment beachcombing amid the stinking seaweed with every appearance of absorption and enjoyment. The rest of her attention she divided between her work in China and sorting out some spreadsheets for Mairi. It was mid-morning on the Wednesday after they’d arrived, and Hope was beginning to think about coffee and biscuits.

  Mairi was in the front of the shop, minding the counter, chatting to the occasional customer, and knitting ruffled scarves at an astonishing speed from native wool. The heathery perfumes of soaps and unguents pervaded the whole shop, as did background music of generic Celtic sound, on endless shuffle.

  For the first time in months, Hope felt relaxed and at peace with herself and the world. Hugh had just the previous day started work on the same site as Nigel, way up in the hills above the synthetic woodlands, partly doing basic stuff like removing bolts with a powered spanner, and partly the more complicated and delicate job of disconnecting and dismantling the turbines. He’d come back tired that evening, but with an outdoor glow, and in a cheerful mood.

  The phone rang. Hope tapped her ear lobe. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Hello? Am I speaking to Hope Morrison?’

  The speaker sounded Indian.

  ‘Yes,’ Hope said warily.

  ‘Very good, Mrs Morrison. My name is Joe, and I wish to speak with you urgently on a matter of considerable import—’

  Hope rang off. Jeez. Hadn’t had one of these for years. Thought they’d all been call-screened to extinction. Now she’d have to update her phone-spam blocker, if she could ever find it on the menu.

  The phone rang again. Same number.

  ‘If you don’t—’ Hope began.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said a new voice, female, London-accented. ‘Sorry about that. We’re not a call centre. Joe really is called Joe – he just has his own form of courtesy, and it’s easily mistaken for the usual spam intro. My name is Geena Fernandez. I spoke to your husband last week, and—’

  ‘Oh,’ said Hope. ‘You. I’ve blocked you from calling me.’

  ‘I know, Mrs Morrison, that’s why I asked Joe to call you on his phone. Please let me explain, it won’t take long.’

  Hope stood up and stepped to the window, checking on Nick. He was squatting beside a tidal pool, arm in to the elbow. The sun shone on the water, making the pool as bright and bottomless as the loch.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘What is it now?’

  ‘Mrs Morrison, do you know about tachyons?’

  ‘Of course I know about tachyons,’ Hope snapped, using the irritation in her voice to cover her surprise. ‘And I know about rhodopsin, thank you very much.’

  There was a pause of about two seconds. Hope smirked to herself.

  ‘So you know about the connection between them?’ Geena asked.

  ‘I read. I’ve made my own speculations.’

  ‘Ah!’ Geena sounded relieved. ‘Well, now it’s more than speculation. Let me put Joe on for a moment.’

  The male voice came back. Hope listened as Joe outlined his professional background and described his experiment, as he called it. She tried to overcome the prejudice, acquired in childhood and early teens, that anyone on the phone with an Indian or similar accent, describing something complicated, was trying to scam you.

  ‘It’s a simulation!’ she objected, when he�
�d finished.

  ‘Mrs Morrison,’ he said, in a tired tone, ‘yes, it is a simulation, but it’s a very accurate one, using the same methods as are used all the time to make new products, day in and day out.’

  ‘All right. Put your friend back on.’

  Hope slid open the double-glazed doors and stepped out and closed them behind her. The seaweed smell assailed her, then retreated as her nasal receptors became saturated, leaving nothing to smell but the clean fresh breeze off the sea. The tide was coming in, covering the live seaweed, which smelled quite inoffensive, but it wouldn’t reach the rotting seaweed at the top of the shore except in a spring tide and a storm; and that would no doubt leave more dead seaweed heaped up, to rot down in its turn. No vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.

  ‘Me again,’ said Geena, in a bright tone.

  ‘Right, Ms, uh, Fernandez. Now, listen to me. I’m sure you mean well, and your friend has put in a lot of work, but you haven’t told me anything I hadn’t already figured out for myself. I know what you said to Hugh, and I have a pretty good idea what he said to you. Let me tell you myself, straight out: neither of us has any interest at all in us or our child becoming an object of scientific attention. Not to mention media attention. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course, Mrs Morrison, but what I’m not sure you understand is that this gives you a perfect legal ground for not—’

  ‘Oh God,’ Hope groaned. ‘I am so fucking bored with hearing this. I’m not scrabbling around for any kind of get-out, you know. I just want to be left alone to make up my own mind, and for my decision to be respected just because it is my own fucking decision, OK?’

  ‘OK,’ said Geena, sounding surprised and relieved. ‘That’s fine, that’s all right. I just wanted to make sure.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Hope. ‘Goodbye.’

  She caught the sound of Geena saying ‘Bye!’ just before she rang off. She blinked up the number of the phone that had been used to call her, and blocked it.