Gathering Evidence

by Martin MacInnes

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, interrupting him. ‘But can you tell us where he is?’

  He paused, momentarily thrown. He visibly composed himself, smiled at me. ‘As I was explaining, Miss—’

  ‘Doctor.’

  ‘Of course, my apologies. As I was saying, Dr Murray, this has all just,’ he began waving his arm, almost knocking over the vase, ‘been dealt with terribly, in the most unprofessional manner imaginable, and I can only begin to offer our sincerest apologies.’

  ‘You don’t need to keep apologising. You can just tell us what’s happened.’

  Alice looked at me again, as if trying to communicate something.

  ‘There was an anomaly with your colleague’s passport and identification.’

  ‘What was the problem exactly?’

  ‘We don’t know. That’s what we’re trying to determine.’

  ‘But you’re speaking as if none of this is your fault.’

  ‘We prepared all the relevant documentation and as far as we were aware everything was in order. We weren’t to know that something like this would happen.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘You still haven’t explained anything. Look, I’m sorry if I sound short, I’m tired from the journey and still a bit hazy. All I want to know is what’s happening. A simple question. Where is he?’

  ‘He’s here.’

  ‘Here? Can I see him?’

  He smiled. ‘Sorry, I mean to say he’s in the country, here, although not officially. He’s in one of the secure transit hotels at the airport; he doesn’t need a visa to enter. The idea is that he waits until the anomaly is resolved, his passport’s cleared and he joins your group. Although, he may well have decided, and you couldn’t blame him really, to simply return home.’

  ‘So you’ve seen him?’

  ‘My colleagues have. I’ve spoken with him – he’s perfectly well.’

  ‘Can I see him? I want to talk to him. You understand I want to verify all this?’

  ‘Of course I understand. But it’s complicated. He’s not permitted to leave the hotel.’

  ‘Well, I’ll go there.’

  ‘You can’t, not without voiding your own entry papers. Talk to him, by all means. Call him. You do have the details?’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘Again, I am profoundly sorry about all this. Honestly, I wish it wasn’t like this; we’ve done everything we can. I’m afraid parts of this are as much a mystery to me as they are to you.’

  ‘But that doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘What doesn’t?’

  ‘You invited him here – can’t you clear it up? Can’t you just approve him and push it through, whatever the problem is? You said it was a minor thing – can’t you straighten it out?’

  ‘I’m afraid you seem to be inflating our authority here. We’re simply a collective concerned with protecting biodiversity. We have no say in matters concerning, for example, immigration.’

  I breathed out, tried to compose myself.

  Alice intervened. ‘Okay. So, if he doesn’t get out, if he can’t join us, then what?’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘He has all the equipment – not just the new device, but the extraction kit, everything for storing the blood. How do we continue without that?’

  ‘Ah, some good news there. In the event he decides not to join you, for whatever reason, the clinic at HQ has offered to provide you with everything you’ll need.’

  Alice leaned in. ‘You’re sure of that?’

  ‘I can absolutely guarantee it.’

  ‘Well, that’s something, I suppose,’ Jane said.

  ‘Wait, what do you mean “decides not to”?’

  ‘Sorry? Look, I really don’t have long at all – I have another appointment which I’m already running late for.’

  ‘You’re not serious? We haven’t even mentioned the bodies – we were supposed to have an appointment to view the two bodies.’

  He stood to go. Alice and Jane automatically rose with him.

  ‘They’ll get to that, as well, at the gates. They’ll look after you there. Look, we’re all on the same side here, you know. Try not to forget that. I’ll continue to monitor the situation, but in any case, I should expect your colleague will be joining you here tonight.’ He glanced over his shoulder, towards the exit, the dusty glare of the noon light streaming in with every push of the heavy revolving doors. He extended his hand again, made a broad smile, told us how wonderful it was to meet us and wished us every success on our trip. He was gone.

  ‘That’s all we’re getting?’

  ‘Look,’ Alice said, keeping her voice down, ‘does it matter? You don’t want to push these people – it won’t get us anywhere. The important thing is, he’s here.’

  ‘Really? You’re happy to leave it like that?’

  ‘I don’t think we have any choice, Shel.’

  ‘Jane, what do you think?’

  ‘Well, he did at least say we’d get the equipment we need.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Alice said. ‘I understand you’re angry, but trust me, this won’t achieve anything. We have to carry on. We have to do our best.’

  I waited a moment, and as they walked towards the corridor I took a seat again in the foyer. There was a buzzing sound, circling, coming closer. I tried to swat at it, and it dipped away. It returned, and the same thing happened again. I stood up, waited for it to land on my jeans, my arm ready, outstretched, but again I missed. It hovered constantly, set the perfect distance from my reach. I snapped at it, uselessly, again and again. It read me perfectly and instantly, modelled me – my size, health, my reflexes, my capacity – appearing to know, in advance, exactly what I was going to do.

  Though we left early, before 4 a.m., it took the best part of two hours to get out of the city. Construction was ramped up during the night, with many routes sectioned off. Before leaving, we re-confirmed our journey and estimated arrival time with the city authorities and with the north-gate staff. Even so, we were stopped four times by security forces, who used lights from their phones to study our identity papers and permits. On the third occasion, we had to get out of the car. Fear, confusion, oil-black air, legions of insects suddenly lit in blue-screen, but it was just another delay, and by dawn we’d outrun the suburbs into long stretches of patchwork farmland broken, intermittently, by tall retail developments and partly built hotels.

  Alice hadn’t spent significant time here in years, but as she was the only one at all familiar with the area we agreed that she should guide. As soon as we left the sprawling outskirts the roads became clear and straight, and with the mApp as well there wasn’t any need for Alice’s directions. I didn’t mind driving, the roads quiet, looking onto long fields and palm forest; it gave me time to think. Alice and Jane spoke quietly from the back. Focused on the road, I couldn’t understand them, heard only this odd, persistent drone.

  We began to notice a difference in architecture further north, lower but more elaborate buildings, an absence of two-storey structures. There were isolated, sprawling private residences remote behind tall black gates, razor wire over the walls. Beyond these block buildings were unmarked ranges of field. Alice pointed to narrow tracks leading into the mines. Once or twice we glimpsed, in the distance, the plumes of chalk coming out of the cratered earth, the opened surfaces of vast quarries. To the west, the land began to rise, and we saw the first hints of the hills we were approaching. Though still on the edge of the primary rainy season, we passed through spells of lurid green, interrupting the starker ochre haze we’d become accustomed to. We started climbing more noticeably, bending slowly through cut mountain. I listened to the engine, rechecked the fuel. We hadn’t seen another vehicle in some time. A ravine dropped beneath us, and I saw rows of perfectly lined terraces dug into a radically steep incline.

  The conglomerate dug caves into the earth. As well as prospecting for oil they mined uranium, gold, copper, co
balt, coltan, diamond. Tantalum was extracted from coltan and poured into circuits to make phones and tablets and audio players. They put it in cameras, 3D printers, pacemakers and reflective lenses in glasses. They used tantalum to build platforms for virtual experiences whose primary purpose was distraction from, among other things, the conditions needed to create the devices and the social, ecological and climatic consequences of the mines. The increasingly disembodied nature of programs run on this hardware – VR holograms, whispered notifications of blood-pressure targets, automatic food replacements arriving silently at the door – was deliberate and ingenious, implying the technology was literally baseless, unlimited and independent, divorced from anachronistic categories such as fuel, labour, emissions, natural resources. It was as if product design exploited latent religiosity, a nostalgia for the belief that people too existed free from bodies.

  It was impossible to convey how hopeless all this could seem. The more indirect and intercepted people’s experience of the world became, the less significant it seemed that poorer quantities of the earth itself remained. As if vanished or damaged matter could simply be regenerated by simulacra. Spokespersons announced the results of sponsored research claiming immersion in phone and tablet screens correlated with fewer air miles per person; at the same time, tantalum was fused in alloys in military jet engines that orchestrated the conflicts creating the conditions for the mines and quarries to thrive. One of the most absurd details was that the techniques supposed to alleviate, if only a little, catastrophic environmental damage – wind turbines, electric cars – themselves relied on quarried coltan.

  According to formal notices, the country’s decades-long conflict was presently somewhere between indefinitely prolonged ceasefire and resolution. The conglomerate received wide international acclaim for its efforts in brokering this. This was obviously bullshit. We were aware of the allegations that throughout the conflict the group remained not only immune and untouched, but it stoked and in some cases scripted its conflagrations, in line with the ebb and flow of prices and demand for the area’s minerals. If the conflict was temporarily stilled, there were clear market reasons for it; as soon as conditions changed and these justifications vanished, the conflict could escalate again. At best, in agreeing to cooperate, albeit indirectly, we were foolish and naive. More realistically, we were passive and effectively complicit in what was happening. If we were invited to the park then there was a clear reason behind it, in the group’s own interest. We were aiding them by ceding to their conditions and demands.

  WEBG were effectively the conglomerate’s PR division. They directly supported the mining. Their videos and reports consistently ignored the conflict around it and were so successful that tourist numbers stayed constant and unaffected through ceasefires and escalations. They just didn’t talk about the war. The group even produced lines of electronics with a small green dot on top, indicating coltan sourced from the zone, a percentage of the profits of which went into supporting and looking after the animals in the park. Which was, of course, such a parody of the truth I didn’t know where to begin.

  There was no evidence anyone in the organisation had any kind of background in the natural sciences at all. They generated goodwill through sophisticated media management and curated tourism operations. They produced short video clips made from years-old footage and recycled material from outdated journals and disseminated them on social media. There was no research presence in the park, only guards making seasonal tours and drone cameras monitoring potential trespasses at the edges. It was a fluke they’d even picked up the two bodies.

  The park itself was getting smaller and smaller, mining continuing to blast away the surrounding forests. In theory, you could never be quite sure when you were inside it, both because there was no physical barrier and because the edge kept changing, drawing in. The reason given for the authorities’ refusal to build, as a last, desperate attempt to deter human interference, a steel wall around the entire perimeter, was that the construction would disrupt the animals, introducing new elements to the park and perhaps threatening plant, insect and bird species, with a knock-on effect on the primates. The reality was that the cost of building it was too high because it would never end. It wasn’t a matter of building a single wall, but rather of erecting, dismantling and rebuilding the same wall continuously, endlessly, as the park drew itself in, ever smaller and tighter, until eventually there was nothing to encompass. Another advantage, from the authorities’ perspective, in having no clear physical boundary – originally a principle enforced to allow natural species’ migration – was that it was more difficult for outsiders to see just how small the park was becoming, how much land was sold and sheared off every year.

  Maps were adapted to hide this, presenting outdated information. WEBG offered free downloads of mApps at the airport, a means of managing the information given to and produced by tourists. Alice said roads, villages, whole towns were named that hadn’t existed for years. It didn’t matter; all travel inside the zone was by permit only and under the guidance of tour leaders, carefully managed so the vanished areas would never be encountered. None of this was explicitly denied, spokespersons for WEBG and occasionally other affiliates preferring to avoid answers and instead make positive statements about the sophisticated technology they had created and how it was available to anyone who wanted it, free of charge. Interrogation was appropriated as PR opportunity, until people stopped asking questions.

  The horizon was ridged in livid cloud, and it was about to fall dark. We had several hours still to drive. Jane cleared her throat. I thought with every passing hour she became more childlike. I thought I’d seen her pretending to sleep, as if she might discover something under false cover. I slowed, and we continued in silence. Settlements were arrangements of lights hung up in the darkness. They seemed bold. They seemed built against something. I was tired. Alice met my gaze in the mirror and asked me if I wanted to stop. I said no, I was fine. She continued to look at me.

  ‘We’ll pass one further town,’ she said. ‘There is a hotel – we can rest and leave early in the morning. It will make no difference.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m fine. There’s not much further to go.’

  I wasn’t sure what it was at first because of the silence. The scene appeared to be missing something. The flashes were sudden, like mistakes in perception. Silver flashes on top of us every few seconds, lighting up, metallically, shards of the environment. The electricity seemed to affect us, inside, with additional tension, a heaviness put around our bodies. I kept both hands on the wheel and continued looking ahead, my back straight, as if the slightest movement might detonate a charge. The lightning continued without sound, without rain. We outran it, but I could hear the others shifting and turning in their seats, watching it, craning their necks at the odd strobe effect distorting the land and time behind us.

  ________________________

  The park HQ – all that was really left of it – was three block buildings at the bottom of a dirt drive. I watched the thick moths turning in the beam of the headlights, fluttering and unfolding, and almost didn’t notice the two figures emerging from the building furthest away. I turned off the lights and we stepped out of the car onto the soft, wet ground. The air was close and humid, a strong metallic smell carried from the rain, and beyond the HQ there were no buildings, no lights at all. The insects were loud, the cicadas’ signalling twice as fast as my heart rate, and they seemed to clutter the hectic air. I noticed Jane wearing a strange expression, breathing through her nose, pursing her lips – she was afraid of inadvertently swallowing insects. The two figures broke into a light jog, though the distance was almost nothing and the rain had stopped and the lightning seemed to have abated, and they introduced themselves, extending their arms, insisting on helping us with our things.

  Both Bryan and Selina spoke in that strongly enunciated English that was hard to pin down, clear but neutral, like the colourless accent of the internet itself,
that we’d noted with several of the WEBG staff at the airport, though they had neither their ridiculous khaki uniforms nor their demanding cheeriness. ‘How was your drive?’ Selina asked, smiling warmly, and in the corridor light I saw several iron fillings. She looked around the same age as Alice, perhaps early forties; she was a little shorter than me, athletic, and held her red hair in a bun. ‘We’ve had quite a storm,’ she said, as Bryan, taking off his cap to reveal close-cropped hair, started hauling bags from the back of the pick-up. ‘Thought you might be delayed. I am so grateful you’ve come here, we all are. We can’t thank you enough, really. Anyway, we’ll get to all that in the morning. You must be tired, hungry, I imagine. Why don’t we eat first, then I can show you to your room?’

  ‘I’d rather leave my things in the room first, if that’s okay.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I can never really relax until I’ve unpacked.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘You might want to hold off unpacking until morning.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Well, the others are sleeping.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You’d wake them, in the dorm. Everything shuts down fairly early here, I’m afraid.’

  We left the bulk of our things inside the vehicle, Alice and Jane went to the kitchen and I said I would see them later. I entered our room, found the light switch and heard people stir – a brief image of low movements in the stacked dormitory beds. I shut it off, whispered an apology, crept to my assigned bed and lay down exhausted. The insect noise was deafening, as if the walls, in the darkness, had collapsed. There was a thin perimeter curtain hanging from the bars of the bed above, and I pulled it to enclose me. We were higher than in the capital but the humidity seemed just as punishing. The ceiling fan spun limply, unable to end. I took out my phone one last time – nothing from John – and fell into sleep.