Chasing Shadows: Visions of Our Coming Transparent World

by David Brin

  And maybe that’s not so far from the truth.

  She’d never anticipated becoming a bioterrorist.

  It had begun as a means of not feeling completely useless in the face of the constant dead ends that Luke had been led down by his doctors. She knew the signs even before they uttered a word. Pursed lips, brief exhalation, sympathetic eyes. “I’m sorry…” Every speculative diagnosis, every tentative treatment regime ended in failure.

  So Zoe ordered the genomics kit, the open-source circuit board, the enzymes, the software libraries, and all the rest, swabbed under Luke’s tongue, and hunted for the mistake in her brother’s DNA. A needle in a haystack didn’t come close. Aside from some illuminating side projects like getting bacteria to bioluminesce, her investigations came to nothing. But she did learn some skills …

  She moves deeper into the dim room.

  The desk holds several laptops, test tubes, a box of surgical gloves, a rack with pipettes in various sizes, and a centrifuge that looks like an oversized rice cooker, but she’s headed to the small fridge under the desk. The fridge door opens with a puckering noise. Icy vapor spreads, causing the hairs on Zoe’s arm to rise. She fans it away, staring at neat rows of strawberries plump and inviting, their color the most vivid scarlet.

  Her hand wavers over the first strawberry, but any lingering doubts are dispelled as she recalls Luke’s last hospital visit. I’m afraid there’s nothing more we can do. Rapidly, yet methodically, Zoe transfers most of the strawberries to a custom-designed cool container that outwardly looks like a designer handbag.

  Zipping up the bag, she grabs her coat, then gives her brother a quick kiss on the top of the head. “The rest of those strawberries are still off limits.”

  “What did you do to them?”

  Zoe doesn’t answer.

  Leaving, she holds off slamming the front door, hollers into the apartment. “I love you.”

  Then she’s gone.

  * * *

  She’s only walked a stone’s throw from her apartment block, skirting past a scrum of Londoners fighting to get on the No. 17 bus, when her cell rings. Private number, but she suspected as much before looking.

  Her stomach balls.

  She swipes, answers. “Zoe Parsons.”

  “You’re running late.”

  Scottish accent, terse, female. Zoe’s usual contact, and one of the leaders of Green Dawn, she suspects. Call me Tess, she said the first time they spoke, but using the alias has never come easy to Zoe. Hard as titanium nails.

  “You’re tracking my phone?”

  Damn geolocation tech. Privacy’s a thing of the past.

  “Of course we’re tracking your fucking phone,” the woman says. “Do you have the merchandise?”

  Zoe instinctively pats her handbag, feels a frisson of cold on her fingers.

  The familiar justifications for what’s she doing circle. GeneLife’s aims for the vertical farms were noble when they first tendered plans for their construction. Reduce water consumption, lower land use, shorten the distance between field and plate to reduce energy consumption. Problem was, when the shareholders wrested control of the company they discovered there was little profit in growing staple foodstuffs for the masses. Catering for the wealthy was where real money could be made. Luxury foods displaced simple grains, exotic fruits grown instead of wheat, vast petri dishes of prime Aberdeen beef instead of tightly packed cod farms.

  Green Dawn wants to scare off the investors, bring GeneLife back into public ownership. Zoe can live with that.

  “Yes, I’ve got the merchandise.” She’s coming up to a busy intersection, pedestrians amassing at the crossing as they wait for the little green man, so she hangs back not wanting to be overheard. Traffic streams past smoothly, electric engines with electric minds. “Is that all?”

  These calls make her nervous. Even with a disposable cell, untraceable to her, phone companies hold records of numbers, call times, call durations, maybe even the content of the calls themselves.

  The quantified self can incriminate as much as it can liberate.

  “No, that’s not all,” Tess says. “We’ve got a problem—well, more precisely we’ve got two.”

  Zoe’s heartbeat gets a little faster. She swerves around the homeless guy in his cardboard kingdom, almost knocking his electronic donations reader flying.

  “What problems?”

  “Nothing insurmountable,” Tess says cockily, “but you’re going to need to do a little more for us today.”

  “Goddamn.”

  “Now, now, that’s not the right attitude.”

  Zoe glances around, lowers her voice. “The right attitude? I’ve done everything you’ve asked—each time for less than we agreed!” Along the side of the Tesco superstore where the delivery trucks come in, a ragtag line has already begun forming in front of the food banks. “Tell me how my attitude could be better?”

  “Let me make this clear, Zoe,” Tess says, deadpan. “If the authorities should ever get word of your indiscretions … well, how do you think that would pan out for you?”

  Zoe stops dead, chilled.

  “You wouldn’t,” she whispers.

  “Not if we don’t have to, no.”

  Zoe’s hand’s shaking, so she presses the phone closer to her ear to still her trembling. “What do I need to do?” she manages.

  “That’s better,” Tess says. “Now listen carefully. First off, the operative we had planned to be in The Gastronomique…”

  While Tess gives her the instructions, part of Zoe’s brain is definitely listening, considering all the angles of what she’s being asked, but a larger part of her attention is in a daze. London slides past, like she’s watching all the street life take place underwater, while she observes from above the surface.

  Inside a luxury grocers’ stocked with the shiny fruits of GeneLife’s labor, a man in a green tweed jacket examines some mangoes with his hands, exchanging a joke with the shopkeep. Across the road, in a children’s playground devoid of any green space, two kids bully a third, keeping their victim on a merry-go-round and spinning it mercilessly. At a street market, a bent-backed old lady examines knobbled potatoes riddled with black marks, while a harried mother argues with the thick bearded vendor, gesticulating with a mis-shapen onion.

  A rising inflection in Tess’ voice snaps Zoe back to the conversation. “—said, did you get all that?”

  “I got it,” she replies. “One, I need to film the fallout in The Gastronomique. Two, you want me to dig up any intel I can on vitan.”

  Within the last twenty-four hours, Green Dawn had got wind that GeneLife had signed a secret government contract with the Home Office to develop some of kind of surveillance biotech that could gather data on the populace.

  Vitan was suspected as the delivery vector.

  “Good. And Zoe … “

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t fuck this up.”

  The line goes dead.

  Zoe stares at the screen for a moment, pockets her phone.

  What the hell am I doing?

  Turning a corner, she’s confronted by the towering vertical farm, a steel-and-glass marvel, bright green foliage pressing against its thirty-eight floors of gleaming exterior like the twisted hands of drowning men clutching for the sun. Gazing upward to the restaurant on its summit, the sunshine dazzles, and she feels light-headed.

  Somebody grazes past, cursing.

  The nausea passes.

  You’re doing this for Luke, she thinks, galvanizing herself. It’s this or nothing.

  The celebs’ arrival is still hours away, yet barricades have already been arranged, and a motley crew of students, tourists, and devoted fans sit around listlessly. “We ♥ you, Jude!” reads one placard. Media from some of the bigger newsfeeds, the logos on their jackets competing to be the biggest and brashest, wander between the bystanders. A few private security bods decked out in luminous yellow jackets are constructing a screening area like you find at airport
s: conveyor belt with CT scanner for bags, Tardis-sized full-body scanner for people, tables for rifling through suspect items.

  Drones hover, recording everything.

  She strides forward, making a beeline for the main entrance to circumvent the private security, her grip tightening on the straps of her handbag. One of the security guys, a big lethargic man with his long hair tied up neatly behind his head, clicks his fingers at her. “Excuse me, Miss.”

  Zoe doesn’t break stride, simply fishes her GeneLife badge—Zoe Parsons, Agronomist—from the front pocket of her suit jacket, and holds it up for the man to see. “I work here.”

  He moves to block her path, glancing at the main entrance, probably hoping to see one of the permanent security staff, but nobody’s in eyeshot. “Sorry, Miss. You know how it is. Rules.” He rubs his neck. “If you can show me the letter that went out to all onsite employees, together with some ID, otherwise…”

  Zoe’s stomach drops.

  “Really, I’ve got a lot to do this morning.”

  The security guy shrugs. “If you’ll just step over here.”

  In her mind’s eye she sees the neatly folded letter sitting on the small kitchen table in the flat, forgotten in her haste and worry. Another employee she doesn’t recognize shows the necessary documents and gets waved past. Zoe’s caught the woman’s name on her driving license: Melinda Jacobs.

  “Melinda!” she calls to the woman’s receding heels.

  The woman swivels, defenses up.

  “Could you vouch for me, Mel?” Zoe says, as if they’re longtime lab buddies. “I left that blasted letter at home.”

  The woman raises her eyebrows, face softening. “Sure,” she says, stepping closer, peeking at Zoe’s GeneLife badge. “I know Zoe.”

  Before the security guy can protest, Mel has linked arms with Zoe, and corralled her away.

  “Thanks for that,” Zoe says. “I hate those full-body scanners.”

  “No drama. I recognized you anyway.”

  “You did?”

  “Loved your old handbag.” She peers at Zoe’s new handbag, wedged tight under her elbow. “Not sure about the new one though.”

  * * *

  On an average day, the vertical farm is a swirl of activity, but today it’s even busier. The zero-hour contractors—the fruit pickers, soil maintainers, pesticide sprayers, and the rest of the menial staff—are coming in and filing down into the vast basement changing room where they’ll slip into their regulation tan-colored coveralls.

  The office staff head straight for the eight central elevators that run through the building’s spine, and are whisked up to the office complex on the eighteenth and nineteenth floors, a rabbit’s warren of cubicle desks surrounded by meeting rooms, conference suites, kitchenettes, and the management’s offices.

  The rest of the human flux comprise the vertical farm’s visitors—buyers from the upmarket chains, school tour groups, press packs, today even a fact-finding mission from Beijing—and last but not least, Zoe’s own tribe: GeneLife’s scientists and technicians.

  Busy is good. Busy means Zoe can move between the levels attracting less attention. Busy means she might actually pull this off.

  She heads for the lifts, slides into the least crowded elevator, and punches the button for the fifteenth floor—Vaccinium, Rubus, Fragaria, the genera of some of the nation’s favorite fruit snacks. Raspberries and blackberries, blueberries and cranberries—and strawberries. One of her colleagues, a botanist whose fingertips are always grimy with dirt, makes small talk as the lift smoothly ascends.

  “Snag some dewberries if you can!” he says, laughing as she exits.

  Zoe winces inside, but doesn’t break stride. The last thing she needs today are people remembering her movements. She’s just glad the only CCTV cameras in the building are limited to the lobby area on the ground floor.

  Act natural.

  Already the heat of the vast banks of artificial lighting that swathe the ceiling of every floor are making her sweat, and the leafy fields of berries shine under the fierce illumination. The hydroponics that sustain every crop, a nutrient bath calibrated to the nth degree, gives the air a chemical tang. Together with the heightened CO2 levels and the warmth, it’s not a comfortable place to work.

  Lucky for me.

  She moves on, glides past the huge cold station where the freshly picked produce sits on beds of chilled air, ready to be transported to the packing area on the third floor. The semitransparent curtains peel open as a worker brushes through, and inside she spies a layer of fat blackberries gleaming like the finest caviar, frost steaming into the air. Somewhere inside the station, the produce destined for the restaurant—and Chad Legarde’s culinary masterpieces—wait on a trolley.

  Produce that includes a handful of plump strawberries.

  Before she makes the switch though, she’s got to keep up appearances.

  After grabbing some cuttings for an experiment she’s been planning for weeks, she heads back for the cold station—and her unscheduled, completely off-the-record stop. As she’s about to enter, the translucent curtains that mark the entrance to the station begin to part. A trolley slides out. It carries neatly ordered baskets of berries of many varieties, its pilot still hidden behind the curtains—

  Her heart stops.

  One of the fancy bespoke menus from The Gastronomique is perched on the end of the trolley, its florid typeface clear to see. She’d recognize it anywhere, given the amount of time she spent staring at its contents, working out where she could weave her biohacking magic most effectively. Somebody, probably Chad himself, has annotated the menu with bold pen strokes, no doubt instructions detailing the necessary ingredients from this level.

  I’m too late.

  The curtain flaps back, the trolley’s lanky pilot emerging. One of the kitchen hands from the restaurant, judging by the disheveled, food-stained whites he wears.

  “Zoe?”

  She takes a better look at his face, realizes. One of Luke’s friends’ older brothers. She hardly knows him, but she did help him land the job upstairs by getting his CV in front of the restaurant manager. “Tim, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, Tim.” His raises his eyebrows. “How you doing? You look a little freaked.”

  “Stressful day.”

  “Tell me about it. Chad Legarde? You think he hams it up for the cameras?” He shakes his head. “Uh-uh. Serious ballbreaker. For real.” He launches into an impression of the chef. “You dickhead, where did you learn to cook, your local kebab shop?”

  “God. He sounds awful.”

  Tim nods. “Thanks for helping me get the job, by the way.”

  She wracks her brains for some cunning fix, some means by which it wouldn’t be really fucking weird if she insisted on taking ownership of the trolley and its cargo of fresh berries at this precise moment, but she’s got nothing.

  “How’s Luke?”

  “Good,” she says, but her mind doesn’t let her get away with the lie so easily. Emotion threatens to overwhelm her, and her eyes film up. “Actually, not so good. Unless something changes, it’s only a matter of time.”

  “Sorry, dumb question. I shouldn’t have asked.”

  “No,” Zoe replies, pinching the corners of her eyes between thumb and index finger, stemming any tears. “I’m glad you asked.”

  Tim rubs his neck, leans on the trolley. “I better get back, I guess. Chef’s waiting.”

  A faint odor of cigarette smoke clings to his whites, and she suddenly remembers that he became a chain smoker, forever on the roll-ups, after kicking a brutal heroin habit a few years back. That’s why employment was always such a problem for him. She glances at his fingertips, spies the telltale staining.

  “Still smoking?”

  He looks embarrassed. “Is it that obvious?”

  “No, not at all.” She smiles. “I just thought you might want a ciggie break. I’m heading up to Botanics so I could whisk this up for you—it’s headed for the resta
urant, right?”

  “You would?” He eyes the glistening produce on the trolley, wisps of frost still eddying off. “Chef wants this stuff back ASAP. You’ll go straight there, right?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I owe you.” He scurries off for his nicotine hit.

  Zoe grabs the trolley, wheels it straight to the nearby service lift. She punches the call button. Come on, come on. When the doors open with a soft hiss, she’s relieved to see it’s empty.

  She wheels the trolley inside, hits the button for The Gastronomique.

  As soon as the doors hiss close, she springs into action.

  Zoe transfers the biohacked strawberries into the punnets, fighting her shaking fingers and carefully ferrying each one individually so they don’t bruise. Afterward, she delves into her handbag and adds a layer of normal strawberries to each punnet in case anyone helps themselves to a cheeky one before they get prepped. Just as the lift arrives at the restaurant level, she pops the tainted produce back on the trolley.

  Mouth-watering smells and a clatter of sounds.

  “Ingredients for Chef Legarde,” she says to a passing kitchen hand, keeping her head down. “Could you get them to the fridges?”

  He doesn’t even glance, taking the trolley. “Sure.”

  Zoe backs up and punches a button. “Thanks.”

  No turning back now.

  * * *

  For the next few hours she focuses on keeping up her normal routine.

  Writing reports, a little lab study, gossiping with colleagues about who’s on the guest list for the shindig upstairs. Only the ones who deserve all they’ve got coming, she hopes.

  She laughs along, tries to act regular.

  After a solitary lunch in one of the staff canteens, outwardly reading on her spex like she often does, but in actuality reading nothing and simply plotting how she’s going to pull off the improbable, she heads off alone for Algae.

  Entering the vast watery floor where the new superfood is being grown, she walks blind into writhing darkness as her eyes adjust to the night cycle. An intense smell of seaweed and the sea fills the air, and then as her pupils contract, the algal farm ghosts out of the darkness, all faint lines and watery ripple. Dim lighting studs the ceiling at uniform intervals, casting the shimmering water and its kelp forests in a soft glow. Metal gantries crisscross the lapping water, glinting in the illumination.