A Box of Birds

by Charles Fernyhough

  ‘Flotation tank,’ Gareth quips. ‘It’s very stressful being a scientist.’

  ‘Water maze,’ I say, calmly searching my desk for their essays. ‘The big paddling-pool thing is basically a big paddling-pool. You add some milky stuff to the water so that it becomes opaque. You put a mouse in somewhere around the edge and see if it can find its way to a submerged platform. That way you can test the animal’s spatial memory.’

  James is looking at the paddling-pool, trying to decide if it’s cruel to make a humanely-reared mouse swim through milky water. He takes his essay without even glancing at the mark. Gareth is trying to disturb my desktop again, to see what lies behind the branching-neurone screensaver. My late night comes back to me in yawning colour. The human clutter of the gaming rooms, the movie clips gifted from faraway traders, the network of linked webcams that creates the virtual universe of Des*re. Hours of poring over that brilliant ribbon of streaming video, probing its anonymity settings, trying to decode the when and the where of it. And, through it all, this nagging certainty that I’ve found him, or that he’s found me.

  ‘Do you get out into the forest much, Miss?’ Gareth is saying.

  He’s standing at the window, looking down at the burn that flows round the back of the Institute.

  ‘Of course she does,’ James says. ‘She works here.’

  ‘Have you ever seen McQueen out there? You know, when you’re walking to work and stuff?’

  ‘I don’t know. What does he look like?’

  Gareth makes a simian chatter and chucks at his armpits.

  ‘Sort of chimpanzee-ish.’

  I shake my head wearily. ‘There can’t be a chimp living wild in Wenderley Forest, James. It’s not possible.’

  Both seem convinced. ‘It belongs to that biotech company, Sansom. Your rivals. We reckon it escaped from their lab and it’s now roaming free with the squirrels. The word is that it’s surviving on scraps from the kitchens. Sansom are getting in a real state about it. They’re trying to find it and shoot it before anyone finds out the truth about their research.’

  ‘I’ve heard rumours like that before. It will have been some bored student, dressed up for a prank.’

  ‘No, Miss. It’s a real chimp. One of our mates has seen it.’

  ‘Chimps are practically human, Gareth. You’d never get ethical approval to work with them.’

  ‘Sansom don’t worry about ethical approval,’ James says. ‘They’re the third biggest biotech on the planet. They do what they want. Anyway, I assumed you’d know about McQueen. I thought all you vivisectionists stuck together.’

  The label stings. I’m too aware of how it sounds, to people who don’t actually understand what this work involves.

  ‘Don’t worry about him, Miss,’ Gareth says. ‘His lot say all of it is wrong. Ethical approval or not. Experimenting on animals can have no justification, whatever the potential benefits to the experimenters.’

  ‘Who are “his lot”?’ I ask, with a feeling that I’m breaking in halfway through an argument.

  ‘Conscience. The radical animal rights group.’

  Gareth looks at me, enjoying my unease. James’ eyes are turned down, gazing past a smile. He’s shaking his head gently. My heart goes flat and stiff in my chest. The last thing I need is a Conscience activist in my tutorial group.

  ‘I’m not with Conscience,’ he says. ‘I’m nothing. I’m not anything.’

  ‘You were on that demo! At Sansom. You’re there every week. It’s either you or it’s your twin brother. You made the local news, humanoid.’

  James yawns extravagantly, dismissing the argument as easily as he started it. He doesn’t really care what happens in that lab next door. He just wants to win something, some game of his own making, beat someone, it doesn’t matter who.

  ‘Well, save it for the debate,’ Gareth says. ‘I might let James ask a question if he’s lucky. Are you coming, Miss? Tonight, at the Priors’ Hall.’

  I glance at the invitation card pinned to my corkboard. Gareth has invited me to something, a college debate on issues arising from the East Wing attacks. Motion: a species that wants cures for its own diseases should not test them out on its inferior cousins. Just what you need, when thousands of dollars’ worth of damage has been done to your world-class research centre: a bunch of students talking about it. But Gareth is scheduled to be speaking. I’m his tutor; I’m supposed to be supportive about this kind of thing.

  ‘I don’t know. Won’t I be at home marking your essay?’

  He lifts his file onto his lap and starts scribbling in it. The label says GAZ’S RANDOM NOTES ON NEUROSCIENCE.

  ‘Just applying the finishing touches, Miss.’

  ‘You’ll have to read it really carefully,’ James says. ‘He’s not letting anyone else see it.’

  ‘What’s the big secret?’

  ‘It’ll all be in the essay.’ James taps his nose confidentially. ‘He won’t tell anyone until he’s absolutely ready to go public. He’ll get in trouble again.’

  ‘I didn’t get in trouble because of my foolproof scheme for getting rich. I got in trouble because I hadn’t satisfied my slave-masters.’

  ‘You mean, you hadn’t handed in any work?’

  Gareth looks up at my computer, seized by an idea.

  ‘Can you access my college record on that thing?’

  ‘That’s for me to know.’

  ‘I’ll have to hack into your account, then.’

  ‘You could try. After recent events, they’ve gone a bit tight on security.’

  ‘He can handle security,’ James says, with a sly wink at me. ‘You know he hacked into the Pentagon? He was, like, twelve.’

  I think of the new bank of firewalls they put in after the latest attacks on the East Wing. You now have to enter a daily-changing security code just to get on to the networked computers. I remember the Executive’s hurried press release in the hours after the last attack, about the importance of scientific work being allowed to continue while we strive to find alternatives to experimental research with animals. That doesn’t help this feeling of dread. They look harmless enough, with their big smiles and prankish undergraduate humour, but I’m still going to find myself in desperate amounts of trouble if anyone catches them up here. I want them out of here, I want my house in the trees, a large Jack Daniels and my own company until bedtime. Not the thought of some uniformed thug walking past at any moment, pushing the door open on this flagrant breach of security.

  ‘If you come to the debate, Miss, you can give the scientist’s point of view. Set the record straight.’

  ‘Yeah. You can tell us what your mice are thinking about while you’re fiddling around with their brains.’

  I watch James slump back into the chair and push off his trainers. He’s wearing a Fred Flintstone hairpiece and a tee-shirt that says BIG IN NORWICH. His lips are dry, and there’s a tender colour in his cheeks that hints at childhood embarrassments. His eyelashes are long and dark. A mole on his right cheek is the mark of a perfect arrogant beauty. I’ve heard this tone of voice before, of course: the slick automaticity of the outrage, the wince in his cheeks as he hurts himself on the words. No doubt the people who firebombed an empty storage room in the East Wing had it, took it with them to their Conscience meetings to argue for a better world without cruelty to animals. But James doesn’t seem the sort who would act on his convictions. He’s just testing me, pushing on the edifice to see if it’ll break. He wants the easy kick at the cruelty of animal research, but he hasn’t the heart, or the arguments, to see it through.

  ‘Like I say, in this lab we’re mostly using transgenics. We don’t have to tamper with their brains at all: we let their genes do it for us.’

  ‘Don’t you have any doubts about that?’

  He stares at me, sensing a weakness I didn’t know about. ‘Sometimes,’ I say.

  ‘So are they conscious when you’re fiddling around with their transgenics or whatever?’

 
; ‘That depends on what you mean by conscious.’

  I wish he’d look away now. I like to think I can hide it, by speaking when I’m spoken to, smiling back when people smile at me, and maybe giving a little obligatory blush when it’s a man. But then, out of nowhere, someone sees right through me, notices how I stumble over a response to a question, or leave a glance out of a window hanging a half-second too long. That feeling of being centred, that X that’s supposed to mark the spot of the soul: it gets shown up as the nothing it is. James has scented it, the doubt that’s at the heart of me. It’s like I’ve thrown open a door onto a party you can hear from the street, only to show that there’s nothing there.

  ‘I mean what you mean, Dr Churcher. I mean what it feels like to be alive. To experience the amazing qualities of existence. I’m not talking about neural pathways or bits of the brain working together in harmony. I mean what it feels like to be you, Dr Yvonne Churcher. Age thirty-something. Possibly single. To be that person, in this room, right now.’

  I redden, and hate myself for it.

  ‘Here, in this room, is not really the place to discuss this, James.’

  He holds the gaze. It’s too determined; its need to embarrass me is too much on show. But I find myself yielding to it, in a kind of admiration for his guessing the truth about me. He has me in his gaze, that cool, fascinating fixedness: not fighting me now, more like what comes after fighting.

  ‘You take it to pieces, Dr Churcher, and then you can’t put the pieces back together again.’

  I laugh. I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t help it. It’s a mid-brain reflex, some neural cluster buzzing some other neural cluster, and going nowhere near that mythical centre, whatever it is that’s supposed to be me. He’s blushing now, scorched by an older woman’s mockery, and I can feel the tingling dread that tells me that I’ve gone too far. He’s hauling up the smile, hardening it, putting a bit of menace into it, a clench of anger. It’s too hot in here. All the doors and windows sealed, and electronic locks on all the doors, and just the two of us trapped in this moment, fighting for air.

  It’s true: I do doubt myself. Not in the way that I would doubt whether I could climb that hill or make that person fall in love with me; it’s more like doubting the ‘I’ that’s supposed to be doing the doubting. I use this word, this feathery personal pronoun, like you might say the name of a foreign town you’re headed for but have never actually seen, hoping the act of utterance might bring it closer. But I don’t believe in that town. I never did. That feeling of centredness, of me-ness, that is supposed to keep you rooted in your life: well, it passed me by. I have this fantasy that I’ll do what Gareth wants me to do, I’ll take the thought-helmet and put it on, dim the lights and let everyone see what’s going on inside. There’ll be the low-level buzz of life-or-death routines, the reflexes that keep the machine working. The Lorenzo Circuit will be flickering, knitting together my past and future selves. As I turn around to see James sitting there, there’ll be the swirl in the back of my brain corresponding to the sight of him. But then he’ll ask me again, ‘How does it feel to be you, here, now?’ And suddenly the evidence of my existence will be gone. I’ll be back to being a network of activity, one neural cluster buzzing another neural cluster, one lot of bio-electrical traffic taking the ring-road around the soul; one deluded meat puppet sizing up another deluded meat puppet and wanting to fight it or fuck it or whatever. ‘What about how it feels?’ James will ask me. ‘There must be something that it feels like to be you.’ I’ll shrug and say that it feels like this. You sitting there with your fading blushes and your day-old stubble, wanting to fight me or fuck me, both, I don’t know. Knocking at the door, trying to work out why there’s no answer.

  Calling my name.

  Wondering why there’s no one at home.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Forest Glade 7

  ◉

  He’s on the stairs ahead of me. Gareth left ten minutes ago, saying he needed to slip away early so that he could get his speech ready for the debate. There’s no one else on the stairwell. I see James on the third-floor landing, peering at the iris scanner that controls access to the maximum-security areas. He flips out his phone and films the scanner for a few seconds, and then glances up at the CCTV camera which eyes him from a safer reality. He pushes on the door, recoils from its solidity, and frowns at it as if it had broken a promise. I’m watching him from one flight above. It feels wrong to be spying on him, but I was the one who let him up here. If I’ve got a Conscience activist in my tutorial group, I need to know.

  He carries on down the stairs. The lift doesn’t even stop at this third floor, unless your access privileges reveal it for you on the control panel. You wouldn’t know that this research floor existed unless you’d worked out the architecture from the outside. This is where the Lorenzo Circuit is being pieced together, neurone cluster by neurone cluster, to make a map worth — to our rivals at least — a price that goes beyond money. If James were with Conscience, this honeycomb of sealed rooms would be top of his target list. As I pass the iris scanner, walking fast to keep him in sight, I feel the hum of the secrets it is protecting, its silent, massively automated efforts to stop certain facts from becoming known. At the second-floor landing, James increases his pace, all at once in a hurry. By now, the grey stairwell holds a wash of daylight from the windows on the lower floors. I can hear his feet clattering as he skips down the last flights of stairs and through the door into the atrium. If I run, he will hear me. Betas buzz around, yabbering into mobile phones. I have to push through the queue for the coffee cart. Someone stops me with a question about an assignment, and by the time I’ve shaken her off James is already out of the building and crossing the concourse by the boarded-up windows of the East Wing.

  Outside it’s the slanting light of late afternoon. A couple of contractors’ vans are crash-parked on the kerb outside the East Wing. A radio blares, but no one is working. James walks past the scene with his Fred Flintstone mask jacked up on top of his head, his gaze set dead ahead, oblivious to the damage his fellow protestors have caused. I watch him catch up with a crowd of betas heading for a session in the Peer Review. He’ll have to do his drinking quickly if he wants to catch the heritage steam service to Fulling, where the students have their colleges, in time for the debate. I’m tempted to follow him, but I’d rather make sure I’m there to watch him tonight, when positions have been stated and I can see which cause he’s fighting for. I’m nothing, he told me. I’m not anything. If I want to know what that means, I’ll have to be there when the shouting starts.

  One of the contractors’ vans is blocking the access to Libet Avenue, which is the way I go when I’m on my bike. The surface is compacted grit, fine for cycling, and at night there are lights in little ground-level turrets, security points every fifty metres. Then there’s a maze of narrower footpaths that trace different routes back to Forest Glade, and less chance of being mown down by some proto-scientist on a thirty-speed racer. Down this way, gorse prickles your shoulders and red squirrels play pirates overhead. From odd clearings you can look up at the treehouses at the top of the rise, paused like tripod aliens taking a break from conquering the earth.

  Today I’m walking. This morning I stood on the roof of my treehouse and realised that I needed to pace it out, leave these jittery thoughts scattered among the undergrowth, and feel the certainty that only the footsore rhythms of a long walk can give you. A feeling is in me, a conflux of internal states that I call a feeling, and at a certain point it’ll turn into a thought, and the conscious machine will start believing. Something has already tipped off my endocrine system; I can already feel the panic that will ripple out. What surprises me is the lovesick feeling that drags it here, a soft buzzing nervousness, all that adrenaline and noradrenaline licking at my insides and twisting me out of shape. Thinking’s a gut reaction, rooted in the heart, the large intestine, the adrenal cortex, and only doing its conscious work in the brain. Hot intelligence, Mat
eus used to call it. His excuse for never losing an argument. If you went against his theory, you went against him.

  Come to Florida. Whether it’s golf, fishing, or old-fashioned sunshine and beaches, we can help you to find the new life you’ve been looking for.

  Hot intelligence. That’s what was bothering me last night, when this video message came through. Alone in my treehouse, curtains open to the blackness over the forest. The wind tongueing the flue of the stove, a reddish glow from a hollow stash of embers as fragile as a house of cards. I logged on and saw the shimmering lilac banner of Des*re, flickering like a flag in a virtual breeze. Another mouse-click or two and I’d be getting a detailed rundown on the items traded, the webcam trails to obscure locations, all the clues and red herrings of this obsessive networking game. The welcome banner gave way to a night sky. Each new message twinkled in the firmament like a star. Some people think I overdo the graphics, but I want the full experience, especially when the rest of me is falling apart. There was one new star, brighter than the rest. The sign of a new trader, travelling under maximum anonymity. Once I’d started trading with him I would get to see his icon, details of his avatars and perhaps even a clue to the flesh-and-blood gamer behind the mask. But for now he was a stranger, casually setting my heart on fire.

  I clicked on the new star. It exploded into a cam-feed of a windy beach under a grey sky. A self-conscious black woman, clearly doing a favour for a friend, was explaining why she was glad she’d picked a realtor to manage the purchase of her condo on Anna Maria Island. Then the movie had been edited, and another voice dubbed onto the soundtrack, speaking through her lips. Even if you lost it in the dark, you could try looking where the light is.

  I only know one person who talks like that. At least, I used to know.

  I looked away from my wallscreen. I saw the cream sofa with chocolate stains on the cushions, stacked with essays waiting to be marked. His photograph on the bookcase, his Sansom car park swipecard and ID badge. That pile of dog-eared journal articles which he never wanted anyone to see. How had he tracked me down? He had his settings configured for maximum privacy, but he must have known that I would see through them. I made myself visible. I could see his icon now, coyly shaded to grey. A Portuguese guitar trapped behind the bars of a cage. It was Mateus alright. My gorgeous, suffering fadista. He tore my heart out, but it was he who sang the sad songs. Mateus who thought he had a monopoly on hurt.