I freeze on the ladder, calculating distances. This is no student in a monkey suit. The animal looks frightened. A grown chimp can do a lot of damage to a person. I have to control his fear as well as my own. That means no sudden movements, and as little eye contact as I can get away with.
‘McQueen,’ I say softly. ‘That’s what they call you, isn’t it?’
The chimp climbs up onto the rail and looks back at me. A spruce branch that overhangs my rooftop will give him an easy escape. He chatters loudly at me, peeling open his tennis-ball mouth and showing his pink gums and gappy teeth. It’s a show; there’s no real aggression there. If he’s come from a lab, he must be used to humans. He probably understands who, in her ignorance, has been feeding him all this time.
I watch him lope up into the tree and vanish into the canopy below my platform. I’m shaken and cold, and this high in the winter sky I feel like a disaster victim awaiting rescue. To the west, the sun is setting over a bristling range of evergreens. In the other direction, Sansom’s metallic expanse is tinged with orange. Somewhere in that gleaming complex is the unwanted home that McQueen has escaped from. But what is a huge corporation like Sansom doing with a colony of chimpanzees? I told Gareth and James that the story of the escaped chimp was just a rumour, but the rumour is true. And if I’m the only person who appreciates that, things are going to start getting difficult for me.
CHAPTER THREE
This House Would Suffer Alone
◉
In the train on the way to the debate, I toy with the idea of reporting what I’ve seen. The night through the carriage windows is black, fields of moonlight laid over a landscape starred with farm lights. Over towards the university town of Fulling, a sky-hoarding flashes out the name of a property company scattering dream homes all over the countryside of UK-D. Another thirty miles to the east, a column of laser-smoke climbs over the high-rises of the city of Pelton, ready to splash its brand on any lingering patch of cirrus.
I see a man running down a lane, scrambling over a stile and cutting across a bare field. Sprouts of winter corn squish into mud where his feet land. I wonder if he’s a migrant, heading back to the new four-hundred-bed reception centre of Dartford 17, whose night-lit hulk just shot past me on the edge of the forest. He reaches the embankment, fingertips up the slope and falls in alongside the railway line, then there’s a blast of iron and coal-smoke and he’s gone and wet fields gleam. Rain scores the windows, etching obscure diagrams onto the glass, cross-hatching areas of substance and uncertainty. There’s a window open somewhere, a wind coming off the North Sea that smells of Siberia. Way over to the right, Sansom squats like a radioactive retail park, suffusing the night with its halogen-blue glow.
The chimp’s flared features haunt my brain. McQueen, the mythical runaway. Escaping from Sansom’s labs must have been quite an adventure. It had a reason to look frightened. Sansom’s people are trying to recapture it before anyone can link it to them. But the man with the gun was from the Lycee. Whatever Sansom knew about the runaway chimp, their biggest rivals knew it too. I’m trying to fit the pieces together, but they resist. James insists that he works alone, but that only makes me more certain that he’s a member of Conscience. According to Gareth, he and his activist friends are demonstrating at Sansom all the time. Which means he must have some idea of what goes on there. What kind of wildlife the biotech is interested in, and why.
The medieval town of Fulling appears from behind a billboarded hillside, and clouds flash past a heavy moon.
I sit alone by a window, shivering inside my military coat. There are four or five other people in the carriage. They are all betas, or maybe young-looking postgrads. The light is strange, that odd panicky surrealness of a railway carriage at night, and I have a sense that this sudden jolt into focus needs to be turned back on itself, scrutinised in some way. It’s not clairvoyance, that feeling you sometimes get of being a second or two ahead of yourself; it’s maybe just the particular patterning of the sensations, an interplay of light and colour that you haven’t experienced before. Anyway, there is no you. There are just fragments: the buffed mahogany of the train seats, the crimson swoosh on that girl’s trainers. The pieces glow brighter the further you get from the centre. It’s an ordinary moment, but it says everything about who I am, why I choose to do one thing rather than another. Maybe this is the hint that gets thrown my way, the nervous system’s anonymous tip-off, warning me that even this brief glimpse of consciousness is out of date, and I’m already someone else.
I force my attention back onto Gareth’s essay. It came through just before I left, while I was scouring for new messages about Florida. I printed it out, thinking I might get a chance to read it on the train. He’s gone way over the word limit, and hardly paid any attention at all to the title. He must have written most of it in the hours since he left this afternoon, as there are garbled references to the Lorenzo Circuit and the possibility of the artificial stimulation of memory. We never talked about any of this before today. I should be pleased that I’ve made an impression, but the manic onrush of his argument, sustained over pages of single-spaced text, is unsettling me. It’s not that plug-in memory implants are impossible, he has written, but that they are unnecessary. You don’t need to implant memories when you have a brain which constructs them out of their raw materials, every single time that it needs to remember. All the information is in there, tangled up in the Lorenzo Circuit. The million-dollar problem is how to put it all together.
For my eyes only, James said. Gareth reveals the first details of his get-rich scheme, and no one but his tutor gets to see them. I suspect that he’s unsure about his ideas and has come to me for approval. But I’m hardly going to be encouraging him to exploit the commercial value of the Lorenzo Circuit, even if I knew how it could be done. There’s a second attachment, entitled GAZ’S RANDOM NOTES ON NEUROSCIENCE. I skim through the few pages that printed before my paper ran out. There are notes on philosophical zombies, neurogenesis, phenomenal consciousness, all the gleaming factoids that have taken his fancy over the course of our wide-ranging second-year neuroscience class. They are a snapshot of his obsessions, and they alarm me. If there’s a message here, I’m not getting it. He’ll have to explain it to me himself, in all the detail he needs.
The train takes us to within a hundred metres of Sansom’s perimeter fence. Rail tracks snake away into a floodlit diorama of containers and low-slung storage units. The flagship buildings at the north end are swathed in forest. The biotech is known for its eclectic tastes, and that means limitless space to create different experimental habitats. The great escapee had a hell of a prison to break out from. I always knew that Mateus’ human–machine interface was only a fraction of what Sansom were interested in. But chimps? There’s no other way of explaining what I saw. There’s not a zoo within a hundred miles. You couldn’t keep one of these animals in captivity unless you had an enclosure the size of a small house. If Sansom have the will to do it, they have the space to hide it away.
The point is, Miss, that if you could map the Lorenzo Circuit then you would have the foundations of a system for enhancing human memory. This is the basis of my proposition for you.
The students get louder as we reach the outskirts of Fulling. As the train pulls into the station they stand up and fetch down banners and oversized teddy-bear mascots, and for a moment we’re a freeze-frame of awkwardness, half-standing, overbalancing with the weight of things and the slowing jolt, jolt of the train. As we step out into the cold, the floodlit abbey soars into the blackness, brilliant with amber light. The Norman stonework seems melted into the rock. It’s a sheer drop on this south side. In front of it, the market square is full of circus grotesques: fire-eaters, stilt-walkers, geeky betas on great tall unicycles, costumed girls milling about with buckets of money. There are some middle-aged tourist couples watching from a safe distance, measuring off non-lethal doses of excitement, counting the seconds before they can scurry back to their hotels.
Students dressed as rival sandwich-chain mascots are handing leaflets into thin air. This year’s Charity Week debate is brought to you by PowerServe Technologies.
Inside, the Priors’ Hall is heaving. Betas in drag-queen wigs are crushing forward out of the lobby clutching flutes of complimentary bubbly. Who’s paying for all this? PowerServe, I guess. That girl with the trainers sees someone she knows and squeals to be hugged. I watch the security guy run his scanner over my pigskin satchel, wondering whether his terrorist-sniffing software will detect signs of imminent attack in Gareth’s unmarkable essay. I can see its author over by the bar, happy, a glass in each hand. A college rowing eight have already necked the free stuff and are getting the beers in. I wouldn’t let students into a place like this. The floor tiles are two hundred years old. Someone carved their name into the oak panelling way back in the seventeenth century. The gold-plated lettering over the fireplace says FLOREAT DOMUS.
Let this house flourish. I think the Executive’s offshore investments will have seen to that.
‘ATTENTION, VERMIN!’ squeaks a voice through the PA. A nervous compère pulls a face for the cameraman, who is filming it all for a live webcast. A girl with silver pigtails jumps up and down as her pills kick in. I can smell kebabs. Someone prods me in the back. I turn. Just faces inclined to the light. The spotlight swerves around in time to catch the compère vanishing stage left. There’s a commotion behind the curtain. The compère backs out again onto the stage, followed by two female betas wheeling a huge high-backed armchair. Fixed in oils on the walls, long-dead churchmen avoid each other’s stares.
‘This house wants to know if there is any justification for using non-human species to improve the human condition.’ There are cheers and jeers. ‘So, to tell us why animals are still suffering in the name of science, I give you ... our first speaker!’
The noise drops a notch or two. A few people clap. Gareth climbs up onto the stage and looks at the compère, who is slouched on a sofa at the side holding a control box in one hand. Gareth pulls an expression of mock shock, jerking his head back and unscrolling his eyebrows for the audience, then takes his seat on the throne. The compère’s finger hovers over the punishment button. Gareth pulls a piece of paper from his trouser pocket, reads something and folds it away.
‘Gareth Buckle,’ he says, shrinking from the brashness of the microphone. ‘Opposing the motion. But that’s just a name, isn’t it? A label for the humanoid. Who am I really?’
There’s laughter. Someone quips that he should get his crib-sheet out again.
‘No, I mean: why am I who I am? What makes me the person I am rather than someone else?’
We hear an opinion about a genetic accident. Gareth gazes blankly out at the crowd, his face a wet moon in a puddle.
‘All right then, what makes you you? When you wake up in the morning, how can you be sure you are the same person who went to sleep last night? How do any of you know that you are the same people you were thirty-seven minutes ago, when you walked into this building? The answer is: because you possess an amazingly complex neural system which can integrate facts about your past history, your emotional memories, and the quality of how every single moment of your life looked and felt.’
Familiar themes, then. Whatever interests him about the Lorenzo Circuit, it’s still doing so. But this is the public version. The version in my satchel is meant for me alone.
‘But how are we going to find out more about these incredibly important brain systems? We can’t study them in human beings. The techniques are too invasive. Computer simulations can only give us a small part of the picture. We need animal research. We need researchers, I mean, who can do carefully controlled, completely humane studies of all the different branches of these pathways, and put them together into a complete map of the system.’
That’s enough detail, I want to say. I’m pleased he’s got the hang of this so quickly, but I don’t want to be hearing a précis of my own research in front of a gathering of animal rights campaigners. I’m not ashamed of what I do, but I am careful. Thankfully, there’s no mention of my ninety-nine mice or their tests of spatial memory. Gareth is just gearing up for a standard defence of regulated animal experimentation. I could have written it myself. The benefits of mapping the Lorenzo Circuit are going to be huge, but we can’t map the circuit without getting close enough to the brain to see how it operates. And that’s where my mice come in.
‘Take Alzheimer’s Disease.’ The crowd are agitated, but Gareth’s voice struggles through. ‘The average life expectancy in this part of the Federation is now into the nineties. Intelligent toilet-paper and networked early-diagnosis expert systems mean we can catch most cancers early enough now. These ninety-year-olds are healthy old birds. But their brains are degenerating as fast as before. We’ve got a dementia situation which is impairing the bingo-playing efficiency of half the population of UK-D. Social insurance spending is running at over thirty percent of GDP. This work will benefit the millions who suffer with the enforced zombie-hood of this crippling disease. We will be able to find out why the build-up of a certain protein, at specific points in the circuit, leads to Alzheimer’s. We are all, in this room, lucky enough to know who we are. With this research, we will be able to help some people who aren’t so lucky.’
‘And how many monkeys have got to be tortured before that happens?’ some well-spoken Conscience sympathiser whines.
‘Not monkeys!’ Gareth shouts. ‘At least, the good guys aren’t doing that...’
There’s uproar in the Priors’ Hall. The compère leaps up from his sofa and does his pushing-down-on-the-volume thing. Half of the audience are screaming about what the other half are shouting. Gareth looks as though he wants to continue, but the compère has already hit the punishment button, sending yellow holographic flame spouting out of the microphone. I wonder what Effi would say if she was here. If she understood enough about what was happening to her, I would ask her. Are my ninety-nine mice worth your sanity? I suspect she would say no. She could never dream of doing harm to anything, even humane, government-licensed harm. In her heart, there is no weighing of moral imperatives. She would take all the pain for herself, before she would even think of sharing it around.
At the interval Gareth is back on the champagne. I think about going over, but decide against it. He’s got his mates with him, some of whom seem to be the same beer-monsters who were heckling him a minute ago. I swear I’m the only person here old enough to be a tutor. I hang around in the passageway for a bit, watching them muscle past with slopping plastic glasses, faces glistening with the unanswerable joke of being young. There’s still no sign of James. Maybe he’s not coming. Maybe, I don’t know, that actually bothers me. The emotion catches me out, as though it only became possible to understand it when I felt it, deeply and heart-lurchingly, in that throb of anxiety inside. He’s sensed something about me, that’s obvious. In my office, this afternoon, he looked right through me. And I want him to do it again, if only so I can tell him that he’s wrong: he doesn’t know the truth about me, he can’t just hassle me into believing so. That’s why I’ll be disappointed if he doesn’t turn up. I dread a confrontation about his allegiances, but it’s more than that. He seems to think he can talk me out of this doubt I feel about myself. Through sheer bullying enthusiasm, he thinks he can make me share his certainty.
The compère takes the mike again. There’s a table covered with leaflets at the back of the hall: Conscience propaganda, spun from shoddy paper and worse information. Lycee scientists conduct brain research on transgenic capuchin monkeys ... You can’t genetically modify capuchins, even if there was any point in doing so. Researchers at the Institute for Research into Neuronal Death and Regeneration, at the Lycee’s high-tech Forest Campus, today denied that ... It’s wrong, but the sight of my own institute’s name is still too close for comfort. I remember the day I spent trying to clean a tin of pink paint off my car at Warwick, and have the dread sense of something
starting up again. And worse: that I might know the people who are doing it.
I’ve just binned the last of the leaflets when James gets to his feet.
‘We all know what causes Alzheimer’s. It’s the build-up of a particular protein, known as beta-amyloid, at certain key locations in the parts of the brain that control memory. The biotech company, Sansom, is trying to find a way of reversing the damage caused by these amyloid plaques. To do that, it needs a map of those memory systems — the same map that researchers here at the Lycee are working on. Now, I’m not going to tell you about all the ways in which Sansom are trying to get their hands on the Lycee’s mapping data. Instead, I want to tell you about Sansom’s own research, conducted at their European headquarters, not five miles from here.’
Boos rise from the body of the hall. James raises his hand meekly and flashes his shatterproof smile. He hasn’t shaved. He’s wearing grey joggers and a green rower’s hoodie. His right-hand fingers palp the bulb of an old motor-car horn bracketed to the arm of the throne. He doesn’t need to hoot: the waves of sound part for him.
‘Sansom was founded in 1904 as a manufacturer of hair oil. Since then it has grown into one of the top three biotechnology companies, with research centres in France, Germany, Australia, Taiwan, as well as the US. As a private company, Sansom’s business is to conduct research and exploit the fruits of that research commercially. The Lycee, in contrast, is a national seat of learning, its endowment supplemented by funds from the regional assembly and the Northern Federation. It therefore has a responsibility to make the outcomes of its research public, according to the most ancient traditions of academia.’
A Box of Birds Page 4
