Intrusion

19. Workaround

Geena sat on her stool in the corner of the lab and gazed listlessly out of the window at the bright blue June sky and the fluffy white clouds above the skyline of Hayes. She felt depressed, and there seemed no rational reason for it. The flash-backs had stopped, and she now had a nightmare only about once a week. She no longer flinched visibly at the sight of a police vehicle or uniform, and the sound of a siren no longer made her jump, though it made the hairs on her back and the nape of her neck stand up as if cold water had been poured down her spine. On the whole, she was quite glad that she hadn’t opted for trauma counselling. According to her cursory online research on clinical outcomes, she was recovering better by herself than she would have done if she’d sought professional help.

Her notes were all written up and her field observations were almost complete. She really had more than enough data now to work with, and she already had reams of outline written on the theoretical questions she had posed to herself when she’d set out on the thesis. All that remained was to integrate them, to match her observations with (or pit them against) the various contending-but-compatible theoretical frameworks – she could already see, to take an obvious example, that the all-male composition of this particular dry-lab team raised interesting questions about the extent to which the self-understanding emerging from their practices was gendered. The developing crash-and-burn, trial-and-error style of work was, you could say playfully, penetrated by masculinities, undoubtedly macho. And the precise location of value production within the intellectual process would be fascinating to pinpoint. A critical-ecological and non-anthropocentric approach to the animal and plant products (aha!) that provided what was so revealingly called the raw material for genetic manipulation, even in the case of pure synthetic biology, promised to yield some fruitful (so to speak) lines of investigation.

Lots to be getting on with.

And yet, and yet… she couldn’t, now, revisit the texts or her own preliminary theoretical notes and queries without seeing, like barbed wire woven through a flowery, fecund trellis, the actual functioning of those theories and texts, as explained to her by the estimable Dr Estraguel, as well as the point that had been brought sharply to her attention by the ministrations of the police. She had lost the taste for theory; in fact, thinking about it nauseated her, quite literally: it gave her actual physical nausea. Rereading the notes she’d written when the project had been all shiny and new and exciting, on the other hand, merely made her want to cry.

The cause that she’d taken up in dogged retaliation for her enhanced interrogation and in expiation of her earlier unwitting and recent coerced complicity in the whole system of ideological and physical repressive apparatuses – her support for Hope Morrison – that too had lost its savour. It had run into the sand last week, when Hugh Morrison had dismissed her suggestion for how to get his wife off the hook. She’d tried calling him, but his phone had given her an even more unceremonious brush-off. She was thinking of somehow getting around that, of appealing to Hope directly, over her husband’s head or if necessary behind his back, just in case he was standing in the way of or distorting the truth about what Hope might herself seize on as the exact solution she was looking for, her get-out-of-jail free card, and would jump for joy and weep with gratitude on Geena’s shoulder for its delivering.

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 speculative.’

‘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.