Ghost Species

by James Bradley

  ‘I can see that.’

  ‘And you, Kate?’

  She nods. ‘It’s extremely impressive.’

  Davis smiles. ‘Once you’re dry, perhaps we could talk about who you might want on your team?’

  They reconvene in a meeting room they have not seen before, its space bounded on two sides by floor-to-ceiling windows. Outside, the rain is still sheeting down and a grey pall of cloud fills the valley.

  Davis is waiting by one of the windows when they arrive. He has changed as well, in his case substituting one hoodie for another, although his hair looks unbrushed, its back springing up in tight curls.

  He indicates they should take a seat but does not do so himself. Once they are settled, he turns.

  ‘The first thing I want you to understand is that if you agree to our offer you’ll be part of the Foundation, and have full access to the Foundation’s resources. That means that although the specifics of your project won’t be public, even within the organisation, you’ll be able to call on the expertise of any of your colleagues.’

  ‘I assume that works both ways,’ Kate says. ‘That they’ll be able to ask us for advice as well?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And our research. What happens to it?’

  ‘You mean commercially? Commercially it belongs to the Foundation.’

  ‘And in terms of publication?’

  Davis blinks. ‘Insofar as you don’t breach the broader requirements of non-disclosure you’re free to publish.’

  ‘In practice though, most of it would remain secret?’

  Davis nods. ‘Obviously.’

  ‘And what about staff?’ asks Jay. ‘You talked about us choosing our team?’

  Davis steps forward and touches the table. Its surface lights up in front of each of them, displaying the faces of possible candidates. ‘That’s right. We’ve already put together a shortlist of individuals we think will meet your requirements, but if there are specific people you want to bring, or candidates you think we’ve missed, just let us know.’

  Afterwards, as they stand to leave, Davis speaks her name, asks if she might stay for a moment. She glances at Jay, who shrugs and then walks out, closing the door behind him.

  Davis turns and looks out the window. This time she knows what he is about to say has been rehearsed.

  ‘You know we chose you two because we think you’re the best, don’t you?’ he asks at last.

  There is a pause Kate knows he expects her to fill. Finally she complies. ‘But?’

  Davis glances around. ‘I don’t want you to think I don’t understand why this might be difficult for you.’

  Kate stares back at him. All the air seems to have drained out of the room.

  ‘I know you don’t trust me, but I want you to know I’ll understand if you say no.’

  She places a hand on the table to steady herself. She isn’t sure whether she is angrier that Davis had been investigating her life or that he is suggesting she might make her decision for psychological reasons.

  ‘My objections to the project are ethical, not personal.’

  ‘I undertand that. And I respect it.’

  ‘Do you?’

  Davis smiles. ‘Of course.’

  As she walks back to the room her legs are shaking so much she is afraid she might fall. Jay is seated by the window, flicking through his phone. Seeing her expression, he gets to his feet, moves towards her.

  ‘What is it?’ he asks, reaching for her. ‘What’s wrong?’

  Kate pushes past him and sits heavily on the bed. Lifting a hand, she stares at it. It is trembling.

  Jay sits next to her. ‘Kate? What happened? What did Davis say?’

  She shakes her head. ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘You know we don’t have to do this, don’t you?’

  She nods. ‘The child. Will they have rights? We need some kind of guarantee they will be protected by the law, that they’ll have the same rights of self-determination as a normal child.’

  ‘We can make sure we have that.’

  ‘And when the time comes what will we tell them about themselves?’

  ‘The truth. Or whatever version of it the people responsible for their psychological welfare think best.’

  ‘That’s not enough. They deserve to know the truth. We owe them that much.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And how will they be brought up? Who will care for them?’

  ‘Davis is talking about some kind of team. Psychologists, paediatricians, nurses.’

  Kate glances at him. ‘So, not us, then?’

  Jay shakes his head in surprise. ‘No. Not us.’

  Kate closes her hands, steadying them.

  ‘Okay then,’ she says. ‘I’ll do it.’

  They were at dinner the first time Jay suggested having a baby. Kate laughed.

  ‘I don’t think we’re ready for that,’ she said.

  Jay fell silent, staring at her across the table.

  She hesitated, realising she had missed something in his tone. ‘You’re serious?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said.

  They had discussed children when it first became clear their relationship was going to endure. Kate had said she wasn’t sure, that after her own childhood it didn’t seem right. Jay waited for her to reply.

  ‘Please, Kate,’ he said when she didn’t. ‘If you don’t talk to me, I can’t help.’

  But she only shook her head, refusing to look up.

  Finally he reached across to her, touched her cheek. ‘I know how you feel about this. But it wouldn’t be like it was for you. We’d be us.’

  Still off-balance, she turned his hand over. His palm, smooth, soft, so different from her scrubbed skin.

  ‘Is this the right time?’

  ‘Is there ever a right time?’

  She didn’t reply, and a moment later their meal arrived, interrupting them. But afterwards, as they walked home, she had wondered about her resistance to the idea. Was it just about her past? Her mother’s failures? Or was it something deeper? She was almost thirty-five, the women around them were having children, yet she couldn’t imagine herself as a mother.

  Jay didn’t return to the subject that night, or the next, though she knew he had not let the idea go. Despite his irritation with his parents’ frequent observations about he and Kate’s continued childlessness, she had seen the delight he took in the company of his nieces and nephews, and knew how much that expansion of the world mattered to him. Occasionally when she was with his siblings and their families she understood it as well, but more often she felt awkward, as if she were an intruder.

  And then there was the sense things were unravelling all around them.

  A week later, she turned to him in the bathroom as they were getting ready to sleep. ‘Look at the world,’ she whispered. ‘How could we bring a child into this?’

  ‘We can’t be afraid like that. By making a child we say we believe in the future, that things can get better.’

  ‘And if they don’t?’

  ‘They will. They have to.’

  She shook her head. He pulled her towards him. ‘And anyway, I don’t care about the world, only you, us.’

  In that moment his tenderness seemed incomprehensible to her. She was so angry, so unreachable.

  ‘Why do you love me?’ she asked.

  ‘You know why,’ he said, stroking her hair from her face.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t,’ and turned her face into his neck.

  Perhaps that is where it would have ended. Yet over the weeks that followed Kate found herself returning to the question. She had never thought of herself as somebody who was good with children – in fact, they usually made her feel uncomfortable – but now she found herself watching them on trains and in parks and at social events. Gradually she realised it wasn’t the children themselves that frightened her, it was something deeper, less easy to articulate. Not just the loss of autonomy over her body, her life, bu
t of being vulnerable in that way. Because were it to happen, she would have to let Jay closer, show him things she did not know how to express.

  The night she told him she would do it they were in bed together. It was dark, and he went still beside her. Finally he touched her hand.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  She hesitated. ‘I’m sure.’

  The Foundation arranges their relocation with remarkable smoothness. Offered their choice of accommodation, they select a house in an area of bushland just under half an hour’s drive from the facility. It is set back from the road with views over a valley, the only sign there are other houses nearby the ribbons of smoke that rise from their chimneys on winter afternoons or the occasional roar of an engine in the distance.

  ‘I feel like the Unabomber,’ Jay jokes on their first evening there.

  Kate laughs, aware it is the first time in his life he has lived more than a few minutes from a supermarket. ‘Don’t worry. I don’t think we’ll be here all that much.’

  Nor are they. For the past few weeks they have been assembling a wish list for their team. Because of the nature of the Foundation’s work, much of the support they need can be sourced internally, especially when it comes to the more specialised computing. But Jay has ideas for several staff from outside. Some of them are people Kate knows, or at least knows of – Torill from the University of Copenhagen, Dulani from Cambridge; but there are others she only knows by reputation, most prominent among them, Mylin, whom Jay knows from his post-doc days and who has had remarkable success creating stem cells from DNA recovered from frozen cells.

  Although all are required to sign non-disclosure agreements, not everybody is made aware of the true focus of the project. How much each does understand depends less on their level of seniority than on their need to know. The scope of the project makes this easier than one might expect: at Davis’s direction they are to work on several different animals at once, allowing the more sensitive parts of the project to be kept secret.

  Still, only one of the people they speak to refuses to be involved. Of the others it is Mylin who is the least fazed. ‘We all know the science is there,’ she says. ‘What we need to do is let go of the outdated thinking that’s holding us back.’

  ‘The technical challenges are immense,’ Jay says to Davis on the day they begin. ‘We might have a sequenced genome but, as you no doubt understand from your work on the thylacines, that’s very different to having the building blocks of a human being. We need to re-create an individual genome, invent a person. And that is only the first step. Once we’ve got that we need to create a fertile egg and an embryo, successfully implant it and bring it to term.’

  As Jay speaks Kate finds herself shifting uncomfortably in her seat. It still astonishes her, that it is possible to exhume the history of life from the deep past, that with a sequence of chemicals it is possible to create a living creature – a living person – in a lab. Yet when she steps back from the scientific questions her larger unease remains. Should they be doing this? Should she? Folding her arms she forces herself to concentrate on Jay’s words, the structure of the task ahead of them.

  They begin with the genomes sequenced in the early years of the century, augmenting them with samples drawn from various sites around the world. As they proceed Kate is surprised over and over again by the Foundation’s reach and the technical wizardry of the people it employs, their ability to extract usable material from samples that are, in most cases, forty or fifty thousand years old. In the end a significant amount of material is extracted from a tooth recovered from a cave exposed by a retreating glacier in the French Alps. The remains are skeletal, yet the unusually cold conditions mean enough DNA has been preserved to reconstruct many sections of the genome that had eluded them, and once passed through a battery of scans provides them with vital information about the subject’s physiology. Although no one refers to her that way, all of them know that this woman, this member of a separate species dead for five hundred centuries, is as close to being the mother of the child they are making as anyone could be.

  The work is consuming, and because of the facility’s relative isolation they take to spending most of their waking hours in the lab, often not returning home until late in the evening. Occasionally on the weekends she and Jay do the ninety-minute drive into the capital, but as the months race by they make the trip less and less often, and instead spend their weekends alone or at the facility.

  At first Kate finds pleasure in the work, and, rather to her surprise, in working so closely with Jay. Although there are still days when she feels the darkness rising around her like a tide, more often she feels focused, clear, like her old self. She knows that if she looks she will find the cracks, that she cannot go back, but for the most part she moves ahead of it.

  Perhaps Jay notices as well; certainly he is less wary of leaving her alone. Yet as the months pass the workload begins to take its toll. By the time they arrive home most nights it is dark, the house cold and silent, and while Kate reads or watches TV on her laptop Jay works, often not coming to bed until after she is asleep. At first it seems not to matter, but it slowly becomes clear to Kate that they are drifting apart, and, though she does not like to admit it even to herself, that she is no longer upset about that.

  Through it all, the work continues. With the material gathered it falls to Kate to oversee the final reconstruction of the genes, a task she approaches using the procedures for synthesising DNA she has developed over the past decade in combination with the processing power offered by the Foundation and Gather. And once they have a complete set of chromosomes, they begin to create eggs and, eventually, embryos.

  The final stage in the process is to use a surrogate. The woman selected for that role arrives towards the end of the second year. Kate encounters her as she steps out onto the pathway leading to the labs, startled to find a young woman she doesn’t know standing, looking out over the valley.

  ‘Can I help you?’ Kate asks, approaching her. The young woman – girl, Kate thinks, correcting herself – turns to face her. She wears her long blonde hair straight, a blunt fringe above her eyes like one of the Manson girls, a wide-boned face with the unassailable beauty of the privileged, yet there is something myopic about the way she stares at Kate, as if she hardly sees her.

  ‘What are you doing here? Did somebody let you in?’ she asks.

  The woman gazes back coolly. ‘I’m Marija. I’m the surrogate.’

  Kate stares at her. ‘Really. And you’re here to see who?’

  ‘Jay. He told me to get some air.’

  Jay is in his office. He swivels his chair towards her as she closes the door.

  ‘What the fuck?’ she demands.

  He looks puzzled. ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve just met our surrogate.’

  He hesitates, composing himself. ‘Marija? Yes. She arrived this morning.’

  ‘And when were you planning to tell me about her?’

  ‘I assumed you knew. Davis found her.’

  Kate stands, staring at him. When they first joined the Foundation they agreed Jay would act as project leader, both because his networks were better and because he was more practised at negotiating organisations. They both knew this was unlikely to be without its costs, but she has managed to ignore the way his increasing involvement in the Foundation’s internal politics has altered him. But until now it had not occurred to her that he might be deliberately withholding information from her. Cold fury boils up as she remembers his friendliness over breakfast a few hours earlier, though she is unsure whether she is angrier about the breach of trust or the realisation he thinks she needs to be managed in this way.

  She is unsurprised it is the issue of surrogate selection that has brought them here, because they have argued about the question before. Right from the outset she has been uncomfortable about Davis’s demand they allow the Foundation to facilitate the choice of surrogate, all too aware of the ethical slipperiness of it all.
/>   ‘How much does she know?’

  Jay glances out the window, as if unwilling to meet her eye. ‘Not much. Davis wants the focus of the research to remain private.’

  ‘She doesn’t know the baby she’ll be carrying isn’t human?’

  Jay looks uneasy. ‘It won’t make any difference to her.’

  ‘That we know of.’

  ‘She’s signed the agreements.’

  ‘The agreements?’

  ‘Jesus, Kate, what is it you want from me?’

  Kate stares at him without speaking. Then she shakes her head and stalks out the door.

  Meanwhile Davis appears and disappears, seemingly at random. Some mornings they arrive to find him already there, seated in the lab, their findings open on his tablet. Often when that happens he will be eager to talk, to review their progress, his grasp of the fine detail alarmingly precise.

  ‘The insertions look encouraging, but have you considered shifting the parameters of the search?’

  The first time it happens Jay is furious, incensed at the invasion of his privacy.

  ‘He can’t just sweep in here, open up private files,’ he rages.

  ‘They’re the Foundation’s systems,’ Kate reminds him. ‘He probably has back doors into everything anyway.’

  Jay considers this. ‘That makes it worse. How are we to know who else he’s sharing our data with? Who else has access to it?’ Kate knows Jay has become convinced they are not the only team Davis has working on this, that there are others, elsewhere. She knows it angers him, although whether that is because he is being kept out of the loop or because he is worried about others using their results without their knowledge she isn’t sure.

  Whenever Davis visits Kate is careful to keep her distance. Davis seems a different kind of being, untethered by ordinary human concerns. Despite his occasional charm, his careful observance of the mores of contemporary sensitivity, there is something oddly absent about him. Yet simultaneously she is in no doubt about his ruthlessness, his preparedness to do whatever he needs to in order to achieve his goals. Is this something about his psychological makeup, or simply a function of his wealth, the way it insulates him from normal human concerns? In the weeks after they joined the project she made a point of reading up on him, working her way through the biography published two years earlier, the profiles in Wired and The New York Times and Bloomberg, the more critical pieces ferreted away in less frequented parts of the web. Yet despite the glimpses of his early life – his parents are both psychiatrists, perhaps explaining Davis’s studied blankness – the facts were oddly unrevealing, the man emerging as little more than the sum of his mantras about transformative change and the need to let go of the past. One detail had stuck with her, though, an observation made by the journalist Davis had commissioned to write the story of his life and then fired, resulting in the most famous piece about him, a defiantly unhagiographical treatise running to twenty thousand words published in the London Review of Books that told the story of the three months its author spent following Davis around. The version of Davis that emerged in it was not so much as the evil genius many make him out to be but something rather stranger; a man whose understanding of the world was circumscribed by the limitations of his experience, his assumptions about his own intelligence, his experience of success. Repeating Davis’s mantra about refusing the constraints of conventional thinking – ‘the best solutions are often the most frightening’ – the author asked whether it was really just the distillation of the adolescent fantasy the entire world is simply a computational problem, capable of being solved by an algorithm or an app, a way of avoiding the unfortunate fact the world is nothing of the sort, that its problems are often messy, intractable, or in the parlance of Davis and his cohorts, uncalculatable.