Ghost Species
Page 5
At other times Davis just appears, turning up in one of the kitchens or dining areas. On these occasions he gives the impression he has been there all along, that his sudden appearance is entirely unremarkable, sometimes going so far as to offer to make them coffee, or push some meal he has been preparing in front of them.
One night, when they are reasonably confident he is elsewhere – just as she is never entirely convinced Madison and the others aren’t robots, Kate is never quite certain Davis doesn’t have a secret living space hidden somewhere in the complex or devices monitoring their private conversations – Jay mentions their benefactor has raised the question of connections between autism and Neanderthal genes.
‘When was that?’ she asks, deliberately casual.
‘He messaged me the other day.’
‘I didn’t know you two messaged each other.’
Jay’s expression remains studiedly neutral. ‘We don’t, or not often.’
‘Why do you think he wants to know?’
Jay laughs, and for a moment Kate remembers her affection for him. ‘You don’t think Davis might have a personal interest in autism?’ he asks.
‘Davis isn’t on the spectrum,’ she says, taking a sip of her wine. ‘He’s a sociopath.’
Jay smiles, amused.
‘I’m serious,’ she says.
He laughs again, more dismissively this time. ‘Jesus, Kate. Give the guy a break.’
‘Who? Our billionaire puppet-master boss? Doctor fucking Evil in a hoodie? Listen to yourself, Jay.’
He purses his lips. Kate is reminded of how much he hates conflict, and more particularly her anger. For the most part she can control it, but tonight she finds she doesn’t care.
‘Is this about him or you?’
‘Fuck you, Jay. It’s about us, this project, all of it. We’re making a human being, not because they’re wanted but because some rich white guy likes the idea of playing God. Doesn’t that bother you?’
Jay stands up. ‘Forgive me if I’m misremembering, but as I recall it was your idea we stay.’
‘And if I’d said no? Would you have walked away with me?’
‘You’d need to have told me what you thought or felt for that to happen.’
Kate stares at him.
‘I’m going to bed,’ he says. ‘You do what you want. You always do anyway.’
The lights are off when she follows him into the bedroom, but she knows Jay is not sleeping. She undresses, lies down next to him. For a long time neither of them speak, the presence of the other in the darkness palpable. Finally Kate extends a hand, touches his back, and Jay turns towards her. She presses her face to his, kisses him; he responds, and for a time their bodies move together, wordless, urgent, each of them straining towards a closeness they have lost.
Afterwards Jay rolls onto his back, his breath slowing as he slides into sleep almost immediately. Kate lies staring at his profile in the darkness. Not for the first time she finds herself struck by how little she really knows about him, how little he really knows about her. Are all relationships founded on this unacknowledged incomprehension? Is it even possible to understand another human being? So much of the time we do not even understand ourselves. And what happens if we do come to understand those we love? Can we still love them? Or is something lost, some possibility?
Finally, unable to sleep, she gets up and, dressing, goes out into the darkness and drives towards the facility.
It is past midnight by the time she gets there, and the offices and corridors are empty. When she was younger she loved to visit the university labs at night. Something about the institutional nature of them, the silence and liminality of them appealed to her. When her friends left to drink or watch Netflix she had often stayed behind, simply to be there.
These labs are different: newer, better equipped, infinitely cleaner, yet as she opens her screen in the half-lit space she feels the same sense of calm the labs she had worked in as a student had given her.
After a few minutes she becomes aware of a presence behind her, and turning, finds Davis standing there.
‘Hello, Kate,’ he says, smiling.
Kate regards him warily, unsure how long he has been there.
‘Davis.’
He walks towards her and seats himself on the bench opposite her.
‘Am I interrupting?’
She shakes her head. ‘I didn’t realise you were here.’
‘I arrived earlier this evening.’
‘Are you staying on-site?’
He shrugs. ‘I don’t sleep much.’ There is a moment’s silence, in which he looks at her, as if expecting her to ask him something else. ‘I hear you’re working on the woolly rhinoceros as well as the main project.’
Kate closes her screen and places it face-down on the bench. Although the woolly rhinoceros de-extinction program is taking the less challenging path of re-engineering the DNA of modern rhinoceroses, the project has been a source of ongoing problems for months. ‘There were a few kinks that needed ironing out. Jay and I agreed that would happen quicker if I got involved.’
‘Excellent.’ Davis pauses for a moment. ‘And the main project?’
She hesitates. ‘You know where we’re at.’
He waits for her to elaborate. When she does not he leans back against the bench. ‘You’re still not comfortable with what we’re doing here, are you?’
‘No.’
‘But Jay is?’
‘I don’t think it’s that simple.’
Davis looks at her, and for a moment she has the unpleasant feeling he has rehearsed what he says next.
‘When I was still at school, some friends and I found a back door into the broadcast systems of Fox News. It wasn’t a big thing, just a piece of code they hadn’t closed off properly. At first we were content just to know it was there, to know that we could slip inside their systems, move around at will. But one day I had an idea: What if we used it? We were really just kids, chatting on an encrypted server, but I remember the way that suggestion set us alight, the way it brought us to life. And eventually we decided we would use it to make a statement. We made a sort of set in my friend Ravi’s basement, and set it up so there was nothing that would identify the space. And then, one evening, we slipped in that back door and jammed their signal.’
Kate looks at him. ‘You’re talking about the broadcast with the guys in masks? The ones explaining what would happen if global warming wasn’t slowed? That was you?’
Davis nods. ‘All twenty minutes of it.’
‘I thought they caught somebody for that.’
Davis shakes his head. ‘They questioned some kids who had nothing to do with it. And a lot of activists. But they never got near us.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’
Davis smiles. ‘I wanted you to see the way knowledge can disrupt the system. The way even the smallest door can open onto something larger.’
Kate stares at him for a moment, aware something is being asked of her but unsure what it is, except that she does not wish to give it.
‘This is where I’m supposed to say, “Or we should leave the door unopened?” I suppose?’
Davis’s smile does not falter. ‘Except I know you’re too smart for that.’
They called it a miscarriage but it wasn’t that, or not quite. There was no unexpected bleeding at two months. She had been almost six months’ pregnant when she was hit with cramps one afternoon at work.
She does not talk about it often, if at all, but when she does, there is one detail she cannot bring herself to speak about. Because when she felt the cramps she was at the lab, in the middle of a cycle, and instead of calling Jay she kept working.
It hadn’t been a long time, just long enough to finish the cycle, but when she stood up at the end she knew immediately something was seriously wrong.
On the way out of the building she called Jay. He was in a meeting on the other side of town, but he called back almost at once. His voice trem
bled as he pressed her for details, and she knew at once she couldn’t tell him.
In the taxi she felt something wet between her legs, and looking down had seen blood. In the mirror the driver’s eyes were on the spreading stain, his face half-sympathetic, half-frightened. As their eyes met she wondered if he was working illegally, what it might mean for him if something happened to her while she was in his cab.
‘I’ll pay for it,’ she said, willing her voice not to shake. ‘Just get me to the hospital.’
In the hospital they called her obstetrician and left her on a gurney to wait. Every few seconds she would reach down, touch her belly. In the first weeks of her pregnancy the idea she was carrying a baby had seemed if not quite abstract – after all, how abstract could it be if she was carrying it around inside her? – then removed from her, as if she were a passenger on a journey she had not quite committed to. But over the months since then she had felt herself changing, the baby, its presence within her so wondrous that the idea she might lose it, that its matter might be sundered from hers was unbearable, unimaginable.
Jay was still on his way when the nurses came for her, meaning she was alone as they took her into the delivery room and guided the baby from her.
She knew it would be tiny, not yet ready to be born, but in fact it was its perfection that shocked her. A girl, not much larger than a kitten, yet fully formed and so beautiful it was difficult to believe she wasn’t alive.
They wanted to keep Kate in hospital for two days, but she refused. Instead she demanded Jay call a taxi, and, refusing his help, walked out into the street to wait for it. Back at home she crawled onto the bed, turned her face to the wall, and wept.
She knew her decision to wait didn’t really matter, that the outcome would not have been any different if she had gone to the hospital immediately, but still, the uncertainty gnawed at her. What if she had left sooner? Might the baby have lived?
At Jay’s urging she asked for a week of leave, but once the week was up she could not go back. Instead she remained at home in their apartment. At first she just slept, weighed down by an exhaustion that seemed to have no beginning, no end. But as the weeks passed she took to reading, chasing through the internet in search of articles about the ruination of the world. She realised that while she had been sequestered away in her discipline, she had somehow let the scale of the situation elude her, but now, as she read and read, she felt the enormity of the tragedy that surrounded them begin to swallow her. Every day there was a new study, a new catastrophe, new evidence of systemic collapse. Every day she felt less able to control her sense of impending disaster.
Part of her understood she was not in her right mind, that this was depression, but knowing didn’t help: it was as if she were outside herself, observing something over which she no longer had any power.
Jay did his best. But it was not until he agreed to give a keynote in Boston, a commitment that would require him to be away for more than a fortnight, that it became clear how bad things had become.
‘I’m frightened to leave you,’ he confessed a week before he left.
‘What do you mean?’
He gestured at her laptop on the table. ‘All this. I know you’re hurting, but you have to try.’
She stared at him. ‘I’m fine,’ she said.
‘You’re not. And you haven’t been for a while. We can’t go on like this.’
Kate caught herself before she suggested they didn’t need to. ‘Okay,’ she said.
Jay drove her to the doctor, where they sat in the waiting room in silence. In one corner stood a model house, large enough for a child to enter, its interior piled with plastic blocks and toys. After they had been there a few minutes a woman entered with a girl of three or so; obviously familiar with the waiting room, the girl let go of her mother’s hand and, hurrying over to the house, entered it and began to remove the blocks and pile them on the chair beside it.
Kate and Jay watched, unspeaking. The girl was small and fair, her blonde curls pinched back from her face by a coloured band in a way that emphasised the bones in her forehead. At one point the mother glanced up from her phone, and catching Kate’s eye, smiled at her; Kate looked away, tears filling her eyes.
In the surgery Jay sat in silence as Kate explained she was feeling unwell, that she was worried she was depressed. Only a few months earlier she had sat here smiling as this same doctor offered advice about stretch marks and dispensed folk wisdom about using the shape of the bump to predict whether the baby was male or female. But even as she spoke Kate had to struggle to keep talking, her words, language itself, blunt and ill-made. The truth was she felt exposed, raw, as if everything that protected her from the world had been scoured away, leaving nothing but the past she had tried so hard to leave behind.
The doctor prescribed a course of anti-depressants, and gave her the number of a psychologist. As Jay ushered her out the door Kate caught the look that passed between him and the doctor, grateful on his part, solicitous on hers. Back in the car she was so tired she could hardly speak.
She saw the psychologist once but did not go back. Instead she let herself fall into the anti-depressants. After a time she realised she was no longer depressed, but she was not better, or not better in the way she knew Jay wanted her to be. He suggested more and more often she think about transitioning back to work, but she did not, could not: the thought of it seemed trivial, absurd. Finally she told him she wasn’t going back.
‘Then what will you do?’ he asked.
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
Davis isn’t there on the morning they attempt the nuclear transfer; instead, he is at a press conference at the Foundation’s facility in Siberia. Neither Kate nor Jay nor any of their team have heard anything about the event, or even the project, so they are surprised when they emerge from the lab to find an alert on their phones asking them to join the feed.
When they connect, Davis is surrounded by a collection of people whose faces Kate recognises, though it takes a moment or two to realise they are famous: two actors, a pop star she remembers from a scandal a few years before, a reality TV star who was briefly involved with Sea Shepherd.
After a brief introduction Davis steps to the microphone, blinking in the light. He looks uncomfortable, like an animal caught in the spotlight, but then he gathers himself, and Kate sees the weirdly oblivious self-belief she knows so well reassert itself.
‘Many of you will know that two years ago I negotiated an agreement with the Russian government for the control of almost two million hectares of state land in areas characterised by continuous and semi-continuous permafrost and forest. This arrangement was completed on the understanding the Hucken Foundation would study the effects of warming on Arctic and Subarctic ecosystems, and explore projects that might slow the changes that have already begun to transform these areas.’
On a huge screen behind Davis images dance by, a dizzying montage of accelerated footage of melting ice and calving glaciers, of a lake of blue water where ice should be, of rivers tumbling down through tussocked grass, of land subsiding, collapsing into thermokarst valleys, of animals and plants emerging from the frozen ground.
‘I’m pleased to announce today that we’ve met a series of milestones in that process, and also that the Foundation has plans to extend our brief by setting up a program to restore a number of extinct species to the park, beginning with the auroch.’
There is a murmur from the assembled crowd, scattered applause. Davis waits awkwardly for it to finish. Kate glances at Jay, who is watching with his arms folded.
‘The Nazis wanted to breed aurochs,’ Jay says. ‘They spent years working on a program to re-create them through elective bloodlines.’
‘You didn’t know, then?’
Jay shakes his head. On the screen Davis is talking again.
‘This is just the first part of a larger scheme to rebuild the ecology of this area. We have plans in place to de-extinct other species—’
‘What now?’ she asks.
He shrugs. ‘We wait to see whether the embryos take,’ he says.
With each failure the mood in the project team becomes increasingly tense. Jay grows distant, irritable.