by Ken MacLeod
‘Hi, Joe,’ Geena said, hoping to get him out of it.
His right shoulder twitched. Geena shrugged, swivelled her seat and looked again at the trawl. Then she slowly spun the seat back around, still with her glasses on, sipped coffee and watched the first interactions of the day.
The SynBioTech Structural Product Research and Development Simulation Testing Environment Room Number 3, aka the dry lab, was not a big room. Its main attraction was that it had windows, overlooking the terraced cottages of Dawley Road and with a fine view of the railway line, Hayes and Harlington station, and the canal. Overhead lighting came from the undersides of broad, inch-deep suspended aquaria within which genetically modified bacteria turned cellulose into luminescence, an advertising tour de force for a product that had never cleared quite enough of the regulatory hurdles to ever need advertising. Beneath the windows a metre-deep Formica-topped shelf ran the length of the room, and the far corner of that made up Geena’s workstation. The rest of the broad shelf supported the kettle, coffee jars, and mugs, as well as thrown jackets and coats, bits of electronic equipment in various stages of assembly or dismantlement, and stacks of paper.
The centre of the room, and indeed most of the floor space, was occupied by a Formica-topped rectangular table, about the size of a dinner table, around which perhaps six people could comfortably fit, and which gave barely enough elbow- and sprawl-room to the four engineers who sat around it. Geena had access to their shared workspace, and to all but their most personal comms. Management had access to everything, so nothing that Geena saw could make the guys self-conscious in that respect; and management had long since come to accept that what people like engineers did on the job was part of the job – within reason, and so long as it didn’t include work on the side, gambling, accessing porn, talking to head-hunters, or building bombs. General idle surfing and chatting – which was usually work-relevant anyway – was accepted as necessary mental down time.
Seen through glasses, what looked like a metre-wide tangle of glistening, pulsing offal hung above the table like some obscene balloon: a realistic representation of cellular machinery on a scale where water molecules appeared as solid and pervasive as polystyrene packaging. Around this slowly writhing mass orbited phantom sheets of text and diagrams. Most of the work was done with calculations that rippled through the sheets. Now and again someone might reach in and click an atom into a different place. In response to these calculations or manual adjustments the molecular mess would squirm into a new shape.
Underneath the 3D diagram the men’s hands moved between actual coffee mugs or pen-and-paper notes to flicking through the virtual pages of newspapers or (in Joe’s case) Science Updates. At 8.25 Brian’s Daily Mail disappeared and its place was taken by one of the worksheets; and one by one Mike, Sanjay and Joe joined in. They were modifying the gene expression for lignin in a new strain of new wood. The gene itself was already artificial, having been reverse-engineered and optimised from the original stretch of plant DNA, but the effects of further modification were by no means entirely predictable in advance. This meant repeated cycles of one-step changes and virtual testing: something altogether more crude and empirical than the high-level definition of synthetic biology seemed to imply, and that at other levels – certainly in comparison with the shotgun methods of early genetic engineering – it did indeed deliver.
Geena’s research interest focused on the subtle changes in everyday practice and self-understanding this form of activity imposed on the engineers. In some respects the guys in this drylab team were becoming more like wet-lab scientists and field researchers; in others, more like programmers had been in the era – the glory days, as the old hands called that time, with a nostalgic backward glance to their youth in the nineties or earlier – when computers had become cheap and fast enough to make trial-and-error an efficient style of software development, and before structured programming and formal verification had become standard practice: before rigour had become de rigueur. The working title of her thesis was Convergent agent-constitutive discursive practices in emergent technological networks: the case of a dry-lab synthetic biology team, and the work fascinated her, though she could well see that it might not fascinate anyone else.
What it was all for – what interest, other than her own in getting a PhD, her research served – was for Geena a matter of idle and infrequent speculation. The Economic and Social Research Council was willing to sponsor it, and her tutor at Brunel, Dr Ahmed Estraguel, was willing to supervise it. That was enough to be going on with. The question of what institutional and economic and political interests actually benefited from social science research into science was itself a small but thriving area of social science research, and the question of who benefited from that research was a smaller area still. The one researcher who had taken the next logical step and investigated who benefited from research into research into research into research had concluded that the only beneficiary of his research was himself, a result so significant that its publication had ensured him a professorship at the University of Edinburgh.
Around 11.00 Geena got a message on her glasses from her friend Maya, who lived in Hayes and who worked out of an office in Station Road. As soon as she saw it, she had a bright idea, inspired by a morning’s subconscious pondering over the predicament of Hope Morrison. She set up an al fresco lunch with Maya down by the canal for 12.30.
At 12.15 she pulled on her coat, nodded to the guys, and went out. Geena usually ate lunch alone in the employee restaurant – the engineers all took in packed lunches, and she needed only the occasional sample of their lunch time conversations to keep track of the discursive practices by which they constituted themselves. This time, she bought two insulated cups of take-out carrot soup and two baguette sandwiches. The bread roll for Maya was listed as ‘vegan filled’, which amused Geena as she left. Her smile broadened as she thought how good it would be to take advantage of the first blink of sun in a month by going for a walk.
She crossed Dawley Road at the cottages and headed down Blyth Road, then turned left into Trevor Road and Printing House Lane, a canyon of factories and office blocks, to where the road crossed the canal, and picked her way down crumbling concrete steps to the canal bank. As always, the chance association of the names set off an earworm of Betjeman’s poem.
No phantom swimmers in this canal. Fringed by tall poplars, cruddy with litter and crusted with ice, the water’s only visible life was a disconsolate duck and the monstrous ripples of the ten-metre-long flexible barges of biofuel that swam beneath the surface like lake monsters. Geena walked carefully along the uneven and ill-maintained towpath for a hundred metres until Maya appeared around a bend up ahead.
Maya waved. Geena waved back. They converged on an iron-mounted beam of greying wood that Geena assumed was something to do with the canal and that now served as a bench. It was just dry enough to sit on. Holding the hot soups out of the way at each side, Geena exchanged air-kisses with Maya and sat down beside her, lunches between.
‘Thanks so much,’ Maya said, pouncing on the vegan sandwich.
‘You’re welcome,’ said Geena.
They popped the tops of the soup cups and inhaled the steam for a moment.
‘Ah, bliss,’ said Maya, and sipped.
Geena had met Maya when they were both studying sociology at Brunel, and they’d kept in touch in the two years since they’d graduated. Maya was a difficult person to get a handle on, and some of that difficulty showed in her appearance. From a distance she looked almost like a crusty, but close up you could see that her fair hair wasn’t in dreads but in springy ringlets, freshly coloured and shampooed; her woollen-patch jacket smelled as if just out of the washing machine, her man-style shirt was cut for women and buttoned on the left, the T-shirt under it had a neat eyelet trim around the neck, her blue jeans had barely a crease and her boots shone. Even dressed for the office in neat blouse and skirt and a warm flared coat, Geena felt slightly dowdy and scruffy besid
e her.
Maya’s look, Geena had discovered from some old photos she had shown her, was a cleaned-up version of that of her parents at the time they’d met, when they’d both been full-time climate campers, their lifestyle a permanent protest against other people’s lifestyles. The couple had kept that up on a part-time basis, somewhat hampered by the string of part-time jobs they’d had to take to support Maya and her sibs, until Maya was about fourteen years old, at which time their entire preoccupation had been made redundant by syn bio tech. Without missing a beat they’d moved seamlessly into campaigning against that. Now, though, they did their campaigning in a mainstream manner, writing and lobbying rather than squatting in muddy greenfield sites, living up trees, or running onto runways.
‘How’s life in the Advice Centre?’ Geena asked.
Maya sighed. ‘Same as usual. It’s like living in a fucking soap opera.’
She went on to talk about some of the problems the Centre’s drop-in clients dropped in with. Most of them arose out of sublet living: inter- or intra-family disputes, rent arrears, repairs… Hayes, like all the outer suburbs of London, was still recovering from a decade or so of battering from the tsunami-like surges of population movement that had begun when Peak Oil and Peak Debt had made suburban living unaffordable. Eastward from Hayes, in through Southall, Ealing and Acton, regentrification was taking place – which brought its own problems to high-street Advice Centres, as former squatters and renters were pushed out by new buyers. Outward – as in West Drayton and Uxbridge, where Brunel University was situated, and where Geena shared a couple of rooms with her boyfriend – the suburbs were still little more than redbrick shanty towns, every neat semi, bungalow and villa occupied by at least two households and every garden by its goat and chickens.
‘You’d think,’ Geena said, after Maya had finished outlining a particularly tedious tangle, ‘that people could just sort these things out online.’
‘That’s the worst of it,’ said Maya. ‘They do go online. That’s why the guy I was just telling you about got so stubborn. Turned out the advice he was taking was from a parser some law student had knocked up to read Home Office databases and cobble them into essay cribs that he sold to his mates, behind a lawfirm front screen that everyone knew was a joke except this poor bastard who found it at the top of a search.’
‘And other poor bastards too, no doubt.’
‘Oh, I’ll meet them, waving their glasses and standing on their rights.’ Maya wiped her mouth and scattered vegan crumbs to an investigating pigeon. ‘Anything interesting going on in your place?’
‘SynBioTech’s shining towers? I wish.’
‘Saw your piece in Memo.’
‘Oh, Christ, that! Well, it was a bit more subtle when I wrote it, let’s say.’
Maya gave an understanding laugh.
‘Funnily enough,’ Geena went on, ‘it got picked up by the trawl, and…’
She told Maya the story all the way to the bit about Hope Morrison.
‘That’s really, really interesting,’ Maya said. Her eyes were bright. ‘Somebody really should do something for her.’
‘Oh, don’t,’ said Geena. ‘Don’t start all that again.’
‘All what again?’ Maya sounded hurt.
‘Campaigning,’ Geena sang, drawing out the word to draw the sting of what she’d just said. At Brunel, Maya had been heavily into campaigning. Her rebellion against her parents had taken the form of standing up for people who wanted to be left alone. To Geena it seemed to have exactly the same relationship to Maya’s parents’ passions as her clothes did to their fashions: a neater, cleaner, more bourgeois version of the same thing, cut from the same cloth.
‘The rights of the individual and all that rubbish,’ Geena added, emphatically.
Maya shook her bouncy shampooed ringlets that from a distance looked like dreads.
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I just think it’s so important that people in that position know they’re not alone. That’s all.’
‘Well, if you’re sure…’
‘Oh yes,’ said Maya, smiling. She stood up and banged her arms around her chest. ‘About time we got moving, no?’
‘Yes,’ said Geena. She crushed up their litter and bagged it, stood up and hugged Maya.
‘See you again soon,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said Maya. ‘I’ll get the lunch next time.’
‘No, no.’ Geena knew she wouldn’t, anyway.
‘OK, thanks. Bye!’
‘Bye. And remember,’ Geena added, mock-stern. ‘No campaigning.’
‘No campaigning,’ Maya said. ‘Promise.’
Smile, wave, turn.
As she walked back along the canal bank, Geena thought: what have I done? What the fuck have I done?
She felt quite sorry for Hope Morrison.
Saturday morning began at seven, as most Saturday mornings did, with Nick bouncing up and down on the end of the bed. Hope yelped as a badly directed bounce ended on her foot, jolting her fully awake.
‘Nick,’ she pleaded, ‘just go and play with Max.’
Nick walked on all fours up the bed and clambered in between Hope and Hugh. Hugh, his back to Hope, grunted and pulled the duvet over his head. Hope wrapped an arm around Nick, feeling the heat of his body through his pyjamas.
‘Well, snuggle in and let’s go back to sleep,’ she said, nosing his hair.
Nick squirmed. ‘Want breakfast.’
‘Get it yourself,’ Hugh said, from under the duvet and under his breath.
Nick heard. ‘Can I, can I, can I?’
‘No you cannot,’ said Hope. ‘Let’s just snooze for a bit, OK?’
‘I’m not sleepy,’ Nick said. ‘I’m hungry.’
‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ said Hugh.
‘Hugh!’ Hope chided.
‘Yeah, yeah, sorry.’
‘Fuck fuck fuck fuck,’ said Nick, enjoying himself.
‘And you stop saying that.’
‘Daddy said it.’
‘Yes, but he shouldn’t have. Now go to sleep.’
Nick sat straight up, pulling the top of the duvet with him.
‘Going to get breakfast,’ he announced.
Hope sighed. This was how it always ended. Nick wasn’t badly behaved most of the time, but Saturday mornings were far too exciting to spend in bed. Hope could understand that. Nick seemed to enjoy nursery (once he’d been prised off her leg each morning) but for him every new weekend was a fresh wonderland of freedom. Hope had a memory flash of how Saturday mornings had been before Nick was born. Oh well. Everything had an up side and a down side, and on balance she didn’t regret it. She got up, winced at the cold, and pulled on her dressing gown and slippers in a hurry.
‘Let’s get breakfast,’ she said.
‘Yes!’ said Nick. ‘I’ll get Max. He’s hungry too.’
‘Hugh, do you want a coffee and toast?’
But Hugh was already snoring again. Hope went through to the kitchen and made eggy soldiers for Nick and toast and honey for herself. As they ate, the garden brightened outside. The sky, visible by ducking down and looking up, was blue.
‘Railway walk?’ Hope asked.
‘Yes!’ said Nick. ‘Railway walk, railway walk!’
So that was that. Saturday, sorted.
The railway walk was Parkland Walk. The nearest entrance was a kilometre or so along East West Road to the east of Victoria Road. Hope, Hugh, and Nick with Max on his shoulder set off about eleven. Hugh had the buggy folded up and concealed in a small rucksack, just in case. Parkland Walk followed the path of an old railway line, through a long cutting for most of its route. It was the first time they’d been there since the late autumn, and Hope felt a little down on seeing it still looked like winter. Mud, dead leaves, bare branches, a few buds, shopping trolleys, litter, frost in the shadows. But Nick ran ahead, breaking thin ice and splashing through puddles in his wellies and sending Max shinning up trees.
After a while she
said to Hugh: ‘We could just go on walking.’
‘What?’
Hope waved a vague encompassing hand ahead.
‘There are walks everywhere, they all connect up. Canal banks, cycle paths, that sort of thing. We could walk from here to anywhere in Britain and hardly go on the main roads.’
‘We could,’ said Hugh. ‘If we didn’t have to sleep or eat.’
‘We could camp out,’ said Hope, ‘and live off the land.’
‘The berries don’t come out for months,’ said Hugh. ‘And the squirrels are skinny even when you can dig them out. Mind you, the roadkill keeps well at this time of year. Like a deep freeze, practically. And we could recharge the monkey at fuel stations, if we took the adaptor. Yeah, that sounds like a plan.’
‘You’re not taking me seriously.’
‘That I’m not. And why would we want to walk to anywhere, anyway?’
‘If we had to get away.’
‘Jeez.’ Hugh didn’t sound amused. ‘That’s not how you do it. There’s no away.’
‘People talk about going off grid.’
‘Yeah, they do. They talk about it. On the net. Nowhere’s off grid any more.’
‘There must be,’ said Hope. ‘There must be a place.’
Nick had stopped by the side of the path up ahead, and squatted down to gaze into the dark space underneath a huge holly bush. Max, programmed to occasionally ape its owner’s actions, squatted beside him. As Hugh and Hope approached, they heard Nick talking, as if to someone under the bush. His elbows were propped on his knees, and he gestured with his hands and forearms, each motion mimicked by Max.
Hope turned to Hugh, smiling, and raised a finger to her lips.
‘Cute,’ she murmured.
Hugh nodded. But he waited only a few seconds, and then coughed, and scuffed the ground as he strode forward.
‘Yes,’ he said to Hope as he reached for Nick’s hand and scooped Max to his shoulders. ‘There is a place.’