by Ken MacLeod
Sitting on plastic chairs at the side of the room were Nigel, Hope and Nick. Nigel’s suit was grubby, and he looked exhausted, his face deeply lined, as if he’d aged five years overnight. Hope was staring straight ahead. Nick saw him first and jumped up and ran to him and hurled himself into Hugh’s open arms, and Hugh forgot the pain. He looked over Nick’s head, buried in his shoulder, and saw Hope still seated. She gazed at him as if afraid he wasn’t there, or as if he might be snatched away at any moment. One of her hands was closed, on her lap, and the other held an open plastic water bottle. Still staring at him, she clapped one hand to her mouth, and followed it with a long swig from the water bottle. She set the bottle down on the floor, and stood up, and walked towards him, smiling like a suicide bomber.
26. The City Burners
It had been a good summer, Hope thought. Not the weather – rainy, damp, or at best a silvery overcast most days, with the occasional glorious breakthrough of deep blue sky and blazing sunshine, though according to the news the year was shaping up to be one of the hottest on record – but how things had gone, and how she felt. This mid-August mid-morning, she sat at the table in the back room of Mairi’s shop, sipping coffee and nibbling biscuits and feeling that life was good. Nick, out playing in the wet, in the drysuit that had become like a second skin, was at this moment out of sight. A glance through her glasses showed her where he was, swimming in the shallow water a hundred metres to the left along the shore. He had a wrist phone, which he was so proud of he needed no urging to wear it all the time. He didn’t know that its camera and sound and GPS tracker were on constantly, but he didn’t need to. Right now he was laughing and splashing and talking to someone – one of his imaginary friends, or one of the real friends he’d made among the village kids. Hope didn’t mind which. He was going to be a much more confident and outgoing boy when he started primary school in a few weeks.
Hope had mixed feelings at the prospect of going back to Islington. On the one hand, they were all having a great time up here. She enjoyed working undisturbed but having at least one person to wander over and talk to whenever she liked, and she’d come to quite welcome the occasional stint behind the counter. The view through the patio doors was often grey, and today the sky was just about black, but it was better than the wall of a basement flat and people’s boots going by. Hugh had benefited from working so much in the open air, having a dozen workmates rather than one or two, and banter with folks who shared the same jokes and references as he did, even if their parents or grandparents were English or Polish or Pakistani. The outdoor work and the wider social life had seemed to help him at another level, if the diminishing frequency of the bad dreams and the long silences and the thousand-yard stares was anything to go by. And they all got on well with Nigel and Mairi. Over the past weeks Nigel had become rather careless, as the locals put it, about going to church and keeping the Sabbath and minding his tongue. It had become something of a minor scandal in the parish of Uig, which had very little scandal and made the most of what it could get.
On the other hand, Hope longed to be back in a place of her own, without treading on other people’s toes or getting underfoot all the time, kind and laid-back though Nigel and Mairi were about it. She yearned to shop for the baby’s arrival, and not in Stornoway. And there were only so many bootees and hats and cardigans that one woman could knit, though try telling Mairi that. ‘It’ll be a long winter,’ she’d say, above a brisk rattle of needles. On top of all that, Hope missed London. She missed the street and the strangers – the strangers more than her friends, come to think of it. She missed meeting people every day who might recognise her and know her name but who didn’t know her at all – and above all, who didn’t want to know. Unlike everybody here.
Not that they felt isolated, on the island. With glasses and phones and screens they could talk to anyone. They’d taken off the blocks against Maya and Geena and Joe, and had reestablished contact. Maya had at first been dismayed and a little disappointed by Hope’s decision, but she was still beavering away, like a hacker of legal code, to establish the wish to pass on a non-deleterious gene as an unchallengeable reason to refuse the fix. She’d even persuaded Hope to link up with the Labour Party again, and had fixed her an engagement to speak on civil liberties to the Stornoway branch – which Hope had reluctantly done, and had found the members much more open to her arguments than those in Islington. She still hated the Party, hated it from the very marrow of her bones. She could look at its banners and badges and see behind them cells of hooded, shackled men, and cold bodies covered with cement dust in sudden ruins, and naked people burning under green rainforest canopies. She could see Hugh, his legs kicked from under him, cracking his head against a tiled wall. When she’d stood up to speak in that draughty hall, that hatred had made her tremble, and had tightened her voice. Afterwards, someone had congratulated her on how she’d put so much passion into her argument, despite her evident nervousness about public speaking.
Joe Goonwardeene had become enthusiastic about the possibilities of tachyon detection, and was busy hustling various departments of SynBioTech for money and resources for a project to develop synthetic mutated rhodopsin. His pitch was that even the smallest hint about the future could be of immense value to the company, giving it an edge on its competitors in anticipating promising new ideas. Geena, meanwhile, was already informally observing and recording Joe’s efforts with fascinated delight. She’d just about finished her thesis, and was casting about for funding for postdoctoral work on how Joe was going about getting his project funded. And, of course, she was keeping a careful record of her own activities, for possible future use.
‘It’ll take reflexivity to a whole new level!’ she’d said. ‘The political economy of the promise of the political economy of the promise of promise!’
Hugh had bought glasses with his first week’s wages, and sometimes he shared a virtual space with Hope and Maya and Geena. Sometimes he talked one-to-one with Joe or with Geena, long conversations in the evening – some, like last night, with Geena, continuing long after Hope had gone to bed. Hope wasn’t more than slightly jealous. Hugh and Geena, and Joe, shared an experience she was glad she didn’t, and talking about it, or indeed about anything, with someone else who’d been through it seemed to help Hugh get to sleep and not wake up shuddering and shouting in the night.
Hope didn’t regret her decision to take the fix. There were two reasons why she had taken it. One was that, just after her arrest, she had said she would. She hadn’t made any conditions, but it had felt like a bargain: if I get off, if we all get out of this, then I’ll take the fix. It had not felt like a bargain with the state, whose forces were at that moment holding her down and telling her her rights. She would have had no compunction about breaking a promise to them. No. It had felt like a bargain with God. Hope didn’t believe in God, not even in the distant, impersonal, mathematical, indifferent God that Nigel spoke of, but she wouldn’t have felt right going back on a bargain with him just because he didn’t exist. It would have felt like cheating.
There was another reason why, when she’d seen Hugh walking in, and seen Nick leaping into his arms and proving him real, she’d kept her side of the bargain without a moment of hesitation. It was because it hadn’t felt, at that moment, that she’d been finally worn down and defeated. It had felt like a victory. More than that, it had felt like revenge. A revenge on all those who had worn her down and arrested her and tortured her husband and threatened to take her children away.
It had felt like that because she knew the gene was real, and that the bright land was real too; because, in the culvert, she had seen what Hugh and Nick were telling her they saw. She’d seen it faintly, a ghost image, like a double exposure, beyond the water and the wall that she saw too. Maybe that faint refraction was all of the bright land that those without the gene could see. Perhaps those with the gene could do more than see it, in some places or circumstances: they could actually go there. They could eve
n go there and come back, at some cost in lost time as the old tales told, and as Nigel (Hope secretly thought) had done. If any of this was true, she knew that the world contained things stranger even than tachyons. She didn’t care. She knew, or at least believed with more surety, that the gene was real and that the fix would neutralise it, and not only did she not care, she was glad. Let it go, let them take it, let them edit it out of the genome.
These people didn’t deserve to know the future.
At that moment, Hugh, too, was having a tea break. He was a long way off, on a new site up at the north of the island, on the headland of Ness. From where he sat, in the lee of a half-dismantled tower, he could see the lighthouse at the very tip of the island, and on either side the sea, grey and white under the darkening sky. Soon the lighthouse would again be the tallest structure on Lewis, though far older and more obsolete than the wind-farm towers.
He sipped hot black tea from a mug and munched the first of the day’s sandwiches, idly scanned the news scrolling on his pad, and without thinking much about it exchanged remarks with the men who sat beside him. He was slightly distracted from all that by the scene straight in front of him, where a gang working for a different contractor was taking no break at all and wasting no time in winding cable out of the conduits in the ground, in lifting reels of the stuff from the winch as one after another the reels filled up, and rolling them to a long low-loading lorry and sticking them along the scaffolding poles that held them in place like spindles, gradually building up to great long cylinders of high-tension cable. The chug of the generator that powered the winch came and went with the freshening breeze. The gang were all of Asian appearance, good old local Stornoway Pakistanis, their accents indistinguishable from his own, and often enough their Gaelic better. He felt a trace of discomfort just from sitting here, watching their unstinting toil. There was something privileged, almost colonial, about the contrast of their work and his rest, while he sat sipping tea from the same subcontinent as their ancestors had come from, and (no doubt) whose current owners the cargo they were loading was ultimately destined to enrich.
There was more than that to his unease. Ever since that moment the first day after their arrival, on the hill above the old school overlooking the bay, he’d felt the same disquiet whenever he’d chanced upon a similar scene. The coiled cable, the generator. Something he couldn’t put his finger on. It had troubled Nick too, Hugh recalled. ‘Don’t like it. Dark.’ The boy had said the same, with more obvious justification, a moment before they’d gone into the culvert.
Hugh pushed that memory away. He didn’t want to think about it. A few days after his release, a gang of men had gone up the hill behind the house, carrying crowbars and lugging heavy packs. An hour or two later, a series of dull thuds had echoed among the hills, and shortly afterwards the men came down. His father had had a word with them, and he’d told Hugh that they had done a job he’d phoned in to urge the company to do: to dynamite and block up the entrance to the old, unfinished culvert, with its deep and dangerous pool at the far end.
‘Should have done it years ago,’ Nigel had said. ‘That time you and the boys went in it.’
‘I’m not sorry you didn’t,’ Hugh had said. ‘And I’m not sure you are, either.’
Nigel had looked at him, grinned, almost winked, and then walked away. It was the closest either of them had come to mentioning anything that had happened the night after Hugh’s arrest. The deeper lines that Hugh had noticed in Nigel’s face, that morning in the police station, hadn’t gone away. Hugh had his suspicions about how the air pistol had got into Nigel’s safe, but Nigel had volunteered nothing, and Hugh hadn’t asked. It wasn’t something you talked about.
But that was manners, or reticence. It wasn’t like some other things you didn’t mention. Last night, when he’d been speaking to Geena, their conversation had raised and dropped the topic that each of them did and didn’t want to talk about, and had ranged off on different matters but always circled back. It was like picking a scab, they agreed; but they also agreed that underneath it all, the scar was healing. In the course of one of these conversational cometary orbits, going far out and then coming back, Geena had touched on the Naxals, and Hugh had said – because it was one of those things that everyone seemed to know and never talk about – ‘The Naxals? What the fuck are they about, anyway?’
Geena had explained, and talked about her supervisor’s theory of them, and her own analogy with the City Burners, those terrifying folk who’d appeared out of nowhere and burned antiquity to the ground. All the cities and all the records, gone, and then the Burners gone, leaving no trace.
‘But how could anyone do that now?’ he’d asked. ‘Not much point burning books, now we have the net.’
Geena, or her virtual image in his glasses, relayed from the cameras in her front room in Uxbridge, where she sat up while her boyfriend snored in the bedroom behind her, had shrugged. ‘Bring down the net?’
‘You couldn’t do that,’ he’d pointed out, ‘without some kind of massive virus attack, or electromagnetic pulse bursts, and you’d need supercomputers for the viruses, or nukes for the EMP – all the advanced tech the Naxals don’t have and don’t want.’
Another shrug. ‘I’m sure they’re working on it.’ A wry smile. ‘A low-tech solution, to get us all back to low tech. Meaning millions of us would die without these bastards even having to kill us. God, it terrifies me just thinking about it. It’s like, hey guys, you’re terrorists, OK? Well, you’ve got me terrorised! You’ve made your point. Can you stop now? Maybe negotiate?’ She shook her head. ‘But that’s the thing. They don’t have demands. There’s nothing to negotiate. They just want us dead in the ruins. So I understand why, back home, I mean in the old country, India, the government just bombs them. I can even understand why the cops here…’
‘Do what they did to us?’
‘No, not that, but… the death-from-above stuff. The killer drones.’ She shuddered. ‘Though it’s not nice to be in the splatter radius. Ugh!’
And then their talk had moved on. It was odd what they talked about, and what they didn’t talk about. Now he came to think of it, even when she was enthusing about the tachyon project, he’d never spoken to her about what he’d seen in the tunnel. Maybe that was a result of the final warning he’d been given by the man. Like Hope, and Geena for that matter, Hugh had become much more reckless and unguarded in what he talked about – they all no longer cared who was watching or listening – but this was one live wire he dared not touch.
Live wire. Something in that thought niggled. The guys around him, by unspoken consensus, began to shift themselves, to splash away dregs of tea or coffee gone cold, to go back to work. We’d better get on with it, Hugh thought, the weather’s not going to hold, the wind’s picking up, carrying tiny stinging flecks of ice… be lucky to get a full day of it at this rate.
He bestirred himself, and as he got to his feet the generator powering the winch ran down, and coughed into silence. An overseer cursed, in loud and fluent Gaelic, and someone hastened to top up the generator’s fuel.
Live wire.
Hugh stared across at the cylinders of cable. If the generator had been connected to those reels, and the reels connected to each other, with an iron core through all of them, each cylinder thus connected would have become an enormous electromagnet. And when the generator’s fuel ran down, and it stopped, the magnetic field would collapse, resulting in…
An electromagnetic pulse.
And that was it, the low-tech solution.
It was so obvious, when you saw it, and its preparation so innocent-seeming and difficult to police or prevent, that Hugh felt sure the Naxals would come up with it sometime, if they hadn’t thought of it already. With something like this, they could bring down the net, and more than the net. Power systems, telecoms, machinery, traffic control… air-traffic control, too. And then what?
With a chill that ran down his chest like a cold shower, Hugh realis
ed that he already knew what would come next. Collapse. And after collapse, barbarism. He had seen the distant consequence already, the barbarians with their gliders over the glens. If that was how the future could be, maybe these visions of his were a warning, of a world that his action or inaction could bring about, and him just the very man to stop it. Or maybe nothing could be done, if his father was right, and the sight never showed you a future you could change.
As Hugh went back to his work on the tower, he thought of shiploads and shiploads of coils and coils of cable, moving into or out of harbours all over the world. Or coils stacked up and generators chugging away, in empty office blocks undergoing renovation or demolition; in dusty warehouses in industrial suburbs; on building sites in central business districts. It would all be a matter of how powerful the electromagnets were, and how strategically they were placed. It would be an interesting exercise, he thought, for this evening, to pull down one of the old physics textbooks and fire up the calculator on his pad and figure out just how many it would take.
And then, and then… he could take the result to the police, and ask them to take it to the man at the base, to warn the authorities of the danger. That would put him in their good books, for sure.
And then again…
He thought about the base, and the man, and smiled. He thought about the danger they were in, all unknowing, and smiled.
They’d never see it coming.
He had to knock off work early that day, as the weather broke.
He was still smiling as he drove home, through the first snows of summer.
Acknowledgements