Shadow Creatures

by Andrew Lane

  ‘Fine, as usual,’ he said. He glanced past her. ‘Hi, Natalie.’

  Gillian’s daughter entered the room, lugging the large box behind her. It was strapped up with plastic tape and it was on a kind of trolley that Natalie was pulling with some effort.

  ‘Hi, Calum,’ she said, and then glanced at Gecko. ‘Hi, Gecko.’

  ‘Hello, Eduardo,’ Gillian Livingstone said, looking over at him. Apart from Gecko’s mother, Gillian Livingstone was the only person who used his real name.

  ‘Professor Livingstone,’ Gecko said, nodding. He glanced between the two women. ‘Can I get you anything? Tea? Coffee? Water?’

  ‘I’ll have a latte, please,’ Gillian Livingstone said. ‘Semi-skimmed milk if you have it.’

  ‘Grapefruit juice?’ Natalie asked, shrugging.

  ‘Coming right up.’

  As Gecko headed for the kitchen area, he heard Calum say, ‘I got your message about coming across to England, but you didn’t say why.’

  ‘Do I need a reason to see my favourite ward?’

  ‘Usually, yes,’ Calum replied. ‘What’s happened? Has Aunt Merrily asked you to check on me? If she did, then it’s a long way for you to come, just for that. All she has to do is send a car for me and I’ll pop across to see her in Richmond. She knows that.’

  ‘Merrily hasn’t been in touch, Calum,’ Professor Livingstone reassured him. ‘I had to be in London anyway, to sign some official documents, and I thought I’d take the opportunity to catch up. And, besides, there’s something I want to show you. Something that came out of a research laboratory I’m associated with.’

  ‘What about you?’ Calum asked Natalie. ‘Aren’t you still in school, or something?’

  ‘Aren’t you?’ Natalie countered.

  ‘Special exemption because of the car accident,’ he said. ‘I’m home-schooled.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Natalie countered. ‘Where’s your tutor, then?’

  ‘Actually,’ her mother admitted with a tinge of embarrassment in her voice, ‘that’s me. I had to promise the authorities that I would supervise Calum’s education.’

  ‘And do you?’

  ‘Better than I supervise yours, apparently,’ Gillian Livingstone said with an edge to her voice. ‘I send Calum a list of topics to research every term, and he sends me back proof that he’s researched them. Usually within a week.’

  ‘It’s a chore,’ Calum said, ‘but I have to put in the time. I want my allowance to continue.’ When Gecko came back into the main area of the apartment with a tray of drinks, he saw his friend was smiling as he asked, ‘So what’s your story, Natalie?’

  ‘She was asked to leave her college,’ Gillian said darkly. ‘I wouldn’t say it was under a cloud, but there were definitely adverse weather warnings.’

  ‘What did you do?’ Gecko asked, handing Natalie her glass of grapefruit juice.

  ‘I bought a dog,’ Natalie said, taking the drink.

  ‘What is the problem with that?’

  ‘It’s a boarding school.’

  He nodded. ‘Ah. I see. No, actually, I don’t.’

  ‘Apparently they don’t allow dogs in lessons. I told them it was only a chihuahua, and I could carry it around in my handbag all day without anyone noticing, but apparently handbags aren’t allowed in lessons either.’ She shrugged. ‘They’ve got rules for everything. Who knew?’

  ‘I blame your father,’ Gillian interrupted. ‘He should have been looking after you.’

  ‘Someone should,’ Natalie muttered. ‘At least, that’s what the principal said.’

  Gecko glanced at the box on the trolley behind Natalie. It was, now he came to look at it, more of a crate than a box. It was heavy-duty plastic with snap-locks holding the two sides together. There was a sticker on the side with a company logo, but Gecko couldn’t see what it was.

  ‘It’s not my birthday,’ Calum said, seeing Gecko looking at the box. He was still hanging nonchalantly from his strap.

  ‘No, I forget birthdays,’ Gillian replied, ‘but I make up for it at other times with random gifts.’ She glanced across at Gecko. ‘Could you be a dear, Eduardo, and open it for us. Calum is fixed in place trying to look casual, I don’t want to wreck my nails and Natalie’s favourite word at the moment is “no”. At least, that’s when she’s not saying “As if!” and “puh-lease!”

  ‘Oh, puh-leased!’ Natalie said, on cue, and flounced off to the sofa in a huff.

  ‘Of course I can,’ Gecko said. He knelt down and shifted the crate on to the floor. The sticker, he saw, said: Robledo Mountains Technology, Las Cruces, New Mexico. Their logo was a stylized mountain range with a sunset behind it. The tape surrounding the crate was hard and razor-edged, made of lots of fibres all wound together. The join looked as if it had been heat-sealed. He slipped a folding knife out of his back pocket and sliced through it, and then snapped the plastic catches. He swung the lid upward, revealing the crate’s contents.

  For a long moment they all looked inside.

  ‘Leg braces,’ Calum said in a cold voice. ‘Gee, thanks. Just what I always wanted.’

  ‘I knew that’s what you would say.’ Professor Livingstone crossed over to him and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘That’s not what they are.’

  It was, Gecko thought, what they looked like. There were two objects side by side inside the crate, each one the mirror image of the other. They were made of some black, dull material – not metal, but maybe carbon fibre or something similar. It looked as though they were meant to strap round Calum’s legs, running from a thick carbon-fibre belt round his waist, down past the top of his thighs and on down towards his ankles. The hip and knee joints were complicated – not just simple hinges, but arrangements of small pistons and what looked like circular motors. There were wires everywhere, and a box on the belt area that looked to Gecko as if it housed a battery pack.

  ‘These are bionic legs,’ he said quietly. ‘They have power, and they can move your legs for you, Calum.’

  ‘Like I said. Braces.’

  ‘Don’t be negative,’ Gillian Livingstone said. ‘These are a product of the latest research into enabling paraplegics to walk again. It’s a spin-off from military work into helping soldiers march for longer and carry heavier loads in hot temperatures. The idea is to give them mechanical exo-skeletons that can take the strain and do some of the work for them.’ She indicated the “legs” in the box. ‘These things are made of carbon fibre – they are lightweight but extremely strong. There’s no chance of them snapping or breaking unless you happen to crash a truck into them. Don’t do that, by the way. The motor units in the joints are based on the ones used in satellites and the International Space Station to rotate solar panels. They only draw a low power, but they are exceptionally reliable and they can apply a lot of torque in a hurry. The braking systems are also state of the art – it’s not much use rotating a joint if you can’t lock it off in the right position.’

  ‘What about the battery?’ Natalie asked. She had left the sofa, and her huff, and come over to stand beside Calum. ‘How long does the charge last? If it’s anything like my mobile phone, it’ll die after three hours.’

  ‘That’s because you leave your social networking sites on all the time,’ Gecko pointed out.

  ‘How else am I going to know what my friends are doing?’ Natalie protested.

  Gillian interrupted: ‘The battery isn’t a battery at all. It’s a next-generation fuel cell, and it can provide enough power to keep these legs going at a run for a day. At walking pace it’s more like a week.’

  ‘And how is it controlled?’ Calum asked, his voice not reflecting any emotion. ‘Does it come with some kind of game-console controller where I twiddle a joystick to get moving, or does someone else use a remote control to move me around like a puppet?’

  ‘Neither.’ Gillian obviously wasn’t going to rise to the bait by getting into an argument. ‘Although it’s funny you should mention game-control consoles, because it’s partl
y a spin-off of that technology. This is the really clever part. I sit on the board of directors of a company that’s seeking to develop a way to control computer games using brain waves rather than buttons and joysticks. The brain produces electrical and magnetic signals that can be detected using sensors placed on the scalp. There’s been a lot of work recently using functional magnetic resonance imaging to determine which parts of the brain trigger when the mind thinks about an action like moving an arm, or bending a knee, or flexing toes. It’s got to the stage where we can take a real-time scan of the brain’s electrical activity and predict what the person wants to do. Converting that to actual movement is then just child’s play.’ She smiled. ‘It’s interesting, but the researchers have found out that the brain displays signals that it’s made a decision before the person being scanned consciously knows they have made a decision. Some of the researchers are using this as evidence that there’s no such thing as consciousness – that what we think of as being consciousness is just the brain catching up with a decision that it’s already made and trying to rationalize it after the event.’

  ‘Like I’ve been saying,’ Natalie murmured, ‘I don’t actually choose to spend all that money on shoes – there’s something in my head that makes me do it!’

  ‘I didn’t say I bought into the theory,’ Gillian warned; ‘I just said that some people believe it.’

  ‘And this is being done just to play games?’ Gecko asked.

  ‘It’s a multi-billion dollar industry,’ she responded. ‘Military spending is going down, year on year, while entertainment spending is going the other way. If you want to get anything developed these days, you need to get game- or film-related funding for it.’

  Gecko turned to look at Calum, ready to say that this sounded like a good thing, not a bad thing, but the expression on his friend’s face made him stop. Instead of the stubborn scowl that he was expecting, what he saw was that Calum looked almost hungry.

  ‘So how does it work – technically?’ he asked in a quiet voice. ‘Do I have to have my head shaved? Do I have to have electrodes implanted in my brain?’

  ‘You’re not listening,’ Gillian replied. ‘This is all done externally. You put on a headband with sensors inside. There’s a Bluetooth link to the controller in the waistband. The sensors pick up what your brain wants to do before it has even formulated the thought properly and activates the motors. That way you start moving just at the point when you want to start moving – not too early or too late.’

  ‘A headband?’ Calum grimaced. ‘I don’t want to look like a 1980s rock star.’

  Natalie glared at him. ‘You didn’t worry about that when you made us wear those camera and microphone headbands when we went to Georgia!’

  ‘You didn’t wear yours most of the time,’ Calum countered. ‘That’s why you got into trouble.’

  Gillian Livingstone frowned. ‘What trouble?’

  ‘No trouble at all,’ her daughter said quickly.

  ‘What do you think?’ Gillian asked, turning back to Calum. ‘Can you work with it? I’m not saying it’ll be the answer to all your problems, but it might help out.’ She paused. ‘It might help you get out and about a bit more.’

  ‘I’ll look like a freak,’ he said softly.

  It was Natalie who responded. ‘No,’ she said, ‘you won’t. Looking at those things, they’ll go under a baggy pair of trousers – and frankly you could do with something more fashionable than the chinos you always wear. I can’t say what the walking will be like, but you’ll look fine.’

  ‘The walking will look perfectly natural,’ her mother added. ‘It may take a little time to get used to them, a little practice in private, but nobody who doesn’t already know will be able to tell.’

  Silence fell across the room as they all looked at Calum. He just stared into the box as if it contained all the secrets of the future – which, Gecko considered, it did. At least for Calum.

  ‘All right,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ll give it a go.’ He glanced at Gillian Livingstone. ‘How do we do this? Do you want me to try them on now? I warn you, if I’ve got to take my trousers off I’m not going to do it in public.’

  ‘There’s a process to go through,’ Gillian replied, ‘and we can’t do it here. It has to be done at Robledo Mountains Technology. They have to calibrate the headband sensors quite carefully to pick up what the brain is doing.’

  Gecko pointed at the sticker on the side of the case. ‘But they are in Las Cruces, New Mexico. That is in America, I think.’

  Gillian raised a hand to reassure him. ‘They have a facility in Hampshire, near Farnborough. Calum can go down there some time in the next few days and they will spend a few hours fitting the bionic legs to him, making sure he’s comfortable and then tracking what his brainwaves look like whenever he’s thinking about various movements of his own legs. I’m told it’s a very simple process.’

  Calum nodded. ‘OK. I’ll do it.’

  ‘Wonderful. I’ll get the people at Robledo to get in touch. Which reminds me – do you still have that robot – ARLENE?’

  Calum nodded. ‘It’s downstairs in the warehouse area. Rhino dropped it off when he and the others returned from Georgia.’

  ‘That’s fine. It was Robledo that originally developed it before it was passed across to the US army at the Aberdeen Proving Ground. They asked me if you could bring it back when you go across to them. I think they want to download the logs from the robot’s memory core and assess its performance. There’s some invaluable data in there on real-life conditions, they think.’

  ‘Logs?’ Calum said carefully. He glanced across at Gecko.

  ‘Geographical locations, speeds across terrain, how bumpy the ground was – that kind of thing. It will tell them a lot about how the robot coped with everything you asked it to do.’

  Gecko checked that Gillian wasn’t looking his way, and then quickly shook his head. He already knew what Calum was thinking. The robot’s memory logs contained the exact location of the Almasti village, and Calum didn’t want anyone else knowing where the last Neanderthals were living.

  Gecko glanced across at Natalie. She was looking worried, but he suspected it was for a different reason. She clearly hadn’t told her mother that she had been kidnapped by mercenary representatives of Nemor Incorporated and had only been rescued when she climbed on to ARLENE’s back and raced across the Georgian foothills to safety.

  ‘That sounds fine,’ Calum said casually. ‘I’ll get Tara to give it a quick once-over before Robledo take it back, just to make sure it’s in good condition.’

  And just to make sure that the robot’s memory is wiped of any GPS coordinates before it gets handed across, Gecko thought with a smile. He nodded briefly to Calum. If Calum wasn’t around, he would make sure that Tara knew what to do.

  ‘I should be going. Things to do; people to see. Natalie – you’ll be OK here for a while, won’t you? I’ll see you back at the hotel later.’ She turned, as if she was about to head to the door, and then turned back. ‘Oh, I nearly forgot,’ she said casually, ‘I need to ask you about that DNA sample that Natalie and the others picked up for you in Georgia. Have you decided what to do with it yet?’

  Calum looked over to Gecko again and raised an eyebrow. They had talked about that earlier. Calum was paranoid about anyone getting hold of the Almasti DNA and using it in a way he didn’t approve of.

  ‘I’m still making lists of different places that could do the work,’ he said.

  ‘Fine.’ She shrugged, as if the matter was of no importance, then went on: ‘It’s just that I also have contacts with a laboratory in Oxford. If you wanted to, you could pop the sample in to them for genetic sequencing. I can highly recommend them – they’ve done work for several Nobel Laureates, as well as Oxford University.’

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ Calum said noncommittally.

  ‘They’re very discreet. Nothing will leak out.’

  ‘Well, maybe I want it to leak out.
’

  She stared at him. ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘We have talked about this before, Gillian. I want the information to be made as widely available as possible. I want the world to be able to make use of that DNA.’

  ‘Even if you won’t say where it came from?’

  ‘Information shouldn’t be owned,’ he pointed out. ‘It’s not like diamonds, or land. It’s a resource that should be freely available.’

  ‘I’ll remind you of those words the next time you think someone has got hold of your bank-account details. And knowing where the DNA came from is information, isn’t it? Shouldn’t you make that freely available?’

  He smiled. ‘OK, I take the point – some information should be kept private, but DNA sequences? If DNA doesn’t belong to the person or creature that it’s been taken from, then it doesn’t belong either to the person who takes it or the researchers they give it to. Genes can’t be copyrighted. At least, they shouldn’t be copyrighted.’

  She stared at him sympathetically for a moment. ‘You’re still hoping, aren’t you?’

  He looked away. ‘Still hoping what?’

  ‘Still hoping that, somewhere out there, some unknown plant or animal has a DNA sequence that will help regenerate nerve cells.’

  He shrugged. ‘Starfish, newts, salamanders – they can all regenerate lost tails or lost limbs. Who’s to say there’s not something out there that can do the same with spinal nerve cells?’

  ‘And you think that the more laboratories working on the problem, the better the chance that someone will solve it?’

  He nodded. ‘Yes. That’s exactly what I think.’

  ‘Has it occurred to you, Calum,’ she said softly, ‘that the laboratories working in the public domain are, by and large, underfunded, underequipped, understaffed and underresourced? They may have all the bright ideals of public service in the world, but if they have trouble paying for a test-tube cleaner then how are they going to make any big breakthrough in the fields of genetics or medicine? No, it’s the private companies that have the resources. They can put millions of dollars into a project to solve a problem—’