by Wayward
Maria, in shock, asks, “What the hell happened there?”
Salvi opens the lock gate.
“Parental instinct,” says Anna. “We were lucky. And unlucky, of course. We just gatecrashed their spawning. That specimen we hauled out had probably just released its seed.”
“But Anna, we’ve not seen anything like that in the past,” says Salvi, “That was damned crazy! It’s a massive jump in their development. They’ve only been in the test bed for five weeks. I don’t know much about science, but I understand that evolution works over much longer periods.”
Anna turns to Maria, an eyebrow raised but her expression unreadable. “Enjoying your first day at work? We have just captured hatchlings. I can hear them chattering. They must have been splashed from the canal into the boat during the affray. We must get them back to the lab, don’t you think?”
*
The laboratory is dark and cool, save where beams of brilliant sunlight illuminate motes of dust dancing above the slabs of the grey stone floor, the glass tanks, wooden cupboards and benches.
“What kind of structure are they making now?” asks Maria.
“Its like shoals of fish,” Anna replies. She has pressed the scar on her cheek, which resonates with their movements and chattering, against the tank. “It’s a language that feels like life.”
“Aren’t they terribly complex structures?” persists Maria. “They splay like fractals, knot like Klein bottles, and form polyhedrons with an almost impossible number of surfaces. It’s hard to keep track of their contortions. They make no sense!”
“Maria, put your fingertips against this tank and shut your eyes. Tell me what you feel.”
Still shaken by the incident in the rio, Maria is uncomfortable with the invitation to get closer to the creatures. She screws her face up tightly and places the flat of her hand against the tank, ready to withdraw. To her surprise, she feels a gentle tapping – as if they are greeting her.
“What can you say about the character of the beats?”
Maria feels as if she is being tested again. She concentrates on the faint rhythms coming through the glass. “They’re irregular. No, they’re regular. And… they’re faint – no, they’re strong–”
“At first I thought they were communicating with small runs of beats and silences – a kind of Morse code,” Anna says. “But if you pay attention and spread the whole of the palm of your hand against the tank you’ll notice something special. Their communications are spatial. Think of them as being written in three dimensions – sort of cloud points of oscillation.”
Maria keeps both hands pressed against the glass pane. For a moment, her expression changes from fascinated delight to a shadow of disgust. She composes herself. Anna can’t see her, but her tone of voice would give her away if she were to speak now.
Anna is projecting geometries into the tank to communicate with the creatures using ‘speaking tools’ improvised from soft foam that she pokes pins into using a simple grid system to create patterns. She knocks these against the tank hoping that the plants will recognize the shapes, beating the pincushion against the glass rhythmically.
“They’re copying you,” Maria whispers. Anna presses her cheek against the tank. Its coldness soothes the weal where the trovant struck.
“Perhaps.”
“They are! Listen! You know what that means, Anna? We can learn how to have a conversation with them. We’ll need to analyse the sounds for patterns that you can feed back to them as a kind of language.”
*
“How are you going to control the trovanti if you can’t even communicate with them?” asks Antonio. “Why the hell do you think you can trust them?”
“I’m working on it,” Maria says. “You can trust me.”
“But they’re not like us!” shouts Filippo. “Their purpose is to reproduce and survive as a species. They don’t give a damn about us!”
The mood in the room is tense. Maria feels she is rapidly losing the trust of her comrades. She tries to make eye contact with Alberto, but he looks down. He is probably waiting to see which way this will go, she reflects bitterly. Now, just when she needs him…
“You’re treating nature like a commodity,” Dino says quietly, “You’re supposed to be working for us, but I think you’re rather taken by your new colleagues. To hell with the environment, eh? Which side are you on, Maria? You have to choose, you know.”
“I am on the side of life,” Maria says without hesitation. She looks unflinchingly into the hostile and suspicious eyes that confront her. “I am on the side of Venice!”
“Death to techno-industrial society!” Luigi shouts. “Our cities must become nature reserves! No trovanti!”
“No trovanti! No trovanti!” The gathering of agitated young people picks up this slogan that stands for so many different objections to the creatures. Some fear the trovanti will take over the city, others are against animal modification, a few of them fear the further exploitation of Venice by multi-national corporations, while others are oppositional for its own sake. They rise to their feet, seemingly with one accord, waving fists in time to the chant. Maria backs nervously towards the door at the back of the stage to the right of the huge Guerrieri della Natura banner. Mercifully, the exit is unlocked.
Outside, Alberto is waiting. “We need to talk,” he says.
*
The trovanti, it seems, have a remarkable affinity for mathematics. Anna taps out equations and algorithms for the living stones to solve using her simple pincushion instruments. In reply, they form a range of shapes with their bodies.
Maria has decided that she should adopt the simplest possible approach towards designing a communications interface, one that mirrors the ‘talking tool’ the bioarchitect herself uses. She searches for a roll of masking tape and covers all sides of the tank with a grid spaced at five-centimetre intervals.
“Please place your cheek on the glass!”
Anna puts her face against the side of the tank. “There’s tape on it,” she observes.
“Yes. Now please give them an instruction with your pin pad.”
Anna taps out a simple set of polygonal coordinates and the trovanti take up the respective geometry.
“So what?” asks Anna, “We already know they respond to spatial coordinates.”
“Wait!” instructs Maria. “Feel the tank again. Their standing waves have changed position, haven’t they?”
“It’s true,” says Anna thoughtfully, “Their oscillatory fields are moving.”
Maria tries to conceal the exuberance she feels. “They’re giving us a new set of coordinates in response to our signal using the pins as a grid reference system.”
*
Alberto is sitting so close that she can smell his aftershave – tobacco, leather… Oud Wood. They have a table at the back of the trattoria, which is otherwise empty save for a young family by the front window, and an elderly man engaging the waiter in desultory conversation at the bar.
“It’s just so bourgeois to think of love as being a couple, chained together, one plus one equals two. That was for our parents’ generation. We need to do things differently. Business as usual is not good enough.” His hand reaches across the table and rests lightly on hers.
“I don’t understand,” Maria says. “What has changed? I’ve never made demands of you.” “We’ve become enslaved. Technology is destroying the very planet on which all species depend. It is concentrating even more power in the hands of a tiny elite. I care about these things, Maria – they keep me awake at night.” She resists the temptation to remark that it is his young, new ‘disciple’ Aurora that is more likely keeping him awake at night. Nevertheless, she is fascinated by the way his hazel eyes sparkle in the candlelight when he becomes passionate about something. He takes her chin in his hand, pulls her face gently towards his and gazes searchingly into her eyes. He is charismatic, with the politician’s penchant for shifting a conversation to topics that better suit him.
She pushes his hand away, smiles, folds her arms. They have known each other five years. There are very few surprises.
“What is it the trovanti don’t like?” he asks. “What hurts them?”
*
“I’d like to change the composition of the nutrient stream,” says Maria, casually, “So we can establish what conditions they flourish in – and what harms them.”
“You should first try varying the concentration of minerals,” says Anna.
“And pollutants,” Maria adds.
“Well, I’m not so sure about that,” objects Anna, “We wouldn’t want to damage them. Plants can be notoriously unpredictable. We’ll have to be very careful. Tiny doses, if so, but I’d rather not, frankly.”
*
“The most effective way of killing these plants is to ramp up the oxygen supply, immobilise the nutrient flow, starve them of light,” says Alberto.
“What do you mean, kill them?” protests Maria. “You said immobilise them.”
“It’s just a question of quantity,” says Alberto, “Anything in large enough doses will kill you. Food. Drink. Sex. Good times. Even water.”
*
The three containers of glyphosate, a root poison, which Maria has hidden, are unlikely to be found for a while at the back of an unused cupboard. Alberto has given assurances that if she tests the dose-response of the trovanti, then they’ll be able to figure out how to stop the creatures should they ever get out of control. He has let Maria understand that she is responsible for figuring out how the activity of trovanti can be curtailed, appealing to her now not as lover, confidante, intimate, but as one good Venetian to another. He has spent some time driving home the idea of her boss as a meddling foreigner who has come to experiment recklessly on their home turf purely for the advancement of her own career – in other words, to line her pockets. He had sensed a reluctant respect from Maria for Anna, and it is this that he has sought to undermine.
Maria waits until the architect goes home then unscrews the lids of the vessels and pours a whole container of neat poison into the tank and reaches for the other two that Alberto wants her to administer. Almost instantly, she is met with powerful jets of water, as the creatures effectively combine together as one. Astonished by the creatures’ ability to defend themselves she struggles to tip the contents of the vessels into the water as tentacles reach for her wrists. She lunges over the tank to empty the rest of the glyphosate into the system. They pull on her hair, choke her, whip her arms so she has no control over the containers. A barbed tentacle slaps her across the face. She passes out.
*
Maria feels calm, although her arm and neck are burning. Nothing is in focus. Has she gone blind, like Anna? Is this how Anna became blind? She regrets never having asked her. She sits up, rubs her eyes with the back of her sleeve, and tests her limbs for evidence of damage. The moon shines through the window like a spotlight on a crime scene. There are living stones strewn across the floor. They are on her clothes, her hair, even in the light fittings.
She gets to her feet, walks unsteadily across the room, taking the empty glyphosate containers away with her. Where is Alberto when you need him, she wonders indignantly.
*
Anna demands emergency assistance from the cleaning staff. She is devastated – it’s going to take a week for a new tank to be delivered. She’ll have to revive the creatures in buckets.
Maria is late, she’s not answering her phone, and when she finally arrives, she sounds tearful and unsure of herself.
“Where the hell have you been?”
“The trovanti got out of control. You said they were unpredictable. There must have been something in the water they didn’t like.”
“I told you NOT to use pollutants!”
“It won’t happen again.”
Anna seems close to tears. Maria puts a hand on the blind woman’s shoulder.
“I’m so sorry, Anna.”
The architect rubs her eyes with the back of the sleeve of her overalls.
“Maria, there are times when I wonder whether what I’ve created here is terrible, or marvellous. These creatures are my invention, but their success spells the end of the way I’ve learned how to design. Living stones are smarter than me, can build more quickly than even industrial robots can, and can invent impossible geometries and realise them in ways I can only dream of. Ultimately, they will replace people like me.”
“Then why do it?”
“Because the technology we produce shapes our future.”
“What about nature. Isn’t nature important?”
“This technology is a kind of nature.”
“But you designed the trovanti. You made them. How is that ‘natural’?”
“It’s certainly not the old kind of nature that the Romantics sighed over. Nor is it some fragile thing that is subjugated by human will. It is a force to be reckoned with and it knows how to survive, even without us. This city has a particular kind of nature founded on its raw, recalcitrant silts. For centuries it has survived all kinds of assaults by assimilating the latest technologies. Trovanti are the next in the line of successors to Venice’s long history, and whatever happens to people, the city will survive in one way or another. These creatures are a ‘missing link’ between the natural and designed realms. That’s the very definition of a city.”
“But it’s a decaying city!” protests Maria. “It’s falling apart before our eyes! And it’s my home!”
“Not at all,” says Anna, “Venice is a transformer and is at its strongest when its citizens and ecosystems work together.”
Maria suddenly wants to hurt the old woman, who now seems more frail than visionary. Her walking stick is within reach. She could beat her with it. Make her suffer. Break some bones, drive her away. Alberto would admire that. Girl gets boy. Problem solved.
“You’re only saying all this because you’re part of the technosphere. You don’t know if the trovanti can be trusted, or controlled, and you don’t care! You’re playing your role. You can’t even hold a proper conversation with them! How can you think of letting them loose in the city?”
“What’s wrong with you, Maria?” Anna snatches at the young woman’s wrist, gripping her a little too firmly, “They’re creatures – part of our shared world. You want certainty before you agree to work with them? Signed forms? Ethics committees? Time will tell just how much we can trust them, but right now, I’m not having the trovanti perish here. I’m taking them home.”
“Home?” says Maria.
“Home. These creatures were not born in captivity. They were developed from botany that belongs to Venice.”
*
Salvi is waiting with a hired barge that is large enough to carry fifty trovanti. Maria is unsure if she can play any active role in returning them to Venice. She feels sick in the pit of her stomach. They make their way to the field laboratory and open the gate of the lock. Salvi backs the vessel up broadside.
They spill the first trovant into the rio. It is motionless for a moment, then blinks its eyespot a few times – the surrounding surface reflections splinter and it disappears.
“I do believe it recognised this place,” says Anna, the tip of her stick trailing in the water.
The next creature is reluctant to leave the container. Salvi strokes around its eyespot for a few minutes and then lowers it gently into the water. It tries to get back up several times before it dips its apical leaf and is gone.
The others already understand what is happening and slide into the waterway soundlessly.
Anna drifts the tip of her stick along the surface, while Maria and Salvi watch for signs of farewell, or recognition from the trovanti – but nothing stirs.
*
“How did it go?” asks Alberto.
“It’s complicated. I emptied about two and a half litres of glyphosate into the tank.”
“Onl
y two and a half? For Christ’s sake, I said you needed at least six!” shouts Alberto. “Why don’t you do as I tell you?”
“Look, it did the job. We don’t know how much they can take. It seemed to knock them out. But they fought back.” Maria hates herself each time she catches herself appealing silently for his approval. “Professor Vita is now determined to release them back into Venice,” she adds.
“Really?” asks Alberto, suddenly attentive. “That’s something. Actually, the results of your experiment are unimportant. The task was a test of your mettle – you half-passed – but you could do so much better. So now you need to get us to their breeding site. We need you on the inside so we can finish the job.”
*
“They’ve woven ornate structural patterns throughout the rio. It’s breathtaking, like Byzantine buildings but far more organic. They exceed any kind of conventional architectural detail. Light is diffracting through sculptured objects and tension wires like lace. It’s incredible.”
“They’re making a four-dimensional tapestry,” says Anna, “There’s intense biological conversation happening in this waterway. It’s like being inside an organic computer. The whole place is humming with life.”
“I don’t know about you two,” says Salvi, “But I feel like I’m being watched.”
As they continue into the oxbow rio, Maria takes photographs, noting the entranceways to the site. When this month is up, she will have all the materials she needs to apply for one of the funded PhD positions that her department annually advertises. Salvi paddles gently into the bend. She will be a pioneer, continuing from where Anna, who must be close to retirement age, leaves off and make her own mark on bioarchitecture.
As they turn the second corner, the boat jolts. One of the creatures drops on to the deck and wraps a tentacle around Anna’s wrist. Maria jumps back and Anna, remembering the scar on her cheek, stiffens. Then she feels the tip of one of its roots in her hand, circling.
“It’s asking to be tickled,” laughs Salvi.
“They recognise us!” Maria leans over to stroke it. “I wonder how?” She knows she should be concerned about what the trovanti remember about her, but, intuitively, she does not feel threatened.