Ken MacLeod - Intrusion

‘Oh, nothing like that!’ Hope said. ‘Look, I’ve tried and tried. Argued online. Argued with the faith mums to their faces. Come on, I even joined the Labour Party .’

‘Quite a sacrifice,’ said Hugh. She couldn’t tell if he was being ironic. He sounded aggressive. ‘Done your civic duty. Gone through the proper channels.’

It was the whisky talking, she thought. Disinhibition. He’d been off alcohol for three months too, and he’d just drunk about three times more than she had. She was feeling a bit dis-inhibited herself. She drained the glass and put it on the table, then moved forward along the sofa on her knees.

‘Come here,’ she said, and wrapped her arms around him and pulled him down to the couch.

‘There’s a girl at the door asking for you,’ said Ashid, smirk on his face, head poking up through the floor from behind the top of the ladder. This house was even more of a wreck than number 37 had been.

‘Is she selling something?’ Hugh asked, putting down a diamond-bladed saw.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Ashid. ‘Indian. Christian. Very black.’

‘Oh, great,’ said Hugh, following Ashid down the ladder. ‘Probably saving my soul.’

The suspicion that the young woman was peddling religion hardened as Hugh caught sight of the tiny silver cross on a chain around her neck. The sight also explained how Ashid had known what religion she professed. Standing in the open doorway in puffa jacket, slate skirt, and flat shoes, her arms down and hands locked in front of her, she looked prim enough to be a missionary. The mission to building workers. Sorely needed. The Meddling Little Sisters of St Joseph the Worker. Early twenties, he guessed. A few years younger than him. But somehow more assured. Confident.

‘Hello?’ said Hugh. ‘Can I help you?’

‘Hi,’ the young woman said. ‘Hugh Morrison?’

‘Yes?’

His tone was, what’s it to you?

‘My name is Evangelina Fernandez.’

Knew it, thought Hugh.

She paused, as if expecting him to recognise the name. Or, perhaps, confused by the way he’d looked for a moment as if he had.

‘But you can call me Geena,’ she went on, evidently giving up on the recognition thing. She stuck out a hand. ‘I’m a sociology researcher.’

Marketing, was how Hugh interpreted that. So, wrong wrong wrong, Ashid. She was selling something.

He shook her hand solemnly. ‘Pleased to meet you. I’m a carpenter.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I looked you up, and found your location tag.’ She glanced past his shoulder. ‘Could I come in for a moment, please?’

‘Oh, sure, come on. Mind your step.’

Hugh guided her into the big front room, finished but bare. It smelled of plaster and paint and new wood.

‘I’ll give that stool a wipe,’ he said, looking for a cloth clean enough.

‘It’s fine,’ said Geena. She scuffed a hand across the back of her skirt, a gesture that suddenly made her seem a lot less prim. ‘Dirt-repellent fabric.’

She perched on the stool and looked at him as if confirming something in her head.

‘Uh… tea?’ he asked. ‘It’s about time for…’

It was about eleven.

Geena nodded. ‘Milk, no sugar, thanks.’

Hugh went to the kitchen, brewed up a pot, called to Ashid, then carried two mugs through to the front room. He dragged up a trestle and another stool, and sat down.

‘Thanks.’

They sipped for a moment.

‘So… what’s this about?’

‘Um,’ said Geena. She looked around, as if for inspiration, or as if she was checking for cameras. There weren’t any. Hugh felt uneasy. He hadn’t been alone with a woman or child in an unsurveilled, unrecorded room since… Lewis, he guessed. At least Ashid was in earshot. Well, probably not, the sound of the radio almost certainly drowned their conversation out, but it was the principle. Ashid was in earshot of a scream, at least.

‘It’s funny,’ she said. ‘I’ve thought and thought about this, and now I’m here I feel, uh…’

‘Unprepared?’ Hugh prompted.

Geena laughed, some tension dissipating. ‘Yes!’

She put the mug down on the trestle and placed her hands on her knees.

‘Tell me, Mr Morrison, is there anything unusual about your vision?’

‘Twenty-twenty, last time I got it checked,’ said Hugh.

What was this about? Glasses? Laser eye surgery?

‘I don’t necessarily mean your acuity,’ she said, with unnerving precision. ‘I mean… have you ever noticed that you see things a little differently from other people?’

Hugh warmed his hands around the mug. He felt cold all of a sudden. This wasn’t about marketing.

‘If you’ve looked me up,’ he said carefully, ‘you’ll know I went to university. I did a year of philosophy, and if I remember right, that’s one of the classic hard questions. Qualia, isn’t that it?’

‘Yes, but that wasn’t my question.’

‘Perhaps you should start again,’ said Hugh.

‘Yes, indeed,’ said Geena. She took a deep breath. ‘Has your wife ever mentioned a woman called Maya?’

Hugh blinked. ‘She may have done.’

Some minor incident at the nursery gate, he recollected. Hope had laughed it off, telling him very little, but he’d noticed that she’d got the bee in her bonnet about the Labour Party shortly afterwards. He’d worried, but he hadn’t pried.

‘Oh, good. Maya’s a friend of mine. She thought she could help, uh, Hope, and I think she did, for a bit, but I’ve come up with something that can help you in a big way.’

‘What makes you think we need any help? What’s this about? Are you trying to sell us something?’

‘What?’ She sounded baffled.

‘Sociology research. Sure you don’t mean market research?’

‘No, no, I really am… I’m a postgrad at Brunel, you know, in Uxbridge? And I’m doing research at SynBioTech, in Hayes.’

‘I thought you said sociology.’

‘STS… sorry, science and technology studies. I sit in on a lab and observe the engineers.’

‘Oh,’ said Hugh, ‘I know about all that. Like they’re a strange tribe.’

‘Like they’re a strange tribe,’ she said, in the tone of someone who’d heard it before.

‘And you pretend you don’t know if science works or not, yeah?’

‘Please don’t tell me the one about jumping out of a window,’ Geena said.

Hugh had been about to. He felt abashed.

‘I suppose it’s like having an unusual name,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Like Hope Abendorf.’

Hugh spluttered tea. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.

‘Pardon me,’ he said. ‘OK. One more time: can you please tell me what all this is about?’

She told him how she’d come across Hope’s name and predicament, and how her friend Maya had tried to help. He listened, with an uneasy feeling of having been watched from behind.

And then she looked away and looked back and said:

‘One thing about the fix that I know and most people don’t, Mr Morrison… there is a basis for exemption apart from the conscience clause.’

‘What!’

‘It’s buried in the miscellaneous administrative provisions, not in the primary legislation. Even the recent rulings don’t change it, they can’t because, well’ – she smiled here – ‘it’s unexpressed, so to speak. I mean, the legislation was drafted with one eye on the possibility – which the government was publicly denying at the time – that some day it might become compulsory. That’s why they built in exemptions in the first place. The main way the fix works is by correcting the expression of deleterious genes, right? It turns genes on or off, depending. Sometimes it repairs a stretch of code. It doesn’t really add or take away anything. That’s one reason why it’s acceptable even to the bloody Catholics.’