Ken MacLeod - Intrusion

So why do some people refuse it? Well, some religious minorities are against it, as is their right. But what motivates people like Mrs Kasrani? Sheer stubbornness? Some deep-rooted doubt about ‘going too far’ or ‘going against nature’? Or something else?

We don’t know, because she isn’t saying. But while anyone has a right to object to any medical intervention, however beneficial, the rest of us have a right to know why. That’s why the judge ruled against her.

She read it over, decided it was too complicated for Memo , and ran it through an app called MyTxt4Dummies. It came out like this:

Syn Bio has made our world better. It cleaned the air. It gave us New Trees. It gave us the fix. The fix makes babies better before they’re born. So what’s with this foreign woman saying no to it? She isn’t even a god-botherer. Time to put up or shut up, missus!

She sent it in, in time for the evening rush-hour version of Memo . She was ashamed to have her name on it, but she needed the money. She wasn’t employed by SynBioTech. She wasn’t employed at all. She had a grant from the Institute for Science Studies at Brunel University, on a postgraduate research project on laboratory culture in advanced biotech dry labs. A social-scientific study of the culture of engineers, for whom ‘laboratory culture’ meant something that grew on a Petri dish under a warm lamp. Her name was Geena Fernandez, but that wasn’t what her colleagues called her, behind her back.

They called her ‘the science bit’.

Hugh Morrison shook wet snow off his hooded Barbour jacket and hung it up in the cupboard in the hall just beyond where the bikes stood. As he did so he glanced at the shelf at the top of the cupboard. The frayed cardboard carton that he thought of as the suicide box – it contained a bottle of whisky and a pistol – was still there. The pistol was a high-power air-pistol replica of an automatic, and thus doubly illegal, but quite undetectable by sniffing for explosives. Hugh had no intention of committing suicide with it, or with the whisky for that matter. Hope didn’t know about the contents of the box, and the carton itself was above her eyeline and she was unlikely ever to notice it. The cameras in the hall didn’t see into the cupboard – Hugh had made sure of that when he’d banged them in – and there were no cameras in the cupboard.

He turned out of the cupboard and into the hall. Through in the kitchen, Hope looked at him over her shoulder from the sink, a smile just beginning. A little closer, Nick hurtled towards him, arms open, Max the toy monkey bounding in pursuit. A metre or so behind the boy and the toy, just below the eyeline between Hugh and Hope, quite solid, a stocky man with long red hair and a blue-dyed face walked at a diagonal across the narrow passageway. The hide pieces wrapped around his feet and strapped around his calves made a wet sound as his heels came up, and a faint, distinct thud as his heels came down. The fur of his sleeveless jacket was beaded with water, his check trousers soaked to the knees, but his hair and his arms were dry. He gave Hugh a sidelong glance a second before he stepped through the wall, and jerked his head a little to the other side, looking away, as if Hugh were an apparition he was aware of but did not care to face.

Hugh dropped to a squat, opened his arms and caught up the boy and the robot. He carried them both hugging and laughing through to the kitchen. As he stepped across the path the apparition had trod, he caught a distinct whiff of rank unwashed human mingled with the fresher smell of brine.

Hugh had grown up facing the new Atlantic, looking out at icebergs while wind-power blades beat the air overhead. Most of the people he knew were locals – the natives, they called themselves, the Leosich – but although Hugh had been born on Lewis, he knew he wasn’t a Leosach. One day when he was about five years old he was playing with his toy spade in some left-over cement and sand at the edge of a new windmill site overlooking Cliff Bay. As usual in certain conversations at that age, he was talking about himself in the third person.

‘So then he mixed them up like this,’ he explained to Voxy, who was kneeling in her muddy skirt at the other side of the mess, ‘and then with the other hand he picked up the water.’ Hugh lifted a rusty paint tin full of rainwater. ‘And he tipped it in and sort of stirred it, no I mean he shoved the spade under the mix and lifted and then turned it over as he poured the water on, skoosh, and—’

‘Who are you talking to?’

Hugh felt a jolt go through him. The water splashed. He set the tin down, dropped the spade, and looked up. Murdo Helmand, a tall Leosach with a glass eye from the war, stood in bright yellow overalls and hard hat looking down at him. Murdo Helmand worked sometimes on the new windmills.

Hugh didn’t know why he felt like he felt when he’d been caught doing something bad, but he did.

‘Nobody,’ he said.

Voxy gave him a hurt look across the mound of half-mixed concrete. She stood up. Hugh stared at the two wet patches where her knees had pressed on the thick woolly fabric wrapped around her legs and tied at the waist with some kind of hairy string. He couldn’t look at her eyes. After a moment, he was seeing nothing but the trampled green grass and yellow flowers behind where she’d been.

‘Nobody!’ he repeated, angry this time, his eyes stinging as he looked again at Murdo Helmand. He wasn’t going to cry. He wasn’t.

‘Nobody?’ said Murdo Helmand, teasing. ‘So you were talking to yourself, were you?’

‘Yes,’ Hugh said, relieved. ‘I was talking to myself.’

Murdo Helmand laughed. ‘Only crazy people talk to themselves.’

He winked with his good eye (back then glass eyes showed only black and white) and strolled away to laugh with his mates on the site. Hugh felt hot. He didn’t know where to look, so he looked down.

‘He looked down,’ he said, but not out loud, ‘and he picked up the spade and went on mixing the cement, and it got sort of like mud and then he looked up but he couldn’t see Voxy, and he felt really sorry because Voxy had been with him lots and was always nice, well maybe not always.’

With the back of his hand, splashed with wet cement and water, Hugh wiped under his nose. It felt gritty. He sniffed, and something stung inside his nostrils and he sneezed. He tried again with the opposite wrist, which was clean, and that was all right.

He stood up and looked around. From where he stood, on the side of the new site, he could see straight out to sea. The site was a hundred metres or so above the wide sandy beach, facing out on a bay between the two headlands: one all crags and cliffs, black with the white dots of gulls and gannets; the other rounded and green, a huge mound of grass-pinned sand, with a small cemetery on its slope. The breakers rolled straight in, crashing on the sand. Behind him the hill went up to a horizon a hundred or so metres away. He was forbidden to climb that heathery slope, because over the hill was a loch. He had, of course, climbed the slope, and nervously approached the loch’s rush-bordered shore, then turned away and run back, muir-burned heather twigs blackening and scratching his legs. Hugh firmly believed, though he had never been told, that the dark waters of the loch covered a crashed fighter aircraft with the skeleton of the pilot still in its cockpit, and that an eel with a body as thick as a man’s and of proportional length swam in it, and on occasion emerged from it to gulp down a stray lamb or unwary child.

On his left and a little below him was the windmill site, a broad flat excavation filled with concrete and sprouting metal rods and plates. Generators chugged. Lorries toiled up the slope from the road. The components of the tower were stacked like pieces from a kit for an enormous toy, around which a score of workers swarmed. Leosich and incomers, men and women were hard to tell apart in their yellow overalls, though more incomers than Leosich and more men than women wore the white hard hats of engineers and overseers. Down-slope from the windmill site was the local school building, Valtos Primary, due to reopen in August. Hugh knew he’d have to go there. He was quite looking forward to it, but he hadn’t been able to explain to Voxy what it was all about.