Ken MacLeod - Intrusion

‘Where are we?’ she asked, stretching her legs and wiggling her shoulders.

‘Halfway up the M1,’ said Hugh.

‘Nick should be—’

‘He is,’ said Hugh. ‘There’s a wee bunk in the back. He’s even in his PJs.’

‘Good for you. What have you been doing?’

‘Reading. Staring out the window.’

‘Are we going to pull off any time soon? I need a pee.’

‘There’s a perfectly good toilet in the back,’ Hugh pointed out.

When she returned, she took her boots off and tilted her seat back.

‘There’s a coffee machine and everything, a regular wee galley. It’s sort of mad, all the comforts for a driver who nine times out of ten won’t be there.’

Hugh rubbed his eyebrows, yawned. ‘Economies of scale. You couldn’t drive like this in Turkey.’

‘Uh-huh.’

Hope gazed out of the window again. The truck sometimes overtook other vehicles – buses, usually, with a bored driver, there only as reassurance, dozing or reading in the front seat – or was overtaken itself. Looking into the empty cabs as they drew level was a little unnerving, and those which, like theirs, contained people dozing or chatting even more so. There didn’t seem to be any pattern to the overtaking, the slowing and accelerating, but there was a rhythm. The drone-driven vehicles had no speed limit, and generally moved at over a hundred miles an hour, but she always had the feeling there was a safe distance between them – shorter than the human safe distance, because of the machines’ reaction time. At one point they passed through a heavy shower of rain, and the windscreen wipers didn’t come on until Hugh, with an irritated gesture, flicked the lever. Hope found some reassurance in the steady whump.

She dozed. After a while, a shift in the engine’s note and a sway to the side woke her up, as the lorry pulled off for a service area. It rolled, with perfect timing, into a vacant slot by a row of fuel pumps. The moment the engine stopped, she heard clangs and bumps from behind, followed by the throb of the pump and the sound of flowing liquid. The same process was being carried out on the trucks in front, the hoses and nozzles moving like hand-puppet snakes.

As the lorry pulled out and before it headed for the exit ramp, Hugh waved his phone.

‘Want to stop for a bit, stretch your legs?’

Hope grimaced. ‘Kind of, but I’d rather not disturb Nick. Besides, I just wouldn’t feel safe, I’d be nervous of the lorry going off without us.’

‘Couldn’t happen,’ said Hugh.

‘You know how it is.’

‘Yeah.’

Back on the motorway, Hope put her glasses on and, feeling like she was being just a bit obsessive-compulsive, checked in to the house wifi. Everything seemed to be in order: burglar alarm armed, the deadbolts in place, blinds down for the night, cameras all showing empty rooms. The bathroom light went on, then off, which startled her for a moment but made sense as part of the programme to make the flat look occupied. Her vision flitted from camera to camera like a ghost. The tap in the kitchen sink was dripping. She could see each drop gather, glistening in a stray street-light gleam past the edge of the front blinds, and after a second or two plop into the sink, then the next would begin to form. Drip, drip, drip.

She blinked hard and shook her head at that. She could hear the drips. Now that she noticed, she could hear sounds from all over the house and outside – boards creaking, cars passing, a dog barking. All very faint in the earpieces, and she might not have noticed them above the motorway noise and the truck’s engine note, if it hadn’t been for that drip.

Hugh was gazing out of the window, watching the traffic and the road as intently as if he were actually driving. Hope found herself hesitating to break his concentration, then shook off the illusion.

‘Hugh?’

‘Yes?’ He didn’t look bothered at all. Maybe he’d just been bored.

‘Do the house cameras record sound?’

‘What? I’m not sure. Never bothered to check, actually.’

‘Well, they do.’

‘Oh,’ said Hugh. ‘How did you find out?’

She told him. He fired up his own phone, put in an earpiece and looked at the screen. She could see the dark rooms flick by, one by one.

‘So they do. Hang on.’ He frowned, and poked about on his screen. ‘Oh yes. Here it is. Homebase catalogue.’ Flick, flick, flick of his thumbs. ‘Home security products. Cameras. Got it. Oh yeah, there it is. “Also records sound with piezoelectric module in shaft.” Talk about small print.’

‘Oh well,’ said Hope. ‘So much for putting my hand over my mouth that night.’

‘So that’s why you were doing it? I did wonder.’ He laughed. ‘That wasn’t the only sounds they must have picked up, eh?’

Hope smiled. ‘What can I say?’

‘Look,’ said Hugh, in that irritating male tone of patient explanation, ‘the whole point of having cameras in the house – apart from making burglars wear masks, I guess – is to have a record if you ever get accused of some kind of domestic violence or… you know. Nobody but us can see them without a warrant. If it comes to the cops checking our cameras we’re in the shit anyway. And we’re not.’

‘That’s reassuring.’

Hugh seemed to take this literally. He nodded and went back to gazing at the road.

Hope now felt a bit paranoid. She ran a search for any references to herself. None were current. The argument about the implications of the Kasrani case that had started the whole trouble had dropped far down the list of threads on ParentsNet, and only cropped up here and there on legal sites whose jargon she found impenetrable. She wished she had access to her own personal profile. Fiona, as a relevant professional, could look at any time at Hope’s ever-evolving profile, but Hope, as its subject, couldn’t. For sure it would be evolving now: unconventional though their mode of transport was, it wasn’t quite illegal, although no doubt Hugh’s father had cut a few corners setting it up. They hadn’t made any attempt at concealment – for people like themselves, as opposed to professional criminals, spies and the like, such attempts were foredoomed to be worse than useless – so the cameras and face-recognition software and all the rest of the surveillance systems were right now aware, at some level, of their location and destination. Her glasses, and Hugh’s phone, were in themselves quite enough to pinpoint their location to the nearest metre. The only precaution they’d taken was to block calls from Maya or from Geena, to prevent at least these dots being joined to them again. The outstanding question was whether the priority algorithms thought Hope and Hugh’s actions significant enough to call for human attention, and intervention.

Probably not, Hope thought, though she kept a wary eye on police vehicles in the fast lanes until she fell asleep, to dream of shining lines connecting dots.

She woke to dawn, and Scotland. Hugh was in the back. He came through with two paper cups of coffee.

‘Mmm,’ said Hope. ‘Thanks.’

She stared out, bleary-eyed, feeling stiff and sticky. They were just past Berwick-upon-Tweed. Low, rolling hills to the left looked rugged and high after most of England. To the right, she caught glimpses of cliffs and the North Sea. Hugh sipped, while thumbing rapidly on his phone.

‘Done,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Cancelled our flight to Prague.’

‘What?’

‘More than twelve hours’ notice, so I’ve kept the penalty down to the deposit.’

He looked pleased with himself.

‘What flight?’

He hadn’t told her. He did now.

‘I’m not sure how clever that was,’ Hope said. ‘It looks exactly like an attempt at a diversion.’