Ken MacLeod - Intrusion

‘Well, it worked, didn’t it?’ Hugh waved an arm. ‘We’re in Scotland!’

‘Maybe you could ask Nick to repeat that explanation he gave Max last night. About how artificial intelligence works. Because you bloody need it!’

Hugh shrugged. ‘Aw, come on.’

‘How much was the deposit, anyway?’

‘Two hundred quid. Think of it as the fare for this journey, and it’s a saving on the bus or the train.’

‘Think of it any other way, and it’s a waste.’

‘Peace of mind, then. Insurance.’

‘Hmph!’

Hugh leaned over. ‘Come on. Good-morning kiss?’

She had to smile. ‘All right.’

Nick emerged from the back of the cab and climbed on Hope’s lap.

‘I’m hungry, and Max needs recharging.’

‘Good morning to you, too.’

Something between a shrug and a squirm.

‘Ah, come on, let’s sort you out.’

Hope went into the back of the cab and got Nick washed – or wiped, anyway – and into his clothes. While he went into the front to sit in her seat, Hope washed her own face and changed her underwear and pulled on a fresh shirt. Back in the front, sitting in the middle, she even found a way to recharge Max, from a socket marked mysteriously with a symbol for a lit cigarette. After a while, the Firth of Forth swung into view, then disappeared and appeared again, then vanished entirely as they hit the city bypass. Hugh tapped on his phone so that they pulled off just south of the Forth Road Bridge, and rolled into the lorry park of a McDonald’s.

Hugh looked over at Hope.

‘Now… sure you’re not nervous about leaving the cab?’

‘Yes, I am, but I’m a bit more willing to risk it in daylight. It’s not like we’re in the middle of the night and the middle of the motorway. Anyway, hunger rules right now.’

‘Don’t it just.’

They stretched their legs, had McBreakfast, bought drinks and snacks for the rest of the journey, and piled back into the cab, hands overloaded, laughing.

As they crossed the Road Bridge, the biotech towers of Grangemouth glittered to the left, and the Forth Rail Bridge and the vast array of tall windmills decommissioned but not yet dismantled on the horizon beyond it loomed to the right. Nick couldn’t decide what to look at, and compromised by surging from one side of the cab to the other.

‘And what’s that thing out there?’ he asked, pointing across Hugh, to the right, at a derelict platform in the middle of the Firth just beyond the Rail Bridge.

‘It’s a place where they used to fill up the oil tankers,’ said Hugh.

‘What’s oil tankers?’

That explanation kept Nick occupied most of the way to Perth. A junction ahead offered one route to the north, the other to the west. Just before the choice had to be made, Hugh’s hands hesitated over the steering wheel; then he shrugged and sat back. So the vehicle stayed on automatic, all the way up the M90 to Inverness. It took about an hour and a half. A long, slow ascent, it felt like, then a descent so fast it made your ears pop, like in an aeroplane. Along the way, Hope felt almost oppressed by the sheer density of New Trees and other plantations that pressed close to the sides of the motorway, for most of the time masking all the scenery except the windmills. Beyond Pitlochry they were in the Cairngorms National Park, from which synthetic organisms were excluded. Here, the view opened out, and natural trees and heather did losing battle with flash-flood erosion. Snow patches shone on summits and lurked in shadowed corries.

‘I’ve heard it said,’ Hugh told her, looking straight ahead at the road, ‘that up near one of these summits there’s a wee stretch of burn that stays frozen all through the year.’

‘A tiny glacier!’

‘Exactly. And it gets a bit less tiny every year.’

‘That would be big news, if it’s true. So why haven’t I heard?’

Hugh shrugged. ‘It’s a rumour. And the rest of the rumour – wouldn’t you just know it? – is that it’s kept secret. The place is supposed to be in an area of the park that’s strictly off limits, to keep nesting eagles undisturbed or something like that.’

‘That just raises the question of how anyone knows about it at all.’

Hugh tapped the side of his nose. ‘Some park ranger who had a dram too many in a bothan. So the story goes.’

‘And where did you hear it?’

‘Ach, years ago in Aberdeen, drinking with some climbers.’

‘It’s taken you all this time to mention it?’

‘You have a point there,’ said Hugh. ‘To tell you the truth, it was one of those memories you file and forget, if you see what I mean.’

Hope didn’t, but she decided to let the matter drop before Nick got curious.

The motorway gave out on the approach to Inverness, and with it the automation. Normally the lorry would turn off to the Business Park and pick up a new driver at this point, but the codes on Hugh’s phone overrode that. He took the wheel, to Hope’s silent disquietude and Nick’s noisy admiration, as the lorry approached the Kessock Bridge, and another splendidly distracting view on both sides.

Hope relaxed as Hugh drove on, with every appearance of confidence, across the Tore roundabout, turned left outside Dingwall, left again at Garve… She supposed the skill of lorry-driving was like cycling: once learned, never lost. The long road west was four-lane all the way, a smooth ride that Hugh kept below sixty. For some reason he didn’t explain – it could have been arbitrary, a mental coin-toss, or else the outcome of some intuitive summing of the likelihood of any security inspection – he had chosen to head for the Uig, Skye-to-Tarbert, Harris ferry rather than the more obvious Ullapool-to-Stornoway, a shorter drive but a longer voyage. Hope kept Nick entertained by pointing out eagles and buzzards, camera drones and jet fighters, deer herds and wolf packs, through a monotonous succession of glens and moors. After they’d turned left at Strathcarron, the scenery itself held his gaze: the long stretch of the sea-loch above whose southern shore they climbed and descended on switchback braes; the precipitous view over Strome; the bleak moor of Durinish. Then the swoop back to another wide four-lane highway, and the scary climb up and over the Skye Bridge. Across Skye, Nick was kept variously occupied by crisps, the Cuillin and the Quiraing.

On the ferry to Tarbert there was no problem keeping him amused for the hour and a half it took, or afterwards in the slow progress through the huddled port. The boredom and fractiousness only kicked in after the steep ascent to the island’s plateau, a glacier-scored surface reminiscent, as Hugh put it, of space-probe photos of Callisto, but less lively. Nick cheered up as they crossed into the strange synthetic woodlands of Lewis, and on to Stornoway, and the grandparents.

‘Who would have thought it?’ said Nigel, watching the container lorry roll away from the pier towards the unloading dock. ‘Cars from Africa, and in boxes like toys!’

‘Plastic models, scale one to one?’ said Hugh.

‘That’s it!’ Nigel laughed, and clapped him on the back. ‘Well, let’s get you all into ours, wicked petrol-burning steel contraption that it is.’

Nigel had for years cultivated an air of ironic grievance that his car, a decades-old Nissan 4x4, was not allowed off the island.

Hugh picked up his own pack, Nigel hefted Hope’s, and they set off towards the car park, with Hope and Mairi, Hugh’s mother, walking ahead with Nick between them, capering along and swinging from their hands. It was late afternoon, about six, but the sun was higher than it would be at the same time in London, so it felt earlier. Every time he came back, Hugh had the same slight disorientation. Stornoway was disorienting in another way, too. Strung around a natural harbour, under a wide sky, the town almost made you turn in a circle to take it in as soon as you arrived. It could make you dizzy. Ever since he’d started at the Nicolson Institute, the big school after wee school, Hugh had experienced Stornoway as a textbook example of uneven development, the sort of place you’d see in television documentaries about African Lion countries where at some point the presenter, as if by contractual obligation, would let slip the phrase ‘land of contrasts’. He’d written a poem for second-year English composition that began: