Ken MacLeod - Intrusion

‘Precognition?’

‘You mentioned it.’

‘So I did.’ Geena sighed. ‘The guy I spoke to said it was involuntary.’

Joe laughed, spluttering coffee. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.

‘Sorry,’ he said, and dabbed his lips and the table with a napkin. ‘If it’s the result of cosmic rays, I should bloody well think it’s involuntary!’

‘How seriously do you take this?’ Geena asked.

‘Quite seriously,’ said Joe, frowning. ‘I would not have put in a weekend to do the research and create that sim if I did not.’

‘Oh,’ said Geena, somewhat abashed. ‘I see. I’ll… I’ll have to think about this. But thank you.’

‘You’re welcome,’ said Joe. He stacked his cup and saucer on top of the empty lunch plate on a tray. ‘Oh well. Back to work.’

Geena did think about it. She thought about it so much that she had to call Maya. They agreed to meet after work in a café on Hayes High Street. Maya tabbed her the location. When Geena arrived at five thirty, she found the place a dingy hangout for people who looked like Maya’s clients: war-zone and climate-change refugees. The walls were papered with news screens in a babel of languages and hung with black-framed portraits of bearded men, from Osama and Che to more recent martyrs who had achieved less notoriety. Somebody was smoking, out the back.

Feeling slightly dizzy from the swaying, swooping scenes and talking heads, Geena tuned her glasses away from the views and her earpieces away from the voices, found Maya, and sat down. The coffee was vile. Geena recounted what Joe had shown her, between sips and grimaces.

‘This is wonderful!’ Maya cried.

‘Well,’ said Geena, ‘it’s also pretty speculative.’

‘That doesn’t matter,’ said Maya. ‘The point is, there’s a very sound basis for, um, our friend to make an appeal. I mean, even the possibility that there might be something in it would have scientists and medical people absolutely falling over themselves to check it out. They’d practically forbid her to have the fix.’

‘Um…’ said Geena. ‘Not quite what she would want.’ Maya waved a hand. ‘Figure of speech. And as well as the scientists, all the woo-woo pedlars would be jumping up and down about it, that’s another constituency of support.’

‘Well, again…’

‘You’re being too literal,’ Maya told her. ‘Look, I’m making political calculations here. None of this actually has to happen. It just has to be understood as something that could happen, and social services and councils and all the rest of officialdom have to take it into account.’

‘ If it goes public,’ Geena pointed out. ‘Or, OK, if there’s the possibility it could go public. Sure. But the next step from that could just as easily be to make sure it doesn’t go public.’

She drew a finger across her throat, a rather reckless gesture in this particular venue.

Maya snorted. ‘They don’t do things like that.’

‘Now you’re being literal. I mean, they could suppress the story, even disappear… the subject.’

‘But why?’ Maya demanded. ‘Look, despite what some people say, I’m not a conspiracy theorist, or even a dangerous radical. I don’t think the authorities are evil.’ She held up a hand. ‘I know, I know. But they don’t do these things for fun. They do them for what seem to them good reasons, pressing reasons, often even from wanting to do good. After all, the business of making the fix compulsory isn’t some evil plot to control the evolution of the human race, or whatever. It grew out of increasing the pressure to get the fix taken up, and then finding there was a tiny minority who were beyond rational persuasion.’

‘Who then have to be coerced for their own good? Isn’t that against everything you believe in? I seem to remember John Stuart Mill himself made that the central distinction in—’

‘Yeah, yeah, don’t try to… Hell, Geena, you know I don’t give an inch on that. But they have a way round the good old argument in On Liberty . They’re not coercing the recalcitrant for their own good. They’re doing it to protect the recalcitrant’s unborn children, who have nobody but the state to stand up for them.’

‘So it’s for the children ?’ Geena sneered.

Maya bristled. ‘I don’t buy that either, as an argument. But I’m willing to accept it as a motivation. And that motivation sure doesn’t allow for snuffing out something that is at worst harmless and at best could be… heck, a real psychic super-power!’

She was smiling as she finished, knuckles at her forehead, forefingers waggling like antennae. Geena smiled back, thinking: you are so fucking naive . She guessed that Maya’s passionate commitments to liberty and human rights were her way of articulating her subject position – of course they were, it was her bloody job! She had to believe all this, including the fundamentally good even if misguided intentions of the human components of the repressive state apparatuses, to do her job at all, which was to ease some of the frictions resulting from population movements and spatial reconcentrations and dispersals of capital. A tiny proportion of the rent skimmed off from these impersonal, inhuman movements of human beings and alienated labour and all the rest was, for the system that generated them, a small price to pay, certainly compared to riots and crime and detention centres.

A grease-monkey! An apprentice with an oil-can! That’s what you are, Maya, in the great scheme of things!

Geena said none of this. Instead she said: ‘Well, why don’t you give her a call?’

Maya nodded. ‘Good idea. Might as well do it now.’

She fished out her phone, thumbed to the number.

‘Shit!’

‘What?’

‘She’s screened me out.’

‘Same thing happened to me,’ said Geena. ‘With her husband. Let me try her.’

Same result.

They sat looking at each other for a moment.

‘Now if only,’ Maya mused aloud, ‘there was someone who understands what all this is about and how important it is to get through to our friends here, and who isn’t known to them and whose phone isn’t blocked by theirs…’

‘I’m not dragging Joe into this,’ said Geena.

‘I’m just saying,’ said Maya.

Hope sat by the patio doors in the back room of Mairi’s shop, overlooking the shore. Through the glass panels she could keep an eye on Nick, firmly injuncted to stay within sight and at the moment beachcombing amid the stinking seaweed with every appearance of absorption and enjoyment. The rest of her attention she divided between her work in China and sorting out some spreadsheets for Mairi. It was mid-morning on the Wednesday after they’d arrived, and Hope was beginning to think about coffee and biscuits.

Mairi was in the front of the shop, minding the counter, chatting to the occasional customer, and knitting ruffled scarves at an astonishing speed from native wool. The heathery perfumes of soaps and unguents pervaded the whole shop, as did background music of generic Celtic sound, on endless shuffle.

For the first time in months, Hope felt relaxed and at peace with herself and the world. Hugh had just the previous day started work on the same site as Nigel, way up in the hills above the synthetic woodlands, partly doing basic stuff like removing bolts with a powered spanner, and partly the more complicated and delicate job of disconnecting and dismantling the turbines. He’d come back tired that evening, but with an outdoor glow, and in a cheerful mood.

The phone rang. Hope tapped her ear lobe. ‘Yes?’

‘Hello? Am I speaking to Hope Morrison?’