Ken MacLeod - Intrusion

The speaker sounded Indian.

‘Yes,’ Hope said warily.

‘Very good, Mrs Morrison. My name is Joe, and I wish to speak with you urgently on a matter of considerable import—’

Hope rang off. Jeez. Hadn’t had one of these for years. Thought they’d all been call-screened to extinction. Now she’d have to update her phone-spam blocker, if she could ever find it on the menu.

The phone rang again. Same number.

‘If you don’t—’ Hope began.

‘Excuse me,’ said a new voice, female, London-accented. ‘Sorry about that. We’re not a call centre. Joe really is called Joe – he just has his own form of courtesy, and it’s easily mistaken for the usual spam intro. My name is Geena Fernandez. I spoke to your husband last week, and—’

‘Oh,’ said Hope. ‘You. I’ve blocked you from calling me.’

‘I know, Mrs Morrison, that’s why I asked Joe to call you on his phone. Please let me explain, it won’t take long.’

Hope stood up and stepped to the window, checking on Nick. He was squatting beside a tidal pool, arm in to the elbow. The sun shone on the water, making the pool as bright and bottomless as the loch.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘What is it now?’

‘Mrs Morrison, do you know about tachyons?’

‘ Of course I know about tachyons,’ Hope snapped, using the irritation in her voice to cover her surprise. ‘ And I know about rhodopsin, thank you very much.’

There was a pause of about two seconds. Hope smirked to herself.

‘So you know about the connection between them?’ Geena asked.

‘I read. I’ve made my own speculations.’

‘Ah!’ Geena sounded relieved. ‘Well, now it’s more than speculation. Let me put Joe on for a moment.’

The male voice came back. Hope listened as Joe outlined his professional background and described his experiment, as he called it. She tried to overcome the prejudice, acquired in childhood and early teens, that anyone on the phone with an Indian or similar accent, describing something complicated, was trying to scam you.

‘It’s a simulation!’ she objected, when he’d finished.

‘Mrs Morrison,’ he said, in a tired tone, ‘yes, it is a simulation, but it’s a very accurate one, using the same methods as are used all the time to make new products, day in and day out.’

‘All right. Put your friend back on.’

Hope slid open the double-glazed doors and stepped out and closed them behind her. The seaweed smell assailed her, then retreated as her nasal receptors became saturated, leaving nothing to smell but the clean fresh breeze off the sea. The tide was coming in, covering the live seaweed, which smelled quite inoffensive, but it wouldn’t reach the rotting seaweed at the top of the shore except in a spring tide and a storm; and that would no doubt leave more dead seaweed heaped up, to rot down in its turn. No vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.

‘Me again,’ said Geena, in a bright tone.

‘Right, Ms, uh, Fernandez. Now, listen to me. I’m sure you mean well, and your friend has put in a lot of work, but you haven’t told me anything I hadn’t already figured out for myself. I know what you said to Hugh, and I have a pretty good idea what he said to you. Let me tell you myself, straight out: neither of us has any interest at all in us or our child becoming an object of scientific attention. Not to mention media attention. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, yes, of course, Mrs Morrison, but what I’m not sure you understand is that this gives you a perfect legal ground for not—’

‘Oh God,’ Hope groaned. ‘I am so fucking bored with hearing this. I’m not scrabbling around for any kind of get-out, you know. I just want to be left alone to make up my own mind, and for my decision to be respected just because it is my own fucking decision , OK?’

‘OK,’ said Geena, sounding surprised and relieved. ‘That’s fine, that’s all right. I just wanted to make sure.’

‘Thank you,’ said Hope. ‘Goodbye.’

She caught the sound of Geena saying ‘Bye!’ just before she rang off. She blinked up the number of the phone that had been used to call her, and blocked it.

As soon as she had put the block in place, however, she regretted it and at the same time realised its futility. There was an unlimited number of other phones, after all, which any of these three people – Maya, Geena and Joe – could use to contact her. She could restrict incoming calls to her known contacts, but that risked missing important calls, or friends whose number had changed. That was the futility. On the other hand, blocking these particular phones would at least show she wasn’t in regular communication with the supposed terrorist suspect Geena, and the libertarian loose cannon Maya, and this Asian guy who was evidently a friend of Geena’s.

The regret came from something else. She might be missing out on something wonderful, as well as spurning a genuine offer of help. Well, she was definitely doing the latter, though how significant that was depended on the former. The more she thought about it, the more uncertain she felt. Was it really so awful, being an object of scientific attention? Even for the kid? There was no question of anything physically intrusive – their genetic samples, after all, were already taken. Blood spots on the Guthrie cards, genome sequence in the solid-state storage of computers. For her and for Hugh and Nick, no more would be involved, surely, than a few parapsychology experiments, whose inconclusive and disputable character was almost spookily predictable. Academic ethics would ensure the anonymity of the subjects. Nick needn’t even know what it was all about. Better that he didn’t, actually, what with the double-blind protocol and all that.

And wouldn’t it be wonderful, in a way, to find that you or your child had a wild talent?

Well, yes, but Hope knew that this sort of thing was evasive, anecdotal, it slipped through your fingers like water. Most likely because there was nothing there in the first place. It was all nonsense.

She slid the patio doors open a fraction, stuck her head through and called to Mairi that she was taking a short walk. An indistinct but positive-sounding reply floated back, as if carried on the shop’s soapy smell. She made her way across the mossy strip of lawn behind the shop, stepped over a token fence and then took a larger step across the strand-line seaweed and on to the stony beach. The shop was near the end of the village, just past the church and before the bridge where the road turned off to Stornoway or continued up the glen. Nick had moved a little farther along towards the bridge and the old pier.

He stood close to the edge of the sea, on a boulder, gazing intently down at the encroaching margin of incoming tide, now about a metre away. Hope placed her feet carefully on stone after stone amid the shingle, approaching him as stealthily as the tide. As she came within a couple of metres of him, she heard him talking.

‘It’s like watching the big hand of a clock, if you look at it long enough you can see it moving, but it’s faster than that.’

He paused, and after a moment went on: ‘A clock is round and has two hands, except they’re not really hands, they’re more like thin sticks, coming out of the middle, and the little hand moves round two times in a day and the big hand moves around one time in an hour, and that way you can tell the time any time of the day.’

‘But you can’t always see the sun.’

‘Oh, right!’

It was like listening to someone talking on the phone. No, not quite, Hope thought. It was like hearing only one side of a conversation. She stopped and stood still, balanced precariously on two round slippery stones, one foot on each.