Ken MacLeod - Intrusion

And now here he was, sawing new wood to size. Joinery. A posh, soft, middle-class job. That was just the way of it, all over the bloody world. When Ashid the plasterer knocked off for a break and came in with coffee, he – as nearly always – talked about his PhD in economics. He had a grudge that he deserved better.

At least you got as far as a fucking PhD, Hugh thought, wiping the back of his wrist across his mouth. What he said was: ‘Things will pick up.’

Ashid laughed. ‘This is things picking up.’

Hope left the carton containing the fix on the table all morning, ignoring it while she worked. Every so often she’d take off her glasses and look at it. When she stopped for lunch, she reached over, picked up the packet, and opened it. Inside were a folded leaflet and a plastic and foil card with a single bubble about a centimetre long. She turned it over in her hands. The bubble was transparent. The fix itself was a grey, almost metallic-looking capsule that tapered from the middle to two blunt ends. Like a fishing weight. A magic bullet. After a while she pushed the leaflet and the card with the fix back in the box.

She didn’t want to leave this lying around, or even in the medicine cabinet. She wanted it out of her sight. She didn’t want to leave it where Hugh might come across it. She walked through to the hall, stepped into the cupboard, stood on tiptoes, stretched, and placed the carton on the edge of the high shelf. Then she gave it a quick tap with her hand and sent it skittering to the back, against the wall.

On Friday the wind shifted and the clouds cleared away. Hope dropped off Nick and picked her way in her Mucks through slush over tapes of ice, along East West Road to Stroud Green Road to the Tesco, enjoying the sunshine and the clean cold air. When she paused, as she sometimes had to, to plot a route that wouldn’t land her on her butt or her back, she looked up. The sky was a pale blue, and if she looked long enough she could see tiny dancing sparkles, particles of light. Orgone energy, she thought, grinning to herself at the fancy. She blinked, and when she looked down found herself dazzled by the sunlight off the remaining white snow on the pavements. By luck she had her work glasses with her – she’d snatched up the case and stuck it in her cagoule pocket in a moment of irritation when Nick’s hand crept towards the forbidden gadget once too often – and she slipped them on.

Instantly the street changed. Everything was tagged: houses with their occupiers, floor by floor; vehicles with their drivers’ names, shops with advertisements and reviews and supply chains, pedestrians with their IDs. Irritated, Hope blinked away the app. As she walked around Tesco similar tags kept popping up again. She was amused by the food miles and carbon counts – how on earth had these apps hung around? – but the relevant ones were no less annoying, nagging and wheedling, and in the end she just put the glasses away until she’d finished her shopping. At the checkout she put them back on to have a look at the news and mags. She selected The Economist , Marie Claire and Psychologies , and added the downloads to her tab as she bagged the groceries.

She lugged the bags home, and left the glasses firmly on the table until she’d made the beds and washed up the breakfast things. Then she made a coffee, cast off her apron and sat back, glasses on, for a half-hour of alternating self-indulgence and self-improvement. The former involved scoping out the spring fashions and wincing at their prices. The latter required skimming the serious articles. Something was wrong with bananas. Scientists at CERN had detected tachyon effects in a suspension of rhodopsin derivatives. The results were disputed. Brazil was hot. The Naxals had cooked up some kit that countered rust spray. There were ten good ways to have sex. The two women’s mags had nothing about the nature kids issue, but The Economist did. Two columns of legal reasoning about the Kasrani case argued that the family court’s decision was perverse, and should and most likely would be overturned on appeal. Hope found this so encouraging that she posted the link to ParentsNet before starting work.

The science bit, whose name was Geena – officially Evangelina – Fernandez (a name very useful to have on your ID card, as was the cross on the silver chain around her neck, if your skin was as dark and hair as black as hers, and especially useful when the cops were looking for Naxals, as they usually were when they stopped her in the street), read the same Economist article with her first coffee and paracetamol of the day. The article had been snagged by the Institute for Science Studies’ overnight keyword trawl. The trawl was so undiscriminating that it had hooked her own piece in Memo a couple of days earlier, in among the haul from Nature and PLoS and the TLS and the Journal of Synthetic Biology . Under the Economist article was a list of links to it, close to the top of which – Geena was intrigued to see – was the root of a long thread on ParentsNet, posted by one Hope Morrison. Geena summoned databases to her glasses, and saw that Mrs Morrison was the mother of a nature kid, not registered as a conscience exemption, and pregnant again.

Interesting, Geena thought. The Kasrani couple, although their dispute had given her the hook for her own article, had struck her as unlikely to last long as a synecdoche for the issue. It was too entangled with other matters: family law, immigration, even Iran, a country whose militant secularism and indeed militant everything made relations with it awkward even for the US, let alone Britain. Whereas Morrison’s case – if it ever became a case – had a test-tube simplicity. The variable was isolated, the question clear.

The question, as it self-assembled in Geena’s brain, was not one about rights. Rights, to Geena as to those who had taught her, were an emergent phenomenon of social practices, which themselves arose out of certain material requirements, which… but you know how it goes. No, the question was: is it in the interests of society (of all or most of the individuals in society, if you like) to permit a mother to risk the health of her future child and that of other children without giving any justification in terms of a strongly held belief?

It did not occur to Geena to question whether permitting someone to do such things with such a justification was in the interests of society. Society had already learned its lesson in that respect. Those with strongly held beliefs were best left to act them out, unless the consequences of that action were worse than those of the actions their commitment, if interfered with, was likely to make them commit. This was understood. The lesson had been driven into the flesh of the body politic like nails from a well-packed rucksack bomb. In social science, of course, that lesson could be questioned, could itself be interrogated. But – context was everything. One cannot run an experiment by changing every variable at once. In any case, that aspect of the question was outside Geena’s field. Non-professionally, in her personal life, she had every reason to question it, and often did. Professionally, in her work, she put it to one side.

Ah yes, her work. Time to be getting on with that. The engineers were coming in. The guys, the lads. Keeping her glasses on as if reading, she glanced up and nodded and smiled at each, and surreptitiously made notes on their demeanour and time of arrival.

Brian Harvey arrived first, at 7.50. Appropriate, for the team leader. Late thirties, dark brush of hair, black stubble on his chin no matter what the time of day. He wore a suit whose jacket he shrugged off quickly, to expose the full eye-watering glare of the yellow and green diamond tile pattern on a woollen sleeveless jumper with two burnt holes near the midriff.