Authors: Ken MacLeod
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.
‘Morning, Geena,’ he said, rubbing his hands together. ‘I’ll get the coffee on. Oh, it is on. Thanks.’
He said that every morning, without fail. Ten minutes later, in came slender, smart-suited Michael Dombrowski, lank brown hair flopping across a wide brow. He hailed her and grabbed a coffee almost with the same sweep of the arm. Geena got on best with him, ever since they’d discovered a shared taste in filthy anti-clerical jokes. A few minutes after eight, Sanjay Gupta strolled in, flashing her a smile from his Bollywood good looks. Joseph Goonwardeene, the youngest, smaller even than Geena, almost as dark-skinned as she and probably twice as bright as any of them, sidled in after him. He was the only one who wasn’t English-born and didn’t have a west London accent. Still shy after all those months he’d worked here, he barely glanced at Geena, mumbled something to Brian and sat down as if in a hurry to log on.
‘Hi, Joe,’ Geena said, hoping to get him out of it.
His right shoulder twitched. Geena shrugged, swivelled her
seat and looked again at the trawl. Then she slowly spun the seat back around, still with her glasses on, sipped coffee and watched the first interactions of the day.
The SynBioTech Structural Product Research and Development Simulation Testing Environment Room Number 3, aka the dry lab, was not a big room. Its main attraction was that it had windows, overlooking the terraced cottages of Dawley Road and with a fine view of the railway line, Hayes and Harlington station, and the canal. Overhead lighting came from the undersides of broad, inch-deep suspended aquaria within which genetically modified bacteria turned cellulose into luminescence, an advertising tour de force for a product that had never cleared quite enough of the regulatory hurdles to ever need advertising. Beneath the windows a metre-deep Formica-topped shelf ran the length of the room, and the far corner of that made up Geena’s workstation. The rest of the broad shelf supported the kettle, coffee jars, and mugs, as well as thrown jackets and coats, bits of electronic equipment in various stages of assembly or dismantlement, and stacks of paper.
The centre of the room, and indeed most of the floor space, was occupied by a Formica-topped rectangular table, about the size of a dinner table, around which perhaps six people could comfortably fit, and which gave barely enough elbow- and sprawl-room to the four engineers who sat around it. Geena had access to their shared workspace, and to all but their most personal comms. Management had access to everything, so nothing that Geena saw could make the guys self-conscious in
that respect; and management had long since come to accept that what people like engineers did on the job was part of the job – within reason, and so long as it didn’t include work on the side, gambling, accessing porn, talking to head-hunters, or building bombs. General idle surfing and chatting – which was usually work-relevant anyway – was accepted as necessary mental down time.
Seen through glasses, what looked like a metre-wide tangle of glistening, pulsing offal hung above the table like some obscene balloon: a realistic representation of cellular machinery on a scale where water molecules appeared as solid and pervasive as polystyrene packaging. Around this slowly writhing mass orbited phantom sheets of text and diagrams. Most of the work was done with calculations that rippled through the sheets. Now and again someone might reach in and click an atom into a different place. In response to these calculations or manual adjustments the molecular mess would squirm into a new shape.
Underneath the 3D diagram the men’s hands moved between actual coffee mugs or pen-and-paper notes to flicking through the virtual pages of newspapers or (in Joe’s case) Science Updates. At 8.25 Brian’s
Daily Mail
disappeared and its place was taken by one of the worksheets; and one by one Mike, Sanjay and Joe joined in. They were modifying the gene expression for lignin in a new strain of new wood. The gene itself was already artificial, having been reverse-engineered and optimised from the original stretch of plant DNA, but the effects of further modification were by no means entirely predictable in advance. This meant repeated cycles of one-step
changes and virtual testing: something altogether more crude and empirical than the high-level definition of synthetic biology seemed to imply, and that at other levels – certainly in comparison with the shotgun methods of early genetic engineering – it did indeed deliver.
Geena’s research interest focused on the subtle changes in everyday practice and self-understanding this form of activity imposed on the engineers. In some respects the guys in this drylab team were becoming more like wet-lab scientists and field researchers; in others, more like programmers had been in the era – the glory days, as the old hands called that time, with a nostalgic backward glance to their youth in the nineties or earlier – when computers had become cheap and fast enough to make trial-and-error an efficient style of software development, and before structured programming and formal verification had become standard practice: before rigour had become de rigueur. The working title of her thesis was
Convergent agent-constitutive discursive practices in emergent technological networks: the case of a dry-lab synthetic biology team
, and the work fascinated her, though she could well see that it might not fascinate anyone else.
What it was all for – what interest, other than her own in getting a PhD, her research served – was for Geena a matter of idle and infrequent speculation. The Economic and Social Research Council was willing to sponsor it, and her tutor at Brunel, Dr Ahmed Estraguel, was willing to supervise it. That was enough to be going on with. The question of what institutional and economic and political interests actually benefited
from social science research into science was itself a small but thriving area of social science research, and the question of who benefited from
that
research was a smaller area still. The one researcher who had taken the next logical step and investigated who benefited from research into research into research into research had concluded that the only beneficiary of his research was himself, a result so significant that its publication had ensured him a professorship at the University of Edinburgh.
Around 11.00 Geena got a message on her glasses from her friend Maya, who lived in Hayes and who worked out of an office in Station Road. As soon as she saw it, she had a bright idea, inspired by a morning’s subconscious pondering over the predicament of Hope Morrison. She set up an al fresco lunch with Maya down by the canal for 12.30.
At 12.15 she pulled on her coat, nodded to the guys, and went out. Geena usually ate lunch alone in the employee restaurant – the engineers all took in packed lunches, and she needed only the occasional sample of their lunch time conversations to keep track of the discursive practices by which they constituted themselves. This time, she bought two insulated cups of take-out carrot soup and two baguette sandwiches. The bread roll for Maya was listed as ‘vegan filled’, which amused Geena as she left. Her smile broadened as she thought how good it would be to take advantage of the first blink of sun in a month by going for a walk.