She waved her arms as if pulling down a rope.
‘Ah!’ she said, after a few minutes. ‘I think I’ve found just the thing.’
The sky was brightening in the east as Geena set off from Uxbridge, leaving Liam for once to sleep later than her, and the sun was well up over the factories and office towers of the blocky Hayes horizon and melting the overnight frost when she arrived at SynBioTech just before six. No one was about. Her glasses – on for the code, off for the retinal scan – got her into the building, the lift and the lab. Joe arrived just as she had the coffee going.
‘Good morning, Geena.’ He looked around, grinning. ‘It feels funny having the place to ourselves, eh?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Coffee?’
‘Oh, very welcome indeed,’ said Joe. He took his mug to the central table. ‘Now, what was it you wanted to check?’
Geena put on her glasses and sat down beside him.
‘A mutation in RHO. Undocumented, but no apparent deleterious effects in, uh, the phenotypes.’
He shot her a look under his black brows.
‘I won’t ask how you know about the phenotypes.’
‘Wise move,’ said Geena. ‘Better you don’t know.’
Joe laughed. ‘We both know that doesn’t matter… Very well, patch it across.’
Geena waved hands and waggled fingers and blinked. The seaweed tangle of the virtual gene popped into existence above the table. Joe reached forward and rolled it around, this way and that.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘That’s the mutation locus. Now let’s see what protein it codes for.’
Molecules of RNA did their thing, and the cascade began. Geena had seen this many times, but she was still struck by how mechanical it all was, at least in this representation, a matter of this fitting into that and bumping off the other. The protein formed.
‘Now the predictive sim,’ said Joe.
The scale changed, from molecular to structural. A sheet of crystalline opsin rippled into view, snapped into stability. Virtual wave-packets flashed down to it like sprites. Electrons – not to scale – spun off and squirmed through the molecules. A number array, incomprehensible to Geena, built up like a spreadsheet.
Joe leaned back and looked at it for a long time.
‘What?’ said Geena.
‘Interesting,’ said Joe. ‘It’s responsive to wavelengths outside the visible spectrum. It’s like… No!’ He laughed to himself. ‘It’s too silly.’
‘What?’ Geena said again.
‘Last year we worked on UV sensors. Built them up from insect visual-pigment analogues.’ He turned to her, with an upraised finger and intent frown. ‘Did you know, Geena, that there are species of insect whose eyes are most responsive to wavelengths that are not present in the spectrum of the Sun? It’s like they are adapted to life under another star.’
12. Ticking Boxes
Two weeks into May, three months into her pregnancy, Hope had her second pre-natal check-up. The appointment was at 10.30. She worked the hour after dropping Nick off – still without problems at the gate – and left the flat at ten. Though still chilly, the weather had improved since the beginning of May. No more flurries of snow. A bit of sun. She walked briskly up Stroud Green Road. The clinic was a two-storey redbrick building in a side street off Crouch Hill, overlooking the railway line. Hope went through the biometric scan at the door and into a reception area with the obligatory decor of plastic stackable chairs, beige walls tacked with children’s drawings and plaintive advice posters designed to look like children’s drawings, and a faint pine-and-lemon smell of disinfectant. She checked in at the desk and sat down by a table stacked with tattered glossy hard copy, which she turned over and flipped through one by one. She’d read more recent issues of all the magazines that interested her on her glasses, but it appeared to be the expected thing to do, and doing the expected thing seemed important in her situation. She wondered how many of the six other women waiting were doing it for the same reason. A big poster on the wall forbade, for privacy reasons, the use of glasses or hand-helds in the waiting room.
Her previous check-up had passed without incident, other than the doctor’s pointed, pained look at the gap in her monitor-ring record where she’d taken it off in the open-air café. Dr Sheila Garnett had scanned and sampled and nodded and smiled and encouraged. No doubt she was aware of the sex of the foetus, but Hope knew better than to ask: that information was embargoed until it would be too late to have a legal abortion. But everything else Dr Garnett was happy to share. The foetus was normal and the pregnancy was going fine. The only mention of the fix had been that now might be a good time to take it.
‘Mrs Morrison to see Dr Garnett.’
Hope looked up, flashed a quick smile at the other mums-tobe and headed off down the corridor. Dr Garnett’s office was small, with just about enough room for a desk, a couple of office chairs, the scanning equipment and the examination bed. And for Dr Garnett herself, a tall woman with ginger hair and a Canadian accent. She unfolded herself from her chair, loomed, and shook hands.
‘Hi, Hope. Good to see you. Feeling OK?’
‘Fine, thanks.’ Hope shrugged. ‘The morning sickness seems to be a bit less frequent.’
Garnett smiled complicitly and sat down.
‘Your monitor ring, please.’
Hope slid it off and passed it over. Garnett placed it on her hand-held and scrolled the readout, which gave a more detailed account than the automatic log the device transmitted.
‘All looks fine,’ she said. ‘And you’ve been keeping it on all the time.’ She handed back the ring, with a half-smile and raised eyebrows. ‘Let’s keep that up, shall we?’
Hope nodded.
‘No need for a scan this time,’ Garnett said. She tapped at the screen a few times, ticking boxes. ‘Just one more thing, Hope.’
‘Yes?’ Hope knew what was coming.
‘I see you haven’t taken the fix yet. Time’s getting on, you know.’
‘If you look at Fiona’s – Mrs Donnelly, the health visitor’s – report, you’ll see what I have to say about that.’
‘I have looked, of course,’ Garnett said, frowning down at her screen. ‘It’s all here.’ She looked up. ‘I was rather hoping you’d changed your mind.’
Hope shook her head.
‘Well,’ said Garnett, ‘that puts me in rather an awkward position, I’m afraid. If I sign off this visit without an agreement with you about the fix – just an agreement in principle, just ticking the box saying you’ve agreed; you don’t have to do it right away – the report gets copied to Social Services, automatically. And just as automatically, you become a case. Now, I know you’re willing to take that consequence, and I see that Fiona’s gone through everything with you, all those options you’ve refused to take. I won’t go through it all again. But…’
She leaned forward and reached out open hands, pleading. ‘This time I’m asking you for my sake, I’ll be quite honest about it. If this goes through as it stands, without that one little tick, my insurance premiums go up because of the added risk to the foetus, and I can say goodbye to my quarterly bonus. Apart from this, you know, my record’s perfect. Would you really want to spoil that for me?’
‘Why should your premiums go up,’ Hope demanded, cutting across the appeal, ‘when your own scans and so on show the baby – the foetus – is completely healthy anyway?’