No. No rational reason whatsoever. She really should get a grip on herself.
On top of everything else, there was now a diffuse pain in her midriff, which had been growing for half an hour and was now becoming difficult to ignore. Perhaps she was going down with something, and that was why she felt so unaccountably depressed and listless and why her stomach hurt. She was about to bestir herself to look up summer-flu symptoms when she heard behind her an apologetic cough.
She turned, almost falling off her stool, and saw Joe standing a few paces away, clutching a pad and looking at her with sympathy and concern. The lab was otherwise empty, the work table littered with sandwich containers and cardboard cups lipped with drying soup.
‘Are you all right?’ Joe asked.
‘Yes, I’m fine, thanks,’ Geena said.
‘You don’t look fine.’
‘Oh!’ Geena gave a shaky laugh. ‘I missed lunchtime, because I was so wrapped up in… my thoughts, and I’m hungry – that’s what’s the matter with me.’
‘Oh,’ said Joe. ‘In that case, would it not be a good idea to go to the canteen? Everyone else has had their lunch and gone out to catch the sun.’
‘Why didn’t they invite me?’
Now she was feeling paranoid, as well as depressed and (now that the pain had been identified, thankfully) absolutely starving.
‘You seemed preoccupied, and the guys thought it best—’
‘They discussed this?’
‘Yes,’ said Joe.
‘Jeez.’ Geena stood up. ‘I must have been, as you say, preoccupied. Let’s go.’
The canteen was still busy, clattering with cutlery and abuzz with talk. Geena chose a sandwich and soup, Joe a slice of meat with two veg. He noticed her puzzled look.
‘Synthetic,’ he said.
Glancing at the plate, she saw that the slice had a most unnatural pattern, an intricate imbrication of different colours and textures, like a cross-section through a vertebrate thorax.
‘Hmm,’ said Geena. She knew vegans – Maya for one – who wouldn’t eat synthetic meat, because… well, there was an animal cell somewhere in its ancestry, and anyway it was cheating. Evidently Joe’s (presumed) Buddhism drew different lines.
‘I have a question,’ he said, after they’d found a vacant table and sat down facing each other. ‘Have you had any results with… the phenotype of that interesting gene?’
Geena shook her head, munching. She swallowed and said: ‘Well, kind of. He was aggressively uninterested. Insisted he didn’t have anything unusual about his vision. Then he blurted out that the gene must be recessive.’
Joe carefully cut a square inch of synthetic meat and slid it around in gravy.
‘How would he know that?’
‘He seemed to assume it was connected with a superstition some people in the north of this country have about, well, a hereditary capacity for, uh, precognition and other so-called psychic powers.’
Geena felt a little embarrassed even talking about it.
‘That’s interesting,’ said Joe. ‘I have something to show you. Perhaps after we have eaten.’
To her surprise, he didn’t take her back to the lab to show her. Instead, over coffee, he took out his pad and doodled with a fingertip.
‘Take a look.’
She put on her glasses and made the connection. It was the same sim as he’d run before, but this time, instead of showing a response to photons, a different sequence took place. A shimmering wave propagated up through the opsin sheet, and in turn sparked an expanding shower of photons. Almost but not quite at the same moment, a massive particle slammed through the display, in a downward direction.
‘What’s going on here?’ Geena asked.
‘A few months ago,’ said Joe, ‘there was a piece about tachyon detection in a rhodopsin suspension. Some contested results at CERN…’
‘I remember,’ said Geena. ‘In The Economist, wasn’t it? I caught it in the trawl.’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Joe. ‘After our discussion last week I ran some searches on any recent work on rhodopsin, and came across the same thing. Dug up the original paper – it has to do with cosmic rays – you know, high-velocity particles, from—’
Geena nodded. ‘I know what cosmic rays are.’
Joe smiled. ‘The tachyons scatter before the charged particle that causes them arrives… well, that’s one way of looking at it. Anyway, I ran a sim on the same event, but using the actual functioning rhodopsin in the retina, and… that’s the result. You only get it, though, with your mutant rhodopsin.’
‘So how did they get it at CERN? Were they using mutant rhodopsin?’
Joe shook his head. ‘No, they were using a suspension of normal rhodopsin. I guess it must be the physical arrangement that makes the difference – the molecules of normal rhodopsin would be much farther apart.’
He leaned back and sipped coffee. ‘The trouble is, of course, that the results are contested, haven’t been replicated, there’s a serious doubt that they detected tachyons in the first place… you know how it is.’
Geena grinned mischievously. ‘You mean, the science hasn’t been socially constructed?’
‘That is one way of putting it,’ said Joe. ‘Not the way I would.’
‘It’s all right, I’m just teasing. What’s the connection with what we’ve been talking about?’
‘Tachyons,’ said Joe, ‘move faster than light. Which means they move backwards in time.’
He said this with the sort of self-satisfied expression Geena was all too used to seeing from the guys when they thought they’d given her an explanation.
‘Yes? And?’
‘It could be a physical basis for precognition.’
Geena looked away, looked around. The canteen was emptying. Its big windows showed the strip of green grass in the sunlight outside, and the wall, and the blue sky above it. The whole conversation seemed utterly unreal.
‘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.’