With her good arm, Kirsten begins to touch Seth’s scalp. At first they both flinch at the feeling: it’s too intimate an act for strangers. But we’re not strangers, they both tell themselves. A slight buzz remains where they connect.
‘So, what made you get into biopunking?’ asks Kirsten. He knows she’s trying to distract him and feels like telling her to just get on with it; he’s not a child. He feels the cold blade against his skin.
‘In high school I saw a YouTube video of the LSD experiments they did on British soldiers in the early 60s. It’s hilarious. Ever see those?’
Kirsten is concentrating too much to answer but the Lab Man starts giggling.
‘I’ve seen it, I’ve seen it,’ he smiles, nodding at them, then immediately looks away. ‘LSD-25,’ he says, ‘Acid. Soldiers be trippin’.’
Seth smiles, despite himself. ‘They were considering using it as part of their chemical warfare, to incapacitate the enemy, so they tried it out on the men. They go from these upright marching men with machine guns to complete jokers. They can’t read the map and get lost even though the hill they need to find is right in front of them. They just walk around in circles and hose themselves. One guy climbs a tree to feed the birds.’
Kirsten finds the small thickening and quickly excises it, squeezing the chip out. Seth doesn’t flinch; his only movement is to spin his ring. It’s a much neater procedure than her own was.
‘The troop commander eventually gives up, and falls on the floor laughing.’
After applying pressure to stem the bleeding she sprays it and covers it with the extra plaster she had brought with her. Rinses the chip under the tap and hands it to Seth, who stares at it.
I didn’t believe it until I saw mine, either, she thinks.
‘It was so powerful. A simple drug changed men trained to kill into fools. Affectionate fools. Imagine the lives that could have been spared in our wars. It kind of hit me in the face. That’s what made me want to become a chemical engineer.’ He hands it over to the Lab Man, who hesitates before taking it. He holds it up to the light, taps its glass capsule with his fingernail, then holds it close to his eye, looking at it through a magnifying glass.
‘Very scientific methods,’ murmurs Seth in Kirsten’s ear, causing her to almost choke on the last bite of her sandwich. He takes a swig of whisky and then offers it to her. She doesn’t wipe the mouth of the bottle: they are double-blood-siblings now.
The Lab Man puts the chip on the tiled floor and steps on it. It doesn’t break, so he steps on it again, this time putting more weight on it, and still it doesn’t break.
‘Very interesting,’ he says, causing Seth to snuffle and Kirsten to laugh out loud. He turns around, unsure of why they are laughing, then turns back to the chip. ‘Superglass,’ he mumbles. ‘Super. Glass. Hmm.’
‘Why is that interesting?’ asks Kirsten.
‘Because superglass was only put on the market in 2019,’ says Seth.
‘Yet I’d guess that the chip itself,’ says the man, ‘was created in the early 90s. But tracking biochips were only invented in 2007, so this isn’t making sense. It’s not making sense at all.’
‘It must be, like, an early prototype,’ says Seth. ‘The guys who made it were obviously far ahead of the crowd, but didn’t share it. Technology wasn’t as open-source back then.’
‘There is a code on here,’ the Lab Man says, ‘which could link back to the manufacturer.’ He scans in the miniature barcode on the chip and reads out the numbers. Kirsten knows the colours by heart now, recognises Seth’s numbers from the list.
‘Made by… GeniX, it says.’
The Lab Man hands the chip back to Seth.
‘Excuse me,’ Seth says, holding up the chip, ‘I need to go to the little boys’ room.’ Within a moment of him leaving they hear the gush of water through pipes in the wall. Good riddance, thinks Kirsten.
Seth comes back, and the flower girl sidles in.
‘I’ve evacuated the office, and we now have security outside. Hopefully they’ll be able to stop anyone from coming in.’
She gives Seth a hard look. There is something close to an apology in his eyes.
‘I’ll let you know the results as they come in,’ she says, stepping aside so that they can leave. They nod at the Lab Man and make their way outside, where there are still many noon-drunk creeps wandering around on the chunky pavements, enjoying the music and the open air. Seth and Kirsten survey the faces of the people around them. A man leaning against a broken algaetree streetlight acknowledges them with the slightest movement of his head: Kirsten hopes that he is the security post.
A cab rolls to a stop in front of them, and the leaning man motions for them to get in. They hesitate, but then the driver flashes a card at them: a green rabbit. It happens so quickly that Kirsten wonders briefly if she had imagined it.
They climb inside, and Seth gives the driver the address of TommyKnockers. Kirsten feels every bump of the drive; every pothole sends more blue sparks flying up her arm. She needs to talk to distract herself from the pain.
‘Why the green bunny?’ she asks. ‘Seems a bit, I don’t know, too fun and quirky for what you guys do.’
‘No science journals lurking in your house, I can tell.’
‘You don’t have to be snarky. I prefer pictures. It doesn’t make me dumb. It’s how I see the world – in thousands and thousands of photos. Pictures fly at my brain all the time as if I’m some kind of five dimensional dual projector. From reality, hyper-memory, from my senses… books are just too much of an assault… you wouldn’t want to be in my head.’
‘Mine neither,’ says Seth. ‘I see formulae and patterns and equations in everything. Sounds like a similar affliction.’
We’re similar, in some ways, he thinks.
‘We’re similar,’ she says, ‘of course we are. We’re twins.’ It sounds strange to say it out loud. He finds it strange to hear it.
‘Ever heard of the Fibonacci sequence? The Golden Ratio?’ he asks.
‘Of course. It’s that pattern that keeps appearing in nature. And in beautiful things. Didn’t know the Fibonacci part.’
‘He was a mathematician. He discovered it by theoretically breeding rabbits.’
‘Theoretically breeding? That doesn’t sound like much fun.’
‘I don’t want to bore you.’
The nerves in Kirsten’s broken arm hum.
‘Tell me. I’m interested.’
‘So in theory you’d start with one pair of baby rabbits. When they mature at two months, they have their own pair of baby rabbits. So it’s just one pair for the first and second month, then an additional pair in the third month. How many pairs? 0, 1, 1, 2. Then the parents have another pair. 3. By then, the first babies are mature enough to breed, and they have a pair, along with the parents. 5. Then 8, 13, 21, 34, 55… etc. In a year you’ll have 144 rabbits.’
‘So you just add the number to the number before it to get the next number.’
‘If you wanted to suck all the beauty out of the equation then yes, I guess you could say that. So the sequence is fn = fn-1+fn-2 where n>3 or n=3’
‘Okay, you just lost me.’
‘It’s not important, I get carried away. The cool thing is that the ratio plays itself out in nature. Pinecones, pineapples, sunflowers, petals, the human body, DNA molecules. Like, a double helix is 21 angstroms wide and 34 long in each cycle. It’s also in lots of different algorithms. So, handy in… software and stuff.’
‘Hacking?’
‘In theory.’