Authors: William Mitchell
“I do,” Max said. And that’s exactly how we were meant to read it, he thought.
“Are you sure you can’t go?” she said.
How presumptuous are these people? Max thought. How presumptuous to send this to Gillian? Do they know how much we want children? Is that why they’re doing it?
“This thing they’re planning, this job they’re bringing people in on,” he said. “I’ve got some pretty serious doubts about what they’re doing. I’m not sure getting involved would be a good idea.”
“You think it might not work? That doesn’t stop you signing up if there are benefits like this though, does it?”
“I’m not doubting it’ll work, quite the opposite. It’s what happens after that. I think they’re doing something that might get out of hand, out of control.”
Her expression changed at that point, hope turning to hurt and disappointment. “Max, this could be the best thing that ever happened to us, and you’re saying no because the job sounds like a bad career move? How can you do that?”
He realised how it must have sounded to her. He rolled over and put his arm round her, but she didn’t respond.
“I can’t tell you what they’re doing,” he said, aware of the need to choose his words carefully, “but imagine if someone said they were going to let a new virus loose and just cross their fingers that it didn’t mutate: that’s how much of a bad idea it is.”
Gillian was just looking at the ceiling. “If it was that dangerous then it would be illegal. And anyway, if you think it’s so stupid, why not go and make sure they do it right?”
Max all but jumped; Victor had said almost the exact same thing. “I don’t know Gillian, my gut feeling is to say no. I’ve had a bad feeling about it ever since that meeting.”
“And you’re willing to take away our chance of having children based on a gut feeling?”
Again the consequences of saying no had been brought home to him. He marvelled at how effectively he’d been railroaded; just minutes ago he’d been dead set against going, and now, with this one message, that choice would bring more pain to him and Gillian than he could imagine.
He thought about the job again, about the scale of the project and the likely consequences. Could copying be carried out flawlessly, time after time after time? Almost certainly yes, but to do those replications in parallel, with a population in the millions? How many opportunities for error did that make? And how bad could they be? A sudden image filled his mind, inappropriately comedic, of Victor’s machines swimming round endlessly until there was nothing left of the sea except distilled water and a few boulders.
“I’ll think about it,” he said.
* * *
Max went into work the day after he and Gillian got back. He knew Indira wanted to see him to talk about the ESOS job, and
he knew he had more preparations to make for the GRACE trip, but neither of those was at the top of his list. Instead he went straight to the lab block where John Olson was waiting.
“Well,” Max said, as soon as he was through the door. “Where are these new arrivals of yours?”
“I didn’t think you’d be able to stay away,” John said, smiling. “Come with me, I’ll show you where they are.”
They left John’s office, and went down to one of the labs in the basement. “It’s a pity you picked this time to leave,” John said as they walked. “If you weren’t Gracing the South Pacific with your presence this project would have you written all over it.”
“Tell me about it. It’s been too long since I did any real research.”
John nodded. “Ever since the Australians started digging this stuff up we knew we had to get our hands on some of it. Sure you don’t want to cancel the Chile trip and stick around?”
Max smiled thinly. “You never know.”
They got to the lab and John led them inside, stopping at one of the benches that lined the room. “Right, here we are,” he said.
In front of Max, only just unpacked from the protective case in which they’d arrived, was a pile of rocks. Max walked over to the lab bench and picked one of them up in one hand. It was about the size of a house brick, dull, grey, and completely nondescript in shape. If it wasn’t for what they knew about its origins on the muddy seafloor of an ancient ocean, it wouldn’t have been worth a second look. However its age, and the stunning level of preservation of the bacterial fossils inside it, made it easily the earliest example ever found of recognisable terrestrial life. How close to the beginning it really was, and what form that mysterious first ancestor may have taken, were questions that John and his colleagues were about to try and answer.
“How much material have they got now?” Max said.
“About twenty tonnes so far, with bacterial fossils all the way through. But it’s the diversity that’s really got people worked up.
They’re too varied for something this old. I mean
way
too varied.”
“How accurately do we know their age?”
“Almost four billion years. It’s the closest thing to the beginning we’ve ever seen.”
“Yeah, and the closest we’re ever likely to see. So what are you going to do next?”
“Radiological scans first, then we’ll start layering them and loading them into the ‘scope.’”
“Well, just make sure you tell me first if you find anything.”
“Of course I will.”
* * *
Max went home after that, going in through the garden entrance where he knew he’d find Gillian. She was in the small workshop she used as a studio, doing the roughing-in for a forest background on one of her latest pieces. Max drew up a stool and perched off to the side where he wouldn’t get in her eye line.
“So you’ve seen your lumps of rock then?” she said, a sarcastic edge to her voice. “We’ve got more out there in the flowerbeds if you’re really interested?” That had pretty much been her tone ever since Max had said no to ESOS: subdued rather than angry, distracted rather than argumentative, her rarely-seen cynical side coming to the fore. He knew she still wished he’d said yes, as much as he knew she understood his reasons for saying no.
“Yeah, I’ve seen them,” Max said. “It looks like they’ve got some interesting times ahead of them.”
“Do you wish you were there too?”
“Maybe. I seem to have no shortage of projects I could go for right now, one more choice wouldn’t hurt.”
Max was inwardly glad that his transition from evolutionary biologist to evolutionary engineer had happened so smoothly.
Even now it let him cherry pick interesting jobs from his old line of work, when time permitted.
“Did you get everything done today?” he said, watching her work.
“Pretty much,” she said. “The bigger canvases are in the gallery’s store room, they’ll be slotting the smaller ones in today and tomorrow. Friday was our last proper day. Busy though. Must have had fifty people come through just in the afternoon.”
“Some kind of last minute rush?”
“Maybe. Someone was trying to take pictures though, it set the detectors off. No way of telling who with that many people in there.”
“Is that even a problem if the show’s almost over?”
“It’s gallery policy. And anyway I’d prefer it if I didn’t see unauthorised prints turning up on the grid, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, I suppose. You do have to sell the things after all.”
She didn’t reply.
“Do you want a drink?” he said. “I’m going to get some juice.”
“No, Max, I’m fine.”
He got off the stool and made his way out into the garden, then in through the back of the house. And that was when he saw the envelope, sitting on the mat under the front door.
He knew what it was the moment he saw it up close, its printed address label showing the source point somewhere in rural Idaho. The location seemed a random one, almost deliberately random when compared to the previous ones, as if whoever was sending them was going out of their way to avoid any telltale patterns.
Though, until now, they’d never sent one to his home.
He listened out for Gillian, the unopened letter in his hands; she was still out there, busy on her picture. He offered silent thanks that she hadn’t got to the letter first, then looked over the outside of the envelope while he decided what to do.
He felt its weight and flexibility; there was no indication of
anything other than paper in there. He thought about taking it to the campus for the security staff to check it over, or even straight to the police, but something inside him wanted to know what it was right now, without delay.
The letter was open and unfolded in front of him before he even knew what he’d done, his hands having made the decision for him. The realisation of what it said — and the cold, dead feeling in his stomach — weren’t far behind.
January–February 2040: Atelognathus Nitoi / Dromiciops Gliroides habitat survey, Valdivian forest Protected Zone
February 15 2040: Colegio Gregorio Quinteo, Puerto Montt
February–March 2040: Rhodopis Vesper population study, Azapa Valley
April 10 2040: Colegio San Martin, Santiago
April 18–May 4 2040: Myotis Atacamensis survey
May 10 2040: Escuela Preparatoria Internacional, Antofagasta
The list continued, a comprehensive account of every research trip, every study and field assignment he’d planned, worded the same way as his own equivalent lists and records, including the school visits and Darwinist lectures he’d be fitting in between them.
There were pictures too though, of him and of Gillian, the ones of him taken in and around the campus, the ones of Gillian taken at her recent exhibition. The last of them even showed her standing next to one of her paintings, a crested caracara on a Baja California tree branch. The photographer in the crowd, the one who’d set off the detectors — they’d actually walked into the gallery and stood right next to her. They’d got that close.
The final line of the note simply read:
Three times already we’ve got close enough to kill you both. Still feel safe?
Max dropped the papers to the floor, and leant back against the doorframe for support. Who are these people? he thought, again and again. Who is doing this to us?
Then his omni rang, the office number showing in its display
strip. He answered, hands trembling.
“Max, it’s Indira, you need to be aware: we’ve had another of those letters delivered.”
She looked genuinely concerned, as she had been all the way through the ordeal.
“I’ve had one too,” Max said. “It’s about the GRACE project.”
“It sounds like the same one. Look, Max, I can’t send you to Chile now, not after this. It would be too much of a risk. I want you to take that ESOS position. I haven’t had your report on it yet but they’ve been in touch today to reiterate how much they want you. I can’t imagine you being unsuitable for the post.”
Max hadn’t given her his report because he hadn’t written it yet. He simply couldn’t think of what to say, how to take the limited amount he could tell her and boil it down to the “yes” or “no” she wanted to hear. Or the “no” he wanted to give her.
“Do I get a say?”
“You do, of course, if there’s a burning reason not to go.”
“Well, I’d be working away from home for a year, we’d have to rent the house out, I mean —”
“We can help with that, Max, you know we can. You wouldn’t be the first person we’ve sent on external detachment. Why, are you thinking of turning this down? I need to give them a good reason if so.”
Again he thought about the incentives they’d shown him, the medical package, and how much it would mean to Gillian and to him. It felt like bait though: bait that he was about to walk in and take with his eyes wide open. The decision was hard, but inevitable.
“I’ll do it,” he said. “I’ll go.”
He told Gillian as soon as Indira had rung off. Gillian’s yell of joy was still ringing in his ears minutes later as they stood in her workshop, her arms fast around him, holding him tight.
The pool building was large, a wide echoing structure of metal frames and sheets enclosing the ESOS marine test facility. It was hot too, the same punishing humidity as the rest of the island, but here, confined, amplified. Victor led the four of them in then took them over to one corner where the SRS-3 prototype was sitting high and dry on its support rig. There they stopped, Victor and Ross to one side of the machine, Max, Oliver and Safi to the other.
In a way Max was surprised that the other two had signed up. He didn’t know their backgrounds, but for Safi and Oliver to have made the break and come all this way for a year couldn’t have been easy. Neither of them seemed to have close family though; they‘d both come out alone, unlike Max and Ross whose wives had shared the plane ride down with them.
“So, here we are,” Victor said. “Here’s what you’re going to be working on. Quite an opportunity, I think you’ll agree.”
Max stepped up to the rig and examined the machine more closely. It was even more makeshift than it had looked in the projections, roughly formed lengths and sheets of plastic bolted together to form gears, levers and pushrods.
“Okay, I can kind of see what you were aiming at,” Safi said, having also come in for a closer inspection. “You’re trying to keep the parts count down, that’s a good first step.”
“Exactly,” Victor said. “There are over two thousand components to this machine, but they’re drawn from a parts list of just thirty: we have three sizes of bar, four sizes of sheet, just one bolt design used universally, plus peripheral items like motors and flotation cells.”
“And have you demonstrated a replication cycle yet?”
“To an extent. This is a third generation machine: SRS-1 built SRS-2, which then built this one.”
“But it’s still just an assembler, not a true replicator, right? It’s not going to perform closed-cycle replication out there, in the wild?”
It was like the Washington meeting all over again, a sudden influx of jargon between Safi and Victor, with Max and — judging by the frown of confusion on his face, Oliver — both none the wiser.
“So what are we saying here,” Max said. “Assemblers? Closed-cycle replication? If this machine isn’t the answer you’re looking for, then what is?”