Intrusion (25 page)

The trolley wheels juddered and bumped on the uneven pavement, each jolt giving Hope a split-second advance warning of where to place her heel, and each lurch making her grab for one of the upper bags. It didn’t seem right that at this time in history, cracked and tilted flagstones should be a nuisance, but icy winters and rainy summers did their work regardless: freezing and erosion, two of the implacable processes that James Hutton had, with a wild surmise that had led him to search for and find the rocks that demonstrated it, held to account for the whole history of the Earth. No vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end …

A bag slithered. Hope caught it and stopped to sling it and another two awkwardly on her shoulders, and pressed on with a surer step. She must, she thought, look a bit oppressed, trudging along like this behind the men of the house. In this instance she preferred walking behind, because it let her keep an eye on them.

Minute yellow flowers drifted down from a tree she passed under, around which a peculiar smell, like honeysuckle but with a sharper, almost aniseed note, hung like a vapour. The
flowers, or perhaps floating seeds, looked like tiny cogwheels. It bothered her that she didn’t know enough to identify them as natural or synthetic. If for any reason she never returned from this flight, or holiday, or adventure, she would always regret not having done more with the back garden. She’d planted a few rose bushes and a clump of sunflowers, but most of her effort in the garden had been a holding action against its return to the Thames Basin’s local version of the climax community, slightly contaminated by stray syn bio weeds.

Her mind returned to what Hutton saw, the slow cycle of erosion and uplift, and she found herself wondering about whether it might be possible to tell if Hugh’s visions showed the past or the future, according to whether or not synthetic biology plants featured in what he saw. It needn’t even be in the landscape, in the visible biota. It could be some scrap or trace in a garment, a tool or a jewel. A whole new discipline rose in Hope’s imagination: psychochronobotany.

She laughed, and hurried on forward to where Nick and Hugh stood at the corner of Holloway Road, waiting to cross, silhouetted against the sunset sky.

The lorry came up Holloway Road, quiet on big fat tyres, a cab up front and a long container trailer behind. When it was about a hundred metres away, Hope watched its icon on her glasses brighten and begin to flash. Hugh stepped forward, waving his phone like a hitch-hiker. The truck slowed, indicated, and
pulled in as close to the side of the road as it could get, the cab just beside the waiting family.

Hugh’s thumb twitched on his phone, and the side door of the cab swung open. He scrambled up the ladder, hauling his backpack, then turned around and reached out for Nick as Hope handed him up. Hope passed up her guitar and bags, folded the trolley, and climbed into the cab. Hugh was in the driver’s seat, Nick in the middle, both strapped in. She reached to slam the door, but it swung slowly shut by itself, closing with a muffled thump and a firm snick, like a bank vault.

‘Buckle up, Mum,’ said Nick, as if trying to sound grown-up. His voice piped a little. It wasn’t often he’d even been in a vehicle, other than a bus. Hope tousled his hair and fixed her lap-and-diagonal strap, settled in, and gave the thumbs-up. Hugh grinned, tapped on his phone, and sat back. The indicator light on the dash flashed, the gear changed from neutral to first, the engine rumbled, and the brakes relaxed with a loud hiss. The lorry pulled out and joined the stream of traffic, up the incline and under the bridge.

Hugh sat back, hands clasped behind his head, obviously tempted to put his feet on the dash. Nick’s gaze switched back and forth from the buildings and traffic to the movements of the gear stick and steering wheel.

‘It’s like there’s an invisible man driving,’ he said.

‘Oh, that’s good,’ said Hope. ‘It’s called the automatic driver, or drone driver, and it kind of is like an invisible man, but it’s a program in the lorry’s computer.’

‘I know
that
,’ said Nick, scornfully. He patted the toy monkey on his lap. ‘I was just explaining to Max. I don’t think Max understands AIs.’

‘Oh, I’m sure he does,’ said Hugh. ‘You just have to explain it to him in very simple terms.’

Which, for the next five kilometres or so, Nick did.

Hope woke from a doze. Black road, white lines, blue signs. Bioluminescent trees lined the motorway, the light they cast easily visible because the lorry’s headlights weren’t on – they didn’t need to be, except when behind a human-driven vehicle, and there were none such in the two lanes reserved for vehicles on autopilot.

‘Where are we?’ she asked, stretching her legs and wiggling her shoulders.

‘Halfway up the M1,’ said Hugh.

‘Nick should be—’

‘He is,’ said Hugh. ‘There’s a wee bunk in the back. He’s even in his PJs.’

‘Good for you. What have you been doing?’

‘Reading. Staring out the window.’

‘Are we going to pull off any time soon? I need a pee.’

‘There’s a perfectly good toilet in the back,’ Hugh pointed out.

When she returned, she took her boots off and tilted her seat back.

‘There’s a coffee machine and everything, a regular wee
galley. It’s sort of mad, all the comforts for a driver who nine times out of ten won’t be there.’

Hugh rubbed his eyebrows, yawned. ‘Economies of scale. You couldn’t drive like this in Turkey.’

‘Uh-huh.’

Hope gazed out of the window again. The truck sometimes overtook other vehicles – buses, usually, with a bored driver, there only as reassurance, dozing or reading in the front seat – or was overtaken itself. Looking into the empty cabs as they drew level was a little unnerving, and those which, like theirs, contained people dozing or chatting even more so. There didn’t seem to be any pattern to the overtaking, the slowing and accelerating, but there was a rhythm. The drone-driven vehicles had no speed limit, and generally moved at over a hundred miles an hour, but she always had the feeling there was a safe distance between them – shorter than the human safe distance, because of the machines’ reaction time. At one point they passed through a heavy shower of rain, and the windscreen wipers didn’t come on until Hugh, with an irritated gesture, flicked the lever. Hope found some reassurance in the steady whump.

She dozed. After a while, a shift in the engine’s note and a sway to the side woke her up, as the lorry pulled off for a service area. It rolled, with perfect timing, into a vacant slot by a row of fuel pumps. The moment the engine stopped, she heard clangs and bumps from behind, followed by the throb of the pump and the sound of flowing liquid. The same process was being carried out on the trucks in front, the hoses and nozzles moving like hand-puppet snakes.

As the lorry pulled out and before it headed for the exit ramp, Hugh waved his phone.

‘Want to stop for a bit, stretch your legs?’

Hope grimaced. ‘Kind of, but I’d rather not disturb Nick. Besides, I just wouldn’t feel safe, I’d be nervous of the lorry going off without us.’

‘Couldn’t happen,’ said Hugh.

‘You know how it is.’

‘Yeah.’

Back on the motorway, Hope put her glasses on and, feeling like she was being just a bit obsessive-compulsive, checked in to the house wifi. Everything seemed to be in order: burglar alarm armed, the deadbolts in place, blinds down for the night, cameras all showing empty rooms. The bathroom light went on, then off, which startled her for a moment but made sense as part of the programme to make the flat look occupied. Her vision flitted from camera to camera like a ghost. The tap in the kitchen sink was dripping. She could see each drop gather, glistening in a stray street-light gleam past the edge of the front blinds, and after a second or two plop into the sink, then the next would begin to form. Drip, drip, drip.

She blinked hard and shook her head at that. She could hear the drips. Now that she noticed, she could hear sounds from all over the house and outside – boards creaking, cars passing, a dog barking. All very faint in the earpieces, and she might not have noticed them above the motorway noise and the truck’s engine note, if it hadn’t been for that drip.

Hugh was gazing out of the window, watching the traffic and the road as intently as if he were actually driving. Hope found herself hesitating to break his concentration, then shook off the illusion.

‘Hugh?’

‘Yes?’ He didn’t look bothered at all. Maybe he’d just been bored.

‘Do the house cameras record sound?’

‘What? I’m not sure. Never bothered to check, actually.’

‘Well, they do.’

‘Oh,’ said Hugh. ‘How did you find out?’

She told him. He fired up his own phone, put in an earpiece and looked at the screen. She could see the dark rooms flick by, one by one.

‘So they do. Hang on.’ He frowned, and poked about on his screen. ‘Oh yes. Here it is. Homebase catalogue.’ Flick, flick, flick of his thumbs. ‘Home security products. Cameras. Got it. Oh yeah, there it is. “Also records sound with piezoelectric module in shaft.” Talk about small print.’

‘Oh well,’ said Hope. ‘So much for putting my hand over my mouth that night.’

‘So that’s why you were doing it? I did wonder.’ He laughed. ‘That wasn’t the only sounds they must have picked up, eh?’

Hope smiled. ‘What can I say?’

‘Look,’ said Hugh, in that irritating male tone of patient explanation, ‘the whole
point
of having cameras in the house – apart from making burglars wear masks, I guess – is to have a record if you ever get accused of some kind of domestic violence
or … you know. Nobody but us can see them without a warrant. If it comes to the cops checking our cameras we’re in the shit anyway. And we’re not.’

‘That’s reassuring.’

Hugh seemed to take this literally. He nodded and went back to gazing at the road.

Hope now felt a bit paranoid. She ran a search for any references to herself. None were current. The argument about the implications of the Kasrani case that had started the whole trouble had dropped far down the list of threads on ParentsNet, and only cropped up here and there on legal sites whose jargon she found impenetrable. She wished she had access to her own personal profile. Fiona, as a relevant professional, could look at any time at Hope’s ever-evolving profile, but Hope, as its subject, couldn’t. For sure it would be evolving now: unconventional though their mode of transport was, it wasn’t quite illegal, although no doubt Hugh’s father had cut a few corners setting it up. They hadn’t made any attempt at concealment – for people like themselves, as opposed to professional criminals, spies and the like, such attempts were foredoomed to be worse than useless – so the cameras and face-recognition software and all the rest of the surveillance systems were right now aware, at some level, of their location and destination. Her glasses, and Hugh’s phone, were in themselves quite enough to pinpoint their location to the nearest metre. The only precaution they’d taken was to block calls from Maya or from Geena, to prevent at least these dots being joined to them again. The outstanding question was whether the priority
algorithms thought Hope and Hugh’s actions significant enough to call for human attention, and intervention.

Probably not, Hope thought, though she kept a wary eye on police vehicles in the fast lanes until she fell asleep, to dream of shining lines connecting dots.

She woke to dawn, and Scotland. Hugh was in the back. He came through with two paper cups of coffee.

‘Mmm,’ said Hope. ‘Thanks.’

She stared out, bleary-eyed, feeling stiff and sticky. They were just past Berwick-upon-Tweed. Low, rolling hills to the left looked rugged and high after most of England. To the right, she caught glimpses of cliffs and the North Sea. Hugh sipped, while thumbing rapidly on his phone.

‘Done,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Cancelled our flight to Prague.’

‘What?’

‘More than twelve hours’ notice, so I’ve kept the penalty down to the deposit.’

He looked pleased with himself.

‘What flight?’

He hadn’t told her. He did now.

‘I’m not sure how clever that was,’ Hope said. ‘It looks exactly like an attempt at a diversion.’

‘Well, it worked, didn’t it?’ Hugh waved an arm. ‘We’re in Scotland!’

‘Maybe you could ask Nick to repeat that explanation he gave Max last night. About how artificial intelligence works. Because you bloody need it!’

Hugh shrugged. ‘Aw, come on.’

‘How much was the deposit, anyway?’

‘Two hundred quid. Think of it as the fare for this journey, and it’s a saving on the bus or the train.’

‘Think of it any other way, and it’s a waste.’

‘Peace of mind, then. Insurance.’

‘Hmph!’

Hugh leaned over. ‘Come on. Good-morning kiss?’

She had to smile. ‘All right.’

Nick emerged from the back of the cab and climbed on Hope’s lap.

‘I’m hungry, and Max needs recharging.’

‘Good morning to you, too.’

Something between a shrug and a squirm.

‘Ah, come on, let’s sort you out.’

Hope went into the back of the cab and got Nick washed – or wiped, anyway – and into his clothes. While he went into the front to sit in her seat, Hope washed her own face and changed her underwear and pulled on a fresh shirt. Back in the front, sitting in the middle, she even found a way to recharge Max, from a socket marked mysteriously with a symbol for a lit cigarette. After a while, the Firth of Forth swung into view, then disappeared and appeared again, then vanished entirely as they hit the city bypass. Hugh tapped on his phone so that they pulled off just south of the Forth Road Bridge, and rolled into the lorry park of a McDonald’s.