‘So… what’s this about?’
‘Um,’ said Geena. She looked around, as if for inspiration, or as if she was checking for cameras. There weren’t any. Hugh felt uneasy. He hadn’t been alone with a woman or child in an unsurveilled, unrecorded room since… Lewis, he guessed. At least Ashid was in earshot. Well, probably not, the sound of the radio almost certainly drowned their conversation out, but it was the principle. Ashid was in earshot of a scream, at least.
‘It’s funny,’ she said. ‘I’ve thought and thought about this, and now I’m here I feel, uh…’
‘Unprepared?’ Hugh prompted.
Geena laughed, some tension dissipating. ‘Yes!’
She put the mug down on the trestle and placed her hands on her knees.
‘Tell me, Mr Morrison, is there anything unusual about your vision?’
‘Twenty-twenty, last time I got it checked,’ said Hugh.
What was this about? Glasses? Laser eye surgery?
‘I don’t necessarily mean your acuity,’ she said, with unnerving precision. ‘I mean… have you ever noticed that you see things a little differently from other people?’
Hugh warmed his hands around the mug. He felt cold all of a sudden. This wasn’t about marketing.
‘If you’ve looked me up,’ he said carefully, ‘you’ll know I went to university. I did a year of philosophy, and if I remember right, that’s one of the classic hard questions. Qualia, isn’t that it?’
‘Yes, but that wasn’t my question.’
‘Perhaps you should start again,’ said Hugh.
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Geena. She took a deep breath. ‘Has your wife ever mentioned a woman called Maya?’
Hugh blinked. ‘She may have done.’
Some minor incident at the nursery gate, he recollected. Hope had laughed it off, telling him very little, but he’d noticed that she’d got the bee in her bonnet about the Labour Party shortly afterwards. He’d worried, but he hadn’t pried.
‘Oh, good. Maya’s a friend of mine. She thought she could help, uh, Hope, and I think she did, for a bit, but I’ve come up with something that can help you in a big way.’
‘What makes you think we need any help? What’s this about? Are you trying to sell us something?’
‘What?’ She sounded baffled.
‘Sociology research. Sure you don’t mean market research?’
‘No, no, I really am… I’m a postgrad at Brunel, you know, in Uxbridge? And I’m doing research at SynBioTech, in Hayes.’
‘I thought you said sociology.’
‘STS… sorry, science and technology studies. I sit in on a lab and observe the engineers.’
‘Oh,’ said Hugh, ‘I know about all that. Like they’re a strange tribe.’
‘Like they’re a strange tribe,’ she said, in the tone of someone who’d heard it before.
‘And you pretend you don’t know if science works or not, yeah?’
‘Please don’t tell me the one about jumping out of a window,’ Geena said.
Hugh had been about to. He felt abashed.
‘I suppose it’s like having an unusual name,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Like Hope Abendorf.’
Hugh spluttered tea. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.
‘Pardon me,’ he said. ‘OK. One more time: can you please tell me what all this is about?’
She told him how she’d come across Hope’s name and predicament, and how her friend Maya had tried to help. He listened, with an uneasy feeling of having been watched from behind.
And then she looked away and looked back and said:
‘One thing about the fix that I know and most people don’t, Mr Morrison… there is a basis for exemption apart from the conscience clause.’
‘What!’
‘It’s buried in the miscellaneous administrative provisions, not in the primary legislation. Even the recent rulings don’t change it, they can’t because, well’ – she smiled here – ‘it’s unexpressed, so to speak. I mean, the legislation was drafted with one eye on the possibility – which the government was publicly denying at the time – that some day it might become compulsory. That’s why they built in exemptions in the first place. The main way the fix works is by correcting the expression of deleterious genes, right? It turns genes on or off, depending. Sometimes it repairs a stretch of code. It doesn’t really add or take away anything. That’s one reason why it’s acceptable even to the bloody Catholics.’
His eyebrow twitched at that, and his gaze flickered to the cross on her neck, but he just nodded.
‘So,’ Geena went on, ‘this usually involves changing a mutant allele back to the wild type. But there are complications. You know about sickle-cell anaemia?’
‘Sure, that’s the one that’s bad for you in some ways but protects you from malaria. Does the fix leave that one in, then?’
‘Good grief, no! It’s a very painful condition, and it doesn’t have any advantages now even in Africa. But some young hotshot in the Lords who was on the committee that drafted all the amendments had had a smattering of biology education, and he was quite exercised on this point. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and all that. So he got a line or two stuck in that stated that a good medical reason for not taking – or more to the point, because it wasn’t compulsory then, not prescribing – the fix would be if you could show that your genome had a beneficial mutation.’
‘But how could you show that? How could you know?’
‘Well, exactly. In practice it would be vanishingly rare anyway. So after a bit of to-and-fro, their Lordships decided to let him have his way, assuming no doubt that this was’ – she smiled again – ‘the legislative equivalent of non-coding DNA. It’s certainly never been publicised, probably because they don’t want people coming up with nonsense claims about their beneficial mutations. Of course, people who would do that are the same people who’d in any case be exempt on the grounds of some wacky religion, so it all comes out in the wash.’
She cocked her head to one side and smiled at him, as if waiting for applause.
‘But you know this,’ he said, ‘because you learned it in sociology of science, or something?’
‘No, Mr Morrison. I actually found this out a couple of weeks ago, when I asked Maya to look for something like it in the Act and the administrative provisions. I just knew there had to be an allowance for rare but beneficial mutations. Well, I didn’t know, but I guessed. And the reason I was looking is’ – she flung out an arm, ta-da – ‘I found that you and your son have a possibly beneficial mutation.’
‘How did you find out?’
Geena looked uneasy. ‘Um, I ran some scanning programs on your genome sequences.’
‘I could figure that out for myself. You’re not supposed to do that, are you?’
‘Uh, no, but…’
‘What I mean is, how do you know it’s beneficial?’
Geena put her empty mug down on the trestle and began waving her arms around. ‘Well, the way syn bio works is they run sims of how a gene translates into a protein; you can actually see the exact cascade, and you can predict the properties of that protein.’
‘I know that, too,’ said Hugh. He did some hand-waving of his own, at the cornices. ‘New wood. I work with it. I read the specs.’
‘Of course. I should have known. Anyway. The mutation I found – there were lots, of course, everybody has some, but they were nearly all neutral, and anyway they were already well documented, but this one wasn’t in any of the databases. It’s in the genes for the retina. Specifically, the one for rhodopsin, that’s one of the rod-and-cone components. This gene results in a rhodopsin variant that has greater sensitivity to light, including outside the visible spectrum. So – how’s your night vision, Mr Morrison?’