This story starts
a long, long time ago – two thousand years ago, in fact – when a Roman poet called Ovid wrote a story called ‘Pygmalion’. Like all great stories, it’s about love and loss, about a sculptor who carved a figure out of snow-white ivory and fell in love with his own creation. Now this was true desire, real lust: passion for this bodily image consumed his heart, he kissed it and felt his kisses returned. Pygmalion wanted the statue as his bride and the gods granted his wish: he touched her breast with his hand, the ivory yielded to his touch and lost its hardness, she blushed and raised her bashful eyes. So, the happy couple married and had a baby.
Four years ago, Ovid sent me on a road trip through the forest and into the future. I have seen titanium fingers heal the human heart, lovers locked in silicone rapture, babies slumbering in a steel embrace. I have spoken with the Makers who realise our ancient dreams of speed, longevity, and love; who craft the maths and mechanics to gift us bodies new and strange: stronger, faster, and surely better! It was the strangest journey I have ever made, for when I reached the end I saw the future has already arrived. There will be no going back to the old ways. We have shed our skins for a technological enchantment. We have changed the power of dream.
Oh, how the poet would revel in these changing times! What Pygmalion had to beg from the gods can now be delivered by human ingenuity. Today, in Lab, with a pale sun slipping out of sight, the chat was of catastrophic forgetting. About previously learned responses that are suddenly lost. This is a problem for machines, not for humans – at least, not yet. But it’s coming. So happy two thousandth birthday, Ovid. People say that Shakespeare got his ideas from you. People also say that Freud got his ideas from Shakespeare. But that doesn’t have to matter anymore. What matters is that love itself – enduring, eternal human love – will be forever transformed.
It started up
thirty-eight minutes ago as they pulled out of the city. A dry sobbing somewhere in the middle of the carriage, the kind of crying that speaks of an awful thing that can’t be borne. The kind of misery that could leach into your life if you linger. The kind of bad news you never want to know. People sit down and then sneak away like it could be contagious. But how do you leave someone alone with that pain?
She rises quickly from her seat, then hesitates, because this is exactly how trouble starts. You bring it on yourself, getting messed up in other peoples’ lives, is what would Frank say. If he was here and not three thousand miles away and asleep, a storybook on his chest with Fintan sprawled beside him, face down like a swimmer in his Batman pyjamas. She steadies herself against the carriage sway. There’s nothing at all about this that calls Fintan to mind, except perhaps the crying loop that a three-year-old slips into when the only cure is a big, warm hug. So it’s that, the feel of him hot and snuzzling at her shoulder, that propels her towards 29D to ask,
‘Are you OK?’
A girl, a young woman in a pink puffer, hands flopped like chicken pieces on her lap. Who doesn’t answer, or even turn her head. Just shudders, staring out the window like the source of her grief is hidden in the dark forest flying past. The puffer is a vile cerise. Her hair’s a day off washing, scraped back, and clamped tight in a scrunchie, a thin brown watermark pushing out the blonde.
At least I asked, she thinks, backing away to her own seat and her own business. She taps her earbuds, but even at maximum volume she can still sense the sobbing beneath the bass.
The Buick glitters like a giant golden bauble in the deserted parking lot and, for a moment, she wonders if this is some bizarre prank. She glances quickly round but there’s nothing, just the vanishing rear of the train, four walls of massive conifer, and a sweep of empty blacktop beneath the leaden sky.
‘Frank, you’ve got to check out my rental!’ She scans her phone over the pristine white tyres and voluptuous engineering.
‘I’ve been trying to reach you.’ Frank’s voice is tetchy. He’s not interested, not listening because it’s day three now and the nanny is still sick, Fintan is still weepy, and work undone weighs heavy on his shoulders.
‘You know how the signal is, out here in the wilds.’
‘So, are you done?’
‘Just heading to Lab now.’ Cold snips at her fingertips as she taps in the lock code and the Buick’s headlamps wink suggestively.
‘I thought you were there already!’
‘I had an unscheduled meeting in the city.’
‘Have you made up your mind? Are you yes or no?’
‘I’m still leaning to no.’
‘Je-sus.’ She hears his weary frustration. ‘We’ve been over this a million times. There’s a bid on the table and both your partners want to sign. There is no logical basis for you to say no.’
‘I’ve just been to meet the new buyers and I don’t trust them.’
‘Trust doesn’t come into it. This is a takeover, not a marriage.’
‘It’s not that simple, Frank.’
‘It’s precisely that simple, but you’re turning it into one against two.’
‘We are three equal partners.’
‘Bullshit. No one’s equal to Felix. And Colin is a definite yes. Hang on – Fintan sweetheart, the blue paint is right there, see? Look, it’s Christmas Eve and there’s only one flight that gets you home.’
‘And I’ll be on it.’ She yanks at the car door.
‘You know this deal is going to happen. You’re just being – ’
‘What? What am I just being, Frank?’
‘You don’t want to let go. I know you’ve spent years on this but – ’
‘Great. So now I have my partners and my husband telling me what to do.’
The clunk is muted. Inside, the Buick La Salle is a sound chamber that insulates from the external world. It’s a creamy vanilla excess of pillowed leather, gold stitching, walnut dash. So this is what she gets for insisting on a drivable disconnected, as if she was some kind of vintage hysteric. Of course, the retro look is surface level: the sensors have already registered her presence with a velvet hoosh of humidified air. She has only to speak and the Buick will limber up for departure. Most disappointing of all is that the windscreen is already busily recasting her worldview to the sunshine default, standard issue now ever since the clouds came to stay. She snaps the override button and kills the internet connection. The yellow filter bleeds from the glass and the world returns to its grey familiar.
‘Sorry, Frank. I know you’re up to your eyes without her.’
‘You know what the solution is.’
‘And you know my answer is no.’ The silence stings. She pictures Frank sucking in his lower lip, holding back a barb.
‘So tell me,’ she says lightly, ‘what’s Fintan up to?’
‘He’s painting a “Welcome home, Mummy” sign.’
‘Ah,’ she strokes the white wheel, pictures paint blotches, a watery blue M.
‘It’s a surprise.’
‘Then don’t tell me!’ she smiles, transatlantically. ‘I don’t want to have to pretend surprise – I want the thrill of actually feeling it.’
‘You asked what he was doing.’
‘Pink puffer,’ she murmurs.
‘What?’
‘Oh, nothing – just a girl who was crying.’
And there she comes, striding past the station’s locked entrance, cheeks red with cold, bleached wisps floating free. She’s short, very short – maybe 1.55 m, and that’s with heels. And very young, or at least young enough to be wearing a short black dress with lacy frills in minus two.
‘You still there?’
‘How’s Fintan’s tooth?’
‘Gum’s still red.’
Pink Puffer stops at the top of the steps, scowls at the parking lot. Twitches her nose like she’s picked up a scent, but there’s nothing to smell in the clear air, crisp and unwelcoming in this northern pitstop.
‘You’re giving him the ice chips? I hate to think of him – ’
‘Missing you.’
‘Having a sore tooth, I meant.’
‘He hates you being away and it’s getting worse. He cries all night.’
‘I wish I was there.’
‘No you don’t.’
‘How can you say that!’
‘You know I didn’t mean it that way.’ Frank’s sigh is long and heavy. Warmth, now, is what’s needed to cross this hump. She closes her eyes, pictures the Christmas tree, Fintan in his Santa suit, Buster with a tinsel collar.
‘I do wish I was there.’
‘If you did, you would be.’
‘Fucksake, Frank.’ She smacks the wheel.
‘Hey, that’s not an accusation, just a statement of fact. If you want to keep up this unnecessary travelling, you know what we need to do.’
‘Let me talk to Fintan, I’ll talk to him now.’
‘You know that just sets him off.’
Of course, Frank is right. Voice makes her present, makes Fintan feel like she’s just down the road and not on the other side of the globe. The more she talks the worse he gets, then Frank has to take the phone and it’s all hurrybye love you and a severed line.
‘Frankisalwaysright’, she whispers, lips close to the microphone, and she knows he’s smiling at this running joke between them, the one with the hard crystal of truth at its core.
‘Kiss him from me. I’ll call later for his bedtime story.’
‘Good luck with Colin and Felix. Don’t make it harder on yourself.’
And Frank is gone. She docks the phone on the dash like a totem and stares at the black screen. Her hand hovers in the space between home and wheel – she should call back right now and tell him she can’t wait to get back, tell him she misses him. But it’s so hard to find the words, and the truth is that lately she misses Frank most when they are together. It’s their shared past she longs for, the one they cannot seem to build on.
She reaches for the gear and rolls towards the exit gap in the forest wall. Pink Puffer turns, eyes cruising over the Buick’s hips, and it’s a feral look in the rear view, her steady gaze tracking the golden chariot as it swings out on to the empty freeway and disappears.
As soon as her voiceprint activates the steel door she is hijacked by a wave of nostalgia. It is seven years since they bought this underground lab from a tech start-up, after the CEO slit his wrists and locked himself in the vault so he could bleed to death online. 9,251,102 candle-flame emojis kept YouTube vigil while the celebrity coder transitioned from man to myth, as if his final act – the wordless bloodletting and his corpse propped up against the server cage – carried an important message, rather than the consequence of a lethal cocktail of cashflow crisis and burnout. Techworld went into a tailspin about bad karma, which meant they could secure the lease on this high-spec lab for a song. For all their brilliance, she has come to realise that programmers are a superstitious lot, like peasants in a hobbit world of rumour and conspiracy that is fuelled by daily newsfeeds about cybercrime. So the partners are careful to nurture their craftsmen and keep them safe: everyone is nanochipped so that real-time biofeeds can be monitored for emotional turbulence and whereabouts.
The lab is silent and chilly as a church. Five coders sit cloistered by a massive, curved screen wall, like a cluster of wizards inside an enchanted fortress. Lines of white and green code slither across the black, like magic spells conjuring up a future that is elegant, robust, and efficient. She steps closer, her movement registers on the monitor wall like an interloper. But no one says hello and she does not speak. Everyone knows she is here, but physical presence is considered an eccentricity. What’s the point of face to face? Why fly with all the security hassle? Old-school, says Colin, but they have both worked together for so long now that he tolerates her quirks. And anyway, she has always loved the shop floor, the quiet fury of concentration where work unfolds in a sacred hush with occasional bursts of banter. She smiles now at the seasonal gestures – Kale sports a Santa hat, Xiang has clipped antlers to the back of his chair. Even the Lab mascot suspended from the ceiling has had a makeover: the large furry fly with electrode spikes in his cranium has grown gossamer angel wings.
Xiang and Kale stand side by side, arms folded, watching a web of yellow vectors converge on-screen. All important work is silent now, since math makes our world. Human industry grows ever more hushed and she sometimes longs for the noisy collaboration of the old days. The echo chamber of idea exchange, the physicality, the yelling and shouting of her old life on the trading floor where you could reach out and touch a living being. Another reason she doesn’t want the deal: she will lose the few tangibles they have.
She turns away from Code and heads down the corridor, tracking her shadowy avatar on the monitor wall. This lab that Felix bankrolled, that she and Colin built, is her home-away-from-home, and now she has reached the end of a wonderful adventure. Her life has been bookmarked by deals: lose one and find another. And the post-deal emptiness brings an adrenaline crash – another petty reason to keep resisting. Or maybe Frank is right. Maybe she really is just afraid to let go?
FlyBoy sits cross-legged behind the glass wall of Test. Slender and barefoot in shorts and T-shirt, he crouches like a child assembling his toys on the floor. Skinny arms and legs spattered with freckles and a tumble of strawberry hair that blazes against the lime-green walls. He still looks like a schoolkid and has not aged a day in the seven years since she found him. At just 158 cm and 53 kg, he is a perfect candidate for recombinant HGH treatment, with a predicted 95 per cent success that could take him to 166 cm in 28 months. She has discussed the idea with him, but he does not care. He rarely ventures out: in fact, he’d prefer to live here all the time, but they only let him bunk over every third night in Sleep, where he spends a few hours suspended in a slothlike hammock. Otherwise he is shuttled between Lab and his safe house, chipped and tracked like everyone else.
FlyBoy twists round suddenly, as if he senses she’s watching, and waves a slow side to side that could be hello or goodbye. His blue irises are clear as the day she bumped into him on campus, smacked his nose on her collarbone, and dropped his lab box on the grass.
‘You’re pretty tall,’ he muttered.
‘And you’re a little boy who doesn’t look where he’s going.’ He was already down on his knees bent over the plastic box that flickered and buzzed.
‘What’s that?’
‘My research.’
‘Insects for your school project? And by the way, where’s my apology?’
‘“Collision Avoidance and Escape Behaviour in Blowflies,”’ he looked up. ‘My paper was in last month’s Nature.’
‘So you’re not a schoolboy.’
‘I am a twenty-four-year-old bioengineer. And I apologise for walking into you.’
‘Tell me about the box.’
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘Because I’m looking for a good story that needs money to come true.’
They settled on the grass with the white box in between them while students swarmed across the quad.
‘When I was a kid,’ he began, ‘my mom used to get up at six to make fresh pasta for a deli. By 7 a.m. it was already twenty-eight degrees and, soon as I could walk, my job was to zap the flies. I have this little red plastic swatter, I get this close and WHACK – but they’re off, buzzing like crazy round the kitchen. They swoop and dive and twist and switch direction, wings flapping at 150 beats per second. It’s boy versus fly and my kill count is close to zero. But all I can think about is why don’t they kill themselves? You ever see a fly in a head-on collision? Ever wondered how they don’t just go splat into the wall? How an insect with a brain the size of a pinhead beats every single flying machine that humans have ever invented?’
He leant towards her, crossing his palms on the box. ‘Consider the fly’s navigational system. Think about how much processing and calculation is going on there. What are the neuronal control systems that allow a fly to outsmart a jet fighter? That is all I ever wanted to know. Because if you can understand the fly, you can revolutionise flight. You can design a completely new flying object. Planes don’t have to look like raptors. Jet fighters are unmanned.’
‘So what do you need to get it done?’
‘What every scientist needs – funds and freedom. Then I can get on with my work and not waste my time writing research.’
FlyBoy slips his right hand in the pocket of his shorts and withdraws a clenched fist. Slowly, gracefully, his long white fingers unfold to reveal a glossy ivory sphere. He raises his arm, holds it delicately between thumb and index finger as if he is admiring a giant pearl. And she is struck, as always, by its satin sheen. For Volo is made from the toughest material on earth: silk fibres harvested from Darwin’s bark spider. And at 520MJ/m3, stronger than steel, tougher than a bulletproof vest.
FlyBoy places Volo on the floor and nudges it with his toe. It spins away, shoots a high-speed diagonal towards the far wall, then swoops to a sudden landing in the corner. He bends, places a second Volo on the ground, wiggles his toe, and it swerves round his foot to land on the wall behind him, crawls upwards, and darts back to ground. FlyBoy stands up and begins a slow walk around the perimeter, hands in pockets. In the long months of beta testing his body was purple with bruises, but now he strolls unflinching through Volo’s flight path.
He has unpicked the mystery. And together they have built this prototype: a multisensory micro air vehicle that outperforms a housefly and weighs no more than a nectarine. Volo will make the jet fighter look like a dinosaur. What’s more, it flies itself: it is completely autonomous – no human intervention required.
And now it is for sale: FlyBoy and the intellectual property, the project that Felix funded, the math model that she and Colin built, the wizards they assembled, the code that created Volo, the engineering that gave him life. The bid is on the table. Her partners are ready to sign. But still, she hesitates.
Her problem is an old one: what humans do with all the clever things we invent. She does not trust the buyer. She does not like FlyBoy’s new handlers, whom she startled this morning with her impromptu visit. The bloated corporate whale that has spent the last decade gobbling up artificial intelligence just because it can. Like the nursery brat who hoards all the toys just to stop others from having them. No clear strategy but plenty of dosh – they are fat and woozy with excess capital. She has studied their acquisition trail and she knows their dreams: drones that make up their own minds. No human dithering to fuck it up.
FlyBoy looks up and grins. It’s a rare moment, like the gift of a child’s smile. She presses her fingertips against the glass. He holds up a splayed palm, adds a thumb and forefinger, and she laughs aloud.
‘Yes, seven!’ she says. Seven whole years at Lab, and she feels the prick of tears for the wonderful adventure that will soon be past tense. The new parents will arrive and FlyBoy will live on here with the wizards and the furry mascot, the partners will say goodbye, and the separation will be complete. Her heart rate rises, her body temperature elevates. She runs her finger over the fleshy base of her thumb – sometimes she swears she can feel the chip beneath her skin, though of course that’s ridiculous – it’s no bigger than a hair’s width. The tiny polymer parasite that feeds off the drama of her daily life and lays her bare on-screen so her emotional arousal can be examined by her partners. In reality, it’s Colin who obsesses over the biofeeds – heart rate, blood pressure, endocrine function, toxicology – a comprehensive neurophysiological newsfeed that identifies problems and tracks performance. But while the data reveals the symptoms, it cannot reveal the cause. Motive remains the only secret.
‘I know why you pulled that stunt this morning.’ Colin draws level with the glass wall, but he doesn’t look at her – just stares into Test. ‘You disabled your chip for a couple of hours so I wouldn’t know what you were up to. Do you have any idea what I was thinking when we couldn’t track you?’
‘Let me guess: that I’d become today’s cybercrime headline? “Mum Kidnapped in Algosnatch.”’
‘Not funny.’
‘So you were picturing me tied to a chair in some dungeon lab while Volo’s algorithms are beaten out of me?’ She grins. ‘I’m surprised at you Colin, you’re turning into a hobbit.’
‘There’s been five high-profile algosnatches in the last six months, all of them within a hundred-mile radius,’ he turns to face her. ‘Volo is the hottest property in town, which means all of us are potential targets. What’s the point in having implants if you are going to hot-wire them? Plus, we agreed, remember? You, me, the coders, and him,’ he jabs the glass as FlyBoy strolls past. ‘Everyone is chipped so we can always be tracked.’
‘Felix isn’t chipped.’
‘That’s because Felix never goes anywhere. And he doesn’t touch the code. And he’s on the other side of the planet. But now, just as we’re about to sign this deal, you decide to go AWOL?’
‘So it was the deal you were worried about, not your old partner.’ She touches Colin’s shirtsleeve and he flinches. At the charge or the touch, she cannot be sure. Here, now, in the dry prickle, she can feel the static in her hair.
‘I just wanted some privacy.’ She heads to the watercooler and reaches for the pressure gauge to discharge.
‘Bullshit. I know you went to see the buyer because I went into the code and hooked you up again,’ Colin follows behind. ‘And by the way, you’re not as smart as you used to be. I was able to overwrite you.’
‘Gold star for you, then,’ she peers into the fruit bowl. ‘Bananas and grapes – Jesus, Colin, is that the best you can do? I’m starving.’
‘I’m in training for a triathlon.’
‘You know,’ she peels the banana, shaking her head, ‘sometimes I just can’t believe it’s still you.’
Colin twitches his neck – the past makes him itchy. But it’s still a shock to see the athlete he’s become. To think of the blubbery shambles he was when they first met: sugar-coated fingers stabbing at the keyboard. Twenty-seven kilograms and total hair loss marks their thirteen collegiate years, and Colin’s fat suit has melted away to reveal a trim, lean string of muscle that can hold her gaze without blinking. ...
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