Chapter 16
Freeman
In the beginning, in the first facility he could visit her, and even stay since the place was more like a sanatorium hotel than a research lab.
She had a suite, not just a room, and he stopped over with her as long as they liked.
They were, she said, adults after all. It wasn’t as though the place was a prison.
Indeed, there was a general air of indulgent benevolence that characterised all the staff which creeped her out after a while, even though he pointed out that a bit of indulgence was only fair, since she was curtailing her normal activities and freedoms in service of a greater good.
He came and went as his job changed and adapted to the slowly gathering upheavals that were beginning to gather a head of steam across the world, and then one day she went to meet him at the small railway station, as was their habit, and he suggested they go and have lunch down in the town by the water as he had some interesting news.
There were no restrictions on her at that time, so they found a place by the harbour and sat outside.
“Go on then,” she said as he slid a beer across the table from her and sat down. “This interesting news?”
“I’ve been offered a new job,” he said. “It’s a good thing, I mean it’s pretty end-of-the-worldy, but it’s good.”
“From who?” she said. “How—?”
“I got a letter,” he said. “Sort of a pitch, sort of an offer. Easier if you read it, maybe.”
He pulled a triple-folded sheet of A4 from his pocket and slid it over to her.
“Ooh,” she said. “Very mysterious. Do I have to burn it after reading?”
“No idiot,” he said. “You just have to read it.”
She sat back and looked at the unheaded and unsigned block of Helvetica on the white sheet.
An Invitation
The world will empty of us. As near as makes no difference there will be no people left in it before the end of the century.
But right now it isn’t empty, of us or you or other important things.
It is not yet empty of love, or hope, or bravery, or laughter.
It isn’t empty of friendships or obligations or surprises, good as well as bad.
Most of all it isn’t and won’t be empty of life, and that is what matters most.
Life, not just humans, is what powers the planet.
And in that we have found the answer to the nihilism that’s making others question why we should continue using our skills and our networks.
Life is what matters, and while humans are still here there are still debts to be paid to it.
There will be an eternity of not paying them once we are gone, but until we are, we believe we are honour bound to repay that life by holding it dear and cherishing it – in whatever shape it comes.
Because we didn’t hold it dear, the whole interconnected organism of the planet may be in the process of shrugging humanity off into oblivion.
We were so busy thinking we were important, the mighty us, our family, our group, our country, our system, our religion or our secularism, all those things that were so vitally and short sightedly ours not yours – and most definitely not theirs – that we ignored the bigger picture and fought and cheated and stole and countenanced whole wars, declared and undeclared, just so we got ours.
Maybe that shortsighted selfishness is the very thing that made us a luxury the planet cannot afford.
Some people think that the tiny lucky remnant of humanity that may survive clinging on by their fingertips needs to honour that luck by keeping quiet and living small in case the planet notices them again.
“I can live small,” the Girl says.
“Carry on reading,” he says, refilling her glass. “It gets less preachy, and more practical.”
“It’d have to,” she says.
We don’t think that. We think the exact opposite.
We think living small is what got us into trouble in the first place: small of vision, small of courage, small of heart, small in kindness, so very small in the understanding of what us and ours truly means.
Because us is everyone, and more: us is everything.
It’s the planet, stupid.
Us is the whole interconnected life system, self-sustaining and self-regulating and, as we spin through the vastness of space and time, we humans are a guest appearance and not the whole show. Lucky passengers. And we should act accordingly.
If you agree with this, we would ask you to join us.
We have plans and you have skills we could use.
The Dyson Lovelock Project/UNPIG
She put the paper face down on the table between them and took a long pull on her drink.
“Lovelock,” she said. “James Lovelock? That explains the Gaia stuff. But Dyson?”
“Another scientist like Lovelock, same generation, different perspective,” he says. “What do you think of it?”
“Still pretty preachy,” she said. “But then I’m the choir, aren’t I?”
He smiled as he nodded at her.
“On the side of the angels anyway,” he said. “Not sure about your singing voice.”
“Fuck off.” She grinned. “Who are they and what do they want with you?”
“Well, it began as a kind of UN talking shop as the United Nations Planetary Initiative Group, but no one calls it UNPIG and as unaffiliated scientists and technorati and whoever else got wind of it and wanted in, it began to snowball out of national controls anyway, into a more informal and useful… collaboration.”
“Collaboration?” she said. “Collaboration on what?”
“Wild stuff. Crazy stuff. Brain meltingly clever stuff. Stuff that sounds stupid and probably is, and other things that sound stupid and probably aren’t: Everything from teams trying to figure out how to migrate carbon-based consciousness onto silicon – they’d be the Dyson wing – to people planning to seed the oceans with iron particles to kickstart a recovery in the marine ecosystems we’ve destroyed – that’d be the Lovelock tendency, giving Gaia a helping hand. ”
“Ocean fertilising?” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “You know, kind of clear the place up before we go, give the surviving life on the planet a better shot…”
He looked at her. She didn’t look especially convinced.
“That’s just one small initiative. It’s not all fringe stuff like that.
Thing is, they’re setting up centres for ongoing research all over the world, kind of spreading out to maximise redundancies if things go south sooner than expected, focusing on people’s skills not their passports.
We want to create a resilient system that can go on as long as possible… ”
“We?” she said. “So you already said yes?”
“No,” he said. “No. I said I’d have to talk it over with you.”
“But you said we,” she said. “Not they. So you’re in, even if you haven’t told them yet.”
“No,” he said. “No. Absolutely not. You come first.”
“It’s fine,” she said. “Good even. They need resilient systems, you’re the systems guy. A good one.”
“It’ll mean travel,” he said. “And there are places out there where who-knows-what shit is starting to peel off the wall.”
“Shit peel off the wall?” she said. “Christ. Are they all Americans, the people you’ve been talking to?”
“Not all,” he said. “Definitely not. Flags of all nations. Old fashioned global co-operation. That’s kind of the point.”
She watched the black blade of a cormorant knife off the harbour wall and disappear into the water.
She waited until it popped back up into the world and sat sleekly smug on the slow swell with a silvery fish flipping in its beak.
As it threw back its head and shuddered the fish down its gullet she turned to the Boy.
“OK, I’m down with it if you promise two things. Always come back… and don’t start talking like a Yank.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“Oh, fuck off,” she said with another grin, and kissed him.
“Thank you,” he said after a while.
“And they need a better name than UNPIG,” she said.
“Some Americans like The Hail Marys,” he said. “But more and more the nickname that’s catching on seems to be Freemen.”
“Like Dune?” she said. “Jesus, you’re not going to be recycling your own pee are you?”
“Dyson’s first name was Freeman,” he said. “Kind of fits, even if you don’t know about him, doesn’t it?”
“You know about him do you?” she said.
“Do now.” He grinned. “He wrote thinking out of the box about big stuff. Interesting bloke, big mind, big heart too, I think. He believed life was the answer, that it would find its way. Kind of as spiritual as he was a scientist. Anyway. Like I said. It sort of fits. Like he didn’t write a manifesto or anything, more like it’s his fearlessness in thinking… ambitiously and unusually.”
“OK,” she said, clinking his glass. “Here’s to the Freemen. Ambitious and Unusual.”
He emptied his glass without breaking eye contact with her, then sat back, suddenly looking lighter and happier.
“Thank you,” he said. “I think it might be important.”
“I know it is,” she said “Especially if this place works and I get properly pregnant again. If we have a kid. Or kids. Be nice for them to have a world to grow up in.”
He looked at her and she was pleased to see he’d found his smile again.
“One other thing,” he said. “In case that shit does peel off the wall and come down on everything…”
“Not loving the imagery,” she said.
“We need a plan. You and I need a fall-back, a bug-out plan, if you will—”
“I bloody won’t,” she said, sitting back and watching the waitress walking towards them with their food. “Not if you call it that.”
So over the fish and chips, they made a contingency arrangement, though neither of them actually believed they’d ever need to use it.
The idea was – should the already overstretched sinews of the modern world snap – to make their way to his grandparents’ house in the Outer Hebrides, the one where they’d met, fallen in love and subsequently spent their summers.
That way, should things go even wronger sooner than expected, and society begin to collapse into widespread civil unrest, or if the wheels fell off in any number of possible ways, both anticipated and unanticipated, they would know where to find each other.
That was the what. All that remained was the how.
She asked if he had a plan for that.
“Not yet we don’t.” He grinned, looking round and then leaning in again to whisper, “But we do have hope.”
After his visit she was surprised to find herself also feeling happier and lighter about things too.
Maybe it was because even though the world might be juddering to a halt, they both had something positive to do.
And maybe this unaccustomed lightness is why she found herself doing the thing she’d somehow been avoiding up until now, which was making friends with some of the other “guests” at the facility.
The facility made much of the fact that mental wellbeing was taken as seriously as bodily health, which manifested itself in everything from group therapy sessions (not mandatory but strongly recommended), one-on-one therapy sessions (only mandatory if you had declined the group option) and a wide programme of physical activities, again all highly recommended in the interests of sound mind/sound body.
Never a natural joiner, the Girl had an instinctive dislike of the group therapy sessions, but since the other option was a weekly one-on-one with the Chief Psych Officer, she chose to pull up a chair and join the circle of other would-be mothers.
She did this hoping that she could get away with sharing less of the spotlight if it was split across the larger group.
Partly this was because of her natural inclination to be private, but mainly it was because the chief psychiatrist was the same woman who’d come to the house to recruit her all those long months ago, the woman who said “frankly” too much.
The Girl had taken to calling her “Frank” in her messages to the Boy, a childish nickname she found herself sharing with one of the other aspiring mothers, a woman from South Shields whose quiet line in deadpan snark appealed to the Girl, almost as much as it seemed to irritate the staff.
She was called GJ, and when GJ turned out to share her view of Frank the beginnings of a friendship were put in place.
GJ, like the Girl, also loved the sea and where the other residents used the gym and the heated pool, she was a cold-water swimmer, and every morning before breakfast would walk down to the town and its wide sweep of beach that curved away to the south of the old stone harbour.
The Girl took to joining her, despite her dislike of rising early.
She found herself enjoying both the invigoration and the ritual of it almost as much as the sense of a small friendship starting to kindle.
The two of them walking down to the beach, the Girl in an old towelling robe and a bobble hat, GJ – unmistakable even though her face was always hidden in the deep hood of her voluminous and garishly neon camo-pattern Dri-Robe – became one of the informal stations of the cross by which the security team marked the day.
Because there was of course a security team.
They worked in the basement of the old main building, monitoring the CCTV coverage of the facility on a wall of screens that captured all the comings and goings of both guests and staff – and of course their visitors.
The level of coverage might have seemed innocent enough since after all this was an important research facility trying to crack a planetary conundrum, but the fact that some of that coverage extended far beyond the confines of the facility and took in important transit points like the local railway station and the slip roads onto the major roadways connecting the small town to the wider world hinted of a much broader surveillance protocol.
It would also not have calmed the more suspicious minds among the putative mothers to know that chief psychiatrist Frank had access to all the camera feeds on the widescreen monitor in her office, and spent many hours toggling through live and recorded video and audio of the women in her care as they went about their lives, public and personal.