You’d have thought Johnny would have wanted to live in my apartment, with every comfort he could need. But Cheri said he’d better live with her as she was his registered carer. So she put him in her tiny spare room. This made sense and I tried not to show I was disappointed, because I was beginning to like him and wanted to get to know him better. He might be weird, socially inept and frequently come out with the most bizarre stuff, but he was kind, brave, fascinating—and funny too, in an offbeat way.
His new room was small and poky, but he said he didn’t mind. It only had a small window, but he said he was used to that. It was bare, with no paintings or tapestries on the wall as in our place, but Johnny said that gave him more space to let his mind wander.
Then there was the problem of his electronic tag. How could he do any investigative work without Cheri being with him and with a tag on his leg? The Gene Police would be on him in five minutes and we’d never see him again. The tags are attuned to your body rhythm so even if he did manage to get one of them off, if it stopped detecting his body it would immediately send out a radio alarm. It worked by broadcasting a regular signal every thirty seconds and if that stopped, they’d also be knocking on your door before you could say reverse transpose genetic engineering, so you couldn’t just break it.
Johnny had a solution: “All I have to do is create a duplicate of the signal and broadcast that from my room, and meanwhile deactivate my own tag so I can leave undetected.”
It sounded easy when put like that.
I spent the hours watching Johnny at work. After a while I became used to his appearance and stopped being bothered by the way his screen was a shifting mask fused to his head. I began noticing other things about him instead. How delicate his long, nimble fingers were. How patient he was, that he would spend an hour carefully filing a piece of metal to just the right shape to fit in its place. How his angular, tall skeleton, which carried little flesh, still moved with a kind of grace. His long arms hung from his broad shoulders, always gently poised for action, and were continually being called to brush his long brown hair behind his ears.
I found myself wondering what his face had looked like before the rewrite took over. Did he have high cheekbones, a shy smile, twinkling eyes? Were his eyelashes long? Were his lips thin, or full and generous? And what colour were his eyes; warm and brown, or blue and piercing?
“Do you have any photos of what you used to look like?” I asked.
“Definitely not,” he replied. “Why would I want to keep those? I’m no longer that person.”
“But what did your face look like?” I persisted.
“It doesn’t matter. Why do you want to know?”
“No reason,” I said. “Just wondered…”
Whenever he was concentrating hard, he would forget to control what was on his screen and across it would flicker, often at incredible speed, an apparently random series of images and words. I liked that. It was like a glimpse into his mind. As the hours turned to days, I became fascinated by how some images would repeat…snatches of video of a room full of young teenagers laughing and cheering at the camera; a house with a sheet hanging out of an upstairs window bearing the slogan “Hybrids Here to Stay!”; children playing; a cat washing itself; a Gene Police van rushing by filmed through a bush. I didn’t ask him about any of it. It was a glimpse into another world—his world.
After four days Johnny announced that his gadget was complete.
“However, there’s one problem,” he said.
“Another one?” I said.
“I’ve got to test this first, before we can use it.” He held up the gadget: a metal box with an aerial, a switch and a light. “If I switch it on and it works, then whoever is monitoring it will receive two signals. So they’ll be suspicious. But if I deactivate the tag and this gadget doesn’t work, then they won’t get a signal at all. Basically, it’s got to work first time or we’re skewered.”
“I see. So what shall we do?” I said.
“No problem,” said Mark who had just entered the room. “I can test it in the studio at work. It’s got a metal cage around it to block out radio interference.”
“Brilliant!” said Johnny, handing him the box. “Go for it. I’m sorry I can’t come with you.”
“I’ll be right back,” Mark said.
While we were waiting, we co-operated on preparing a meal—Johnny was happy to help me right from the first time he saw how hard it was for me to do many common tasks.
“Three hands are better than one,” he joked as he helped me chop some vegetables and apples for soup, and grate some cheese.
“I wish I could be your eyes and nose too,” I said.
As we ate, he sat opposite, playing for me on his screen silly cartoons he’d downloaded from the Internet. I laughed so hard I spattered soup all over the table.
When Mark returned after two hours it was with a smile on his face and we knew it had worked. “Are we ready for the moment of truth?” he said.
“Good a time as any,” said Johnny.
The tag sent out a signal once every thirty seconds, so that was how long they had to deactivate it and activate the gadget. Johnny didn’t want to break it and take it off his leg because he might have to show it to somebody sometime. He had simply to remove the tiny battery at the right time, which it was possible to do with a Torx screwdriver.
I held a stopwatch. Johnny removed the battery. I immediately started counting down from thirty. On “one” Mark switched on the fake. There was a moment when we thought it hadn’t worked but then the little box let out a beep. We breathed a sigh of relief and I jumped up and down.
“Well, Johnny, I guess this means you’re a free man again,” said Mark.
I nearly hugged Johnny, but if he was pleased he didn’t show it. He turned to me.
“Kestrella. Do you want to deactivate your tag too and leave a copy here, and then Dominic wouldn’t have to come with you?”
The thought hadn’t occurred to me. “N-no,” I said. “I don’t think I dare.”
“OK.” He shrugged, turning to Mark. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go.”
Dominic, Mark, Johnny and I walked out of the apartment leaving the gadget, Johnny’s alter ego, beeping away behind us. I ran ahead of Johnny down some steps to where Mark’s car, a hydrogen fuel cell Rapide Mark II, was waiting. The wail of a Gene Police van nearby made us all start. I turned round to see Johnny putting his hood up, his camera scanning all around anxiously. He wasn’t looking where he was going. I saw he was about to trip over a low railing and ran back.
“Johnny!” I cried.
Too late—he fell forward, but luckily I was near enough to catch him. My arms went around him and supported him, while his went around me, with his full weight against my body. He instinctively started to pull back, but I was reluctant to let go.
“Are you all right?” I breathed.
He stayed in my arms long enough for me to feel his heartbeat slow and his muscles relax as the Gene Police van’s wail faded away—it must have been after some other poor hybrid. I felt his ribs beneath his clothing, felt his long fingers on my shoulders as my own heartbeat increased.
“Hey, you two! Come on!” shouted Mark.
“Thanks,” Johnny said, all low, to me. We pulled away from each other, a bit embarrassed, and hurried to the car.
Dominic and Mark sat in the front, with Johnny and I in the back. Johnny’s hoodie well over his head, we cruised out of London on a virtually deserted Essex Road.
“I thought we’d just go on a recce this time,” said Mark as he steered his way through the light traffic. “You know, check out the lie of the land. Then we can come back and formulate a plan of action. So I haven’t told Cheri. No point. She’s one busy lady.”
“No, no need to bother her,” agreed Johnny.
I felt a little uncomfortable about the fact that Cheri didn’t know what we were doing. But it would probably be all right. After all, what could go wrong? I couldn’t think straight. I was very aware of how Johnny’s and my legs were touching. My fingers were groping towards his hand.
“There’s maps in the back if you want to study them,” said Mark.
Johnny’s hand quickly picked up a map and he started studying it. I put my own hand back in my lap.
“Actually, I’ve been doing a little research,” announced Johnny. “There’s a peace camp next to the Centre. Dunno what it’s like. Or why they’re there. They’ve got a website and they say visitors are welcome. They might be able to tell us a thing or two, mightn’t they?”
Mark shrugged. “Sure, why not? Although in my experience just because someone is bearing witness, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are reliable witnesses.”
“But any information must be worth something,” I said. “I think that’s a really good idea, Johnny.”
For ages we never left the urban sprawl. Every mile or so we’d pass an exchange, full of jostling crowds pouring in and out carrying all manner of stuff. A lot of people thought that you were more likely to catch the disease if you spent a long time close to the same piece of technology. So these markets had sprung up full of people swapping their microwave/car/hi-fi/razor/PDA/whatever for different models.
“I’ve got a friend who spends half his time wheeling and dealing in these places,” said Mark. “He’s made a fortune. Of course, there is no statistical proof that people who continually swap their goods are less likely to catch Creep. But that doesn’t stop them.”
“Superstition,” said Johnny. “That’s what it is. They believe anything.”
“Small wonder,” observed Mark. “When you think what science has given us. People like you!”
“I hope that was a joke, Mark,” said Johnny.
Now we were out of the city, but this wasn’t countryside. Rows of heated greenhouses and battery farms of hens and pigs were occasionally interrupted by refineries and power stations burning rubbish and anything else they could get their hands on for electricity. Mark pointed out the chemical works where milk was produced directly from grass using geneticallyengineered bacteria, or where meat of an unspecified nature was produced in a similar way. “They say it’s just for pet food…”
The buildings glowed with ultraviolet light. “See?” Mark continued, almost gleefully. “The countryside is doing its traditional job of producing eggs, meat and milk for the population.” He pointed out the fields, radiant for miles with GM rape and hemp for making cooking oil for powering vehicles. “Their fibres make clothes and fabrics.”
Every now and then we saw a few trees but no birds. Not, that is, until we came to an area near the flooded mouth of the Thames, windswept and bleak beneath the steel sky, where scavenging gulls and kites circled over the old landfill sites now too polluted to be used for settlements or factories.
“I’ve never seen any of this place before,” I said.
“Why would anyone come here who didn’t have to?” continued Mark. “They tried once to use bacteria to clean up the pollution, but the bacteria mutated and just produced other toxins. They tried to house people—see those ruins? But no one could put up with the smell. That’s why they built the Centre for Genetic Rehabilitation out here.”
We stopped the car. Five hundred metres away across the flat, stinking marshland was a cluster of buildings surrounded by a steel wall topped with barbed wire.
A feeder road led from the main road. “Here we are,” Mark said, stabbing a finger at a point on the map Johnny was still holding. “Notice anything?”
“There’s no buildings marked on the map here,” said Johnny.
“Exactly. This place doesn’t exist on any map, just like a lot of military installations. Except it’s not supposed to be a military base. It’s supposed to be a research hospital to care for people like you.”
Slate grey as the sky it was, a sprawl of prefabricated units with few windows and no identifying features. Mark took out his camera and began filming. As he was doing so a Gene Police van trundled along the road from London and turned down the access road to the Centre. It drove towards the checkpoint at the entrance to the complex, passing a cluster of tents and caravans that I hadn’t noticed before because they were in a slight dip. From one of them a rainbow flag fluttered rather forlornly.
“What’s that?” I said.
“Must be the peace camp,” said Johnny. “Let’s go and say hello.”
Whatever they might be able to tell us, I didn’t think it would be how to get in. The complex looked totally impregnable.