ANWAR:
Sleep-walk
The cops don’t so
much let you go as politely direct you to the door with a stern
admonition to keep out of their hair. There’s a crossed wire
somewhere; they don’t seem to know whether to treat you as a victim
of crime (Subtype: next of kin) or person of interest in ongoing
investigation (Subtype: old lag).
You’re numb inside by
the time Inspector Butthurt finishes dragging the sorry story of
Tariq’s business out of you. You ken you probably didn’t
incriminate yourself overmuch, and as she pointed out, it’s a
murder investigation—they don’t care
about your probation as long as you’re not plotting any bank
robberies—but after you finished spilling in her lap, she wheeled
in her colleague, Chief Inspector McHaggis, who is an entirely
different species of arsehole, with his radge attitude and
aggressively bristling moustache. He glared at you like he’d found
you stuck to the bottom of his size-twelve para boots and curtly
told you that he’d be in touch and in the meantime please do
something about your mother-in-law (who is still wailing up a storm
in the kitchen whenever she remembers).
Speaking of
remembering, you remember phoning Bibi, who tells you to phone Imam
Hafiz, so you phone the imam, who agrees to call your
father-in-law, then come right round, and you wait on the
street-corner for him to show up as, meanwhile, everyone in the
local community wanders by, casually checking out the scene with
their phonecams and occasionally pausing to tut-tut and share
furtive condolences with you, all the time wondering if you are in
fact some kind of serial killer and waiting for the police to come
and arrest you. It is truly mortifying. And so, some hours
later—when Bibi has efficiently squirreled numb-faced Taleb and his
grieving bride away in one of the hotels on Lothian Road and
organized a rota of hot-and-cold-running daughters-in-law and
nieces to sit and keep them company through the long night—you
tiptoe away to a certain pub on the far side of Calton Hill, where
the Gnome is waiting for you with a warm pint and a quizzical
stare.
He glances at your
face and shoves the beer in front of you. You take it wordlessly
and chug most of it straight back. The Gnome looks concerned. “What
kind of way is that to treat a pint?” he asks, then pauses,
laboriously taking note of your face. “Ah, I see. Would you be in
need of another?”
You nod. He makes
himself scarce in the direction of the bar (despite those stumpy
legs, he can shift when he needs to) and you put the remains of
your first pint down on the table and try to shove away the
enormous hollowness behind your breastbone. It won’t budge. You
glare at the pint. There’s maybe an answer of sorts to your dilemma
hidden in the glass, but you’re not sure how to frame the question.
To get blootered, or not to get blootered? (Bibi’ll scream at you
if you come to bed legless and stinking of alcohol, but
right now you don’t really care about
that: plenty of time to shrug it off as an aberration later.) The
real question is—why?
A new glass, clone of
the old one, appears under your nose. You nod. “Thank
you.”
“What’s the story?”
the Gnome asks, not ungently.
“My cousin Tariq’s
dead,” you tell him, wanting the words to sting.
Instead, the Gnome
perks up. “Was it you who killed him?” he asks with
pseudoprofessional cheer.
“The Polis think it
was murder.” You finish the first pint. The Gnome deflates, humour
hissing away.
“Oh, lad . .
.”
“I had a visit from
one of Colonel Datka’s people this afternoon. I don’t think it’s a
coincidence.”
“Shite.” The
brass-necked gears are turning behind his eyes. “What makes you say
that?”
“Tariq gave me a
little job yesterday.” You take a first mouthful of the second
pint. Your lips feel comfortably numb. “Testing a chunk of a web
app, off-line.”
“That’s no kind of
connection, lad.” He pauses. “Coincidences happen.”
You feel like
punching him for a moment: “Coincidences like someone murdered him? Right after he gave me a wee
job? While I have the attention of our friends
from Bishkek?”
You have the distinct
sensation that Adam is giving you the hairy eye-ball. Wondering if
you’re reliable. “What do you think the web app’s part
of?”
“Honey trap, front
end for a botnet, something like that.” You take another sip. “Grow
your penis, cheap off-license gene therapies for that annoying
melanoma, holidays in the sun with added drivethru liver
transplants, the usual.” In other words, it’s the same the usual that put you inside Saughton for a
year.
“And now Tariq’s
dead? What happened?”
“I don’t know. Got a call from Bibi, who heard it from
Aunt Sammy, who found him. When I went round, I walked into a cop
convention. They figured out soon enough it wasna me what did it.”
You ken where this is going. “Don’t worry, I didn’t breathe your
name. I had to cough to working on the side for Tariq, but I figure
what he gave me isn’t majorly incriminating, and anyway, it’s a
murder investigation. They won’t be blabbing to Mr.
Webber.”
The Gnome turns an
even whiter shade of fish-belly pink than is his wont. “I’ll thank
you for doing that much.” He raises his glass and drinks deeply.
“Do you know how Tariq died?”
“No.” The ignorance
burns your throat. “They wouldn’t tell me anything, except
that—except—” You can’t bring yourself to finish it.
He leans forward.
“Tell me about Colonel Datka’s man.”
Adam is treating the
shrapnel of your life like some kind of puzzle game, you realize,
just like Inspector Butthurt. The momentary flash and sizzle of
resentment nearly throws what’s left of your beer in his face. But
what stills your hand is knowing that he’s trying to help, in his
slightly askew borderline aspie way. Help: You need it. So you tell
him.
“He scared the shit
out of me—even though he was polite. Eyes like a detective, you
know? Only with a drum of unset concrete instead of handcuffs if
you fucked him off.”
“I do believe fear
reveals your hitherto-unplumbed poetic depths.” The Gnome is
scrutinizing you like he’s got you under a microscope. “What did he
want?”
“A padded envelope
from the office safe. And a bag of bread mix.” You shiver. “He
opened the envelope—there was a baggie in it, with a passport.
Other papers. And he gave me a suitcase to take home. It’s got a
combination lock. Said he may need to stay with me for a couple of
days from tomorrow.” You shudder again. Those eyes.
“Well, you’re in it
now,” the Gnome observes calmly.
“In what?”
“That remains to be
seen.” He leans forward. “But I’ve got a fair idea it means the end
game is in train. Listen, can you lay your hands on five grand? Put
it on credit if you have to, but you won’t be able to pay it back
for a month.”
“What has that
got—”
“It’s time to cash
out.”
“Eh?” You think fast.
There’s the two grand you staked Uncle Hassan a couple of years
ago, back before everything caught up with you—he’s probably good
for at least one. Maybe more. You’ve still got your credit card,
but in these deflationary times, you can only draw five hundred in
cash against it. You could pawn some of Bibi’s jewellery to cover
the rest, but she’s bound to notice, and she’ll want to know what
you’re doing with the money. And hurrying right behind the hamster
wheel spin of your financial calculations is your native suspicion
of anyone asking you to cough up cash on the barrel for something
too good to be true. “Why now, Adam? What’s the sudden
hurry?”
“The sudden hurry,
dear boy, is that your employers didn’t go out looking to hire
honorary consuls at not-inconsiderable cost on a whim; they obviously had a purpose in mind, and
with a purpose goes a plan, and with a plan goes a time-table. I’ve
been waiting for a sign that they were getting ready to go to the
end game, and the arrival of your colonel’s man means things are
about to get too hot for you to stay in the bathtub—you’ll be
wanting out while the water’s still clean enough that the Polis
aren’t taking an interest. So it’s time to cash out.”
“And how precisely am
I going to do that?”
Adam bares his teeth
at you. “You’re going to do as I tell you and short a particular
national bank’s bonds. Trust me, you’ll make a killing . .
.”
There is no solace to
be had in getting stinking drunk with the Gnome. So you take your
less usual route home, up the hill and through the graveyard in
search of a casual shag.
There is a younger
man up there, short-haired and heavily accented: a small-town
incomer, escaping from the usual, but with his feet under him
enough to know the places to haunt. You make brief small-talk
before he leads you round the back of an overgrown crypt, then it’s
hard up against the lichen-encrusted stone, tongues grappling
hungrily and his hand down your trousers, squeezing your cock. He
tastes of stale roll-ups and sweat, and when you go down on him, he
washes away the memory of the day’s horror with furtive
joy.
After he sucks you
off in turn, you stumble away in disarray, drained and feeling
curiously vacant. You’re late, and you feel like a complete fraud.
Some family man you are, with the touch of another’s lips on your
bell-end. But at least Bibi isn’t there to stare at you in silent
irritation or chide you for drinking again.
When you get home,
it’s quiet and empty. Your wife is off auntsitting and has taken
the kids to run errands or something. There’s an uneaten portion of
rice sitting in her fancy rice-cooker, and she’s left some daal in
the karai, to go cold for you in silent reproach. You fumble
through the kitchen drawers until you find what you’re looking
for—a pair of plastic chopsticks (Bibi likes a Cantonese take-away
once in a while)—then climb the stairs with heavy tread, pull down
the attic hatch, and ascend, wondering what you’re going to
find.
Adam’s slid a dagger
of curiosity between the slats of your misery and paranoia.
Investment opportunities aside, it’s time to find out what the
little fuck’s playing with.
Your den is
suffocatingly over-warm from the summer evening sun, and you feel
ill at ease, as if your personal space is under siege. The
stranger’s suitcase squats in the corner like an enemy garrison, a
forbidding reminder of ill-advised treaties. Tariq’s old pad
sprawls out from behind the fridge. You stretch the metaphor until
you see the fallen tombstone of a forgotten soldier and shiver
despite the heat. The brewing bucket lies where you left it, under
the beam of early-evening sunlight sluicing through the Velux:
There’s a yeasty smell in the air like rising bread dough, and the
wee airlock thingy sticking up from the lid burps an alien curse as
you stare at it.
It’s a fab of sorts,
the Gnome told you. A new kind of fab, or a really old one,
depending on your perspective. Transmutation, liquid bread, water
of life, al-kuhl. Not like the desktop
fabs Tariq and his mates are using to run off air-guns and sex toys
these days.
This is about using
yeast cells as a platform for synthetic biology. As the Gnome
explained it to you at great length—there will
be an exam later, Anwar—in normal cells there’s DNA, which
is transcribed into RNA, which in turn is used as a punched-card
template by protein-manufacturing machines called ribosomes. Each
three words of DNA data—codons—correspond to a single amino acid
out of a palette of twenty-one; the ribosomes read the codons, grab
amino acids bound to carrier molecules out of the soupy
intracellular medium, and glue them together to form new proteins
or enzymes.
But in these cells
there’s a whole new biology. It uses four codons to represent a much wider range of
amino acids, many of which are entirely artificial. Some of them
code for the protein components of the molecular assembly line that
replaces the boring Nature 1.0 ribosomes in the mechanosystem;
others code for enzymes that synthesize the exotic new amino acids
the synthetic biochemistry runs on. There’s bootstrap code written
for old-style ribosomes to get the new system up and running:
That’s what the health-food supplement switched on. Once it’s
running, the yeast cells are redundant, just a convenient platform
for servicing the nanosystem.
Not that this is
about shiny Star Trek nanites. Oh no,
we’re not that advanced. Nanotechnology
is the shiny new magic dessert topping /floor wax/pixie dust of
tomorrow, and always will be. This stuff is just synthetic
biochemistry, with some funky new tools for handling buckytubes and
exotic amino acids. Nothing strange about it at all, except that
it’s bubbling away in the bucket in the corner of your den and it
smells like money, which is always
enough to secure your exclusive attention.
What’s in the bucket,
Anwar?
Adam gave you some
helpful pointers. If it’s full of yellow crystalline sediment, back
away slowly—but no, that’s not so likely. You glance over your
shoulder at the intruder’s suitcase, but it just sits there,
eyeless and unspeaking. Too many ideas are jostling in your head,
seeking attention. Bread Mix. Colonel Datka’s
man. Tariq’s chat room. The stuff you didn’t tell Inspector Butthurt about: Tariq’s
unhealthy interest in making sure his chat-room environment wasn’t
as well guarded against malware as it looked, his secret VPN access
to the webcrime bulletin boards, plausible deniability. And then
there are the dark suspicions you don’t dare voice even to yourself
as yet: How accidental is all this? Where did Adam hear about the
Issyk-Kulistan gig?
Thoughts fermenting
in your head, you lever up the rim of the bucket lid and look
inside.
The bucket smells of
old socks and the broken promises of a hostile future, musty and
somehow warm. You peer in and see only dirty greybrown water, a
scum adhering to its surface, bubbles forming at the edges: It’s
slightly iridescent, as if you’d spilled a drop of diesel oil on
top. Is that all? you think,
disappointed, and dip the chopsticks in it.
The kitchen utensils
don’t spontaneously catch fire, or dissolve, or morph into brightly
coloured machine parts. You stir the scum on the surface around a
bit, and it crinkles and crumples against them; then you pull them
out again. A rope of congealed filmy scum sticks to the chopsticks,
dribbling water back into the bucket.
“Yuck.” You raise the
chopsticks, and the floating sheet dangles from them, mucilaginous,
like an elephant-sized snotter. You cast them aside, and they curl
together, landing on the carpet in a stringy mass under the window.
You clamp the lid down on the bucket of spoiled whatever-it-is and
shake your head. Probably you’ll have to take it downstairs, pour
it down the toilet—hope the Environmental Health wardens don’t have
surveillance robots lurking in the sewers. It’d be just your luck
to be busted for possession of an illegal chemical factory.
Assuming the thing hasn’t died or been infected by sixty kinds of
bacteria.
You climb downstairs
wearily and head for the bedroom. It’s been a long day, what with
the visit from Colonel Datka’s man and the unspeakable event at
Taleb’s. At least Bibi’s taking care of the
kids, you think.