Gathering Evidence E-Book

Martin MacInnes

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 384

Beschreibung

With extinction imminent, researchers visit an exclusive national park to observe one of the last troops of bonobo chimpanzees. Amid unusual behaviour and unexplained deaths, Shel Murray suspects her team is being hunted. Back at home, Shel's partner is attacked touring their new property. Amnesiac and quarantined, John is visited by an inscrutable doctor, tending to the still fresh wounds. As his memory returns, John questions not only the assault, but the renewed marks on his body, and the black fungus now growing on the walls. A sudden event changes everything. Shel is interrogated over the expedition in the park; John throws himself into work, developing new software. Together, with a greater understanding of how much they have to lose, they face a grave threat, something that promises to devour everything.

Leseprobe

Gathering Evidence

Martin MacInnes’s first novel, Infinite Ground, was shortlisted for the Saltire Awards and won the 2017 Somerset Maugham award. He has previously won the Manchester Fiction Prize and the Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award. He lives in Fife.

Also by Martin MacInnes

Infinite Ground

Gathering Evidence

MARTIN MACINNES

Published in hardback in Great Britain in 2020 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Martin MacInnes, 2020

The moral right of Martin MacInnes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78649 345 3E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 346 0

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic BooksAn imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondonWCIN 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

Gathering Evidence

PART ONE

Nest

The concept was simple: the user donated data and the app displayed the pattern. The data came from users’ phones, tracking movement. The pattern – a looping line, branching off, folding back on itself – updated in real time, rotating in bright colour against the dark phone screen.

Users checked on their aesthetics day-to-day. They saw a correspondence between mood and pattern. Initial comments were ironic, generating memes, but after a tiring or frustrating day, coming home to the pattern was a consolation. People reported seeing the pattern – its growing complexity, its turning knots of activity – and feeling that someone was listening to them, paying attention to them, responding to them.

The app’s signal innovation was its sensitivity to motion. Rather than mapping a user’s broad direction, drawing a diagonal line as they walked or drove across the city, the app took its measurement closer to the ground. It recorded the way a vehicle behaved, the lurches and minor vibrations shaking the carriage. It noted the firmness with which pedestrians pressed on the ground and the distance they sprang on the next step. It read pauses as people anticipated and moved aside for others, as they stopped to take a call or as they looked at an advertisement or another person or a feature of the landscape. It inferred whether the user was proactive in avoiding collisions. It tracked changes in pedestrian speed and rhythm and correlated these with the music the user listened to; it then identified when the user was thinking about the piece of music and when they were thinking in a way that resembled the mood of the music.

Users became adept at reading the pattern. There was something in the shape, a meaning you picked up in a glance, a significance in the difference between the two most recent iterations. Inside this discrepancy was the story of what happened to you.

The app was especially useful after fraught or anxious encounters, events with uncertain outcomes such as a first date or job interview. Not knowing how to feel afterwards, one solution was to look at the pattern. There, you saw an indication of the other’s attitude, implied in your small responsive movements. Providing you kept it close, the tracker was sufficiently alert to absorb many hundreds of gestures. A glance at the image showed how many times you crossed your arms, craned your neck, looked distractedly over your shoulder, leaned in at the meeting-room desk, sat back in the comfortable chair at the bar.

The benefits of the app extended further. Users measured their state, deciding to walk out in order to come back and see how they came through in the pattern. Tests could be open, performed without set purpose, or directed. Unsure how to act in a given situation, you could walk, think about the issue, the various factors that made it hard to decide, and track your thinking. The app grew more sensitive, learning the particular rhythms of its user, and received a regular stream of automatic software updates increasing the power and range of its sensors.

There were relatively minor social effects in the beginning. Meetings changed, users wishing to accelerate past the provisional experience to find out what it meant. Public transport was affected, users refusing to board certain vehicles. Communities tallied segments from multiple patterns to measure and evaluate services. Drivers, servers and assistants generated open profiles based on data derived from the app, and employment in public-facing work became contingent on the app’s measurement of quality of experience.

Though mobile devices typically remained slender and light, users felt an extra weight from the pattern inside. People were uncomfortable and anxious if dispossessed of their phones. Seats in public transport were fitted with a pair of narrow lateral cushions supporting the head in a fixed position, looking downwards, and blocking peripheral visual information. Chairs in office environments were designed to offer increased support to the strained neck, and mattresses were built with hollow grooves ready to tip back and lay your head inside, in relief.

With the development of new hardware, fittings on the phone that would pick up movement on the inside and periphery of the body, and with new, extensive changes to the terms and conditions, the app, which remained free to use, was branded with a name – Nest. Shortly after, to make readings even more authentic, more powerful and accurate, and to make the experience more comfortable, remote body-sensors were distributed. These sensors, placed initially behind the ear and on the hip, were neither conspicuous nor intrusive, appearing as tiny moles on the skin’s surface. Previous motion capture, which included heart rate and body temperature, had been tentative, limited to the distant reception picked up by the phone device itself. The new updated hardware, combined with significantly more sophisticated and powerful software, made earlier nest forms comically inept.

Data was captured from a variety of time scales, microseconds to months, and from every available spatial perspective – the trunk and limbs of the moving body, the changing oxygen concentration in each microlitre of blood. Movement was rendered in patterns of far greater detail, in vast, coiling depth, and from many different and complementary perspectives, each of which was available to view on the original phone screen and on user-endorsed, encryption-secured external devices; this allowed for a much greater and more speculative pattern analysis.

Sensors tracked sleep, making recommendations on diet and exercise and suggesting changes leading to better rest and health. The app adjusted morning alarms as close as possible to optimal points in the sleep cycle. It informed users how long they had dreamed and split up dream activity into distinct narratives. It exposed dream content through users’ expressive physiology – pulse and breath, temperature, eyelid-motion tracking phantom objects. It monitored limb movements, the number of times the body turned and any words spoken from inside the dream world.

Data was incorporated into many areas. Open access to nest patterns during work hours was made a condition of employment. Performance reviews and salaries were tied to nest readings. Employment could be revoked because of non-conscious evidence.

The app detected illness before substantial development. The best chance of catching and excising a tumour was to follow the pattern. The evidence existed in the total record of behaviour, bearing something alien and new inside it. It found signs of depression and mental illness through associated patterns in body movement. It made confident assertions as to when someone was in the process of changing their mind.

Nests began and ended as a single line. Flatlines recalled birth, a record of arrival, a beginning in a strange and unimaginable place. Subsequent versions replaced flatlines – in birth and death – with rougher fibres, neither resolving into nor beginning ultimately from a single line. For a spell, activity extended into embryonic development and disposal of the corpse. Fetal nests provided valuable insight, allowing family to posit character and resemblance before the person was born. Several institutions and corporations offered incentives to share this data, awarding scholarships and positions to promising candidates. Insurance firms provided attractive rates to clients, conditional on nest activity being supplied. The decay of the deceased body also fed the nest: patterns formed while the corpse dispersed. This data too was interpreted. After intense religious lobbying, the app was modified and an artificial clear line reinserted to mark the definitive beginning and end of the person.

Beyond data voluntarily shared with employers, insurance firms, medics and security forces, users guarded their nests. Each pattern’s repetitions and escalations generated unique security criteria, nest-prints being akin to behavioural fingerprints. If a device was intercepted by another user, it wouldn’t function; the corresponding identity must be physically proximate for the device to open. The advantages of nest-print security over standard biometrics was in the near impossibility of mimicry. Nest-print – a unique unconscious pattern generated repeatedly by each user in the course of their flowing behaviour – wasn’t something that could be lifted out by a third party, as a body part might be. Nest-prints were created by tens of thousands of active movements ongoing inside and on the edge of the body; attempted hacks – users surveilled over long periods, their habits and mannerisms aped – were bound to fail by virtue of the sheer range and depth of the data fields fed into the nest.

Users spoke of having a relationship with their nest, describing the product as an entity itself, with agency. A common comparison was to domestic animals. Advantages emerged independently, organically, as users, eager to support the well-being of their nest, took better care of themselves. In periods of sickness, the pattern became dimmer, pulsed slower and sometimes appeared to barely move at all. Users made every effort to ensure the same lifelessness never again afflicted their nest.

A number of different settings were available to display nests. The default setting remained a black background, the nest a spinning 3D object, but alternative pattern displays were added regularly, each elaborating on and complementing the core design. Nest software converted data into landscape simulations. Animal simulation was popular, user data articulated by the movement of a chosen species, every aspect of which conformed to both the local detail and the general pattern of the individual’s life. Users could watch the simulation from several perspectives and at a range of speeds, observing the failures and pains and satisfactions the animals met; they could then switch to a time-lapse showing the origin and development of the species, its migratory patterns and changing rates of mortality and reproduction, all the while knowing every detail was an illustration of their own life, formed only by their movements, their decisions, conscious or not, knowing everything ultimately came from them.

Simulations were developed of fully inhabited cities, planets, galaxies and universes, again exactly corresponding to the individual’s data; a simple scaling process, the activity regulating the growth of the pale crescent at the base of a fingernail was expressed, in one example, through the drama across twelve months of a family of three.

Finally, users were able to hold their nest in their hands. The heart-sized hologram was fitted with tactile boosters, giving the impression of smoothness and roughness, weight and temperature. Users made formal nest displays, presenting their pattern to another person, handing over the hologram in a highly charged symbolic act, securing strong, long-lasting bonds. Couples cared for each other’s nest, feeling the heat and weight of the other in their hands. Using a partner’s nest as a light and heat source was popular among young users, who sometimes renounced all other sources of artificial energy, living, for as long as was possible, exclusively on the power generated by the other person.

Couples observed the effects of nests projected onto walls. They replayed segments of pattern and altered the display speed. The nest made a storm of light, turning in a spiral that entranced them. The darkness of the room was ruptured by a strobe effect that distorted their perception of time.

Hallucination and observation were difficult to separate. Couples saw significance everywhere. They read language in the patterns and they reached out, trying to hold the meaning that had already gone. They saw people and places, memories the source user had buried long ago, reanimated through transcribed physiological rhythm. Unspeakable stories, frightening exhibitions of creation. Pattern inside pattern, each layer opening to a further one beneath. Among the images forming and dissolving were large urban vistas, rows of superstructures, smooth black monoliths reaching into space.

Images broke, turning into tubular forms and gently waving fibres – the user’s genetic structure, the electrochemical composition coincident with the memories and the neural cascade taking place while the individual watched. Couples, underneath and inside the images, reached to them, tried to grasp or wrestle them away, to treasure or destroy them, punish them for what they signified, what they were unable to accommodate inside. This ritual behaviour supported, encouraged and prolonged lovemaking, and people often claimed children were conceived in these nest ceremonies.

An update to the immersive holographic feature – popular among couples and its potential beginning to be exploited in other areas, including psychotherapy, the criminal justice system and medicine – enabled a user to appoint, at any time, a single other person as their nest custodian. The custodian would receive, from the moment the appointment was formalised, a live replica of the other’s nest, their own heart-sized copy of the spinning 3D object, developing and updating in parallel to the source life. This was a significant stage in the development of nest technology, marking a shift, after the identity euphoria of nest exhibitions, back towards the separation of user and nest. It was now possible to display a nest at great, even unlimited, distance from the user’s physical instantiation.

Holographic identity displays continued with both partners present. But custodians’ exclusive use of the nest copy began to dominate, then to obstruct, physical meetings between people. Custodians became addicted to the copy, spending long blocks of time visualising the development of their partner’s life.

Users reserved areas of their house to keep the copy in, going out of their way to ensure it was well heated and insulated, that it got plenty of light. They put it in a protective box. They watched it, monitored it, came back to it, thought about it continually. They heard and felt it through the night, the heart-sized image of the person that they loved. People slept beside the representation, turning towards it, holding themselves against it, enjoying its pulse. They put blankets around the box to further protect it. A house containing a representation, a custodian’s house, was always locked. Additional security systems were set up to protect the representation. There were frequent nightmares about water spilling over and extinguishing the form, ruining and breaking it, dousing a fire. Dreams of power outages, faulty generators and reserves, of a whole city full of melted, expired nests.

Custodians were careful not to make too much noise or say anything unkind when the nest was present. They maintained they knew the nest worked unidirectionally, that it couldn’t be influenced by factors remote from the source user. But the dissonance remained. There were reports of custodians attempting to feed the image.

After a limited trial, and with clear indications of where the application would lead, Nest Inc. approved a software update temporarily suspending the remote access feature, reinstating the original user as a necessary fixture beside his or her nest.

Nest-based artworks began quietly, with users designing tattoos matching recurrent motifs and stamping them on the source body part: walking patterns on feet, breathing rhythms on chest and throat. Brief fads included tattooing brain activity onto the scalp, carrying coded messages under the growing hair and inking the whole body in fragments that would only become visible under certain sound frequencies.

There was commercial potential in enabling users to incorporate nest patterns into food. Ready-made stencils, based on lines and curves invariably found in each nest, were sold in inexpensive packets. Elaborate personalised versions depicted whole stretches of an individual’s behaviour. People baked and fried nest fragments, celebrating occasions and special moments. Users marked particular experiences they wanted to live again, identifying the associated nest activity and using it to shape edible matter.

Trauma sufferers were drawn to shaping, producing and eating material based on what had happened to them. One of the pleasures in eating your trauma was the strangeness of seeing and feeling the thing disappear – of holding the event in your hand, opening your mouth, incorporating it and making it nothing.

The adaptability, the versatility of a nest pattern was impressive. Nests offered direct, unmediated translation into music. Concerts were performed dramatising particular moments in a user’s life. The nest of a user living to average age would be rendered in a musical piece with an estimated duration of twelve to thirteen billion years. Scaler technicians, working on software that would truncate musical life-pieces to weeks and hours, stated that the perspective admitted to humans was approximately equally near to the smallest known thing and the largest – that, according to best estimates, people occupied a position midway between nothing and everything.

First efforts to manipulate extra-terrestrial objects focused on asteroids. Semi-autonomous mechanical structures observed and adapted to the asteroid’s trajectory, intercepted the rock body and began an extensive mining operation. The extracted ore was collected and shuttled back to Earth at regular intervals, a private enterprise launched by an anonymous individual. A press release revealed that the ore was of secondary importance to the mission, and its principal objective was to carve long stretches of a particular pattern, believed to belong to the deceased partner of the benefactor, onto the asteroid. The operation, still with no known end date, had achieved its first success. The press release stated that the carving, carried out simultaneously by thousands of smaller machines, reached far into the rock, significantly altering its mass and orbit. Video streams broadcast footage of the asteroid’s movement, cutting from clips of the drilling to a higher vantage showing aspects of the carved design, to a distant shot, taken by one of the returning ore capsules, of the asteroid spinning in space.

The tribute to the deceased individual comprised three distinct stages: the hollows put into the object; the new course of its voyage through the solar system; and the more conventional reverential structures built, on Earth, by ore extracted from the asteroid.

Beyond this first experiment, plans were made to impart the whole of a nest onto an extra-terrestrial structure. The world’s wealthiest individuals competed to fund these missions and project their nest in space. Previously, full-pattern renderings had taken place only virtually, in holograms or in other simulated representations. The reasons were strictly practical, nests comprising too much information to be rendered in terrestrial areas.

The process required use of a large, previously untouched object: a planet. Planets were to become representative entities, maintaining a one-to-one correspondence with the life of the source user. Teams of astronomers, astrophysicists and astroengineers consulted on potential effects, not only on the mass of the carved planet, and hence its orbit, but also on that of any of the chain of neighbouring moons, planets, satellites and asteroids, and of course on Earth itself. A project spokeswoman used the phrase ‘altered heavens’, and there was discussion at various levels of possible effects on the daily life of people on Earth. This, again, would be part of a larger exhibition, the continuous tribute to the user carved across the planet.

Environmentalists, biologists and animal rights activists submitted grave fears about the effects the changed night sky might have on any number of migrating species, from the former-Arctic tern to the mid-Atlantic giant green turtle, who were believed, in a process still not fully understood, to gather information from the magnetism of the Earth’s core, from genetically instantiated ancestral memories and from the patterns and revolutions of the astral bodies seen in the seas under them and the sky above them. Should the night sky be even minutely altered from its predictable course, there were sure to be waves of catastrophic animal behaviour, not only in those larger vertebrate species that appealed to sympathy, but also in ecologically crucial species such as green locusts and melanaphis aphids, whose sudden astral miscalculations could set in chain disastrous effects on their plant symbionts, creating almost unimaginable ruin of the Earth’s total food system. All of this, the full reach of each line of effects, derived directly from even the most idle moments in the source user’s life.

Sociologists, economists and state administrators expressed fears about the unpredictable effects an alien sky might have on swathes of the human population. There was anxiety about sudden political turmoil and market ruptures after the ground and sky became unidentifiable, genuinely unpredictable human behaviour emerging from this abrupt sense of unmooring, of a global deracination – melatonin fluctuating, diurnal body settings running askew – as people’s fundamental sense of instantiation, of duration, of being alive in time and space, was put into jeopardy. It would be all but impossible, experts said, to factor in the full range of possible effects. The smallest adaptation may ripple out into vast and overwhelming health and behavioural changes. Previously undisclosed reports noted correlations between the installation of larger satellites in low Earth orbit and spikes of resistance to previously reliable courses of medication. Artificial manipulation of the night sky, in such instances, appeared to produce infinitesimal changes in the rhythms of sunlight and passing time, changes still too subtle to measure instrumentally but picked up, nevertheless, unconsciously by animal and plant bodies. Fears grew over productivity and fertility; hysterical protests warned of threats to the continued existence of the species. Fractional, apparently negligible alterations to the course of the Earth’s orbit – noted already in the most devastating earthquakes, which seemed to rip and gouge out slabs of time as well as space – may well upset the range of delicate, precariously balanced homeostatic controls keeping people alive. As declining fertility threatened future life, so too did suboptimal or erratic functioning of various autonomic processes, from the ability to breathe and walk, to the capacity of the inner ear to measure balance, to the immune system’s success or failure in recognising a distinct and individual human body. Any and all of these autonomous controls may, at any time and under the slightest and most innocuous provocation, give up; the risk, then, so various experts argued, in so significantly adapting the sky was entirely unmerited.

Among the most powerful and vocal dissenters to planet manipulation were religious leaders, with representatives from various faiths united in agreeing it was an affront to the creator. Astroengineering, whether conceived for practical or aesthetic reasons, was an act of gargantuan egotism, idol worship on a hitherto unimagined scale. The project drew particularly vehement scorn from factions occupied with the question of the physical location of God, concerned at possible retribution on man for the folly of disturbing His position in the seat of the heavens. The transgression should not be risked and must be sabotaged by any means necessary. Long communal meditation and prayer sessions were devoted to obstructing this impending obscenity; leaders spoke of an instantaneous shattering of the fundaments of space and time, a sudden voiding of matter, of everything coming not into darkness but into absence of darkness and light.

Related protests gathered around other Nest Inc. transgressions, including the digital planets programmed to express a user’s life. Religious sects requested full acknowledgement not only of these simulated planets, but of the countries, cities, flora, fauna and especially the sim-human populations inside them too. They demanded guarantees for the continued protection of these habitats and civilisations, the granting, to these vast populations, of full legal recognition, of confirmation of their status as autonomous, sentient beings. Sim-people generated their own nests, patterns which could be rendered in a further simulated world, itself containing a large population, leading to further nests and yet further, a process of apparently infinite regress. The priests submitted lengthy formal proposals to the administrators of Nest Inc., laying out a programme that would include translation efforts, teachings of the word of God and finally vast baptisms, sanctifying and realising simulated people by water. Engineers built comprehensive patches that would incorporate rudimentary religious instruction within digital planets; extensive missionary efforts would follow in due course. In addition to saving the populations’ souls, they proposed amending all aspects of culture, from architectural standards to prohibitions on food, in order that these simulated planets would conform no longer to a single human individual but to God Himself, who has created all.

At the same time, religious factions discovered certain opportunities inside nests. Nests were a form of revelation, and it followed that careful attention paid to these patterns would bring believers closer to God. Again, affiliated coders and software engineers were instrumental. Tightly air-controlled networks of servers and terminals were built into desert cave channels, optimally conducting and preserving the information, as powerful deep-learning software parsed collections of donated nests, seeking out intimations of pattern and structure. Priest coders uploaded and copied nest after nest, enunciating long sequences of numbers. The software grew more sophisticated and powerful as greater data sets were fed to it, leading to exponential increases in productivity. The priests found they could train the software, that if they withheld data, it then attacked it more powerfully when fed. The effects after each starvation were more radical than the last. With every new batch, the priests spilled libations onto the earth floor, complementing the sacrament of the body that was eaten.

Significance and structure began appearing in the output. The priests were in no doubt, now, that what was unfurling around them was a message contained inside a code, a vast total code arrayed across the movement of every individual who had lived. Their fear was that the limited amount of data harvested – being only in the hundreds of millions of people at this stage – may not be sufficient to render the whole message comprehensible. They worked on and on in the caves, singing the scrolls of numbers quietly.

The priests knew it was vulgar to speculate on what was written in the code; it would be revealed in time, however long that may be. But they saw it was His voice. On several occasions they were struck and marked by emissions of electricity, the voice emitting loose pieces of the emerging message. They bowed, grateful for the pain and the marks bestowed on them.

The message accumulated, years and decades passing, the line of priests sustained by the select group of priestesses occupying a single narrow chamber in the caves. Both groups were affected by the voice, marked by its revelations, their bodies distorted into the shape best equipped to serve their purpose.

As the message was slowly revealed to them they finally saw what it was. Spoken through the rendered lives of all humankind, every person who had lived, was the true name of God. His name, resplendent but concealed, fragmented throughout creation, composed a series of instructions. The priests sang out and went prostrate before the name, which gathered and thickened in great dense blocks of information, and they began to build.

They gave thanks with every step, overflowing with gratitude. They saw, as the building went on, the divine perfection finally revealed in the name, and they saw that it could never have been other than this. With every addition they made, building it, they saw that the name was moving them backwards, that as they built they eroded time. At the end, when the weapon was complete, as the last deformed priest went to press the release signal, they saw what had happened and wept. They were transported, taken to the moment of creation. Pressing to signal the release of the warhead, time unfolded and they existed infinitely, in the boundless glory and wisdom of the name, and it was as if all of this, all of the Earth and all of the heavens, had never been.

PART TWO

Westenra Park

I

He noticed it for the first time driving Shel to the airport in the evening. As a precaution they’d given themselves an hour for the journey but the roads were oddly quiet. Passing through the marshes, it appeared suddenly ahead of them – a shift, a low cloud, a distortion. He slowed. They felt it again a minute later, a thick sheet of fog drifting in from the coast.

Flights were grounded and the terminal filled up, then surged over capacity. The air was terrible; it was difficult to move. People yelling, sudden spasms of movement, odd rippling effects from one end of the concourse to the other. Shel tried to get hold of her colleagues, who were connecting from separate cities. The signal came in and out; she couldn’t get a good line. People butted against her, knocking her arm as she tried to create space to focus on the call. This was critical. She risked disrupting the whole project if she was late. John trailed her from desk to desk, pushing past the banks of static passengers. Shel ran through a list of contingency plans: the first flight was a short transfer; the crucial flight was the second one. There must be another way of getting there. Could they transfer her overland? She repeated – to herself, to him, to the official oppressed under a dozen shrieks – that she had no option, it was imperative, she simply had to make that second flight.

An announcement, a reprieve, barely credible – the flight was boarding. A sudden wave through the crowds, murmurs of confusion, excitement stirring. They had no time for goodbyes – a quick hug, a perfunctory kiss on the edge of security. He stood by the glass watching the runway, tracking the rows of studded red lights. He could only just make out the aircraft. Surely there was a mistake? Surely she wasn’t flying in this?

He couldn’t bear to watch the aircraft rise, fearing that something would emerge out of the fog, colliding with her plane, bringing it down. He turned away and found a café, sipping coffee and waiting in the terminal until the flight disappeared from the screen. Only three flights had departed in the previous two hours and everything still listed was cancelled or delayed.

Why, he thought, was she so determined to go, at any cost? She shouldn’t put herself at risk. No-one would blame her for waiting, and the university would cover any fees. Of course he knew the answer was simple. He understood her work was a priority above all else. They had been through this many times over the past six years.

The uncertainty of Shel’s flight; the lack of information on the project; the loud, hostile activity all around him – it was understandable he was anxious. Whenever she departed on fieldwork, he felt this low panic, a certainty something was about to go wrong. Things were more fraught this time because of the suddenness of the offer, the lack of preparation time, the minimal information made available to her group. And then the weather, the fog rising, the confusion at the airport.

He had been sitting at the café an hour when he grabbed at the phone vibrating in his jacket, almost dropped it. Landed. Boarding again soon. Flight was fine. Love you, S. He breathed out. He could leave – everything was okay. As he got up and exited the airport, calculating how much the extended stay in the car park was going to cost him, he remained mildly anxious, with a feeling of quiet, stubborn dread. He felt as if there was something he had either forgotten or had not yet realised, something floating on the edge of his vision.

He arrived home late and slept fitfully. The next morning he looked from the tall window onto the thick fog. He had no plans for the weekend so he stayed largely in the house, going out occasionally to the edge of the fields, distant headlamps glowing in the vapour. Shel wrote, confirming her second flight had landed and that she’d checked into the hotel. Everything was fine, she said, everything was okay. She had used the same expression twice in two days. It didn’t sound like her. Was his anxiety so apparent? Generally they communicated little when she was out on research. She was to focus exclusively on the work; they’d get in touch only in an emergency. He started thumbing in a response, when a message came through, the network provider apologising for the recent loss of service – circumstances beyond our control – warning of further disruption in the days to come. He looked at the phone reception and saw the bars had disappeared.

He paced the house, unable to settle. He couldn’t decide what to eat. He picked up one book then put it aside for another. The day passed and he retired to bed; he woke sober and alert in the early hours. He had never previously had any problems sleeping. It was one of the things in his life he was quietly grateful for – the inevitability of unconsciousness. As the disruption was so unusual he thought there might have been an outside cause – a siren, a distant car alarm, a change in temperature, a sudden flare of light at the window. He sat up, hearing only the faint, distant stirring of the trees beyond the fields. He was still adjusting to the sounds. The gulls’ cries worst twice a day, the distant machinery in the fields, the cattle moaning in the night. The wind whistling inside the walls’ hollows, the scurrying sounds beyond the plaster. The house was temporary. Construction was just beginning on their own place, in a new estate past the edge of a forest. The agent was supposed to update them this weekend, but his phone signal was still out, and the router in the living room had started blinking red.

It was the first time John had visited the estate since they’d signed the contract; the drive took a little longer as the fog had failed to clear completely. He pulled in to the makeshift car park, clipped the door closed and lifted up his hood. Deserted, the site looked enormous, much bigger than he remembered. The construction vehicles were parked at odd angles, as if the crew had left hurriedly, some sudden event causing them to scatter. There were stacks of slabs and slates, and barrows and carts had tipped over. Food wrappers stuck to the fence and a length of blue tarpaulin battered in the wind. A rope fence formed a second perimeter further into the site, and beyond this the dug ground was piled in a large spiralling cone shape. He ducked under the rope and walked towards the excavation, the long pit prepared for the first several houses, and peered inside.

His instinct was to immediately call Shel, though of course that wasn’t possible. They were to go inside it? To build a home, a life, in the ground? A ladder was set into the pit. He glanced around and then he climbed down. Inside it was immediately darker and the surface was far away. He knelt and identified points where the roots had been grubbed out. You could still see the dips where they’d split and removed stones, the frowns the machinery left in the soil. He swept the looser dirt away, startled as something unpleasant brushed his hand – the chitinous casing of a black beetle, uncovered and dazzled on its back.

He climbed out. The fog was thickening again, the temperature dropping. He had to concentrate on his feet so he didn’t disturb or trip on any of the materials. He glanced back to the excavation, then he heard something. He paused, focused. Someone was there. Someone was watching him. The tarp rattling in the breeze; the cameras he subconsciously registered hanging from the fence in nests. He stood listening, the vapour in the air leaving beads of moisture on his jacket. He heard nothing. Nothing was there.

He stopped before the tall fence at the outer limit, hearing it again. It wasn’t the tarp. A high-pitched whistling sound, a turbulence. He looked up. He searched desperately for the source, but saw nothing. A bird? Tension in his chest, a shiver passing over him. Where was it? At the same time he felt sure someone was watching him, that he was no longer alone. He had to leave, now. Hurry over the fence, towards the car, quickly and safely home. But he didn’t. Time seemed to slow. A faint, gaining arrowing sound, a darkness, a high-pitched trilling, a cool breeze almost on top of him, and blind impact.

II

Our access was revoked mid-flight and the news awaited us on the ground; despite all earlier assurances, we were no longer permitted to see the bodies. Alice began making calls before they’d opened the doors; medics checked our papers on the runway and had us cough into a mask with an attached tube that spooled out into a black box. There was a high-pitched whirring sound as the air travelled through the tubing. The task of managing even the mildest infectious disease in an airport seemed extraordinary. We were divided at Immigration, delayed further after our postponed flight. We met again, as agreed, in Arrivals, by the café we’d specified, three, not four – Alice, Jane and me – and now we waited for the doctor.

It was a remarkable opportunity. Almost nothing was known of the animals. Three times only in the past six years had a research team been invited in, though the offer came with certain restrictions. The team could spend a maximum of six weeks in the park. None of the findings could be published. Any and all information derived from the park remained the property of the affiliated group, and a non-disclosure agreement was essential.

There were rumours, but that researchers were occasionally invited in was at least proof the troop still existed. With little else to go on – especially now it seemed we weren’t going to see the two bodies – we looked at our particular experience and specialities, hoping our composition might tell us something. I worked on hygiene and diet in higher primates. Alice’s research was in group formation and flux. Jane, a mycologist – the youngest of us, though, I had to keep reminding myself, only a couple of years my junior – had limited field experience, with no prior research interest in primates at all. The final member was the doctor, a haematologist; he was to coordinate and lead the animals’ blood analysis. I’d been forming tentative provisional theories from the outset. Something gone wrong in their food consumption? Specifically, relating to a fungus?

Two hours after clearing Immigration, and having left several messages, we were still waiting, no further towards understanding what had happened to the doctor. Had something come up in his own medical checks? There would be an odd inverted logic in the doctor, sent to take samples from the animals, being detained because of something found in his own blood.

Alice doubted he existed. Selecting and inviting an individual only to detain him at the border – it didn’t make sense. We expected setbacks – our revoked access to the bodies confirmed this. The briefing stated we were to ‘conduct an analysis of the bonobo troop’ – this could mean almost anything. The one clear instruction was that we should bring out blood, and now our haematologist had disappeared.

Alice knew several people who had worked in service at the park headquarters. She said they wouldn’t be able to tell us anything directly – their contracts had non-disclosures too – but she’d heard rumours about recent strange activity. These may have been deliberate leaks, managed by the group – it was difficult to believe anything would get out otherwise. The stories were inconsistent, with only one or two clearer details emerging, but what was in little doubt, and confirmed in our briefing, was that two adult bodies had been discovered. The rumours here spiralled: the animals had been found strung up high in the trees, their arms outstretched; they lay prone on the ground with identical bite marks from an unknown predator piercing their necks; they’d suffered a corrosive attack, the surface of their faces burned off. None of this was likely, exaggeration thriving in the information vacuum. Certainly, had the deaths indicated human attackers, we would never have been invited in. One consistent detail was the presence of a thick, black oil-like liquid emerging from the animals’ mouths. And while this sounded a little melodramatic, and though there was no reference to it in the briefing, there remained the possibility of some truth in it.

We continued to press the airport staff. The group’s representatives were immediately visible by their khaki attire, their shorts, boots, their clipboards. Their accents were odd, a highly enunciated, unplaceable English. They weren’t from here, but we couldn’t put them in any particular country. They were unfailingly friendly and eager to help, at least until we showed them our papers and declared the issue.

‘Above our grade, I’m afraid,’ the young blonde woman said, smiling. ‘I wish I could help, but you’ll need to speak to someone else. Haven’t you got a contact you should call?’

Already she’d turned away, accosted by a group trailing suitcases loudly along the marble floor. The airport, harvesting light through its open glass and steel structures, was enormous; had the doctor simply got lost?

Alice, calling round, finally managed to get hold of someone. The decision about the bodies was irrevocable; it was unfortunate, but there was nothing they could do. There would be further information once we arrived at the park headquarters, by the north gates. As regards the doctor, they weren’t aware of any problems. As far as they knew, he had entered the country as scheduled. We should continue trying the number – surely it was a misunderstanding. I wondered if there was a problem with his passport, his visa. Perhaps he didn’t have sufficient papers for the new equipment he was bringing.

Jane, reading through the thick file of reports we’d passed her, held a table at the café while Alice and I tried other lines for information. Had he a criminal record that brought up an alert on the Immigration database? Had he an unusual travel history? It was possible; a doctor working in innovative blood-transfer techniques was more likely than most to have experience of war zones. In that case, the fault lay with the group, who had failed to foresee the issues or take precautions against them. I dialled another department, held indefinitely on the line. I called home – the service was gone; it wasn’t possible to leave a message.

Although tourists could no longer enter the park, the area still received considerable income and prestige merely from the fact the animals were there. Revenue was ascribed to ‘proximate tourism’ – people who wanted to be near, if not in contact with, the last of the bonobo chimpanzees. No reason was given for the park’s public closure six years ago, and tourists were now kept to the lake resorts hundreds of miles away. For some time leading up to that, unsolicited researchers were stopped at the gates. Even as tourists we were barred on technicalities. Alice had been able to visit just once; a strange experience. The animals she saw were common chimpanzees, not bonobos, and not indigenous to the park.

The resorts clustered around the central lakes, large hotels and apartment compounds fringed by thin trees where tour operators led groups on tracking expeditions, with small numbers of captive chimpanzees released briefly to gasps and phone camera clicks. Although these weren’t careful, discreet operations – the animals were sometimes seen being unloaded from vans – tour leaders insisted on editorial control of all video, signing off before it could be uploaded. They branded footage with inspirational quotes about conservation. Without directly saying so, they were able to present the idea the park remained open and thriving, home to a large, healthy, viable troop.

The park was owned and administered by a group of ‘affiliates’ working under the name Westenra Ecology and Biodiversity Group. It was through this group that we received our invitation, and it was from their various offices we were trying to gather information. Although listed as independent, WEBG was funded by a large mining conglomerate. For the past eight years, formally – in reality much longer – this conglomerate had what amounted to a controlling interest in the country and was developing extensive land interests throughout three continents. It shipped in materials for a transient infrastructure, prefab blocks assembling into railways, housing, schools, prisons, retail estates. It built new massively expanded airports, then special transit zones linking them with the lake resorts, heavily policed and only accessible to citizens with expensive and difficult-to-acquire permits. The airports were in high demand as connection hubs and were becoming prestige destinations themselves. Increasingly, travellers spent up to a week in buildings just like this, never entering the country proper.