Descent (26 page)

I flipped my viewpoint forty-odd miles, to the doorway of the Boyd Orr Building, and hovered. I wondered how many other invisible presences hung around that doorway beside me: boyfriends and girlfriends, over-anxious parents, jealous lovers, stalkers … Just after five, students crowded out. The POV was partly inferential, its real-time elements pieced together from CCTV, happenstance overflights, passer-by phones. The time ticked on … ten past, quarter past. Just as I was beginning to wonder if the spotty coverage had missed her, Gabrielle appeared. She was smiling to herself. My heart jumped like a hooked fish. The doors swung shut behind her. She walked up the ramp to the street, and turned right. I followed her all the way on her brisk brief journey, up the hill past the old university building and down past the library and the Students’ Union to the traffic lights. She crossed and walked on, took a couple of turns, and in one of the back streets between the university and the Kelvin river she skipped up a flight of steps to a main door, opened it with a key, and went in. The door closed behind her.

Inside, as I could see from the building’s overlay, were three flights of stairs to the door of Calum’s flat. No doubt she had a key to that, too. The only view I could get showed a light coming on, but nothing closer was on offer. I dropped back out and took the glasses off. My hands shook even more than they had before I’d put the glasses on. Not with rage or jealousy, but with the sort of slightly shame-faced thrill I sometimes felt while viewing quite innocent ice-skating, dance and fashion-history sites. I found myself wondering what time Gabrielle went to work, and which evenings she and Calum went out.

I heaved myself off the recliner, and went through to the kitchen to prepare my dinner. A tin of mixed beans went into the pan, followed by a carton of passata, a pinch of dried herbs, a few leaves and stalks of fresh coriander and a chopped chilli. While it was simmering I tore off and buttered a chunk of bread, and poured a mug of wine. When the meal was ready I put the pan on the table and ate from it with the wooden spoon while watching the news on my glasses, pausing now and then to wipe off the steam. Replete, I stuck the pan and plate in the sink, topped up the wine mug, and returned to the recliner. I made a careful mixture of Focus and Mellow Yellow – a nifty little combo of cannabinoids, opioids and nicotine from the head shop on the South Bridge that I’d taken to dropping in on – and sat back for a physically relaxed but mentally alert evening of thinking, browsing and watching vapour rings drift apart. After catching up with the rest of the day’s news and checking my email and watching a clip of a skate-dancing contest in Kyrgyzstan for the third time that week I found my attention turning back to Gabrielle. With a saving modicum of caution, I resisted the temptation of another virtual visit, but I couldn’t stop thinking about her.

She had apparently settled in with Calum. She’d looked happy to be heading home, light on her feet, smiling, quick up the steps. I’d already seen the touch of her taste in the flat’s decor, over Calum’s shoulder. I could all too easily imagine the two of them together. They made a couple like those I’d noticed four and a half years earlier at the wedding ceilidh: all the big lunks and gracile lassies. That old Neanderthal sexual dimorphism thing …

At this point a thought occurred to me that got me pouring a slug of whisky into the bottom of the now empty mug, and toking Zip, a mixture more potent than Focus or Mellow Yellow. My mind started racing, and I took a swig of whisky to slow my brain.

The thought was this. Remembering the ceilidh, I’d recalled the guarded looks I’d got from Gabrielle’s parents the first time they saw me, and their obvious wish for further private conversation with Gabrielle immediately afterwards. Things had continued in the same way after that discouraging start. Her parents had never really taken me to their hearts. They’d been polite enough, even friendly and hospitable, but I’d never been able to shake the suspicion that they didn’t rate me as good enough for their little girl.

Was it possible, I now wondered, that Gabrielle’s extended family knew, at some level, who was and who wasn’t likely to be a good match? That they had some traditional knowledge, even if only in hints and rumours and old wives’ tales, of the speciation that Gabrielle had learned of from studying genetics? Calum’s now-disavowed schoolboy claim of a secret family tradition came back to me with renewed salience. Of course, he’d said he’d made it up, but when someone says once that they were lying earlier, how can you be sure they aren’t lying again?

I could easily imagine family occasions, and weddings in particular, being used as matchmaking opportunities, bringing together cousins distant enough to avoid inbreeding but close enough to be fertile. Was it possible, then, that whoever had invited Calum to the bash had expected him, and not some stranger he’d brought along, to fall for Gabrielle – or at least, for one of the many single ladies there? He’d ended up in deep conversation with one of the bridesmaids, to be sure, but as far as I knew nothing – or nothing much – had come of it. Looking back, I had the distinct impression that Calum had noticed Gabrielle at the same moment as I had, and that the other young woman was very much a second best as far as he was concerned. If Calum hadn’t baited me about missing out more than once on Sophie’s subtle signalling of interest, might I have been less forward in approaching Gabrielle? Might he have got to her first? Just as he’d got to Sophie first.

Hah. That was, to my surprise, a sore point. Sophie! Every time I’d met her since and including that time in the pub before our Highers I’d missed her signals, misread her situation, put a misplaced loyalty to Calum above the impulse to say something, to do something, to make a move. A sore point, indeed. I decided that probing it further would be like poking at a tooth you already know is going to hurt.

No, what was on my mind and galling me was the thought of Calum being welcomed into Gabrielle’s family as the ideal son-in-law. I felt oddly more jealous about that than I did at the thought of Gabrielle in his bed, infuriating and agonising though that was. What if – and it was here, I think, that my most elaborate and self-serving and self-destructive conspiracy theory really took off – Gabrielle’s parents had all along intended Calum to be Gabrielle’s partner, and had subtly poisoned her mind against me? By hinting or outright saying that I was a waster, a drifter, a man with no future? I couldn’t see how I could find that out other than by a direct admission, but that could wait. What I wanted to do, right this minute, was find out if my idea about the wedding and the family had been correct.

Unfortunately for me, I knew just how to do it. My phone, my pad and now my glasses contained all the tools I needed. Some of them were standard apps, others were part of every journalist’s kit and therefore on the shady side of legal. I sat up, took a toke of Zip, spread my phone on the table and pulled everything together: Registry Office records of births, marriages and deaths; police and court records; genetic databases; personal searches; consanguinity calculators … I started with Calum and Gabrielle, and worked my way back through generations. I soon found the two of them were indeed, as Calum had said, distant relatives. They had a great-great (etc) grandfather in common – that old village atheist Gabrielle had mentioned over our first lunch together: Seamus the Tink, Hamish an Duirach, James the Jura man. From there I began tracing the branching lines forward, through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and on into the twenty-first. Then I traced other lines back.

By midnight I had a rough genealogy for the clan. In three dimensions it was a multi-node roughly cone-shaped network. I saved it, vaped some Bliss, knocked back a nightcap slug of Glen Pokhara and hit the sack.

The following morning, feeling predictably bleary from the whisky but revived by a shower and boosted by a toke of Zip with my first coffee, I sat at the kitchen table with my glasses on and my chin propped on my hands and watched Calum leave the flat about eight and head down to the Kelvinbridge subway station. I flipped back to the street outside the flat and kept half an eye on it while making and eating breakfast, glancing at the news headlines, and conducting a more careful scan of my science and technology trawl to see if any items worth writing about had been caught in its nets overnight.

Gabrielle left the flat about forty minutes later. I followed her every step on her ten-minute walk to work, and then, in a moment of daring, hitched a floating camcopter to catch a glimpse of her through the windows of the sixth floor. She’d put on a white lab coat and tied up her hair, and she had her hands – fists, going by the muscle tensions – rammed in the pockets as she stared at a wall screen. Then she seemed to relax a little, took her hands from the pockets and slipped on glasses of her own. Quite unaccountably, unless she had the feeling of being watched or the glasses warned of the camcopter’s gaze, she turned and looked out of the window as if straight at me. I felt a jolt like electricity, but held the orientation for another few seconds. She blinked hard, gave a tiny headshake and shrug, and turned away.

I dropped the connection and sat quivering. Had she noticed me watching her? Or had she just spotted the camcopter, as a minor flaw in her sight like a floater in the eye? I searched on counter-surveillance apps and found many, several of them recently and specifically developed and marketed in response to the release of SkEye. One or two claimed to be able to show the user the identity of any SkEye user watching them. This gave me a falling-lift moment of dismay, but my experience of tech journalism made me sceptical of the claim. My doubt was confirmed by a quick search on the apps: SkEye itself was advertising counter-counter-measures as standard. The discretion of the watcher versus the privacy of the watched was just another arms race; this one, I could see, would run and run.

But this was no cause for complacency: Calum could easily have given Gabrielle backdoor access to SkEye itself, or for that matter included some usage-tracking software in my trial package. For all I knew, it might not even be a hack, it might be a feature. Maybe I was being a bit paranoid, but … I bit the bullet and bought a sub to EyeFly (the name was already in litigation), one of the rival products that had sprung up in the week since SkEye’s launch, having been in development for months or years beforehand and hastily readied for market. That meant it was pretty much a beta release, but I could live with that for the peace of mind.

Unless the tracking software I’d imagined had been left on my glasses … No. I stopped that train of thought right there. No need to get paranoid, I told myself, and just to test my nerve used my newly installed app to look at Calum at work in StrathSpace’s glass tower on the Clyde. He didn’t look back.

Paranoia, I decided, was something I needed to think about. There was a definite danger of my falling into it. It wouldn’t do at all to let it get in the way of my investigation into a possible generations-long conspiracy that I suspected had now turned its attentions against myself.

I dropped out of EyeFly and fiddled with my e-pipe, as something to occupy my hands. A calmer toke than Zip seemed called for so I unscrewed that tank and replaced it with one of Focus, to which I added a few drops of Mellow Yellow. After I’d surrounded my nose with a soothing cloud of maple-syrup-scented vapour, I faced up square to my misgivings. Let me try to reconstruct a rapid and at the time rather frenetic process of thought.

What was I worried about? Like everyone else, I’d long taken for granted that the state, and anyone with the relevant resources and connections, could monitor all my online activity. I already knew, or had good reason to suspect, that this had happened to me at least once – when Baxter had traced my search on Revelation – and again more recently when he’d picked up on my conversation with Sophie. But Baxter had no reason to be interested in what I was doing now. I doubted that Calum, or his employers in StrathSpace, had the kind of influence and connections that Baxter and British Avionic Systems had. Nor was this likely of the people whose genealogies I’d roughed out the previous night. True enough, that network of linked extended families demonstrated a thriving lineage, but it was of people who’d done well in the small to medium private sector – business owners like Calum’s father, professionals like Gabrielle’s, farmers like Big Don’s – rather than within the state or in companies cock-in-condom with it like defence. Oddly enough, they were exactly the kind of people Baxter’s party appealed to, rather than like Baxter himself.

Baxter … something was bugging me about Baxter, some connection I hadn’t made. I scribbled his name down, and returned my attention to the main point – that no one I was looking at was likely to be able to repeat his feat, whatever it was he had done.

So I was probably safe enough investigating the supposed family conspiracy. As for watching Calum and Gabrielle, the simple measure of changing to a different app would keep me off the radar of any unconventional counter-measures. That left the conventional ones: if Gabrielle’s phone or glasses or just uneasy feelings warned her that someone was watching her, she could call the police with a complaint of stalking, in which I’d be the natural prime suspect. A mention of my name would trigger an automatic trawl of my records, and have me bang to rights.

Well, not over my adventures of the previous night and this morning, obviously, but certainly if I were to make a habit of them. A pattern of behaviour – that’s the phrase the lawyers use. I wouldn’t go to jail or even be fined for it, unless I’d made actual threats or actively harassed her, which I had no intention of doing. But being convicted of persistent unwanted watching of a specific individual – particularly a former lover – is a good way to get a restraining order slapped on you. And the usual restriction imposed? A software lock on your phone and other devices that leaves you with little more than the capacity to phone your mum or order a take-away. Add to this a legal restraint on your acquiring any other devices or access, and that flags up your name to every business and institution you might approach. There are ways round it, of course, but I’d be barred from any legitimate work in freelance journalism. Even after the order had expired, its record would remain. My employment prospects would be like those of someone whose name had once been on the Sex Offenders Register looking for a job in a nursery.