Hybrids: Saga Competition Winner. David Thorpe

my head and nobody gave us a second glance as we walked through to the back. There, sitting at a table by himself, was a thirty-something man with a shock of brown hair, brown eyes, freckles and a rollneck pullover. He had the appearance of someone used to sleeping standing up. Mark Jarrett shook my hand vigorously and said he was very pleased to see me and that the name of his company was 3x+y Productions. From that I was able to dig up a list of their TV programmes—mostly stuff to do with politics and current affairs or international issues—not a comedy among them.

      “I’m compiling material for a programme about the plague. I think there’s more going on than the government is telling us,” he announced.

      “Like what?” I said.

      “Well, you know the Prime Minister, Lionel Smith? Don’t you think it strange he hasn’t been seen in public for four months?”

      “Yes,” said Cheri, sipping her juice. “They say it’s due to security reasons, but he hasn’t even been on TV. A bit unusual for a politician, don’t you think?”

      Mark continued: “They’ve given the Gene Police new powers to arrest and detain anybody they suspect might not only be carrying the virus but also protesting against the way the government is dealing with the pandemic.”

      “And,” added Cheri breathlessly, “it’s becoming harder and harder for Salvation House to get the drugs we need. The drug companies keep putting the prices up.”

      “Somebody is making a lot of money out of this. And we’re trying to uncover whether any of the politicians have shares in the drug companies.”

      I was beginning to get bored. I was obviously surrounded by people who thought the world should be fair and liked to complain when they discovered it wasn’t. Personally, I thought they enjoyed complaining. I put up on my screen a crying smiley. Boo hoo.

      The message sank in, so they finally got to the point. “And then,” Mark said, “there’s the Centre for Genetic Rehabilitation. That’s where all the Reds get taken. And nobody knows what happens to them. It’s covered by the Official Secrets Act. They’re never seen again.”

      “Of course, the message is that they’re all well taken care of. They have to go somewhere because they have nobody to take care of them in the outside world,” said Cheri. “We can’t take everybody.”

      “But if it’s all hunky-dory, why won’t they let me in with my camera to film it?” asked Mark. “I think it’s because they use the hybrids illegally, attempting to find a cure.”

      Cheri left the table for a moment, to visit the toilet. While she was absent, Mark leant conspiratorially across the table at me.

      “You know what?” he said. “I think Kestrella’s mother is in the CGR. Don’t you?”

      I shrugged. “Could be. But I bet you want me to see if I can find out.”

      Mark said:“We could do it together. If you ask me, it’s the most likely place for her to be.”

       10. Bearing Witness

      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.