Genealogy Club, a story you haven’t got time for by Faith Jones

Oh wondrous Caliban, glowing with virtues, you have grown mighty indeed, circling your coordinated flurry of successes. Hours, the renewing round of 24 races all there to be won and filling them there’s you, so much talk about you, but I sense… washing up. Region 4, Region 3, Region 2, Region 1, the attributes of a performer god shrunken to a mere man. Should I relate your montage of pride, or some of the more seedy conquests? Should I expose you before you inevitably expose yourself? Temerity is more your natural vessel than mine but you have become interesting enough for the narrator to… seep through the fourth wall and pick on you. Look at you tonight. All great men turn into parodies of themselves and you have proven to be no different.

Galleries upon galleries of images lie out there, photo archives of those gala awards, entire scripts tapped out only to lure you into them, the lyrics of a song or two sung and then slapped straight back loud in your face across red carpets that could once have been — what? — Moorish tents stamped down by a celebrated stallion? The ruddied pavilions of empires lost, fallen to you, then forgiven and cherished, their hearts and minds stolen with an approachable wave.

Too fanciful a simile, too far East, you’re thinking? After all I have witnessed, don’t tell me you’ve become jaded and prosaic when I have not. Can you blame the narrator for dwelling on style when you make such a hero of it? You do often wear the loose-flowing fashion of the Medes and Phoenicians in videos but, yes, I can see you have no genuine desire to discover the bones of your unlettered ancestors.

Crowds and fans, nothing new to you, one who encourages sycophants and idolaters. Do you have a home beyond these transient hotel rooms? Oil-paint tubes from where you ordered the lot but forgot to learn, always meant to, time soaked into media headlines and out again to ‘do’ chat shows and then another broom is out again sweeping mushroom corks off the polish of a parquet floor.

The Dancing House in Prague is your backdrop, or Jazz by Henri Matisse, it’s all you; another time, another place, no real reason. The components of Jazz pull apart in your mind like acid; the piano keys, the sodium door-light piercing the nightshade of an alley, leaving only the dancing, posing, tissue-paper-thin figure of yourself, the centre of attention even when the musicians have gone.

One trick you learned early, thank God The Artist, was to always draw the eye first. A brush with excess paint flicks and falls into an oblong of blackness as one great artist expires and a new generation hatches out from that tired soul’s husk to continue the cycle of rebirth and reimagining.

So there you both sprawl, dissolved in luxury. Legs on a jacket. A gig, the after-party with its candy shop of choices, where you selected by shape but couldn’t see into her mind.

‘Hello Angel’, you ventured, with a practised smile. There are two kinds of angel, Aidan. You didn’t see the other women in the room, who instantly coalesced in hatred of her as they faded out of existence. Your fingers, this one’s hair.

‘So adorable.’ So demure. Aidan has an ache.

She’s into you but aware of them, the others you’ve just insulted.

‘Let’s split’, you say.

‘Okay. For a coffee?’

‘Never coffee after a gig. I have a strange compulsion to get the Space Hoppers out.’

‘Are you staying here?’, she asks. That was easy. You love her look of nervous innocence which says ‘I wouldn’t normally be doing this but… as you’re so famous… I suppose we could do something.’ She knows what she’s doing.

If you must bless your weary fortune with a vigorous conclusion, we have expectations too. I know you’re tired, Aidan, but don’t dream. This pretty girl has come a long way to suck up and down your personal area of interest. Theodora, let greatness own her, for she is mean no more!

What do you think a young woman can possibly get out of this act of submission, especially if her prince nods off and flees along the fields of his pride? That’s better, you’re rising to meet her, a view of that youthful face in the light, sensation awakens into electric frisson, the feel of exhilaration under lengthening strokes, an owl-flash of eyes as she looks up into yours — and oops, it’s soon over, pulsed into a mop of her silk-soft hair. That’s what you wanted. That’s what you needed. That’s why you act and dance and sing. It’s never been about the money or the houses, has it Aidan? Now you can rest, thankful boy, and those loving green eyes of yours are closing.

She looks around. Alone, hesitant, and she’s taken it.

There’s no mess and you’re too far gone to remember when she rolled that sheath along you. Word gets around, doesn’t it, that your line of work goes hand in hand with nasty diseases, so perhaps there was some rudimentary intelligence at work after all in this cutie. College girl, is she? You forgot to ask. You’ve used her and she’s really used you. No, she has, you’d never guess there was no spermicide in that carefully commissioned sample collection system.

A pen-light comes on, illuminating a strewn path to the bathroom, then it winks off again. The door from the bedroom opens, the black oblong from Jazz again, and into the oblong in essence revealed by distant street lights steps through your little nocturne girl. A criss-cross screen casts fish-net shadows down her legs but she’s part of your history now, your fault, your consequences.

She won’t switch the main light on, no. Things might get strange and difficult if you were to wake up now. She closes the door silently, opens the clip bag she brought with her and withdraws a plastic test tube with a hinged lid.

Upending her little bag of latex, she pours, squeezing the precious last drop between fingers and the tube is soon filled as the lid clicks decisively shut. Blue fluid from a reservoir hidden in the lid sinks into the sample. At the basin now, she turns the tap to cover any sound this makes and shakes the test tube for five seconds, counting in her mind.

Checking again to see if you’re sleeping, nocturne girl takes out from the carry bag what looks like an old fashioned brick telephone — but it isn’t. Plastic arms and legs are extracted and locked into position, but again they are not what they seem. Oh, I get it, small propellers and a drone is unfolding. In the centre of the flying, whirling device is a hollow shaft like a coffee cup holder but slim and deep, into which she slides the test tube. Ravens and their twigs.

As a last act, nocturne girl opens the bathroom window, leans beyond, switches on the drone motor to give it life and lets it go, buoyant now, as the cargo floats away and down into the fluorescent tangle that spoils true darkness. A stranger’s thumb takes it onward now. Sorry Aidan. You’ve been had.

‘Don’t take all night. I’m getting cold in here.’

Unforeseen this, her heart responds and jogs around ribs in realisation. Not the final act then, to clear the massive debt from her brother’s treatment. He’s called Angelo, by the way, but you weren’t to know. She silences the running tap and pauses to control her breathing, retouches the lipstick in seconds and then walks back through the door to the bedroom to play another set in bed, motives and suspicions slipping into infinite blackness behind her.

‘Flip a record on, luv.’

‘Okay’ — but someone else’s. She’s not your fan. Neither wish I to be your spiritual amanuensis as, believe it or not, I am even more fickle than you are. I choose instead, right here and now, to find a soul who seeks their laurels instead of sitting on them, who fears their imperfections and doesn’t huff their future up their nose. I bid you atchoo.

The next day a functional wall-clock unwinds to half past seven and an impenetrable girl restored to her elements of virtue and daylight receives a text: ‘Hey, it’s Aidan. Let me paint you. You’re doing art college or something, right? Paint you in the dark. Yeah, that’s totally a challenge.’

She doesn’t reply, not to him. Already she’s someone else he wouldn’t recognise, writing a parking strategy report at the office.

A city at daybreak on another sea-board, with curtains drawn and streets still quiet. The incessant hum of a cycle courier scatters fat pigeons from topiary tubs as this ratting intrusion banks a corner, a kerb, to park outside a modern building, almost blocking the entrance.

Reception is open, strangely for daybreak. The cycle courier approaches the desk and is then intercepted, relieved of the sought after pouch.

‘You can’t take the bag as well’, chips the courier ‘and sign’. A small packet, two fingers lifting, the contents removed and the bag handed back to him.

The sound of a lift and a life descending, almost Faustian this. The doors to the chamber tug open and, before the guard can step over the boundary, a poised technician in turn relieves the hand of its burden. The guard doesn’t bother getting out, settling instead for the return journey and a saving on shoe-leather. Bloody lab nerds.

At last! This is a real laboratory, a business investment. Is it daytime? Who can tell in these underground spaces, no clock, without any signal, where you’re not allowed to wear jewellery, trinkets or watches because of potential contamination? A clean room does not always translate to a clean business.

‘Aidan Grange’, the tube is marked with a permanent felt-tip marker, like a pair of his old school shoes.

It would take you a week to review all of these blinking, plastic-visored facilities, the pins and needles in the intricate process of genetic extraction and sequencing.

Stripped of all pair-bonding baggage, no warmth or scent to the nest, DNA strands alone are being loaded apologetically into bleak containers. He’ll soon be a multiple format product, our hapless rock star.

Business staff stand around on the far side of a glass panel, waiting for the technicians to finish; and now they have, securing workstations and putting plastic gowns in their lockers.

‘Hello. Are you Brendan Chase?’ a new blue suit asks a technician. ‘I want to go over the process with you.’

The technician looks bemused at the face, at the tie pin. ‘It should all be in your predecessor’s notes.’

‘My predecessor was dismissed on the spot and wasn’t being entirely cooperative, referring me to the gagging order in her contract. I’m having to write procedure notes from scratch. The CEO said he couldn’t put anything in writing for me for ‘operational reasons’ so I should come down here and talk to you. Could you give me a break, please?’

‘It’s simple, like all good business plans’, the tech told him. ‘The elevator on the West side of the building opens at floors 1, 3, 4 and 5. The elevator on the East side of the building opens at floors -1 and 2.’

‘I’m asking for the process not the architecture.’

‘I’ll get to that. Floor 5 is the management level, Floor 4 is marketing and distribution of all the test kits to customers, 3 and 1 are the labs that process the public DNA samples, 2 is where we securely archive the reporting data and -1 is here.’

‘I don’t get minus 1’, the suit presses.

‘It shouldn’t be me explaining this, but if no other bugger wants to take responsibility I suppose I have to. Put it like this: How many other DNA testing companies offer their services to the public, for either full mtDNA sequencing, deep ancestry, disease markers or genealogy?’

The suit counts on his fingers. ‘23andMe, AncestryDNA, Heritage DNA, AfricanDNA, FTDNA, Argus BioSciences, My Heritage, Cambridge DNA Services, Bioresolve, BritainsDNA, Family Tree DNA, Ethnoancestry… five or six more I’ve forgotten.’

‘Too many, so they’re undercutting each other. That tosh is only what we do in our core business, process kits that tell little Sally on her 10th birthday she’s distantly related to a sparkly princess — but — to come out ahead in a saturated market you need to have an angle.’ Brendan pauses, seeing whether the suit needs him to clarify further. It seems he does, so the tech soldiers on.

‘In this lab we have compartment 2 of the business. We curate a collection of what you might term A-List genetic samples, with which we provide reproduction options to discerning and wealthy clients.’

‘You clone famous people?’

‘No, that would be illegal. We provide ideal silent partner genetics for you to make your child.’

‘Designer babies?’

‘That’s one way of describing it. Clients can select a remarkable achiever to contribute chromosomes to the child they’ve always wanted. The genetics they choose are totally unrestricted by compatibility; male, female, any sexual orientation. We can use real sperm in a few cases for a standard or surrogate pregnancy. Otherwise, we can implant cellular DNA from both parents into voided eggs in vitro and then set the fertilised egg either in the client’s womb or source a surrogate carrier to take it to term, depending on negotiating a solid financial package.’

‘Jesus Christ? Einstein?’

‘We don’t have either of those assets, I regret to say, as they would be somewhat marketable, but we do have many others of significance banked. The genomes of people who achieved their status from 1980 to 2005 are currently sought after because those able to afford the service at the current point in time often began their careers or businesses in those years. Some have underlying fertility concerns but many are just unattractive super-fans with too much money.’

‘Which means there’s guaranteed ongoing demand for this?’

‘Clearly. Here’s what’s happening, if you want my opinion. As long as anyone can remember, the most successful actors and singers have flirted with the audience, openly prostituting themselves in many cases, but the audience couldn’t touch so were driven crazy by it. The stars didn’t know or care who they were seducing at the time, but now the barrier between the intoxicated nut-job fan with unfinished business and the star is breaking down. The new era is here, where a performer in a pretend way openly inviting the viewers to have sex with them will find there are real consequences, as the wealthy obsessed fan can make good on those promises and have their baby.’

‘Is that ethical?’

‘It’s screwed up, but everything is allowed until there’s a law stopping you doing it. If that happens, it still isn’t the end. We take the whole business into international waters where there’s no national jurisdiction and carry on.’

‘What about this sample, the film actor-singer Aidan Grange?’, the suit wonders.

‘Two options for reproduction, this being a live sample of the right kind of cells.’

‘The right kind?’

‘Freshly donated from the swaggering poser’s bollocks’, the tech elaborates for the manager without much patience, ‘and worth about seven and a half million an ounce.’

‘Strewth! Did we pay Grange?’

‘I expect he got something nice out of it. This material can be inserted almost naturally by pipetting into the mother’s egg, but that option is priced as premium because we would run out of stock. Better still, we’ve sequenced his code, so can build copies of genetic material to insert into a void egg template whenever we need them.’

‘You can do that? Build real DNA from only a data sequence?’

‘We can do that. Take some responsibility mate. You’re a manager — I only work here.’

‘But a string is millions of base pairs long!’

‘I didn’t say it was cheap’, the tech chides him.

‘When I think of the financial opportunities here… Re-insertion from data alone though, the reconstruction of a man’s DNA from a sequence plan, that is something new. When this technology becomes normal, eggs will jump at the chance!’ He realises that sounds a little weird.

‘It’s not just men’s genomes I’m talking about’, the tech assures him, ‘We’re working on homogametic fertilisation in addition to heterogametic, so we might soon be able to help women to conceive with their preferred woman and men to do the same, using a surrogate to take that to term.’

Only a little of the material has been destroyed in sequencing, the creation of an identical code which spells Aidan’s biology exactly, in every sense except corporeal. The technician walks a glass vial to a refrigeration tray marked ‘Strictly confidential’, subdivided into ‘Intelligence’, ‘Luminaries’ and ‘Entertainers’. The sample ‘Grange’ is archived amongst other tubes with scribbled surfaces that read ‘Adams, Anthony, Arquette R, Attenborough, Baldwin, Bardot, Berry, Bowie, Chase, Cheech, Chong, Ciccone, Cleese, Clooney, Connery, Cruise, DiCaprio, Ekland, Ford, Hamill, Hathaway, Murray, Presley, Fiennes, Freud, Feynman, Fox, Houston, Hill, Hutchens, Jagger, Jobs, Jones, Kasparov, Kennedy, Khan, Knightley, Mandela, Marley, Minogue, Musk, Navratilova, Penrose, Perelman, Pfeiffer, Pratchett, Ryder, Sinatra, Smith, Spielberg, Stone & Parker (mixed due to unusual circumstances of sample collection), Windsor, Williams, Woods’ and some presumably cheaper social influencers who only kids and the Chinese state’s internet monitoring service have ever heard of.

‘How do you collect these samples?’, the suit enquires.

‘People chuck away their skin and fluids all the time without thinking about it. We buy used spoons and cups from restaurants then swab them for saliva, take sanitary products from communal waste, hair follicles from hotel pillows and the occasional used prophylactic. Hotels are worth their weight in gold, for genomic collection.

I should advise you that donors won’t gift their genetics to every Tom, Dick and Harry who asks, so you will see some high consultancy fees every now and then, to reward our most talented field agents.’

‘How many of the donors know this business exists?’

‘The genetics are no longer their property, as they’ve put them in the communal waste. In rare cases, we do hold small quantities of viable sperm like Grange’s, for clients who want a natural conception and can pay premium rate. What surprised me is some famous stars make an effort to find us and be sure we have their deposit, Bowie for example.’

‘Fuck’, exclaims the suit unprofessionally, the implications of it all sinking in.

‘We’ve made that part of the process redundant’, the tech replies despondently.

Helsinki. An email arrives on a corporate laptop, squared up at the regulation height for ergonomic working, open and ready for business on a hotel suite desk. The lone occupant, Ms Georgia Farrow CBE has dedicated her life to the business her parents started in the 1970s and one that did well from the original free labour of a hippie community, but it was only under her control that it divested its shoeless friendships and assembled the corporate tonnage it wielded today.

An accountant might tell you Farrow’s journey had been close to flawless but, sometimes when you have focused too hard on reaching the summit of your mountain, you see other mountains and much a bigger picture emerges, a cohesion of awareness about all the other things in life you could have done instead. Priorities — she had achieved them for the firm, that was undeniable, but it had all happened at the expense of everything personal, every human need. She had never allowed herself rewards, personal luxuries, the accoutrements of greed as she considered them anathema to a lifetime’s work ethic. She’d never allowed herself pets or cars or men.

Opening and reading the message, Miss Farrow feels a knot forming in her stomach and knows at last that she can have something just for herself. She becomes aware of a new sensation in her body — excitement… is it joy? She feels the chakras opening and the body telling her what it wants, over-ruling the logical mind. Heavens, she realises, she can make a baby with her secret crush Aidan Grange!

Farrow needs to calm down and get control over anything impulsive, so moves over to a tea tray loaded with sachets and makes herself a steady instant hot chocolate, the first in thirty years, and mulls over whether to entrust her egg after lab fertilisation to a surrogate mother or to carry it herself and take a sabbatical. After all, they promised it could be done either way.

It is a huge investment, she knows, but rationalises that not only has she earned the right to treat herself to the best but in the unlikely event that her business did go bankrupt, a natural birth and simple paternity check would ensure Aidan paid serious maintenance money as the father. Was she ruthless enough to do that to him? To anyone else but…

She never made quick decisions in the past and wouldn’t do that now, returning instead to the technology, running her fingers along a music station, awakening to the sensation and tingle of something that had been dormant since her twenties. Had she sublimated motherhood?

She finds herself unable to decide what to do. Not about pregnancy, but whether to play one of Aidan’s songs or watch either of his magnificent films. No, the documentary. It makes him more real, domestic and close enough to touch. Farrow wriggles under the duvet like she’s a teenager and won’t sleep tonight for dreaming that Aidan feels the same about her. By midnight she’s decided and is transferring currency.

The Genealogy Club in the long, hot summer at Lentwetter’s Social Club and Library was somewhere you ended up in Trentsville when you’d reached school leaving age but still weren’t allowed to buy drink for a good half a lifetime more. Time passes slowly in this situation, sagebrush slow. Charlie, the club volunteer and amateur student of the comedic tradition, was acutely aware of the dust that accumulated in his own throat by seven each evening and had also seen the effects of tainted home brew on local people who didn’t have enough distraction in their lives. It was time to distribute the testing kits.

‘Now everyone read the instructions carefully, then I’ll go through them on the board’. Were they listening? He supposed so, but their attention might soon be on the drift. ‘If you get this wrong, the others will have their results two whole weeks ahead of you.’

Pachu’a was listening intently. Not every male in their 20s would be interested in genealogy and its utility for proving legal relationships, except the few who would discover the power of that particular science at the wrong end of paternity cases, but Pachu’a (who’d changed his name from Jon. His mother had chosen to Americanise him, but when he moved north he found it was slang for the lavatory, so reverting to a Hopi name meant no surprises) had something he wanted to prove, with evidence, not long interruptions.

When the Hopi lands were designated under the ownership of the native community, the people who lived there were ascribed a level of autonomy, by which they could set different rules than the regulations which applied to the lands surrounding them. This suited the Hopi fine, as they maintained a special and sometimes spiritual relationship to certain wild vegetable crops, but it was only with the advent of tax-free gambling that they found their modern niche. Hopi casinos became big business in just a few years and have made their owners wealthy, but to qualify as an owner with a community share of the casino, you had to meet one exceptional qualification: To be a Hopi.

Pachu’a was the first to spit a copious delivery of saliva into his tube. He’d studied this process.

‘Hi. I’m Gretchen. Gretchen Clusterbaker.’

‘Do your family bake clusters?’ replied Pachu’a, with feigned concern.

‘Uh, no. Duh. My ancestors maybe did but there’s no point doing that now; you’d get undercut by importers. I work in the bowling park. What are you in for?’

‘In for? I am establishing my native heritage.’

‘Proving it, not running away from it? The employment figures for native Americans are screwy.’

‘No, not running. I want to know who I am’, said Pachu’a with finality, as an unimpressed Gretchen drooled phlegm into her receptacle.

More voices, more reasons. ‘You’re doing well Bernie and so are you Tabitha. Do you want to tell everyone your reason for learning more about your heritage?’, Charlie asked them.

Tabitha waited to see if Bernie would answer and spoke up when he didn’t. ‘It’s gonna tell me if Dad is really Dad.’

‘It will do that’, Charlie answered, ‘but are you sure you want to know?’ Tabitha went quiet but it was too late as she’d already spat and couldn’t get a refund. ‘Bernie?’

‘It’s for medical reasons’.

‘An inherited condition?’, Charlie replied, realising he shouldn’t go into such questions. ‘If you have markers from both parents… for…?’ He really, really shouldn’t ask.

‘I can’t eat chillies.’ A laugh breaks the group’s reserve.

‘Lucas, how about you?’

‘The usual. Which part of Africa.’ Lucas leans back in his seat, cross-armed, defensive.

‘Ruth?’

‘Which part of Venus.’

She’s funny, thinks Charlie. The practical joke will be so much harder to go through with now because he likes them all. Such good kids. What the hey — comedy must be performed or this town would get boring.

Two weeks later and Floors 5, 3, 2 and 1 were in uproar.

‘Oh shit, oh shit.’

‘Is that you, CEO Willis? Are you locked in the washroom?’

‘Oh shit oh shit screwit, crap dogs!’

‘Have you got a dog in there? Is it scratching you?’

‘Who is that?’, rebounded the most senior voice in the company.

‘Tina Heller-Minchkin, Sir. If there’s a personal injury in the cubicle, I can be very discreet handling it. I’ve got cold cream in my bag and might even have some treats.’

‘What? Non-ATCG DNA, that’s the damn problem! It’s FJVR!’

‘Sir, they’re not even nitrogenous bases. I can assure you there’s no such thing as FJVR DNA.’

‘Not on this planet, Helluva-Minchkin.’

Back in the olden days long before the internet, when golfers couldn’t stop their trousers flapping, a visionary by the name of Carl Sagan received a letter from a provocateur who claimed to have come from another planet and offered to satisfy any test that would evidence it. In reply, Sagan asked to see non-ACTG DNA (all animals and plants on planet Earth are coded from the bases adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine), which abruptly ended the correspondence.

The thing is, all Earth life has a common ancestor. In addition, all Earthling animals share the same body design of one head at the top (or front if on all fours), a central spinal axis, symmetrical rib cage, four limbs and smaller bones on the end of those. To determine a non-terrestrial animal, you only have to look for a completely different design than the ribcage, head and limb pattern we would be expecting because that’s what we know from here.

Of course, if aliens could mimic our bodies, print new ones or decant themselves into a mould, we would be stymied for a visual identification — but — DNA made from a different set of chemical markers would be decisive. That’s what Sagan asked for. Back to the lab and a flustered technician’s meeting:

‘It arrived in a batch from a small town called Trentsville in Kansas. The only thing I could find online is it was founded by someone called Trent, when his wagon broke down and he had to stay there and then someone else’s wagon broke down and they kind of got acquainted and the place grew on them…’

‘Contamination?’, asked Willis.

‘There’s no sign of that — or rather, I don’t think it is possible.’

‘Not by a state actor, to discredit us?’

‘Not even then. It would be the greatest achievement in scientific history to make a working genome from different chemical bonds and bases. It doesn’t even curve clockwise. Probability theory rules this biology must have evolved independently.’

‘Is there a legal requirement to inform the Capitol?’

‘If you do, sir, we will need enough time to re-label the core samples in the lower lab before they confiscate everything.’

‘Authorised. That’s re-label, remember, not lose.’ The CEO passed into a state of soulful reflection.

‘We will never get any more Bowie jiff.’

When you live in a small town in the middle of nowhere in particular and the lazy days of summer don’t contain quite the fireworks you had expected, the sing-song sameness of it all can begin to pall. Watch with me now as Lucas appears in the distance, walking home. Pottering along the edge of a wheat field he goes, listening to the natural insect drone of the summer. Not for him, headphones; they give him a rash.

‘Hey, Lucas! What did you do?’ — and there’s Gretchen, leaning out of the window of her parents’ car as it passes.

‘Huh?’

Gretchen points enthusiastically at a parked black car as she whizzes past it. ‘It’s the Feds! Run, Lucas, run! Ha-ha-ha.’

‘Get lost’, he shouts back at her receding bumper.

Taking account of his situation, Lucas registers three parked cars, not one. Knowing in his logical mind he’s done nothing wrong, Lucas still feels a minor blink of universal anxiety that he doesn’t want to be set up for anything he hasn’t. The synchronised opening of car doors tips the balance. Tense, daunted by the attention of strangers, Lucas hurls pell-mell across the field, crunching the baked earth beneath him — and then pulls up short. There are now six cars around the field and a van with lines or bars across the back window. WTF?

‘What do we know about the supposed family?’ asks a pair of dark glasses.

‘There’s not much in central records, sir. They’ve kept a low profile, paid their taxes on time. A couple of traffic violations and his father unsuccessfully applied to copyright the term Electric Boogaloo in 1981.’

‘I knew there was something un-American about that dance.’

‘Should I bring him down sir? With the tranquiliser?’

‘No, put that thing back in the vehicle. We don’t know what it could do to his physiology. We’ll walk toward him slowly, showing him open hands.’

‘That’s not the protocol, sir.’

‘The protocol, dumb-ass, was written for humans.’

Fourteen days, that’s how long the Federal Biohazard Investigation Team and several shifts of staff from the Bureau detained Lucas. Fourteen days of questioning, sleep deprivation and good cop/bad cop needling.

The first thirteen days had impressed them, how well this species played the part and appeared to the casual onlooker to be completely human, how they never broke or changed their story, how they got the dialect and cultural references spot on, even when thrashing under water, or when subjected to invasive cavity probing. In short, despite a few knocks to hurry things along, Lucas’s head didn’t crack open and, disappointingly for the federal team, no wiggly tentacles or razor-sharp teeth came out.

Yes, they concluded, this was either awesome resolve or exceptional mimicry through superb training, so they did it to the squealing Gretchen too for good measure because she’d warned him. They sent a tickly robot millipede up her nose.

Bernie and Tabitha checked out and Pachu’a had recently moved to a penthouse on a reserve, which was out of their mandate, untouchable, so every possible accomplice who had supplied a DNA sample to that lab had now been eliminated.

Toward the back end of fourteen, someone eventually thought to re-test Lucas.

‘The new test says he’s 100 percent human.’

‘What? Oh my god. Some bastard mixed the samples up!’, the agent raged, struggling to accept that any species could have hoodwinked this whole operation. ‘Those kids are gonna sue us.’

‘I think they will do that, sir.’

‘What about the Electric Boogaloo?’

‘Human origin, sir. The President’s Office checked with Chaka Khan.’

When Lucas is finally loaded with apologies and allowed to go home on a federally-confiscated Greyhound bus, he limps resentfully back from the Trentsville stop and along a field-side margin that would never again be the same.

Charlie, a former Lentwetter’s Social Club and Library volunteer, sits far away on the distant scrub with another of his kind alongside him.

‘Your infiltration went well?’

‘Of course. Do you know what I did? I entered a business by cloning a new employee’s brain.’

‘Isn’t that dangerous? When we probe famous politicians’ brains, doesn’t it always cause devastating damage to their intelligence?’

‘You may have a point, but the public never notice.’

‘See what they did? Those monsters?’

‘Yes, that is how they would treat us, but worse, so we cannot reveal ourselves to them yet. Humans are not dignified or mature enough as a species so who knows how they will behave when they are introduced to the people of Plurp.’

‘Agreed.’

‘We can see if their maturity has changed after our 21 year each way round trip home. You will stay here, but you must be unnoticed.’

‘I understand. I think I’ve always known they are an odd race but the experiment had to be attempted, the chance to show their worth had to be given.’

‘We will do something for the poor boy who was hurt by these fools, but it cannot jeopardise our incremental alignment with their culture.’

‘Yes. Alignment is the way, to lessen the shock they will experience. Every year the humans make continual improvements. I’ve been reading about 1984 and it is so much better now.’

‘Then there is hope.’

‘I think I even prefer their language to ours now. I feel strangely self-conscious when I have to revert back to all that clacking and whistling through the ventral and rectal ducts.’

‘Anything else?’

‘I like dancing, very much. You have no idea, yet, how difficult it is to synchronise movement on two legs with handfuls of toes getting in the way all the time and simultaneously holding the bladder and breathing in and out. When you get those things the wrong way around, it can be devastating.’

‘Noted.’

‘I find it pleasant here, when they let you alone. Ice cream is of course poisonous but don’t let the humans know that or they will threaten us with it.’

‘Right.’

‘Their simulacrum of eee-deees, which they call swans, have no antennae or larval stages and they’re the wrong way up. I like banjo music very much, but not drums because they hurt me. There’s one song called Lucky Boy by an Aidan Grange — that’s very good. I hope he gets some luck.’ He mulled before continuing.

‘Have you see those powerful trees called oaks? They have such magnificent shapes and can really hold the soil, which is a boon in case of gravity inversion. I also like ocean sunlight zones, the top 30 feet, and reading novels by unusual minds.

Have you ever seen an octopus in a bottle with one big eye against the glass? I’ll never tire of that, so like our entertainers, or when the humans engage in a full-blown Twitter-spat. Remarkable language, economy of emotion.

Jokes are more difficult. I’m writing a thesis on them. I still can’t get my mind around puns and suspect they might be the high point of human culture. In England, they have a place called Wareham Down and they tell me that’s not a pun but it is funnier than most other jokes I’ve recorded.’

‘Noted. We will monitor the settlement and relocate it off-world if it is a hindrance.’

‘You can also tell those podlings printing body vessels for us back on the mother ship that they can’t just pour our cells into a shape without first checking the literature on internal anatomy. I mean, why is my brain between my legs?’

‘Respected literature by one Virginia Woolf states clearly that this location is the origin of male thinking.’

‘Tell them not to believe the first source they find on the internet then. Incidentally, livers aren’t supposed to broadcast anything — that’s not their function at all.’

‘Not even your allergies?’

‘No, nothing, and ribs are supposed to be connected at both ends, otherwise when you take three good breaths you inflate like a puffer fish and everyone runs away from you. Except kittens. Expansion fascinates kittens for some reason.’

‘You’ve gone native, my pod-sibling.’

‘I suppose I must have.’

At a tidy office block, in the leafy business district of a city comfortably far away, photons stream from the sky and an inexplicable hole the diameter of a pencil burns, pierces and pushes through the roof, floors, concrete and girders of a building occupied only by a defenceless genetic heritage testing company. With elegant point-to-point accuracy, the spearlight flickers out and a luminous runny tinkle of plasma which follows vaporises one lab.

Published in 2020. Audio version here: https://youtu.be/5Jr2KfeJTBA