Tokyo Cancelled

One night Rajiv decided to go to one of his factories to inspect how business was being conducted. He was that kind of businessman: he liked to see every detail for himself.

As he arrived it was already nearly midnight, and the discreet lighting along the pathway to the main entrance left most of the vast building floating unseen in the darkness. This was the site of one of his newest ventures: a telecom centre where honey-toned Indian operators with swiftly acquired American accents gave free 1–800 telephone succour to the throngs of needy consumers of the United States.

He swiped a security card at the entrance and day struck; the lights inside burned in the night like a sunny afternoon. Rajiv scanned the rows of cubicles critically, saw a Coke can on the floor that immediately irritated him, watched for any malfunctions in the efficiency of the place. Every worker had to average thirty calls an hour. Nine-hour shifts, one 45-minute break, two 15-minute breaks. Efficiency was everything.

He walked down the length of the hall unseen by the headphoned workers at their screens, and climbed the staircase to the mezzanine where the floor manager sat in a glass booth.

The manager jumped as if he had seen a television image come to life.

‘We are honoured, sir–extremely honoured–sir–’

‘How is everything?’

‘Extremely well. Thank you. Thank you very much.’

‘I’ve come to spend a bit of time listening to the calls. Want to see how everything is working.’

‘Of course, sir.’

The manager took off his headphones and switched the output to the speaker.

From above, the cubicles looked like a magnified insect battery, a nest uncovered by mistake, a glimpse of geometrically precise rows of pods, lines of tiny vespine heads, shining with black Sony ovals, trembling with larval energy on T-shirted thoraces.

‘Is this the number for customer complaints?’ A crystalline American accent asserted itself over the speaker.

‘Yes it is, madam. What can I do for you this morning?’

At that inconvenient moment, Rajiv’s mobile phone rang.

‘Hello?’ he said, in one quick syllable.

‘Hi, it’s me.’

‘Hello, Mira. I’m at work. What are you doing? It’s late.’

‘Last week I was on one of your flights from San José to Boston. There was a stop-over in St Louis. The flight out of San José was delayed by one and a half hours and I missed the Boston connection.’

‘I’m having a massage. At home. There’s something important I want to discuss with you.’

‘Not now.’

‘When then? Do I have to make an appointment? You never have time. There’s something very important to both of us that I want to tell you about and at ten past midnight on a Tuesday night I feel I have a right to expect that you’ll be available. And since you’re not actually in the house–’

‘You people didn’t have another flight to Boston till the next morning. So I had to buy another ticket on American to get there on time.’

‘OK quickly. I don’t have much time. What is it?’

‘I’ve just read this article–today’s paper–it’s about a new technique. Listen to this.’

‘Mira–please, not now! I can’t concentrate.’

‘You guys couldn’t get me there and I had to attend a dinner with people who were only in the country for one day. I need a refund.’

‘How dare you talk to me like that?’

‘I mean they’d managed to make it all the way from Paris and I was going to say sorry I’m stuck in Missouri?’

‘Is loitering around your damned factory at midnight so important? Just tell them to wait. Listen to me for one minute. You’ll be as excited as I am.’

‘OK, I’m listening–Why is this guy letting her talk on like that? Who cares about her damned dinner? Just give her what she wants and let’s move on–Go on Mira.’

‘SCIENTISTS PRODUCE VIABLE GORILLA CLONE: Claim Human Cloning now Possible.’

‘Madam, can we start from the beginning? Name and the date of travel?’

‘It’s datelined Cambridge, England. I’ll start from the beginning. A group of scientists at Bios Laboratories Ltd today announced they had produced an eight-cell gorilla foetus that would, had it been implanted in a mother gorilla, have given rise to a normal pregnancy and infant. The scientists destroyed the foetus, saying that their objectives were simply to confirm a number of theoretical and technical hypotheses, not to create quote public curiosities–blah blah blah…’

‘Last Thursday. Flight 162. Name is Laurie Kurt.’

‘OK, this is the bit: Dr Stephen Hall, the Technical Director at Bios Laboratories, said that the experiment showed how far the science had come.’

‘Let me just find that on the system for you. Hope you made it to the dinner in the end, after they’d come so far?’

‘In the end. Thank God. They were venture capitalists from France who were looking to put money into my company. It was the only time in four months we all had spare diary time. Can you believe that?’

‘I’m going crazy listening to this small talk. If this guy wants to chat he can do it in his spare time. He’s supposed to do one call every two minutes. What’s his average? Check it.’

Somewhere in California a police siren swelled, Dopplered, and faded.

‘Rajiv? Are you listening? “A few years ago these eight cells would have been on the cover of Time magazine and people would have been saying that this has turned our idea of nature on its head.”’

‘We’ve got this amazing technology, it’s going to turn the lives of three hundred million Americans literally upside-down–and I’m sitting stuck in St Louis–of all places!–missing the only time I could get with these VCs in four months.’

‘“Now we have well-established techniques for doing this kind of thing, and can achieve our objectives with a high degree of predictability–and no one is really surprised anymore.”’

‘He’s making eighteen calls an hour, sir.’

‘Then why is he still here?–Mira, hang on a minute–That’s not how you were briefed. If he’s not doing his job, fire him. That’s what you’re here for!’

‘You can imagine how I felt–’

‘Otherwise I’ll fire you.’

‘When asked what this meant for the future of human cloning, Hall was unequivocal. “It’s going to happen. We could do it now. And someone will do it. One thing that history has taught us is that human curiosity never sleeps, no matter what obstacles the doomsayers try to put in its way.”’

‘Mira, please!’

‘–this was possibly the most important moment of my life–’