The Actor

Public-spirited pigs

Jenny & Chris

In the end, Jenny chose to follow her long lunch with an early finish. This meant leaving for tomorrow what she should have done today, but so be it. She felt she had earned the lapse. It also meant Simon would return to the office only to find her gone. Let him. If he'd really been serious about his invitation they could make their arrangements in the morning. It was true that she felt a lingering ambivalence about why Simon should suddenly choose to ask her out; but it was equally true that she had the ideal antidote: a prior engagement.

From the office, it was no more than a ten-minute walk to the city park that Chris had designated for their second meeting. She took her time, happy to arrive early, grateful of the opportunity for idle thought it provided.

It was early autumn, the trees still in possession of their leaves, the afternoon air still holding on to the warmth of the day. From the park bench where Chris took a seat beside her, Jenny looked south toward the cluster of high-rises that marked the city center. The remainder of the horizon was clear, with a string of clouds to the west that had only just begun to color up for the evening. It was as if, in its comfort and inertia, the scene was gently mocking them and anyone else with plans to change the world. If so, the effort was wasted: the lunch with Mrs Vassinger and the attention-focusing demands of her job had flushed away her morning doubts. For now, the pair of them had eyes only for each other, and for something else, something that manifested between them as an invisible glow: their ideal.

"When I make a promise, I mean it," said Jenny. "So I'm not going to make any promises. Not yet. But if you are prepared to tell me what you want me to do, I'm prepared to talk through the possibilities."

Chris was turned toward her on the bench, his elbow leaning on the backrest. "Never expected it would be any other way."

"Really. The way you were talking last night, I thought you would be looking for something a bit more, ... unequivocal?"

"It's all right. I'm prepared to work with whatever I've got."

"I see." Jenny made an effort to sound affronted, but neither were fooled.

"This isn't about me and you," said Chris. He kept his expression tight, his lips pursed, only curling a fraction at their ends. "We can't allow ourselves the luxury of thinking ourselves special."

"Of course not." Jenny let out a giggle. For a moment her face recaptured that teenage freshness it had possessed for a time at the Snowden Café.

Chris savored the moment. Having done so, he did his best to adopt a sober voice. "So when you went to visit Professor Singh last night – it was because you recognized how this brain map might be used to design new smartdrugs?"

"That was part of it." Jenny nodded.

"And it's public knowledge that these illegal smartdrugs aren't cheap, right? They aren't sold to junkies. A lot of them don't even give you the jollies. Instead they're about performance enhancement – mental performance especially. They get supplied to people who need an edge: CEOs, top lawyers, politicians even."

Jenny nodded again, her eyes on his face.

"Okay. Another point, also public knowledge: the criminal gangs who produce these drugs were interested in Spurious Developments, the company that Graeme Williams works for, the ones who built the scanner they used to make the brain map."

"Not just public knowledge. I was on the case. You know that."

"What's happening with the case now? If it's okay for me to ask, that is."

"Sure. There's nothing much to tell. The case is idle, deemed 'no immediate threat'. We passed on what we had to the drug squad and went back to our day job of chasing programmers with Jihadi tendencies. Rumor has it we'll be shut down in the next round of budget cuts, in which case the Agency's interest in Spurious Developments will likely disappear with us. At least until their machine goes public."