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.