[WARREN WAKES WITH A START]
[IN THE BACKGROUND, A TAPE OF GORDON’S MEMOIR PLAYS]
GORDON
… what actually qualifies as an ‘heirloom’ seed and what is just an historic seed. Some would argue there’s more to take into account…
WARREN
Ugh. What’s… what’s going on?…
GORD
Hi Warren.
WARREN
Argh. Too many… too many Gordons. Shh.
GORD
Which one?
WARREN
You.
GORD
Sure.
GORDON
[continuing] …beyond simply the dates of a seed’s discovery or use, including the history of its preservation, the geography of its use and connection to specific groups of people, honestly you need be as much a sociologist as a student of agriculture, and I am neither of those things…
WARREN
You have to what… no, no, no… What… what is this all about?
[THE MEMOIR CONTINUES]
GORDON
So, let’s work through the different categories you need to organise by. You have a crop, it’s species, it’s method of pollination -
WARREN
Why? Wait, wait, wait, stop.
GORD
Is everything alright, Warren?
WARREN
I fell asleep.
GORD
You did.
WARREN
How long for? I was actually trying to listen to that. He was talking about… he was just getting started… the… the Chin… Chinsomething people…
GORD
The Chinchorro people of Northern Chile. You’ve been asleep for just under 2 hours.
WARREN
I must’ve missed loads of it. Shall we… shall we er… wind it back?
GORD
[hesitant] If you really want to…
WARREN
Why are you saying it like that?
GORD
It’s just… after his introduction, Gordon discusses the purpose of a seed vault.
WARREN
Yeah, that sounds… well… I don’t know, is that… is that interesting?
GORD
Well, before he gets into seed vaults in particular he goes into some extensive depth regarding the study of seed and crop history.
WARREN
Yeah ok… That sounds less interesting. I was asleep for 2 hours?
GORD
Yes.
WARREN
And he’s still going on about it?
GORD
He is.
WARREN
Yikes. Let’s take a break then.
GORD
Indeed.
[WARREN PULLS HIMSELF UP AND STRETCHES, HIS BONES CLICKING]
GORD
How are you feeling, Warren?
WARREN
I, uh. Yeah, uh. Fine.
GORD
May I ask you something?
WARREN
Sure.
GORD
Yesterday you spoke to Aubrey for the first time fully compos mentis, with your short term memory intact. She told you that you’ve been in hypersleep for 44 years. And you laughed.
WARREN
What’s the question?
GORD
Why would you laugh?
WARREN
Is this where the robot asks me about this mysterious human behaviour called denial?
GORD
Are you in denial?
WARREN
I mean… there probably are ways you could prove it is in fact 2064, but you are yet to do so.
GORD
I am under instructions from Aubrey to limit the information given to you at this stage of your emergence. Your conscious level may have improved but we remain uncertain over the speed of your recovery both physical and psychological.
WARREN
You know, Aubrey could literally just, like, show me her face or something. That would be good proof. Oh God, is she a robot too? Oh God, are you all robots? Is this a human zoo? Am I an exhibit in a human zoo?
GORD
It is difficult to tell if you are joking.
WARREN
The reality is Gord, that I have largely lost respect and appreciation for the passage of time. Time is utterly subjective, of course it is. I have had years of memories scrubbed clean out of my head. Apparently, I’ve been awake the last few days, but I can’t remember. I’ve lost weeks and months of my life dipping in and out of… the cryonic void, if you will. I didn’t age. Basically, not existing, right?
[PAUSE]
WARREN
You know everyone at some point or another develops a kind of internal clock, even if it’s just waking up right before your alarm every morning?
GORD
I literally do have an internal clock.
WARREN
Right. Of course you do.
GORD
It is 04:38am.
WARREN
Right. Well I have an absence of that, like a… like an anti- internal clock. I have no idea what time it is -
GORD
It is 04:38am.
WARREN
Yes, thank you. I mean… I have no interest what time it is on an existential level. To hear it is 2064… I find myself… indifferent. It could be 2034, or 84, or 3064, or stardate blah blah. I’m not the same guy in a different time. Right now, I’m… I’m this version of Warren Godby, whoever and whenever he is. Next time, I might be different. Or the time after that, or the time after that.
[HE PAUSES FOR A MOMENT]
WARREN
[seriously] All our cells get replaced anyway, don’t they? Every few years or whatever, I… I read that, right? We all shed our skin. We shed everything. Every atom. Become different people. I don’t know what I’m saying. I guess it really is 04:38am.
GORD
English author Charles Caleb Colton once wrote: ‘The present time has one advantage over every other - it is our own.’
WARREN
Wow. You pluck that out of thin air?
GORD
No, I actually dropped that quote into conversation with Aubrey the other day, but I thought it appropriate here too.
WARREN
That’s very honest of you.
GORD
You know I did consider concealing the truth just then to make myself appear more intelligent. Is that arrogance?
WARREN
Oh my God, you are gonna be insufferable, aren’t you?
GORD
Do you want to go back to sleep?
WARREN
No. No I do not. Can I listen to more of the memoir thing, please?
GORD
Shall I skip the part that debates the nature of an heirloom seed?
WARREN
Absolutely.
[CUT]
[THE OLD TAPE BEGINS]
GORDON
You can find seed banks all over the world. They’ve existed for longer than you might expect. The first known seed bank was founded in 1894 in Russia, the Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry. Other wonderfully named examples include the Berry Botanic Garden in Oregon and Peru’s International Potato Centre. But the most famous seed bank in the world is easily the Svalbard International Seed Vault, due no doubt to its dramatic surroundings, buried deep in the permafrost of a mountain somewhere between Norway and the North Pole, and its equally dramatic nickname - the Doomsday Vault.
GORDON
I’ll be frank. As a student of the archival sciences and shameless nerd, the idea of an isolated frozen seed library acting as a back up for the world’s crop supply in the event of global catastrophe is definitely up my street. Imagine the scope for hi jinx and shenanigans running around a mountain in the permafrost. So, I want you to imagine how truly over-the-top pumped I was when I heard that Overhead had taken on a contract to build the UK’s own seed library. Deep in the Scottish Highlands. A decommissioned military radar tracking station, at the base of a mountain, in a place called Red Valley. And they need an archiving system built from the ground up. I would take this job for free. My application went in 25 minutes after the position of Archival Facilitator for the Red Valley Seed Vault went live.
GORDON
Everything happened in a whirlwind. Application, interview, job offer, induction. I couldn’t believe it. Just 10 people in the archive team. Didn’t need to be in contact with any other departments. Got to work remotely, didn’t even have to change desk.
GORDON
[audibly excited] It was a fascinating challenge for me on a systems level. I’ve been with Overhead straight out of uni so I was leaning far too heavily on the Archive department’s integrated records program, it’s all I knew. But this was the first time I’d been part of a biological archive, a real living document if you will. That required a very different logistical approach with a whole new bag of parameters to work within. So, once I’d laid out a preliminary configuration, there were far more verification stages needed to ensure -
WARREN
Mm, tell me more… No, no, I take it back, don’t tell more… Stop, stop, stop. How much archive talk is there?
GORD
This section is not… succinct.
WARREN
It’s pretty dry.
GORD
It does not get wet.
WARREN
Shall we skip it?
GORD
I can skip it.
WARREN
Make it so.
[WHEN THE RECORDING COMES BACK, GORDON IS MID-STREAM, AND QUITE JOVIAL]
GORDON
… which really opened my eyes to a different way of thinking! I’d never had much time for the holistic approach, but Oscar put it in a way that really spoke to me and made me realise just how indoctrinated I was to the Overhead archiving program. Oscar would go off about the records continuum model once we were off the clock, just really digging into multidimensional and non-sequential archival theory while we were playing an emulator of Mario Kart Double Dash that he had found online (which, incidentally, we both agreed was the most under-sung Mario Kart) -
WARREN
Ok, wrong… Whoa whoa whoa.
GORD
The archive talk is just ending.
WARREN
[offended] Who is Oscar?
GORD
A member of the team working on the seed vault.
WARREN
Oh right.
GORD
He was based at Overhead’s Manchester office.
WARREN
Sure.
GORD
Shall I resume playback?
[WARREN MUTTERS UNDER HIS BREATH, JEALOUSLY]
WARREN
Yeah… I don’t think Double Dash was that good.
GORD
I’m sorry?
WARREN
Nothing.
GORD
Shall we continue?
WARREN
Yeap… Sure.
[GORD STARTS PLAYBACK AGAIN]
GORDON
And so, the seed vault model came together relatively quickly. Management were happy with the progress we’d made. The team were happy too. Oscar said he’d never worked on a project with so much creative freedom, and I agreed. It had been liberating to be given so few boundaries, to have such little pushback from on high. Of course, that’s exactly what should’ve made us suspicious.
GORDON
As we approached the 12 month point, our manager suddenly left the project. No leave, no notice. Gone. We’d never even met in person - they’d been brought in from outside, headhunted for the role. Then, poof. No replacement. We continued to work, what else were we going to do? But grumbles started amongst the team. Oscar had heard that budget reviews had been mentioned, and before long team members started being moved over to other projects. It became a miserable time waiting for the axe to fall. This was Overhead, we knew the game. If they don’t like the numbers, you’re toast. And one quiet Tuesday I got the email informing me that the Red Valley Seed Vault was no longer in active development, and I would recommence my old role in Archives the following week. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. I was fucking livid.
[AS GORDON’S STORY RETURNS TO OSCAR, HE BECOMES A LITTLE AWKWARD, NOT QUITE SO SURE HOW TO ARTICULATE THEIR RELATIONSHIP]
GORDON
The team drifted apart almost immediately. We never really knew each other anyway, and I was hardly the life and soul of the remote working party. But Oscar and I stayed in touch. We’d actually mentioned meeting up a couple of times. We’d never made any plans but… yeah, we… still messaged each other for a few weeks. Then out of the blue one day he tells me he’s back on board. That the Red Valley project was back in action, in some capacity. He asks me if I’d been invited to return too. I said no, I’d heard nothing, not yet anyway. He’d see what the deal was and get back to me. And I waited.
[PAUSE]
GORDON
But that was it. No more contact. No response to any messages. I even called him. Nothing. Just like the job, Oscar had dropped me. I asked around the old team about Red Valley, if any of them had been taken back on. I heard back from a couple, but they knew even less than me. The others never replied. I don’t know if they’d been reached out to like Oscar, or if they just couldn’t be bothered to answer. Weeks went by, and eventually I just settled back into a comfortable pattern of quiet seething and resentment.
GORDON
But then one night I got a message. Not at work. At home. Online, a DM on my gaming account. From Oscar. No details. He just asked me to meet him. In a car park, just a few miles from my flat. That night. And he asked me… he asked me to record everything we would talk about. So… here’s what I recorded.
[SUDDENLY GORDON’S RECORDING CUTS TO ANOTHER]
[HE IS SAT IN HIS CAR, THE RAIN HAMMERING ON THE ROOF]
GORDON
[awkwardly] Hello, hello, is it working? Oh er… yes. Um. This is me. Er… Gordon. Gordon Porlock. I’m sat in my car. In the rain. In the car park by the big Asda and the Pets At Home. I’m recording myself, sat in my car. It’s er… very late, and I’m very weirded out, because I’m meeting a colleague, a… a friend. My friend Oscar. We’re meeting in my car in the rain in the middle of the night. Because he wants to tell me something. He’s late. But that’s fine. He doesn’t live anywhere near here. So that’s… weird. But he said come and I’ve come. And he said record, so I’m recording.
[PAUSE]
GORDON
I like the sound of the rain on the roof of my car. I’ll let you know when he arrives.
[GORDON GOES QUIET]
[THE RECORDING GOES ON, THE RAIN IS THE ONLY SOUND]
WARREN
Oscar isn’t going to show up, is he?
GORD
No.
WARREN
How long does he wait?
GORD
The recording lasts another 40 minutes.
[THE RAIN CONTINUES WHILE NO ONE SPEAKS]
GORD
Would you like me to play the next recording?
WARREN
No. No, I can wait.