A hundred thousand rumours, lies, and rituals live in Kent; although outnumbered they gang up on the people waiting in the camp to be granted entry. But only one rumour rises or falls to the level of legend. As such it’s not of the people but of the place. Those who manage to reach the drone-seething shore learn of it, it almost seems, in a dream during their first night or encoded in the common grammar of the dozens of languages in which they keep silent in quiet hope of bureaucratic grace.
Parts of the legend are prosaically true. Almost everybody healthy enough to arrive to England — not a journey anybody is guaranteed to survive — after the automatic sterilisation that defines the core compromise between the pro-business and eugenic wings of the ruling coalition is offered the opportunity to volunteer for one of the hundreds of phase I clinical trials run by the research laboratories that pay so handsomely the company running the processing centre for this recruitment pool.
It’s also true that some of those trials are related to regenerative medicine, and some of them with reproductive health. The government would very much like more children from the ageing Traditional Briton stock (their wives, that is, not their much younger pink visa assistants and proteges).
It’s not likelihood but possibility bordering on science fiction, but what isn’t?, that an experimental treatment could reverse the sterilisation.
It’s not possibility but hope not examined lest it collapse that after such result they wouldn’t sterilise the subject again.
Like all legends it’s necessary for the preservation of sanity or of the status quo. Which one you think is being saved depends on who determines their degree of overlap if any. Yet without this desperate prophecy less people would sign up for the clinical trials — despite the sort of jobs available for those who end up leaving Kent neither back to the sea nor to be cremated, despite the inference dismissed as horror story that experiments are sometimes designed to maximise not the expected medical outcome but information gain, despite their stretch of shore being part of the United Kingdom but not, legally, of England and their gutted and straw-stuffed yet still standing regulatory laws. This more than justifies the small cost of designing the legend and carefully keeping it alive.
Perhaps it even justifies those inhabitants of the camp who, unbriefed, unbribed, and with more scientific experience than the local employees and company reps, hear, know, and keep silent. If not by the mark-to-market value of false hope then by their own whispered secret story, shared only among shameful initiates, of old warning voices suddenly quiet having left the camp through no known door.