The *BIG* thing about Palo Alto is that, as a city, it designs tons of incredibly powerful and scary shit inside its science parks, which are EVERYWHERE.
- Douglas Coupland, Microserfs

Even before the slate-gray “Hong Kong Science Park” sign heralds your correspondent’s arrival, it is easy to tell where he is.

A vast expanse of glass, punctuated by gunmetal formwork, solid waved awnings, and sky; green as the sea, and as enigmatic.  Not the blank reflection of a skyscraper’s façade, nor the naked transparency of domestic windows, hinting at some sort of intermediate usage, involving sleeping bags placed beneath office desks.  As if to compound the mystery, most of the blinds are drawn.  Some buildings even boast an outer layer of glass.

The Science Park, like Cyberport before it, was set up to incubate local technological development, leverage synergies, and do any number of things only comprehensible to MBA holders.  It, like its predecessor, has enjoyed decidedly mixed success: buildings remain unoccupied, corridors remain deserted, restaurants in the local minimall are so desolate as to have resorted to reduced opening hours.  Instead it, again like Cyberport, has become a favoured haunt for photographers and families looking for a bit of verdant greenery without the inconvenience of a trek to a country park – and a venue for weekend fun fairs and other entertainments.

Behold the Science Park on an average weekend.  Numerous stalls for the Science Fun Day of the Month are cheerfully arranged beneath the Auditorium Building, an immense golden egg on four spindly stilts.  The nearby food court’s outdoor tables are filled with cyclists of varying levels of professionalism and scattered with the most fashionable digital cameras.  Nearby, the artificial lake is lined by metallic birds, welded to their perches.  A warm breeze wafts through the cloudless air.

Yet, for all that, it is easy to leave this air of comfortable, middle-class domesticity behind.  A short walk and escalator ride from the obligatory Starbucks and one is in a maze of immaculately deserted corridors.  Everything from the carpets to the doors projects an air of aggressive blankness, as if to offset the wonder and horror of the projects taking place within.  Occasionally a multimedia kiosk (one of many scattered throughout the corridors and the paved parkland outside) plays an introduction to the Science Park.  This is delivered in the authoritative, self-assured tones used in the Fifties to extol the virtues of the microwave oven.  Or Tang.

Even outdoors, one finds signs of this menacing banality.  At an amphitheatre overlooking the sea, as infants, families and couples mill around, an intermittent hiss – like that from a stopping bus, or a train – issues from an adjacent building.  On closer examination, a series of signs affixed to its louvered wall proclaims an arsenal of dangerous chemicals, some of them in ominously cryptic acronyms:

CAT 2 D.G.
ACETYLENE
METHANE
ARGON
HELIUM
TETRAFLUOROETHANE
CARBON DIOXIDE
NO SMOKING

CAT 5 D.G.
ETHYL ALCOHOL
ISOPROPYL ALCOHOL
ACETIDE
NO SMOKING

CAT 5 D.G.
CM-1
HI-50
AM-ZX60
NO SMOKING

The windows of numerous floors above these signs frame the faint outlines of desks, boxes of paper, ventilation ducts and what appears to be an airport luggage scanner.

All the windows of the first floor have blinds drawn across them.

As a helicopter lumbers overhead, the Sunday revelries continue.

But the true character of the Science Park, only ever hinted at on carnival-day weekends, emerges in full force only in extremis.  One overcast weekend, the public-address loudspeakers embedded in the hedges burst into life, repeating, in an eerily calm female voice and in all three official languages:

This is an emergency situation…

Meanwhile, as the Valium-voiced woman continues droning her dire warning, the Tang-advertising kiosks continue to pronounce their relentless optimism.

There is no thump of military helicopters.  No phalanx of firefighters in haz-mat suits.  Not even anybody from the management company.

It turned out that – at least on this occasion – there was a false alarm.  But this, surely, must be what it is like to be there when the grey goo finally escapes. ?