Nature Futures, page 12
“Who’zat?” Leo asked.
“Gates!” Mercury swore. “Didn’t you attend Required Lit. lectures? I’m cloning Charlotte or Emily Brontë. One of the sisters. I took a hair from a mourning brooch at their shrine in Yorkshire.”
“Whose facilities are you using?” Leo asked, suddenly all business. He must have turned off his sim program. “What’s your estimated time of fruition?”
“I’ve rented an off-Net portable speed-Queen. ETF in six months.”
“I can’t believe they’re still legal out there! They’ve lost their license in Asia Major and Australasia,” Leo spluttered.
“Tried and true.” Mercury wrinkled her nose. “You know their motto. ‘No one need ever outlive their pet again!’ Listen, I’ve sent across the specs already. Find four more writers to make this show work. Otherwise, I’m walking with my Brontë. I can groom her as a novelty personality.”
“No! I’ll have a contract for you in a few minutes. How will I find the other nostalgia writers?” Leo moaned.
“Include me as a consultant. Ideas are my forte.” Mercury bared her teeth.
All those writers who had left pieces of themselves. Archives and special collections. Treasure hoards, they were. Filled with papers with pieces of skin, hair, even blood. A splatter of Hemingway. A drop from Mishima’s seppuku.
And not only writers! The second season could be tortured artists. Van Gogh. Frida Kahlo. They could be groomed in special holo environs to replicate their original circumstances. Their “development” could be broadcast on the Nets and betting pools could be arranged. The copies still weren’t exact replicas and the technique hadn’t eradicated every dysregulation, but a few abnormal traits would only make the artists more interesting. More tortured. It would be the biggest credit-making artistic freak show in the history of entertainment.
“I’ve sent the contract!” Leo’s eyes shone. “Merc, Merc, what can I have delivered so you can start celebrating now?”
“Mmmm.” Mercury closed her eyes. This was what it felt like to “have the splice of life.” Oh, so heady … “I’ve always wondered what hydroponic oysters tasted like.”
There was no denying it. The Brontë was a male.
“Gates! Gates!” Mercury swept the data from her desk. She couldn’t risk going to Yorkshire to steal another piece of their lives. But Branwell Brontë! He’d been a second-rate artist. A clichéd alcoholic.
Mercury tapped her finger against her lips. No need to throw out the clone with the amniotic fluid.
It wasn’t too late to introduce hormone therapy. Branwell could be turned into a female. And Emily had been an odd creature, practically autistic.
Mercury smiled. No one would notice a thing. And by the time they did, they’d be well into their second season with a whole new cast.
Mmmmmm. She loved oysters.
Spawn of Satan?
NICOLA GRIFFITH
Nicola Griffith is a native of Yorkshire, England, but now lives in Seattle. She is the author of four novels and coeditor of the Bending the Landscape series of original short fiction published by Overlook. Her nonfiction has appeared in a variety of print and Web journals. Her online home can be found at www.nicolagriffith.com.
Egg donation has begun to bias the new and controversial Raswani Social Intelligence scale and the more traditional Stanford-Binet IQ test. Nationwide testing has been prompted by what some educators are calling an exponential change in the behavior of kindergarten children. “We noticed a real big difference,” said Anita Cunnings, a teacher’s assistant at a grade school in an upscale Chicago neighborhood. “When I first took this job in 2015 we’d sometimes get a kid who was not only smart, but smart all around, who really knew how to handle other kids. Now we have half a dozen or more every year. They’re almost perfect. To tell you the truth, they’re a little frightening.”
A local bus driver, who prefers to remain anonymous, was less circumspect. “Spawn of Satan,” he said. “It ain’t natural. These kids climb on the bus, say ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’ and read all the way to school. Lord knows, I can’t abide all the yellin’ and runnin’ up and down of normal kids but this ain’t natural.”
Demographics point to white, middle-class women in the 45–48 age range. “So it’s only to be expected,” said a harassed-looking Dr. Judith Sternberg, returning from testimony to a congressional ethics subcommittee. “Record numbers of career-oriented, well-educated women are now choosing, in their mid-forties and older, to have children. And they’re choosing extremely smart, well-educated women in their twenties to be the donors. The rest is genetics.”
“Nonsense,” responds educational sociologist Mike Chattergee, “the deciding factor is the child’s upbringing. These older mothers tend to be more affluent, so they can give the infant everything it needs in the way of education and nurture. Better nurturing means a happier, healthier, more well-adjusted child.”
A corollary of the egg-donation boom is the change in behavior noted in the spouses of married mothers. “It’s good old-fashioned competition,” said red-faced Jack Donatelli at the bowling alley in Midwich, Connecticut. “Women get to pick the father so if you can’t hack it, move aside for someone who can.”
“There’s nothing old-fashioned about it,” says his companion, who would only give his name as Bill. “Look at me, see that muscle? Strong as an ox. Good job. But that’s not enough anymore. Now it’s ‘Oh, Bill, why don’t you do the laundry while I write that proposal for the UK office?’ Because I don’t want to, that’s why, but do I say anything? No. Because if I do she’ll get someone else to father her goddamn test-tube baby, and I’ll be slaving to support a cuckoo child!”
Some Church leaders have long decried the commercialization of egg donation. “Life is a gift from God,” said the Archbishop of Chicago. “When one woman who is blessed with fertility can help bring joy to another, that gift should be given freely.” Unitarians, on the other hand, believe God is in everything, even the test tube and the bank account. Other religions, such as Islam, forbid the procedure entirely.
But ethics have nothing to do with it, argues the director for reproductive health at the Women’s Clinic. “It’s all very well wishing things were different,” says Dr. Allison Toomin, “but this is the real world. What healthy twenty-two-year-old college senior in her right mind would go through a month of pain, daily injections, bloating, hormonal disturbance, and the risk of medical complications, just for altruism? Especially when prospective mothers are offering $75,000 and a trip around the world if the donor has a SAT score of over fifteen hundred, good looks, and perfect health.”
Senator George W. Bush III believes people like Dr. Toomin are wrong. “It’s just not right,” he tells voters gathered at a rally in Texas. “These women are buying smarts for their babies. They’re buying fertility, love, and a secure old age, just because they were too selfish to stop working and have babies when they were young and healthy, while God-fearing folks are so crippled by Big Government taxes that they can hardly scrape together the bread for their own little ones!”
Not far from where Bush is speaking lies Austin, one of the epicenters of the intelligence spike now being observed all over the country. Others include Seattle, the San Francisco Bay Area, and certain neighborhoods of larger cities such as Atlanta and Boston. “With the exception of Atlanta, these are all very white cities,” points out M’Shelle N’dele Mbele, from the Urban Justice Center in St. Louis. She grins sardonically: “Wonder why that is.”
She believes that, like most racial issues, this is at heart a money-based discrimination. Few would disagree: reproduction by egg donation is expensive, but with a first-time success rate now approaching 80 percent, it’s by far the most reliable of in vitro technologies.
Dr. Sternberg believes that as Americans approach the second half of the twenty-first century, egg donation is here to stay. “What I told the ethics subcommittee is that we need to think about what this means for business. Global competition from emerging nations is threatening the ascendancy of American corporations. We need our female executives to remain focused on their jobs through their thirties and early forties and not be distracted by the idea of a biological clock. Egg donation lets us reset that clock, if not banish it all together. Right now America has the edge. Egg donation lets us keep it.”
The subcommittee has declared that there will no longer be regulation of viable human ova at the federal level, and the debate is under way regarding tax credits for donors and clinics.
All parties expect controversy. For every egg donor and prospective mother there will be someone like old-timer Sam Underhill, overheard recently at the Green Dragon Inn in Bywater, Maine. “It’s not natural,” he said, “and trouble will come of it.”
Take Over
JON COURTENAY GRIMWOOD
Jon Courtenay Grimwood was born in Malta and christened in the upturned bell of a ship. He grew up in the Far East, Britain, and Scandinavia. Apart from writing novels, he works for magazines and newspapers. His novel Felaheen, featuring his North African detective Ashraf Bey, won the BSFA Award for Best Novel. He divides his time between London and Winchester, England. His Web site can be found at www.j-cg.co.uk.
It began when someone stole my wallet. Now, I’m not the kind of guy from whom you steal anything, and it was a good wallet—real alligator—so I was upset.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
And standing up from where I’d seemingly tripped him in my hurry to get to the departures desk, he bowed. After another apology, he left in the opposite direction, still bowing.
He was foreign, obviously. Someone local would have called an attorney before even picking themselves off the floor.
At the departures desk, I put my hand inside my jacket and scowled. You know that look? The one you see in other people’s eyes that says, why me? That was the look in the eyes of the boy on the other side of the desk.
“My wallet,” I said.
He waited.
I searched my other pockets, in the way that you do. Even though you know it should have been in the first pocket, and if it isn’t in that pocket, then it’s not going to be in any of my other pockets either.
“It’s gone …”
A security guard was moving toward me before the boy even had time to suggest that I leave the queue before taking another look.
“Problems, sir?”
“My wallet,” I told him. “Someone’s stolen it.”
He did that thing security guards do where he checks your clothes and watch and shoes, and for all I know your haircut and whether you have dirt under your nails. Whatever he saw, it was enough to put some politeness back into his voice.
“When did this happen?”
“Just now,” I said. “When I was on my way to the desk. A pickpocket…”
We walked to the Ops Room together, he got me a paper cup full of water and then showed me to a chair. I’d done an iris scan at the door and a computer obviously matched this to the scan I did on arrival at the airport, because I came up on the screen immediately.
“That’s you,” he said. It was one of those half questions.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s me.”
I was the broad-shouldered man pushing his way through a crowd, impervious to the scowls around me. (I’ve never been good in crowds. I’m a guy who likes his space.)
“Watch,” I said.
The guard did as he was told. And he kept watching as I suddenly stumbled, looked around in a slightly drunken fashion, and began talking to myself. The conversation lasted about thirty seconds, and finished with me giving an embarrassed little bow to no one in particular.
“That’s impossible,” I said, half rising from my seat.
“Let’s take another look,” said the guard. His hand on my shoulder could have been friendly. But when another two guards came into the room behind him I knew it wasn’t. Actually, I’d known from the beginning.
All four of us watched the sequence.
Then we watched it again, from the moment I entered the airport to the moment it was my turn at the departures desk. A voice recorder had captured my conversation with the check-in clerk, and a box in the corner of the screen ran diagnostics. It registered 98 percent conviction in my voice.
“He’s good,” one of the guards said.
“I was robbed.”
The guard shrugged toward the screen. “Doesn’t look that way to me. You should have realized we’d have cameras everywhere.” Glancing at the others, he raised his eyebrows.
“I’ve got to collect the kid,” said one.
Another nodded.
“Toss him,” said the guard who’d escorted me from the desk. “We can do without the grief.”
Two of the guards walked to a back door, and one of them held me while the other punched me hard in the gut. He had muscles developed under full gravity. And the blow was hard enough to double me over. I’m not sure my feet even touched the three steps it took to reach the ground.
“Don’t come back,” he said.
And that’s my story … I did go back, of course. I went with a lawyer from one of those booths outside the departures lounge. He took my watch as surety and is probably still wearing it.
The guards denied ever having seen me before. As did the boy on the check-in desk, although less convincingly. They denied having punched me or showing me a replay of myself walking across the floor. And, unfortunately, the file for those few minutes had corrupted. So that was no use either.
The man living in my habitat has my ship, my bank account, my eyes, my DNA, and for all I know, my girlfriend. He seems to be doing a good job of running the corporation and I see shares are up again.
Obviously enough, he also has my wallet. From which he took all the information necessary to achieve this. So I’m waiting to go into court. Only, accusing someone of identity theft is a serious matter. And the courts are not kind to vexatious accusations these days.
So, my question is, should I take the money? Should I drop my claim and sign an agreement never to repeat it? The sum I’ve been offered is large enough to see me out the rest of my life in relative comfort. And I won’t be working eighteen-hour days or taking endless board meetings with people who want to replace me.
Because that’s already been done. By someone so smart even my PA will probably never notice.
Speak, Geek
EILEEN GUNN
Eileen Gunn comes from a background in advertising for high-tech industry, which she puts to good use in her short stories and as editor of the SF site The Infinite Matrix (www.infinitematrix.net). She lives in Seattle, and her Web site can be found at www.eileengunn.com.
People call me a nerd, but I say I’m a geek. In my youth, I ran wild on a farm and bit the heads off chickens. This was before the Big Tweak, back when a chicken was dinner, and a dog was man’s best friend.
They call me a mutt, too. Sure, I’m a mutt. Mutt is good. Mutt is recombinant DOG. And I’m a smart mutt. I was smart before they tweaked me, and I’m a hell of a lot smarter now.
I’ve watched untweaked bitches (pardon the expression) trot by on leashes. I don’t envy them. I don’t even want to breed with them. (And, yes, I am quite intact, not that you were asking.) Their days are filled with grooming and fetching and the mutual adoration that comes with being someone’s trophy pet. I have a second life, a life of the mind, beside which theirs pales.
Not that I take credit for my enhancements. Didn’t get a choice. But gene engineering is inherently fascinating. Massively multiplayer, fraught with end-of-life-as-we-know-it threats. It made me who I am. I’ve chosen it for my career.
Working at the Lazy M is the job of a lifetime. Loyalty is a big thing here, and you’d better believe I deliver. I love this place so much that I don’t want to go home at night. There’s free kibble and a never-empty water dish right outside my kennel. (Did I tell you we each get our own private kennel? Except for the contractors, of course.)
I understand my place in the corporate structure, and my importance to the Man update.
There’s always more code in the genome—always something to snip or interpolate. That’s why I was there in the middle of the night: a last round of corrections before the code freeze on Man 2.1.
I was taking a good long slurp of water when I noticed the cats. They weren’t making a big deal of it—just quietly going about their business—but there were cats in all the cubicles, in the exec offices, in the conference rooms. It looked like they were running a whole separate company in the middle of the night.
Who hired them? HR doesn’t hire cats for R&D. They’re not task-oriented, or good at working within a hierarchy. They sleep all day. Better suited to industrial espionage.
Back on the farm, I was a watchdog, and I’ve still got a bit of that energy. Better keep an eye out, I think. So I’m lying there in the doorway to my office, nose on my paws, like I’m taking a break, when the alpha cat comes by. Big muscular Siamese mix. His flea collar says “Dominic” in red letters.
“Hey, Dominic,” I call. I feel like a character in The Sopranos. You ever see that show? No dogs to speak of, but lots of food. Great food show.
The cat stops. Stares. “You talking to me?”
“What’s the story here, Dominic?”
“No business of yours.” He narrows his weird cat eyes, then yawns ostentatiously. He turns away, shows me his butt, and walks slowly off, his loose belly fur swaying. I notice that his ears are facing backward, in case I rush him: he’s not as nonchalant as he appears.
Detective work is needed. I go down to the cafeteria, keeping my eyes open en route. Funny thing: I notice there are cats in and out of Susan Gossman’s office like she had a catnip rug. Gossman? Seen her in the hallways. We’d never spoken. More of a cat person.
