Nature Futures, page 19
Dangerous? Not really. The meat trade is too specialized to interest professional criminals, although quite a few are customers; one crime boss likes to serve the meat of his enemies with his special sauce. Politicians and businesspeople also enjoy revenge feasts, but the fans are the backbone of the trade. These days, you aren’t a hardcore tru-fan unless you’ve partaken of the flesh of your hero. It’s the ultimate form of possession, and I don’t suppose I need to point out the parallels with Christian communion. No, that’s just an urban myth lifted from some cheesy bestseller. In order to clone tissue, you need to start with live cells, or at least a live nucleus, and after two thousand years … exactly.
Cloned babies? Another myth. It’s very difficult to turn a somatic cell into an embryo, and even harder to bring it to term. Far easier to grow sheets of epidermis or muscle. I guess the oddest case I dealt with was the meatlegger who cloned himself. All he ate was his own meat. I guess you could say he was really into self-sufficiency.
I don’t think the meat trade is going to die out anytime soon. Most clone lines have been wiped out, and people like me do their best to make sure that the meatleggers have a hard time getting fresh ones started, but now there’s this new thing. These nanotech makers. Pretty soon the meatleggers won’t need live cells, just a DNA sequence, and I’ve heard that these makers can build an entire body from scratch.
As long as people keep finding twisted uses for new technology, there’ll always be a need for people like me, cleaning up the mess.
The Candidate
JACK MCDEVITT
Jack McDevitt is a former English teacher, naval officer, Philadelphia taxi driver, customs officer, and motivational trainer. He is the author of fourteen novels and many short stories, and lives in Brunswick, Georgia.
The high and low points of my career came on the same night: when we beat George Washington, and Peter Pollock returned to the White House for a second term.
Well, okay. It wasn’t really Washington; it was an artificial intelligence programmed to behave like Washington. But a lot of people got confused. When you’ve been in politics as long as I have, you know how easily people get confused.
Fortunately.
President Pollock’s numbers were down, but the Democratic candidate put everybody to sleep. So we knew it would be close. Then Washington showed up. He was a software package developed at the University of Georgia to play the part of the first president in seminars. He was so believable that somebody at the school put him on a local radio show, and next thing he was a national phenomenon: people were desperate for a candidate they could believe in. The general gave an interview to the Florida Times-Union, the wire services picked it up, and by God, he did sound like George Washington.
I was running the Pollock campaign, and we all had a good laugh when they tried to put Washington on the ballot in Georgia. The Democrats tried to block it. Candidates have to be born, they said, and have to be at least thirty-five years old.
We could have stopped it then. But if Washington got into the general election, he’d pull votes from the Democrats: we knew our base wasn’t going to support a candidate who wasn’t even human. So I called in some favors and the Supreme Court ruled they could find no reason to suppose he was not a “Washington-equivalent.” He was therefore clearly well past the minimum age limit. As to the requirement he be born, the software had been written in Georgia, and the meaning of “born,” said the court, is not limited to biological events.
I watched Washington on cable, and he was persuasive. He didn’t like frivolous spending; didn’t like unaffordable medications; didn’t like corruption. I thought he came across as wooden, and maybe a trifle stern. Americans, I thought, don’t like being lectured.
They could simply have done the whole thing electronically, but somebody in his campaign was smarter: he was housed in a Coreolis 5000, and they dutifully set it on a table along with a screen that provided an animated image from the Gilbert Stuart portrait, except they’d cut the General’s hair and put him in a business suit.
By midsummer he was making the rounds of the network talk shows. The week before he made his first appearance on Meet the Press, he passed the Democratic candidate and moved into the runner-up spot. The liberal media decided the Democratic candidate was a lost cause. Russert, at first ill at ease talking to the machine, warmed to him. “Are you really George Washington?” he asked.
“The man’s dead,” said Washington. “But I’m everything he was.”
Russert asked about the Intervention, which had become another of those endless wars. “We intended the nation to lead by example,” the General said. “We would not willingly have plunged into the affairs of others. Keep your own house in order. Do it competently, and the world will follow.”
We realized, belatedly, that we were in a race. After his appearance with Jon Stewart, there was no longer any doubt. “I would prefer,” he told the vast audience, “that you not vote for me. And I’ll tell you why: people should be governed by other people, not by software. If the voters insist, I will do my best. But I fear the long-term potential.”
So we went after him: doesn’t want the job. And we looked at his record: do we really want a former slave owner in the White House?
We knew we couldn’t touch him on national security, but we demanded to know where he stood on the issues. “What about Roe vs Wade?”
“Put it aside for now,” he said. “At the moment, we have bigger problems.” We got some of our base back on that one.
“Gay marriage?”
“I cannot see that anyone is harmed. We should be careful about codifying moral strictures. They change too easily.”
We got some more of our people back. We talked about Frankenstein. This appealed to voters so we kept hitting it. Vote for People, we said. We found a few physicists who were willing to say publicly that an artificial intelligence could develop a glitch: would you trust the Black Box in the hands of a computer?
We held on. We were still holding at 2:00 A.M. election night, when we went down to the last district in Indiana, but we took the state by a few hundred votes and that put us over the top.
Pollock went on TV after Washington conceded. He said how we’d saved the nation from a hardware conspiracy. (He tends to say things like that when he gets off script.) When it was over, he took me aside to express his appreciation. A Rainbow 360 rested on the coffee table. “We saved the country, Will,” he said. “We’ll get legislation to bar the things from holding office. Otherwise, I guess, they’ll trot out Abe Lincoln next time.”
“Yes,” I said. “And congratulations, Mr. President.” It meant four more years for me too, as chief political adviser.
“No. It’s not on the cards, Will.” He looked almost genuinely pained. “We have to look to the future.”
That was a shock. “What do you mean, sir?”
“It was a near thing, this election. We miscalculated our opponent’s strength. I mean, incumbent president and all. It should have been easy.”
“But—?”
“I need someone who won’t be taken by surprise.”
I was trying not to let my anger show. “Who did you have in mind, sir?”
He smiled at the Rainbow 360. “Will—meet Karl Rove.”
A Modest Proposal for the Perfection of Nature
VONDA N. MCINTYRE
Vonda McIntyre was one of the first successful graduates of the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop. She attended the workshop in 1970: by 1973 she had won her first Nebula Award, for the novelette Of Mist, and Grass and Sand. This later became part of the novel Dreamsnake, which won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Her debut novel, The Exile Waiting, was published in 1975. Since then she has written many others, including Star Trek tie-ins. It was Mcintyre who came up with Mr. Sulu’s first name, Hikaru. She lives in the Pacific Northwest, and her online home can be found at www.vondanmcintyre.com.
The crop grows like endless golden silk. Wave after wave rushes across plains, between mountains, through valleys, in a tsunami of light.
Its harvest is perfection. It fills the nutritional needs of every human being. It adapts to our tongues, creating the taste, texture, and satisfaction of comfort food or dessert, crisp vegetables or icy lemonade, sea cucumber or big game. It’s the pinnacle of the genetic engineer’s art.
It’s the last and only living member of the plant kingdom on Earth.
Solar cells cover slopes too steep and peaks too high for the monoculture. The solar arrays flow in long, wide swaths of glass, gleaming with a subtle iridescence, collecting sunlight. Our civilization never runs short of power.
The flood of grain drowns marsh and desert, forest and plain, bird and beast and insect. Land must serve to produce the crop; creatures only nibble and trample and damage it, diverting resources from the service of human beings. Even the immortality of rats and cockroaches has failed.
The grain stops at the ocean’s beach. No rivers muddy the sea’s surface or break the shoreline. The grain and the cities require fresh water, and divert it before it wastes itself in the sea.
The tides wash up and back, smoothing the clean silver sand, leaving it bare of tangled seaweed, of foraging seabirds or burrowing clams, of the brown organic froth that dirtied it in earlier times. Now and then the waves erase a line of human footprints, but these are very rare.
The air is clear of any bite of iodine, any hint of pollution or decay.
The sea undulates, blue and green, clear as new glass. Sunlight shimmers on its surface and dapples the bare sea floor. Underwater turbines cast shadows on the sand. The tides power the turbines, tapping the force of gravity.
Far from shore, where its colonies will not interrupt the vista of clear water, a single species of cyanobacterium photosynthesizes near the surface, pumping oxygen into the crystalline air, controlling the level of carbon dioxide. Its design copes easily with the increasing saltiness of the sea.
Except for the cyanobacteria, the ocean’s cacophony of microscopic organisms has followed redwoods, mammoths, and Hallucigenia into extinction. The krill are gone. Krill would be of as little use to people as sharks and seabirds, fish or jellyfish, seashells or whales. They are all gone, too.
The water deepens beyond the reach of light. The continental shelf ends in a precipice, dropping off into darkness.
On the sea floor, the glass-lace shells of diatoms lie clean and dead, slowly settling. In a moment of geologic time, they will form white limestone.
In the deepest trenches, black smokers gush scalding chemical soup. Machines sense the vents of heat, swim to them, and settle over them to trap the energy from the center of the Earth. Nothing remains for the sustenance and evolution of primordial life in these extraordinary environments.
The strange creatures that lived there, and died, were never any use to human beings.
All the resources of sea and land serve our needs.
Cities of alabaster and adamant grace the crests of mountains and span the flow of rivers. The cities’ people live rich, full lives, long and healthy, free of disease. We are well fed. We have interesting, challenging occupations and plenty of time for leisure, family, and virtual reality. We can experience any adventure, from wilderness to exotic ritual, without the expense, trouble, or danger of travel. We can experience any adventure that ever happened, any adventure anyone can imagine. The virtual experience matches reality or invention in every way: sight, sound, smell, touch, and movement.
Our civilization pulses with vitality. We have unlimited opportunity: of thought, of achievement, of freedom, and of the pursuit of happiness.
Whatever we require, human ingenuity can invent and provide. And if, in some unlikely but imaginable future, we should wish to re-create any organism, the means to do so exist. DNA sequences, RNA sequences, are easy to write down and archive; there is no need to store messy biological material, either tough and persistent DNA or fragile and degradable RNA. We are magnanimous; we have preserved the blueprints for everything, even parasites and pathogens.
No one has bothered to re-create an organism in a very long time. We have considered the question long and hard, and we have made our decision. No creation of nature has an inherent right to exist, independent of our need.
We have perfected nature, for we are its masters.
The Republic of George’s Island
DONNA MCMAHON
Donna McMahon has a degree in history from Simon Fraser University and currently works in biotechnology. She has written one novel, Dance of Knives, and is working on a sequel. She lives in Gibson’s Landing, British Columbia, and her Web site can be found at www.donna-mcmahon.com.
On Tuesday afternoon, with the weather reports still forecasting hurricane-force winds, I hauled my decrepit fiberglass dinghy down to Davis Bay and rowed out to try to talk that old throwback into coming ashore. I knew it was futile, but I felt like I had to make an attempt.
Westerly gusts drove whitecaps down the fetch of Georgia Strait. They rolled and crashed across the shallow shoreline, nearly overturning my clumsy boat. Icy spray slapped me as I strained at the oars, and within a minute I was soaked and achingly cold.
In the lee of the house, I tied up to a rusty trailer hitch. Decades ago, George had started driving deep steel pilings into the sandy soil around his house. He built a concrete retaining wall using old car and truck frames as rebar, and then piled up any other junk he could find for a breakwater. We kids watched with fascination while his neighbors, already besieged behind sandbag walls, shook their heads with a mixture of dismay and derision, but thirty years later, after three meters of sea level rise, his was the only original waterfront house remaining on the bay. And his sign, spray-painted on a full sheet of plywood nailed to the south side of the house, had become a local landmark:
THE INDEPENDANT REPUBLIC OF GEORGE’S
ISLAND—PISS OFF!
I picked my way cautiously along the rough, algae-coated breakwater and positioned myself to one side of George’s door before pounding on it and shouting.
“George, it’s Logan. Let me in, OK?”
I couldn’t hear much over the roar of wind and surf, but after several repetitions, a gruff voice bellowed back.
“Piss off!”
“I brought a bottle of rye.”
There was a pause—probably George checking all his surveillance cams for evidence of an ambush—then the warped door opened a crack, revealing a wild tangle of gray beard and a bloodshot eye.
“You could’ve brought a forty-pounder,” he grumbled. But he let me in.
So I sat for an hour at George’s kitchen table in a stench of mildew and rotting carpet, trying to talk some sense into a guy with a rifle on his lap, chugging whiskey straight from the bottle. Long ago he’d been a big man with a big gut, but he was well past seventy now, and his ancient, dirty clothes hung off him. I often wondered what he was eating these days. Any remaining cases of canned food must surely have rusted, and there wasn’t much left in these plundered waters except barnacles and a few tenacious shore crabs. Even the glaucous gull population had plummeted.
The Pacific was slowly undermining George’s foundations, and his cupboard doors hung askew, their melamine surface mildew-spotted and bulging with damp. Every room was crammed with piles and boxes of stuff—a moldering graveyard of ancient flat-screen televisions, home appliances, and power tools that had been sold or given away when people couldn’t afford to run them anymore. An ancient tungsten lightbulb, powered by a homemade solar system, illuminated the dirty kitchen and the illegal woodstove that George burned driftwood in.
He waved the bottle at me, interrupting my warning about record-breaking winds and storm surges. I shook my head.
“No thanks. I don’t drink.”
“That just figures. Well, it’s crap rye anyway.”
Crap that I’d paid for out of my own pocket, I thought angrily, but I said, “Look, how about coming ashore until the storm is over?”
“So you can lock me up and then tear down the house like you did to Lawsons? Just how stupid do you think I am?” he muttered.
Pretty stupid, I thought. But mostly selfish. I’d met any number of old people who’d expected to be cocooned in consumer comfort all their lives, and who just couldn’t get it through their heads that those days were over. They even had the gall to go crying to people like me who struggled to live off the scraps of their greed while busting our asses to rescue remnants of the ecosystem.
I wanted nothing to do with George, but my job as remediation team leader made it unavoidable. We were trying to reestablish intertidal zones on human-altered and polluted shorelines—filthy, frustrating work, the worst part of which was expropriating property that had fallen below sea level. The rolling easement laws were clear, but people nonetheless clung to their houses with blind tenacity. And George was the worst—sitting in his fortified pile and dumping raw sewage and garbage into my bay. Last summer, when I discovered he’d been digging for clams in the bivalve test site we’d spent three years building, I’d been ready to go out at low tide with a fire bomb.
“Last chance,” I said finally. When George shook his head, I got up and walked to the door.
“Hey!” He rose unsteadily, and when I turned to meet his eyes, I saw fear. He knew.
Unexpectedly, he held out a grimy hand.
“Uh … Thanks, eh?”
I felt an unexpected lump in my throat as I shook his hand.
I didn’t sleep much that night. I could hear the pounding surf even from my bedroom, a kilometer away from the beach. The next morning, the streets were littered with wind-shredded branches, broken glass, chimney bricks, and roof tiles.
