by Toby Weston
“An auto immune cascade reaction triggered in response to uniquely primate blood proteins,” Ben explained, repeating the contextual prompts. “The modifications are all placed in critical reproductive areas, on multiple chromosomes, making it highly unlikely that random mutations will remove the traits. Also, our strain hyper-expresses sexual selection markers, making it a preferable mate for the wild type. Hybrids are guaranteed to inherit the modification. The cut will shift the fitness topology to favour individuals who avoid food that contains the selected proteins.”
“I am a lawyer, Mr Baphmet, not a geneticist,” said Al-Afaf, “but I think I understand you want to make my mosquitoes allergic to human blood?”
“Yeah, and the hard work has already been done. Now our client would like to help you by listing this new strain of your clients as a core participant in all his ecosystem specifications for existing and future development sites. With the parasite ruling from Çin, we should have a legal basis for the modification. They would be happy to share revenues generated on a fifty-fifty basis. The vehicle would be Culico Corp; our client already runs a lot of their GM licencing through it.”
“Nonsense! your modifications are merely a tweak! You can’t ignore two hundred million years of evolution. Eighty-twenty would be more reasonable.”
“In controlled trials, after just eight generations, wild populations of mozzies stopped biting people. The boffins are looking into the mechanism, but it seems robust. Think of the adoption rates you will see! Projects across the world will be queuing up to reintroduce your clients. You might even take back sub-Saharan Africa!”
“Sixty-forty and you sign over all patents and other intellectual property to us; otherwise, we will bring an unlicensed modification suit against your client.”
Ben smiled and stuck out his hand.
“Deal!” His Spex would have recorded the entire conversation and the shake constituted a legally binding acceptance of the terms of the contract. “I'll get my office to draft up the legal and mail it over.”
Ben had just given Al-Afaf a PR coup and probably doubled his firm’s annual licensing revenue; but, as Al-Afaf limply gripped the proffered hand and the reality of a world free of biting mosquitoes sunk in, he looked like a kid with a broken toy. He would probably have to re-model his office and abandon his stupid gothic styling.
Chapter 6 – Them and Us
Humans have their castes. These are the archetypes familiar from myth and fiction. In the male medieval world view, they might be called: fool, warrior, serf, sage, and king. Evolution plays a collectable card game with itself over eons. Each new generation is dealt from the deck to make a hand the size of a typical cro-magnon village. The proportions of the archetypes in the deck represent the composition of the society. A village of mostly serfs, with insufficient warriors, will enjoy a peaceful agrarian existence for a few turns, until inevitable carnage and extermination visits from outside. Some neighbouring village, strong on warrior cards or with advanced technology from wise old sages, will smash its huts, kill the children, and plough the resulting offal back into the pack.
The sage seeks wisdom for its own sake, only as a side effect turning up useful principles and widgets for the king, who cares nothing for any concept of abstract truth. To him, all information is a tool for conquest or repression.
After a long game, having ultimately prevailed through superior weapons and tactics enabled by his educated society, the winning king will have a hand strong on sages and hermits and will find himself with the peacetime problem of herding cats. His ideology does not fit into any universal truth; his policies are self-serving and sub-optimal. After all the battles are won, he can no longer afford to fund the arcane hobbies of his sages or support what goes on within the dungeons beneath the alchemist’s towers. This will annoy these inquisitive, idealistic, and politically naive nerds.
A successful king must react to the danger inherent in a mass of educated and dissatisfied, potential troublemakers. He must redirect their perilous energy inwards, away from the relentless need to uncover destabilising truths, towards something absorbing and pacifying. The standard option is a theology fascinating enough that it will draw in successive generations of troublesome intellectuals to work on its vast, pointless mandala.
Not that any of this is conscious in the mind of the king. History is evolution. The bad choices will simply disappear, leaving only those who succeed. Winning strategies can be adopted by observing what works, with no understanding of why.
Christianity, which replaced classical philosophy as the primary sink for intellectual activity when the Romans became the Roman Catholics, was a fantastically mysterious bundle of lore containing enough metaphor, logic, and mystery to support a thousand years of intellectual masturbation. It was a beautiful time of limited destabilisation for the ruling classes. Eventually, the marrow was sucked from the bone and brilliant minds found its patterns familiar and faded. The mysteries became inconsistencies. Luther showed that faith didn’t require the intermediary of the Catholic Church. The new Renaissance man went further. He was enticed by the possibility of bypassing revealed knowledge altogether and stealing fire directly from the gods—one patiently validated insight at a time.
Physics and chemistry first, then messy biology following. Obsessive pedants sorted the rules and multitudes of life into neat piles. Mind, the most nonlinear, recursive, and baffling of domains, remained the zealously guarded purview of priests and mystics until the twentieth century.
Biologists, used to sorting, collecting, and pinning their specimens to boards, were the first to attack the rainbow of minds from the edges, starting with the broken and defective. Scientists in the new field of psychology zapped, hacked, and drugged their way through tens of thousands of patients. They assembled crude maps of the brain along the way, and didn't stop until there was a name for everything they considered a departure from the median: Asperger’s, ADS, Dyslexia, and Homosexuality... A box, and often a profitable prescription drug, was created for each.
Most divergent from human understanding were the minds of the animals. A blinkered, solipsistic, insanity prevailed for most of the twentieth century, which insisted if it cannot be objectively measured it is not science and, therefore, impossible to describe with meaningful statements. Animals were not conscious; how could they be if it was not measurable?
“I eat this ice-cream because I like its flavour, but this monkey screams when I rub acid into its eyes because the scream is an evolutionary adaptation that confers a selective advantage on the species by warning other members of a present danger.”
This arrogance is a variant of: “I know I am conscious, but what about you?”
The dying of old ossified brains in the early twenty-first century—
“Truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents, but rather, because its opponents eventually die.”
—brought a softening of this solipsistic dogma. Primates, with their anthropomorphic hands and faces, were recognised by the more progressive judicial systems as people. Dolphins and parrots, with their firm grasp of language, were accepted as being self-aware. When tested for mathematical or linguistic ability, most animals proved surprisingly smart. However, apart from the parrots, they couldn't communicate in our language, and we were usually worse in theirs.
Language allows ideas to exist outside of brains. During the hundreds of thousands of years before early Homo acquired language, our bones evolved faster than our technology. For over half a million years, hand axes remained essentially unchanged, while teeth and bones metamorphosed from ape to man. Without language, even the most brilliant agents are doomed to repeat the discoveries and errors of their ancestors.
Ape + Language = Human Being.
***
Hot air carrying organic smells blew steadily up from the station and tussled the tufts of hair that poked out from under Keith’s baseball cap. The warmth was nice, the smells less so. He jogged down a few cracked yellow til
ed steps and pushed through a small scruffy crowd, who were also enjoying the warmth while they milled around in front of the ticket barriers. The desperate huddle shuffled out of the way as Keith approached. Before the barrier beeped and sprang open he was subjected to a brief, almost overpowering, encounter with super-strength beer fumes. The gate shut again after he passed, separating legitimate travellers from thermal tourists.
It was after 10am and the morning rush was over, so the station was deserted. Keith followed the familiar tunnels to the platform, where a few other travellers were sitting or standing. He looked up at the long-dead information board. It was as blank as it had been for the past five years, but he didn’t need to get out his Companion or check his watch or resort to any of the other cybernetic oracles at his disposal to understand he had just missed the previous train.
Various forms of economic and political propaganda covered the walls, each plastered upon another, building up thick mâché strata. In places, the weight of paper had pulled itself off the wall, sometimes revealing the scratched old inactive video screens below. The structure and the superficial layers of adverts and announcements charted the social trajectory of London. They captured proud Victorian wrought iron and hand-enamelled tiles; massively chunky seventies surveillance cameras, still hanging uselessly from ceiling-mounted poles; early twenty-first century flat screens that had once beckoned from every surface. Now, two massive poster-sized screens looked down on the platform and fed news and previews from upcoming shows to those who couldn’t afford Spex.
Keith watched the huge screens distractedly, where a well-groomed young man in a wetsuit interviewed a dolphin, using some new language translation software. Keith couldn’t get the gist of the interview. The interviewer seemed to ask why the dolphin had written a book attacking humanity. A man on the platform was standing in the way, blocking the subtitles, so Keith couldn’t catch the answer. There hadn’t been a train for at least ten minutes and the platform was slowly filling up.
A crude hanged man and the slogan ‘Fletcher should die’ was spray-painted onto an old yellowing underground map. For a few seconds, Keith was surprised at the audacity, as any street artist working down here was almost guaranteed to be caught by London Transport’s vigilance and ubiquitous smelling, watching, and listening. Then, he figured it was just more cunning propaganda.
Although Keith didn’t follow the soaps, he knew Fletcher was a gang lord in one of the alternative reality shows. He recalled this one was set in a fictional dystopian London, where honest, hardworking people struggled against crime syndicates with ties to corrupt officials. Keith chuckled at the irony. Surprised for having been caught out, he wondered what else amongst the degenerate squalor was sophisticated stage dressing designed to subconsciously prime him for some long scam. Even as he looked down on the mentally lazy sheeple, who followed the trash pumped out by the RBC or syndicated through the networks, he knew it was only with a constant effort of conscious filtering that he kept his own worldview intact.
News shows deliberately mixed stories from fictitious versions of London with the real deal, and most people who watched did not have the mental discipline to separate fact from fiction. They relaxed and allowed the deceptions to wash over them.
Bodies were crammed in around him; it had been forty minutes. A distant screech and wad of approaching air finally announced a train.
While he was being funnelled in through the door, he took in the battered old aluminium carriage, its faded orange tartan seats, and wooden planks showing through the worn linoleum. He wondered at the layers of deceit it represented. Keith thought he understood the world: too many people, too much incompetence, not enough good old blitz spirit. Was this his analysis, or were subtle nudges guiding his thinking?
***
“Morning, Mr Wilson, I hope you had a pleasant journey. Would you like a glass of water or a coffee?”
Keith looked up to see a pretty admin in a tight-fitting, but smart, blue business dress. She was reading from a Companion tablet, probably showing his picture and biography and the details of the morning’s meetings.
“Hi, sure, a coffee. That would be great.”
Keith’s eyes lingered as she turned and walked away to source him a cup of coffee, but he quickly lowered them, acutely aware his gaze and entire physiological state was almost certainly being scrutinised as he waited. The coffee hadn’t arrived when she returned and told him they were ready for him. Cruel, his body’s Pavlovian reaction to the offer of coffee, now unceremoniously retracted, rattled him. He felt as if he was losing composure, just when he needed it most. Keith picked up his man-bag and followed, his gaze intently fixed on the back of the girl’s neck. He was relying solely on peripheral vision to inform him of the pleasing way her hips swayed as she walked.
They padded along the richly carpeted corridors, past conference rooms and offices. She stopped at a door, knocked politely; then, turning the handle, she gently pushed the door open for Keith.
“Good luck, see you in a half hour,” she said smiling politely, before walking back the way they had come.
The occupant of the office, a smartly dressed young man about Keith’s age, dashed around his desk and across the room. He leant out of the door to observe the departure of the admin.
“Ha! Keith! Come in, how are you?”
“Hi Ben, I’m fine. How are you? How’s the job?”
“Good to hear. The job’s great. I’m great. Just got back from fucking Somalia. Ever been there? Bat-shit crazy I tell you.”
Ben put a paternal arm around Keith’s shoulders and guided him into the office. It was spacious and simple, with low-key geometric art and subtle lighting. One wall showed a low-resolution scene of apparent rural bliss: a group of boys in whites playing cricket. There were formal neo-classical buildings in the background. Something about the scene was unpleasantly familiar to Keith. Despite the green grass, white-clad children, and fluffy clouds, it evoked a vague sense of dread.
“Drink?” Ben asked.
“Coffee, thanks. I did ask the receptionist…”
“Ha! And did you get any? You think she’s allowed to dole out coffee to any old pleb, Keith?” Ben chuckled. “Michelle, coffee for two,” he said to the room.
“Hey, look at this. I was just doing some research on a prospective candidate,” Ben added cryptically, while gesturing for play to resume.
Keith realised the scene on the wall was a frozen frame from a video. As the video un-paused, a voice called out: “Abimelch forty-eight all out! Ishmael one hundred and eleven for six! Well played Peterson!”
Oh fuck, Keith recognised the source of the scene’s dread.
The master took the captain’s hand and shook it. The jubilant Ishmaelis patted backs and whooped as the Abimelchians sloped off back to the changing rooms in grass-streaked silence.
The match had been on Top-Field due to the sorry state of the cricket oval, which had suffered irreparable damage during the ignominy of the end of term fête. Hundreds of people and dozens of tents mercilessly raped its three-hundred-year old lawn.
“You fucking twat, Keith!” a young Ben called out. “At least give us some sport when we crush you!”
Keith endured the long walk back down to the school; even his own team was hanging back, joining the abuse.
“My grandmother could have caught that lob!” one of his teammates shouted.
“Piss off, Whinstone! If you hadn’t bowled like a complete flid, they might not have been smacking sixes off us for the last hour and a half.”
“Ha! Remember that? We killed you, right?”
“Sorry… what?” It took Keith a few seconds to snap back to the present.
The cricketing clip had probably been captured by a kid with a phone. It had paused again, returning to its picturesque freeze frame. Keith’s mind had skipped on a few chapters as a succession of memories from Gladworth’s, triggered by the video, played within his mind.
“We slaughtered you!”
“Yep, don’t think I played my best that day.”
“I got the vid from Hendy. Remember him? He was in your house, wasn’t he?”
“Er, yeah. Dark hair, big farter?”
“Christ yes, he was a colossal farter wasn’t he! Yes, he works for my father now. He dug out a bunch of stuff back from the old school. I’ll ping them over to you if you like.”
“Sounds great. I’d somehow forgotten how much fun we had,” Keith said.
Ben either missed the sarcasm or let it slip. “So you’ve decided to swallow your pride and take me up on the offer to come and work for us?”
After Uni, Keith had tried to find a job to fit his aspirations. Any residual optimism had been abraded by four years of shitty minimum wage jobs in the sham economy. Unemployment for under thirties was forty-two per cent, official inflation was fourteen per cent, while prospects for improvement were negligible. The desperate faces of the people on the streets gave a more accurate picture than any government numbers. He knew the despair of the people. He was intimately acquainted with it. His pride, by now, was only a small mouthful; so yes, he would swallow it. It was either that or join the army, which was always ravenous for young men with limited options.