In the Flesh and Other Tales of The Biotech Revolution [SSC]

by Brian Stableford

  Dad’s interruption was explosive. “Shit!” he said, loudly enough to be heard all along the corridor. “You told me it was safe! You told me that there’d be no lasting side-effects!”

  The other man seemed very confused for a few moments. “I didn’t....” he began—but then he stopped and began again. “Oh, I see. You don’t mean me personally. You mean us. The employee clinical trial program. No, Mr. Pinkham, I can assure you that your problem doesn’t have anything to do with any aspect of your work for this organization. It’s a very common problem nowadays, almost certainly connected with diet and general environmental pollution. In fact, we have some very interesting projects in house which are aiming to find a solution....”

  “Okay, okay,” Stevie’s Dad said, speaking in a more moderate tone now that he had collected himself. “Facts are facts. No point in looking for someone to blame. We still have the gene, don’t we? If you can’t get copies that way, you can get them another. No problem.”

  “Just a little practical difficulty,” The white-coated man agreed. “The technique will be a little more invasive, but the ultimate goal is the same. We have to contrive a source of totipotent stem-cells, but there’s more than one way to produce an embryo. We won’t have to wait for Stephen to grow older...although we’ll have to use him as the source, given the problems with your own DNA.”

  Stevie didn’t like the sound of that at all, and he took note of the fact that Evie didn’t want to met his eye—as if she’d just found out that her promises were worthless. Stevie decided that he didn’t want to be a “source”, especially if it was going to involve needles.

  Fortunately, the grey-haired man in the white coat was interrupted at this point by the chime of his mobile phone. Stevie was proud of himself, because he was able to recognize and put a name to the chorus of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The big cheese and Mr. Winthrop obviously had more in common than was immediately obvious.

  The grey-haired man seemed very annoyed to be interrupted, but his mood became a good deal worse when he heard what as being said to him. “You have got to be joking,” was his response—but Stevie knew that people only said that when whoever was talking to them was very serious indeed.

  As soon as Evie’s boss closed his phone with an audible snap he rounded on Stevie’s Dad. “Your wife is in reception,” he said, coldly. “She’s got a man named Keyson with her.”

  “Shit,” was Dad’s response—not very loud, all things considered. “That was fast. How the hell did she know where to come? And how the hell did she get through all the traffic? It ought to be gridlock out there by now”

  “Mr. Keyson is an agent,” the grey-haired man said, even more coldly than before. “He seems to have done his homework. It wouldn’t require a great detective to deduce that you’d come directly to HQ, once your wife told him what had happened—which she seems to have done as soon as she found that Stephen had gone.”

  Stevie nodded his head understanding, although no one was watching. Mum might have dithered indefinitely over whether or not to call Mr. Keyson, but Dad had made up her mind for her.

  “You’ve got a properly-signed contract,” Dad said to Mr. Martindale, trying to sound as if everything were under control. “Stevie’s right here in the room. Possession is nine points of the law, isn’t that right? What’s she going to do—have us both arrested for assisted truancy?”

  “There seems to be one thing we haven’t got,” the Beethoven fan retorted. “One little thing you forgot to mention.”

  “What’s that?”

  “When Stevie was born, you and your wife requested that the umbilical cord be kept in cold storage.”

  Stevie saw his Dad’s face grow pale. “Oh shit,” he said, again. “The bastard has done his homework. Stacy would never...but it’s not a problem, right? I mean, it’s Stevie’s, not hers. The genes....” He trailed off, before beginning again. “It was the sensible thing to do...forward-looking...covering every eventuality...it was company policy, for fuck’s sake!”

  While he was speaking the grey-haired man had gone to one of the computer terminals, and had set his fingers dancing on the keyboard. “Except that you didn’t take advantage of the company scheme, did you?” he said, when he’d seen what he wanted to see. “You made a direct deal with the hospital. Or, to be strictly accurate, your wife signed the contract that the hospital gave her, in your absence.”

  “I was at work,” Stevie’s Dad whispered. “I was at work.”

  “Well, we’d better see if anything can be salvaged, hadn’t we?” the white-coated man said, bitterly.

  Stevie was anxious for a minute or two that the two of them might go off together and leave him to the tender mercies of Evie and the other two young doctors, whose promises not to hurt him were just so much hot air—but he acted quickly to avoid that possibility. When he slipped his hand into his Dad’s, his Dad clutched it hard, the way a Dad should, and drew him away from the overequipped room, back into the maze.

  * * * *

  This time, they ended up in a much friendlier room, where the chairs were kitted out in orange rather than black. There was even a sofa, where Stevie could have sat between his mother and father, except for the fact that they obviously weren’t in a sitting mood, and probably wouldn’t have wanted to sit on the same item of furniture if they had been. Stevie sat there anyway, carefully taking a central position in case they wanted to join him later.

  The grey-haired man introduced himself to Mr. Keyson as John Martindale, and didn’t even pause for breath before trying to seize the conversational initiative. “I’m sorry there’s been some slight confusion,” he said. “But we shall, of course, be requisitioning the umbilical cord at the earliest opportunity. Just a formality, of course, given that Mr. Pinkham has already granted us an exclusive option on all the produce of his DNA.”

  “I don’t see that there’s any confusion at all, Dr. Martindale,” Mr. Keyson said, smoothly. “The contract between the hospital and Mrs. Pinkham relating to the storage of the umbilical cord clearly establishes her entitlement to negotiate its future disposal.”

  “Even if the cord as an object might be regarded as joint property,” Dr. Martindale countered, “the stem cells contained within the cord are obviously Stephen’s. We have a contract with Mr. Pinkham that grants us exclusive rights to the exploitation of Stephen’s DNA. Any contract you might have made with Mrs. Pinkham is quite irrelevant, even if it were signed before ours—which I doubt.”

  “I agree entirely that the cord constitutes an item of the assets of the marriage,” Mr. Keyson came back. “For exactly that reason, the allocation of all rights pertaining to it must be the prerogative of the divorce court. Given the existence of competitive contracts—and I also agree with you that the timing of the signatures is irrelevant—I must ask you to desist from all further violations of the person of Stephen Pinkham, pending the decision of the divorce court as to the disposal of the rights to exploit his DNA.”

  “What’s that going to achieve?” Dr. Martindale snapped. “We still have the father. We can do anything we like to him.”

  “Anything except monopolize his genes,” Mr. Keyson said, his tone remarkably similar to the one Pete used whenever he won a playground game.

  It only needed a brief pause in the main event to let Dad and Mum get in on the act. “How could you do this to me?” Dad wailed, while Mum was yelling: “You kidnapped him, you bastard!”

  Dr. Martindale had his second wind now, though. “You know full well that we can tie up the divorce court for years,” he said. “This is a race, and you can’t win. Even if you could take the kid out of the equation, there’s no way you can deliver that cord to anyone else. We have everything we need to get the project rolling—we only have to stall the opposition.”

  Stevie was impressed by the smile that Mr. Keyson put on before responding to that one. It was a weirdly wicked kind of smile he’d only ever seen in movies. “Really?” said the agent. “Everything
you need? Including a healthy sperm count?”

  Dr. Martindale turned red, but clamped his mouth shut. It was Stevie’s Dad who said: “How the hell did you know about that? I didn’t know myself until fifteen minutes ago!”

  Stevie had watched enough TV to know that his Dad had just fallen into a classic trap. Mr. Keyson had been guessing, although he’d probably interrogated Mum while they were dodging the traffic in Mr. Keyson’s Peugeot as to whether Stevie had been planned as an only child.

  Dr. Martindale was sweating now, in spite of the air conditioning. “That’s not an insuperable problem,” he said. “There are other ways of producing embryos.”

  “Nuclear transfer technology?” Mr. Keyson retorted, with a scornful leer borrowed from the same sort of movie as his wicked smile. “Bone-marrow tissue culture? Don’t make me laugh!”

  Nobody was laughing—least of all Stevie, who figured that they’d be back to referring to him as “the source” any minute. He slipped off the sofa, but nobody turned to see what he had to say, so he took a step towards the door—and then another. Everybody else was so busy matching angry stares that they didn’t see him leave.

  * * * *

  To an Ultimate Labyrinth player of Stevie’s experience the corridors were child’s play; there weren’t even any zombies to shoot. He found his way back to the lab with the black imitation-leather chairs with no difficulty at all.

  Evie and the other two junior doctors were still there. They didn’t seem surprised to see him, although they did look expectantly at the door for someone who might be following him.

  “Can I ask you a question?” Stevie said to Evie

  “Sure,” she said, nodding her blonde head a little too vigorously.

  “In private,” Stevie added. He’d seen it done on TV but he’d never dared try it himself, for fear that it wouldn’t work.

  It nearly didn’t, but Evie backed him up. “Give us a minute, guys,” she said.

  It was just like Suzie talking to Pete. They meekly did as they were told, as if hypnotized. They went out, and politely shut the door behind them.

  When they were alone, Stevie felt his heart skip a beat, but he knew that this was no time to wimp out. “In a year,” he said, “or maybe two, I’ll be able to masturbate....”

  He hadn’t even got to the question yet, but the effect was electric. Evie started, and her eyes grew wide. “Jesus, Stevie,” she said. “Is that what they teach you in SexEd these days? Shouldn’t you be talking to your Dad about this?”

  “No,” said Stevie. “Definitely not. And that’s not the question. Mr. Winthrop believes in moving with the times, and he already covered that. What I want to know is, no matter what anyone’s signed, and no matter which bits of me anyone thinks they own, when I turn thirteen...even though I won’t be old enough to sign any contracts...will anyone be able to stop me asking Dr. Greenlea for a case full of specimen bottles, filling them up any way I want to, and taking them anywhere I want to?”

  Evie swallowed hard. “Jesus, Stevie,” she said, again. “Why ask me?”

  “Because you’re the only person around here who doesn’t think they own me,” Stevie told her, forthrightly. “I can ask Mr. Winthrop tomorrow, if Dad lets me go back to school, but if I know now, I might be able to talk some sense into Dad. Or Mum. Or even both.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well...well, no, I guess. I mean, the law’s the law and all that, but no—no one would be able to stop you. They might be able to stop other people using the gene as a manufacturing base, but...oh! I see what you mean! You’re not thinking wrinkles, are you?”

  “That’s another thing I wanted to ask you about,” Stevie said. “Mr. Keyson wasn’t really trying to explain, but I’m not stupid. If this gene I’ve got is supposed to prevent wrinkles, how come my Dad looks so old?”

  Evie laughed at that. She seemed more at ease now he’d impressed her a little. “He’s not such a bad specimen, for his age,” she said. “That’s one of the things we’ve got to figure out before we can turn theory into practice. The gene you have is only expressed in certain kinds of cells, and we don’t know why. It doesn’t seem to be switched on in skin cells, or brain cells—which is where it would do the most good, from our point of view. It’s obviously something to do with differential effects of natural selection in different tissues— but however good your Mr. Winthrop is at moving with the times, he won’t have covered that in Elementary Genetics. If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, though, it’s not likely to be a problem for you. We can only deal in extracts—you’ve got it built in, and you’re already eleven years old. That’s a long head start over any potential competition.”

  Stevie frowned as he tried to figure out what the less obvious parts of the long speech meant, but now that Evie was convinced that he was an intellectual superstar he wasn’t going to blow it by looking stupid. “That’s what I thought,” he said, nodding his head the way he’d seen clever detectives do in movies when they’d figured out the plot.

  “Your Mum and Dad won’t like it,” Evie pointed out.

  “I know,” Stevie said. “But while they’re both trying to sell bits of me, they’ll always be at war. This way, I get to decide who gets a cut, and how big the cut is—and if they both get mad at me...they’ll have something in common, won’t they?”

  “You really think you can get them back together?”

  Stevie thought about that for a moment, and then said: “No. But it doesn’t have to be blitzkrieg. They could ease up—for my sake.”

  The blonde woman laughed again at that. “Good luck, Stevie,” she said. “You’re going to need it.”

  * * * *

  Evie was right about him needing luck. It wasn’t nearly as easy to talk some sense into his father as he’d hoped, and it was even harder to get his mother to see his point of view.

  While he’d been away, Mr. Keyson had persuaded Dr. Martindale that it would save an awful lot of hassle if he and Dad made a new contract cutting Mum in—and, of course, Mr. Keyson. Dad was still smarting about that when he drove Stevie back home, because he was convinced that he’d lost a wonderful opportunity to ingratiate himself with the board and secure his future career track, and he wasn’t really in a mood to listen to what seemed to him—at first—to be blackmail. In time, though, he began to see the sense of it, especially when Stevie assured him that there was no one else in the world he would trust—especially Mr. Keyson—to act as his agent.

  That didn’t go down too well with Mum, of course, and she had the further disadvantage of having done SexEd in an era when a teacher who’d been moving with the times wouldn’t have been nearly as advanced as Mr. Winthrop. In the end, though, when she’d consented to be enlightened by Dad—who understood elementary genetics well enough, even though he was only a salesman—she had to admit that no matter how obscene it sounded, it just might work.

  All in all, it was the best evening the family had had since Dad had gone to live in the loft.

  The next day was, in its way, even better, because he got to tell Pete, and Simon, and Suzie. He didn’t rush into it—in fact, he let them come to him.

  “Another day off, eh?” Pete said. “You’ll be getting a reputation. Playing truant was it? Or emotional distress caused by your Mum and Dad splitting up?”

  “Actually,” Stevie said, “I was at the headquarters of the largest pharmaceutical company in Europe. They were doing a few tests. It turns out that I’m a national treasure.”

  “A what?” said Pete.

  “A national treasure.”

  “Pull the other one, Pinky,” Simon said, putting up his hands as if in anticipation of being smacked in the mouth—but Stevie just looked at him contemptuously.

  “From now on,” he said, “It’s Stephen. I’ve got this rare variant gene, you see, which ameliorates and repairs free radical damage. They’ll find more people with it, of course, now the National Database is growing, but that will take time.”

  �
��What’s it got to do with a pharmaceutical company?” Suzie wanted to know. “My Mum says they’re evil—making money out of suffering.”

  “They want to develop drugs based on the protein made by the gene,” Stevie explained, airily. “They’ve bought all kinds of patent rights off my Mum and my Dad—my Mum’s even got her own agent—but they’re only interested in short-term things, like getting a slightly better anti-wrinkle cream on to the market before the opposition finds something even better.”

  “Big deal,” said Simon. “I don’t call that a national treasure.”

  “Nor do I,” Stevie said, agreeably. “But companies have to take the short view, because that’s where the profits are. People, on the other hand, can think in terms of much longer-term investments.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Pete wanted to know.