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

by Brian Stableford

  “They didn’t say valuable, exactly,” Mum confessed, as she investigated the contents of the tea-urn on my bedside table. “Just interesting. That was nice, though, wasn’t it? I’ve never been interesting before. Not since I turned thirty, anyhow. I was interesting before that, all right—but you have to settle down a bit eventually, don’t you. Not as much as Stan wanted me to, obviously, but...I don’t suppose there’s a chance of a fresh brew, is there, love? I’m parched.”

  “You can get tea by the gallon here,” I told her, absent-mindedly pressing the buzzer. Mention of Stan—the husband she’d divorced two years before she had me, whose surname I’d got stuck with even though he wasn’t my father—made me wonder whether Jardine might conceivably be running a bluff on Hartman with regard to Mum and Gran. Signing up all the antecedents he could find might have been a sensible precautionary measure, and he’d obviously pretend that he’d got what he wanted, even if what he really needed was time to try to find the parent from whom I had inherited the Klondyke gene. If so, he’d have a real problem on his hands. Mum had always told me that she didn’t even know the guy’s name, let alone his whereabouts. She might have been lying to deflect my curiosity, but she might not.

  I shook my head, dazedly. It was all happening too fast, and my imagination was beginning to run away with me.

  * * * *

  More tea arrived soon enough, and so did Dr. Finch. She had the grace to look a bit sheepish.

  “I’m sorry about all the fuss, Darren,” she said. “We didn’t expect anything like that to happen. I’m afraid, Mrs. Hepplewhite, that you might have been unwise to sign anything that man put before you. He’s not the sort of person I’d want to act on my behalf.”

  “What sort of person is he?” I asked, interested to find out what GSKC might know about his erstwhile kidnappers.

  “Do you know what biopiracy is?” Dr. Finch countered.

  “No,” I confessed.

  “I do,” Mum put in. “I saw a documentary about it on BBC-2. It’s where multinational companies go prospecting for rare genes in underdeveloped countries and steal all the traditional medicines that the natives have been using for millions of years, and make fortunes out of the patents.”

  “Well, that sort of thing has happened,” said Dr. Finch, judiciously, “but that’s not exactly what I mean in this case. The pirates I’m talking about operate closer to home. They keep a close watch on the research that companies like ours are doing, with a view to pirating our data on behalf of black marketeers who sell counterfeit drugs. Sometimes, though, it isn’t enough to steal a base-sequence. In theory, anyone who knows the base-sequence of a particular gene can build a copy in vitro in order to produce the relevant protein, but some genes need the assistance of other biochemical apparatus to put different bits of a protein together and fold the resultant complex into its active form. Some proteins can only be produced in living cells, and a few can only be produced in living cells with a particular genomic spectrum. Maybe more than a few—but so far, we’ve only found a few. Human proteonomic science is still in its infancy, and because of the unexpectedly large number of versatile exons in the human genome it’s turning out to be a more complicated business than anyone anticipated.”

  “What you’re saying,” I said, to make sure that I was keeping up as well as I could be expected to, “is that whatever is happening inside my bladder—but not in the bladders of the other people you roped into the experiment—can only happen inside me, or someone with the same genetic quirk as me.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” Dr. Finch parried.

  “But you think I might be in danger?” I said. “You think somebody might try to kidnap me—or Mum, or even Gran.” I knew it had to be bullshit, given that I’d already been turned loose once, and that Jardine could have kept hold of Mum instead of giving her a lift to the clinic if he’d wanted to, but I was a spy now and I had use a spy’s tricks.

  “You’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick,” the doctor assured me. “What’s at stake here isn’t mere possession of the bioreactor that your bladder has become, or another body which shares the genes responsible for the anomaly. What we need—and what might, in principle, be pirated—is an understanding of the interactions that are happening between your body and the gene we tried to transplant into you. Once we understand the manner in which the exons are collaborating, we won’t actually need your entire body, or anybody else’s, to reproduce the interaction. Any clonable tissue sample would be adequate, although the most efficient technique uses semen samples—it allows us to select out those sperms with the most useful combinations of exons, so that we can fertilize eggs and produce whole series of easily-clonable embryonic hybrids. As your mother pointed out, albeit in the wrong context, biopiracy is all about intellectual property rights. Biotech patents are a real minefield, and this case could be a precedent-setter. It’ll be bad enough if Mr. Jardine’s backers are only intent on stalling us while they try to develop a couple of therapeutic products for black market distribution—if they really do want to go for the big prize, by establishing property rights of their own, that would be a very different ball game.”

  I wasn’t at all sure that I was following the details, but I’d seen enough gangster movies to know that the more businesslike Mafia men always want to use their ill-gotten gains to set up legitimate businesses, so that they can start swimming with the real sharks. Suddenly, the fact that the deceptive blonde had gone to the bother of extracting more than piss from my hapless prick began to seem more sinister than embarrassing. I wondered whether the three musketeers had been overtaken by events for a second time, and were now wishing that they had hung on to me instead of trying to turn me into a Judas. On the other hand, I was probably worth far more to them as a willing double-agent than a hostage.

  “What do you mean by precedent-setter?” I asked Dr. Finch. “What’s so special about my trick bladder that I’ve been promoted in easy stages from national service nobody to the guy every agent in town wants to sign within the space of twenty-four hours?”

  “I think I ought to wait for Dr. Hartman and the lawyers before saying any more,” Dr. Finch said, worriedly.

  “Mr. Jardine suggested that you might want me to join in your experiments,” Mum put in, “but he was very insistent that I shouldn’t sign anything without him being with me. He also told me to look after Darren.” She sounded innocent enough, but I’d always suspected that I hadn’t got my lack of stupidity from my Dad.

  “Nobody’s going to hurt Darren,” Dr. Finch assured her. I noticed that she didn’t say anything about the possibility of recruiting Mum to the program.

  “Mr. Jardine also said,” Mum went on, slowly, “that no matter what Darren’s signed, you can’t imprison him. No matter what he agreed to when he signed your forms, he’s still free to walk out of the door. You can sue him, but you can’t stop him. Not legally. If I wanted to take him home and you tried to stop me....” Mr. Jardine had obviously schooled her thoroughly while he was giving her a lift to the clinic.

  “All right!” said Dr. Finch, putting up her hands. “Nobody’s saying that Darren’s a prisoner—just that he has responsibilities. Nobody wants to sue anybody. We want everybody to be happy. He is getting paid for being here.”

  “Mr. Jardine also said...,” Mum began—but the door opened before she could start haggling.

  I wasn’t in the least surprised to see Dr. Hartman and the security guard, or the two suits that were with him, but any illusions I had about knowing what was what vanished when one of the suits stepped forward and shoved an ID card in my face.

  He wasn’t a corporate lawyer. According to the ID card he was Lieutenant-Colonel Jeremy Hascombe of “Special Services”. I’d seen enough movies to know that “Special Services” was the organization that had risen out of the ashes of MI6’s funeral pyre, but I’d never been certain that they actually existed. Apparently, they did.

  When the colonel showed the ID to
Dr. Finch her astonishment made mine look distinctly feeble. “Oh, Mike,” she said. “You didn’t.”

  “Of course I didn’t,” Hartman growled, through gritted teeth. “They had the pirates under surveillance all along. Whatever their hackers got went straight to the spooks. They’re trying to pretend that this thing has defense implications.”

  That was worrying. If Special Services knew that I’d been snatched outside Sainsbury’s they must also know that I’d been recruited as a double-agent. I didn’t suppose that Special Services needed to pay any heed at all to the principle of informed consent.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Dr. Finch said. “The management will fight you, you know. You can’t just march in here and take over.”

  “Show the doctors out, will you, Major,” said Jeremy Hascombe.

  “Now just you wait a minute...” the security guard began—but when Hascombe rounded on him and looked him straight in the eye he trailed off. He was probably ex-army, and he still had his carefully-trained habits of respect and obedience.

  The same didn’t apply, of course, to the lawyer who came bounding through the door at that moment to take up the slack, but he didn’t get anywhere either. His first sentence began with the words “I insist” but I never got to hear what it was he was insisting on.

  “Just get them out,” Hascombe said to his associate. “All of them.”

  The associate didn’t look particularly intimidating, but the way he grabbed the lawyer casually by the throat was wonderfully menacing. It wasn’t only the lawyer who spluttered into total silence. The sheer insolence of the gesture was breathtaking. Everybody knew that we were on camera, and everybody knew that they would be held accountable for whatever they did. I wondered what it might be like to have the power and authority, not to mention the sheer front, to grab a corporate lawyer by the throat.

  “This,” said Jeremy Hascombe, equably, “is now a matter of national security.”

  His associate guided the lawyer carefully through the door. The two doctors and the security guard followed them meekly.

  “Could you possibly give me a few moments alone with Darren, Mrs. Hepplewhite?” the colonel said. “No harm will come to him, I promise you.”

  Mum looked the colonel straight in the eye, but when she spoke it was to me. “It’s not three any more, Daz,” she said. “It’s ten.” She never called me Daz. She’d always disapproved of anyone who did, even though that had excluded practically all my old school friends.

  “Make that twenty,” Dr. Hartman called out from the corridor, although he was too intimidated actually to stick his head around the door. It might have been a stab in the dark, but I got the impression that he knew exactly what the Vivaldi fan had offered me the day before, and what Mum was trying to tell me. Three times the so-called wage that GSKC paid national service recruits was still a fair way short of a doctor’s salary, but ten was a pretty fair wedge, and twenty was adequate by anyone’s standards. I figured that what Dr. Hartman was trying to get across was the suggestion that if I refused to play ball with Jeremy Hascombe, then GSKC plc would look after me as best they could.

  I’d seen enough movies to know that big multinational corporations paid way better than governments, but tended to be far more ruthless if they were mucked about.

  * * * *

  When he’d shut the door behind Mum’s retreating bulk, Colonel Hascombe sat down beside the bed and put out his hand. “Give me the other recorder, Darren,” he said.

  I was tempted to tell him to look for it, but I didn’t fancy being searched. I unclipped it from the pocket of my pajama-top and gave it to him.

  “Cheap Korean crap,” he observed, as he put it into his coat pocket. “That should tell you something about the people you’re in bed with. The Americans are so much better at this sort of thing. It almost makes you wish that they were on our side.”

  “I thought they were,” I said.

  “If you listened to the politicians,” Hascombe told me, “you’d think that we didn’t have an enemy in the world, except for a couple of ex-colonies that aren’t talking to us just now. It’s true, in a way— but that doesn’t mean that everybody else is on our side, even if they operate freely on our soil. Do you see what I mean?”

  What he meant was that dear old England wasn’t “on the same side” as GSKC plc, but Dr. Hartman had already made that obvious.

  “Whose side are you on, Darren?” the colonel wanted to know. It was a good question.

  “Mine,” I said, unhesitatingly.

  “That’s what I thought,” he said. “Which makes you the weakest piece on the board: all on your own with not an honest ally in sight, with the possible exception of your mother. Not that you’ve had a lot of choice so far, given that everybody else who’s tried to deal with you has been as likely to rat on you as you are on them. They’ll offer you money, of course—and keep on upping the stakes every time you seem likely to turn—but they’re not people you can rely on.”

  “And you are?” I said, skeptically.

  “I have to be,” he told me. “I’m not a crook or a businessman. I represent the king, parliament and the people. My word has to mean something.”

  I didn’t say anything in response to that, but my face must have told him that it was so far beyond believable as to be funny.

  “What a world we live in,” he said, with a sigh. “You’d rather deal with pirates than with GSKC, and you’d rather deal with anyone than representatives of your country. What does that say about you, Darren, apart from the fact that you’ve watched too many bad movies?”

  “What I’d rather deal with,” I told him, frostily, “is someone who was prepared to tell me the fucking truth about why my market value goes up another notch every time somebody takes another bucketful of my piss. I didn’t want to be a fucking guinea-pig in the first place and I certainly don’t want to end up as a fucking secret weapon—so if you aren’t going to tell me what the fuck is going on, Jez, why don’t you just fuck off?”

  He didn’t flinch and he didn’t get angry.

  “Okay,” he said. “You’ll need to know, whether you decide to come aboard or not, and I’m betting that nobody else will make much effort to tell you the truth. How much have they told you so far?”

  “Bugger all,” I said, resentfully. I waved a hand at the paper mountain. “They gave me plenty to read, as you can see, but it might as well be hieroglyphics. Apparently, they stuck some gene into my bladder expecting that it would fill my piss full of some kind of useful protein. It didn’t. Instead, I got four different proteins, or bits of proteins. Everybody knew that last night, so something new must have come up in the meantime. Finch was just waffling, but I gather that they’ve now got interested in whatever there is about me that was making the transplanted gene act up. If the original target protein had been especially valuable I wouldn’t have been walking the streets in the first place, and if one of the four unexpected byproducts had been a gold mine the pirates would probably have hung on to me instead of sending me back, so I’m betting that once they began to figure out what my bladder had done to the target they began wondering about what it could do to other proteins...and what it might already be doing inside me. Right so far?”

  “Spot on,” he conceded, ungrudgingly. He was obviously surprised that a dolehound with three GCSEs had got that far, but he seemed pleased to know that I wasn’t a complete idiot.

  “So what is it doing?” I asked. “And what else might it do, with the right encouragement?”

  “It’ll probably take a long time to work that out,” he told me. “Which is why everybody’s trying to put a claim in before the hard work starts. All we have so far is hopeful signs—signs that a lot of people have been looking out for, although nobody expected them to turn up in a bog-standard op like this. Have you ever heard of the Principle of Selective Self-Medication?”

  “No,” I said. “Mum probably has. She watches documentaries on BBC-2.”

  “Wel
l, put very simply, it means that all living organisms are under continuous selective pressure to develop internal defenses against disease, injury, parasitism and predation. Any mutation that throws up a means of protecting its carrier from one of those things increases its chances of survival. A lot of the medicines doctors developed in the last century, from antibiotics on, were borrowed from other organisms that had developed them as natural defenses, but our evolutionary history had already equipped us with a lot of internal defenses of our own—like the immune system—which we’d simply taken for granted. Once the Human Genome Project had delivered a basic map, we were in a much better position not only to analyze our own defensive systems but also to search for refinements that hadn’t yet had an opportunity to spread through the population. Most of the publicity associated with the project concentrated on the genes that make certain people more vulnerable to various diseases, cancers and so on but there’s another side to the coin. We’ve also been able to search out genes which make people less vulnerable to specific conditions: self-medicating factors.”

  “So Hartman and Finch think I’ve got one of those: a gene that makes me less vulnerable to some kind of killer disease?”