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

by Brian Stableford

  He didn’t reply, because he’d said all he had to say, but he looked at me with what I thought—or, at least, hoped—was understanding.

  * * * *

  It wasn’t until nearly a week later, on New Year’s Eve, that I heard through the hospital grapevine that Maria Innocente had given birth to a boy who was outwardly perfect, but who didn’t respond to stimuli in a normal way. He was certainly blind, almost certainly deaf, and probably badly brain-damaged; only time would reveal the lull extent of his disability. Amniocentesis hadn’t thrown up any warning signs, but the DNA in the embryo had evidently been defective.

  I shed some honest tears for the disappointed mother, because I understood only too well the sharpness and the bitterness of the grief that she must feel; but I couldn’t find it in my heart to weep for Dr. Gabriel, or for the dismal failure of the Work of God.

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  * * * *

  DR. PROSPERO AND THE SNAKE LADY

  I’m not often awake in the middle of the night in winter, especially when the skies are clear and the temperature drops to thirty below zero, but I had been feeling restless of late. There was a meteor shower due that night. Caliban and Ariel don’t care for things like that—one of the few things on which they agree—so they were content for once to let me be whole, even though my being awake was depriving one or other of them a tiny fraction of “her” time.

  Dr. Prospero didn’t seem to care one way or another who I was. He’d become bored with me: the experiment’s honeymoon was over, and he was content to leave further formal monitoring entirely to AIs.

  The shower wasn’t as spectacular as I’d hoped, but there was a fugitive aurora that made up for the thinness of the meteor trails. I’d read only a few days before that the aurora’s lights are echoes of storms on the sun, and that made the flickering seem more romantic—or magical, in Ariel’s way of thinking. There were a couple of airships above the island, running with minimal lights so that the sightseers could watch the shower, but I didn’t pay them much heed until one of them dropped a falling star of its own.

  I watched it fall, knowing that it had to be aimed at the island. Dr. Prospero never invites visitors, but that doesn’t prevent people from coming uninvited. For a while, when I was the apple of Dr. Prospero’s eye, there was at least one illicit visitor every week, and they all wanted pictures of me. Now I was nearly full-grown, though, it was as likely to be someone interested in the white mammoths, the zebroid tapirs or the giant rats—or even Python, who’d been old news for three centuries before I was even born.

  It was a stupid time to come calling, I thought. There’d only be few hours of very meager daylight when dawn eventually came, and the night was so cold that even the mammoths were likely to stay huddled up, deep in the pines. Python was safely curled up in the bowels of Dr. Prospero’s ice palace, fast asleep and oblivious to the world of men.

  I envied him that, sometimes. I’m not mentally present in my sleep the way I am when I’m awake, but I’m not oblivious. Sleep, for me, is an eternal dream. Ariel and Caliban remember nothing of one another, but I remember every embarrassing moment of both their stupid lives.

  There wasn’t much wind, but the descending capsule drifted further than I expected. For a moment, I thought it might get carried as far as the ice-sheet, but it came down in the water no more than a few hundred metres offshore. The parachute-rider’s life raft inflated immediately.

  I went down to the beach to meet the raft, in case its occupant needed help, but she was so frightened by the sight of me that she raised her flare gun. I made frantic gestures to assure her that I was harmless.

  Her suitskin’s tegument was thickened against the cold, slightly inflated by an insulating layer of vacuum, so her face was slightly indistinct, but her features seemed bland enough. She was unfashionably tall, and her long limbs seemed to be unusually supple. There was no way to tell whether her eyes or any other part of her body were wired as recording devices or transmitters, but the way her gaze wandered suggested that she wasn’t paying much attention to anything—yet.

  I tried to sign to her—although I can write quite well, I can’t talk because I don’t have the necessary vocal apparatus—but she didn’t understand. It obviously wasn’t me that she had come to investigate.

  “You shouldn’t creep up on people like that,” she said, unfairly. “You’re the smart orangutan that never sleeps, right? I didn’t think you’d be out on a night like this. I didn’t expect you to have such a fancy suitskin. Glad you’re here, though. You can see me safely up the mountain to your daddy’s door.”

  She was taking a lot for granted. I was going back up the mountain anyway, but I hadn’t planned on using the footpath. On the other hand, I didn’t have Dr. Prospero’s distaste for human company. I liked people. I could study them to my heart’s content in v-space, and communicate with them too, but there’s no substitute for actual presence and authentic touch.

  I offered her my hand, but she wouldn’t take it.

  “Just lead the way,” she said. “Your name’s Miranda, right? Or are you one of the others now?”

  I shook my head to indicate that I was indeed Miranda, not Ariel or Caliban, but I’m not sure that she even understood that. She didn’t seem to care.

  I meekly led her up the mountain. I even let her in, although I wouldn’t have been able to do that if Dr. Prospero had wanted her kept out. Even then, I assumed that he was just making the best of things, and that he’d get rid of her as soon as he could—but when he came to meet her, I realized that I’d been mistaken. He was expecting her. He seemed less resentful of her presence than any other human I’d ever seen him look at.

  “Miranda,” he said, “this is Elise Gagne. She’ll be staying for a few days. I’ve agreed to work on a project with her.”

  I was thunderstruck. Dr. Prospero working in collaboration! It was unthinkable. There were a thousand Creationists working on pet projects in the Pacific, of whom nine hundred were reputed to be reclusive, fully half of whom used silly pseudonyms in the great tradition of Oscar Wilde and Gustave Moreau, but Dr. Prospero was in a class of his own when it came to cultivated eccentricity. If Python and the white mammoths weren’t evidence enough of his original turn of mind, and his determination to venture where other Creationists feared to tread, I was final proof of it. Who could this person be that he would deign to “work on a project” with her? I thought that I had made myself familiar with the names of the world’s leading Creationists, but I had never heard the name of Gagne.

  I signed a question, curious to know what project Dr. Prospero was talking about—but he ignored me. The humiliation was bitter.

  “You can go, Miranda,” he said. “Elise and I have things to discuss.”

  It was not so much the fact of the dismissal as the tone that cut me. It was one thing no longer to be the focus of Dr. Prospero’s attention or the object of his intensest study, and quite another to be waved away like some mere irrelevance. I had never felt so hurt. I had, of course, only been alive for a mere fifteen years—a drop in the ocean by comparison with Dr. Prospero’s 433 and Python’s 399—but I had never expected that I might feel so wretched if I lived to be a thousand.

  Elise Gagne did not wait for me to leave. She had already stepped into Dr. Prospero’s private space, without causing any precipitate retreat. She actually reached out to touch his cheek.

  “Thank you, Prospero,” she said. “You don’t now how much this means to me.”

  He didn’t flinch. The omission of his title didn’t disturb him any more than the pressure of her fingers.

  I crept away, feeling like Caliban at her worst.

  * * * *

  I had no difficulty at all finding out who Elise Gagne was. It was equally easy to discover what it was that she wanted from Dr. Prospero. The woman was an open book: her life, her art and her ambition clamored for attention on the uniweb.

  She wasn’t a Creationist at all. She was an exotic dancer.


  She danced with snakes. What she wanted from Dr. Prospero was a perfect partner.

  The one thing that wasn’t a matter of public record was what she’d offered him in exchange for designing one, but that wasn’t hard to figure out. The answer was hard for me to swallow, but it wasn’t hard to figure out.

  She had offered him fleshsex.

  A year before, I would have thought the idea of any such exchange ridiculous, but not any more. I had had a great deal more time to further my education since Dr. Prospero’s observations had grown less intense—and so had Ariel and Caliban. Neither of them was fond of reading, and Caliban was no seeker after wisdom even in v-space, but there were kinds of experience for which each was avid, and I remembered every last detail of my dreams when I woke up. My partial selves had, inevitably, become the intensest objects of my study, as I struggled to understand the stuff of which I was made.

  Although I am formed like an orangutan, that being the genome-plan and fundamental cytostructure with which Dr. Prospero worked when he shaped the egg from which I was born, the inspiration for my creation came from another mammal: the dolphin. Like orangutans, dolphins became extinct in the twenty-first-century ecocatastrophe, and like orangutans, they were among the first of the recreated species. There are many things about them that are remarkable, but the one that seized Dr. Prospero’s imagination was a consequence of the fact that a sea-dwelling mammal cannot go to sleep as a land-mammal can, else it will sink and drown.

  Many creatures with less complex brains than dolphins can solve this problem by restricting themselves to very shallow sleep-slates, but dolphins need to dream, and thus need deep sleep. They solve this problem by letting the two hemispheres of their brain sleep in shifts, one at a time.

  This is restrictive in a different way. It requires that each hemisphere of a dolphin’s brain needs to be able to perform all of the basic functions required to sustain the animal; there is still scope for some specialization, but not as much as a primate brain. That is one reason why dolphins are not as smart as clever dogs, let alone recreated orangutans, in spite of the potential offered by the size and complexity of their brains.

  Dr. Prospero was probably not the only man ever to wonder whether such a situation could be produced in a brain whose functions were more elaborately divided—but it is his propensity for actualizing such wonderings that makes him the exceptional Creationist he is. He undertook to find out, and I am the result of that inquiry. When both sides of my brain are awake, I am Miranda. When the left hemisphere sleeps, I am Caliban. When the right hemisphere sleeps, I am Ariel. The specialization of my two hemispheres is not as marked as that of a human brain, nor is it patterned in the same way, but the principle is similar. Ariel and Caliban are very different individuals, and I am far greater than the sum of my parts.

  At least, I like to think so.

  Indeed, I feel obliged to hope so, now that Ariel and Caliban have become—each in her different way—so obsessed with sex.

  I, by contrast, have only an intellectual interest in the subject, perhaps because I always wake up to possession of a fully sated body and mind. But I shouldn’t be writing about myself; I should be writing about Dr. Prospero.

  One would think that a man of Dr. Prospero’s age, intellect and temperament would have long since transcended sexual urges, or at least confined their expression to virtual experience—how, after all, could any mere partner of flesh compete with the exquisite subtleties of his artifice?—but it doesn’t work that way.

  Humankind took effective control of the species’ evolution a thousand years ago, at the end of the 20th century, but clung hard to as much of its inheritance as was not actually disastrous. By that time, ten thousand years of mental and social evolution had far outstripped the physiological evolution of a body whose emotional equipment had been shaped by the brutality of natural selection. Since then, physiological evolution has outstripped the mental and social evolution of a brain whose moral and emotional equipment was shaped by terror and lust. One day, no doubt, a reasonable balance will be struck, but today’s emortals are no more than five generations removed from the rough-hewn products of natural selection, and the tools with which they have reshaped themselves are still crude. They retain the greater number of their follies.

  Even Creationists, masters of evolution as they are, retain their follies. Even Dr. Prospero, the greatest of the great eccentrics, retains his follies.

  And that is why, no matter how absurd it seems, Dr. Prospero was willing to design a perfect dancing-partner for Elise Gagne, in return for a fleshsex fling: a hectic folie à deux.

  * * * *

  On the second day of Elise Gagne’s visit, I unearthed one of my old electronic voice-boxes so that I could communicate with her more easily. Dr. Prospero and I didn’t need spoken words, because we had such expert fingers, but her fingers—long, slender and supple as they were-—were mute.

  She appreciated the effort, I think, but she didn’t really want to talk to me. She always seemed uncomfortable in my presence, although I made every effort to be pleasant and polite, and to take an interest in her art.

  “Why did you come to Dr. Prospero?” I asked, one day when we were dining à deux because Dr. Prospero could not interrupt his work. “Couldn’t any commercial engineer make you a dancing snake?” The words were pronounced as I typed by a beautifully modulated voice, that would have sounded perfectly human to a blind person, but they seemed alien to me. After all, I’m not human, let alone perfect.

  “The kind of dancing I do is very complicated,” she told me, seeming to look down at me from her great height even though we were sitting at a table. She used her lovely fingers to smooth her hair, which she was wearing Nordic blonde in honor of the latitude. If Dr. Prospero’s island had been in the tropics, like the vast majority of Creationist havens, she’d probably have worn it obsidian black.

  “Is it?” I said. Unfortunately, my artificial voice had politeness built in to its tone, and it wouldn’t do contemptuous skepticism.

  “I needed a snake with a brain far larger than any ordinary recreated species,” she went on. “Just making a snake with a big enough brain is only part of the problem, apparently; there needs to be some particular specialization of function, which has something to do with structural determinants of formal development...the jargon’s beyond me. Anyway, they all said that Prospero was the man, if I could get him to do it—they laughed when they said it, but I wasn’t worried. You’ve already got a smart snake living in the cellar, I understand—old as the hills and nearly as big.”

  “That’s Python,” I said. “He was the best result of Dr. Prospero’s first experiments with mammoth genes.”

  “I thought the white mammoths were recent—last century.”

  “Yes, they are. They were a joke, of sorts. The mammoth genes Dr. Prospero started working on weren’t the genes of mammoths; they were called mammoth genes because they were so big. When geneticists first began reverse engineering XL proteins, they ran into problems because of the size of the genes required to make them. Big proteins need lots of coding bases, and if they have several interlocking strands the components can’t be laid out in a single span. Mammoth genes can have as many as twelve introns, and they’re very prone to transposon migration. Natural ones are rare— understandably so, given that heritable artificial ones tend to suffer fatal mutation within a couple of generations. Nowadays they’re mostly used for short-term somatic engineering.”

  “That’s all I need in a dancing-partner,” Elise Gagne observed.

  She was rude to interrupt, because I clearly hadn’t finished. I had a lot more to say, even though my fingers were feeling the effort because I hadn’t used the voice-box for so long.

  “Dr. Prospero figured that it would be best to study their potential uses in long-lived individuals,” I went on, trying to keep it simple, “so he made Python. Reptiles are easier to engineer for longevity than mammals, but smart reptiles are ha
rder. The giantism was a side-effect, but it added further interest to the results of the brain-differentiation. The other engineers advised you to come to Dr. Prospero because he’s done so much work on brain-differentiation.”

  “Obviously,” she put in, meaning that I was living proof of it.

  “It’s not just genes, however mammoth or minuscule, that determine differentiation of function,” I persisted. “The formal development of an embryo is mainly dependent on an architectural blueprint carried in the cytoplasm of the egg-cell. Dr. Prospero will use one of Python’s cells—carefully renucleated—as the parent of the snake he’s making for you.”