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

by Brian Stableford

  “You’re the one who’s supposed to be telling me, you bastard!” Jenny screamed, figuring that if hysteria disturbed him she might as well let loose a broadside. “What’s wrong with my baby?”

  She heard him out as far as “I’m not at liberty—” and then she cut him off. She called Jackie’s voicemail again.

  “They’re sending an army ambulance for me,” she said, as calmly as she could. “Some hospital in South Oxfordshire—that’s as much as he’d say. If it were anything really nasty, like anthrax or Ebola, he’d have sent men in moon suits to storm the flat. Flagging my file with an urgent request to call him is pretty laid back by today’s standards, and whatever I’m carrying I’ve been carrying for the best part of nine months, so the feeling I have that it’ll explode any minute, or claw its way out, is probably a trifle exaggerated. That won’t stop them invoking the emergency regs, though, so it’ll be no phone calls, let alone visitors, once they’ve got their sticky fingers on me. Don’t let me vanish, Jackie. If I’m not in touch soon, start asking questions, and don’t stop.”

  She rang off, and wondered who else she ought to call. The phone rang in her hand, causing her to start, but the hope that it might be Jackie died when she saw Dr. Gilfillan’s name in the display. She blocked the call and rang her brother Steve. She figured that there was no point trying anyone at the office, where she’d been out of sight and mind since she started working at home in advance of her official maternity leave, and she hadn’t spoken to her father since the funeral. Steve was the only one left who might conceivably give a damn.

  Naturally, his phone was off too. “It’s Jenny, Steve,” she said to his answering machine. “Something’s wrong with the baby, and its nothing ordinary. The army are coming to pick me up. There must have been something wrong with the bloody soldier. I know you blanked it out when I told you about the eating, the kicking and the exhaustion, but it wasn’t just feminine frailty. If I don’t call you in the next two days, start making enquiries, will you? They say they’re taking me to some private place in South Oxfordshire, but they might be lying. This is just a precaution. No need to panic yet.”

  It wasn’t until she’d rung off that she began to think that maybe she was jumping the gun a bit herself, in the matter of panicking. If all this turned out to be a storm in a teacup....

  Gilfillan was still trying to get through, so she accepted the call. “Sorry,” she said, trying not to sound as if she meant it. “Had to bring a couple of people up to speed. Now, the way I figure it is that the soldier boy who got me pregnant was either a casualty himself or part of some kind of horrible experiment. Either way, I’m carrying some kind of giant mutant that’s trying to claw its way out because it knows it won’t be able to get out the usual way. Is that about the size of it?”

  “You’re being ridiculously melodramatic, Miss Loomis,” the doctor informed her, reassuringly. “There is nothing wrong with your baby. If anything, he’s a little too healthy. If only we’d known about this from the start, instead of having to find out when your Genetic Profile results tripped an alarm, there wouldn’t be any problem at all— and the fact that you’re as voluble as you are suggests that you’re still perfectly able to cope with the stress until we get you into hospital. So please stop trying to make yourself worse by scaring yourself to death.”

  “So I’m not a casualty, then?” Jenny said, bluntly. “I have your word on that, as an officer and a gentleman?”

  “Well,” the officer and gentleman procrastinated, “that all depends on exactly what one might mean by casualty.”

  “Exactly what I thought,” Jenny said. “Fucked by friendly fire. It’s some kind of supersoldier, isn’t it? I’m carrying some kind of fast-growing, android, cannon fodder.”

  “No, Miss Loomis. I promise that I’ll explain just as soon as I can, but...”

  “I should never have let Jackie talk me into it,’ Jenny put in, not wanting to listen to a long explanation of why the Frankenstein Corps weren’t allowed to talk about their work to mere civilians. Let’s sign on for an evening class at the university, I said. Imagine a kid with my head for figures and the instincts of a creative artist. Oh no, she said, your Junoesque body cries out for alliance with Hector or Lysander or the British bloody Grenadiers. Brains are for wimps. I can’t believe that I went along with it. It’s my baby, when all’s said and done. Or is it crown property, given that it must have extra genes cooked up in some secret lab in the wilds of South Oxfordshire? Do you need directions, by the way, or do you know where I live?” She tried to lower her voice as she pronounced the last few words, aiming for the customary implication of menace, but it came out all wrong; the hysteria was creeping back.

  “We have your address, Miss Loomis,” Dr. Gilfillan assured her, trying to sound reassuring. “Our ETA’s eight or ten minutes. Please be patient.”

  “Oh, stick your bedside manner up your jaxy,” Jenny said. “I’ve got to try to get to the loo before you get here, then back again. Wish me luck.” She rang off without waiting for a reply.

  * * * *

  She did manage to get to the loo, and back again, before the doorbell rang, but it was a close run thing. She even managed to get to the door without having to take a rest en route.

  Dr. Gilfillan was very tall and distinguished, and exceedingly well dressed, considering that he might have turned up in a moon suit. In person, he oozed authority, almost to the extent that Jenny might have been inclined to trust him if she hadn’t known that he was a slimeball who had dedicated his career to the design and deployment of weapons more insidious than the human imagination had ever been able to dream up before. He had some uniformed chit in tow who didn’t look a day over nineteen. The ambulance parked outside her front gate was dark green. Jenny wondered whether it had a red cross on the roof, to warn off enemy aircraft, but she decided that it probably hadn’t; warfare had become so unsporting in the last twenty years that today’s guerillas used red crosses and red crescents for target practice.

  Gilfillan introduced the chit as Sergeant Cray while he looked Jenny carefully up and down, as if trying to figure out how much trouble she might give him.

  “Come in for a moment,” Jenny said, tiredly. “I think I need to sit down while you try to persuade me that I ought to go with you—because you will have to persuade me.”

  “I can do that, Miss Loomis,” Gilfillan told her, his confidence seemingly renewed now that he had seen her, and the neat little garden fronting her neat little suburban maisonette. “I’m sorry you’ve been alarmed by your wild guesses. Would it be possible for Sergeant Cray to make us a cup of tea while I try to set your mind at rest, do you think?”

  “Kitchens a mess,” Jenny retorted. “Worse state than me. Shall I show you where everything is?”

  “I’ll work it out,” the sergeant assured her.

  Gilfillan waited politely for her to sit down when they hit the living room, but Jenny hadn’t the strength to make a contest out of it. She slumped down on the settee; he took the armchair. He reached into his jacket and produced a thick sheaf of papers. He peeled off the top half of the stack and held them out to her. “I’m afraid that I’ll have to ask you to sign these,” he added.

  Jenny didn’t reach out to take them. “No consent forms,” she said, soberly.

  “It’s not a consent form,” he countered. “It’s the Official Secrets Act.”

  “And if I won’t?” she said, trying unsuccessfully to sound menacing.

  Gilfillan shifted in the chair, arranging his limbs with more civilian fastidiousness than military precision. “Please don’t be afraid, Miss Loomis,” he said. “I doubt very much that you’ll want to publicize your situation, but I can’t tell you what your situation is if you don’t sign the document, and that’s not what either of us wants. Please sign.” He offered her a pen.

  Jenny understood well enough that if she signed the Official Secrets Act and then blabbed, even to Jackie, she could kiss goodbye to her so-calle
d career—but she believed Gilfillan when he said that if she didn’t sign he wouldn’t talk.

  “And I suppose the others are my conscription papers?” she said, hoping that she might be joking.

  “I don’t have the authority to conscript you,” the RAMC man told her. “You have to volunteer.” He put all the papers together and placed them on the coffee table.

  Jenny picked them up. She skipped the Official Secrets Act, and found that the other set really was an application form to join the RAMC in the capacity of “civilian aide.” Curiosity was burning up calories Jenny couldn’t spare, and she really did need to know what was what, for the baby’s sake. She signed the top set of papers and gave them back, but left the others where they were.

  “I need to confirm the name of the father,” Gilfillan told her, now sounding confident that he not only had the upper hand but the full cooperation of his victim.

  “He called himself Lieutenant Graham Lunsford,” Jenny told him, putting on her best brave face even though she knew that it couldn’t be very convincing. “Very tall, not very dark, and extremely handsome. Have I just got him into deep trouble or won him a medal?”

  “That’s not for me to say. Was it just the fact that he was a soldier that triggered your anxieties, or was there something more?”

  “Apart from your attachment to the RAMC and the fact that we haven’t had a good bioterrorism scare hereabouts since Wednesday last?” Jenny countered. “Actually, we did have a conversation—Jackie, me, the lieutenant and the lieutenant’s friend. Jackie’s my friend. She screwed the lieutenant’s friend, but she took precautions.”

  Gilfillan had apparently been doing his homework too. “That would be Mrs. Jacqueline Stephenson,” he said. “Lives at number thirty-two. Divorced five years ago, shortly after your mother died.” His tone was remarkably even, but what he was telling her was that he had access to all the information he could desire about Jackie—and about her. He probably knew about Jackie’s teenage chlamydia and present sterility, let alone the whole sorry saga of her own mother’s cancer. He had probably guessed about the biological clock, and the reasons why she’d gone fishing for unattached sperm rather than wait for the kind of miracle that might equip her with a committed partner and full-time father.

  “You had a conversation, Miss Loomis?” the biologist prompted, still scrupulously polite.

  “A conversation took place,” she said, remembering how little she’d contributed to it. “Jackie has theories. She spent a couple of hours telling them both that soldiers like them would be redundant soon, and would be already if our military strategists had any sense at all. She’s a great believer in biological warfare. Never mind shooting and bombing the poor buggers, she says—hit them where it really hurts. If you want to be slightly subtle, sow the entire Middle East with a virus that sterilizes women. If you want to be very subtle, use one that does what the female hormones in the local water supply are supposed to be doing to our menfolk by accident: feminize them. See how the apprentice martyrs of Global Jihad cope with that”

  Gilfillan nodded his head, as if he agreed with every word. “And what did Lieutenant Lunsford and his friend have to say in their turn?”

  “They said it wasn’t that easy, and that she was looking at the problem from the wrong angles—that the biggest problem with biological warfare was delivery, and after that self-defense. They said it’s hard to produce designer diseases that are more velvet glove than iron fist. For the time being, they said, the trick is to make the most of the genes that we already have. Expressionism is the way to go, your lieutenant said. His mate added that Abstract Expressionism is best of all—which was obviously some kind of joke. I didn’t get it at the time, but I think I do now. The soldier boy meant genetic expression, and it was a joke because the army was abstracting his sperm for in vitro experimentation.” Jenny winced as the baby kicked, expressing himself the only way that was currently available to him.

  “Actually,” Gilfillan told her, “the joke was a bit more convoluted than that. It’s an obscure item of rhyming slang.” He paused as Sergeant Cray brought in a tray bearing a pot of tea, two cups, a milk jug, a sugar bowl and two spoons.

  Jenny usually stuck a bag in a mug and poured the milk from the carton, so this seemed to her to be uncommonly civilized. “Aren’t you having any, Sergeant?” she said.

  “Sergeant Cray will pack you a bag while I explain” Gilfillan told her.

  The sergeant was standing behind the doctor at that point, and Jenny met her eye. The chit favored her with what was presumably supposed to be an expression of sisterly support. It wasn’t convincing. Jenny didn’t say that she’d far rather do her own packing, because the simple fact was that it would take every last vestige of her strength just to walk up the garden path to the ambulance. Gilfillan took a genteel sip from his unsugared cup, and pretended not to notice the second heaped teaspoon that Jenny had shovelled into hers.

  “Okay,” Jenny said. “I’m gagged. Tell me exactly how I’ve been fucked over.”

  “All your test results are fine, Miss Loomis. We’ll probably have to think in terms of a precautionary Caesarean section, given the size of the fetus, but we don’t expect any further problems. If you want to bring the baby home after we’ve completed our preliminary observations, you can. We’ll stay in the background, if you wish—but if you’d like to move into army accommodation, to be with other mothers in the same situation as you, that would probably suit you as well as us. If you want to arrange mainstream schooling for him, that will be okay too— again, we’ll be discreet—but again, it might suit everyone better, especially your son, if we were able to keep him in a protected environment.”

  “So he is a supersoldier with artificially boosted genes? Have you got a battalion full of pregnant squaddies, or are you mixing up the fetuses in petri dishes and outsourcing them all to civilian aides7. Is it a long-range program, or are the little Action Men programmed to continue growing twice as fast as normal once they’re out in the open?”

  “It is a long-range program,” Gilfillan said, remaining perfectly calm in the face of the attempted onslaught. “It compares reasonably well with the time it takes to get a new warplane or missile from the drawing board to the battlefield, but that’s not the point. The nature of warfare is changing, though not quite in the direction your melodramatic friend imagines—and so is the range of political thinking.”

  “I know,” she told him, intent on making it clear that her brain was still working even though her body had turned traitor. “The Age of Reckless Haste ended the day oil production peaked and the price of energy began its inexorable upward march. Everybody thinks in terms of generations now. I read the papers—and I fiddle company accounts for a living, or did before 1 decided that it was time to fulfil my destiny as a woman. You’d better get to the bottom line, Dr. Gilfillan, if you expect me to get into that ambulance when Sergeant Cray has packed my nightie and toothbrush.”

  “Fair enough,” Gilfillan said, seemingly quite pleased by the way she was handling herself. “Your lieutenant was right about the difficulties of biological warfare. We don’t know exactly how many biological attacks have been mounted in this country during the last twenty years, but the casualty figures have been tiny, even when the agents were supposedly deadly. Even if the flu epidemics were assisted, they’ve done far less damage than self-inflicted injuries like junk food and cigarettes. The days when biowar enthusiasts thought that it would just be a matter of opening a test tube on a plane or filling a cluster bomb’s warheads with contaminated powder are long gone. Biological agents are delicate, and even the most contagious ones don’t spread far if the targets have the sense to move back and wash their hands. The cutting edge of research isn’t a matter of designing deadlier or cleverer diseases—it’s a matter of designing better carriers. Do you know what a perfect carrier is?”

  “A Typhoid Mary, in tabloid-speak,” Jenny said. “Someone who can infect a lot of other people with
a disease without suffering any ill effect himself.”

  “Actually, it’s a Typhoid Mary with the ability to discriminate: to switch his infectiousness on and off, so that he—or she—can target the contagion.”

  “And that’s what I’m carrying—in a slightly different sense of the word.”

  “I hope so. You asked whether we have a battalion of pregnant squaddies—well, if things had gone the way we hoped, we might have. At present, we’ve hardly got a platoon. Your country needs you, Miss Loomis. And when you’ve had a chance to think it over, I’m sure you’ll understand that you might very well need us. If this were to leak out to the media—and I’m certainly not trying to threaten you, because we’ll move heaven and earth to stop that happening, whether you come aboard or not—you and your baby would be subject to weeks of intense scrutiny and a lifetime of haphazard prying.”

  If she had had the strength, Jenny would have laughed— not because what he was saying was absurd, but because it was so obviously true. For her child’s sake, and her own, she ought to be begging the army to let her in, not to leave her out in the open, where the eagle eyes and sharp beaks of the media might only be one of the threats facing her. The world was, alas, full of people who might find a use for the kind of weapon she was allegedly carrying in her womb—and might not want to wait until he was in long pants before setting him loose.