Parasite World

by Trevor Williams

  ‘Man, I can help your transition to becoming near enough a woman but I can’t make it go the other way. It’s a one way street. Next stop, surgery.’

  ‘But is it possible to stop the process?’

  ‘Oh yeah. That’s why it never became a full blown weapon,’

  ‘A weapon?’

  ‘Devised by DARPA as a way of neutralising enemy armies, but it was too slow and not infectious enough, so they dropped it.’

  ‘So, not a weapon. What’s the cure then?’

  ‘Easy: antibiotics and testosterone. Go see your doctor.’

  The homunculus woke up. ‘That is good news, Archbishop.’

  ****

  The homunculus flipped its e-pad open and tapped in a number. A tip-off from the homunculus of a senior official in the Home Office had come through. The operation was blown. It had been a breeze to set up the network. All that had been needed were a few gullible humans who frequented the GUF forums and an anonymous e-mail address. JC didn’t want to wrap up the network but it was necessary. MI5 knew about the transgender attacks on the clerics and had even retrieved one of the umbrellas. The homunculus smiled inwardly. The umbrella technique would be an excellent red herring with its overtones of the cold war and the Georgi Markov assassination in 1978. What was puzzling was why the GUF hadn’t claimed responsibility even though they’d been handed a huge propaganda gift. There was no response from Lucinda. Good. She must have gone into emergency mode and destroyed all data. Even if tortured, she couldn’t have told them anything.

  Semperimportante’s homunculus glanced at its dozing host. The plan had worked, at least in the archbishop’s case. His attitude to gays in the church had changed. The means had justified the ends. Would he revert once he’d had the treatment for the human Wolbachia bacterium? Only time would tell.

  A Congenital Criminal

  The Home Secretary, Jemima Heinous-Smythe, preened herself in front of the TV cameras. She was wearing her pinstripe suit as usual. Her homunculus, in matching garb, whispered in her ear briefly before she spoke.

  ‘Yes, I know it was your idea originally,’ Heinous-Smythe replied to the parasitic advisor growing out of her right shoulder. ‘However, we have an election coming soon and this is going to be our big idea. As far the voters are concerned we need to say it came from the PM.’

  The homunculus shrugged its tiny shoulders, a look of resignation on its face as Heinous-Smythe began her sales pitch.

  ‘Everybody knows that law and order are the basis of a stable and democratic society,’ she began. ‘Our police force does a wonderful job catching criminals after they have committed their acts of folly, violence and antisocial behaviour. What we propose is a new system. Alongside our initiatives on intervening in and re-shaping the lives of problem families that suck up disproportionate quantities of public resources, we are going to prevent crime before it happens.’ Heinous-Smythe paused and took a glass of what looked like water from the desk in front of her. It fluoresced blue. Taking a breath, she continued with what sounded like a sigh of pleasure or relief. ‘Science has come to our aid. We can now predict who in society is likely to commit crime by virtue of their genome. The Prime Minister has decreed that a new agency, the Crime Reduction Agency for Public Protection, will be set up to detect latent criminality and prevent its effects.

  ‘Once we have located people with criminality genes, we will swap them for genes beneficial to society. To help us in our crime prevention strategy, the Gliesens, our alien friends, have agreed to supply us with the necessary biotech. We have always struggled with making genetic swaps permanent. The Gliesens can do it routinely. Soon, we will be able to eliminate people with criminal tendencies from society. A golden age of law and order beckons.’

  She smiled, showing her gleaming white teeth. The studio lights brightened and the Eton Boating Song, the government’s battle hymn during elections, blared out as her image dissolved leaving a picture of the union flag.

  ****

  Lzortm Ekjorb watched a vid of the Home Secretary’s performance on U-Bend. He was in his office at the Gliesen biotech research centre in Manchester. Flipping open his e-pad, he told it to call a fellow alien academic, Mzorkl Probtzl.

  ‘Mzorkl, have you seen Heinous-Smythe’s broadcast? Yes, the one about correcting aberrant criminal genes in non-offenders.’

  ‘More propaganda than information,’ replied Probtzl. ‘Also, she made it sound as if the treatment is known to work and there was no mention of our continuing involvement in monitoring what is essentially a trial.’

  ‘Trial? They are rolling it out nationally.’

  ‘There is an election pending, of course. Political hubris has eclipsed everything else.’

  ‘You are correct, but we got what we wanted. The new research centre on the 2012 Olympic site, paid for by the British government, is an excellent quid pro quo.’

  ****

  Matt Zeeman looked out of the window at the caravans around him. He could see old Steve, with his bird’s nest hair, stringy tattooed bare arms and baggy grey shorts, sitting on the step of his dilapidated caravan. It had a lopsided roof and the windows were held in by duct tape. The grizzled old man stood up and went to a stack of bald tyres filled with soil, picked up a cracked white jug and poured water into the top. The previous day he’d told Matt that he’d planted potatoes there and intended to make his own chips from the crop. Matt suddenly had a mental picture of Steve’s caravan going up in smoke as the molten lard in the pan caught fire. He cocked an ear in case his mother, Wanda, was calling him but the whining voice wasn’t there.

  Back to work, he thought. Hacking shopping sites wasn’t much fun but he had to get some money and quick: his mother’s medical bills and bad habits were expensive. And it was so easy it was boring: many sites had poor security and a five year old could break in, he reckoned. He ran his script and his commands bounced through a series of servers, making it almost impossible to track where his hack was coming from. He logged in as an administrator and sent a list of credit card details to a mailbox on a server in Kazakhstan. After that it was simple. He used a credit card number to have currency sent to a post office box in Preston. He’d take that to a bank and change it into pounds as soon as it arrived. That would provide some cash.

  His next step was to go shopping. He used another couple of card numbers to order food hampers from specialist gourmet suppliers. The delivery guys always looked puzzled when they found the address was a down-at-heel caravan park on the edge of Ainsdale. Matt just smiled and told them that he was having his mansion renovated and this was a short lease.

  A bout of coughing erupted in the adjacent room and a reedy voice called out. ‘Matt, are you there?’

  He got up, stretched his lanky frame and stepped into the next room. His mother’s grey face confronted him.

  ‘Hey, I need something to eat. Any of that salami left?’ she asked, coughing once more.

  ‘Mum, you must give up the cigarettes: they’re going to kill you.’

  ‘Stop nagging: you’re worse than my dad use to be when I was a kid. He was always telling me to give up. I wouldn’t have minded but he smoked cigars.’

  The conversation continued in the same vein for another ten minutes and Matt went through the ritual exchange knowing that they would do it all over again some day soon.

  ‘I ordered a couple of those hampers you like. Should be here tomorrow.’

  ‘About time, I was getting tired of pizza. Why you never learned to cook, I’ll never know. That school I sent you to was rubbish.’

  ****

  Sara Marchand was at her desk at the north west regional office of the Crime Reduction Agency for Public Protection when the report came through. It popped on to her screen with a breezy Hi! from the cartoon ginger cat used by the AI as its avatar. Ever since she’d read about the Blue CRUSH project in Memphis dating back to 2012, she’d been fascinated by crime prediction and prevention. It hadn’t been as exciting as Philip K Di
ck’s Minority Report but it had worked. They had correlated patterns of crime with apparently unrelated factors such as public events and train breakdowns and then sent out officers to the potential crime hotspots. CRAPP had now taken this to a new level: they had integrated anonymised genome maps of the population with the Memphis technique. Sara’s move from straight police work to CRAPP had been a foregone conclusion as soon as she’d learned about the project and its successes. Only the previous day, the prime minister had been on TV extolling the agency’s importance in the fight against the rising tide of crime, using one of Sara’s cases as an example.

  Sara looked at the latest report. The ginger cat scrolled through the most pertinent sections, finally pointing a fleshy paw at a map of Southport. A vid of a caravan park in Ainsdale bloomed on the screen. With distaste, Sara looked at the piles of old tyres, overflowing bins and improvised shelters nestling against dented and ill painted caravans. The people looked as scruffy as their surroundings and their body language said it all.

  ‘There is a high concentration of potential genetic criminality here,’ said the cat in a gravelly voice. MAOA gene variants figure in this location. This correlates with a possible locus of offences based on recent crime records.’

  ‘What sorts of potential crimes are we looking at here?’ asked Sara.

  ‘95% probability of violence, possible murder and robbery at least,’ replied the cat. ‘Mental disorder could be an added factor but it’s not certain.’

  ‘Do we have a list of residents?’

  ‘No details: population of non-registered itinerants.’

  ‘OK. Looks like we need a sweep,’ said Sara picking up the phone.

  ****

  Matt watched Wanda opening the first hamper. At least he could do this for her. They couldn’t live on the pitiful handouts she got because of her illness. Her health insurance payouts had stopped a year ago. As far as Matt could ascertain, she was a classic case of ME or chronic fatigue syndrome but the medics had said she was a malingerer, despite all evidence to the contrary. Any treatment and drugs she needed had to be paid for.

  Wanda delved into the box and pulled out a small package and read the label. ‘Hey, smoked haddock pâté: that’s nice. I’ll have that with some fresh bread. Don’t suppose we have some?’

  ‘Yeah Mum. Got it this morning,’ responded Matt. ‘You know I always do.’

  ‘Seems kinda weird,’ said Wanda looking around at her surroundings. ‘Here I am with all this great food but eating it in a dump like this. It’s not right.’

  Matt knew what was coming next; a list of the indignities meted out by their bad luck in life. He played the game yet again, saying yes and no in the right places when she railed against BT for sacking her because she could no longer work fast enough even though she still had the talent. When the diatribe had run its course, he left her to her gourmet feast. He had bank accounts to hack.

  ****

  The CRAPP team descended on the caravan park at midday. The surrounding roads were blocked off and checkpoints set up. Officers in black body armour and full face helmets swarmed out of their hybrid Land Rovers and invaded the park, grabbing all the men they could find and hurling them into the backs of Transit vans fitted with wire cages. Anyone who resisted in the slightest was subdued with a narcotic gas sprayed into the face at point blank range.

  The noise of clanking doors and shouting brought Wanda out on to the step of her caravan. Twitching bodies lay everywhere. She rubbed her eyes at the sight of what looked like an invasion by alien storm troopers taken straight out of a computer game. Spotting Sara Marchand hovering behind one of the vehicles, Wanda threaded her way through the melee.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ she shouted over the din.

  ‘CRAPP!’ Sara shouted back. ‘Crime Reduction Agency for Public Protection!’

  ‘There’s nobody here doing anything criminal,’ replied Wanda. ‘We’re peaceful people, minding our own business. You’ve no right to come here and take innocent people away like this.’

  ‘I don’t have time to argue with you lady. And we have every right to be here. We have a report of potential crime in this location and we aim to prevent it. Now keep out of the way.’ Sara strode towards the lead officer and checked the progress of the raid.

  Wanda returned to her caravan and found Matt hiding under his desk. The doorway darkened as two of the raiders muscled their way in and dragged him to his feet.

  ‘Leave him alone! He hasn’t done anything!’ she screamed at them.

  The larger of the two men picked her up and threw her into the other room where she landed in a heap against a bunk bed. She could hear Matt protesting his innocence as they dragged him away.

  ****

  Matt awoke to find himself lying on the concrete floor of a small cell. Light spilled in through a small barred window high in the wall. The only furniture was a plastic bucket in the corner. A wave of nausea impelled him to stagger over to it and throw up. His head was spinning and aching at the same time. Having emptied the contents of his stomach, he slumped down on the floor waiting for the convulsions to stop. After a few minutes, he started to feel slightly more normal and got to his feet. No shoes, he thought. He felt in his pockets: nothing there. He looked down to see that his jeans were sagging at the waist: no belt either. His watch had been taken from his wrist also. Had they found out about his hacking? No, it had been a mass raid on the caravan park. He’d seen old Steve being kicked and then bundled into a van. Those guys were bastards.

  Time stretched interminably and without his watch his only sense of time came from the patch of light from the window moving along the wall as the sun progressed across the sky. He could hear sounds outside cell. There were shouts and the thudding of boots on stone but no-one stopped outside his door. His headache was wearing off and his stomach rumbled. He realised that he was thirsty and hungry: it must have been at least half a day since he’d eaten. The thought of his mother’s gourmet hamper made him feel even more empty and he tried to stop himself thinking about food.

  His door clicked and a compact muscular black woman in a brown uniform entered. She was accompanied by two men in white jackets.

  ‘We need a blood sample, Mr Zeeman,’ the woman said.

  One of the men crouched down beside him, saying he wouldn’t feel a thing. He pulled Matt’s arm out while the other white jacket stuck a hypodermic into a vein and drew up a blood sample. The door clanged shut as the three left the cell without a word.

  A couple of hours later, the uniformed woman was back.

  ‘Come with me Mr Zeeman,’ she said and led the way along the corridor. He scuttled after her, padding along in his bare feet and holding his waistband. On both sides were steel doors with keypad locks and no windows. By the time they reached the door at the end, he reckoned there must have been fifty cells in that block.

  ‘What is this place?’ he asked. ‘Nobody’s told me anything.’

  ‘The woman glanced over her shoulder and stopped. ‘CRAPP,’ she said and resumed walking.

  ‘What? Is that some sort of joke?’

  ‘Crime Reduction Agency for Public Protection,’ the woman replied.

  ‘And where are we exactly?’

  ‘The regional centre at Fazakerley, next to the hospital.’ She stopped and turned towards him. ‘We’ll get you fed and watered and then you’ll be told everything you need to know. Oh, and don’t make a run for it. We shoot runaways on sight,’ she said, patting the holster on her hip.

  ‘But I haven’t done anything,’ he protested. ‘Yeah, that’s the whole point,’ replied the woman with a broad grin.

  ****

  Sara surveyed the man in front of her. He didn’t look like a thug and hadn’t put up any real resistance at his arrest. Despite his lack of aggression, the officers had still gassed him though. She would have to look at their procedures more carefully, she thought.

  ‘You’re probably wondering why you’re here, Mr Zeeman. Our tests
show that you are a potential criminal because of your genetic configuration. That means that you have at least one gene that makes you likely to commit crimes. We’ll have to do some more tests before we can be certain about your status as a potential criminal.’

  ‘You are saying I might commit a crime and that’s why I’m being held. What happened to our famous justice system? What about innocent till proven guilty?’ Matt responded. He had been given his shoes and was now well fed and staying in a properly furnished but cramped room. It didn’t make him any less angry about his detention though.

  Sara laughed. ‘Justice and guilt are relative terms, as you know. Plea bargaining makes it so. However, in your case, if we find that there is a high probability that you could commit a crime, we won’t throw you in jail: we’ll help you overcome your problem by treating you.’

  ‘Two questions: can I tell my mother where I am? What do I have to do to get out of here?’

  ‘We have told your mother where you are. To get out of here, you just have to do what we tell you.’

  ****

  Matt lay on the table of the fMRI scanner while the technician clamped his head in position and clipped a small TV screen to the frame around his head so that it was in his line of sight. Sara Marchand had told him that they were going to check his responses to images flashed on the screen. Another inmate had enlightened him further while he was in the prisoners’ canteen. Matt recalled his words verbatim: They want to see how you respond to images of criminal activity. Parts of your brain light up depending on how you feel about stuff. You can’t fake it.

  The table slid him into the scanner and a voice came over the intercom. ‘Keep as still as possible Mr Zeeman. Just look at the pictures on the screen and we’ll do the rest. It’ll only take twenty minutes. The machine looks at blood flow and oxygen use in your brain. It can’t hurt you.’

  Matt found the loud buzzing noises of the MRI machine distracting at first but the flashing images on the screen soon absorbed him. Pictures flashed on and off in quick succession. Tranquil rural scenes and golden beaches devoid of people vied with images of pneumatic naked women stroking themselves. Copulating couples alternated with bloody corpses with gunshot wounds. Children with limbs hanging off were followed by idyllic scenes of mothers and young daughters playing with dolls and then cut to men counting piles of money with seraphic smiles on their faces. These were the ones he registered. He knew from his informant that he wouldn’t remember or realise that he’d seen many of them because they would appear for nanoseconds only. Then it was over and the table motor rumbled. Matt slid out into open space. He was mentally exhausted.