Zone 23

by Hopkins, C. J.

  In the spirit of the scientific quest for knowledge, the team of Geiger, Chao, and Fournier published the results of their research online, foregoing any and all proprietary claims. Whereupon, en masse, like a kettle of vultures, leading biotechnology firms, and the bio-divisions of global conglomerates, like the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin, invested gadzillions in the race to develop, patent, and be the first to offer, prenatal variant-correction technology to the transterritorial consumer market. Given that approximately ninety-nine percent of the global population had sub-normal variants, the potential profits from variant-correction were of a magnitude beyond calculation.

  Valentina remembered the day that HH/BioTek GmbH, a formerly Austro-German subsidiary of the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin, announced the first successful correction of sub-normal variants in human subjects. Naturally, no one understood how HH/BioTek had achieved this success, their methods being strictly proprietary, but that didn’t matter, because a cure had been discovered, and the all caps boldface BREAKING NEWS message ... CURE FOR ANTI-SOCIAL DISEASE, scrolled across every screen in existence. Jubilant crowds poured into the streets, celebrating like it was New Year’s Eve. Prescheduled Content was interrupted. Elated news readers sat there, live, interviewing anyone remotely expert.

  Valentina was only six years old, so she didn’t understand all the science at the time, but she knew that Anti-Social Disease was the cause of everything bad in the world, and the reason that hundreds of thousands of people had had to go live in the Quarantine Zones. She had learned about the disease in school. She knew she had it. Everyone had it. Her mother had it. Her father had it. So did her teachers and her friends and their parents. It was why they all took their medication, to keep them from doing and saying bad things, and thinking bad things about other people, which the doctors could tell if you were thinking those things. Mostly the medication worked, but every once in a while on the news there’d be a story about some poor person who got real sick and did something bad and had to be sent away to the hospital, or sometimes to one of the Quarantine Zones.

  “The disease is cunning,” Ms. Johnston warned her.

  Ms. Johnston was Valentina’s first grade teacher. Valentina wasn’t totally sure what “cunning” meant, but she knew it was bad, and she had to watch out, and take her medication, or she might start thinking and saying bad things. She didn’t want to be sent away to the hospital or one of the Quarantine Zones. She wanted to stay with her mommy and daddy, and go to Playhouse Community Day School, and play with Zora, Tammy, and Gia, and not get sick and do something bad.

  Sometimes Valentina’s mommy forgot to give her her medication, and Valentina, who remembered religiously, would have to remind her mommy to do it. Other times it seemed like her mommy forgot to take her own medication, and she said these things to Valentina’s daddy that seemed like maybe they were sick and bad. Whenever that happened, Valentina’s daddy would hold his hands up in front of his chest and try to make her sit down and be quiet.

  “Lower your voice,” he’d whisper to her. Then he’d turn up the volume of their In-Home Viewer. He did that so the neighbors wouldn’t hear and have to report her mommy to Security. Valentina was glad he did that. She wanted her mommy to take her pills, which it seemed like, eventually, she always did, because later she would seem to be happy again and wouldn’t be saying those things to her daddy.

  Then the doctors found a cure, and no one had to be sick anymore. Valentina asked her mommy when they could go and get their genes fixed.

  “We can’t, sweetheart,” her mommy told her.

  “Why?”

  “Because it doesn’t work like that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because of science, baby. We have to keep taking our medication.”

  “Forever?” Valentina asked her mommy.

  “Yes, sweetheart. Forever and ever. ”

  “Catherine,” Valentina’s daddy whispered.

  “Catherine” was Valentina’s mommy’s name. Her daddy said it in that way he spoke when it seemed like her mommy was off her medication. They were sitting in the open kitchen area of the townhouse Valentina grew up in, in another Residential Community, almost exactly like Pewter Palisades, except with a different accent color.

  “But the doctors cured the Anti-Socialty.”

  “Anti-Soci-al-ity, sunshine,” Valentina’s daddy corrected her. “Yes, they did. But what that means is, all the new babies will be born without it, and then their babies will be born without it, and then, one day, no one will have it.”

  “What about us?”

  “We’ll be just fine, hon. We’ll just keep taking our medication.”

  Valentina’s mommy coughed, or laughed, or some odd combination thereof. She pulled a used disposable tissue out of the pocket of her fuzzy bathrobe. The pockets of her bathrobe were full of those tissues.

  “And then, one day, when you’re a mommy, you can have corrected babies.” She over-emphasized the word “corrected,” smiling in that way that frightened Valentina. Then she hawked and spit into the tissue, and stuck it back into the pocket of her bathrobe. Valentina didn’t get why she did that. Why didn’t she just throw them away?

  A few years after their historic breakthrough, HH/BioTek’s bio-engineers perfected MAO-Variant Correction. Their techniques remained proprietary, but the basic science was something every medical professional learned in college. Valentina was no exception. In Anti-Sociality and Corrective Genetics, a sophomore-level survey course nominally taught by an adjunct professor with a Russian-sounding name who never appeared, and actually taught by graduate students, who sometimes got up on stage and lectured, but who mostly just streamed a lot of Content, Valentina learned the following: Monoamine oxidase A is a protein enzyme that degrades neurotransmitters, like norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine. The gene that encodes it, the MAO-A gene, lives on the short arm of the human X chromosome. People have different versions of this gene. These versions are commonly referred to as “variants.” To tell one variant of the gene from another, you count the number of tandem repeats of sequences of genetic alleles, which are copies of your DNA, basically. People have different numbers of copies, two, three, four, five. Prior to HH/BioTek’s discovery, geneticists believed that two to four copies was what was “normal” for the MAO-A gene. The geneticists believed this because two to four copies was what it turned out most people had. But then came the Pfizer-Lockheed research, and the findings of Geiger, Chao, and Fournier, which led to HH/BioTek’s breakthrough, and the most successful biotechnology licensing franchise in human history.

  What HH/BioTek’s researchers had done, first in lab mice, later in humans, is copy and synthesize the MAO-A gene, lock in the number of DNA copies, knock out the gene in the Inner Cell Mass of some Day Six IV-fertilized embryos, insert their synthesized, variant-corrected MAO-A gene into the blastocysts, implant the embryos into a subject, and wait for nature to take its course. * The operation itself was simple, something that any competent genetic technician could handle in the space of an hour. What had taken so long in the lab to perfect was the synthesis of an encryptable gene which couldn’t be copied by corporate rivals and that didn’t cause some virulent strain of metastatic molecular cancer. They worked with the mice for a good ten years.

  The final product was a perfectly healthy and otherwise normal common house mouse ... aside from several notable features. For one thing, this otherwise normal house mouse, which one of the geneticists christened “Leo,” was exponentially more intelligent than your average beady-eyed laboratory rodent. They (there were twenty-six in all, so Leos 1 through through 26) navigated their little mazes in under half the time of a normal Mus musculus. Their reaction times and speeds were improved, as were their long-term memory functions. Their ability to follow simple commands and respond to a range of meaningless stimuli, like flashing lights, was quite remarkable. All of which was certainly interesting, but given the state of bioengineering, IQ b
oosting, and genetic enhancement, was not exactly revolutionary.

  What was, however, revolutionary, and changed the world as everyone knew it, was that HH/BioTek had engineered a creature completely devoid of aggression, and not just “active” or “predatory” aggression, but also “affective” or “reactive” aggression (i.e., elicited by fear or sense of threat, also known as “defensive” aggression).

  Interestingly, this absence of defensive aggression did not mean that the Leo mice had been rendered incapable of self-defense. On the contrary, in batteries of lab experiments, the Leos, when predatorially aggressed by hostile uncorrected lab mice, exhibited a shockingly intelligent type of cooperative self-defensive behavior.

  First, they formed an outward-facing circle, to keep the hostile intruders at bay. (Picture an impenetrable circular wall of raggedy yellow rodent teeth.) Then, by opening a gap in this “wall,” which must have appeared to the less-intelligent predator mice as an exploitable weakness, they lured the aggressors, one by one, into the center of their defensive ring, then sealed the ring up tightly around them. Trapped inside and totally isolated, the aggressor mice were easily neutralized. Designated Leos chewed their throats out, while the other Leos maintained the defense, keeping the aggressors ignorant as to the fate of their now ex-comrades inside. Thus, the Leos gradually degraded the size of the hostile aggressor-mice group, eventually achieving numerical superiority, at which point they simply swarmed their remaining opponents ... and chewed their throats out as well.

  But it wasn’t the intelligence and cooperative behavior displayed by the Leos that was most remarkable. What was most remarkable was how the Leo mice successfully defended their phyletic social group (i.e. literally gnawing the aggressors’ throats out ... in some cases actually severing their heads) without exhibiting any of the symptoms of predatory or affective aggression. In fact, during the entire experiment, their heart rate, blood pressure, and respiratory readings never once fluctuated, not one iota. The typical fight-or-flight response (or “stress response”) was simply not there. They appeared to be utterly impervious to fear, and able to carry out acts of violence as calmly as one might flip a light switch.

  Another interesting aspect of the Leos was their rather atypical sexual function. Which is to say, they procreated in more or less the usual fashion, but here, again, the behaviorists found, the typical neuro-affective activity accompanying coitus was absent or negligible. It wasn’t that their pleasure centers weren’t working. They definitely were. They registered pleasure. It was just that they registered sexual pleasure no differently than any other type of pleasure (feeding, for example, or grooming each other, or solving one of those spatial puzzles, or reacting to a sequence of flashing lights). Basically, they conducted the sexual act in the same Zenlike state of detachment they’d exhibited during the commission of violence, which violence, the behaviorists needed to emphasize, was initiated in reaction to a threat, so not aggressive, or in any way gratuitous.

  And this, of course, was the point, after all. Left unmolested, fed and watered, the Leos were peaceful, cooperative creatures, highly sociable, easily trained, intelligent (although not terribly curious), and responsive to visual and verbal commands, and other types of exhortative stimuli. These traits were also the predominant features of the first generation of human subjects, which thanks to a global marketing effort soon became known as “Clarions” or “Clears.”

  The first few thousand successful births (i.e., outside the lab, to regular consumers) occurred when Valentina was eleven. She remembered the all caps BREAKING NEWS messages that appeared throughout the spring of that year. By summer, reports of additional births were appearing routinely in the normal news streams. HH/BioTek (now wholly-owned by the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin’s wholly-owned subsidiary, Clarion Corp., Inc.) began its global marketing campaign ... and the rest, as they say, was history.

  By 2580, or 5293, or The Year of the Loris, depending on the calendar, when Valentina turned eighteen, variant-correction had become the norm throughout the United Territories. By the time she finished her medical studies and began her histopathological career, the number of births of uncorrected children had dropped to virtually zero .

  Screens on the walls of the consultation room at Paxton Wills, where Kyle was late, and Valentina was waiting for Doctor Fraser, and for her meds to kick in, were running those loops of the infant Clears that the screens in reception had been running earlier. Their pallid, blue, equanimous eyes appeared to be staring directly at her. Other screens were running the standard archival footage of the Leo mice you saw on the science and medical channels. They were looking straight into the camera imperiously, wiggling their little rodential noses.

  She took a deep breath and said her mantra. Any moment now the half a milligram of Zanoflaxithorinal she’d taken would go to work on her neurotransmitters and still the storm of thoughts in her head. Many of these thoughts were questions ... questions she had asked a thousand times, silently, safe in the dark of her mind, and had never been able to satisfactorily answer.

  For example, the one that occurred to her now, as she watched two Leos placidly copulating, was what those behavioral geneticists had meant by the Leos’ “atypical sexual response.” This question wasn’t haunting her or anything, but it occurred to her pretty much every time she saw this archival footage of the Leos, which she (and every other Normal) saw on a more or less daily basis. The atypical sexual response they’d described was what Valentina had always experienced while having sex with Kyle, or anyone. Of course it was. This was no mystery. Zanoflaxithorinal, if you stripped away all the added features, was basically an MAO-A inhibitor, which mimicked, as well as any compound could, the emotional state of the Clear Generation, and that of its progenitors, the illustrious Leos. She’d been on Zanoflaxithorinal forever. She’d been on it when she lost her virginity, and every time she’d had sex since then. She liked having sex. Sex was pleasurable. But then lots of things in life were pleasurable. Yoga. Meditation. Shopping. Work. Reading. Running. Eating. Watching Content. Seeing friends. Shopping. All of these things were pleasurable.

  Any moment now the Zanoflaxithorinal would flood her brain with serotonin, and wave after wave of warm well-being would wash away all these negative thoughts, these obsessions, these phrases that stuck in her head ... like the one she’d first heard while watching the Leos copulating in that archival Content, years before, back at Gates University, which was playing inside her head right now ...

  “Typical neuro-affective activity accompanying coitus absent or negligible ...” She could still hear the voice of whatever actress had done the narration, an Austrian woman, who she later suspected had done these ads for some kind of upscale carpet cleaner. She couldn’t remember the name of the cleaner. **

  Another question she could not shake, and which she swore her mother, Catherine, had asked her at some point during her early childhood (an event which Catherine had repeatedly denied), was why, if the One Who Was Many was infinite, indivisible, and multiplicitously molar, which meant that everything that was was perfect, and the infinite Paths of the Path(s) to Prosperity led one, not to some “higher” state of being, but simply to a state of Total Acceptance and Affirmation of what already was ... why weren’t people already perfect? Why did their variants need correction? Why did anything need correction? She swore her mother had asked her this question. She’d asked it herself a thousand times. Here she was, asking it again. She did not want to be asking this question. She wished she’d never heard this question. She averted her eyes from the unblinking stares of the infant Clears in the video screens and prayed to the makers of Zanoflaxithorinal to hurry up and erase this question. The Austrian actress barked in her head.

  “TYPICAL NEURO-AFFECTIVE ACTIVITY ...”

  It wasn’t that she didn’t want this baby. She did. She desperately wanted this baby. Things were going to be so much better, once she had it ... her ... Zoey. It was just that, despite the f
act she knew she needed to let all this go and surrender, she kept coming back to this irritating phrase, and wondering what it was, exactly ... or rather, wondering how it felt. She knew what it was. It was ugly, and sick. This TYPICAL NEURO-AFFECTIVE ACTIVITY was the type of neuro-affective activity Anti-Socials experienced when they had sex ... their brains were flooded with norepinephrine, serotonin, and other stress hormones, driving them into states of frenzy so that they didn’t even look like people anymore. She’d seen enough lab films of A.S.P.s mating, their faces contorted into grotesque masks, the males just hammering away with their things, straining, grunting, the females screaming, gouging their fingernails into the backs of the males, occasionally drawing blood ... and the sounds they made as they reached their orgasms, and the way their eyes rolled back in their heads, obviously on the brink of seizure. She thought about the sex she’d had with Kyle, and, before Kyle, with his cousin, Greg Cramer. She thought about the sex she’d had in high school, with Donny Decosta, Cole Quintana, Sunil Walters, and Handrail Barkley, and a few other boys who she’d never mentioned to Kyle, and who didn’t officially count. These boys had always been warm, gentle, and attentive to her sexual needs. They had kissed, caressed, and massaged each other, establishing physical and emotional trust, stroked or sometimes orally stimulated their respective genitals to sufficient states of genital arousal and lubrication, making eye contact at regular intervals, then inserted and performed the sexual act, which normally culminated in mutual orgasm, followed by a period of extended cuddling. All of it was textbook sex. Normal sex. Typical sex.