Steel, Titanium and Guilt: Just Hunter Books I to III

by Robin Craig

  ~~~

  “The boss will be here soon, I imagine,” James said after tying them to chairs and removing the phones from their wrists. “Make yourselves comfortable,” he smirked. He added in a tone of idle conversation, “I hope he isn’t too long. I get bored easily. I might feel like beating you two up a bit for something to do.” He cracked his knuckles and smiled at them politely.

  Neither of them had anything to say. Miriam was in no mood. Even Amaro, who normally couldn’t resist wisecracks, knew when it was safest to just shut up.

  A few minutes later Tagarin entered the room. He favored both of them with a look of disgust.

  “I knew you’d be trouble,” he said to Miriam, “just not this much this soon. And you,” he said, turning to Amaro, “You were with her at the ball. So I presume it wasn’t an accident you were both there after all.” He glared at Miriam. “You’re a better liar than I thought.”

  Miriam just shook her head dumbly. What was the point of arguing, she thought?

  He turned back to Amaro. “I guess from your weapons that you’re the one who actually shot her. What are you? GenInt?”

  Amaro just glared at him.

  “Not that it matters. You’re both in it, both guilty. Now I have to decide what to do with you. I am most tempted to hang you both, and leave you to be found by your colleagues, when they eventually break in, swinging gently from the rafters. It would make a nice image for the less tasteful news feeds, don’t you think? But I am sorry to say that killing you two is very likely to interfere with certain other plans of mine, which generally end in my leading a long and happy life in some tropical paradise. So I shall have to think of something else less satisfying but more strategic.”

  He glared at them a while longer. “My AI is currently negotiating with the police. If handsome here really is GenInt, his friends have either not yet made an appearance or are content to stay in the background for now. A pity, as I might have enjoyed a shootout with them. For all my flaws I am less inclined to shoot at the police, who at least fight real criminals part of the time. Such as myself, I suppose. But they know some of their own are in here and still alive. My AI’s strategy programs estimate that it will be at least ten hours before your negotiators decide to either pretend to let me go or try to break in at the risk of killing you and all your colleagues, so we have time yet. And I have some important things to do during that time to ensure my future wealth and dissipated lifestyle.”

  He gave Miriam a hard glance. “But based on my experience of Detective Hunter here, I don’t trust you two not to find some way to interfere. Again. So I am afraid I shall have to knock you both out for a while.

  “James.”

  Miriam steeled herself. She did not imagine this was going to be pleasant.

  “Don’t flinch, Detective. We are not going to be so crude as to hit you over the head with an iron bar, gratifying as that would be. A simple injection will suffice.” James brought out a kit containing two syringes filled with clear liquid. “This will hurt no more than the usual injection and will ensure a restful sleep. Unfortunately it would be dangerous to give you a dose large enough to keep you out for very long, and even so there will be side effects. But you’ll be out long enough to ensure you can’t cause me further bother. First our detective here.”

  Miriam watched, helpless, as James injected the solution into her arm. She wondered if she would ever wake. “Now her friend here.” Amaro snarled and his muscles bulged as if to break his bonds by pure strength, but to no avail. “Sweet dreams, children”, said Tagarin. Miriam watched Amaro’s eyes close as he slumped sideways. Then it occurred to her to wonder how she was still awake to see it.

  Chapter 47 – Answers

  “Now, Ms Hunter. You may be asking yourself why you are still with us. Think of it as a bit of misdirection. I wanted your GenInt friend out of this, but you I want to talk to you some more, without his knowledge or interference.”

  Miriam looked at him somewhat fearfully. “Aren’t you better off doing something to get out of here?”

  “Why, are you in a hurry to see me go? I would have thought luring me into conversation to give your friends time to find me would have been your own plan, if I hadn’t offered it to you myself. But don’t worry about me. For my escape certain things must be done that will take some time but do not need my personal involvement. We have hours.”

  He smiled at her reflexive quiver. “Ah, you fear a reprise of your first ‘interview’ with Katlyn? I am not interested in hurting you for hurt’s sake and I am not after revenge, at least not on you. So don’t worry, it doesn’t involve hanging or even a beating. I just want to talk without your friend here hearing. I neither like nor trust GenInt, as you might have guessed.”

  “What makes you think I won’t just tell him anyway?”

  Tagarin shrugged. “Perhaps you will, though I would advise you not to trust him either.” At Miriam’s involuntary grimace he nodded. “Indeed. In any case I wish to tell you and my desire to exclude him is more policy than necessity. If you do tell him I don’t expect it will make any difference.”

  Miriam looked at him curiously, but stayed silent. Tagarin smiled sharply. “You are still wondering why I should wish to tell you anything, but have finally realized that you should just keep your mouth shut and let me keep talking? But to answer why, think of it as a trade: I will answer your questions in return for finding out what you know. You must have learned far more than I thought you could or we wouldn’t be in our current predicaments, I under siege and you at my mercy. You may also think of it as part validation – Katlyn’s too brief existence needs to mean something, and perhaps my confession will give it meaning; and part strategy – we are enemies now, but I think that is a matter of circumstance not necessity. Perhaps if I tell you my story you will understand; and perhaps understanding, one day you will be my ally when I need one.”

  Miriam gazed at him intently. What could she say? She was not convinced she would be alive tomorrow, let alone that they would meet again. Even less that they could ever be allies. But he was offering her answers; she would be a fool not to take advantage of his desire to talk. She considered her first question.

  “I guess events pretty much prove that Katlyn was a geneh and you are the one who made her. So how much of what you told us is true? How did you manage to create her, given the reasons you told us it was impossible?”

  “Most of it was true,” he replied. “I see no need for honesty when dealing with enemies, especially enemies with guns. But lies are risky, so I find it is best to follow the Jiu-Jitsu of deception: go with your enemy’s flow and use it against him. In short, tell the truth rather than bend it, bend the truth rather than break it, lie only if you have to. Let the truth he already knows or can find out lend credence to the lies about what he cannot know.

  “So it is true that none of us could have created Katlyn before the bans came in and that nobody could get the equipment afterwards or use existing facilities without detection. But in the years before, supply and disposal of those items weren’t monitored with any rigor. Our lab was well funded and we were always upgrading to the latest machinery. As the climate for our kind of research worsened, I decided it would be prudent to have a backup, though I never dreamed the laws would go as far as they did. When nobody is looking very closely, it isn’t too hard to dispose of older equipment so it vanishes without a trace: where for all the paper trail is concerned it has been scrapped. In fact, where it vanished to is a facility I built secretly here.

  “That was all I needed. I did not need technicians as I was not attempting a full research program and the equipment is automated. I did not have the most advanced equipment but it was good enough. I had spare parts and if I needed more it would be much easier to get them than a whole machine.

  “So I just continued my work in private and in secret. At the time, I thought the insanity couldn’t last.” He grimaced. “I was wrong.

  “You know we had already
successfully made a newborn, who was doing well until GenInt goons murdered her. With that proof of principle, I was interested in something more advanced: someone enhanced but not extreme; someone attractive, a bit fun, capable but in a non-threatening way. A showcase of what was possible, of what good was possible. Of course I had my failures, as you always do in science, but each one taught me something.”

  “Then fifteen years ago, Katlyn was born. She was the only survivor of a batch of five experiments. The others died before birth due to developmental problems. But I expected that. Getting the gene engineering precisely right is tricky.”

  “May I ask a technical question?” asked Miriam.

  “Certainly.”

  “You said once that after you’ve engineered a stem cell, you let it recover then clone it. I thought cloning meant, you know, making copies. Why can’t you, once you have a genetically stable stem cell, make as many copies as you want? Why aren’t there a hundred Katlyns?”

  He nodded. “You do ask incisive questions sometimes. The pluripotent stem cells used medically are easier to maintain and can be multiplied almost indefinitely. But to make an embryo you need totipotent cells, and totipotency is a tricky state to induce and maintain. It is easy to lose your chance if you go through more than a few generations: especially with engineered genomes, which we still don’t have the ability to make exactly the same as natural ones. The same is true of nuclear transfer into eggs, which is the standard method of cloning from adults. To cut a long story short, it is a compromise. I did multiply my engineered stem cells, but only for a few generations. So I actually started with 32 identical cells, which resulted in only 5 viable embryos, of which only one survived to term. We expect such low survival rates. That is why we would do many more experiments with many more variations if we were free to do so. But it was enough for my purposes.

  “The rest of the truth I also bent by omission. Katlyn is effectively a twenty-two year old woman: I inflated her apparent age a little to make your geneh theory seem even more implausible, but not so much that another expert could categorically dispute it. After all, with such limited data her age was a matter of judgement. It was indeed achieved by accelerated development both to puberty and to full maturity, as you guessed.”

  “But why didn’t you make more, if you had the technology?”

  “Before the geneh laws and with a bustling lab I might have. But I wanted to be cautious. Although I had a healthy baby, I wanted to follow her development a bit more to make sure nothing unexpected went awry. I didn’t want to make ten babies just to see all of them die young of some ghastly developmental failure. Despite what GenInt say, I cared about the results of my experiments.

  “Then by the time Katlyn was four I had decided to stop. The legal environment was getting worse, not better. I could see what kind of life Katlyn would have: at best hidden from the world, unable to show her face; at worst, hunted like an animal. You know, I read once about parents being jailed for keeping their child locked in a basement its entire life to protect it from the world. But that’s what I was offering Katlyn, wasn’t it? And there was still the chance that her accelerated development would kill her when she hit puberty, when humans change so radically. Or she would fall apart after it.”

  He looked at her. “Again, despite what GenInt might claim, the scientists who do this work aren’t monsters, any more than their creations are. These are babies. Babies we made. You can’t help but get attached to them even if you wanted not to.” He looked into the distance. “By that time, I thought of Katlyn almost as a daughter. I was deathly afraid that puberty would kill her – because of what I had done. As I told you, accelerated development has risks. I couldn’t bear the thought of risking the lives of other children until I knew.

  “But, as you see, she survived. Oh, there were problems. Puberty was painful for her. It usually is, but she had some bad times of it. But not so bad they killed her, not so bad she ever wanted to die.”

  “How old was she?”

  “She was through puberty by age twelve. Less than average for a woman, more than average for a chimp; and actually within the natural human range. By then she was effectively an adult. Even mentally she was more like a young adult than a child just entering her teens: she had gone through all the usual stages, just faster. She developed quickly, learned quickly, grew up quickly, matured quickly.

  “But by then I didn’t want more. I was not interested in cloning Katlyn herself: my interest was always scientific, in what could be done. I saw no point in just copying an existing success. And doing something new ran the same risks of failure as with her. But most importantly, for all that she was a success biologically, I didn’t like the life I’d given her and didn’t want to do that to another human being. Which,” he added glaring at her, “is what she was.”

  He paused. “And while I ended up hatching plans that relied on Katlyn, I decided they would work with her or not at all. Don’t get me wrong. I regard those plans as crucial for things I hold dear, including Katlyn and her kind. But if you do not understand hate, Ms Hunter, do you understand love? Sometimes it makes cowards of us. It can make a price we might gladly pay ourselves too high to contemplate when it might have to be paid by another. Katlyn was willing to risk her life for those plans. But I did not want to put anyone else into a position where such a choice must be made.

  “In any event, it was probably too late. It would have taken several more years to do and what was the point? If Katlyn failed, I would almost certainly fail with her, leaving a helpless child at the mercy of the authorities.”

  He stopped, looking into the distance. Miriam watched, imagining him seeing all those years of labor, of falling in love with his creation, of fear and planning; hoping he would not stop to think of how it had ended tonight and Miriam’s role in that end. If Katlyn had been driven mad by her life or her genes, she wondered, were Tagarin’s own mood swings because he too had been driven mad by bitterness and isolation? She had better ask a question that might direct his mood back to the safe one of academic discourse.

  “You have spoken of your hesitation in trying more times, your high failure rate, your fear that even a successful baby might not reach adulthood. Doesn’t that support the intent of the Geneh Laws? Not GenInt’s more extreme methods, but their bans?”

  “I am a scientist not a philosopher, Ms Hunter. And I’m not sure the philosophers are much help: they don’t even believe each other’s theories, so why should we? And if we did, whose would we choose? But if you want to look at it democratically, the ethical standards I followed are what most people actually believe: if you judge what they believe by what they do rather than what they profess. The fanatics in GenInt are no different from the old anti-abortion or anti-drink crusaders: they claim to speak for morality, decency and democracy, whereas in fact and in practice most people believe and do quite the opposite in private – whatever they may approve of in public.

  “Most of my embryos die? Well, nearly everyone these days accepts the morality of abortion and in vitro fertilization, both of which involve the death of embryos – and not even accidental death. My creations might die as a result of their modifications? Many babies made by the standard method still have deformities or die; many will suffer severe problems as they grow up due to genetics, disease, accident or some chosen folly such as drug addiction. Many more are simply weak or dull. Do people therefore forego having children in order to prevent such disasters? No, and properly so. We do not, and should not, live our lives as if our purpose is to avoid the possibility of pain: we live in order to create life with all its hope of pleasure and happiness.

  “Yes, the chance of problems in my research is higher: that is in the nature of research. But also in the nature of research is that the absolute numbers are far, far lower. Many more children have suffered and died through the natural course of events since I started my research than ever did because of it. In fact, far more children have avoided suffering or death and led fu
ll, happy lives because of my research than died from it!

  “You must realize that this work wasn’t just some academic game, it had a purpose: improving the human race. Our bodies are the result of the blind operation of evolution: what worked well enough for our ancestors and their ancestors, given the environments they lived in and the anatomy their ancestors left them. Compromise upon compromise. Then consider what people have valued throughout history, the people they have admired and the art they have created: their greatest athletes and warriors, their geniuses. The best that was possible to man, not the average. How can people admire greatness but choose mediocrity in their own selves? When we have the tools to make man better, how insane is it to refuse to use them?”

  The look in his eyes seemed familiar. Then she remembered where she had seen it last: in the face of Amaro, when espousing exactly the opposite view. Enemies with opposite ideals, she thought; sharing nothing but that look and the belief beneath it: that they stood for what was right. How many battles had that caused? But how many less would it have caused if men had learned to stop forcing their beliefs upon others? She wondered which one of them was right; whether she could ever know. She wondered what difference it could possibly make.

  “Earlier you mentioned you had plans for Katlyn. I presume you meant her career as a burglar?”

  “Yes,” Tagarin said. “And I think you already know most of it. I think it is your turn to talk.”

  Miriam wondered what to tell him. She wondered how it could matter now. She thought that her best chance of learning the full story was to give hers. “We know that the jewelry thefts were cover for taking over the victims’ AIs, and we know that you used that power to steal substantial amounts of money and to gather material for blackmail. We also know that in at least one case you used this to gather material that could be used to blackmail yet further people, perhaps all the way to President Felton. But most of your victims were unwilling to tell us anything, so we don’t know the full scope and we don’t know why. You already have more than enough money. It all seems so small: too small to risk your own wealth, your own position and the life of Katlyn. What was it all for?”