2184

by Martin Parish

  The employees contributed to a coffee fund, and at break I crossed the plant to queue for some synthetic coffee from the pot. From there I headed outside to enjoy a few minutes of fresh air. Kamal had the same idea, because I found him leaning against the wall of a shed.

  "Kamal?"

  "Is that Mark? So what do you think?"

  "It's better than digging through a landfill," I said. "It's easy enough. And if we're lucky it's only for a week." I heard another train passing.

  "It'll do for now," Kamal said. "So what do they have you doing?"

  "Gluing the cells together."

  "Ah. They've got me running a cutter. I wonder what they put in this stuff," Kamal said, staring down at the coffee; "it tastes like it's got metal in it." Synthetic coffee was usually manufactured by Mongrels; there was a plant in London responsible for most of the stuff, and if you knew how you could make your own.

  "Who cares, as long as it's got what counts," I said. "I wouldn't care if they put stale piss in itT" heigs it had enough caffeine."

  Kamal shook his head. "Now that you mention it, it does taste a little like-"

  "How the hell would you know what stale piss tastes like?"

  Kamal laughed. "I got real thirsty back at the work camp. No, I'm just kidding. I've no idea." I heard footsteps approaching us and discerned Ben's slouching figure.

  "So you like the fresh air then too?" Ben asked. "Most of these people just go back and stand at their benches. I don't see why take a break if you're just going to stand at your bench."

  "Kamal, this is Ben, he works on another part of the line," I said. "And Ben, this is Kamal, he's a friend of mine."

  "Nice to meet you," Ben said. "You new here too?"

  "Yes, I just started," Kamal replied.

  "So how long've you worked here?" I asked Ben.

  "Too long," Ben said. "That's what I say whenever anybody asks. Too long. But then, I've been around a while. You see that tower there in central Reading? I can remember back when there used to be a town hall where that is now."

  "So if I'm taking your place what are they having you do now?" I asked.

  "They're going to have me work with the drill press. They had to fire the fellow they used to have on the drill press, you know."

  "Why, what'd he do?"

  "He lost two of his fingers in the big drill press. How the idiot got his fingers stuck in the drill press I've no idea. I wouldn't have thought anyone would stick their fingers in the drill press," Ben said ruefully. "But he can't work here any more. That's how you'll know if they're firing someone, by the way; you'll see they're hiring more people to work on the other end of the line. So if you ever see that then watch out."

  "Do they fire people often?"

  "No, not really, no," Ben said indifferently; "only people who deserve it. You do your three-fifty an hour and they'll pay you on time. And they can't fire me," he said, his voice sinking to an insidious whisper, "because I know something about them that no one else does." He tapped the side of his head as if it were the receptacle for some secret information. Kamal and I exchanged a glance. The old man was crazy.

  "And what is it that you know that no one else does," I asked.

  "Some other time," he said with a crafty look; "we've only got a minute left."

  "We do?" I said in surprise. I didn't have a watch and I couldn't see the wall clock from outside.

  Ben nodded. "It takes too long to queue for coffee on your break. You're best off if you get here early and take some coffee. Then you can drink it later on when it gets cold."

  The night wore on, lethargic like the last hour of a lecture. It's amazing how time can move both quickly and slowly at the same time. It moves quickly, because you feel yourself slipping farther behind your production goal every moment, like a runner trying to catch up with a train; and yet it moves slowly, because it seems you've been repeating the same motions forever. When Kamal and I returned home in the morning I slept on the carpet(no one had torn that up, thankfully enough) in what remained of my jacket, grateful and frustrated at the same time. I always seemed to have a splitting headache after a night's work. Perhaps the plant used some toxic chemical; there weren't any laws governing exposure to hazardous substances for Mongrels, and the Mods wouldn't have cared much about a complaint like that anyway.

  Other than Tom, Kamal and I spoke to few of our co-workers and kept to ourselves. I didn't want to share information that could compromise us, so I dodged any questions with evasive answers. The exception was Ben, who was only too glad to find a willing listener for his complaints and his reminiscences about the past. You hardly had to say anything to encourage him to talk, you could guide him with the occasional question like a rudder steering a boat while he filled your ear full of conspiracy theories.

  At every break Kamal and I would head outside to snatch some fresh air, and when we found that Ben followed us we tried changing places - circling to the other side of the plant, for instance - but Ben would still find us nonetheless. "Here comes that crazy old sod again," I'd mutter to Kamal, and Kamal would shake his head with a grin, and Ben would - with hardly a word of greeting - launch into some terrible new tale about Sam, or Karen, or people I didn't know. He was very articulate, but he grew distracted and his stories became confused. One of the worst cruelties of old age is that now that you've learned from life and have more to say than ever before, no one wants to listen to you. This was Ben's predicament.

  If I'd been more charitable or less impatient, though, I might have found Ben interesting. His skills as a storyteller might be limited, but at least he had stories to tell. The photo he'd kept over the bench was a group photo of his daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter together; he'd had another daughter, he explained, but she'd died of the flu - in the last of the pre-war epidemics. His son-in-law and daughter either could not or would not support him, and so (although he didn't say it) he'd have to work until he died or starve. He also had innumerable theories about the Mods.

  "They're designing a new race of dwarf humans," he told us during the half-hour break. "That's hat they're doing in the labs, you know." He glanced at me as if prompting me to ask the obvious question.

  "Why?"

  "Oh, it's simple enough, really. There's not too much we're good for. We're cheap labour, but we're too troublesome. What they want is a labour force that's like us - that's just intelligent enough to be useful, but not intelligent enough to use a gun. Like a cross between human and monkey, really." I didn't ask him how he knew. Asking Ben how he knew something only elicited a blank look and an irrelevant reply. "It's what they've been wanting since they took over."

  "You mean the war?"

  "No. No, I mean before the war," he said, shaking his head. "I mean long before. They didn't just take over after the war, you know. They go quite a long ways back - decades and decades back. It's all our own fault. We were so stupid. We thought we could improve ourselves." He laughed through his teeth without smiling; if I didn't know better I'd have thought he was hissing. "We didn't know when we did that that we were speeding up evolution, you know, creating a new species. But it was all predicted, even before it happened. I know, because I used to work for the government back then, and I followed current events and that kind of thing. I used to be very well read, you know.”

  "Really," I said. I was a little intrigued, but I'd heard too many versions of the past to be especially interested in another. It did surprise me to imagine this ailing, bony old man, squabbling with his boss over his production goal, as a government bureaucrat. Time alters us as much as it does our circumstances.

  "Yes, really. There was a writer in the 19th century named Nietzsche. Ever heard of him?"

  "Vaguely," I said, and glanced at Kamal; he nodded in sympathy. God only knew who Nietzsche was.

  "He wrote a book that predicted all this. 'What is the ape to the man? A jest or a thing of shame. Then what shall the man be to the Superman? A jest or a thing of shame.' There's your Superman
over there," Ben said, nodding towards central Reading and the star-strewn sky. "And Superman really does think of us as a kind of little ape. Even if we created him."

  "And how did that happen," I asked, realizing he was expecting me to say something.

  "It started with two things, with synthetic biology and reprogenetics," Ben said with a knowing glance in my direction. "Now these days whenever they want to do something they design cells or animals that can do it. But nobody did that until back about a hundred and eighty years or so ago. It wasn't until scientists started to think of life as technology, as something you can manipulate. That's synthetic biology. And as genetic science kept on improving there was eventually the temptation to improve humans. That's the reprogenetics part.

  "It was natural, of course. There's so many things about humans you can improve. We have to sleep, we get afraid and we can't think straight, we're weak, we don't live very long, we're not as bright we like to think. We're only really smart when there's a lot of us together. So it's natural we'd want to improve ourselves. At first we had cognition enhancers, drugs you could take to boost your brain power. But that was only good for so much. Ultimately tinkering with the human genome had more potential, although it was terribly unpopular. Terribly unpopular. So the scientists sold the idea of genetic enhancement by saying they were going to cure hereditary disease. By 2060 hereditary diseases like Tay-Sachs were history.”

  "I'd heard about that part," I broke in. "What I never understood was how the Mods came about from that."

  "I'm getting to that," Ben replied hastily. He was enjoying himself. He relished the opportunity to tell a long story. "So- what was I saying. Curing hereditary disease led to other things. If you can legally alter an embryo to forestall disease, why can't you alter an embryo to lower the risk of obesity, or increase intelligence, or increase stamina? And why shouldn't parents be able to choose for their own children? It's their children, they want to give them the best future possible. So before long some clinics started selling modifications. I think China was where it started. Anyhow, a few fertility clinics would offer this revolutionary new service - reprogenetic counseling. It was like this. We'll screen your baby to fix any genetic diseases and by the way, which of the following modifications do you want? Of course everyone wanted children that were six foot four, and could run the marathon, and were daring and confident, and had a sky-high IQ. But only rich people could afford to go to the clinics, so most children weren't modified, only a few. Probably less than 1% of the population in China and Mexamerica.

  "After that modification really got controversial. The governments encouraged it because they didn't want to fall behind. If you're China you don't want Mexamerica to have all these kids with IQs higher than yours, you've got to keep up. But people were jealous. Every parent likes to think their brat is better than every other little brat. So what happens if I know my little Suzie's inferior because I couldn't afford to have her improved? Well, I get mad about it, that's what. So there was lots of tension. Some politicians argued that people had the right to decide their children's traits, what they used to call the Right to Decide movement, after all, it's their kids. Other politicians said the technology should be available to everyone. And the churches argued it was all immoral no matter who did it. Some countries did try to shut the clinics down, but even that didn't work, because the clinics just moved and kept on doing the same thing. There were loads of these clinics in the Philippine Islands, I think, it was a popular thing for rich people to go there for reprogenetic counselling, baby tourism they used to call it. So no matter which countries shut down the clinics, over time rich families kept improving. And you can imagine the kids – they were brought up knowing they were better than everyone else. They saw themselves as aristocracy. They started to work together, to marry each other, to despise everyone else. Within a couple generations society split up into two castes, the Mods and the Mongrels. The Mongrels outnumbered the Mods, but the Mods had the top positions in industry and government, they had money on their side, they were more intelligent. And they were more confident. That was robably their biggest advantage of all.

  "After that it became a matter of time. I know not everyone agrees about this, but if you ask me, I think the Mods wanted to rule us for our own good at first. I think most of them still do. But it's not easy to be kind to people when they're so much stupider than you are. Besides, it's very difficult to make people see what's good for them. It doesn't matter what you've got planned, everybody disagrees about it. You want to build an antimatter plant? People moan it'll give their kids cancer. You want to build a solar power plant instead? Well, you can't do that, you'll have to use cadmium and it's a toxic metal. You decide to do nothing? Everyone whinges about how there's not enough power.

  "So the Mods clamped down, starting in China and Mexamerica, because those were the places where they were concentrated. They passed laws and regulations that discriminated against Mongrels. Which - that caused some riots by itself. But it was the epidemics that really got people mad. There was a lethal flu pandemic about a year before the Species War. The thing everyone noticed was that altered people didn't get sick. It wasn't until a Mongrel scientist - one of the last, the Mods took over all the sciences pretty quick - found the virus that caused the epidemic had a watermark."

  "Watermark?" I asked, interested in spite of myself.

  "A hidden sequence in the DNA. Like a signature to say who made it. Some clever bastard was too clever for his own good, he was proud of his work, put his signature on there. We still had the internet back then, so the word went round in - minutes. You can imagine what that kind of news caused. It was absolute bedlam. The Mirks were out to kill the Mongrels. Dr. So-and-so had the proof. It was abso-lute panic. The biggest problem the Mods had was that they only controlled the rich countries, and one country was so terrified of the new bioweapons and nanoweapons they did a pre-emptive attack. There was nuclear terrorism. You know, when they blew up Shanghai and New York, because those were the Mod capitals at that time.”

  "I didn't realize the war started with an epidemic," I said. "I thought it was the RPL." The Racial Purity Laws, sometimes known as the New York Decrees, had finally declared genetically enhanced humans to be a master race "separate, distinct from and superior to" all others, and legalized specific forms of discrimination.

  "I'm not saying the RPL didn't have anything to do with it," Ben said. "I'm just saying it was these epidemics that set it off. And the war – well, you were around when that happened, I'm sure, you remember that. They won. And now eventually they'll wipe us all out. Sooner or later they'll get tired of us."

  "How do you know?"

  "The more time passes the more different they feel they are, the more they can forget they used to be us. It's easier than you might think. Just think about the slave trade, you know, hundreds of years back. Slave owners knew slaves were humans, but they tried to forget that, they thought of them as slaves first, humans second. After all, te slaves seemed so ignorant and they usually had different colour skin. Now if slave owners could deliberately convince themselves their slaves were a lesser race, how long do you think it'll take the Mods – since they really are another species – to blot out any memory of ever having anything to do with us? We're a disgrace to them. They can't believe they're really related to anything as filthy and stupid as a human. That's why they call us Mongrels. That's why you'll never hear them use the word human. They don't want to remind themselves how much like them we are.

  “Sometimes you hear all this rot about people fighting back when it comes. It's rubbish and it's not going to happen. Anybody that really tries it ends up dead. It's just like before the Mods took over, we had governments called dictatorships that ordered everyone around and told everyone what to do. Did people revolt against the dictatorships when they did something stupid? Half the time they couldn't. And this government is more powerful than any dictatorship in history, because they're actually superior to the peopl
e they rule. So when they do decide to kill us all off there won't be a thing we can do about it. I'm an old man so it doesn't matter for me anyway; but every time I think of my grand-daughter I'm worried half to death about it. I suppose I didn't have any right bringing her mum into the world, but I didn't know how things were going to turn out. Besides which, I was a young man then, it wasn't any good to talk to me. If you'd told me where I'd be now, I'd never've believed it. Working for these arseholes. You know they're going to up my production goal? I'm doing a time and a half what the fellow before me did and they want to up it. Can you believe it?"

  I quickly lost interest; I knew I'd hear more about the production goal later, at least if we were unlucky enough to have Ben for a companion on last break. Instead, I let my mind wander like one of Ben's stories. I thought of the computer in the North London flat, a weapon so unexpected the Mods would never even see the blow coming until it fell. They thought they'd cowed us, that we were at their mercy, divided and dispirited and fighting over whatever scraps they threw us. Their superiority had lulled them into a false sense of security, the dictator who believes the legend of his own invincibility. Didn't we believe it ourselves? Hadn't Ben just said it – what we all felt – that if they wanted to they'd sweep us away? And within less than a week I would be back in London. My muscles constricted with tension as I pictured the impending life-or-death struggle.

  Of course I could unleash Marengo to do its lethal work, and that would be the only part I would need to play, like kicking a stone loose to start an avalanche – the destruction out of all proportion to the act that caused it. I would set history in motion, like the Serbian assassin that began a world war with a single bullet from his gun, and yet remain in the background, the messenger behind the terrorist who pulled the trigger. But the bloodbath that would follow was almost beyond my imagination to comprehend. I looked at the tower looming over central Reading and I was afraid.