Gemsigns

by Stephanie Saulter

  Gabriel didn’t mind. Mama’s fierce love could be overwhelming, but it made him tingle with happiness. She was home a lot less so most of the time it was just him and Papa, in whose calm, steady affection it was easy to feel safe.

  He knew they both worried about him, but they didn’t get scared the way his old parents had. He had a vague memory of the way the people he used to call Mummy and Daddy had flinched and tightened up their minds when he came into the room.

  Everything else about them had almost completely faded away. He thought there might have been another place between that long-ago past and the bright present with Mama and Papa, but he wasn’t sure. There was a black space in his head, a yawning gulf of nothingness that lapped right up to the edge of his awareness, and everything on the far side of it was faint and fading. He couldn’t remember much from before Mama had pulled him out of the rubbish and brought him home.

  He was certain, though, that the flat was unlike wherever he’d lived before. It felt smaller and warmer, full of mismatched pieces and gentle colours. From the beginning, no one had minded if he stretched out on the rug to play, or crawled under a table and just sat for a while. No one minded that he knew things he hadn’t been told; no one was afraid of him, or wanted him to be afraid of them.

  He guessed it was because being different was so ordinary here. Sometimes he got Mama to talk about all the invisible stuff around them so he could understand what was going on behind her eyes, and he would sit on her lap while they made up names for things, and she laughed and laughed. When she had a headache it made him feel a bit ill too, and they would go and lie down on her and Papa’s big bed, and when they woke up everything was fine.

  He liked it when Aunty Aryel came to visit, although she was so busy now she didn’t drop by as much as she used to. He could recall the very first time he saw her, even though he was so scared he couldn’t remember how to talk, and he felt thirsty and sick and aching, and the waves of outrage and bafflement from Mama and Papa kept making it worse. She had come back to see him again and again. She said he had something called trauma, and that was why he couldn’t remember his name or what had happened, even days later when he had worked out how to talk again. She had calmed them down, and him too, because she was so different he forgot to be afraid, so he could focus.

  They had figured each other out pretty quickly in the end. He remembered the look she got when she was kneeling in front of him, staring at him with so much concern, wondering why he was frowning back at her and if she was frightening him. Then she saw him understand, his eyes widening as the picture of her came clear in his head. The huge wash of anxiety that flooded out of her, about the bad things that could happen if he said anything, made him put a finger to his lips and shake his head so she knew not to worry.

  She had smiled and hugged him and told Mama and Papa that she thought he was going to be okay, but he was very special and it would be better if the people looking for him didn’t find him. They could keep him, and be a family, and their friends would help make sure that as far as the world was concerned, nothing had changed.

  ‘If,’ she said, looking down at him and stroking his strange hair, ‘that’s what you want, little one. Is it?’

  Gabriel was fairly sure that no one in his four years of life had ever asked him what he wanted. He nodded so hard that all the grown-ups laughed, and Mama had picked him up and hugged him so tight he could barely breathe, and Papa had put his arms around them both. He still felt the pulses of worry coming from Aryel even as she smiled at them, but she was thinking how to take care of him, not what to do about him.

  After a while his old name had drifted back to him across the void, but he didn’t tell them. He liked the new one better.

  5

  How We Got Here:

  The Syndrome, the fight for survival

  and the rise of gemtech

  This is the first in a series of articles examining the impact

  of human genetic modification ahead of next month’s

  European Conference

  Register for ongoing coverage and analysis

  Autofeed @Observer.eu/features/GMH_Conf_bkgd_1of3/3011131AS

  The Syndrome arrived in the first decades of the twenty-first century, slipping unnoticed into virtually every human community on the planet. It revealed itself gradually, via a slow increase in neurological disease among the young. In the West it was generally diagnosed as a particularly pernicious and difficult form of epilepsy, presenting shortly after puberty, refusing to be outgrown and causing more and more damage until the patient was wheelchair-bound and catatonic, usually before their thirtieth birthday.

  In rapidly developing countries it was variously identified as brain damage due to high pollution levels, a neurological reaction to industrial poison, or mental illness caused by parental absence as families creaked under the strain of upward mobility. It was slowest to take hold in the most deprived regions of Africa, but even where mobile webtech was only just beginning to shift populations out of abject poverty neighbours saw it strike down the children of the most successful, and ascribed the new madness to the jealous application of witchcraft. The variation in presumed causes and apparent characteristics, and errors in prognosis and estimates of prevalence, delayed its identification as a unique, globally distributed disorder for almost twenty years.

  The first researchers to aggregate the data identified a number of commonalities. It struck boys and girls equally, generally between the ages of twelve and fifteen. Initial symptoms ranged from a momentary neural freeze, during which all cognitive functions appeared to shut down, through to violent seizures. In some individuals these episodes happened often and in some they were rare, but regardless of their nature and frequency the condition of each patient gradually deteriorated.

  When the number of people in their early twenties seeking treatment for the first time shot up, rising by orders of magnitude in every country year on year, the authorities realised that the true extent of the illness had been hugely underestimated. Most children had had the mild and infrequent combination; it had neither been reported nor recognised as a problem, since all their friends had it too.

  No single cause could be identified. For some time scientists in the developing world insisted that affluence had to be a factor, since it manifested almost exclusively among the betteroff, better educated. The Americans, Europeans and Australians disagreed, noting that while the wealthy were more likely to seek early treatment, they saw less of a correlation between actual illness and household income. The Africans and Asians replied that by their standards, even the developed world’s poorest patients were rich.

  As the search grew ever more frantic and fractious, neural damage accumulated. The most severely affected began dying fifteen to twenty years after they had first become ill, and needed constant care during the last years of their lives. Those who had appeared to have a more mild form of the Syndrome got at most another five to ten years. The rate of new cases continued to increase exponentially. The statisticians crunched the numbers and reported that the human race was likely to be within a few decades of extinction.

  The breakthrough came later that same year as mass suicides, quack cures and religious revivals swept the globe. A cross-disciplinary team from the medical, academic and business sectors had left the search for a smoking gun to others, and concentrated on the patterns left by the bullets. They analysed terabytes of data about the victims, their friends, families, homes, lifestyles, and the recent history of their communities. The conclusion they arrived at had been mooted early and dismissed. This time the evidence, though technically circumstantial, was irrefutable.

  The incidence of the Syndrome mapped perfectly onto the worldwide growth of what the previous century had dubbed information technology. It occurred where children had, from infancy, been exposed not only to a plethora of computing and communications devices, but to the immense load of interactions, analysis and responses they demanded, and the radio f
requencies over which they travelled. Its distribution through the socioeconomic strata of every nation state matched the degree, not just of exposure, but of immersion.

  There was an outcry. Previous studies to examine whether wireless communications could damage the human nervous system had reported no danger. Cognitive and behavioural tests had indicated that too much time dedicated to gaming and social media could cause eye strain, carpal tunnel syndrome and a lack of attention to personal hygiene, but did no other harm. Nevertheless the correlations were clear. The final proof lay in the evidence that it was only those groups who had had no exposure to the full weight of the technologies – such as the American Amish, some monastic communities and the remaining Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribes – who had no cases of the Syndrome.

  For a week the world turned itself off. Hundreds of millions of devices were destroyed. Server banks were blown up, corporate headquarters were burned down, ministers of technology and captains of industry were assassinated. The global economy crashed. Nothing moved. Food ran out in the shops, water stopped flowing from taps. Those who still used vehicles powered by petroleum travelled on empty roads, only to discover that the pumps they needed to refuel for the return journey were inoperable.

  The few who stayed plugged in pleaded for calm, pointing out that a calamity that had been half a century in the making was unlikely to be exacerbated by a few more weeks or months while the findings were tested and the planet worked out what to do. Governments dug out ancient public-address systems and repeated the message, begging their populations to log in at least enough to receive instructions; and to stop throwing their computers into the sea lest they poison the oceans too.

  Gradually the hysteria abated and people drifted back, denouncing the addiction even as they indulged it. Digital networks had become the most essential component of normal life, the default means of communication. They needed the systems that were killing them, so they could tell each other how scared they were to die.

  The scientists got to work and quickly confirmed the findings. No one aspect of the networked world was responsible, but all of them, all together, all of the time, amounted to a greater cognitive load than human beings had evolved to process. The Syndrome was believed to begin at the sub-molecular, perhaps even quantum level, at the very earliest stages of cell division. As the child grew, structural damage built up in the delicate neural pathways. It accelerated as they acquired language and literacy, and began to interact with the digital interfaces that surrounded them.

  It had long been held, and hailed as a triumph, that the explosion both in artificial processing power and in the content it enabled had facilitated a massive and frictionless increase in intellectual productivity. The machines did the work of transmission, organisation and storage, and humans were free to be creative with the inputs and clever with the outputs; to connect, communicate, and multitask across a vast array of platforms.

  Now the researchers understood that the burden on the primary biological processing device – the human brain – had been exploding at virtually the same rate, but without any corresponding increase in capacity. The elasticity of human cognitive potential, the vast redundancies built into the neural architecture, had appeared able to keep up. But a tipping point had been reached.

  There were, observed the then President of the United States, three options: to give up all of the technologies and interactions that were the connective tissue of the modern world and return to a pre-networked state, never again allowing development down this particular path; to continue as they were, mitigating the damage where possible and trying to ensure there would be at least some survivors, but essentially accepting lengthy illness, early death and the twilight of the human race; or to find a cure.

  Those who did not believe one could be found in time, or feared its consequences more than the Syndrome itself, left cities and civilisation behind and became those relics of a bygone age that we know today as the Remnants. While they slipped away into the last wild places of the world, medical research facilities shelved whatever else they were working on, or found a way to redirect it. Every country committed its financial resources and political will to the problem. Any remaining restrictions on research methodologies or avenues of inquiry were lifted. Most religions found they were able to incorporate whatever adjustments their credos required in order to support the mission. Those that didn’t were told to shut up, and their congregations deserted them in droves.

  Without a cooperative global effort the solution might never have been found. As the children of the world sickened and died, a genetics team in Canada identified a series of complex sequence adjustments that conferred resistance to the initial destabilisation. A lab in India figured out how to incorporate them into the genome at the zygote stage. The British established a process for retaining the viability of the engineered embryo, and the Chinese government ordered accelerated testing on a massive scale. While they were busy confirming that the technique did indeed result in immunity, which appeared to be heritable and to have no negative side effects, the Brazilians found a way of scaling up in-vitro fertilisation facilities to industrial levels.

  The genetic modification technique worked only if applied at the pre-embryonic stage. Within ten years natural conception was almost unheard of; several countries outlawed it. A cure for those who already had the Syndrome was never found. The death toll mounted, and the cost of caring for the sick soared. Young women were encouraged – or required – to start early and bear as many Syndrome-safe children as possible.

  The burden of caring for those children as their parents became incapacitated formed yet another component of the continuing crisis. Multigenerational households in which grandparents cared for their sick children and healthy grandchildren became commonplace. This exacerbated the already severe labour shortage and ongoing economic decline.

  A way had to be found to get people back to work. As children grew up they began to take on the care of their parents, and the last generation of healthy adults – the grandparents – could become economically active again. But they were much older now, and governments stared into the yawning productivity gap and shuddered. It looked as though the depression might last a century or more.

  So they did not intervene as businesses turned to surrogacy. Parentless girls in particular were offered payment for undergoing more implantations, enticed by the prospect that their children would become their carers, and would lead happy and healthy lives after they were gone.

  The practice, once established, became endemic and was broadened to the gestation of more extensively engineered embryos. The techniques that had been perfected in order to respond to the initial emergency were being applied to a far wider range of characteristics, creating humans uniquely suited to the under-served needs of the market. That these babies were removed from their surrogate mothers at birth, in many cases leaving her cradling a Syndrome-safe but otherwise normal sibling with whom they had shared her womb, caused no complaint. In the uncompromising calculus of care, One for You – One for Us was a bargain.

  In fact experimentation on a vast scale was being conducted on human genetic material. The conferring of immunity against other afflictions, physical and mental, was just the start and was included with Syndrome protection as a matter of course. Quite apart from any humanitarian considerations, there were no resources available to deal with frailty; the new generations of humanity needed to start and stay healthy.

  There were other priorities as well. Food production had crashed along with population levels, and needed to be restored quickly lest starvation replace the Syndrome as the new scourge of humanity. Away from the cities, unharvested grain and other food crops had naturalised, livestock had escaped and proliferated and fish stocks were flourishing. The challenge was getting them out of the wild and into the mouths of hungry children. Workers who had the strength and stamina for hard labour, could tolerate heat, cold and hunger and were unconcerned with compensation, career pr
ospects or indeed any considerations of personal safety or comfort were desperately needed.

  That formed the brief for the first generation of genetically modified humans – GMHs, or gems as they quickly came to be known. Raised in crèches, they were put to work very young, housed separately from the populations they served and remained functionally illiterate. Intelligence levels were generally low, as much due to upbringing as engineering, and of little consequence. Gems were a necessary measure, a stopgap until there were enough normals to take over. Encountering gems in the wild lands they were sent to reclaim, Remnant communities were among the first to criticise the two-tier society they saw developing back in the civilised world; but as outcasts themselves, they commanded little attention and were lightly regarded. That they were suspected of encouraging and harbouring runaways did not help.

  Children grew up, the labour swap progressed, and the original gemtypes were reassigned. There were huge numbers of abandoned, crumbling buildings which needed to be made safe; there were trees to be felled, reservoirs to be repaired, mines to be reopened. The gems took on the menial work of demolition, clearance and waste disposal.

  As society stabilised and slowly began to recover, genetic engineering objectives became more focused. After over half a century of crisis, natural procreation could resume. The vast scientific and technical capacity that had rescued the human race found itself in danger of becoming redundant. Those bright minds looked out on a landscape of need and saw opportunity. They redeployed to commercial production.