Coming of Age: Volume 1: Eternal Life

by Thomas T. Thomas

  When Antigone Wells went to explore her and John’s options for in vitro fertilization and surrogate hosting, she found a number of providers, some offering package deals with genetic analysts and cloning services thrown in, some offering the best low prices on single procedures. Medicine had rejoined the disorganized world of buying and selling that had all along pertained to car dealerships, oil changers, and auto body shops. Medicine had become a commodity once again, like carpentry or house painting—although perhaps with a higher sense of humanitarian purpose.

  Wells did most of her shopping online because, along with the advertising of providers and their services, a secondary market had grown up on the internet, modeled off the original Angie’s Doc® listing. It was an automated, area-wide, word-of-mouth service that provided reviews and testimonials on quality of care and pricing. But still Wells had to get out her sharp pencil, take notes, figure costs, decide what she actually wanted in terms of service and how much she could afford, and then make her own decisions. It was both daunting and exhilarating.

  At first, she thought she should look into cloning services, because that seemed to be the nature of her quest—to copy one person out of two genomes. Since it had become technically feasible, cloning had enjoyed a varied history, filled with social taboos and local restrictions. The biggest disincentive, however, was a popular perception of buyer’s remorse. You might want to recreate a favorite cat or dog, or even a deceased loved one, but you soon discovered that genetic material was just the starting point of any organism, and about as important as the yeast in bread dough. Original genes might exist in an embryo, but their expression in the body’s different tissue types was controlled by a variety of chemical factors present in the environment. This was the enigmatic realm of “epigenomics.” It was why even identical twins grew apart over the years. And, in the case of human beings, nurture and the accidents of life, experience, education, and acquaintance had more to do with the essence of personality than the original genes.

  For a while, Wells lingered over consulting services that offered “genetic analysis, realignment, and reassignment.” But these people didn’t seem to do anything. The gist of their advertisements seemed to involve looking at your genetic chart, like some kind of new age horoscope, and offering suggestions about what your and your spouse’s baby would become. Wells needed something a little more basic—from people who would actually knit the chromosomes together and make that baby in the first place.

  She finally punched her exact requirements into a search tool, creating a parameter of eleven key words without prepositions or conjunctions. The likeliest hit came back in half a second: “parthenogenic reproductive services.” It sounded Greek and vaguely antique. Wells had a notion of Athena erupting from the head of Zeus, and when she checked the operative term, “parthenogenesis,” it made reference to “virgin birth.” That seemed like what she and John were looking for, but without cutting into either of their foreheads.

  The medical buzz-feeds had almost nothing to say on the subject or about any of its practitioners—all of two of them in Northern California. So at that point she decided to take her findings back to John for discussion and to see if he really, really wanted to go ahead with this.

  * * *

  After the Tallyman Systems service technicians had installed the Stochastic Design & Development® software on Praxis Engineering’s computers—with the help of outside IT contractors, because the firm didn’t have its own in-house technical staff yet—Mariene Kunstler was invited to a demonstration. Richard Praxis was in San Francisco for the entire week, holding one-on-one training sessions with each of the senior executives. The purpose of the training was to show them how the software package worked, its basic inputs and outputs, and what it could offer PE&C’s clients—for which he was spending extra time with Mariene Kunstler as head of marketing.

  Most of it she could have picked up from a brochure. But what she learned from the hands-on was intriguing.

  The two of them were sitting side-by-side at her computer console, which tied into the office server. The man was close, with his knee actually pressing against hers under the desk, and his hands brushed her forearms and wrists—once even the front of her blouse—as he reached across to work her mouse and keyboard. She knew without having to think about it that he was interested in her, and that gave her psychological leverage.

  When the show was over and he was sitting back in his swivel chair, she asked, “So, what is your game?”

  “Excuse me?” He feigned ignorance. “I’m demonstrating a piece of software.”

  “Oh, I understand that,” she said. “I realize it has to make outside connections for feeds from demographic and census databases, tax rolls, land surveys, opinion polls, and all the rest. But I see the program makes some inside connections, too. Accounting. Project backlog. Scheduling and estimating. Even my client list. I wonder why an application that designs sewers and transit systems needs to know so much about its parent company’s business.”

  “Well, that’s an integration feature. Those connections let the SD&D software share its data with the project organization, prepare Gantt charts and bills of materials, issue billing invoices, and so on.”

  “Bullshit,” she said, but keeping her voice and manner pleasant.

  “I beg your pardon.” His manner went all cold and hostile.

  “You are using the software to spy on this company.”

  “That’s an outrageous accusation,” he protested.

  “I’m an outrageous person.” She turned her head to make sure he saw her tattoo. “But I’m not a fool. I do my homework. I know the history of the Praxis family. I know how, long ago, you and your brother took the company away from your sister and then from your father. So pardon me for not believing that all is forgotten, bygones are bygone, and you would come to them, install an invasive software package, and not have a few extra features in mind. I think they call it a ‘Trojan horse’?”

  “You can’t prove any of this.”

  “I can hire an expert to strip that thing—” She pointed at the last SD&D screen left pulsing on her monitor. “—down to its machine code and wring its brains out.”

  Richard Praxis collapsed—predictably. “Are you going to expose me to John and Callie?”

  “Of course not.” She gave a low chuckle. “But I want a look at whatever your software finds. Understood?”

  “I would think, with your access, you could just—”

  “Simply tell me you understand my request.”

  “I understand. … Piece of the action.”

  “Very good. You may go now.”

  After he stood up and collected his papers, but before he reached the door, he turned back. “I would have thought you’d be more loyal to your employers. To the family.”

  “Oh, I’m loyal, all right. To the core. The question is, which family?”

  * * *

  John Praxis sat with Antigone in one of three conference rooms in the office of a reproductive medical supplier, Parthenotics, Inc. That was one of two firms she had found online which, presumably, could create a viable embryo—no, a baby—out of their two genomes. They sat side by side and he held Antigone’s hand while they listened to Ashley Benedict, a medical technician with the firm, explain details of the procedure. In truth, the woman seemed more like a sales consultant, although she spoke very knowledgeably. She used graphics and video animation software to make her points.

  One of the questions that had been worrying Praxis himself was their legal right to become the putative child’s parents. Clearly, they would have to undergo some kind of adoption process once the baby was born, because he and Antigone were not married. In fact, they had not really discussed the issue of marriage. As the session progressed, however, it became clear that Parthenotics was only involved in the technical end of things. And that was the end Antigone appeared to find unsettling.

  “I understand about in vitro fertilization,” she said. “Y
ou put donated eggs and sperm together in a petri dish, let nature take its course, then implant a fertilized embryo back inside the mother, or in a paid surrogate.”

  “Well, we do something very similar,” Benedict agreed. “Although first we have to make the ‘egg’ and ‘sperm’—or their genetic equivalents—from scratch using your genes. So the process is kind of in vitro vitro. By the way, since the active cell is not actually the product of two gametes, we can’t legally call it a ‘zygote’ or ‘embryo,’ so we have to use the term ‘parthenote.’ ” Praxis suspected the term was also good as a sales tool.

  “Your brochure mentioned using stem cells?” Antigone said. Praxis knew they both had some experience with and understanding of that technology.

  “No, actually,” Benedict said, “we just employ procedures similar to inducing pluripotency in a stem cell. What we’re doing is taking somatic cells from anywhere in your body and reprogramming them, like an artificial stem cell—except we’re taking them all the way back to the embryonic, pre-development stage.

  “Here we’re not working so much with genetic changes as with epigenetics,” the woman said, “which are the basis for most differentiation processes during normal cell development. We use a fairly small set of transcription factors—Oct4, Klf4, Sox2, and c-Myc, collectively called the OKSM group—to convert differentiated chromosomes back into an unexpressed state representing total potentiality. Then we can transfer the nuclear material into oocytes and continue with ectopic development expression.”

  “It sounds like you’ve got this down to a science,” Praxis said.

  “Well, we’ve been pretty successful so far,” she replied.

  “But if you’re not using genetics,” Antigone said, “will we be able to choose any of the child’s characteristics?”

  “Certainly—within broad limits. We’ll select judiciously among the chromosomes from both parents to get the desirable traits represented in one gene set or the other. And to select for sex, of course. From examination of your genomes, we can even detect some of the undesirable recessives and mutations, and then we remove them using DNA restriction enzymes and ligases—along with extending the telomeres on each of the chromosomes, of course. All of the parthenotes we start will have the best possible combinations.”

  “ ‘Parthenotes’—plural?” Antigone asked hesitantly. “We only want one child. At least for now.”

  “Of course,” the technician said. “But while our techniques are good, they’re not perfect. Some of the proto-embryos will have mechanical or structural damage. Others will have picked up some form of chemical contamination. We raise a number of them until the fetus has developed enough to make sure the specimen is healthy, with no obvious defects, before implantation.”

  “ ‘A number,’ ” Antigone repeated. “Exactly how many?”

  “Our routine starter is a thousand parthenotes, before the first cull.”

  “A thousand embryos … all to get one baby?” Antigone said.

  “Yes, ma’am. But don’t worry. You won’t have to see any of them.”

  “No, but I’ll know about them. I’ll think about them. John, I don’t like this!”

  “Hush now, darling,” he said. “This is the way it has to be done.”

  “I understand,” she said. “Still … all those tiny lives, just thrown away.”

  He could see she was visibly troubled. “We don’t have to do this, you know.”

  She tried to smile. “If it brings one new life into the world … I’ll focus on that.”

  “The parthenotes are just tissue,” the medical technician said. “Not real people.”

  “Your saying that only makes it worse,” Antigone replied.

  Praxis tried smooth over the moment by asking the technician, “But you only implant one child with a human mother, right? Only one baby is actually … grown?”

  “That’s right. For now, we still gestate the parthenote with a human host. But we’re working on bringing our fetuses to full term in a bioreactor. That will create a more stable environment, with better control of physical conditions, nutrients, and potential contaminants.”

  “But it wouldn’t have the influence of a mother’s love,” Antigone observed.

  The Benedict woman looked confused. “If you mean talking to the baby in the womb or playing Beethoven for it, no. But none of those effects is scientifically proven, either.”

  “Since these are just ‘tissue samples,’ ” Antigone went on harshly, “how many of your starters would you carry to full term in this bioreactor?”

  “Well, not all of them, of course, for cost reasons. But certainly a number of them, until obvious defects begin to appear. That way you get to the best chance of a healthy baby and you can pick from the best of the lot.”

  Antigone stood up. “Let’s get out of here,” she said to Praxis.

  He started to rise with her, then turned to Benedict. “But you’re only speaking hypothetically, aren’t you? With a human host, we’re still talking about just one baby, aren’t we?”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “And so this question of disposing of multiple babies is not really a problem in our case. And, as to the number of embryos or parthenotes you start, that’s not much different from the way in vitro fertilization works, right?”

  “The numbers are very similar,” Benedict said. “It ensures quality.”

  “Then we’re talking about standard medical practices.”

  “I still find it abhorrent,” Antigone said.

  “But if you want a child …”

  “You wanted a child.”

  “But you agreed.”

  “I think we need to discuss this some more, John. Away from this place.” She pointed a finger at Benedict. “Away from her. In an atmosphere where we can focus on our desire for a child and not so much on … tissue.”

  * * *

  In the end, Antigone Wells had let John persuade her about the rightness of their conceiving a child together, whatever the grisly details. They returned to Parthenotics, Inc., where a different medical technician—at John’s request—had taken cheek swabs from both of them. And that was the extent of their involvement. They would never study the gene charts and review potential characteristics and recessives, never see the petri dishes, and never negotiate with or even meet the host mother. The one decision they could not leave up to the Parthenotics people was the child’s sex. In the end, they decided the old-fashioned way, trusting to chance and flipping a coin. It came up heads, a boy.

  And then, to take her mind off details of the in vitro vitro birthing process, and because everything was going so well with Praxis Engineering’s business that they could afford the time off, John took her on their first vacation together. They went on a six-week tour of Europe, starting in London and ending in Italy.

  Halfway through, in the middle of France, at the Hôtel Le Choiseul in Tours, a mysterious package from Parthenotics, Inc., caught up with them. It was a small, square cube covered in manila paper. John put it in his pocket and said nothing. He probably thought Wells hadn’t seen it, but she had, lying in their mail cubby at the reception desk, where she asked the clerk about it. The man said the package was addressed to John and wouldn’t release it to her. She couldn’t guess what it contained, but her imagination conjured up bloody images of broken and damaged fetuses.

  He waited until they were visiting the castles of the Loire Valley, until they found the one they both agreed was the prettiest and most romantic—Chenonceau, on the River Cher. It was the former seat of the King of France’s glamorous and notorious mistress, Diane de Poitiers. It was a place made for love and remembrance.

  Standing in the formal gardens on a perfect spring day, with billowy white clouds passing overhead, he finally pulled out the box and presented it to her.

  “What is it?” Wells asked. She couldn’t resist shaking it and heard a faint rattle.

  “It’s something I asked the Parthenotics people to prepare.
It’s a special service of theirs, although the actual silverwork is from Tiffany and Company.”

  Wells ripped off the postal wrapping and, sure enough, inside was the trademark baby-blue paper and white silk ribbon. She opened that and found a heart-shaped pendant, the size of a half-dollar coin, on a silver neck chain. She checked front and back but saw no engraving.

  “It’s very pretty,” she said. “I love it.”

  “It might not look like it, but the heart actually opens,” he said, “although you need the right tools. Inside, in digital notation, there’s a chip holding our two genomes, twenty-three pairs each, all ninety-two chromosomes, fully reprogrammed and cleaned up. Essentially, they’re the complete instructions for making any children we might ever want in the future from synthesized strands of our DNA.”

  “That’s um … unusual.”

  “It’s the secret of life.”

  Appendix 1:

  Praxis Family Tree

  Circa 2030,

  and Other Characters

  in the Story

  Praxis Family Tree Circa 2030

  Characters Other Than Family

  Part 1 – 2018: First You Die …

  Carolyn Boggs, one of Antigone’s associates in Bryant Bridger & Wells, LLC

  Suleiman “Sully” Mkubwa, the other associate in the BB&W law firm