by Julian Gough
Oh, man. Need to pee. Guess I’d better have a shower . . .
He gets up and the cave opens out ahead of him as he goes to the bathroom.
He’s worked out how to shower in the helmet. Waterproofed every joint. His head doesn’t even feel itchy any more.
He steps under the waterfall. It’s totally convincing.
He pees in the shower. Dark orange. Hmmm. Still need to drink more.
He dries off, dresses, walks outside into the light. Still pretty early in the day.
He admires the game desert.
Fresh, sharp.
The couple of houses you can see from their yard have been replaced by weathered outcrops of red sandstone.
He turns around.
The 76 station in the far distance has become a tight clump of pine trees, the canopy of branches casually mapping onto the steel and plastic canopy of the gas station. A deer moves out of the shade of the pine trees, sniffs the air, and bounds away. Colt does a reflex check to see, is it a neighbour maybe that Mama has asked to check on him, but the real-world object is a red, out-of-state pickup; and the deer disappears into the hills.
Overhead, a bird of prey cries.
American Airlines, Dreamliner, he thinks reflexively. 10.15 a.m., Vegas–LAX. He looks up and sees an eagle, yes.
He glances back at the house, just for the pleasure of seeing the cave entrance.
His father appears before him.
Colt grimaces at the break-in. This is not an ingame message. It isn’t mapped onto the gameworld at all.
His father sits at a desk, head and shoulders, just mashed into the landscape, in mid-air, at no particular distance, so he hurts to focus on. The edges of the picture stop abruptly where the camera can’t see.
It’s so ugly and painful, Colt tries to look away. But the break-in is anchored to Colt’s vision, so when Colt looks away, the desk and his father stay central, and just drag across the landscape, leaving artefacts. The picture is that terrible, shitty military hyper-encrypted/decrypted low-res, like bandwidth is still rationed.
There had been no ring. No option to refuse.
Colt checks, yes, all calls are off, all sources, to stop Mama arriving every few hours as a local woman or a trader, spoiling the game. All notifications, off.
There are messages from his mother, from other members of the game-development team, patiently waiting.
I’ve been hacked. By my dad.
‘So,’ says his father.
‘Dad, please, you’re spoiling my game.’ Colt tries to block the call, but everything is locked. He can’t even power down the helmet. That shouldn’t be possible.
This isn’t fair.
‘How’s your mother?’
‘Good. Dad, please—’
‘Where is she?’
‘Dad, you must know.’
‘I know she’s in New York. I don’t know why she’s in New York.’
‘Just ask her.’
‘Mmmm. She’s giving a paper, isn’t she?’
‘Yes.’ Colt gives up. His dad won’t go away till he gets what he wants. Colt turns and walks back into the house.
His dad looks less wrong indoors, in the cave. Colt experiments, moving his head, to position his dad’s image somewhere that isn’t so visually irritating.
Ryan’s still talking. ‘We asked the guy running the conference to show us the paper. He wouldn’t. I’m kind of pissed.’
That didn’t make sense. ‘You could get that in two seconds, Dad.’
‘Don’t I fucking know it. Sure, two seconds’ work. But two days’ paperwork. Two weeks’ red tape. Fuck that.’
These were the kind of dots he couldn’t join. ‘Why?’
‘Because we used to be married. Sexual harassment, stalking, blah blah. There’s a whole bunch of extra regulation involved . . .’
Colt’s back in his room by now. Ugh. His dad looks so wrong in a cave, lit from nowhere. Colt moves his bedside lamp, to get the lighting to match his dad’s office.
The lamp is a smoky torch, ingame. Colt sniffs, as the burning torch passes his face, and the helmet gives a hint of smoke. Nice touch. But the smell seems a little off, oddly lemony. Sure enough, a second later, the helmet flashes up a warning that the chemical pack for the olfactory unit is running low. Oh, beans. They’re always running out.
He switches off smell mapping.
‘. . . This place fucking KILLS me. Look.’ Ryan pushes around the papers on his desk. Real paper, and piles of it. Typical high-security office, where half the work can’t be trusted to online systems. ‘I can’t investigate relatives, and because I’m in charge, I can’t order subordinates to investigate relatives. Turns out she’s in a kind of security shadow.’
‘But you hacked me, Dad,’ says Colt politely.
‘Face-to-face communication. You know we did it. No deceit involved. I’m allowed emergency override communications on all devices and systems. And you’re using military chips in that dumb fucking helmet of yours, so I just use the hardware backdoor. It’s not an intelligence issue. There’s still an hour’s paperwork just to do this.’ He sighed. ‘Tony Stark never had to deal with this bullshit.’
‘So ask Mama for the paper, Dad. Face to face.’
Silence.
Colt grimaces. Ugh, so annoying, that scientists still use the word ‘paper’ for a data file. It messes things up. It isn’t scientific.
Mama’s paper. Piles of paper. Paperwork. The words clash in his head. The picture they make is muddy, disturbing.
His dad still doesn’t speak.
Colt gives up on playing the game, and snaps it off. The gameworld vanishes, to reveal the real world.
And his dad, still lo-res, still sitting there, in the centre of his vision.
‘I sent the paper, Dad.’
‘I know.’
‘I can send you a copy if you like.’
‘That’s my boy.’
‘It’s a really good paper.’
‘That’s what I’m worried about.’
His dad’s eyes flick down to his desk as the paper arrives. ‘Thanks, kid.’
His dad reads the title and grunts. He swipes it open with a bigger gesture than the task requires, and starts reading.
As his father reads, Colt closes his eyes and thinks about how to solve a problem with the light, ingame. The new, bigger sun is throwing the lighting out of whack.
And maybe set up an alert, so if that girl plays . . . the girl who tried to take his clothes off . . .
‘Who really wrote the paper, Colt.’
‘She did,’ Colt murmurs. He squeezes his eyes tighter closed, trying to visualize the problem code.
‘Who really wrote the paper, Colt.’
Colt opens his eyes. ‘Mama did.’
‘Colt.’
‘I didn’t write the paper.’
‘Colt.’
‘We talked about some of the ideas.’
‘Bullshit. You wrote code.’
‘I wrote some of the code. To do the analysis. To get at the patterns. The genome information was a mess, Dad. Some of these genes hadn’t been brought cross-species before.’
His dad’s eyes were skidding back and forth, scraping the paper fast for the gist. His right hand was already doing something – fast, big gestures – on the broad desk.
‘OK. Thanks. Don’t tell her we talked yet. Tomorrow, fine, tell her whatever you like. Happy birthday.’
His dad disappears.
Colt thinks about the date.
No, not that one; in crapworld.
He’s been running a single-season gametime, cycling through a series of winters, for months now. He likes the desert in winter.
Oh yeah. It’s his birthday. Probably what those messages from Mama are about. Maybe he should unlock the gametime, and run it in sync with the real world for a while.
He tries to work out exactly how his dad hacked in.
Damn. It’s in the helmet hardware. It’s a high-level –
government-level – back-door entry, just like he said.
How to fix that?
His head hurts, thinking about the problem. It’s hard to hold all the pieces in working memory.
I need more memory, processing power.
And the old argument starts up again in his brain.
Well, there is a solution. It’s the reason he decided his mother needed to go to StemCellCon. To go to New York. To go.
But now he’s alone; now that he’s free to do it, to change his brain, to change his life . . . He’s afraid.
His mind rocks back and forth between the possible outcomes. There aren’t many. It’s not complicated.
1.) He could become more than human; better than human.
2.) He could die.
27
‘The search for love continues even in the face of great odds.’
— Graffito on a wall, near Yale University, sometime in the 1970s
In New York, in the Marriott Marquis Hotel, backstage in the green room of the Astor Ballroom, on the seventh floor, Naomi Chiang’s phone rings. She’s due to speak in two minutes. She hesitates.
Might be Colt.
She looks.
No.
She turns it off.
Yaakov raises an eyebrow. ‘You’ve got time to take a call.’
Naomi shrugs.
Now Yaakov’s phone rings. An old-fashioned phone, an even older-fashioned ring, like a phone in a film. Defiantly retro. He hesitates. Hauls it out. Big, physical model. Answers it. Looks across at Naomi.
Ah.
‘It’s Ryan . . .’ says Yaakov, raising his huge white eyebrows. ‘He wants to talk to you.’
She shakes her head. Looks down at her feet, so that her hair covers her eyes. Shakes her head again.
Yaakov half turns away, says, ‘She’s about to deliver a paper. Can you call later?’
No. Don’t hide. He can’t do anything to you. He’s not here.
She straightens up. Watches Yaakov. He is holding the big old phone fiercely in both hands, his knuckles white. The thin bracelet of red thread that he’s always worn catches for a second on the hairs of his left wrist, then slides down to his shirt cuff. ‘. . . No, I’m afraid she can’t talk right now . . . Yes . . . Yes . . .’ Yaakov looks across at her, and she looks back at her feet, no; looks back up, at Yaakov. Yaakov says, ‘He wants you to pull the paper. Not to deliver the paper . . .’
She shakes her head.
‘He says he is risking his career to do this.’
His career. She laughs. And shakes her head.
‘Ryan,’ says Yaakov, ‘that’s a rather extraordinary request. She has a career too, you know . . . Listen, she has said no . . . I’m sorry, I have to go, Ryan . . . Yes, I know . . .’ Yaakov ends the call. ‘My goodness. He was very, uh, insistent.’
There is something odd in Yaakov’s tone, and Naomi says sharply, ‘How insistent? What did he say?’
‘He says he’ll get your funding pulled . . . That there are lawyers preparing an injunction . . . Do you need a minute to think? Once I release this, there is no calling it back.’
She thinks of Ryan.
Of pleasing Ryan.
Of submitting to Ryan’s will.
She thinks of Ryan’s cock in her mouth; his hands holding her hair, pulling her closer. His cock at the back of her throat.
He pulls her hair, hard, in memory.
‘Are you OK?’ says Yaakov.
She clears her throat.
‘Release it,’ she says, and walks out of the green room, and onto the stage.
As she reaches the microphone, she hears the notifications on different devices ping and sing like little birds, as her words arrive, all over the room.
The wall behind her is suddenly covered with a photograph. She glances back at it, and smiles through her fear.
Familiar territory. Hang on to that.
Concentrate on the photo. Don’t look at the crowd. Pretend they’re not there.
‘OK,’ she says, and her voice comes back at her, strong from the speakers all around the room. ‘That’s an imaginal disc from a monarch caterpillar, Danaus plexippus. We now know pretty much everything about how the monarch transforms from, essentially, one kind of organism into an utterly different organism, with utterly different parts.’ She points behind her, at the photo. ‘That imaginal disc contains about one hundred cells, so it’s pretty much microscopic. The caterpillar builds a waterproof chrysalis; enzymes dissolve most of its major organs and tissues into a kind of rich soup of amino acids, etc.: but of course, the imaginal discs don’t dissolve; each contains the blueprint for a different part of the new organism, and they build up the butterfly’s new wings, legs, antennae etc. from this soup of proteins.’ She hesitates for a second; no, she can’t resist. ‘Caterpillar soup, yummy,’ she says, and there’s a startled titter from some in the audience. Naomi wonders if Colt’s remembered to watch the live stream, to see his joke.
‘My early research, into pain . . .’ She hesitates; but he deserves the credit, she has to say it, ‘. . . with Ryan Livingstone, at Berkeley, led to some interesting insights into physical trauma repair.’ Her legs are trembling. She squeezes her thighs together, to stop them. ‘Since then, my research focus has been on new ways of speeding human healing processes . . . But getting there . . . well, I did a lot of solo work on caterpillars; just seeing if I could mimic the natural processes. And eventually, with the help of several graduate students from the University of Nevada, in particular Audrey Mayvale, we developed controlled biosynthetic techniques; we built our own imaginal discs, from scratch. However, stepping these techniques up to mammals has proved difficult.’
As she speaks, some of the delegates, then more and more of them, call up her paper on their devices, and flip from image to image, following her logic. Deep breath. Deep breath.
‘Working with the existing human healing mechanisms, you come up against some hard limits. The human rebuild system has a very limited blueprint to work from, and can only rebuild a few hundred cells deep. That means a baby can regrow a fingertip, but an adult cannot. Obviously, stem cells work well for small internal structures, where there is a strong nutrient supply: teeth, kidneys, etc. But complex external structures – a hand, a foot, a leg, external genitalia – cannot be regrown at all.’
Some of the audience have begun whispering to each other, and she worries that she’s losing them; but no, that’s not it. They’ve read ahead. Absorbed the abstract.
They’re excited.
She namechecks the German stem-cell team from Munich, to show she is aware of their recent breakthroughs. Various people, scattered about the hall, glance in the same direction, towards the right end of the front row. Naomi follows the glances.
Oh my God, they’re here.
Her legs start to tremble again and she can’t stop them this time.
Concentrate. You know this paper backwards.
‘But the imaginal disc mechanism used by holometabolous insect larvae is very different to the stem-cell mechanism; imaginal discs are extremely effective at building entire external structures, and integrating them with the body as a whole. It occurred to me that if we were to build imaginal discs for human body parts, and supply a nutrient soup, the limb could self-assemble in 3D space, and integrate, instead of having to build outward from the point of trauma.’
She calls up another photograph, from her mouse research.
‘The point of trauma is encased in an antiseptic artificial silk cocoon, supplied with sterile nutrients, and an individually tailored imaginal disc for the lost limb. Integration with the existing, damaged limb was a stumbling block; you can’t just leave damaged blood vessels open, and without a functioning circulatory system, oxygenating the growing tissues is problematic. And you can’t circulate the nutrient mix – to oxygenate it externally – as that will disturb and damage the growing cells and grosser structures. We solved this by slowly dissolving oxygen in the nutrient mix, throug
h the silk wall, using a second layer of cocoon.’
A man bangs through the door at the back of the hall. She stops speaking.
Is there a fire? He doesn’t look like a firefighter.
The man slows down when he sees her onstage; sees the crowd, some of whom have turned to look at him. He finds an empty aisle seat, and sits.
No. No fire. Just rude.
Naomi continues.
‘It works. We’ve regrown full limbs on mice and gerbils.’ She hesitates. No, say it. ‘We’re ready to go on primates, once we get permission. To be honest, we’re ready to go with humans: I just doubt the FDA are, yet.’
The whispers grow louder and louder.
She flies through the rest of the paper. It seems to be over in seconds.
When she finally stops, there’s a terrifying moment of silence, just long enough for her to imagine she’s got something obvious terribly wrong, just long enough to brace herself for dismissive words. Booing. Hisses of disgust.
She glances across at the team from Munich. They are frowning. Oh my God.
Their lead researcher shifts sideways a little, and raps his knuckles hard on the seat of the plastic chair in which he is sitting. The others in the team do likewise. Fast, loud rapping of the knuckles.
Faster and louder.
Some others join in from the back of the room.
She feels a little moment of terror before she realizes.
Of course. It’s what German students do, when a lecture has been particularly good. A sign of respect for the speaker.
Respect . . .
And now others in the room start clapping. Start rising to their feet, clapping. The Germans, too, rise to their feet, now, and clap.
She doesn’t know what to do with her body, how to respond.
Yaakov joins her onstage, gives her a big hug that she returns fiercely. ‘Well done,’ he murmurs. ‘Well done.’ He lets her go, and waves her to a chair. She collapses into it, her calves and thighs aching from released tension.
Yaakov invites questions.
The man who burst in late commandeers the roving mike like a guy used to getting what he wants. ‘The military implications are . . .’ He trails off, as though he has abruptly changed his mind. There is an awkward silence.