The Long List Anthology Volume 3

by Aliette de Bodard

  “What’s wrong, Evan?” She stands.

  It has Tony’s eyes.

  She’s never seen Tony, so she can’t know. But the eyes in that one-and-a-half-year-old pig belong to Tony: light brown irises with a hint of gray. It’s not just the eyes, but also something unnamable in their depths, something that sends chills down my spine, making me forget why I’m here.

  It reminds me of how I felt the time I found myself in the middle of a stage, having forgotten everything about the song I was supposed to sing. The electric guitar’s prelude was nothing but white noise, and my legs trembled in the flickering magnesium lights.

  “Do you need a cup of coffee?” She peers at me, concerned. “You don’t look so good.”

  “Can we… talk… alone?” Even if I performed at three back-to-back shows, my voice still wouldn’t sound like this.

  “I was just about to show you our pig,” she says. “It’s doing really well. Fantastic, don’t you think?”

  I catch its gaze again, and in that second, I feel my soul being torn apart.

  “My God!”

  The pig stares at me as though it already knows its destiny: a wordless acquiescence to suffering, imbued with a fatalistic sense of tragedy. The last few times Tony underwent dialysis, he gazed at me with the exact same expression.

  “Okay, Evan.” She steps forward to hold my trembling hands. “Let’s go somewhere else.”

  • • • •

  We don’t say a word on the way to her office. The afternoon sun dissipates all shadows in the spacious room. Edmund brings in two tiny, round cups. “Thank you,” she says, but then she doesn’t say a word to me after Edmund leaves. The dappled shadows of tree leaves upon the desk lengthen. I take a sip of the now cold and bitter coffee. Finally, she breaks an afternoon’s worth of silence.

  “I thought you might want to take a look at the report.”

  A thick file lands before me. I open it, my arms stiff. Inside are notes starting from when the pig was an embryo until now. I can only make sense of the pictures. From the outset, it’s always smiled at the camera, if that joyous and eager expression can be called a “smile”—but within the last month, it’s ceased smiling. On the last page is a close up portrait of its eyes. Staring at them, I can barely tolerate the agitation in my stomach—I throw the file to the ground.

  She stands and picks up the file, chuckling. “Good thing I didn’t give you a digital version, or else I’d have to fill out a damaged equipment report now.”

  “How could this be?” I murmur.

  “Evan, we have to face the facts.” She lets out a soft sigh. “This is perhaps the best outcome: the pig is now in prime condition for organ donation—if you were to ask me, this experiment went unusually smoothly. We found the right path from the very beginning, and we overcame every obstacle within the shortest possible time. I doubt you’d find another instance in the history of science where the road to discovery was so smooth—”

  “You—” I interrupt her, but I’m not sure what I should say.

  “I’ve already gotten in touch with my friend Dr. Sanger. He’s the best kidney surgeon at the state hospital.” Her tone is level and calm. “I’ve already sent him the pig’s file. He’s reviewed the data and thinks the surgery will be no more risky than a standard human-to-human transplant. Evan, I don’t understand why you’re still not satisfied.”

  Only her last sentence betrays her suppressed anger, but it’s enough to provoke all my terror and rage. I unlock my phone: the wallpaper is a picture of Tony staring innocently at me.

  “Enough.” I fling open the file and place my phone on top of the close up of the pig’s eyes. “We both know where the problem is, right? Look at these eyes: they’re exactly the same—”

  “—as Tony’s,” she finishes. “Of course I know. Those are Tony’s eyes; the cells in that organ are human cells.”

  I read the unspoken message from her face. “Are you… are you saying there are human cells in other organs as well?”

  “Yes… it’s a bit hard to take. Its nervous system is almost entirely made up of human cells.” She shrugs. “Don’t be naïve, Evan. We knew from the start that we couldn’t control the degree of chimerization, but we went ahead anyway.”

  “The nervous system?”

  “The cerebrum, the cerebellum, and the spinal cord—the vast majority of it,” she says, enunciating each word, as if she’s trying to engrave the words into my heart with her poisoned tongue. “To put it simply: our son is inside that pig.”

  I’ve never been so frightened, not even the time I saw Tony being pulled under that car. Back then, I was a father, but now, I’ve become a criminal—what in the world have we done? We’ve melded our son with a pig, and now we’re going to butcher it with our own hands!

  My silence allows her to relax her tone. “So long as I stay quiet, no one will know about this. These notes won’t appear in my paper. The nervous system isn’t the focus of this experiment, and it’s not important for whether the experiment is declared a success. The kidneys are perfect, Evan. You don’t have to worry about that at all.”

  “I’m not worried about that!” Her forced composure is intolerable. “Killing it is cruel—it’s wrong! Don’t you realize that the pig knows what’s going to happen?”

  She smiles. “Evan, what do you plan to do?”

  “I—”

  “You know, I haven’t been able to sleep for the last two weeks.” Her voice is low. “I keep thinking about whether you’ve been trying get back at me with this pig. I abandoned Tony, so you thought up the cruelest of methods to reawaken my motherly instincts. I kept telling myself that this isn’t Tony, that this isn’t my son; I even refused to name it out of fear that doing so would humanize the animal. But it went beyond my imagination: out of all the researchers, it’s closest to me; out of all the music we play for it, it only likes yours.”

  Tony is the same way. From when he was a baby, as soon as he heard “Fire by Lightning,” he’d start dancing.

  She continues. “I’ve thought about it: should we stop and let Tony succumb to his fate, thereby allowing the pig to live? But then I saw you, and I realized that we’ve never had any choice but to go forward.”

  Her gaze penetrates me to the root, and I, in turn, finally see the trembling that she’s kept hidden inside. Her terror and pain are undoubtedly far sharper than mine: it’s only because she’s been ruminating on them for so long that she can bury them under a tranquil façade. I’ve only glanced at the pig, but she’s been raising it since it was a single cell.

  Of course we can’t turn back. Tony continues to deteriorate, and everything her lab has invested into this pig can’t be hidden from her supporters. I demanded that she cross the Rubicon; it’s only reasonable that both of us should bear this heavy cross.

  “Right.” I force myself to forget the pig. “Tony hasn’t been doing so well lately. I’ll bring him here as soon as possible. Don’t want to miss the best window for surgery.”

  “We have an understanding then.” She smiles, erasing all misgivings from her face. She opens her notebook and gives me Dr. Sanger’s contact information as well as his CV. Then she tells me her own opinions and recommendations for the transplant surgery. Only after it’s gone dark outside does she stop talking. “You should go,” she reminds me. “If you leave now, you can still catch your flight.”

  I get up, hesitating for a moment over whether to shake her hand in a sign of friendship and gratitude. But she’s holding her hands together before her chest. I guess there’s no such need.

  “I’m off then. Thank you,” I say, my mouth dry.

  She laughs and shakes her head. “Evan, Tony is my son too. Why are you saying ‘thank you’?”

  “Ah, yes.” I laugh too.

  We walk out of the laboratory together. The shadows of the trees pool together, enveloping the world in the stillness of night. I’m about to say goodbye, but then she speaks.

  “The first time
I saw you was over there, right?” She whispers, “That day, you played such a gentle tune. Who’d have thought that the song you’d end up recording would be so wild?”

  I know she’s talking about “Titans.” The inspiration for the first phrase had come to me while I was performing at this school. That night, as though in the throes of a craving for some drug, I rushed around in search of a piano to bring the notes in my mind to life. I climbed through the window of my room and felt my way back to the locked auditorium, never realizing that there was another pair of ears outside listening.

  “Detested by our forefathers,

  Buried deep, hidden from the sun,

  Scythe-wielding, throne-stealing, we bear curses and epithets.

  We’re destined to rebel,

  Smashing barriers, heedless of cost;

  Let smoke choke the air, let the earth burn to oblivion!”

  She sings, only remembering some of the lyrics. She’s also totally off-pitch, but I can’t laugh as freely as I used to.

  She turns to look at me. “Now that I think of it, your song was rather prophetic.”

  • • • •

  In the end, she never went to the state hospital, nor did she show up at Tony’s recovery party. For five years, she disappeared into her lab, cutting off contact with all her friends.

  I’m shocked when she calls me out of the blue. She tells me that she would like me to set up a charitable foundation in Tony’s name to support organ transplants for children. During the last five years, I had emailed her with such an idea, but all my messages had been returned as undeliverable. I immediately agree.

  Once the framework of the foundation is in place, I contact her again.

  “I get the feeling that you’re about to make a grand gesture,” I say.

  “I am,” she replies. “I reprogrammed the chimera gene regulation network and turned it into a blastocyst-like structure—”

  “Sorry,” I interrupt her. “You know I don’t understand all that.”

  “Give me a minute.” She pauses, as though she were switching her linguistic module from scientific jargon to common. “We already have the capacity to produce human organs in a lab. I used existing chimeras to create a more stable structure; all you have to do is add new human cells, and it will create the corresponding organ.”

  “That’s fantastic!”

  “I’ll never allow it to look like a human being again.” Her tone is exhausted.

  Simultaneously with the creation of the foundation, she publishes a series of papers on chimeras in Cell. Starting with the first human-pig chimera, she traces her groundbreaking work through the regenerative medicine lab. Overnight, she rocks the foundation of humanity’s understanding of “life.”

  I buy that issue of Cell. The reviewers lavish her with praise: “This is a revolution for regenerative medicine, hinting at our near future: humanity will be able to swap out our organs as if they were interchangeable parts. We will live longer, maybe even forever.”

  Criticism and debates follow soon after. Although a mother’s pressing need to save her son’s life is understandable, experimenting with human stem cells is nonetheless an ethical taboo.

  Her third paper pushes back against the torrent of attacks, laying out her model for the organ-cultivation matrix, which she names “Adam.” It resembles a small, square box filled with mucous membranes and doesn’t look like a living creature at all.

  “The Adam technology won’t encroach upon any ethical concerns,” she says in an interview. “It won’t develop a human brain; it can’t think; it has no feelings—because we haven’t provided it with any mechanisms for thoughts or feelings. The only thing it can do is use its own rib to save the people who need it.”

  C. The Captain

  Luo Ming didn’t really think that he could get in front of the captain of Eden based on just a letter—though that was his plan.

  The woman before him had ashy white hair, wrinkled skin, and a hunched back; even sitting on the sofa seemed to take a lot of out of her. Luo Ming was surprised by the captain’s appearance. The women he knew prioritized external beauty, listing organs related to appearance at the front of their replacement queue.

  “Regarding the incident in Cabin 35”—belying her appearance, the captain’s voice was energetic—“I’d like to hear your point of view.”

  “The first officer has indicated that the incident is beyond my purview,” Luo Ming said carefully, placing his hands before him.

  “I actually think it’s better to have a professional involved in the case.” The captain gestured for Luo Ming to take the armchair before her. “But given the sensitive nature of the cultivation cabins, the results of the investigation should be kept confidential. That’s not an issue for you, is it?”

  “No.” Luo Ming sat down. “I assume you’ve read my letter carefully?”

  “Yes.”

  “As I mentioned, I believe this was no accident, but a premeditated crime.”

  The captain dropped her gaze. “Your theory is in conflict with the first officer’s report.”

  “Haven’t you summoned me here for another perspective?” Luo Ming studied the captain’s expression, then continued. “I went over all the orders that the hospital’s system canceled without explanation from the last three months. The total was over seven times the normal cancellation rate. I traced all the canceled organs to Cabin 35, but the monitoring system showed all the organs to be developing normally.”

  “And that’s enough to convince you this wasn’t an accident?” the captain asked. “Maybe the monitoring system is malfunctioning.”

  “It’s not just the monitoring system, Your Excellency. Don’t forget the cultivation cabin itself—how did that pile of ‘accidentally harvested’ organs come to be? And we have no explanation for the discrepancy between the cultivation cabins’ monitoring system and the hospital’s order tracking system.”

  The captain stared at him. “I’m listening.”

  “Before coming to see you today, I wasn’t too sure about my conclusions.” Luo Ming smiled modestly. “I originally suspected that the mismatch between orders was due to the overseers’ efforts to hide the truth. But by summoning me, you’ve told me that even you, the captain of this ship, aren’t sure what exactly happened. That leaves us with only one other possibility: The Adam overseers did not know about the recent incident in Cabin 35. Thus, we can theorize that the monitoring system has been tampered with.”

  “I had First Officer Qin Wei examine the cultivation cabin monitoring system,” the captain said, her gaze growing more intent. “It appears to have been modified with a ‘green screen’-like technology. Police droids entering and leaving the cultivation cabins would show up on the monitors as normal, but they’d always appear against a background showing the interior of the Adam chambers functioning normally.”

  “You’re saying that the recording was selectively tampered with? The images of the Adam cabins on the monitors never changed?”

  “No, not ‘never changed;’ they showed as ‘functioning normally.’ On the monitors, you could see the organs growing as expected, and when orders were supposed to be fulfilled, they were ‘harvested normally.’” The captain shook her head. “This method of tampering with the system is highly sophisticated.”

  The captain’s news deepened Luo Ming’s puzzlement. “But this is what I can’t figure out. If the entire incident was a premeditated crime, then the criminal already accomplished the most difficult step—taking over Adam’s high-security monitoring system. Yet they forgot to cover their tracks in the far more basic hospital systems.”

  “There’s a simple explanation for that: the criminal couldn’t conjure the patients’ requested organs out of thin air. They had no choice but to leave the orders alone and hope that patients would not exercise their right to examine the cultivation cabins.”

  Luo Ming shook his head. “But they could have played any number of other tricks that would have worked bett
er. For instance, they could have systematically delayed the order fulfillment dates for all the affected organs to prevent anyone from knowing what had happened. However, based on my review of the hospital’s records, the doctors and patients only found out at the last minute that their orders had been delayed or canceled. The notices came through the hospital’s regular organ reception channels, not Adam.”

  “I’m now thoroughly confused.” The captain furrowed her brow. “What are you trying to say?”

  “For someone who came up with such a complicated scheme—going so far as to use a green screen to tamper with the monitoring records—forgetting about the hospital’s basic database is a very strange oversight. They clearly have the capability to break into the hospital’s systems, but they didn’t—why not? One possibility is that they actually wanted to draw attention to what they did, but another possibility is that they didn’t even know that the hospital’s information platform existed.”

  “That’s impossible,” the captain said. “Every person aboard Eden knows about the hospital’s organ replacement database.”

  “Of course, that’s how it should be,” Luo Ming said. “But there are always bound to be some people who don’t know.”

  “I’m not interested in a vague hunch. If you have a definite suspicion, say so.”

  “On this ship, who wouldn’t know about the existence of the hospital’s organ replacement database? Or rather, who’s never ordered an organ?” Luo Ming looked at the captain. “I hope you can help me gather a list of names. They’re the primary suspects.”

  The captain tapped the armrest with a wrinkled finger and chuckled coldly. “That’s quite an accusation.” She met Luo Ming’s gaze. “I’ve never replaced an organ.”

  4. Orthrus

  Men say that Typhaon (Typhon) the terrible, outrageous and lawless, was joined in love to her, the maid with glancing eyes. So she conceived and brought forth fierce offspring; first she bore Orthus the hound of Geryones… but Echidna was subject in love to Orthus and brought forth the deadly Sphinx which destroyed the Cadmeans.