Designer Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution

by Brian Stableford

  Indulge him! His audience was rapt, hungry for every word.

  “No one here will be surprised to hear me say that the Promethean fire that first raised humanity above the animal was the cooking fire,” Jerome went on. “The seed of Godhood was sown within humankind on the day when it was first decided that the raw, bloody, and meager providence of nature was inadequate to the needs of a creature possessed of mind—and hence of taste. No one here will be astonished to hear me quote with unqualified approval the old saw that we are what we eat. When the first agriculturalists and herdsmen set out to modify the genomes of other species by selective breeding, for culinary convenience, they also began the modification of their own flesh by the alteration their own selective regime. When I say that we are what we eat, I do not simply mean that the flesh of our captive plants and animals has become our flesh, but that we have internalized the consequences of our own biotechnologies. Our first human ancestors placed themselves in the slow oven that we call society, carefully dressed themselves with the seasoning that we call culture, and set their sights firmly upon that perfect combination of manufactured tastes that we call civilization.

  “You and I are fortunate, my friends, to have lived in interesting times—not because we have witnessed the imbecilic wars and witch-hunts whose casualty-lists I am about to join, but because we have been present at the dawn of a new era in human nutrition: the era of nutritive augmentation. Just as the clothes we wear nowadays are active assistants in the business of waste-management, patiently absorbing all the organic by-products of which the body must be rid, so the food we shall eat in future will be active within our bodies. The foodstuffs of tomorrow will not simply be broken down into the elementary building blocks of our resident metabolism; they will work within us in far more ambitious ways, to equip our flesh with new fortitude and new versatility. I have tried, in my own humble way, to make some beginnings of this kind. I promise you, my friends, that you will be better off for the meal you have eaten this evening in more ways than you had anticipated. Even before I learned that it would be my last I had determined to excel myself, and when I learned of my betrayal, I increased my efforts. The effects will, I fear, be subtle, but I hope that they will be detectable long after the constituents of any ordinary meal would have been thoroughly digested, excreted, and evacuated. I hope that they will help you to remember me, and to remember me kindly. Thank you all—and farewell.”

  He made his tour of the room then. There must have been camcorders in the building, and I dare say that three out of every five diners probably had digital cameras secreted somewhere about their persons, but no one attempted to take pictures. It was an essentially private and personal occasion. To make a record of it would have been too closely akin to admitting the loathsome paparazzi.

  When Jerome came to take my hand in his I knew that fate had already spoiled my grand plan—how could I possibly propose to Tamara now?—but I also knew that he was not at all to blame. I tried my utmost to keep the tears from my eyes as I gripped his fingers and thanked him profusely for everything that he had done for me and for the world, but I’m not sure that I succeeded.

  Tamara certainly didn’t: had it not been for her smart foundation her cheeks would have been streaming when she whispered: “Maestro!” and allowed him to kiss her naked hand. “You will return,” she said. “I know it! Thousands, if not millions, will see to it that the ban will be lifted. Trimalchio’s will open again, and a thousand years of glorious evolution will begin! We shall not rest until the population of the whole world is convert to our cause.”

  “Thank you, my child,” he said.

  The officers from New Scotland Yard had already arrived by then, but they waited dutifully until Jerome had completed his circuit before they led him away.

  * * * *

  I left it until the following Saturday to ask Tamara to marry me. She refused. I had felt fairly sure that she would, just as I had felt fairly sure that she would have accepted if I had been able to seize the more propitious moment. Nothing I could say a week after Jerome’s arrest made any difference. When I told her, in frank desperation, that I had booked into a Harley Street sex clinic to have the full treatment—tongue as well as penis—she merely shrugged her shoulders.

  “In Mexico,” she pointed out, “pioneers are already busy converting the semen of rich Americans into what Jerome called a nutritive augmentation. What use are mere playthings when possibilities like that are visible on the horizon? How many times have you heard me argue that marriage is irrelevant in a world like ours, when ectogenesis will soon relieve the womb of its role in the reproductive process and dieticians will make sure that all children are raised successfully? It’s not you, Ben—you know perfectly well that I’ve turned down others. I love you dearly, even though you are so absurdly old-fashioned—but I couldn’t love you half as much if I didn’t love the ideals of progress even more.”

  She was right, according to her own lights. I was old-fashioned, perhaps to the point of quaintness if not absurdity. I still am—and I see nothing wrong with it. Such things are a matter of taste, after all, and the world would surely be a poorer place if we couldn’t take some pride in the arbitrary idiosyncrasies and mannerisms that form our individual personalities.

  Tamara and I remained good friends, but it was inevitable that we eventually drifted apart. In the end, I married Monica, and I still think that the marriage was reasonably successful, within its limitations. We both grew out of it, but that doesn’t mean that it has to be reckoned a failure.

  The last meal ever served in Trimalchio’s did leave the kind of lasting impression for which Jerome had hoped. The antis were outraged when they heard what he’d done, and the tabloids were full of scare stories for months afterwards about our having dined on “living food” and “living wine” that would “devour our inner being” as we struggled to digest it, but it wasn’t like that at all. The active cells could have been flushed out of our alimentary canals in five minutes if we’d cared to ask our doctors to flush them but, so far as I know, not a single person who was at Trimalchio’s that night even went so far as to take advice from a GP. We had faith in Jerome, you see. We trusted him not to harm us, and we were confident that if the active cells—which weren’t really any more “alive” than a new set of Marks & Spencer underwear—had any perceptible effect at all, it would definitely be beneficial.

  I was always pretty fit, but I think I’ve been even healthier since I ate that meal. I know there’s more of a spring in my step, more zest for life. I’m more confident, too. It’s almost as if a weight that I didn’t even know I was carrying has been lifted from my shoulders.

  All that’s a bit vague, I know, but there are some specifics I can point to. I’m no longer allergic to mussels, and I’ve developed quite a partiality to locusts in bitter chocolate. I’ve doubled my bench-press record and I’ve knocked five seconds off my best time for fifteen-hundred kilometers. I’m also becoming far more adventurous. As soon as the divorce settlement has been formalized—assuming that it doesn’t prove to be too ruinous—I’m thinking of taking a little trip to Mexico. If fate has decreed that I’m to be a swinging single for the rest of my life, I might as well try to make the most of the opportunities.

  If all goes well, the only thing I’ll need to make my future happiness complete is for Trimalchio’s to re-open. Maybe I haven’t been as active in that cause as I ought to have been, but I’ve never been the zealot type, and I figure that I did my bit simply by taking Tamara to the restaurant. It’s rather ironic that if it hadn’t been for my botched proposal plan, the movement would lack its most brilliant leading light.

  Anyhow, with or without my help, that’s bound to happen soon. The old world is already dead; it’s merely a matter of waiting for the enemies of progress to admit that it’s high time for the new one to begin.

  THE FACTS OF LIFE

  1. December 2020

  Benjy Stephens carefully peeled off the sterile g
loves before standing back to scrutinize his handiwork through the glass wall of the terrarium. He surveyed the central mountain with a careful and critical eye, and saw that it was well done—or well enough done, at any rate.

  Four flat blocks of no particular shape sat atop one another, the biggest at the base and the smallest at the apex. He had smoothed the edges of the steps, but not so much as to create too many shallow slopes. It would be possible for motiles to migrate from one level to the next—and hence from one thermal regime to another—but such migrations wouldn’t be so easy that the environments merged into a seamless spectrum.

  He had decked the exposed faces of the four blocks with appropriate combinations of primary producers. Their distribution would change fairly rapidly over the next few weeks as they grew to cover the entire territory, but ought to have settled down after a couple of months. Benjy knew that there would be a strong temptation to introduce the motiles too soon, while the pp populations were still in flux, but he was an old hand now and he was confident that he had patience enough to wait until the moment was ripe.

  He heard a loud crash from the room directly below his own, and felt the faint reverberation as something slammed into the wall. The muffled voices, which had been periodically raised for some time, grew in volume yet again.

  In scientifically detached fashion he noted that Monica was at full screech now, and that the row must therefore be close to its climax. She would have been the one who had hurled whatever it was that had hit the wall; she was always the first to resort to missile warfare. Benjy wondered what on earth it had been that she had thrown; the thump had been far too solid to be mere crockery but too light to be a chair. Surely she couldn’t have torn the vidphone free of its connections!

  There was no point wondering what the row was actually about. What were they ever about?

  May came in, without knocking. If ever Benjy had had the temerity to enter her room without knocking, she’d have complained in no uncertain terms—she had inherited her mother’s screech and knew how to use it to devastating effect—but it would not have occurred to her to extend him a similar courtesy. She was only six months older than he was, and he had recently caught up a little of the difference in height and weight that had always been to her conspicuous advantage, but because he looked two years younger than he actually was, May and everyone else treated him as the baby of the family.

  “Christmas sucks,” she said. “Two p.m. and everything’s gone to hell. You got the right idea, kid—hide out until new year.” She came to stand beside him, peering into the new terrarium curiously.

  “What hit the wall?” Benjy asked.

  “What do you think? The tree, of course. Good thing it’s a hundred per cent synth. Even the lights stayed on. Your old man’s a real bastard, you know—which maybe wouldn’t matter so much, except that he’s such a careless bastard. What’s the point of going to all the trouble of paying cash for something if you keep the fucking receipt?”

  “What did he buy?”

  “Just trash—but it was fancier trash than he bought for Mom, and way more expensive. I mean, Jesus, you’d think a guy who’d been through it all before would be wise to that one. Christmas is stressful enough even when all the associated hypocrisy is decently covered up. You got this one set up in record time, didn’t you? Nice mountain. When do the critters go in?”

  Down below the screeching crescendo continued to build, with occasional punctuation by a deeper voice. Benjy couldn’t make out what his father was saying, but Monica’s contribution to the discussion was clearly audible, if somewhat muddled by alcoholic incoherence. “If you care so much more about her than you do about me,” was the gist of it, “then why don’t you get the hell out and shack up with her?”

  “The end of February,” said Benjy, absent-mindedly. “Maybe mid-March.”

  “March?” May echoed, incredulously. “You put all this together in eight hours and you aren’t going to use the thing till March?”

  “The primary producers have to settle down,” he told her. “It’s not necessary for them to reach true equilibrium, but if I put motiles in any earlier than that, the whole system would go straight into tachytelic mode. I’m going to use the new tank to set up a test-case for Gause’s Axiom, and there’s no hope of breaking the rule unless the pp distribution over the four thermal regimes is stable enough to allow the two kinds of motiles to establish themselves securely while their numbers are low.”

  “Don’t try to show off with me, kid,” May said, acidly. “I’m your sister, remember. I got my first tank the same day you got yours, Christmas 2017—only I put away my mutaclay with all the other childish things when I started my periods, because I’m not a case of arrested development. Now, you want to tell me that again, in plain English or would you rather talk about the divorce rate?”

  Benjy knew that he must be blushing fiercely, but he tried to take control. There was no use protesting about any of the inaccuracies in what she said, not even the one about her being his sister. Actually, even though his father was married to her mother, they weren’t related by blood at all, both being relics of former relationships.

  “Gause’s Axiom says that two species with the same ecological requirements can’t co-exist in the same ecoarena,” he said, mildly. “It’s considered to be obsolete in respect of natural organisms—there are several counter-examples in nature and the results of several contradictory lab experiments were published more than fifty years ago. So far, though, it’s held up with respect to mutaclay organisms. If you put two motile species that feed on the same range of pps into the same terrarium, one always drives the other to extinction within a matter of six or eight months—a couple of hundred generations. So the literature says, anyhow. Even in the universities, no one’s managed to stabilize a situation like that. In principle, though, anything that DNA can do mutaclay ought to be able to do too. DNA got a couple of billion years start, but it didn’t have the kind of help mutaclay has.”

  “Some help!” said May. “Postgrads serving their time in second-rate colleges and teenage boys hiding away in their rooms because they can’t be bothered to grow up, all playing at being God. What makes you think you can do it if the college guys can’t?”

  “Anybody can set up experiments,” said Benjy, keeping his temper under strict control. “Mutaclay’s cheap and the price of the tanks has come way down since they were the big Christmas fad of ’17. University labs might do things on a much bigger scale, but there are tens of thousands of amateurs running operations like mine. Anybody can work at the cutting edge, if they’re prepared to put in the time, because it’s all so new. Nobody knows what can and can’t be done because it’s all still to do. The world record for keeping an ancestral line of motiles going is only seven years, and that’s in a classic bradytelic set-up. I’ve got two horotelic lines that have clocked up four hundred days.” He pointed as he spoke at Tank Two and Tank Three. Tank One—the one he had received with his first kit—had long ago been relegated to the lowly status of breeder tank. It was where he grew his primary producers: the thermosynthetic organisms that were mutaclay’s “plants.”

  “This is in danger of becoming an obsession, you know,” said May, loftily. “You’re hiding out from reality in here. There’s a world, you know, out there.” She pointed at the window, which Benjy kept curtained at all times lest sunlight shining on the walls of the terraria should upset the internal temperature-regimes.

  Downstairs, something else hit the wall—something considerably lighter than the Christmas tree. It was probably a bottle. The row had reached its final phase.

  It was perhaps as well, Benjy thought, that the march of progress had consigned breakable bottles to the dustbin of history. He became tense, waiting for the sound of something heavier hitting the floor. The march of progress hadn’t done as much for the human body as it had for bottles; people could still get badly hurt when things got this far out of hand. Mercifully, that sound never came; instea
d there was the slam of a door, followed soon after by the slam of another. Monica gave voice to one last screech. It was his father who had retreated, as per usual.

  “No prizes for guessing where he’s going,” said May, bitterly, as they head the sound of the garage door rolling up on the cylinder.

  “He’ll be back,” said Benjy, faintly.

  “Oh, sure,” said May. “And by that time, she’ll be maudlin drunk and full of apology. She’ll forgive her darling Jim—again—and he’ll make the usual soothing noises. But it won’t be the end, will it? Christmas is peak time for divorce petitions, you know—not to mention suicides and domestic murders. Like I say, it really sucks. Not that you care—you got what you wanted.”

  Benjy asked for new mutaclay equipment every year, birthdays as well as Christmas. This year he’d got an assay kit, which produced paragene spectra by chromatography, as well as the new tank. It would make a big difference to the kinds of data he could collect. May hadn’t ever supplemented the kit she’d got back in ’17. In fact, she hadn’t managed to sustain her own mutaclay populations through the summer of 2018. Her tank had gone tachytelic through sheer neglect, and she hadn’t been able or willing to take the measures necessary to prevent mass extinctions. By the time she’d offered Benjy anything he could salvage, it had all been reduced to junk. In that first season of fashionability, the manufacturers had sold millions of kits with the slogan MUTACLAY IS REAL LIFE; few of its purchasers had realized the that the chief implication of that sentence was that in the fullness of time, it rotted down into mere dirt.