I said, “You’re right. In the end, all we can do is be true to our nature. See through the veneer of civilization and hypocritical morality, and accept the real forces which shape us.”
Largo burst out laughing. I actually felt my face burn at his response—if only because I’d misread him, and failed to get him on my side; not because he was laughing at the one thing I believed in.
He said, “Do you know what I was working on, back in the States?”
“No. Does it matter?” The less I knew, the better my chances of living.
Largo told me anyway. “I was looking for a way to render mature neurons embryonic. To switch them back into a less differentiated state, enabling them to behave the way they do in the fetal brain: migrating from site to site, forming new connections. Supposedly as a treatment for dementia and stroke . . . although the work was being funded by people who saw it as the first step towards viral weapons able to rewire parts of the brain. I doubt that the results could ever have been very sophisticated—no viruses for imposing political ideologies—but all kinds of disabling or docile behaviour might have been coded into a relatively small package.”
“And you sold that to the cartels? So they can hold whole cities to ransom with it, next time one of their leaders is arrested? To save them the trouble of assassinating judges and politicians?”
Largo said mildly, “I sold it to the cartels, but not as a weapon. No infectious military version exists. Even the prototypes—which merely regress selected neurons, but make no programmed changes—are far too cumbersome and fragile to survive at large. And there are other technical problems. There’s not much reproductive advantage for a virus in carrying out elaborate, highly specific modifications to its host’s brain; unleashed on a real human population, mutants which simply ditched all of that irrelevant shit would soon predominate.”
“Then . . . ?”
“I sold it to the cartels as a product. Or rather, I combined it with their own biggest seller, and handed over the finished hybrid. A new kind of Mother.”
“Which does what?” He had me hooked, even if I was digging my own grave.
“Which turns a subset of the neurons in the brain into something like White Knights. Just as mobile, just as flexible. Far better at establishing tight new synapses, though, rather than just flooding the interneural space with a chosen substance. And not controlled by dietary additives; controlled by molecules they secrete themselves. Controlled by each other.”
That made no sense to me. “Existing neurons become mobile? Existing brain structures . . . melt? You’ve made a version of Mother which turns people’s brains to mush—and you expect them to pay for that?”
“Not mush. Everything’s part of a tight feedback loop: the firing of these altered neurons influences the range of molecules they secrete—which in turn, controls the rewiring of nearby synapses. Vital regulatory centers and motor neurons are left untouched, of course. And it takes a strong signal to shift the Grey Knights; they don’t respond to every random whim. You need at least an hour or two without distractions before you can have a significant effect on any brain structure.
“It’s not altogether different from the way ordinary neurons end up encoding learned behaviour and memories—only faster, more flexible . . . and much more widespread. There are parts of the brain which haven’t changed in 100,000 years, which can be remodeled completely in half a day.”
He paused, and regarded me amiably. The sweat on the back of my neck went cold.
“You’ve used the virus—?”
“Of course. That’s why I created it. For myself. That’s why I came here in the first place.”
“For do-it-yourself neurosurgery? Why not just slip a screwdriver under one eyeball and poke it around until the urge went away?” I felt physically sick. “At least . . . cocaine and heroin—and even White Knights—exploited natural receptors, natural pathways. You’ve taken a structure which evolution has honed over millions of years, and—”
Largo was greatly amused, but this time he refrained from laughing in my face. He said gently, “For most people, navigating their own psyche is like wandering in circles through a maze. That’s what evolution has bequeathed us: a miserable, confusing prison. And the only thing crude drugs like cocaine or heroin or alcohol ever did was build short cuts to a few dead ends—or, like LSD, coat the walls of the maze with mirrors. And all that White Knights ever did was package the same effects differently.
“Grey Knights allow you to reshape the entire maze, at will. They don’t confine you to some shrunken emotional repertoire; they empower you completely. They let you control exactly who you are.”
I had to struggle to put aside the overwhelming sense of revulsion I felt. Largo had decided to fuck himself in the head; that was his problem. A few users of Mother would do the same—but one more batch of poisonous shit to compete with all the garbage from the basement labs wasn’t exactly a national tragedy.
Largo said affably, “I spent 30 years as someone I despised. I was too weak to change—but I never quite lost sight of what I wanted to become. I used to wonder if it would have been less contemptible, less hypocritical, to resign myself to the fact of my weakness, the fact of my corruption. But I never did.”
“And you think you’ve erased your old personality, as easily as you erased your computer files? What are you now, then? A saint. An angel?”
“No. But I’m exactly what I want to be. With Grey Knights, you can’t really be anything else.”
I felt giddy for a moment, light-headed with rage; I steadied myself against the bars of my cage.
I said, “So you’ve scrambled your brain, and you feel better. And you’re going to live in this fake jungle for the rest of your life, collaborating with drug pushers, kidding yourself that you’ve achieved redemption?”
“The rest of my life? Perhaps. But I’ll be watching the world. And hoping.”
I almost choked. “Hoping for what! You think your habit will ever spread beyond a few brain-damaged junkies? You think Grey Knights are going to sweep across the planet and transform it beyond recognition? Or were you lying—is the virus really infectious, after all?”
“No. But it gives people what they want. They’ll seek it out, once they understand that.”
I gazed at him, pityingly. “What people want is food, sex and power. That will never change. Remember the passage you marked in Heart of Darkness! What do you think that meant! Deep down, we’re just animals with a few simple drives. Everything else is less than chaff in a breeze.”
Largo frowned, as if trying to recall the quote, then nodded slowly. He said, “Do you know how many different ways an ordinary human brain can be wired? Not an arbitrary neural network of the same size—but an actual, working Homo sapiens brain, shaped by real embryology and real experience? There are about ten-to-the-power-of-ten-million possibilities. A huge number: a lot of room for variation in personality and talents, a lot of space to encode the traces of different lives.
“But do you know what Grey Knights do to that number? They multiply it by the same again. They grant the part of us that was fixed, that was tied to ‘human nature,’ the chance to be as different from person to person as a lifetime’s worth of memories.
“Of course Conrad was right. Every word of that passage was true—when it was written. But now it doesn’t go far enough. Because now, all of human nature is less than chaff in a breeze. ‘The horror,’ the heart of darkness, is less than chaff in a breeze. All the ‘eternal verities’—all the sad and beautiful insights of all the great writers from Sophocles to Shakespeare—are less than chaff in a breeze.”
###
I lay awake on my bunk, listening to the cicadas and frogs, wondering what Largo would do with me. If he didn’t see himself as capable of murder, he wouldn’t kill me—if only to reinforce his delusions of self-mastery. Perhaps he’d just dump me outside the research station—where I could explain to Madelaine Smith how the Colombian air force p
ilot had come down with an El Nido virus in mid-air, and I’d valiantly tried to take control.
I thought back over the incident, trying to get my story straight. The pilot’s body would never be recovered; the forensic details didn’t have to add up.
I closed my eyes and saw myself breaking his neck. The same twinge of remorse passed over me. I brushed it aside irritably. So I’d killed him—and the girl, a few days earlier—and a dozen others before that. The Company had very nearly disposed of me. Because it was expedient—and because it was possible. That was the way of the world: power would always be used, nation would subjugate nation, the weak would always be slaughtered. Everything else was pious self-delusion. A hundred kilometres away, Colombia’s warring factions were proving the truth of that, one more time.
But if Largo had infected me with his own special brand of Mother? And if everything he’d told me about it was true?
Grey Knights only moved if you willed them to move. All I had to do in order to remain unscathed was to choose that fate. To wish only to be exactly who I was: a killer who’d always understood that he was facing the deepest of truths. Embracing savagery and corruption because, in the end, there was no other way.
I kept seeing them before me: the pilot, the girl.
I had to feel nothing . . . and wish to feel nothing—and keep on making that choice, again and again.
Or everything I was would disintegrate like a house of sand, and blow away.
One of the guards belched in the darkness, then spat.
The night stretched out ahead of me, like a river which had lost its way.
STABLE STRATEGIES FOR MIDDLE MANAGEMENT
Eileen Gunn
Eileen Gunn is not a prolific writer, but her stories are well worth waiting for and are relished (and eagerly anticipated) by a small but select group of knowledgeable fans who know that she has a twisted perspective on life unlike anyone else’s, and a strange and pungent sense of humor all her own. She has made several sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, as well as to markets such as Amazing, Proteus, Tales by Moonlight, and Alternate Presidents, and has been a Nebula and Hugo finalist several times. She is currently at work on her first novel. Long involved in the administration of the Clarion West writer’s workshop, she was a resident of Seattle for many years until moving to Brooklyn in 1998. Now, proving that once you set a stone to rolling it’s hard to get it to stop, she’s making plans to move to San Francisco sometime in the near future.
In the strange and funny story that follows, a Hugo finalist, she shows us how bioscience may someday make possible career-advancement ploys far more bizarre than any that are possible today . . .
###
Our cousin the insect has an external skeleton made of shiny brown chitin, a material that is particularly responsive to the demands of evolution. Just as bioengineering has sculpted our bodies into new forms, so evolution has shaped the early insect’s chewing mouthparts into her descendants’ chisels, siphons, and stilettos, and has molded from the chitin special tools—pockets to carry pollen, combs to clean her compound eyes, notches on which she can fiddle a song.
From the popular science program
Insect People!
###
I awoke this morning to discover that bioengineering had made demands upon me during the night. My tongue had turned into a stiletto, and my left hand now contained a small chitinous comb, as if for cleaning a compound eye. Since I didn’t have compound eyes, I thought that perhaps this presaged some change to come.
I dragged myself out of bed, wondering how I was going to drink my coffee through a stiletto. Was I now expected to kill my breakfast, and dispense with coffee entirely? I hoped I was not evolving into a creature whose survival depended on early-morning alertness. My circadian rhythms would no doubt keep pace with any physical changes, but my unevolved soul was repulsed at the thought of my waking cheerfully at dawn, ravenous for some wriggly little creature that had arisen even earlier.
I looked down at Greg, still asleep, the edge of our red and white quilt pulled up under his chin. His mouth had changed during the night too, and seemed to contain some sort of a long probe. Were we growing apart?
I reached down with my unchanged hand and touched his hair. It was still shiny brown, soft and thick, luxurious. But along his cheek, under his beard, I could feel patches of sclerotin, as the flexible chitin in his skin was slowly hardening to an impermeable armor.
He opened his eyes, staring blearily forward without moving his head. I could see him move his mouth cautiously, examining its internal changes. He turned his head and looked up at me, rubbing his hair slightly into my hand.
“Time to get up?” he asked. I nodded. “Oh, God,” he said. He said this every morning. It was like a prayer.
“I’ll make coffee,” I said. “Do you want some?”
He shook his head slowly. “Just a glass of apricot nectar,” he said. He unrolled his long, rough tongue and looked at it, slightly cross-eyed. “This is real interesting, but it wasn’t in the catalog. I’ll be sipping lunch from flowers pretty soon. That ought to draw a second glance at Duke’s.”
“I thought account execs were expected to sip their lunches,” I said.
“Not from the flower arrangements . . .” he said, still exploring the odd shape of his mouth. Then he looked up at me and reached up from under the covers. “Come here.”
It had been a while, I thought, and I had to get to work. But he did smell terribly attractive. Perhaps he was developing aphrodisiac scent glands. I climbed back under the covers and stretched my body against his. We were both developing chitinous knobs and odd lumps that made this less than comfortable. “How am I supposed to kiss you with a stiletto in my mouth?” I asked.
“There are other things to do. New equipment presents new possibilities.” He pushed the covers back and ran his unchanged hands down my body from shoulder to thigh. “Let me know if my tongue is too rough.”
It was not.
Fuzzy-minded, I got out of bed for the second time and drifted into the kitchen.
Measuring the coffee into the grinder, I realized that I was no longer interested in drinking it, although it was diverting for a moment to spear the beans with my stiletto. What was the damn thing for, anyhow? I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out.
Putting the grinder aside, I poured a can of apricot nectar into a tulip glass. Shallow glasses were going to be a problem for Greg in the future, I thought. Not to mention solid food.
My particular problem, however, if I could figure out what I was supposed to eat for breakfast, was getting to the office in time for my ten am meeting. Maybe I’d just skip breakfast. I dressed quickly and dashed out the door before Greg was even out of bed.
###
Thirty minutes later, I was more or less awake and sitting in the small conference room with the new marketing manager, listening to him lay out his plan for the Model 2000 launch.
In signing up for his bioengineering program, Harry had chosen specialized primate adaptation, B-E Option No. 4. He had evolved into a textbook example: small and long-limbed, with forward-facing eyes for judging distances and long, grasping fingers to keep him from falling out of his tree.
He was dressed for success in a pin-striped three-piece suit that fit his simian proportions perfectly. I wondered what premium he paid for custom-made. Or did he patronize a ready-to-wear shop that catered especially to primates?
I listened as he leaped agilely from one ridiculous marketing premise to the next. Trying to borrow credibility from mathematics and engineering, he used wildly metaphoric bizspeak, “factoring in the need for pipeline throughout” and “fine-tuning the media mix,” without even cracking a smile.
Harry had been with the company only a few months, straight from business school. He saw himself as a much-needed infusion of talent. I didn’t like him, but I envied his ability to root through his subconscious and toss out one half-formed idea after another. I know he felt it reflected b
adly on me that I didn’t join in and spew forth a random selection of promotional suggestions.
I didn’t think much of his marketing plan. The advertising section was a textbook application of theory with no practical basis. I had two options: I could force him to accept a solution that would work, or I could yes him to death, making sure everybody understood it was his idea. I knew which path I’d take.
“Yeah, we can do that for you,” I told him. “No problem.” We’d see which of us would survive and which was hurtling to an evolutionary dead end.
Although Harry had won his point, he continued to belabor it. My attention wandered—I’d heard it all before. His voice was the hum of an air conditioner, a familiar, easily ignored background noise. I drowsed and new emotions stirred in me, yearnings to float through moist air currents, to land on bright surfaces, to engorge myself with warm, wet food.
Adrift in insect dreams, I became sharply aware of the bare skin of Harry’s arm, between his gold-plated watchband and his rolled-up sleeve, as he manipulated papers on the conference room table. He smelled greasily delicious, like a pepperoni pizza or a charcoal-broiled hamburger. I realized he probably wouldn’t taste as good as he smelled, but I was hungry. My stilettolike tongue was there for a purpose, and it wasn’t to skewer cubes of tofu. I leaned over his arm and braced myself against the back of his hand, probing with my stylets to find a capillary.
Harry noticed what I was doing and swatted me sharply on the side of the head. I pulled away before he could hit me again.
“We were discussing the Model 2000 launch. Or have you forgotten?” he said, rubbing his arm.
“Sorry. I skipped breakfast this morning.” I was embarrassed.
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