The Biggerers

by Amy Lilwall

  03:02. ‘What noise?’

  ‘The one that…’ Hamish closed his eyes and rubbed the length of his face with one hand. ‘The one that woke me up.’ Then: ‘It was me, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Are you kidding me? This is the first time you’ve woken yourself up snoring?’

  ‘Was that really me?’

  ‘Probably, Hamish.’

  ‘How do you know? You were asleep.’

  ‘Because you were snoring when I drifted off.’

  ‘But that was really loud!’

  Susan baulked then snorted out a smirk. ‘It’s like that every night.’ Using her elbow to pivot onto her belly, she flopped back into her pillow and looked towards the bedside table. An apology would only come if it wasn’t asked for; and looking right at him just after that last sentence could seem like apology-fishing. After nearly five years of telling her that he never, ever snored, this apology could not be buggered up by fishing for it.

  She waited, knowing that he was still propped up because the bed hadn’t jolted. She knew that he was thinking about his snoring because it had happened to him; he had been the victim and the culprit in this scenario; and so it deserved to be thought about.

  ‘Every night,’ she couldn’t help. She’d said it almost under her breath, almost to herself.

  ‘Ye-es…’ Stubble scratching noises could be heard. ‘There must be some sort of medical reason for it.’ The bed jolted and Susan felt a pull on the duvet.

  Her eyes danced about in the blue hue of the clock projection as her ears dominated her brain’s concentration. The breathing had slowed. The lung-wobble had started. He was asleep! He’d gone to bloody sleep!

  Just as the wobble turned into a judder, she swung her legs out of bed and pushed her feet into a pair of flip-flops. Bastard! He’d woken her up to tell her he had woken himself up, and now he was… And that meant that she was…

  ‘Wha?’ he moaned as she got out of bed.

  ‘Toilet!’ she almost shouted at him before striding out of the room, yanking a bath towel from the ottoman and pulling it around herself as she left.

  Jumping down the stairs, she thought about the fact that her eyebrows turned downwards in the middle when she was angry, and that she must have looked really angry but there was no one to see it. That seemed like a bit of a waste. She crossed the hall and remembered the last time she’d been up in the middle of the night, two nights ago. She pressed the kitchen door open. Light oozed over one blonde ball and one brunette ball resting together like chocolates in a box. Her eyebrows went back to normal. Bless them, they were so sweet. Little sleeping chocolates… She pulled the door back until it was almost shut. Mmm… She had watched that documentary two nights ago with a cup of chocolate from the machine. That had been nice. She made her way towards the living room, towards the chocolate sofa bubble. Ha! She had invented a whole scenario about the chocolate sofa bubble; now what had that been about…? There was a sofa involved and Hamish and life. That had been quite a happy alone-moment; drinking chocolate and watching TV while the rest of the world was dark and asleep. Pressing the corner of the coffee table, she selected The Mini Human Phenomenon and waited for the little glass tongue to deliver her chocolate.

  The documentary un-paused a few seconds from where Susan had left off. An interviewer was facing the camera; his interviewee sat in the background, one brown suited leg crossed over the other. Ah yes. Cloning. Death. That was how the sofa-bubble thought had been triggered.

  ‘This brings us back to the initial question: how did the scandal of the first batch of pocket-sized people come about?’

  Three tags appeared at the bottom of the screen. ‘Return to Main Menu’. ‘Replay Cloning Interview’. ‘Pocket People Scandal Explained’.

  Susan swallowed back a sipful of chocolate. ‘Tag three,’ she sang towards the screen. Might as well follow the order of the narrative.

  ‘In 2063, the company trading under a name that has since been discontinued released a prototype that was to have the world divided: the reason for this controversy? The prototype was a miniature human intended to be marketed as “a family member” in order to breed back into younger generations what the company described as “extinct organic notions of living and loving”. Its slogan, “Space and race before interface”, set debates buzzing across the globe; but the biggest question on everybody’s lips? Just where did they come from? At the time, senior geneticist Dr Mark Hector was only too happy to give an explanation…’

  The screen flicked into footage with a late twenty-first-century look, the colours so bright they blotched and shadowed over in places. Dr Hector grinned into the camera as a shorter journalist held a microphone up to his mouth. ‘So, where do they come from?’ asked the journalist. Dr Hector repeated the question slowly, as if to help the viewers who might not have understood what was going on.

  ‘Where do they come from?’ he grinned. ‘Well, as with all brilliant inventions, they come from error! They were a complete mistake! We were actually engineering pluripotent cells to see if we could tweak the growth instructions of human DNA to create smaller babies. This… this demand, I could say, had been put forward by international environmental officials with the view to create a smaller race in correlation with the massive overpopulation of the planet. Smaller humans require less. This idea has been in its planning stages for a while, but because of its overlap into the field of cloning, getting the go-ahead wasn’t simple.

  ‘Initial research into this area was kick-started in 2016 with Project Isabel, which was terminated several years later due to largely unsuccessful results. In 2029, our team was awarded substantial government funding to continue research. After a few false starts, our cells started to develop into what we have today.’ The doctor grinned again, holding his hands together over his chest and tipping his head to one side. Susan realized that her lip was curling. He was a tad smarmy… How old was he? His lips puffed over his teeth like shiny hotdog buns. She honestly couldn’t tell if his face was that plump and stretched because he was a young person who’d had too much surgery, or an old person who’d… had too much surgery.

  ‘You started to tell us that all of this was an accident?’ prompted the interviewer.

  ‘Well, I started to answer the question by saying that all of this was an accident.’

  The interviewer nodded.

  ‘And indeed it was! The first successful cells are what you see before you today. But, of course, our original mission was fairly unsuccessful—’ He opened his buns to go on but was cut off by the interviewer.

  ‘Could you tell us why?’

  ‘Let me tell you why. The simple answer was that they were too small. A race of that size would adjust very poorly to our environment, as well as the fact that these miniature people would not be reproductively compatible with the existing human race. It was never our intention to produce a being that small.’

  ‘But how did you get permission to market them as a product?’

  ‘So how did we get permission to market them as a product? What else could we do with them but adopt them out? Their repressed intelligence and lack of instinct meant that they could never live alone. So we adopted them out to families, families that went through – and still go through – rigorous selection processes and follow-up interviews for up to three years after purchase,’ shaking his head quickly, ‘er… adoption.’ He went on: ‘Although purchase does play a big part in all of this; the adoptive family need to prove their commitment monetarily. At the same time, exhibiting sustainable means to be able to provide for the little humans as they, and their families, progress into what will one day be known as the biggest social experiment that the world has ever seen.’

  The interviewer took a deep breath to say something but the doctor turned to the camera, filling up the whole of the screen with buns and smarm. Susan stuck her tongue out and made a yuk-face. ‘A social experiment that aims to recapture what humanity has lost, after all: the human race needs saving, in mor
e ways than one.’

  Oh gross, thought Susan, blowing into the foam on her chocolate. Hamish would love this.

  The old footage froze and the screen flicked back to the original presenter.

  ‘A very convincing argument,’ he began, holding both hands out the way that presenters do, as if holding them after a hand-dryer. Palms, then backs, then one, then both. He went on: ‘And what, from the surface, seemed like an effective method of, not only solving two problems, but a positive contribution to humanity.’ The presenter brought his hands together in front of his chest and smiled. ‘A real, happy accident. But…’ one hand pointed a figure towards the sky, ‘little did Dr Hector know that the truth behind these pocket people was soon to be revealed…’

  A different image appeared in the same blotchy twenty-first centuryness as the first. This time, a montage of helmet-haired newsreaders with lip-glossed mouths sailed from one end of the screen to the other; each one tailing off from where the last had begun:

  ‘Leading genetic engineers…’

  ‘Genetic engineers in London…’

  ‘London’s leading team of genetic engineers…’

  ‘Entrusted with a mission…’

  ‘The first mission of its kind…’

  ‘Were granted permission to conduct…’

  ‘The creation of several thousand human clones…’

  ‘Has been shut down…’

  ‘Is ceasing to operate…’

  ‘Authorities have disallowed all further developments…’

  ‘Dr Mark Hector…’

  ‘Head of department, Dr Mark Hector…’

  ‘At the centre of this scandal, Dr Mark Hector…’

  ‘Using human embryos…’

  ‘Taking from the “parentless” stock of human embryos…’

  ‘Using embryos from the surplus supply…’

  ‘Experiments have led to the deaths of many human embryos…’

  ‘Clinical assistants speak of deformation…’

  ‘Several members of staff say that some foetuses lived past the legal abortion date before…’

  ‘Before any major physical defects were identified…’

  ‘In an unlikely circumstance, an adoption agency…’

  ‘Brought to light by the refusal to cooperate with adoption agency Billbridge & Minxus…’

  ‘A government request to find parents for dormant embryos…’

  ‘Been kept in a frozen state since the abolition of Embryonic Stem Cell Research…’

  ‘First scandal of its kind since Embryonic Stem Cell Research was banned…’

  ‘Embryonic Stem Cell Research was banned in 2025.’

  The presenter returned. ‘When initially granted permission to go ahead with studies,’ the dryer-hands appeared to cup two oranges and jiggle them with each syllable, ‘scientists were specifically informed that a clone was defined as “the propagation of an organism from the cell of a single common ancestor” and quantified as one cell to one ancestor; that’s to say, multiple copies could not be made of a single ancestor-cell.’ He clasped his hands back together. ‘The use of human embryos for this research means that, effectively, the mini humans of the Mini Human Phenomenon cannot fall into the category of “clone” but are legitimate human children, with real parents, grandparents and possibly even brothers and sisters. At the time, scientists were divided over this incredible, illegal, breakthrough in science.’

  The screen flicked to another dated newsreel where a man in a suit stood over three microphones that grew out of the bottom of the screen. His nose was so squashed towards his face that it almost touched his top lip. ‘There’s no denying that, although illegal, this technique of being able to, effectively, shrink a human being while in its embryonic state represents enormous progression in genetics and holds invaluable consequences for the future of science.’

  A woman with a Scottish accent stood before a conference. ‘What we’ve really got to bring up again is the initial debate that, ultimately, saw the abolition of Embryonic Stem Cell Research: at what stage should a group of cells be governed by the same moral law that protects humanity?’

  A young man in a stripy shirt with blue-tinted glasses stood at ease next to a pot plant. ‘We mustn’t forget, you know, that this is what we wanted. The mission never once stipulated, um… erm… the creation of an entirely new race, because that would be pointless, you know; people would continue to have normal-sized babies while extra humans were being artificially created; no, that would defeat the object entirely. What Dr Hector has done is to immediately implement a technique that would have been adopted in the final stages of the trial, that’s to say, altering the DNA of embryos in pregnant women. Of course, using pregnant women at this early stage would be out of the question. But working on anything other than human embryos, especially when the supply is so… erm… abundant, would have set all research back unnecessarily. In fact, research intended for this mission performed on any other cell other than a human embryo could be deemed as largely irrelevant.’

  A caped old lady stooped in the street with an owl-like posture; two fabric Tesco shopping bags hung like drooping wings from hidden arms. ‘The thing is: they have parents… Each and every one of them has a mummy and a daddy who never thought that they’d even have these children. Some of them might be eighty or ninety years old by now. I mean, what does all of this mean for them? For the parents? Are they going to have any rights over the children?’

  Six men and women in suits sat on black chesterfields around a coffee table in a television studio. One sat well forward with his legs apart. ‘What we have to put into perspective here is that these embryos were abandoned. They were surplus to requirements. In fact, there was a massive surplus. In a society where parents are allowed to produce and freeze potential offspring in such quantities only to abandon them, somebody has to be responsible for the fate of these offspring; somebody has to figure out what to do with them. I mean, what is the suggestion here? That keeping them in their frozen embryonic state is the kindest thing to do? Is that really what we mean when we talk of respecting human life? The only reason they’re kept in that state is because nobody knows what to do with them. They would have been completely forgotten about had Billbridge & Minxus not approached the government about the possibility of adopting them out.’

  ‘It’s tricky. This is a tricky one,’ said the first lip-nose man. ‘It’s not that nobody wishes to take responsibility for the embryos; the fact is that nobody can. The only person who was granted responsibility for this particular batch was Dr Mark Hector. Forms have been signed by parents claiming that they no longer require the cells, effectively leaving them to him. He is the closest thing to an adoptive parent, and with that comes such a great sense of responsibility that, just like with a parent/child dynamic, it borders on ownership. What he has chosen to do with them in the interests of science is ground-breaking, ground-breaking! Unfortunately, what he should have done was to be straight about his intentions right from the beginning. The fight would have been drawn out, but raising the topic of what to do with these forgotten embryos has long been overdue.’

  A pin-striped man with sticky-out grey hair sat at a desk, his hands clasped in front of his mouth; he spoke over his fingers. ‘Dr Mark Hector… That name will resonate for centuries. What he did was crazy! Think about it: a scientist, in his position, overstepping the lines so dramatically… It would be ridiculous to treat his intentions in the same way as those of a reasonable man. His actions were impressive, but completely irresponsible. I would, I would even say foolish.’

  Susan opened her eyes, inhaled a slurpy breath and woke herself up. ‘Stop!’ she said, wiping the side of her mouth. Where was she? Oh, still here. Damn! The empty chocolate cup had spilled secret drops onto the white towel that she’d used as a quilt. Susan looked around, shivered and got up. ‘Turn off TV.’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Watching,’ Susan yawned, ‘documentary.’


  ‘—.’

  ‘The Mini Human Phenomenon one.’

  Hamish was silent, then: ‘You never called Mrs Lucas.’

  Susan smacked her forehead. ‘Oh… It’s too late now, isn’t it?’

  ‘—.’

  Yep. Of course it was… Either too late or too early.

  ‘Why don’t you ask them if they’ve seen her?’ His voice was mumbly and slow. Susan knew his eyes were closed.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Banksy.’

  ‘Blankey?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ask who if they’ve seen her?’

  Hamish sighed. ‘The happy-clappies.’

  Susan wrinkled her forehead. ‘I have trouble understanding you at the best of times.’

  ‘Tweedledum and Tweedledee.’

  She smirked at the darkness. Fuck’s sake. Whatever. She swung one leg onto the bed. What the fuck was he going on about? Bonbon and Jinx, probably: Tweedledum and Tweedledee. She was about to swing the second leg up but it froze, sat in that position like a dowsing rod that had just discovered water. Two little people appeared in her mind, sniffing and stroking the grey crinoline coat of a third. Just like Bonbon’s coat. They were all friends. Weren’t they? She’d seen them! Bonbon, Jinx and Blankey all together in the garden. She looked in the direction of Hamish, her surprised head filling up with this new idea. She could ask Bonbon and Jinx if they knew what had happened to Blankey. Why hadn’t she thought of that before?

  Her legs hesitated.

  Two little chocolates snuggled together downstairs; one dark, one white, giving off little zeds as their bellies rose and fell. It wouldn’t be fair to wake them up now; her dowsing-rod leg seemed to confirm this as it rose to join the other. We know the water’s there, we’ll tunnel for it tomorrow, it seemed to say.

  ‘Weren’t you here on Saturday? With your littler, you bought the grey, mock rabbit, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right! Have you had your delivery?’

  ‘We have indeed. If you don’t mind, I’m just helping this lady; I’ll be with you in a few moments. Is that okay? Do feel free to browse…’