by C. P. James
The Perfect Generation
C.P. James
THE PERFECT GENERATION
Copyright © 2018 C.P. James
All rights reserved.
No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Under no circumstances may any part of this book be photocopied for resale.
This is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters and situations within its pages and places or persons, living or dead, is unintentional and coincidental.
Contents
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Part II
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Part III
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
A Note to Readers
About the Author
For Amy
Part I
2019 – 2050: The Merriweather Prize
1
The girl adjusted her scarf against the cold and hurried off into the darkness, as though Geller intended to follow her. She carried a tray of four coffees but didn’t even pause to set them down and properly re-button her coat, so her free hand held it together in front like a bathrobe while he held the door open. Perhaps he’d looked at her in the way Baz cautioned him against—like a snake trying to work out whether it could unhinge its jaws far enough to swallow its prey. He doubted it would’ve eased her mind to know that his appraisal of her features was purely academic.
Her narrow hips suggested an Eastern European ancestry, though her skin tone and hair may have indicated Greek or Italian. Her slight frame had to lean into the wind to push through it, and judging from the thickness of her clothes to the speed of her gait, he guessed she had little tolerance for cold. He settled on an Eastern Mediterranean descent, perhaps Turkish, Syrian, or even Israeli. 60/40 on the Asian.
He played this little game a lot with people and it never occurred to him it might be creepy on the other end. But Christ, to even feign interest in most people, his mind needed something else to chew on. Often, one part of his brain would conduct its analysis while another would deliver the nods and uh-huh’s that reassured them he was hanging on every word.
People weren’t any more mysterious than a computer. Everything that mattered was hard-coded—reproduction, survival, maybe nonverbal communication. Though the code itself had taken nearly a century to unravel, getting in there and fucking with it was the secret fantasy of any geneticist. Technical considerations aside, what stood in their way was a phony and misguided morality. Mention genetic engineering in passing, and off they’d go to human-animal hybrids and designer children. These were the same people who ate genetically modified grains and drank milk from genetically modified cows on a daily basis. The same people whose hearts bled for people with Alzheimer’s or sickle cell anemia but only supported the idea of a cure, not the actual mechanics.
What they didn’t realize was that they could go online at that very moment and learn for themselves the precise gene or chromosome responsible for a whole shitload of diseases. If a mechanic said their car needed a new starter, they’d replace it without a second thought. If enough starters went bad on a particular model, the manufacturer would either issue a recall or install a better starter in future vehicles. This was how the industrialized world worked. Living things—particularly plants—had been improved upon since the days of Mendel. Yet, no one cried foul when a turf grass engineered to be drought-resistant helped athletic fields use less water. They didn’t seem to mind that corn-based products were tasty and dirt-cheap as a result of genetic modifications that made the plant more resistant to pests. Fucking hypocrites.
It seemed like a long time ago that he’d been featured in the journal Science as a 17-year-old prodigy about to pursue a simultaneous PhD and MD at the University of Wisconsin, though it had only been three years. On paper, he’d lived up to the hype. He’d authored or co-authored more than 40 peer-reviewed articles since then and held 14 bioengineering patents, any one of which could make him a very wealthy man overnight. But very little of that was common knowledge, and he almost never talked about it because he almost never talked to anyone besides Baz, Dr. Biermann, and the research assistants in the lab. Very few people in the world could understand what he was working on, let alone what it could lead to.
He finished his coffee, zipped up his jacket and headed back across the quad to the Genetics Biotechnology Center where his lab awaited. The wind off Lake Mendota carved smooth ridges into the powdery snow. Long, white fingers reached across the sidewalk as though trying to crawl toward shelter. It stung his face through his scraggly beard, prompting him to ask himself yet again what he was doing there when he could’ve gone anywhere he wanted.
The answer was Biermann. His doctoral advisor was close enough to the work to add legitimacy but not close enough to notice the siphoning of funds from multiple grants into his little side project. For example, he and Baz were working together on three of them, so if they had a working lunch, they could charge it back to any of the three. His proposals were based on timelines that didn’t really apply to him. By spending less than they needed in less time than they forecast, he bought himself some room for his pet project. The results were all that really mattered to the funding authority.
The building was warm—too warm compared to outside. He immediately removed his jacket and folded it into the crook of his arm as he made his way upstairs, his footsteps echoing through the empty stairwell. When he opened the heavy door onto the main genetics floor, he was greeted by the sweet perfume of lab work, a persistent antiseptic sort of smell that Geller never tired of. The building was almost always silent this time of day, yet he heard a commotion from the end of the hall. And was that … music? He quickened his pace and pushed into the lab.
It was a party. All the grad assistants were there and a few brought their significant others. The “dirty room,”
as they called it, was festooned with tissue paper and Christmas lights. Relish trays and plastic cups covered nearly every square inch of horizontal space. Several people were even dancing, including Biermann himself. No chance of un-seeing that.
Geller stood in the doorway for several seconds before anyone noticed him. A young grad assistant named Kalpana noticed him first, and her broad white smile collapsed. One by one, the partygoers realized he was there and paused their revelry to see how he would react. Someone turned the music off. After a moment, Baz pushed his way through from the back. Geller saw Baz’s girlfriend, Lucia, keeping a safe distance.
“Brent!” Baz said. He held an open beer in one hand and an unopened one in the other. “We expected you a little sooner.”
Baz held the unopened beer out to him, but Geller indicated his coffee.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“Didn’t you get my message?”
Geller shook his head and pulled out his phone, which he rarely checked. A raft of messages filled the screen.
“Doesn’t matter,” Baz said, clearly tipsy. “We’re celebrating because we cured liver cancer.”
Interesting choice of pronoun, Geller thought.
“What do you mean?”
“Your protein binds perfectly to the carbohydrate,” he said, beaming.
“Show me,” Geller said.
Baz turned around to the group, all of whom were trying to interpret Geller’s reaction. “Party on, people!”
The music came back on and the hum of conversations returned. Geller followed Baz through a door and into the main part of the laboratory. A single workstation was illuminated with a screen saver running on the computer.
“I knew you’d want to see,” Baz said.
Geller sat and moved the mouse to wake the screen. A 3D model of a protein appeared, which looked like a mile of ribbon blown by the wind into a hopeless tangle. To Geller, it was the secret language of God—an impossible system of folds and loops that combined to do one specific thing in one specific way. He clicked through a series of images and tables, his brain processing the data as fast as it could be displayed.
“What about the rats?”
“Clean. Like it was never even there.”
“Lymph?”
“Normal.”
Geller felt a little jolt of adrenaline. The idea was to isolate the sugar molecule the cancer cells needed for fuel and change it into something useless yet harmless, like turning a baloney sandwich into a rock. If the cells starved, the body’s own immune system could easily destroy the cancer. The last protein they’d tested caused massive lymphedema that killed the rats in days. But what excited Geller most was the retroviral delivery system that programmed cells to manufacture the protein. It had been extremely effective.
Geller pushed his chair back and sat for a moment, staring out the window. He never dreamt they’d be at this point already, but it seemed they were. It didn’t matter that it took just two years to get to this point in a five-year grant. The plan was always the same. He had the time and the resources, and he definitely had the vision. Now he had to try and sell it to the most ethical person he knew.
“Let’s get back in there,” Geller said, forcing a smile. “The party’s waiting.”
2
Lyle Merriweather felt a lump. Softened as Laura’s breasts were by age, it was easy to distinguish. He’d thought little of it right then. Five years previous she’d had a scare with a benign cyst, but the doctor cautioned it probably wouldn’t be the last. She had found that one during yoga and didn’t handle it as calmly as he’d come to expect during their 36 years together. Breast cancer had grown in adjacent branches of her family tree, so her anxiety was justified then. But because of that, and since it had been such a painfully long time since they’d made love, his focus remained in the moment.
It was a little much to call Lyle and Laura soul mates, but theirs was a pretty good story and not many people knew it.
While they were dating, Laura’s father, Chet, cracked a piston on his tractor a couple days before heavy rains accelerated the wheat harvest. Lyle cast a replacement from a die he made himself and had the tractor up and running the next day. Chet would later give Lyle the seed money, at great personal risk, to start Merriweather Tool and Die. On the same day Lyle repaid his debt, he asked for Laura’s hand. When the very same tractor—still running like a champ—rolled over on top of Chet three years later and crushed him to death, the inheritance helped expand the business and branch out into other parts of Kansas with other ventures. Eventually Merriweather Industries evolved into the country’s second-largest company, with its fingers in many pies.
It was uncommon for a captain of industry like him to remain genuinely faithful to one woman, but faithful he was. There had been so many opportunities to stray, but what more could he have wanted? His billions meant nothing to her. Laura saw his whole self. She’d expected him to build a comfortable life around her and nothing more. She’d have dispensed with the rest without hesitation.
The next morning, she poured his coffee for him and sat down to a bright red half-grapefruit.
“I need to tell you something,” he said.
“Oh?”
“Last night I felt something in your—“
“Yeah, I noticed it last week,” she said, casually. “In fact, I already went in.”
“Really?”
“They took a biopsy. They said they’d have results in a few days.”
Either her first experience with the cyst had steeled her, or her insouciance was just an act. Either way, it didn’t make him feel any better.
“Dr. Fagan?”
She nodded.
“Did she seem concerned?”
“Meh. You know how doctors are. I’m not thinking about it until I have to and neither should you.”
“I’ll do my best.”
She smiled her slightly crooked smile at him and eased a wedge of grapefruit between her lips. He returned it and checked his watch. It was getting late—there was a board meeting he couldn’t beg off.
“I have to run, but obviously—“
“You’ll know when I know,” she said. “‘Now. Cervantes’ foil.’ Five letters, ends in ‘a.’”
He thought for a moment, and said, “Panza?”
She smiled and tapped in the letters. “You’ve served your purpose,” she said, and shooed him toward the door. “We’re here for dinner.”
He kissed her on the cheek, a gesture she received with a practiced stretch of her face toward his lips, and he left her.
The day passed slowly. Two hours tying off on the shareholder meeting, then a short lunch at his desk, then an afternoon of conference calls. During the drive home he turned his phone off—something he never did—with nothing but the thin, hermetic hum of the Mercedes to distract him, thinking of Laura. He knew he never took her for granted, yet worried he did. She was the context for his wealth and success; without that, it had no meaning.
The Merriweather Foundation was like the daughter they hadn’t lost. When Molly died in her crib all those years ago, Laura poured herself into getting the foundation off the ground. She’d chaired and appointed the board of the fledgling organization herself, allowing him to handle the business particulars while she courted donors. Initially it was established to help coax great ideas into life. They both knew they’d simply been in the right place and time, and that there were others out there who could benefit from money and validation.
In this spirit, the foundation courted the interest of well-resourced people. A college dropout in Iowa came up with a way to mix pulverized corn stalks and husks with an organic resin to create cheap, durable building materials akin to cinder blocks. The foundation gave him $50,000 to build a prototype home, and four years later HusKey Homes was helping transform third-world villages. Special legislation made it possible for farmers to put their regular subsidies toward the program in exchange for tax credits, and they were happy to
do it. There were millions of other great ideas, of course, but the foundation breathed life into a select few and the world had benefited. Over time, Lyle had come to see the foundation’s myriad pursuits as a more noble calling than running the business. It was necessary to remain involved at a high strategic level—mostly as the public face of corporate governance and to help launch new spinoffs or products, but the foundation wasn’t just a reflection of his company’s success—it justified it.
Young people had the best ideas. Oh, what a gift idealism was! To pursue a thing with single-minded resolve, out of a crystalline notion of what was right, or fair, or necessary. He’d always felt and acted younger than he was, and he liked that about himself, but it had been many years since he’d had that kind of clarity about anything. It was like that old movie Being There, when the gardener, Chauncey, walked on water because he didn’t perceive it as an obstacle. These days, all he knew were obstacles, and all he ever seemed to do was negotiate them. In a way, his approach to the foundation was a little patriarchal—in the sense that it was his, but more so the vicarious thrill of enabling a dream.