Future Crimes

by Jack Dann

  "I'm in," I assured him. "Just get this fucking tape off, will you."

  "We know where you and your mum live, Darren," the Vivaldi fan reminded me. "We even know where your gran lives."

  I couldn't quite imagine them sending a hitman all the way up to Whitby with instructions to break into an old people's home and shoot a ninety-two-year-old who usually didn't know what day it was, but I could see the point he was trying to make.

  "It's okay," I assured. "I'm on your side. One hundred percent committed. I always wanted a more interesting job. Who wouldn't, when the alternative's having the piss taken out of you relentlessly, literally as well as metaphorically?"

  I knew he'd be impressed by the fact that I knew what "metaphorically" meant.

  "Okay, Darren," he said, after a few more seconds' hesitation. "I'll trust you. You're in."

  The first surprise was that the female kidnapper not only had real blonde hair under the peroxide wig, but wasn't really fat or fifty-five. I could almost have wished I'd known that earlier, although it wasn't a train of thought I wanted to follow.

  After that revelation, it wasn't quite as surprising to find out that the man who supposedly didn't do nice had also been heavily padded and that his cauliflower ears were as fake as his Honey Monster grin. He really did look fifty-ish, but he seemed more bookish than brutal.

  The team leader turned out to look more like a twenty-five-year-old nerd than a gangster. I wouldn't have cared to estimate how many GCSEs the three of them had between them.

  The gun, on the other hand, was real.

  Once they'd made up their minds, they moved swiftly to get me home before anyone knew I'd gone. The only one who told me his name was the Vivaldi fan, and I was far from convinced that "Matthew Jardine" wasn't a pseudonym, but it seemed like a friendly gesture anyway.

  Jardine lectured me all the way home, but I tried to take in as much of it as I could. I had no option but to be the gang clown, but I knew that I had to make an effort to keep up if I were going to build a proper career as a guinea-pig-cum-industrial-spy. He dropped me on the edge of the estate. Because it's a designated high crime/zero tolerance area, we have almost as many hidden CC-TV cameras around as the average parking lot, even though the kids have mastered six different techniques for locating and disabling them.

  The repacked shopping bags didn't look too bad, but I had to hope that Mum wouldn't make too much fuss about the missing wine or the frozen peas and fish fingers being slightly defrosted. I needn't have worried; she was much too annoyed about the phone ringing off the hook. She hadn't answered it, of course—she always used the answerphone to screen her calls—but she was paranoid about the tape running out. GSKC had left seven messages in less than four hours.

  I called back immediately, as requested.

  "Mr. Hepplewhite," the doctor said, letting his relief show in his voice. "At last. Thanks for getting back to us."

  I had my story ready. "That's okay, mate," I said. "I'm sorry I was out, but I was watching the match on the big screen down at the Hare and Hounds. Not a drop of alcohol passed my lips, though—it was bitter lemons all the way, especially when the opposition got that penalty."

  "That's all right, Mr. Hepplewhite," he assured me. "It's just that something's come up as a result of the samples you delivered yesterday. It's nothing to worry about, but we'd like you to come in as soon as possible. In fact, we'd like to send a taxi to pick you up now, if it's not inconvenient."

  "Well," I said, acting away like a trooper, "I don't know about that. I had plans for later—and Mum was just about to put a ham and mushroom pizza in the oven."

  "We'll pay you overtime, of course, as per your contract. We'll even send out for a pizza." He carefully refrained from mentioning that they wouldn't be letting me out again, and I carefully refrained from letting on that I already knew.

  "Okay," I said. "If it's that important."

  I took Mum into the bathroom to brief her and turned the taps on, just in case. You can't be too careful when you live in a high crime/zero tolerance area.

  The taxi was round inside ten minutes, but it didn't take me to the general hospital where I'd signed on. It dropped me at a clinic way out in the country, halfway to Newbury. As soon as I saw the place, I knew how far I'd come up in the world. It was a private clinic—the sort that you have to pay through the nose to get into if you don't have an organization like GSKC to pay your way. It was the sort of place where someone like me would normally expect to be hanging around in reception for at least half an hour, but I got the VIP treatment instead. Two doctors—one male, one female—pounced on me as soon as I was through the door and led me away.

  The room they led me to wasn't quite as palatial as I'd hoped, but the bed seemed comfortable enough, and it did have a wooden bedhead rather than a tubular steel frame.

  The TV was a twenty-six-inch widescreen. There was a highly visible CC-TV camera in the corner, with its red light on, but I guessed that it probably wasn't the only one.

  The male doctor asked me to undress, and an orderly took away my clothes as soon as I had, but by that time I'd already managed to secrete one of Jardine's bugs behind the bedhead and another in the jacket of the green pajamas they provided.

  When the female doctor offered me a cup of tea, having condescended to tell me that her name was Dr. Finch, she tried hard to make it sound as if she were merely being polite, but I'd seen enough movies to know what a hidden agenda was.

  "I'd rather have coffee," I said. "Cream, no sugar. A few bourbon biscuits would be nice, while I'm waiting for my pizza."

  I got tea, and lots of it. Mercifully, they didn't want any other samples just then.

  Dr. Finch really was plump and fiftyish, but she was far from blonde. I waited patiently while they did their stuff, munching on the ham and mushroom pizza they'd ordered in for me—which, to be fair, was a little bit better than the one I'd bought in Sainsbury's—but I was ready for them by the time they braced themselves to tell me that they were enforcing the clause in my contract that allowed them to admit me for twenty-four-hour observation whether I liked it or not.

  "I suppose it's okey," I said, by way of brightening their day before I began biting back, "but I need to understand what you're doing. You have to tell me why, don't you? I believe you mentioned the principle of informed consent. It's the law."

  "You didn't seem very interested last time," the male doctor said, suspiciously. His name was Hartman. I'd never seen him before but I didn't bother to ask him how he knew.

  "I've been thinking about it a lot," I told him. "I've even done some reading. Something's gone wrong, hasn't it? Your virus has turned rogue. I'm infectious, aren't I? You've gone and given me some kind of horrible disease." It was all claptrap, but they didn't know that I knew that. They had to set my mind at rest.

  "No, no, no, it's nothing like that," Dr. Hartman hastened to assure me. "It's just that we're not getting the protein we expected. We think we may know why, but we need to be sure. If there are any awkward side-effects, of course, we can kill the virus off just like that. We need to monitor the situation, at least until we've confirmed our hypothesis as to why the translocated gene isn't behaving the way we expected it to."

  "Well," I said, temptingly, "I guess that would probably be all right . . . but you have to tell me exactly what's going on. It's my body, when all's said and done, and I have to look after it. Do you think I might be able to patent my bladder?"

  He looked at me suspiciously again, but all he saw was a twenty-year-old benefit scrounger with three GCSEs, and not an ology among them.

  "Okay," he said, finally. "I'll explain what we're doing. How much do you know about the Human Genetic Diversity Project?"

  "What I've read in the papers," I told him. "Second phase of the Genome Project. Greatest scientific achievement ever, blueprint of the soul, key to individuality, etcetera, etcetera. Individually tailored cures for everyone, just as soon as the wrinkles have all been ironed out
. I take it that I've just been officially declared a wrinkle."

  "What the first phase of the HGP gave us," Dr. Hart-man said, putting on his best let's-blind-the-bugger-with-bullshit voice, "was a record of the genes distributed on each of the twenty-four kinds of human chromosomes. There are twenty-three pairs, you see, but the sex chromosomes aren't alike. We've managed to identify about fifty thousand exons—they're sequences that can be turned into proteins, or bits of proteins—but not nearly as many as we'd expected. Before we'd completed the first draft, way back in 2000, we figured that there might be anything up to a hundred and fifty thousand, but we were wrong-footed." He paused.

  "The reason for that, we now know, is that we'd drastically underestimated the number of versatile exons—expressed sequences that contribute to whole sets of proteins. Twentieth-century thinking was a bit crude, you see: we thought of genes as separate entities, definite lengths of DNA laid out on the chromosomes like strings of beads, separated by junk. The reality turned out to be a lot messier. All genes have introns as well as exons, which cut them up into anything up to a dozen different bits, and some genes are so widely scattered that they have other genes inside their introns. Some so-called collaborative genes producing proteins of the same family share exons with one another, and we're even beginning to find cases where genes on different chromosomes collaborate.

  "The HGDP is gradually compiling a catalogue of all the different forms of the individual exons that are present in the human population. A directory of mutations, if you like. Before we knew how many versatile exons there were, we assumed that would be a fairly simple matter, but now we know that it isn't. Now we know that there are some mutations that affect whole families of proteins, complicating the selection process considerably because it allows individual base changes to have complex combinations of positive and negative effects."

  He stopped to see whether he'd lost me yet. I just looked serious and said: "Go on. I'm listening."

  "Most of the genes that were mapped before the basic HGP map was complete were commonly expressed genes, producing proteins necessary to the functioning of each and every cell in your body. Exon sets that produce proteins that only function in highly specialized cells, or proteins that only function at certain periods of development, are much harder to track down, but we're gradually picking them off, one by one. Finding a protein is only the first step in figuring out what it does, though, and investigating whole families of proteins can be very tricky indeed." He frowned.

  "The exon set that we imported into your bladder cells was big, but by no means a mammoth, and our preliminary observations of its operation in vivo hadn't given us any cause to think that it was anything other than a straightforward single-protein-producer, but in the admittedly alien context of your bladder wall, the exons have revealed a hitherto unsuspected versatility. They're pumping out four different molecules, which might only be disassociated fragments of a single functional molecule, but which might be functional in their own right. At any rate, they're not the expected product. If it's all just biochemical junk, we're all wasting our time, but if it's not . . . well, we need to find that out."

  "Suppose my contract runs out before you do?" I asked, innocently.

  "There's a possibility of renewal," he said, and was quick to add, "at the designated higher rate, of course. You'll be getting all the customary overtime and unsocial-hours premiums while you're here, so this could work very much to your advantage. But to answer your earlier question, if you intended it seriously: no, you won't be able to patent anything on your own behalf, or share in any revenues from any patents we might obtain. That's not the way the system works."

  "I figured that," I admitted. "Am I the only person you've tried this virus on?"

  This time, Drs. Hartman and Finch looked at me very closely indeed. Mum had always told me that I had an innocent face, but this was the first time I'd had real cause to be glad about it.

  "No," Dr. Finch admitted. "We always replicate. That's standard procedure. But you're the only member of the cohort who's producing the anomalous protein-fragments, if that's what you want to know. People are different, Mr. Hepplewhite. It would be a dull world if we weren't."

  "Amen to that," I said. "It's okay if you're keen to get on. You can update me in the morning. I'd like to see the paperwork, though—see if I can get to grips with the specifics."

  That was over the top. They knew something was up. "You do realize, Mr. Hepplewhite," Hartman said, coldly, "that you've signed a non-disclosure agreement. In return for our taking proper care to obtain your informed consent to the experiment, you've guaranteed that everything we tell you, and anything you might find out on your own, is absolutely confidential."

  "Absolutely," I assured him. "But we all have to abide by the principle of informed consent, don't we. I'm consenting, so I need to be informed. Can I have the paperwork?"

  The CC-TV cameras were working to my advantage as well as theirs. They knew that if they found anything really interesting, their intellectual copyright claims would have to be cast iron. It wasn't enough for them to do everything by the book; they had to be seen to do everything by the book.

  "All right, Darren," Hartman said, pronouncing my name as if it were an insult. "We'll show you the records. That way, you'll know as much as we do." He was mocking me, but he was too careful to say out loud that I was too stupid to understand a word of it. I didn't mind. The assumption would make it all the more plausible when I started spelling out the long words audibly.

  There was, of course, a veritable mountain of paper—enough to keep me busy for a month, if I'd bothered to read every word—and I knew after a single glance that I wouldn't be able to understand it if I had a hundred years to study it, but I was all set to do my level best to sort out the good stuff from the blather. A fresh pot of tea arrived with the mountain in question, plus a pitcher of ice-water, a two-liter carton of fruit juice, three packets of crisps and a jar of salted peanuts. I noticed that the temperature of my room was a little on the warm side, and remembered that the pizza had been rather salty.

  I figured that it was going to be a long night, but I didn't even glance at the cable-TV guide that had been carefully placed on my bedside table. I had work to do.

  In the morning, Mum came to visit me—and she wasn't alone. The Vivaldi fan had spruced up a treat, although his blue suit was a little on the loud side.

  I figured out later that Mum must have told the receptionist that the guy was my big brother, but that when the data had been fed into the computer, the consequent mismatch with my records had set off an alarm. Mum had hardly had time to hug her little boy when Dr. Hartman came hurtling through the door, accompanied by a security man whose cauliflower ear definitely wasn't a fake.

  "I'm sorry, sir," Hartman said, "but you'll have to leave. I don't know who you are, but . . ."

  He was interrupted by the business card that the man in the blue suit was thrusting into his face. There was something on it that had stopped him in mid-flow, and I figured that it probably wasn't the name.

  "Matthew Jardine," Mum's companion said, helpfully. "I'm Mr. Hepplewhite's agent. I also represent Mrs. Hepplewhite, and her mother, a Mrs. Markham, currently resident in Whitby, Yorkshire. As you probably know, that's the entire family, unless and until someone can identify and trace Mr. Hepplewhite's father—who is probably irrelevant to our concerns."

  I was impressed. Signing Mum was one thing; signing Gran—if he really had signed Gran—represented serious effort and concern. On the rare days when she knew what day it was, Gran had a temper like a rat-trap.

  "Darren—Mr. Hepplewhite—signed all the relevant consent forms himself," Dr. Hartman said, through gritted teeth. "Even if whatever agreement you've signed with Mrs. Hepplewhite has some legal standing, which I doubt, you can't represent Darren. He's ours."

  "We shall, of course, dispute your claim," said Jardine, airily. "I think you might find that your forms are a trifle over-specific. Whi
le you might—and I stress the word might—be able to exercise a claim to ownership and control of the gene that you transplanted into Mr. Hepplewhite's bladder, the rights so far ceded to you cannot include the right to exploit genes that he has carried from birth, having inherited them from his parents. I have documents ready for Mr. Hepplewhite's signature that will give me power of attorney to negotiate on his behalf in respect of any and all royalties to be derived from the commercial exploitation of any exotic native proteins derivable from his DNA."

  While he was speaking, Jardine drew a piece of paper from his inside jacket pocket. It looked suspiciously slight to me, but Hartman was staring as it as if it were a hissing cobra, so I figured that it could probably do the job.

  "You told me I couldn't patent myself," I said to the doctor, in a deeply injured tone that was only partly contrived. "That's not what I call informed consent."

  "Don't sign that paper, Darren," Hartman said. "Our lawyers will be here within the hour. If you sign that thing, we'll all be tied up in court for the next twenty years. It'll be bad for you, bad for us, and bad for the cause of human progress. And if it should transpire that you've seen this man before, or had any dealings with him of any sort, you and he will probably end up in jail."

  "Mr. Hepplewhite and I have never met," Jardine lied, "although I do have the honor of his mother's acquaintance. While your robots have been working flat-out on Mr. Hepplewhite's genomic spectrograph, a similarly eager company has been working on hers—purely by coincidence, of course."

  "Coincidence, my arse!" Hartman retorted. "If you hadn't got your hands on some of Darren's samples . . ."

  "Before you level any wild accusations against my client," Jardine interrupted, smoothly, "it might be as well if you were to check the security of your computer systems."

  "He's not your client," Hartman came back. "And hacking databases is a crime too, in case you've forgotten. And we both know perfectly well that your hackers couldn't possibly have gotten enough out of routinely logged data to get you into a photo finish in figuring out what's going on. If you really have been to Whitby and back . . . you were a fool to come here, Mr. Jardine."