Body by Blood

by Patrick Johnston

  Riddell answers at a table behind me, “We’ll be the filter for that financial offer, Madam President.”

  I turn to nod at him, and Riddell gives me a thumbs-up.

  “What about my duties at the company, Ivan? Do I even have duties?”

  “An office, but no duties. It’d take several years of full-time schooling for you to just get up-to-date on the technology. Clearly, you’re, uh,”—he clears his throat, his gaze darting around the room—“you’re a bit behind the times.”

  The physicians bristle with nervous laughter. I can tell I have offended them with my outburst on the Verity Wing.

  “I was practically euthanized and chilled at negative 196 degrees Celsius for 27 years,” I reply with a grin. “What did you expect of me upon my awakening besides being behind the times? At least I’ve still got my charm.”

  The mood in the room lightens a bit.

  “Thank you so much for the offer, Madam President.” Morgan reaches across the table to shake her hand. “It’s right down Raymond’s alley.”

  I take a deep breath and smile at President Sayder. “I am honored to serve.”

  I’m back. Everything’s going to be all right.

  5

  AFTER AN HOUR OF NEAR-SUPERNATURAL passion with Morgan, and four hours of deep sleep, my mind and body waken as active and alert as I’ve ever been. It doesn’t keep me from trying to catch some more shut-eye, but I couldn’t sleep if my life depended on it. Clearly, my body’s been engineered to require very little rest for maximum performance.

  When Morgan finally opens her eyes, she excitedly informs me that she has a surprise for me. She refuses to divulge, but from her choice of outfits, it is pretty obvious what she has in mind. Normally, she would wear a summer dress to the dock and strip down to her bright pink bikini once she boarded our yacht, but she apparently considers that old-fashioned. She insists on sporting her bikini from the moment we step out of the front door, and even through the two department stores she stops to shop at en route to the dock. Once we leave port, even that is too much fabric for her, fearing “the distractive tan lines of yesteryear.”

  It takes a few minutes to familiarize myself with the luxurious yacht to which Morgan has upgraded, but soon we are speeding east. In a half an hour, the shore has disappeared and we are encapsulated in sunshine and salty waves in every direction. We enjoy the dolphins, bask in the Jacuzzi, and sip chilled twenty-seven-year chardonnay, chatting till dusk.

  “I saved the bottle since the day you were preserved.” She swirls the cool liquid in her wine glass.

  “Thank you for waiting for me.”

  “I knew it’d be worth the wait. I put this chardonnay in a prominent place on our mantel. It brought me comfort, knowing that Ivan was planning to bring you back some day and we would enjoy this together.”

  The thought of that day stirs some distrust in me. “Why did you go through with it? I clearly said that I wanted to live.”

  She smiles uncomfortably, as if she’s in denial of some shame associated with the memory. “The document had already been signed, and everything was in motion.” She shrugs. “You’re the one that made it irreversible. Don’t you remember?”

  I set down my glass and try to recall.

  “You were concerned that you would be delirious at the end, so you had Vlad make the document irrevocable without three psychiatrists confirming you were of sound mind.” The excuse sets me reasonably at ease, and in a moment my eyes are feasting on the curves of my wife’s amazing body. “Oh, dear, do you regret it?” She draws close to me and looks up into my eyes. “Don’t you prefer a wife who looks like a 25-year-old cover girl instead of a sagging 70-year-old nursing home patient?”

  I think for a moment, introspective, keeping silent.

  “Dr. Cranton said that if your body withered away much more, your resurrection may have been impossible. They found many genetic aberrancies in your DNA, and they had a difficult time correcting them, which was necessary before they could even create your dupe.”

  “What genetic aberrancies?”

  She pursed her lips. “You had a genetic mutation that gave you a good chance of developing testicular cancer, not just lymphoma. You were a genetic carrier for dozens of diseases, and dispositions for certain diseases. Cardiomyopathy and epilepsy were two of them, I think. Oh, the list was as long as my arm.”

  She begins to take a sip of her wine and then hesitates. “Oh, wait. Call coming.” Morgan taps behind her right ear. “Yes, Quaid?” Her optimistic wide-eyed stare at the horizon suddenly becomes a warm smile. “You approve of the contract? Great.” She listens for a moment. “Thank you both so much.”

  This tapping behind the ear to answer phone calls is unusual, but no more unusual, I suppose, than it was when people started communicating through wireless Bluetooth earpieces.

  She taps behind her ear again to end the call. “Quaid and Vlad have given their go-ahead. The President will be flown to our yacht by helicopter tomorrow morning, arriving at nine, for your final approval and your marching orders.”

  Although I am still conflicted over the ethics of what we are doing, I beam with pride in how far I’ve come, how lovely my wife is, how wealthy we are, and how famous I’ll become as the public face of the New Body science.

  I clear my throat. “Do Savannah and Louie have the same diseased genes?”

  “Of course. You and I passed down our genetic dispositions. But not for long.”

  “Tell me about ‘em. I can’t get them out of my mind.”

  She drank down the rest of her chardonnay and poured herself another glass. “Louie is in San Francisco. He’s on his second marriage to an attorney named William. Louie is halfway through his first new body. He and his husband have adopted two boys and named them Frank after your dad, and Gene after William’s.”

  My jaw drops. “Louie’s gay?”

  “Since his first marriage ended in divorce, yes. He’s also HIV positive, a drug-resistant strain, but that’s not going to be a problem. He’ll probably have a new body before he has any symptoms. He’s practically a god to the gay movement, quite the national figure. Though, if you ask me, much of that fame was riding on the coattails of a famous father. For a while, he lobbied for federal funding to identify ‘the gay gene,’ but when it was feared that the discovery would lead to a search for ‘the cure’ to homosexuality, he was persuaded to abandon those efforts.”

  She must be able to tell that I’m uncomfortable with the information about my son, so she changes the subject to speak about Savannah. I stop her. “I didn’t mean to have such a frown on my face when you talked about Louie, Morgan. I’m not homophobic, you know that.”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s just that I didn’t expect my only boy to turn out gay and, and”—I turn the statement into a question—“HIV positive? Louie?”

  “I understand.” Morgan sighs and pats me on the hand reassuringly. “It doesn’t carry the negative stigma it did three decades ago. Today, even consensual M.B.L. practitioners and bug-chasers are tolerated and embraced.”

  “M.B.L. practitioners?”

  She furrows her brow at me, as if I should know this. “Man-boy-love.”

  I flinch. “What’s a bug-chaser?”

  “Gays who seek out HIV infection as if it were a fashion symbol. Most think they simply crave the thrill of the threat of risky sex, but I think most of them just want the monthly disability checks.”

  That information turns my stomach. “Tell me about Savannah.”

  “Savannah’s still bitter, unfortunately. She keeps her distance. She is engaged to a stockbroker named Jeffrey Gilmore. They have one child and named her . . . ” She pauses and frowns, as if something has suddenly upset her.

  “What is it?”

  She clears her throat. “They named her Mary Nell. They wanted only one child, so I think that’s it for them.”

  “Why is she bitter? Remind me?”

  “Don’t you reme
mber? We had a falling out about six months before you were, um, cryo-preserved.”

  “Oh, yeah.” We had some contentious conversations near the end. “Has she lightened up with her attacks on me?”

  Morgan shakes her head as she reaches into her purse on the deck beside the Jacuzzi. “Not really. I ordered her a new body off her cord blood, hoping to change her mind. With her genetic platform, it’s just a matter of time before her diseases begin to manifest, and then she’ll be more receptive. I guarantee it. She’s so, so stubborn. It’s too bad she’ll have to wait another eight years now.”

  She opens a palm-held image album and hands it to me with a picture on the screen. “Here’s Savannah with her fiancé and daughter.”

  The happy threesome stand in front of the Statue of Liberty. It gives me an unfamiliar warmth, a euphoria that simultaneously fills me with regret for the years of her life I missed. “Oh, she’s beautiful. I miss her.” I gaze at her longingly for a moment. “What if Savannah doesn’t change her mind when her dupe ripens? The protocol only goes to eight years. What becomes of her dupe?”

  “Ivan will probably cryo-preserve it until Savannah changes her mind, be it in five, ten, or thirty years. And if she never wants it, that’s her choice. They’ll just dispose of it. You know, recycle it to get some good out of it.”

  “It?” I study Morgan for a moment. “You saw that poor girl that looked just like Savannah, tied to that gurney, crying and wailing, physically perfect with the exception of what would have been a barely perceptible scar above her eye and a little too much romantic affection for the opposite sex. They terminated her, Morgan. Does that bother you?”

  Morgan looks at me as if I am giving an argument for aliens living inside my brain—like I’m crazy and out of touch with reality.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” I urge her. “I’m serious.”

  She shakes her head and begins to search her purse for her lipstick, as is her custom when I have insulted her with my words. “It’s not a person, Raymond,” she frowns. “The Supreme Court has ruled on this several times. Your DNA is your property, including any modification of it.”

  She reapplies her lipstick. “With the separation of church and state fully integrated into American society, judges only look at the facts and the law, not tradition, not superstition, and not a book of Scripture. All but the most extreme anti-choice groups agree that dupes are sub-human, and that commercial cloning is an inevitability that they are content to try to regulate. The fringe proponents of banning cloning or banning the termination of clones have completely disappeared off the national scene. The benefit to humanity far, far outweighs any consideration of a dumb lab monkey. You must know that.”

  Dumb lab monkey? Humankind certainly evolved in the past 27 years. There must be something wrong with my mind for me to be so critical of the very same terms of dehumanization that I employed throughout my career. Perhaps Ivan can discover what deleterious genes were responsible for this freakish quirk of human nature that makes me feel a pang of guilt at Morgan’s words, so we can purify the human race of such unreasonable scruples.

  I look more carefully at Savannah’s daughter in the picture. She looks to be about three years old. She has abnormal facial features. “Does Mary Nell have Trisomy 21?”

  “Yes, Down Syndrome.”

  “And Savannah kept her?”

  Morgan nods. “Savannah’s still a health nut who thinks the medical community has kept the cure for cancer under wraps for forty years for profit. She thinks obstetricians are involved in some great conspiracy to convince the public that pregnancies are pathological illnesses. So she decided to birth at home with a hairy midwife.”

  She releases an embarrassed chortle.

  I smile. “That’s the Savannah I know and love.” Always going against the grain. GMO-free, oil-rubbing hippy. “Does she still avoid soap?”

  Morgan laughs. “No, I think her ideals are finally growing lukewarm in her old age. Being Savannah, she refused some of the prenatal testing, otherwise the defect would have been caught and the pregnancy certainly would have been aborted. Mary Nell, to her mother’s credit, does talk better than most Down Syndrome children.”

  “Can Ivan fix Mary Nell?”

  “No, hon. You should know that. Her genetic code is in every cell of her body.”

  I shake my head, feeling like a fool. “Of course.”

  “I did put an order in last year for Mary Nell’s new body.”

  “Really? You can do that without Savannah’s consent?”

  “I’m the wife of the Raymond Verity. I can do what I want.” Morgan raises her eyebrows and wags her head in her sassy fashion, as if she’s some untouchable Hollywood superstar who will assert her will, regardless of who it offends. I’ll bet she has a jpeg of my signature on her P.C.

  “Will the courts let you?”

  She shrugs. “I may appeal to the courts to do what’s best for Mary Nell, regardless of her parents’ wishes.”

  “You would do that?”

  “Undoubtedly they would rule in our favor. I mean, they let physicians remove obese citizens from their homes and incarcerate them in wards until they lose their excess weight.”

  “What? You’re kidding, right?”

  She furrows her brow, as if she is offended that I dare to doubt her honesty. “The courts respect that freedom is worthless without health, and freedom abused is abuse of others, for we are all connected in this socialist society. If someone abuses themselves, they abuse others through forcing them to fund their preventable surgeries and their medications through taxation and—”

  “Well, quit forcing people to pay for another’s medication,” I interrupt.

  She squints her eyes at me. “What planet are you from? Healthcare’s a right, not a luxury. The precedent’s firm: if I asked a judge to replace my defective, tax-wasting granddaughter with a productive dupe, the courts would predictably rule in my favor, Ray. But I don’t think I’ll need to appeal to the courts. When Savannah realizes that Mary Nell’s new body has already been ordered and that unused dupes are recycled or terminated, she will consent. When she realizes that her new daughter’s potential won’t be inhibited by a speech impediment, physical deformity, heart valve surgeries, ear tubes, mental retardation, infertility . . . ”

  “Down Syndrome doesn’t cause infertility! They can marry and procreate.”

  “And have normal babies?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And who’s going to marry them, Ray?”

  “They can marry each other and still make normal babies.”

  She shakes her head side to side. “Which judge is going to grant that child-bearing license. Not one in this country.”

  The cold, hard reality strikes me full force. I guess I knew it all along, I just suppressed the notion. Every dupe is terminated anyway, whether the owner accepts the new body or not. We grow them to exploit them. “So one of them’s going to die.”

  Morgan takes my statement personally. She harrumphs and guzzles down her glass to pour another, as if the process is sufficient to distract her from my point. I study the picture of Savannah and Mary Nell, appreciating the innocent smile on the face of the three-year-old granddaughter I have never met. “Wait, Mary Nell’s brain is Downs. How can they transplant her brain into her perfected dupe?”

  Morgan sighs, swirling her drink as she speaks. “There’s a special protocol in such cases. The dupe will be a genetically perfect replica of Mary Nell—no Trisomy, no cancer genes, and no abnormalities. This dupe will be educated, not medically servilized, and can be processed into the host’s family quicker than the usual eight years. The dupe will completely replace Mary Nell. No transplantation. The dupe’s mind will be a blank slate for new memories of her new home and new parents. It’s better than what our granddaughter can do now with her defective mind.”

  She must be able to read my mind from my facial features, for she immediately gets defensive. “Don’t be so judgment
al, Ray. It’s better for everyone. More happiness. Less suffering. Less cost. Better future.”

  “So the ‘it’ is going to magically become a ‘her’ when the real Mary Nell is terminated?”

  “Huh?”

  “The ‘it’—Mary Nell’s dupe—is going to magically become a ‘her’ when the real Mary Nell is killed. That’s what you’re saying, right?”

  She sighs and gulps down her chilled wine. “Why are you doing this?” Her words are slurred from the alcohol, and her tone is less respectful. “You pioneered this, babe. You laid the foundation of the New Body science. You’ve got to adapt to the new world you, you, uh, you . . . ”

  “Envisioned.”

  “Yeah. You envisioned.”

  I am dumbfounded by Morgan’s stubborn reluctance to admit the self-evident cruelty of these transactions. But she is right. It is a transaction I perfected.

  I climb out of the hot tub and lean against the bar that separates me from the ocean. They’re going to terminate my grandchild, my only grandchild. My wife stands with a swagger and wraps her arms around my waist. I fix my eyes on the sunset, so beautiful on the western horizon here, twenty miles off the Chesapeake Bay.

  “I’m sorry I spoke to you like that, Ray. But you’ve got to think of the good. The end justifies the means, right? You taught me that when you knowingly wandered into legal trouble creating vaccines from aborted fetal stem cells, when you commercially sold fetal tissue to cleaning product manufacturers and research companies. Remember your early attempts at cloning humans and chimeras? Remember? Other researchers were quiet about it, but you went public. You defied the bigoted precedent. Remember the lawsuits and the warrant?” She begins to rub some more coconut-scented tanning lotion on my bare back. “You did what everyone knew could be done, and wanted to do, but didn’t have the guts to do.”