by J D Lasica
Sullivan moved closer to meet Waterhouse’s eyes. “Our clients want reassurances and guarantees. They need to feel absolutely confident that there’s not the remotest chance something will go wrong in our clinic.”
Waterhouse’s shoulders gave a small, involuntary shudder. The haunting memory of the early clinic trials came to him and crawled down his throat. He let it sit there, eating at his insides. His eyes scanned the room, looking for a drink but finding none.
“We need to think less biology and more psychology,” Sullivan went on. “We’re not here to sell babies in a test tube. We’re here to sell dreams. We’re the dream factory.” She moved to the far corner of the room, bent down, and lifted a long cardboard box stashed next to the sofa.
“Someone once said life is a journey between hope and fear.” She placed the box on the lacquer table in the center of the group and lifted the lid.
Teddy bears.
“Hope.” She squeezed a white bear and handed it to Harrison. “Never underestimate the power of hope. Clients come to us starry-eyed, full of dreams about home, hearth, family. And we play on those fuzzy feelings. Tell us your dream, we say. Then we listen. Do they want movie-star looks in their child? We can’t overpromise, but we can deliver beautiful eyes, a trim figure, a full head of hair, and lots more. We all pay lip service to individualism and diversity, but it’s the need to fit in and the desire for social status that drives us.”
“Fear.” She handed a light brown teddy bear to Tornquist. “Fear is the other great motivator. Every parent wants to protect her child from life’s pains and hardships. So our counselors sit down with our clients and probe their insecurities, vulnerabilities. To some degree, we’ve all felt cheated by the spin of the genetic roulette wheel. We let them know that Birthrights Unlimited is the solution to those anxieties.”
She tossed a teddy bear across the table to Waterhouse. “Our messaging has to make people feel convinced they—and only they—have an absolute right to decide what kind of children they want to bring into the world. They need to believe they have an inalienable right to choose their child’s innate endowment.”
She strolled toward the projection screen on the center wall console. “Let’s turn to internal messaging. All successful marketing starts with the company’s own employees. Does the B.U. Way need any revisions?”
The Birthrights Unlimited Way had been controversial early on when Waterhouse forced Human Relations to implement it as part of the hiring process for all new employees. New staffers were hired based on three qualities: intelligence/expertise, loyalty to Waterhouse and the company vision, and imagination/creativity. Applicants were asked, If you had the power to change three things about yourself at birth, what would they be? Those who couldn’t think of any flaws or potential enhancements were shown the exit.
Initially, there was some blowback. One disgruntled employee who had quit gave the Dallas newspaper an interview, describing Birthrights Unlimited as “a cult of personality.” Absurd, of course. Waterhouse knew it was important to get all employees aligned with his vision.
While employees were allowed to have kids the traditional way, the B.U. Way stressed that sex should be for fun, not for procreation. In the atrium, free condoms were set out like bowls of M&Ms. One-dollar T-shirts were available in the gift shop with SEX IS FOR FUN on the front and (NOT BABIES) on the back. Employees were given steep discounts if they wanted to start an Enhanced Family using the company’s IVF facilities for a surrogacy in which both parents were genetically linked to their modified, enriched offspring.
“I’ve heard no complaints about the B.U. Way,” Waterhouse said.
“Any changes needed here?” Sullivan made a swiping gesture with her hand to advance to the next slide. The screen showed the list of banned words at Birthrights Unlimited. In talking with existing and potential clients, in their phone calls with the press, in their emails with the public—hell, even in their dinner conversations with family members—employees were instructed to never use the forbidden words.
EUGENICS
DESIGNER BABIES
TEST TUBE BABIES
CLONE / CLONING
REPROTECH
GENETIC ENGINEERING
BIOHACK (except internally)
INTERBREED / BREEDING
SUPERIOR GENES
ARYAN
PLUS: Any symbol or reference that even remotely evokes Hitler or Nazism .
“Any other additions to our little list of verboten words?” Sullivan asked.
Everyone looked at each other. “How about Brave New World?” Tornquist offered.
Waterhouse nodded. “Sure, add it.” That book was still a headache, nearly a century after it came out.
“Why is Biohack up there?” Julia Wentworth did a search on her smartphone. “It says here that biohacking is just a way to enhance your body through lifestyle changes. Or adding some weird cybernetic devices to your body.”
“But it also means genetically modifying an organism.” Lee shot a cold glare at Sullivan. “After all, we don’t want to spook people.”
“It’s interesting to see Cloning up there.” Lance Harrison swiveled his office chair to face Sullivan. “Arguably, identical twins or triplets are clones that developed naturally. From a strictly scientific point of view, cloning is quite safe to perform, even trivial, once the ethics are stripped away. How long do you think it’ll be before we remove it from our list?”
“A generation, at minimum,” Sullivan replied.
Waterhouse agreed. He knew Harrison was always careful not to use the term with clients. It was still too much in the realm of spooky sci-fi, even though the Lab had been successfully using human cloning in secret for years—since even before the company was officially founded. The kids on stage at the Island Retreat were proof of that.
A generation from now, as cloning becomes public and more widespread, the stigma will fade. For now, though, Birthrights was doing what it could to make sure there wasn’t a new –ism added to the list of societal indignities. Racism. Sexism. Clonism.
“Let’s close by exploring some promising target audiences we’ve identified,” Sullivan said. “Carriers for a recessive disorder. If you and your fiancée discover you’re both carriers of a recessive gene for a serious illness like Tay-Sachs, your doctor will tell you to adopt, break up, or not have children. With our technology, we can correct the typo in the gene at the pre-embryo stage. Happy ending for the couple, who can now have their own healthy baby. Shout-out to Lance Harrison for advancing that use case.”
Harrison smiled and gave a theatrical little wave of his hand.
“A larger market opportunity is the hundreds of thousands of people on adoption waiting lists who are tired of the wait.” Sullivan advanced to the next slides. “Parents who’ve given birth to one child with a serious malady and want to make sure it doesn’t happen a second time. … Women who’ve had repeated miscarriages and would consider using a surrogate. … Breast cancer survivors who want daughters without the BRCA mutation.
“The overseas market. In India and China, the desire for baby boys is so great that it has skewed the population, producing lopsided gender ratios in spite of government pressure. I heard one expert who estimated those two countries alone were responsible for 100 million ‘missing’ girls.”
“The culture wants what the culture wants,” Waterhouse reminded everyone. “We don’t take sides. Let the parents decide.”
“Fortunately,” Sullivan interrupted, “in the U.S. there’s a slight preference for girls. I guess Americans are smarter on that score.”
A few chuckles at that.
“Some market opportunities will require a great deal of finesse,” Sullivan said. “Our market studies show a lot of men who couldn’t score a date with a pretty girl in high school now want to select a supermodel’s genes for a daughter. I don’t know what to do with that. … Sexual orientation is still a hot-button issue. A surprising number of our survey respondents said
, yes, they would want us to screen for a ‘gay gene’ once the science is th ere—and we’re partway there. Even supposed progressive couples want the screening.”
“Why am I not surprised,” Waterhouse said.
“Oh, there’s more.” Sullivan turned back to the screen. “Red-headed parents who don’t want their children to suffer the same slings and arrows they’ve endured.” She curled a strand of hair around her ear. “Women who’ve had breast implants and want their daughters to have naturally bigger cleavage.”
“That’s a good one,” Tornquist cut in. “Nobody wants a flat-chested daughter.”
Sullivan’s face went rigid. “Shall I continue?” She swiped to the next slide. “Mixed-race marriages where the couple can choose the skin color of their baby instead of leaving it to chance. Our studies show they’ll want to split the difference about ninety percent of the time.
“And here’s a target segment we haven’t considered before.” New slide. “Home DNA tests. Millions of us swab our cheek, mail our saliva sample to a genealogy company, and a few weeks later learn about our family history going back hundreds of years. Well, a lot of those results contain—how should I put this?—unwelcome surprises about our ancestry and where we came from.” She paused and let the silence fill in the rest.
Waterhouse saw where this was going. “So for their own future offspring, or their grandchildren, they could take control of their genetic heritage. Clean up their gene pool, so to speak.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa! Easier said than done,” Harrison warned. “If it should be done at all!”
“Duly noted.” Personally, Waterhouse found the idea of trying to “purify” one’s familial roots distasteful. But his personal feelings were irrelevant. He had engrained in the company culture the idea that the client can do no wrong, whether it came to selecting gender or sexual orientation or arranging for your child to be born deaf.
Let the customer decide. The marketplace always rules .
Sullivan advanced to the next slide. “Let me suggest one last market opportunity we’re exploring: parents who’ve lost a child.” The projection screen showed a downcast couple holding hands. “I can see some discreet, low-key outreach to hundreds of these support groups for bereaved parents, along with some financial incentives for referrals.”
She swiped to the final slide. The screen showed a photo of a smiling Valerie Ramirez.
She turned to Waterhouse. “A final thought. This company needs a public face for our ad campaigns, just like the big brands. I strongly recommend we use Valerie Ramirez—I’ve already reached out to her. Modern career woman. Attractive. Hispanic with cross-over appeal. In good shape, articulate, someone who clearly has a mom gene.”
True . We certainly don’t want a blonde, blue-eyed German as a spokesperson. Birthrights Unlimited was marketed to the world as an ultra-safe, venerable, trusted, exclusive upscale brand where couples or singles could take advantage of the company’s services without regard to creed or color.
“We tested Ramirez and she scores high across a wide range of demographics. When her son is born, her story would resonate, especially among single moms.”
Heads around the table nodded. “Get it done,” Waterhouse ordered.
Good presentation from Sullivan. She’d been hounding him to increase her access level so she could get a “three-sixty view” of what the company had in the pipeline.
He stood up, grabbed Sullivan by the elbow, and steered her toward the hallway. “Give us five minutes,” he said to the other execs. “Then you folks can wrap up.”
He walked with her a few steps, out of earshot of the others. Then he took out his phone and dialed the short code for his security chief. “Conrad, please upgrade Sullivan’s security permissions to Level One. ”
“Are you sure?” Conrad’s voice crackled through the smartphone speaker. “That lets her—”
“Don’t argue, just do it!”
He turned to her. “Sharon Sullivan, you are now one of five people in the world with Level One access.”
30
Brooklyn, New York, August 26
K aden knew what Randolph Blackburn would do the moment he dropped off their video call. Trash his computer, change his passwords, and try to secure his network.
But it was too late, mister.
Since the night she and Nico had broken into his estate, she had spent every waking moment following every digital footprint he left. The private accounts he logged into. The files he was updating on his computer. The websites of random gravesites he seemed fixated on.
His online forays were a hodgepodge of high finance, biotech headlines, and historical nostalgia. It made zero sense, at least to her. But there was one common denominator. The name Birthrights Unlimited kept cropping up, over and over again.
Before the video chat, she and her B Collective cohort had, of course, downloaded everything from his cloud storage and local computer files, and Nico had managed to create a presence on all of the private networks connected to Blackburn’s account, just to keep an eye on his online wanderings. Her B Collective buds were still in the process of filtering through all of his business contacts, term sheets, strategic partnership proposals, financial projections, data collection spreadsheets, browser history, and on and on.
For her part, Kaden was hoping to come across some mention—any mention—of her mother. But so far, nothing. Terabytes of data and not a hint of anything family-related.
“This could be interesting,” Sayeed called, nodding for her to come over to his stand-up workstation. They had all divvied up the materials to find some fresh avenues to explore.
Kaden walked over to his station.
Sayeed said, “We know Blackburn is the biggest investor in Birthrights Unlimited. He seems actively involved in their operations, while he’s hands off with all his other investments. And look at this—the most recent file in his Birthrights folder.”
Sayeed swiveled his screen to show her. Kaden inspected the one-page press release announcing the signing of “the spokesmom for Birthrights Unlimited,” along with a photo of a pretty dark-haired woman from Miami.
Kaden nodded. “Yeah, good find. Gotta start somewhere. I’ll read up more on her and then Nico and I will have a chat with Valerie Ramirez.”
She returned to her own station just as a new message hit her queue. She’d programmed her personal AI to screen out all the noise and surface only top priority messages.
The return address was masked, and so was the return IP address—the message bounced off encrypted servers in a dozen countries before it reached her, according to the AI readout. Somebody knew what they were doing.
The message was cryptic enough: “Thought you’d want to know.”
So far, it seemed like typical spam. But her AI rarely led her astray .
She scanned the attachment for malware, opened it, and began reading. The long electronic document went on for pages and pages, with dates and detailed annotations. Medical conditions, detailed physical traits, birthmarks, genetic defects, weight (new entry every month), school records (including suspensions), favorite foods, interests, diary entries, notable behaviors and personality traits, shopping habits, social skills—even menstrual cycles.
She scanned through the document once, not quite believing what she was seeing. Then she returned to the top and began reading it more carefully.
Kaden Taylor Baker [birth name redacted]
Primary DB: BU-Dallas | Mirror: Tiraspol
File #000000001
Tracker: Paul Baker
Tracker ID: DENV100311WRJ@XY
Tracking initiated: 9 years 4 months 21 days ago
What the holy hell?
31
Dallas, August 26
W aterhouse paused outside the office of his chief legal counsel. He tapped the small metal container in the right pocket of his jogging outfit, then rapped on the door. He was actually looking forward to this workout. They could get in some mid-day exercise
and knock off some important legal crap at the same time.
The door opened and Alan Tornquist retreated into his office, bent down on one knee, and began lacing his tennies.
“Ready?” Tornquist said.
“Let’s make this quick.” Waterhouse led the way down three flights of stairs to the Birthrights Unlimited gym. He and Tornquist used to do this once a week before things had gotten crazy.
He had recruited Tornquist, as he had recruited other members of the executive team, for his unbridled loyalty, take-no-prisoners philosophy, and unapologetic commitment to getting filthy rich.
Tornquist was a short man with thin hair, bad skin, and smoky rings under his eyes. At forty-eight he was just three years older than Waterhouse, but in ticket lines lately he’d been getting offers of senior citizen discounts. He said he’d felt trapped at the law firm in Los Angeles—the traffic was a nightmare, the three-martini lunches had turned into four, and he was certain he would be dead at fifty-five. Waterhouse offered him an escape, a change of scenery, an opportunity to be part of something epic.
He and Tornquist had managed Petrov’s newborn snatch-and-grab reasonably well, but Waterhouse wanted no more blindsides. He whipped out his smartphone and made a short voice memo: Reminder to see if Valerie Ramirez—our new spokesmom—has an AI device in her house that Conrad’s people can penetrate. No more surprises.
As he and Tornquist entered the gym and began warming up on two StairMasters, his mind wandered, as it often did, to Randolph Blackburn. Blackburn had begun badgering him about the DNA Legends at every turn. Today Blackburn had left another voicemail, saying only, “Waterhouse, you’re running out of time.” A thinly veiled reference to the deadline he couldn’t afford to miss—just three days away.
Waterhouse had learned a lesson from his mishap with Petrov, and he would not make the same mistake. This time, he was committed to moving ahead with the grave teams on August 29—even if a lot of the details were still up in the air.