Dr. Bell positions the tray next to the barred door of her cage. From the adjacent cell, the macaque with the white tuft looks on, baring its teeth at their captor when he approaches but relaxing when he steps back.
In such puzzles, the aim is to move the fewest matchsticks to leave a valid equation. Removing two of the vertical matches from XXIII leaves XXI; placing one of those on the right hand side transforms II to III—twenty-one divided by seven equals three, but there is a leftover match.
A single matchstick from either side could be placed over the equals sign, rendering the non-equation correct but pointless. Unlikely to be the answer.
“Do hurry up, Arky. My espresso is getting cold.”
She ignores the other her. Roman numerals are cumbersome to use for even basic arithmetic; little wonder they were overtaken by the Arabic version used today. The influence of Rome does live on, of course, in the Latin alphabet. Curious that Ancient Greece, which laid the foundation of Western politics, philosophy, and culture, is barely visible on a modern keyboard—with the exception of the humble letter “Y”, which the French still call the “i grec”. The influence of Greek mathematicians like Pythagoras does live on, partly through the use of Greek letters for certain concepts such as…
She takes one of the vertical matches from the numerator and lays it across the top of the two matchsticks on the right-hand side.
“It should really be approximately equals,” she says. “But twenty-two divided by seven equals 3.142857… which is tolerably close to 3.141592… Or, more precisely, π—pi.”
“Oh good show, Miss Arcadia,” Dr. Bell seems genuinely pleased. He places a croissant and a coffee in the metal hatch outside each cage and slides it in. The design makes it possible to do this without risk of them touching him.
“Word for the wise, Arky,” Moira observes. “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you. Grab it, steal the keys, and make a run for it. Isn’t that right, doc?”
Dr. Bell rubs his own hand, an old injury? “Quite, Moira. Enjoy your breakfast, ladies. I have some errands to run but will be back within the hour.”
Seeing Moira drink her espresso, she eats her own croissant and tastes the coffee. Very good indeed. The caffeine also helps to make her more alert. Why would Dr. Bell want that?
“I guess you should have stayed in Paris,” she says, breaking off a piece of pastry to share it with the macaque.
“What?” Moira takes a bite of her own croissant and then laughs. “Oh, the escape room. No, though I did learn French one weekend, I’ve not yet been to the city of light. Do you know how often they change their underwear?” She pauses, then adds: “C’est pas quotidian, hein?”
“But you said—”
“I say a lot of things,” Moira cuts her off. “And I say them for a reason, but that’s not the same as them necessarily being true.” The other her raises an eyebrow slightly
A signal? Clearly Dr. Bell can listen to their conversation. Is Moira proposing some kind of plan?
“It’s like the riddle about the raven and the writing desk,” the other her says. “You did understand it in the end?”
“That some riddles have no answer—or many answers,” she replies.
“Precisely. Much like our predicament this morning. There may be no escape, or many. As you will have noticed, the cage doors have electromagnetic locks. There are at least three ways to open them. One is with the key that our friend Dr. Bell carries in his right trouser pocket. A second is with the master switch in the control room at the end of the hall.”
“Or else cut power to the whole building,” she adds.
“Why, aren’t you coming along!” Moira beams at her. “There’s probably a backup generator to stop that happening, but yes, it would work.”
She tries to ignore the patronising tone.
“But then what?” Moira continues. “Leave this room and where do we go? The good doctor has my revolver and is a passable shot. Perhaps you are familiar with the story of the two hikers in Yosemite National Park who encounter a grizzly bear. One of the men takes off his backpack and starts changing from his hiking shoes into his running shoes. ‘What are you doing?’ the other man says. ‘You can’t outrun a grizzly!’ The first man looks at his companion: ‘But I don’t need to outrun the grizzly. I only need to outrun you.’”
“So your plan is to outrun me in case Dr. Bell takes a shot at us?”
“Oh my little bag of hammers, you’re far too literal. What I mean is that we need a plan that incapacitates the grizzly also. Now let me tell you another story, one I hope you will remember as it may come in handy one day. An Arab sheikh wants to decide which of his two sons should inherit his fortune. There are many versions of this story, but it’s always the boys that get the money, for some reason. In any case, the sheikh has an odd challenge: the two boys must race their camels to a distant city, but the one whose camel gets there last wins. The two lads wander around aimlessly for days, but neither wants to lose their inheritance by arriving first. Finally, they chance upon a wise man and ask him for guidance. After hearing what he has to say, they jump on the camels and race to the city as fast as they can. So the question is: what did the wise man say to them?”
Another puzzle? Even trapped in a laboratory surrounded by monkeys, Moira seems incapable of having a direct conversation. Was this how she experienced the world from her petri dish—one puzzle at a time?
This one is simpler, however. “He said: ‘switch camels’,” she replies.
“Exactly.” Moira leans back with a satisfied smile and drains the rest of her triple espresso, as if that explained everything.
Arcadia turns to the macaque with the tuft of white hair in the cage next to her own. “Do you understand what my sister is talking about?” she asks, passing the last piece of croissant through the bars of the cage.
It was a rhetorical question, but the monkey looks her in the eye as she speaks. Putting the pastry in its mouth, it raises its shoulders in a gesture that could easily be mistaken for a shrug.
“I need to go to the bathroom,” Moira calls out.
“I thought he said he was leaving to run errands,” she says.
“Nonsense, he’s in the control room or somewhere nearby preparing for whatever is going to happen next.”
“Quite right, Moira,” Dr. Bell says, walking back in. “And it’s soon enough that I don’t think a walk to the bathroom is a particularly good idea. You can urinate through the cage floor like the other primates.”
“But what if it’s a number two?” Moira enquires innocently. “Do the monkeys throw their faeces at you?”
“They have learned”—he coughs—“not to do so.”
“So what does happen next?” Arcadia asks.
Dr. Bell now holds an iPad and is making a show of being absorbed by what it displays. “Next,” he says, “we complete your destiny.”
“My destiny?” she replies. “I thought I was the control, while Moira was the main event.”
He chuckles as he looks up from the tablet. “Moira is brilliant in her own way. But when you light a candle with a blowtorch, it tends to burn out too quickly—doesn’t it, Moira?”
The other her rolls her eyes.
“Moira is indeed the future,” Dr. Bell continues, speaking to Arcadia. “A future in which we can remove genes that bring disease and suffering. But also add genes that will make us smarter, faster, happier. More than that, she is living proof that the brain can develop well after birth. Genes are the source code of life, but epigenetics lets us adapt that programme—adding neurons, repairing connections. We can enhance the brain well beyond what we might now call genius. She told you, I presume, about her IQ tests?” A sideways glance at Moira gets another eye roll.
“Unfortunately,” he says, “the same biological processes that accelerated her neurological development accelerated everything else also. You have doubtless worked out her age is far less than her physiology suggests.” He turns back to Moira. “
We’ll be celebrating your fourth birthday soon, won’t we?”
“That’s twenty-eight in dog years,” the other her replies with a wink. In the fluorescent light, the grey in Moira’s hair is now more evident.
“As we refine the technique, there are some things we can adapt, of course.” Though still fiddling with the iPad, he is watching Arcadia carefully now. “Repairing severely damaged brains—a patient suffering from cerebral hypoxia, for example. Lack of oxygen can drive the brain into a coma, but the treatment I have developed could reverse neuronal cell death and bring about a partial or even full recovery for such a patient.”
For such a patient as Mother.
“So why haven’t you published this research, started clinical trials?” She has read every medical journal article on comas published in the last thirty years; there has been no mention of this treatment. Even as the words leave her mouth, it is clear that she is being manipulated. But she has vowed to try.
“This technology is not yet mainstream, shall we say.” Dr. Bell flicks at the iPad with a frown, dismissing a piece of unhelpful information. “So-called ‘ethics’ can be a great hindrance to great work. That’s why my research on rhesus monkeys had to go underground, so to speak. Between the government and the damned animal liberationists it was becoming harder and harder to run a laboratory. As for clinical trials, the human subject protocols at Oxford would have made my work impossible. Even if I did receive approval, how does one demonstrate the upper limits of intellectual capacity when the volunteers are likely to be the dregs of society—the unemployed and ex-prisoners? The macaques I could import through the black market, but where was I going to get human subjects whom I could groom for greatness?”
“I thought university students participated in those studies all the time,” she says.
“They do, but I needed a controlled environment from before birth. To measure the impact of parentage and genetic enhancements against environmental factors like school and home life—nature vs nurture—with an eye to the next phase of human evolution. Yes, Moira may be the future. But you, Miss Arcadia, you are very much the present.”
“Why me? When the Hebrons died, you signed their death certificates and put me with Mother and Father. You arranged for me to go to the Priory School under Milton and sent Miss Alderman to keep an eye on us both. But why did you choose me in the first place?”
“I didn’t really choose you, Miss Arcadia. We chose each other.”
She shakes her head, a truth dawning that she is unwilling to accept. “What are you talking about?”
“Here it comes,” says Moira. “You can choose your friends but you sho’ can’t choose your family.”
Dr. Bell puts the iPad on the bench and approaches her cage. “It means that you’re my daughter, Arcadia.”
9
IDENTITY
“That’s impossible,” she says, even as she realises that it is not. “You said your wife died years before I was born.” Yet he also said that she reminds him of her.
Dr. Bell stands before her cage door, examining her closely. “CRISPR technology may be new, but frozen embryo transfer is a technique from the previous century. My wife died in childbirth, the birth of our son, but we had taken the precaution of freezing embryos to carry on our work.”
“You experimented on your own children?”
“We experimented on ourselves,” he says firmly. “And look what we achieved. Edith and I were among the brightest of our generation, but all we could do to expand our own horizons was to use nootropics as stimulants. The quantum leap was the generation gap: taking the best of ourselves and then supplementing those genes with the best possible environment from the moment of conception.
“It’s not so unusual, I suppose. Many women today take fish oil, folic acid, vitamin supplements, and so on during pregnancy. Edith and I developed a more elaborate regime of fatty amine compounds to encourage neurological development. There were some side effects in the early stages. Our son was born with a metabolic disorder—but, of course, you know all about that.”
Magnus. “Your wife died when Magnus was born?”
“Yes. He was an enormous baby but she insisted on carrying him to term. When he was at last delivered the strain was too much for her—she suffered a postpartum haemorrhage and—and died. I vowed to carry on our work and, seven years later, you were born.”
“And you, you just gave us up without wanting to be part of our lives?”
“I gave you up so that I could help shape your life better than a mere parent ever could! I couldn’t be a father and a scientist. So I found a couple who wanted children and were willing to accept the conditions that came with it: diet, tests, a school environment all geared towards enhancing your abilities.”
“Mens sana in corpore sano,” she whispers. Then more loudly: “But to what end?”
“Why does there need to be an end? Isn’t the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake what has always driven innovation?”
Necessity also typically plays a role, but hold that thought for later. “And then you wanted to go further,” she says, “beyond what was possible in nature, so you created Moira.”
“Only one of the original frozen embryos was viable—you—so as a further safeguard I caused it to divide and re-divide, keeping the monozygotes stored in liquid nitrogen. It took another decade before the technology was available to move beyond nurturing the strongest qualities in one embryo to editing the very genes of another. The risks increased also, but as a prototype Moira is truly remarkable.”
“A prototype?”
“I suppose she wasn’t technically the first,” Dr. Bell replies. “After you, Arcadia, came Beatrix, then Cassiopeia, Delilah, and so on. But none of them survived more than a couple of days. Lyra lasted almost a week, but it was only with Moira that we achieved stability. Though I’m not sure a psychologist would entirely agree that you are stable, eh Moira?”
The other her leans back in her cage, fingers interlaced behind her head. “Oh I’m crazy like a fox, Daddy. Remember, Arky: if you’re going through hell, keep going.”
“Wait.” She processes information faster than most, but this is a lot, even for her. “I have—I had—eleven other sisters, all of whom died because you were experimenting on them?”
“You make it sound very dramatic,” says her fath—says Dr. Bell with a frown. “They were clones and they died well before they had the capacity for conscious thought. We only even gave them all names because Moira insisted. ‘Thirteen’ wasn’t good enough for her poetry, apparently.”
“That’s not the point,” Arcadia interjects.
“Of course it’s the point! Through Moira, we have demonstrated our ability to change our very genetic makeup and radically expand our intellectual potential. The next step is to ensure that that potential lasts over a full life cycle or longer.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Even if Moira is only a few years old, if you could accelerate her growth surely you can slow it down again?”
“Alas, no,” he replies. “The acceleration is at the genetic level and this affects cell growth and decay through her entire body. You know what telomeres are, I assume?”
She does. Stretches of DNA at the ends of chromosomes, they are sometimes compared to plastic tips on shoelaces. Telomeres help prevent the chromosomes from fraying, which would scramble genetic information. Over time, however, they shorten and eventually cannot hold the chromosome together. Linked with ageing, the shoelace analogy is sometimes replaced with the metaphor of a bomb fuse. “You light a candle with a blowtorch and it burns out too quickly,” she whispers.
“That’s right, Arky,” Moira pipes up cheerily. “I’m dying. Well, technically we’re all dying. But I’m likely to die first, right, doc? That is, unless you want to hand me back my revolver so that I can push you to the front of the queue.”
“Not today, Moira,” is his deadpan response.
“I’m sorry,” she says to her sister.<
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“Don’t be,” Moira replies. “Life’s a terminal disease for everyone, Arky. I’ve probably got another few years. And though Dr. Feelgood here has given up on me, I have a few ideas that I want to try out before shuffling off this mortal coil.”
“I haven’t given up on you, Moira,” Dr. Bell says. “Just this version of you. That’s why you’re here—to help finetune mark fourteen. I’m thinking Natalia might be a nice name?”
“How about ‘No Man’?” the other her replies.
“Hmm?” Dr. Bell frowns again. “Now you’re confusing your Greek myths. That’s Odysseus rather than Oedipus.”
“Exactly,” Moira says, her voice rising, “just before Odysseus puts a red hot poker in his captor’s eye!” From within her cage, Moira lunges forward at the bars.
It is a feint, but their captor jumps back despite himself, almost dropping the iPad. As he straightens up, he comes too close to the cage of the white-tufted macaque. With a screech it reaches out a paw and scratches at his face. A line of red appears on his cheek and he winces in pain.
“Nice one, George,” Moira says to the monkey, which bares its teeth at Dr. Bell.
“To think,” Dr. Bell says, staunching the flow of blood with a handkerchief, “that I was about to say that I would miss you, Moira. I certainly won’t be missing you,” he adds to the macaque, which hisses in response.
Not one sister but a dozen sisters. Their lives created and destroyed by this man. This monster. Her father.
“But why do all this,” she says helplessly. “What end could possibly be worth the death of your own children? How smart do I have to be—how smart does Moira, or Natalia, or anyone else have to be to justify all this suffering?”
“Don’t be so short-sighted,” he replies, examining the reddened handkerchief. “Our intellect is merely the means to an end. The end itself is to fix the ultimate design flaw in humanity.”
“Which is our ignorance?”
“No, our death. I am going to cure death.” Blood is still flowing from his cheek, undermining the portentous tone of his voice.
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