Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  This statement is not exactly intriguing, but it is, at least, not boring. She has dangled a mystery. Metaphor.

  “What’s happened in the last six months?” I reluctantly ask her. I notice that I have paddled slightly closer to her side of the pool.

  “It’s a mess, Your Highness,” she says. “The world is splitting into two.”

  She switches on the projector and at once a full-color, three-dimensional video image springs to life above the water of the pool, looking real enough to touch. It shows me the United States Congress, which is immediately recognizable thanks to the words United States House of Representatives, which are written across the bottom of the image.

  “You’re probably thinking, ‘This girl got saddled with me at the last minute and is just throwing this lesson together,’ but you’re wrong,” Frances says, her vivid eyes fixed on the video image. “I put thought into what we should cover—what I’d want to know if I were you, Alexios.” (I’m certain that the concept of what I, Alexios, would like to know has never occurred to Mr. Tavoularis. I am drawn in.) “Really there are three things to tell you. First, what’s happening in the United States.”

  The image above the pool switches to a female reporter standing outside a white-domed building. Her feet seem to disappear into the pool water.

  “Today, the United States passed a fourth human germline improvement bill,” the woman says, “vastly expanding the list of approved permanent modifications—those that can be passed on through DNA to future generations—and the list of single-generation modifications that can be legally performed in the US.”

  Frances freezes the video.

  “What has Mr. Tavoularis told you about modification in the US?” she asks me.

  “Nothing,” I tell her. But instead of lapsing into silence, I find myself saying more. “My first clinic was in the United States, though. I was never allowed outside there, but I know they do mods in the US, and the mods don’t always work out the way people expect. They keep trying anyway.”

  Frances is chewing on her thumb and also looking at my body, which is mostly beneath the surface. “That’s actually a pretty good summary. But I’ll give you more detail that adds up to…well, you know.” She gestures around her head in a way that is perhaps meant to encompass the whole world. “The first real mods were supposed to be for health. Rebuilding broken stuff and editing disease out of people.”

  “Mr. Tavoularis mentioned disease editing once,” I say.

  “So he’s not totally useless. That’s a relief.” She gathers her thoughts. “There were big disease eradication programs, which means, at this point, most of the world has healthy DNA. Inherited diseases, infectious diseases, even things like tendency to get fat or bad eyesight—all gone, even when my parents were kids,” she tells me. “And back then, people got into basic cosmetic mods—like this.”

  She pulls down the wide collar of her white medical shirt. Beneath, she is wearing a tank top, and across the light brown skin of her upper chest there is moving artwork, a dancing tattoo in white and black. A small egg hatches by her right shoulder, and out comes a tiny bird, which stumbles across her chest and then gains its footing and begins to fly. The bird appears to fly right out of her skin on the left side of her body, before reappearing in egg form on the other side and starting over again. I can tell that Frances is proud of the artwork and pleased to have an opportunity to display it.

  “Have you ever seen one of these?” she asks. I shake my head, which is partially submerged, so that I send out ripples. “A moving tattoo is pretty easy to do, but when I was little—way before you were born—bigger cosmetic mods started to be possible. Like adding stuff to your body, stronger muscles, longer bones, different hair, wider eyes.”

  “Bigger brain?” I suggest.

  Frances is looking at me and my big brain, floating in front of her. “Yeah, they tried that. Which brings me to the second thing. Do you know who this man is?”

  She runs the video again, and now it shows us an eye-catching image of a man standing behind a golden lectern. The lectern is decorated with up-stretched golden limbs—human arms, the fins of fish, the legs of dogs and horses, the tentacles of an octopus, and so on, all reaching ecstatically toward the man.

  We cannot hear the man himself but instead are listening to an announcer, who speaks the way most announcers do—in a tone that never changes whether it is reporting on a successful birth or the destruction of a city. She is saying, “The Seekers of Evolutionary Advancement—known to many as the SEA—announced today that the daily broadcasts by the Reverend Tad Tadd now reach a billion and a half people each week.”

  Frances mutes the video, leaving the man orating silently in the air above the pool. “You’ve heard of him, right?”

  “Yes,” I answer, interested despite myself. “Caroline at Genetic Radiance showed me a few videos. He’s an American religious figure. This video is more recent, though. He looks different.”

  The Reverend Tadd still has wavy black hair on one side of his head and lighter, curlier hair on the other, also one green eye and one black eye, but he has done something new to his skin, so each arm is a different color. His right arm has skin that is so dark brown as to be close to black; his left is a rich reddish brown, like mahogany wood. And his hands—they are an odd shade of light green, as if they’ve leached the color out of plant leaves.

  The Reverend Tadd’s vast audience, hovering above the surface of the water, is cheering and clapping, displaying in their ranks much strange and varied coloration, and even odder characteristics like extra fingers and bulky solar collectors built right into their skin.

  Frances examines the thumb she has been chewing, and then she narrows her bright eyes at the image of the Reverend Tadd. “Um, the weird thing about him is that he started out religious, and also pretty mean, but so many people were interested in modification that he ended up bringing groups together that you wouldn’t expect to get along. Like scientists and flat Earthers and human rights people.”

  The video changes to footage of a huge march with the same white-domed building in the background. Thousands of people are moving together—men on motorcycles with ink over every inch of their skin, people in long robes holding up crosses, children in wheelchairs, a group of women with decorative scarring all over their faces. Many carry signs that say some version of Human Freedom Now! and near the front of this march is a younger version of the Reverend Tadd, holding hands with a woman in a doctor’s lab coat and a man in judicial robes.

  Frances pauses the video and says, “And this brings us to the third thing, probably the most important thing. You saw Reverend Tadd’s audience. Whole-body moving tattoos, extra fingers, tiny motors under the skin. The more doctors can do, the more people want. Now scientists can even make human tissue using cells grown from millet crops.”

  “What’s millet?” This is the sixth question I have asked in this lesson—possibly a record.

  “It’s a grain, kind of like wheat. Engineered versions can produce cells for modding people. Farmers are planting it all over the prairie states. But where are we supposed to draw the line?” She is not asking me this question. It is a mere rhetorical flourish, and she accompanies it with an aggressive nibble along the side of her thumb.

  “Do you know who this is?” she asks as she changes the video feed to the image of a woman who looks about fifty years old.

  Before I can answer, the announcer is saying, “I spoke today to Elsie Tadd, the Reverend Tadd’s daughter, whose message of Natural Humanity—an opposition movement to her father’s beliefs—is reaching hundreds of millions of people around the world.”

  Frances pauses the image so the woman is frozen above the water. She is in extreme close-up, so her head looks huge.

  “At Genetic Radiance, I saw a video of her when she was a young g
irl,” I say.

  “She had to listen to her father back then,” Frances says. “Not anymore.”

  I am interested to study this child of the famous Reverend Tadd. Like her father, Elsie Tadd has mismatched eyes and multicolored hair, but apart from these features, she looks like an old-fashioned human. And unlike her father, Elsie Tadd is not trying to make herself look younger than she is. She is aging in the normal way.

  When Frances rolls the video again, Elsie Tadd is gesturing at her face. She is saying, “I keep these eyes and this hair as marks of humility. An example of what we’re fighting against—frivolous, self-aggrandizing manipulation of our species. We’re struggling in the United States, but we’re being heard across Eastern Europe and Asia.”

  Disaffected daughter.

  Farsighted feud cadet.

  “Some people are literally drawing lines, Alexios.”

  Startling footage appears above the pool. Soldiers are herding citizens in a great mass before them, using batons and tear gas when they encounter any resistance. The people flee in utter panic, some falling to be trampled by the oncoming mass. I can tell the soldiers are Russian by the insignia on their caps.

  “This latest purge aims to rid the Russian Republic of any so-called modification apologists, those who support modifying the human genome beyond the curing of disease,” the announcer says. “To remain in Russia, citizens are now required to take an Oath of Principle, committing themselves to ‘the simplicity of the human form….’ ”

  The soldiers are pursuing the stampede of terrified citizens toward a distant border fence, when Frances pauses the video. “Do you understand what that means?”

  “Russia is kicking out people who like to modify themselves,” I say.

  “Yes, and scientists who work in that field, and college professors who discuss it in their lectures, and their families.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “This last purge? Just after the new law passed in the US. But the purges have been going on for years, in one form or another.”

  She plays the video again, and in a moment it switches to a new footage, this of Russian soldiers marching and driving tanks through the streets of several old-looking cities.

  The announcer says, “Russian troops are occupying the capitols of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, with the stated purpose of ‘restoring order.’ The Russian foreign minister has described these democracies as ‘teetering on the brink of civil war’ amid political, religious, and grassroots disagreement about access to modern medical therapies. Russia has stepped in, the foreign minister says, ‘to protect the future of their citizens.’ The governments of several European countries and the United States are convening an emergency summit….”

  She turns down the volume.

  “It’s not enough for Russia to make rules for itself,” Frances tells me. “They’ve taken over other countries to make sure their neighbors are following Russian rules as well. Europe is neutral on modification, and even they are separating themselves from Americans and restricting trade and travel.” She sounds troubled.

  “I studied Rome and the Middle Ages at Genetic Radiance,” I tell her. “And World War I and II. History is full of invasions and clashing philosophies. Why are you upset about this particular version?”

  I seem to have gotten under Frances’s skin with that question. (Metaphor.) She gets to her feet and peers down into the pool at me, her outlined eyes, her dark hair, her ragged fingernails suddenly menacing. For a moment, I have the idea that she wants to jump into the water and shake me, but if so, she restrains herself.

  Self-control.

  Tell of scorn.

  “I’m upset,” Frances says, with forced calm, “because this is happening now. Mr. Tavoularis doesn’t tell you about recent events because he’s happy to keep your mind in the sea cage. But this is not ancient history, Alexios.”

  I expect she has a valid point, though I am having trouble seeing it. “So Russia doesn’t modify people?” I ask. Question number nine.

  “They don’t want people to stop looking human, but they do mechanical and robotic add-ons for their military. So…” She shrugs. “I’ve never been to Russia to see any of it in person.”

  A piece of the Frances puzzle falls into place then. “You’re American?” I ask. I have finally noticed the way she pronounces certain words.

  “I have English citizenship now,” she tells me defensively.

  I do not want to be interested in Frances’s life, but I am. “Why did you leave?”

  Frances drums her fingers against her leg, gathering her thoughts. Clearly we have strayed off the lesson’s path. (Metaphor.) She has rubbed her left eye and smudged her dark makeup, which makes that eye look even brighter. “My parents said Americans were pretending to respect nature, but really they were exploiting it. So we came to Europe, where you can get mods if you really want them, but things are tamer.”

  A strange question occurs to me and I am asking it before I realize what I am doing. “Would your parents think that I shouldn’t exist? That I’m dead wei—”

  “Of course they wouldn’t think that, Alexios!” She sounds angry now. “But if you’d been given the choice at the beginning, is this what you would have chosen?”

  I do not have an answer for that.

  “It’s more than all the mods, though,” she says. “Since the law changed, people in the US are moving into cities. There’s a huge tax if you want to live outside a city wall. They’re withdrawing from the countryside to leave it pure—for visiting, they say. But I think it’s because when you change your body drastically, you have to be in a city so you’re close to help if anything goes wrong—like if your new skin starts to peel off or your extra hand seizes up. Russia is starting to mine the solar system, and Americans are going to be getting their unicorn horns polished and designing children with claws and rainbow auras.”

  I stare at Frances and she stares back. We are both thinking, I am sure, that whatever a rainbow aura is, it doesn’t sound too bad. But Frances sighs. “It was too much for my parents, so we left.”

  “Was it too much for you?” I ask her. It is rare that I ask such a personal question, because there is no reason for me to care, and yet I am curious to hear her answer.

  Frances shrugs and nibbles at her thumb. “Maybe.”

  I understand that my official lesson is over and she has told me far more than Mr. Tavoularis ever would have. I could request that she send me back to the paddock, but I don’t.

  “Tell me about the strangest mods you’ve ever seen,” I say.

  Frances has no objection. She seats herself at the pool’s edge and speaks to me about a man with a tail and a woman with a third eye, and another woman who had mirrored skin so she was almost invisible in certain lighting. None of those mods looked natural, she explains, but someday they might. I listen to her as I float around the pool on my back, staring up at the whitewashed ceiling and calculating how many lab techs it would take to completely cover it so none of its surface was showing. I am also wondering if I will ever sit in the audience at one of the Reverend Mr. Tadd’s sermons. Would they wheel out a special saltwater tank for me? The idea is humorous but irrelevant. The Reverend Tadd, his daughter Elsie, the whole world Frances has been telling me about…these things feel as remote as the moon.

  Land-based problem.

  Old bedpans ramble.

  And yet I see now that I am not merely Alexios, boy from the Genetic Radiance clinic who now lives at Blessed Cures. I am, in fact, a product, a piece, of the greater world. Mr. Tavoularis’s version of history is as clinical as the clinic he works in. But I am a person in Frances’s story.

  5. THE PICTURES

  My own habitat is underwater, built into the end of the jetty. There is a door in the bottom so I can swi
m up into the pressurized interior and then pull myself all the way inside with the special sling rigging the lab techs have built for me. From the conveyor belt, I return to the sea paddock and then to my habitat, in time for the afternoon meal. I could have eaten inside the clinic, but I do not like the way the lab techs watch me chew and swallow, as if they are planning to make a medical diagram of the process later.

  My habitat is one spherical room, which I navigate from the rigging. Using rungs on the walls, I can pull the sling wherever I need it to take me, and it slides about on a track in the ceiling. There is not much space to navigate: I have a small desk and colored markers, in case I would like to write something down or, I suppose, draw pictures. I have a video screen for speaking to Mr. Tavoularis and the lab techs and for recording my observations of the flock and the dolphin pod. There is a bathtub for washing myself, a toilet, and a tap of fresh water for drinking. My food is delivered by its own small conveyor belt, direct from the clinic’s kitchen, and it arrives through a slot in the back wall. There is no bed, because I and my Frankenstein limbs sleep in the sling. Everything is damp, but it has been made for the damp. My new legs and new skin prefer the damp.

  Dinner arrives shortly after I get back, and next to the tray of food is a large envelope full of pictures, printouts from my afternoon with the camera. I look through them as I eat my turkey and mashed potatoes. This is my favorite meal, by the way, especially when it comes with cranberry sauce, which it does today. There are also two glasses of what looks like gray sludge, which doesn’t taste as terrible as you might think, because the flavor of apple pie has been added to mask all the other flavors—of medicine, of vitamins, of cell-boosting concoctions that will feed the dolphin parts of me. In all it is a kind of Thanksgiving meal.

  I am a chimera.

  Aim, aim, reach!

  I do not appreciate the food fully today, though, because at least eighty percent of my attention is on the pictures. I made portraits of each of the dolphins and each of the manatees, and I am pleased that every creature is clearly recognizable. These portraits I arrange in a long line around the habitat’s curving wall with the sticky putty that the lab techs stock in my habitat, which lets me decorate even though things are wet. After the portraits, I took pictures of the amusement park, and of every type of seaweed that can be found in the paddock. There are twenty-seven varieties, by the way, and I arrange the pictures of them by size and color. When this begins to feel too obvious, I rearrange the seaweeds by percentage of the paddock they occupy, and then I try a few other sorting methods, including the order in which I first noticed them. Eventually I am satisfied and I stick them to the wall below the dolphins.