The Golden Fleece

by Brian Stableford

  Professor Alfonso hoped that he might be able to sell his new product as a longevity serum. He reasoned that the one intractable and untreatable aspect of the aging process was the accumulation of somatic mutations and copying errors in DNA. Meta-DNA was much more resilient, and it had the useful ability to colonize the cells of a mature organism one by one, replacing the obsolete programming without any loss of routine function. Because meta-DNA was self-replicating, a single injection would suffice to set in train the rebuilding of any existing organism as a souped-up meta-DNA version of its former self.

  As things turned out, of course, Professor Alfonso didn’t make any money out of his immortality serum, because it was far too good at its job. Meta-DNA didn’t stop with single individuals; it transformed all their passenger bacteria too, and thus became highly infectious. It only required the transformation of a single individual to ensure the eventual transformation of every living organism on Earth.

  As soon as Professor Alfonso put his brainchild to the test on a single laboratory rat, the die was cast. DNA was on the way out and meta-DNA was on the way in, permanently.

  Alfonso was right about meta-DNA ensuring longevity; it succeeded in doing that without any problem at all. Unfortunately, he had not given overmuch attention to the question of what it might do to the physiological apparatus of reproduction— specifically, to the process of meiosis, by means of which fusing gametes produced whole new genomes. Meta-DNA was far too stable to go in for that kind of molecular balletics, so every organism that took it aboard became irredeemably sterile.

  In a way, the sterility was convenient, for the long-lived organisms that were inheriting the world would soon have become exceedingly crowded had they continued to reproduce at anything like the old rates. This convenience was, however, limited to those organisms that specialized in sexual reproduction; organisms that went in for vegetative reproduction had no such check on their proliferation.

  Fortunately, bacteria reproducing by binary fission were soon cut back by ferocious new meta-DNA bacteriophages, and plants suffered similar plagues, while the meta-DNA-reinforced immune systems of higher animals prevented their suffering similar catastrophes. Even so, the Earth’s ecology went pretty wild for a decade or two before a new generation of meta-DNA genetic engineers got to grips with the problems of ecospheric control. After that, change was pretty much a thing of the past. Chaos was gone and order had triumphed. Homo sapiens had been replaced by Homo alfonsiensis: an ultra-rational species no longer troubled by emotions, dreams or other disturbances of flesh and spirit.

  Asked whether his fellow men might, if given a choice, have selected some alternative destiny, the new Alfonso the Wise said: “Had God been present when I injected that first rat, he would doubtless have regretted that I had not been available for consultation when the Big Bang was but a twinkle in His eye.”

  And no one could any longer be found to disagree with him.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  NEXT TO GODLINESS

  As the cab drove away Adam looked down, checking his clothing carefully from the bottom up. The black moccasins, charcoal-grey slacks and chocolate-brown sweater looked supremely casual—which was exactly how they were supposed to look. They seemed slightly loose, but that was a carefully-contrived surface effect; like all smart clothes, they clung fast to his own skin. He took out a pocket mirror in order to make sure that his hairpiece was on its best behavior, spruced up the petals of the scarlet roses he was carrying and finished up by taking one last look at the label on the bottle of wine expertly clutched in the same hand, to reassure himself yet again that it was the ‘98 and not the ‘99.

  The gate didn’t creak and the path to the Millers’ front door was entirely free of weeds. The smart WELCOME mat was spotless. The stained glass panels in the front door depicted characters from Greek mythology: Tantalus and Sisyphus to the left and the right, Ixion upraised in the centre. The door chime was as mellow as a concert grand.

  “Adam!” said Nick, responding to the signal with wonderful alacrity. “It’s great to see you again. Come into the kitchen for a moment and say hello to Eve.”

  Adam was ushered through the hallway and into the kitchen, where he presented Eve with the roses and Nick with the wine, swiftly fulfilling the true purpose of his abrupt summons to Eve’s inner sanctum by admiring the astonishing cleanliness of the cooking area.

  Even while cooking a four-course dinner for six, Eve Miller was in total control; there was not a drop of spatter anywhere on the gleaming tiles, dumb as they were, not a crumb or a flake on the polished work-surfaces. The crockery for the later courses was stacked with military precision; the knives, ladles and spatulas assembled in wall-racks were gleaming so brightly they might have been chrome-plated. Eve was wearing a frilly apron that was as dead as a doornail, but the blood-red dress she was wearing underneath was vibrant with artificial life.

  Nick, like Adam, was conscientiously clad in drab plumage; a superficial glance might have rated them as nearly alike as two peas in a pod, although Adam saw things very differently. He always had, even before the divorce from Lilith, but his new circumstances had sharpened his regrets considerably. Reducing the dosage of his patches might have helped with that particular problem, but that kind of retreat was unthinkable for a man of Adam’s stripe.

  The door chime resounded again, impossibly mellow, and Nick rushed off to admit Seth and Ruth Wright, leaving Adam alone with Eve. That hadn’t been in Nick’s script—the effusive host had to tidy his inconvenient guest away into the sitting-room as soon as the perfection of the busy kitchen had been dutifully observed—but Eve had known Adam far too long ever to be flustered by his presence. She gave him a swift peck on the cheek and whispered: “How are you holding up?”

  “Pretty well,” Adam replied—but his hands were now free, and he couldn’t help a reflexive twitch of the right hand towards the left bicep, where his patch was. Eve pretended not to notice, but he knew that she had. Her fake ruffled sleeves were amply long enough to conceal her own patch. The day was not far off, Adam knew, when the work of patches would be fully integrated into the smartness of clothing, but the time was not quite yet. Lilith was still working on the problem, among others, but she was unlikely to win the race to the crucial breakthrough.

  Nick hustled Seth and Ruth into the kitchen, creating a crowd. There was a further handover of flowers and wine, efficiently executed, given the crowding. Adam was relieved to note that Seth had brought silver carnations and Chilean wine. Seth and Ruth were both solicitors; he was a specialist in company law while she was in criminal—another marriage made in Heaven, but one more likely to survive internal corrosion. Legal minds always tended, in Adam’s slightly churlish estimation, to be somewhat lacking in the aesthetic department, although legal stomachs certainly seemed to enjoy fine food.

  Adam was proud of his own aesthetic sensibilities, even though he was a scientist through and through. He was always prepared to argue that there was as much aesthetics as logic in bioscience, especially its creative aspects.

  At least, Adam thought, neither Seth nor Ruth would be inclined to spend all night explaining to him how badly the divorce settlement had been mismanaged by his solicitor. He greeted them both politely, but with a certain reserve. They were among Nick’s newer acquaintances—of which he had made a great many since he had become a successful corporate analyst, assessing the potential of takeover targets for a mysterious cabal of private equity investors—but they had already achieved a remarkable closeness, to Eve as well as Nick.

  Nick had assured Adam when issuing the invitation, with all the sincerity he could fake, that the sixth guest would merely be making up the numbers, but Adam knew well enough what his fate and his role now was within all the overlapping social circles in which he moved. Wherever he went, there would always be “someone to make up the numbers”, until he was “fixed up” again. It would become a telic objective, with an appropriate psychological
reward attached.

  The Millers’ sitting-room was as spick and span as the kitchen, though not as conspicuously polished. There was not a speck of dust on the carpet, nor a thread of lint on the sofa, nor the remotest ghost of a cobweb in the corners of the ceiling. Adam, determined not to be consigned to the sofa with an empty space yawning beside him, beat Seth to the armchair without seeming to make a race of it.

  Nick was busy with the cocktail-shaker when the chime sounded again; politeness demanded that he pass it to Adam, who was the older friend, and Adam stood up to pour, allowing him to turn his back to the door when it eventually opened after the obligatory sidestep kitchenwards. Nick would, in any case, have introduced the newcomer to the couple first, leaving Adam for last.

  “And this is my old friend Adam Goldsmith,” Nick finished, as Adam handed round the chartreuse-tinted cocktails. “He lectures in biotechnology at the Uni—the old one, not the new one. Adam, this is my new friend Judith Apter. She’s a web developer.”

  There was something about the combination of a female Christian name and the term “web developer” that made Adam think “black widow”, but Judith Apter wasn’t dressed in black and he had no reason to think that she was a widow. The miracles of cosmetic somatic engineering made it impossible to judge anyone’s age simply by looking at them, but there was something about Judith’s smile suggestive of authentic innocence. Her purple sleeves came all the way down to her wrists. There wasn’t the slightest hint of a bulge, but Adam guessed readily enough that she’d be wearing a patch the size of a five-pound coin, just like his own. Even if she were just making up the numbers, there had to be something at stake between her and Nick, business-wise. She had to be feeling the stress of opportunity and expectation, and must have taken extra precautions in the interests of maintaining focus and incentive.

  “What sort of biotech to you do?” Judith asked, politely.

  “Mostly artificial,” Adam replied. “Some microbial, some textile. What sort of web development do you do?”

  “The usual cocktail of commissions—two-thirds ads, one-third edutainment.”

  “Are you doing some work for Nick?

  “Consultancy for one of his takeovers. You?”

  “We’ve never worked together,” Adam said. “We used to play together, when we were young—back at the dawn of time.” He looked away, slightly discomfited, when the careless metaphor stirred up ideative echoes. At the dawn of time, according to Genesis, Adam and Eve had been happy in the garden, until Old Nick had come along in serpentine guise—but Adam had had another wife before then, if you believed the Apocrypha: a nonconformist Lilith who would doubtless have insisted on baring her arms to demonstrate her independence, her “ownership of her emotions”, her “responsibility for her own telic intensity”. Adam felt an urgent necessity to change the subject.

  Fortunately, Judith did it for him. “Are the Wrights old friends too?” she asked.

  Seth Wright, having left his wife to entertain Nick, immediately elbowed his way into the conversation. “I only met Nick a few months ago,” he volunteered. “We came into the Propriotech takeover from different directions and joined forces to manage the leverage. We’ve become thick as thieves, though—we live within walking distance, although we’d never dream of actually walking. Adam was somewhere in the Propriotech battle-line too, although I didn’t meet him at the time—he made a small killing when the buyout went through.”

  “Killing’s a corporate lawyer’s term,” Adam said. “He means that one of my patents was among the assets that got stripped.”

  “Stripped isn’t a corporate lawyer’s term,” Seth quipped, “and my lovely wife has far more to say about killing than I do. She sometimes defends killers of the literal kind—paratelic killers, of course. There’s no point defending telic murderers— no arguments to be made in mitigation.”

  “Patches aren’t supposed to encourage violence, let alone murder,” Judith observed, gauchely—making it obvious that she really was as young as she looked.

  What she said was true, of course—PIA patches were only supposed to encourage socially acceptable telic behavior, although they couldn’t forbid natural telic behavior, or the association of such behavior with inappropriate neural rewards. The sin that Judith had committed was an error of judgment rather than fact. Discussions of that particular topic were already passé, quite worn out.

  “Adam’s a bioscientist,” Seth observed, dismissively. “He can give you all the technical details, if you’re really interested.”

  “Actually,” Adam said, “the problem with designing patches to promote telic violence is economic rather than technical. There’s no substantial black market in them. Patches promoting paratelic violence, on the other hand, are always in demand.”

  “I thought that was a tabloid myth,” Judith said.

  “Just because it’s a tabloid myth,” Seth put in, beating Adam to the punch, “doesn’t mean that it’s untrue.”

  Nick ushered them into the dining-room then, and promptly disappeared into the kitchen, from which he returned bearing bowls of asparagus soup, a basket of French bread and a bottle of Chardonnay in a portable cooler. Adam had to count Nick’s hands twice to make sure that he still only had two. Eve emerged in his wake, bearing more soup-bowls, a second bread-basket and Adam’s bottle of ‘98 Bordeaux. There were no place-cards on the oval table, but Nick and Eve cleverly maneuvered all of the guests into their carefully-allotted seats. Adam was set between Eve and Judith, directly but rather distantly opposite Ruth.

  The soup, as was only to be expected, was divine. Seth was the first to spill a stray drop on the tablecloth, but the smart cloth swallowed it with alacrity. Adam could not suppress a pang of regret as he looked at the place where it had vanished; in a kinder world, that might have been one of his patents, worth a great deal more than the one that had brought him such a derisory windfall in the Propriotech takeover. It might even have been a shared patent, cementing his Heaven-made marriage and protecting it against disaster—but treacherous Lilith had refused to take advantage of the technology that could have facilitated their partnership.

  ~ * ~

  “It’s obscene,” Lilith had said, when the first PIA applicators came on to the market, eighteen months after the first TGAD applicators. Until then, TGAD patches had been called “pleasure patches” by their users and detractors alike, but as soon as the new antithesis was established the popular parlance shifted. TGAD stood, somewhat euphemistically, for Third Generation Anti-Depressant but PIA wasn’t so stubbornly descriptive; it stood for Pride In Achievement. From that day onwards, the rival product-categories were known as Pride and Joy, at least among the users who loved Joy. Those who preferred Pride eventually came to favor a sterner terminology; it was they who had taken up the telic/paratelic dichotomy.

  “It’s inevitable,” Adam had assured his wife. What had begun as a mild philosophical debate had then turned into their fiercest and most enduring argument; at its beginning they had not been long out of the honeymoon period, and the sporadic continuation of the quarrel hurt them both more deeply than they knew.

  Adam took the position that people had been using drugs to control their moods for millennia, ever since the primal discovery of the intoxicating effects of fermented grains and the hallucinogenic effects of certain fungi. Organic chemistry had made that kind of artificial intervention far more sophisticated, eventually leading to the invention of the first- and second-generation anti-depressants. It was inevitable, he argued, that genomic augmentation would lead to a further order of sophistication, ensuring not only that people would never have to feel miserable again if they didn’t want to, but that they could actually employ artificial happiness as a carrot to encourage them in productive endeavor.

  “That’s the beauty of it, you see,” he told her, when he still thought or hoped, that he could make his point by the sheer force of reason. “The problem with TGADs is that all they do is make people feel good, with
no regard to circumstances. They’re just the latest opium of the people, blotting out the pain and misery of poverty and failure with blunt neurochemical instruments. They take away incentives, facilitating bliss in ignorance. PIAs are different. PIAs recognize and accommodate the fundamental principle that feeling good—happiness, joy, pleasure, or whatever label you care to use—ought to be earned, as a reward for some task completed, some artistry attained. What PIAs do is enhance the neural pathways that connect the pleasure areas in the brain with purposive action, with physical and intellectual accomplishment. They guarantee that people can take an entirely proper delight in the results of their creativity, and an entirely appropriate pleasure in the products of their labor. Whereas TGADs drag their users down, forging a society of modern lotus-eaters, PIAs will lift their users up, reopening the road to Utopia.”

  “That’s a foolishly optimistic expectation, Adam,” was Lilith’s bitter riposte. “These things have more in common with the old nicotine patches than mere appearance. What they’re peddling is poison; while pretending to help us free ourselves from addiction, they’re actually feeding and enhancing addiction. We’ve grown used to thinking of TGAD reliance as the ultimate in addiction, but that’s because we couldn’t see PIA coming. You can trumpet all the slogans you want, but at the end of the day, all PIAs offer is the opportunity to become happier workaholics. When you talk about enhancing the neural pathways connecting to the pleasure areas in the brain, you mean that it will intensify the rewards associated with the pathways that are already there, not that it will encourage the development of new pathways. In fact, it will discourage the development of new pathways, preventing the further elaboration and sophistication of an individual’s spectrum of rewards. PIA isn’t a road-map to Utopia, Adam; it’s a recipe for a society of obsessive-compulsive freaks who rejoice in their obsessivecompulsiveness.”