The Moreau Quartet, Volume 2

by S. Andrew Swann

What’s going on? Just that, in less than a minute the Fed’s most powerful computer is going to burst-feed some very interesting information into the database of every news organization in the States.

  “Thirty seconds until TECHNOMANCER.”

  She looked at Pasquez, grinning hard enough to hurt the ghost of an old scar. “So, you want a fucking-A exclusive?”

  Appendix: History of the Moreau World

  Moreau Timeline

  circa. 2000: Race begins involvement in terrestrial affairs.

  1999–2005: Worldwide breakthroughs in genetic engineering. Start of the biological revolution.

  2008–2011: War for Korean unification; despite the South’s technical advantage the North overwhelms it with Chinese assistance. The U.N. is bogged down in nationalist conflicts in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Republics. The United States begins its policy of diplomatic nonintervention.

  2008: The first moreau is engineered in a South Korean lab. It’s a large dog breed with an increased cranial capacity. It is the first species so engineered that breeds true. Even though the war is short-lived, an intensive breeding program results in nearly ten thousand of these smart dogs slipping north to plant explosives and otherwise harass the enemy.

  2011–2015: The aftermath of the Korean War begins an international debate on the military uses of genetic engineering. The debate culminates with United Nations resolutions banning genetically engineered disease organisms and any genetic engineering on the human genome. The U.N. deadlocks on banning the engineering of sapient animals—by the time it reaches a vote, four out of five nations with a substantial military have their own “Korean dog” projects.

  2017: On a tide of public opinion fueled by anti-Japanese sentiment (by 2017 the Japanese have the most high-profile genetic program, notably ignoring the U.N. restrictions), there’s a constitutional convention to draft the 29th amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The amendment bans any genetic engineering on a macroscopic scale and, in an effort to prevent any possible atrocities like the ones in Korea, gives the sapient results of genetic engineering of animals the protection of the Bill of Rights.

  2019–2023: Iranian Terrorists slaughter the Saudi royal family, sparking the Third Gulf War. The war eventually envelops all the Arab states and marks the beginning of substantial nonhuman immigration into the United States.

  2023: The Gulf War ends, forming the Islamic Axis. The Axis is a fundamentalist Pan-Arab union. The price of oil triples even over wartime levels. A small company in Costa Rica, Jerboa Electrics, begins production of the Jerboa—a small, cheap electric convertible that now costs less than half to run as the most efficient gas vehicle.

  2024: Start of the Pan-Asian war. It begins around a Pakistan-India border dispute and snowballs almost instantly. By the end of the year it involves the Islamic Axis, most of the former Soviet republics, and China on one side, India, Japan, Russia, and most of North Africa on the other. The United States continues its hands-off foreign policy.

  2025: The Ford Motor company buys Jerboa Electronics to avoid an international lawsuit over Ford’s wholesale swiping of the electric-car design. Proceeds to sue GM motors and Chrysler for doing the same thing. BMW is producing its own electric design.

  2027: United American Bio-Technologies is indicted for breaking the ban on macro-genetic engineering. They’ve been producing moreaus for the Asian war effort (both sides) and, worse, they’ve been working on human genetics as well—though there’s no evidence that ever went beyond the computer-simulation stage on their human project. The Fed seizes all of UABT’s assets in an unprecedented move against a corporate criminal. Rumors persist that the Fed Intelligence community wanted UABT’s nationwide facilities for its own uses.

  2027: New Delhi nuked as the Indian national defense begins to crumble. Mass desertions are rampant and whole sections of the country lay down their arms and surrender. From the Afghan frontier, an entire company of moreau tigers from the Indian special forces seize control of a cargo plane and fly to America. It is called the Rajastahn airlift, for the strain of tiger involved. The airlift is an American media event, the officers of the company become celebrities. Especially Datia Rajastahn, the officer in charge of the airlift. He’s eloquent, charismatic, and the first major voice for moreaus—not only in America, but internationally.

  2029: The American space program reaches its apex. NASA has an orbiting space station, a temporary lunar base, an orbiting radio telescope that may be picking up alien radio signals from the vicinity of Alpha Centauri. The peak is reached when appropriations for NASA’s deep-probe project are approved. The deep-probe project is to involve a half-dozen unmanned nuclear rockets to fly by the nearest star systems.

  2030: The Israeli intelligence community, the Mossad, conducts a raid into Jordan and captures a secret training base for Jordanian franks. The Mossad, with domestic legal constraints on a par with the American bans on macroscopic genetic engineering, destroys the Jordanian base, but takes the immature franks (100 girls from Hiashu Biological ranging from 3 to 16 years in age) and secretly trains them as Israeli agents.

  2030: The last Indian national defenders fail. The subcontinent falls to a Pakistani/Afghani invasion force.

  2032–2044: The African pandemic, genetically engineered viruses, race across the continent in waves that resemble the Black Death that swept Europe in the Middle Ages. Entire villages are wiped out in weeks, governments collapse, and the entire continent is under virtual quarantine. The worst is over in three years, but it takes nearly a decade for a central government, the United African States, to repair the damage to the African economy. The rebuilding of the continent is due, in large part, to a husbanding of the indigenous genetic diversity Africa is home to. By 2044, the U.A.S. genetic programs rival any on the globe and are a billion dollar industry.

  January 8, 2034: The “big one” hits California. The quake is a 9.5 and centers about 30 miles south of San Francisco. Aftershocks in the 5-7 range echo down the coast as far south as Los Angeles. The urban landscape of California is altered forever.

  2034–2041: The last Arab-Israeli war. (According to the Axis, the war of Palestinian liberation. According to the Israelis, the Second Holocaust.) Israel fights for six years against the entire Islamic Axis. Eventually Israel loses as the conflict goes nuclear. Tel Aviv is nuked, and despite retaliatory nuclear strikes against the Axis that kill nearly five million Arabs, Israel is overrun. There is an Israeli government-in-exile in Geneva.

  April, 2035: Tokyo is nuked as part of the Chinese invasion of Japan. Most of the Japanese technical base is either destroyed in the attack, or is destroyed by the Japanese defenders to deny it to the Chinese. Countless technological achievements by the Japanese are lost in the final days. Marks the official end of the Pan-Asian war.

  2037: U.S. morey population is estimated to have hit 10 million. Most of the moreau population in the States are refugees from the Asian war. A substantial minority consists of rats and rabbits coming across the border from Central America.

  2038: Pope Leo XIV surprises the entire Christian world by issuing a decree that, though genetic engineering is a sin, moreaus still have souls. The political pressure of this causes the European Community to cease moreau production. In Central America, this causes a virtual civil war, as massive moreau armies begin to rise against their masters. Latin American moreau immigration into the U.S. quadruples.

  2039: NASA begins to experience new setbacks in Congress as the country becomes more and more concerned with the exploding moreau population. In the first of a number of budget-cutting moves, NASA’s radio telescope—the Orbital Ear—is shut down.

  2042: The “Dark August” riots across the U.S. A summer-long eruption of urban violence that most humans blame on the rhetoric of Datia Rajastahn, the first and most influential moreau leader. Datia had become more and more radical as time progressed, until he was the leader of a n
ational moreau para-military organization. The Moreau Defense League is said to be defensive in nature, but the Fed views it as a terrorist group. Datia is eventually cornered in a burning building in Cleveland’s Moreytown and shot down by combined police and National Guard. Datia has since become a moreau icon of political activism.

  2034: Congress halts NASA’s deep-probe appropriations, the four completed probes are mothballed. As a result of the riots, there is a moratorium placed on moreau immigration. Anti-moreau sentiment reaches an apex as there’s public debates about mass deportations, mandatory nonhuman sterilization, moreau “reservations.” Fortunately for the nonhuman population, none of the extreme measures are popular enough to pass. However, legislation is passed banning a moreau from possessing a firearm and it becomes a silent Federal policy to isolate concentrations of moreau population from human population. The most visible signs of this are the semipermanent traffic barricades that block the roads into most Moreytowns.

  2045: South African coup led by mixed blacks and franks. It is revealed that the South African government had a rampant human-engineering program. By the time of the coup, there are close to a million franks indigenous to South Africa. The coup marks the first time a country allows franks full citizenship. (In the States there is a debate concerning the wording of the 29th amendment, so while moreaus are tolerated as second-class citizens, the franks are treated as if they have no rights at all.)

  2053: Congress scuttles NASA’s deep-probe project. Rumors persist that the project was taken over by one of the Fed’s black agencies. The European Community eliminates internal moreau travel restrictions.

  2054: The Supreme Court hears the Frank civil rights case and rules 7-2 that the 29th amendment applies to genetically engineered humans, as well as animals. Orders a halt to Government internment and summary deportation of franks. Suddenly, a large number of franks begin to appear “officially” on the government payroll—primarily in the intelligence services.

  2059: With the discovery of a Race warren under the Nyogi tower in Manhattan, the alien threat is made public. Fed invades the Bronx with the National Guard to root out entrenched Moreau Defense League armor. The move sparks a nationwide increase in moreau violence.

  2060: Sylvia Harper wins the U.S. presidential election.

  Afterword

  Frankenstein in Utopia (Part 2)

  The idea of Utopia predates Science Fiction as a genre by hundreds of years, if we date from Sir Thomas More’s coinage of the term. Thousands if we go back to Plato’s Republic. It is probably as old as politics itself. And Utopia bears a natural attraction to Science Fiction writers such as myself.

  Modern practitioners have proven to be a pretty diverse crowd, including H. G. Wells, Gene Roddenberry, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ayn Rand, Kim Stanley Robinson, Iain M. Banks and L. Neil Smith. The treatments of the ideal society run the same gamut as the authors; from post-scarcity anarchism to socialist paradises run by enlightened engineers and technocrats, ecotopias to libertarian meritocracies.

  Every human being on the planet has some vision of what is wrong with the world, and what might be done to fix it. Every author brings that sense of right and wrong to whatever they write. For those of us who manufacture entire universes it is tempting to show that ideal world; a place where everything works as it should and all the details are planned out and work as intended.

  Every single one of us has our own personal Utopia.

  Which is why I hate them.

  • • •

  Charles Stross, the Scottish Science Fiction writer, once wrote the following: “I tend to take the stance that Libertarianism is like Leninism: a fascinating, internally consistent political theory with some good underlying points that, regrettably, makes prescriptions about how to run human society that can only work if we replace real messy human beings with frictionless spherical humanoids of uniform density (because it relies on simplifying assumptions about human behavior which are unfortunately wrong).”

  While I consider myself a Libertarian, I have to admit that I agree with him.

  But I also believe that the same analogy holds for any single political, economic, or social structure you care to name or invent.

  Unlike Plato or More, Wells or Rand, I personally cannot conceive of any social order that is believably Utopian. The messy reality of human beings will always intervene; their different desires, motives, beliefs, psychologies will always be at odds. Even if you manufacture a world that by every objective measure maximizes the Good, you are left with very deep arguments about what the Good actually is.

  Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Utopia is about hubris.

  So, if you present me with a Utopia, I start looking for Frankensteins.

  • • •

  Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, and its cousin, H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau, are both obvious influences on my own “Moreau” novels. Less obvious an influence is one of the most prominent works by Isaac Asimov, a work that had a very specific impact on the narrative braiding through all these books and their successors—an impact as great, perhaps greater, than that of Frankenstein.

  The work of his I’m referring to was still known at the time as the Foundation Trilogy. Within it, and central to it, is the invention of what might be the epitome of that rational Enlightenment universe that Frankenstein both embodied and reacted against, the embodiment of a universe that can be known and understood by the rational human mind: the science of psychohistory.

  As created by Asimov’s fictional mathematician, Hari Seldon, psychohistory was a method by which the scientist was able to accurately model and predict the rise and fall of entire cultures. More importantly, it allowed the modeler to determine what actions and resources were required to achieve a desired outcome.

  In the Foundation stories, the main driver of the plot is the attempt by Seldon’s Foundation to reduce the duration of a coming dark age by an order of magnitude.

  The Foundation books might not strictly be utopian, but that didn’t stop me from looking for a potential Frankenstein in the idea.

  Psychohistory is, to put it mildly, the Holy Grail of all central planners and utopians. So I couldn’t help imagining what would happen if it should be wielded by hands—or pseudopods—that didn’t share the ethics, motives, or morality of Hari Seldon’s Foundation.

  So I weaponized it.

  • • •

  Again, it can be seen as allegory, in this case for the thinking behind central planning in general, as well as attempts to manipulate society, politics, and economies more covertly.

  If we had such a “perfect” tool as psychohistory at our disposal, it is inevitable that we would assume we knew enough to wield it. And, as with my alien race, when our ignorance or ineptitude finally caught up with us, our reliance on such a “perfect” tool would probably fail with catastrophic results. In my aliens’ case, that failure would eventually wipe out their entire species at the hands of the humans they had tried to control.

  We can already see this beginning in Specters of the Dawn. In the two trilogies that followed, these themes only become stronger.

  • • •

  Specters of the Dawn is the appropriate note to close on. It is also where the allegory about the racial tensions in the U.S. becomes most explicit in the moreau books.

  When Specters was written, the Los Angeles riots of 1992 were still fresh in my mind. Now, over twenty years later, another incident of police violence has sparked racial unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, and I am writing these words exactly one week after a white supremacist killed nine people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina.

  I suspect a lot of people in the U.S. the past year or so have felt like Angel, shell-shocked at how these tensions, this history, can suddenly and violently erupt to the surface. Re-reading Specters in 2015, two decades after it was written, has certainly left me a li
ttle uneasy about the parallels between what happens around Angel and what is happening in my country today. We never quite know what event will trigger something catastrophic, and in retrospect we always seem to have been closer to the edge than we thought we had been.

  In Part One I pointed out that history has no end point. It just keeps going and going.

  On the other hand, it also never goes away completely.

  The San Francisco where Angel lived at the start of Specters of the Dawn would have seemed, at least superficially, to have overcome the prejudice against non-humans. There were no blockaded ghettos, the population was at least somewhat integrated, and non-humans appeared in at least a few professions. In all the externalities, Angel’s city would have seemed positively utopian compared to the Cleveland and New York City of the prior books.

  But history doesn’t go away, and evils are remembered. And it doesn’t help that the effects of evil can persist long past any evil intent. Just because one group ends its organized persecution of another, the once persecuted group will not suddenly find itself on the same social level as its persecutors. And once all the overt methods of discrimination are removed, all the legal barriers between one segment of society and another are abolished, then the disparities that persist can become even more painful and intractable, because there’s no one thing that anyone can point to and say, “fix this,” and all will be better.

  As much as the San Francisco in Specters started as the best case scenario in my world, it still was only a generation removed from the evils that created the world the moreaus live in.

  • • •

  This probably sounds pessimistic.

  For someone that looks forward and sees, somewhere, a perfect society, a future free of the problems we see in our own imperfect present, the anti-utopian idea that society cannot be perfected might seem almost nihilistic. I don’t think it is. I think it’s simply a reflection of society being an emergent property of all the individuals who comprise it. As such, it is messy, and complicated, and not amenable to top-down direction. All persistent change comes up from the individuals in a society, from individual beliefs about right and wrong.