by Sue Burke
I would be working for the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. “I’ve heard of it,” I said. It researched countermeasures against biological warfare, and it had a reputation for responsibility and rigor. I could only hope that it was true.
“Our concern, Dr. Li,” he said, “is a vaccine.”
I remembered the blood delivered to the lab that day. “Against the deltacoronavirus cold?”
“Yes. You spotted that.”
“It would be a common approach to create an attenuated virus as a vaccine.”
“We’re thinking of something slightly different. Something self-administering.”
For a moment I was confused. Then I was appalled. He meant to create an attenuated virus that would not be administered as a normal vaccine—by injection, for example. Instead, this one would be set loose to spread from person to person through direct contagion. No one had ever tried that before successfully.
He noticed my reaction. “We need to act quickly because we can be certain the virus will be here in the United States within a week, maybe a lot sooner. In all honesty, China has done its best with containment and has done well, and it’s destined to fail. We’re aiming for a version of the virus that’s highly contagious but causes no harm to the host.”
That was exactly what had appalled me. “It will be hard to do. The does-no-harm part, especially.” The virus in the blood samples I’d seen back in the lab hadn’t seemed contagious but would have made the hosts very ill, as I’d reported. (What had happened to the people infected by that virus?)
“We don’t have time for test subjects.”
I felt a little light-headed, and not without cause. Fainting would be one way to flee a looming disaster. “That causes more difficulties.” That was unspeakably unethical, even in times of emergency, as he was well aware.
He nodded. “We know you can read, so to speak, genetic material, especially for human beings.” He paused, then added, “We’ll inform your employer that you’ll be working for us for a little while. By law, there can be no effect on your employment. You’ll be paid through them for your time. I needn’t mention that this project is of the highest secrecy. You have special clearance.”
Declining was not an option, and I understood the government’s need to commandeer expertise. A mistake in the design could be even worse than the disaster of the actual delta cold, but a perfect design would save billions of lives. Here I was, Peng, creator of life, cornered and trapped. Here was my chance to be an unsung hero. They must have been desperate to want to hire me, but they obviously knew of my extraordinary work.
“I agree.” Hubris, thy name is Peng. I had to sign a lengthy contract that held the United States government and all its agencies harmless from liability for every imaginable unfortunate occurrence. It held me responsible for everything but inclement weather. They allowed me to contact a friend to ask him to care for my pet bird in my absence, which I described to him as a sudden work-related trip.
I was led down the hall to my new office. I had a comfortable chair, a big L-shaped desk, five screens, a keyboard, a graphics pad, and two dictation microphones, but no windows to outdoors—no surprise, among other reasons, because I suspected I was in a basement. In a short briefing, I learned that I had the latest DNA analysis programs: newer, more powerful versions of the ones I used in the lab where I worked.
I also had access to a small, well-stocked kitchen and a bedroom provisioned with my preferred brands of soap and deodorant (that was disturbing), and some lab scrubs in my size to wear in the coming days. They had been expecting me.
I worked late into the night and returned to my desk after minimal sleep, exhilarated intellectually—and terrified in every other respect. I worked with colleagues off-site somewhere, and we knew each other only by designations we hadn’t chosen for ourselves. We had voice as well as text communication, but the voices were clearly altered. We discussed the expression of a carefully engineered section in a strain of the virus with one essential question to answer: Would it remain human-to-human contagious in its pulmonary form but not cause deadly symptoms?
The virus by its nature damaged and killed infected cells. The host’s body could react, possibly too strongly, to the damage and inflammation, which by itself could lead to death. As was sometimes the case with cold or flu infections, especially with the delta cold, people developed rapid respiratory failure—very rapid—and if they survived that, they could still fall prey to secondary infections, including pneumonia, which could be equally fatal, or they could die from worsened chronic conditions like congestive heart failure.
We wanted a virus that would irritate the lungs enough to cause coughing to spread the illness, but that would cause no serious symptoms. To accomplish that would require big changes, too many changes to create in one day, maybe in a week, but we had to try.
During our discussions, I insisted on using the terms people and human beings rather than hosts or subjects. Confucius would have been proud. Some of my colleagues clearly lacked his compassion.
The survival of any species involved a constant struggle against death from enemies of all kinds. Releasing the perfected virus (if we ever got it close enough to perfect) would be humanity’s greatest risk ever. We had no margin of error. I, Peng, designer of life and master of its language … I should have expected something like this eventually.
Only ten years ago, I’d had a lot to say about medical ethics. No one listened, in the end. Few even remembered my testimony at a United States Senate Select Committee on Health and Technology. As time went on (but not soon enough), fanatics found unfaded and far more worthy targets.
I arrived for the hearing in a nondescript car that pulled up to a rear loading dock. Meanwhile, at the front of the Hart Senate Office Building with its quaint white rectilinear styling from the twentieth century, hundreds of protesters screamed through bullhorns and shared the event live through video. They feared that I and DNA designers like me could make them second-class humans. Indeed, second-class humans eventually came to pass, but the people capable of creating them thrived in legislative halls, not in laboratories. As everyone learned through hard experience, all it took was a few legally binding words, not a few carefully selected genes.
No matter. Police feared violence and escorted me through back halls. I arrived in my finest pearl-gray suit made of top-quality synthetic spiderweb fiber, incidentally and conveniently bulletproof. I looked female then, walking confidently in formal spike heels, but I didn’t get to cross the building’s beautiful atrium. Too risky, the building security officers said, and I had received enough threats to accept their warning.
I arrived on time according to the summons, only to discover to no surprise that the hearing was running two hours late.
I waited in the greenroom. On the other side of the wall lay the Central Hearing Facility, a boring, functional name for a grand hall with handsome age-darkened wood paneling and, behind the committee-member dais, a gleaming white marble backdrop. The waiting room on the other side of the marble-clad wall offered standard-issue beige sofas, a coffee and tea maker, a watercooler, an adjoining toilet, and walls painted pale green out of tradition. A screen on the wall showed what was happening in the hearing room.
What was happening was a parade of failed genetic engineering.
Senators were gently grilling a ten-foot-tall young man in a motorized wheelchair. Rather, they fulminated against what would have been called in Roman times a monster, an unnatural creature, and these days what we politely called modified, a kinder term. Or some called him a dupe, which was both rude and inaccurate.
“Although my bones grew, my nervous system couldn’t keep up,” he said. “I have little or no feeling or control below my knees or elbows. Even if I did, I could hardly walk very far.” He joked about it, true to his famously stalwart personality. “I can never play basketball.”
I watched as angry as those senators. That poor young man wa
s a botched job. Anyone who knew physiology would have known that bones and nerves were separate systems and both needed tweaks to grow in tandem. Beyond that, hearts could beat only so strong, digestions work only so hard, and lungs breathe only so fast. Humans had limits.
The DNA-modifying engineer responsible for that disaster sat near me in the greenroom, hauled out of his suicide-watch prison cell, waiting to testify, still manacled, and if he had not sat hunched over and weeping, I would have given him something to wail about. Spike heels could make good weapons. He never looked at me, although his police handlers did and seemed to equate us.
Meanwhile, the young man testified to other modified failures who hadn’t survived infancy. Gills that didn’t work even for children born underwater. Tails that involved unviable architectural changes to the spine. Some attempts to improve vision hadn’t killed the thoughtlessly modified children but had left them blind because their brains couldn’t process what their unnatural eyes saw.
“Would you agree with the majority, perhaps the unanimity of this committee,” a senator asked the young man, “that human genetic engineering ought to be banned?”
“I support natural humanity,” he said—what was he supposed to say? And he used that magic word: natural.
He wheeled himself out, and the abject designer of that failure was called in for a tongue-lashing with a cat-o’-nine-tails. I watched astonished at the senators’ verbal skills and aghast at their ignorance.
My lawyer sipped a cup of minty tea and glanced at the screen. “Five minutes. Any last questions?”
“Any last words?” I answered. “That’s all this is, words.” But I knew that if Congress passed the wrong law (or other countries did, for that matter), my fate was prison.
“Yes. The most polite words are likely to win.” She looked stern. She knew me.
“I’ve spent all last night studying the playbook.”
“Good,” she said. But she blinked for too long, as if she were hoping not to witness what she saw coming.
“These senators have no gist of what they’re even saying,” I complained. “The staff wrote the questions.”
“And if the senators are smart,” she said, “they’ll stick to the questions so they don’t prove that they’re showboating idiots. Remember, the real audience is far away, the people who can still be convinced.”
Good woman, that lawyer in her nice, fashionable haircut. Smart and efficient. If I were going to make a human being, and I had, I might have made her, a pinnacle of humanity. That was all I had ever wanted to do.
So, sworn in, I sat at that table twelve feet from the frowning committee chair, with bright lights overhead, a microphone ready to capture my wisdom, and, as that excellent lawyer had bargained for, I got to read a two-minute opening statement.
“Consider the definition of medically necessary: to prevent or treat an illness, condition, or disease or its symptoms that meet the accepted standards of medicine. Prevention. We do that all the time. Would you outlaw DNA vaccine production, especially after the cholera outbreaks five years ago? Treatment. Would you outlaw gene therapy and tell cancer patients they can’t be cured? Then why not provide medically necessary prevention and treatment before the moment of conception?”
Such blank stares! Obviously, some form of sudden deafness had infected the senators.
“I’ve been accused of attempting to engineer perfection, and it’s true. Perfect human beings are merely ordinary human beings brought to their optimal level: perfectly, optimally typical. Responsible genetic engineering can bring people to their best, but not one step beyond that—because as you have seen, to step beyond normality is to fall into the abyss.”
No one believed me, a humble technician of the language of life. Behind me, an audience watched and tables of reporters placed context and commentary around my words. I might be reasonable, but what about the others? What about the ones who tried to make feathers and wings? What about the ones who would trick grieving parents into thinking they could resurrect their dead child? What about the ax blade of suspicion that fell unfairly on naturally conceived children with some disability or difference and who were tainted by this hysteria?
What about all that? Senators now glowered at me as if I were the ignorant one.
“It’s true,” I explained oh so patiently, “strawberries can be made purple, cows can produce insulin-filled milk, wheat can be perennial, woolly mammoths can be resurrected. Each of these amounts to a parlor trick, not playing god, and we need to be aware that these kinds of tricks are not applicable to the human genome.”
My attorney was right. I was speaking to showboating idiots and beyond them to a panic-stricken world.
“People are like—think of a triangle,” I testified, an explanation designed for nonscientific minds. “An equilateral triangle. You know, all three sides are the same length? The perfect person is like that, balanced on all sides. None of us are perfect. We’re all a little more or less lopsided: taller, shorter, stronger, weaker, smarter, stupider. With a lot of work, we can draw an almost perfect triangle. We must be balanced to be perfect, and the perfectly ordinary human being is the one best adapted to their environment in the many ways that evolution has shaped us.”
I could have gone on, but I was asked instead about deextinction, which I felt passionately in favor of, yet I wanted to say more about the real issue, and eventually someone asked a question I could use to tangent into the facts.
“No, Senator. No one can successfully make a superman. That person would be disproportionate on one or even two sides of the triangle and ultimately fail. People can be made too tall for their nervous system, as you’ve seen. A superbrain would demand so much energy from the body that circulatory and digestive systems would falter. Perfect is balanced, like the scales of justice.”
I didn’t add that perfection was impossible to achieve, like all worthy artistic goals, but I could get close.
And finally I was dismissed. Yes, maybe I believed in limits, but others did not, which the senators knew for certain, and to be fair, they were right. Thus human “designer babies” were outlawed without exception. Justice was skewed by legislation designed to please crowds with loopy definitions that left us in the field not entirely certain of what was and wasn’t legal.
No matter. I had crossed that wavering line with SongLab. By then all I had left from my business were creditors nipping at my knees. And babies, dozens of babies, now toddlers and teens (all of their DNA containing a tiny, inconsequential sequence of me as a signature of my artistry). A few of them were as perfect as humans could be, with occasional parlor tricks like red hair or the ever-popular above-average IQ to enchant choosy parents.
Red hair was easy. Humans could breed for it by their choice of sexual partner if they wanted to. Above-average IQ was harder, actually more likely to be produced by parental expectations and early childhood interventions than by anything I could do. Humans tend toward the norm in IQ, the most human of all characteristics. But I could make promises, and lo, if they were believed, they would come true. Placebos were effective medicine.
But that was all behind me, and a court order now banned me from initiating contact with my children. The past, tucked into the back of my mind, gave me frequent nightmares about fine people who became pariahs through no fault of my own besides ambition.
Two days after the testimony, in a hotel room in New York City, a tiny robot gun waited for me to return. How it got there was somehow never determined. It had two bullets. One lodged in the woodwork, the other in my left lung close to my heart, where it exploded. A fragment sliced open my pericardium. I never knew if the emergency-room staff approved of my work, but I was most grateful for theirs.
Now that lay in a past that felt much more distant than it was, and before me lay the immediate chance to save or murder billions.
CHAPTER
3
Irene woke up a little before dawn—time to get to work, and she’d never get use
d to getting up so early. But just like elephants, mammoths didn’t sleep much. Nimkii would be waiting for her. She listened for rain. It had stopped. Good. She listened for quarrels. Silence. Good. She got up, dressed, decided to skip breakfast, and was out as sunshine crept over the horizon. Raindrops clung to everything, sparkling like a magical landscape.…
He wasn’t there.
That was impossible. She climbed on the truck bed for a better look at the far side of the pen. Maybe he’d lain down to sleep.
Instead she saw that the water trough had been torn up and out, its pipes broken and spouting water, and she could figure out what had happened next. The flowing water had eroded the soil around a fence post, and he’d pulled down a whole section of fencing. He’d charged through the opening, waded across the moat, dug a ramp through the soft dirt on the other side, and torn through the wire fence meant to keep out humans. It would have been like cobwebs to him. His big prints marked a path through the mud.
“Nimkii!” She didn’t expect him to answer. She heard only a distant crow. Nimkii was out, free, wandering somewhere. Maybe even stolen. Or hunted, slaughtered. Gone.
Her breath trembled. No. Stay calm. Step by step. First, tell the owners. Then search. What would she need for a search?
“Nimkii!” she called again. “Pedazo!,” as if he would answer—well, maybe he would, maybe with a roar or a trumpet.… But he didn’t. She jumped down from the truck bed and ran into the house.
“Nimkii’s out! He got out!” she shouted as she opened the door.
Ruby was stirring oatmeal. Alan was sitting at the kitchen table. Their wide eyes asked the same question.
“He tore up the watering trough, and the water wore down a way for him to get out. I can’t find him.”
