In the Flesh and Other Tales of The Biotech Revolution [SSC]

by Brian Stableford

  “It means that I’m going to be a commercial sperm-donor,” Stevie said. “It means that I’m going to advertise my sperm to women with infertile husbands—who, as Mr. Winthrop told us only the other week, are as common as brass buttons nowadays—as the carrier of a gene which might offer built-in protection against ageing.”

  “Might?” echoed Simon, skeptically.

  “Might,” Stevie agreed. He drew in a lungful of air, ready to deliver the speech he had carefully prepared and rehearsed, with the aid of the explanations his Dad had spent half the night trying to get across to his Mum, while Stevie listened avidly. “Might’s not enough for drug companies, of course, because they have to go through clinical trials—but when you’re thinking of having children, all you have is mights, and you have to think in lifetimes. Mights sell, my Dad says—and he also says that we’re learning more every day about how to activate genes in tissues where natural selection never found any profit in activating them, so the parents of tomorrow ought to be prepared. But it’s not just about making money. It’s about making sure that the children of the future are as fortunate as we can help them to be. What I have is a gift from nature, but it’s not really mine. It happens to be in me, but that only means that it’s up to me to make sure that as many other people get the benefit of it as possible. It’s not just a matter of investing in pills and potions, you see—it’s a matter of investing in people. That’s what my Dad says, and he’s a salesman. He’s in the business, my Dad. Mum has her own agent, but my Dad’s my agent.”

  “I still don’t understand what it’s all supposed to mean,” Suzie complained.

  “I do,” Pete said. “You lucky bastard, Stevie. I’m getting my Mum to take me down the doctor’s as soon as possible, just in case.”

  “What it means, Suzie,” said Stevie, putting a companionable hand on Pete’s shoulder, the way a best friend could and should, “is that I won’t even have to wait until I leave Secondary School to be in the Biotech business. Next year, or the year after, I’ll be busy making the future, just like my Dad—only much, much better.”

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  * * * *

  TAKING THE PISS

  Modern town centers are supposed to be very safe places. There are CC-TV cameras everywhere, in the street as well as in the shops, all of them feeding video-tapes that can be requisitioned by the police as soon as a crime is reported. Unfortunately, the promise of safety draws people to the High Street like a magnet, in such numbers that mere population density becomes a cloak sheltering all manner of clandestine skullduggery. Which was how I came to be kidnapped in broad daylight, at two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, as I came out of Sainsbury’s clutching two bags of assorted foodstuffs.

  If I’d had any warning I might have been able to figure out how to handle the situation, but who could possibly expect a dumpy and lumpy peroxide blonde with a Primark raincoat draped over her right arm to snuggle up to a well-built lad beside the trolley-rack and stick an automatic pistol under his ribs? It’s not the kind of situation you rehearse in idle moments, even if you have been warned that you might be a target for industrial espionage.

  “Make for the car-park, Darren,” she whispered. “Nice and easy.” The woman looked almost as old and homely as my mum, but the gun-barrel digging into my solar plexus seemed to me to be more a wicked stepmother kind of thing.

  “You have got to be joking,” I said, more stupidly than courageously.

  “On the contrary,” she retorted. “If I weren’t extremely serious, I wouldn’t be taking the risk.”

  I started walking towards the car park, nice and easy. It was partly the shock. I couldn’t quite get my head together, and when your thinking engine stalls you tend to follow ready-made scripts. I’d never been kidnapped before, but I’d seen lots of movies and my legs knew exactly how scenes of that sort were supposed to go. On top of that, it was exciting. People talk about going numb with shock, as if that were the usual effect, but I didn’t. Once my thinking engine had restarted after the momentary stall, it told me that this was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me. In my twenty years of life I’d never been able to think of myself as the kind of person who might get kidnapped, and actually being kidnapped had to be perceived as a compliment. It was like a promotion: I felt that I’d leapt a good few thousand places in the pecking order of human society.

  Car parks are lousy with CC-TV cameras, so I wasn’t particularly astonished when a white Transit slid past the EXIT barrier as we approached and slowed almost to a halt as we approached. The side door opened as it eased past us, and the blonde reached out with her free hand to force my head down before using the concealed gun to shove me forward. Two hands reached out from the dark interior to haul me into the back of the van, without the least care for elegance or comfort. The woman slammed the door behind me. I presume she walked on, a picture of innocence, as if she hadn’t a care in the world.

  By the time I’d sorted myself out and got myself into a sitting position on the hardboard-covered floor I’d taken due note of the fact that the hands belonged to a stout man wearing a Honey Monster party-mask. His ears stuck out from the sides, though, and the way they’d been flattened suggested to me that the guy had probably gone more than a few rounds in a boxing ring, maybe one of the unlicensed kind where the fighters don’t wear gloves. I’m no weed, but I figured that he probably didn’t need a gun to keep me in line.

  I was tempted to tell him that he must have got the wrong Darren, but I knew I wouldn’t like hearing the obvious reply.

  “You could have tried bribery,” I said, instead. “Kidnapping’s not nice.”

  “I don’t do nice,” the masked pugilist informed me. “But don’t wet yourself yet—there’ll be time for that later.”

  The back of the driver’s head was stubbornly uninformative, and from where I was sitting I couldn’t see his face in the mirror. So far as I could tell, though, his was also the head of a man who didn’t do nice. The van was still crawling through the heavy traffic, and I figured it would take us at least fifteen minutes to get out of town. We were headed north.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  The only answer I got was painstakingly measured out in duct tape, with which the Honey Monster sealed my wrists and mouth as well as my eyes. I wasn’t surprised. I guessed that the conversational skills of bare-knuckle fighters were probably a bit limited, and that he was more deeply embarrassed by the fact than he cared to admit.

  My head was relatively unscrambled by then, so I was able to wonder whether the dumpy blonde would actually have shot me if I’d screamed blue murder and yelled “Look out, she’s got a gun?”— assuming, that is, that the gun was real.

  Maybe not, I decided, but I’d probably have been trampled to death in the shoppers’ stampede. It was only a fortnight since some prion-perverted maniac had gunned down thirty-five outside a Macdonald’s in one of the side-streets off Shaftesbury Avenue.

  As soon as the Honey Monster’s busy hands were withdrawn I began to feel a growing need to take a piss, but that was only natural.

  Ten years ago, I reflected, kidnapping had been the prerogative of optimistic ransom-seekers and desperate estranged fathers, but the twenty-first century had arrived. Nowadays, busty women might be kidnapped for their milk, marrow-fat men for their blood and job-creation fodder of either sex for their urine.

  It’s a crazy world, I remember thinking—I’d have said it out loud if I could—but it’s the one we all have to live in.

  * * * *

  When I’d committed myself to the job at GSKC—under threat of having my benefit cut to nothing at all if I didn’t—the long list of dos and don’ts had taken me by surprise. I hadn’t had a chance to think it through properly. Getting paid for pissing had seemed like a pretty slick idea, given that it was something I had to do anyway, but I hadn’t reckoned on the measures I’d have to take to ensure that my piss measured up to the expected standard of purity.
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  “No alcohol,” the young man in the white coat had insisted, while he was fiddling with something that looked like a cross between a hypodermic syringe and a dust buster. “No drugs, not even prescription medicines. No shellfish.” Then he got really serious, although you wouldn’t have known it from his smirk. “You have to wear the kit at all times. From now on, everything that comes out goes into our bottles.”

  “Hang on,” I said, way too late. “You can’t mean everything. You’re only supposed to be mucking about with the piss.”

  “It’s only for a month, in the first instance,” the white-coat reminded me, mockingly. “If we renew your contract after that you get time off in between experimental runs.”

  “A month!” I said. “That’s not....”

  “Darren,” he said, in that infuriating you-can’t-bullshit-me-I’m-a-doctor way that the clever bastards learn in their first term at medical school. “Have you even got a girlfriend?”

  He knew that wasn’t the point, but he also knew that the conversation was on the brink of becoming extremely embarrassing, and not for him.

  I’d been suckered, of course. He knew that I hadn’t really listened to the interminable lecture I’d had to sit through before I signed on the dotted line. My eyes had glazed over as soon as the bastard had launched into his spiel about “the many advantages of the human bladder as a bioreactor”. The science had all been double Dutch, the instructions all humiliation, and as for what they had done with the dust buster-cum-syringe...well, let’s just say that I’d begun to have second thoughts about the whole bloody thing long before they told me to go home.

  And now, to add injury to insult, I was being kidnapped.

  Somehow, the man with the magic syringe had failed to include that in his list of don’ts. If he had included the possibility in his presentation he’d probably have fed me a line of bullshit about trying to keep track of the turns the van made, and listening out for any tell-tale sounds, like trains going over bridges and street-markets and church clocks, but I didn’t bother with any of that. As far as I was concerned, if the kidnappers wanted to steal a bucketful of my piss they were more than welcome, and if GSKC plc didn’t like it, they ought to have been more careful with that fucking dust buster.

  Mercifully, the man who didn’t do nice didn’t start to fiddle with my apparatus while we were still in the van. I couldn’t have stood that. It was bad enough having to walk around all day with a lube and a glorified hot-water bottle attached to my inside leg and a double-duty condom hermetically sealed to my prick, and I’d had my fill of embarrassment the day before, when I’d handed over my first set of sample bottles to GSKC’s collection service. Having some pervert do a removal job in the back of a white van would definitely have added yet more insult to the injury that had already been added to the first insult.

  I tried to lie back against the side-panel of the van and think of England, but it wasn’t the kind of situation that was conducive to a shrewd analysis of our chances in the upcoming World Cup. I concentrated on telling myself that once the kidnappers had got they wanted, they’d have no further use for me and they’d turn me loose again. I even started rehearsing the statement I’d have to give to the filth. No, officer, I wouldn’t recognize the woman again, officer— all fat middle-aged peroxide blondes look alike to me. No, I didn’t get the index number of the van and I didn’t see any distinguishing marks, inside or out.

  The need to piss got steadily worse, but I wanted to hold on, for propriety’s sake. It did occur to me that if I went there and then, they might just take the bottle and let me go, without even bothering to take me all the way to their destination, but that wasn’t what the plug-ugly had implied when he’d advised me to hang on.

  I wondered what he’d done with the shopping bags. I had to hope that they’d let me have them all back when the deal was done—but even if they did, Mum wouldn’t be pleased if anything was broken, or even slightly bruised. As if in answer to my unspoken question, I heard my captor say: “Naughty, naughty. You’re not supposed to be drinking alcohol.” He’d obviously found Mum’s bottle of Hungarian pinot noir.

  I heard the sound of a cork being withdrawn.

  Somehow, the idea of a kidnapper carrying a corkscrew was deeply unreassuring. I couldn’t believe that he’d been carrying it on the off-chance that I had a bottle of wine in my shopping bag when his ugly girl-friend had intercepted me.

  If it hadn’t been for the duct tape, I’d have told the presumably-unmasked Honey Monster that the pinot noir wasn’t for me, and that Mum would have his guts for garters if she ever found out who’d deprived of her of her Sunday treat, but as things were I had no alternative but to let the ex-pugilist believe that I was the kind of person who didn’t take obligatory employment contracts too seriously.

  Maybe, I thought, that was the kind of person I really should have been, given that piss-artists are right at the bottom of the totem-pole in the bioreactor hierarchy. I’d always thought that was completely unfair. I suppose one can understand the social status that attaches to pretty girls with loaded tits, but why blood donors should be reckoned a cut above the rest of us is beyond me. Where’s the kudos in being vampires’ prey?

  “This stuff is disgusting,” the man who didn’t do nice informed me, effortlessly living up to his self-confessed reputation. “It’s been dosed with washing soda to neutralize excess acid, then sugared to cover up the residual soapiness. There’s no excuse, you know, with Calais just the other side of the tunnel and a resident smuggler on every housing estate from Dover to Coventry. It’s not as if we’re living in fucking Northumberland.”

  He was displaying his age and his origins as well as his ignorance. I might have failed geography GCSE but even I knew that there was no such county as Northumberland any more, and hadn’t been in my lifetime. Years of exile had weakened his accent, but I guessed that he had probably been born somewhere not a million miles from Carlisle. Anyway, Mum liked her wine sweet as well as fruity. She wouldn’t have thanked me for a classy claret.

  The van rolled to a final halt then, and I heard the driver get out. It must have been the driver who opened the side door, although it was the wine connoisseur who seized me by the scruff of the neck and thrust me out into the open again. Wherever we were there can’t have been many CC-TV cameras around. I couldn’t tell whose hand it was that grabbed my arm and steered me along a pavement and down a flight of steps, then along a corridor and up a second staircase, through God only knows how many doorways. In the end, though, I felt the pile of a decent carpet under my trainers before I was thrust into a perfectly serviceable armchair.

  The strip of tape that had sealed my mouth was removed with an abruptness that left me wishing I’d shaved a little more carefully that morning, but the strips sealing my eyes and securing my wrists were left untouched.

  “Sorry about the precautions, Darren,” said a male voice I hadn’t heard before, “but it’s for your own good. You really don’t want to know too much about us.” I guessed that this man too was from up north, though not nearly so far north as the one who didn’t do nice. Derby maybe, or Nottingham: what real northerners would call the Midlands.

  “I can go any time you want me to,” I told him, meaning go rather than literally go. “Just take the bottle and drop me off— any where you want, although somewhere near home would be nice.”

  “It’s not that simple, I’m afraid,” said the Midlander. “We’ll need a more generous sample than you can provide just like that.”

  “Oh shit,” I murmured. It’s amazing how half a dozen marathon water-drinking sessions can put you right off the idea of thirst. “How long are you going to keep me here?”

  “A few hours. You’ll be home in time for dinner. We’ll put the pizzas and the other perishables in the fridge for you. Sorry about the wine—but you really aren’t supposed to be drinking.”

  “It’s for my Mum,” I told him, exasperatedly. “You’d better be telling the truth. Mum
’ll report me missing if I don’t turn up by six—that’s when the supermarket shuts.”

  “No problem, Darren,” the voice said, softly. “We’ll need to do a few little tests—but we won’t hurt you. I promise.”

  There was something in that seemingly-insincere promise that immediately made me think of dust busters and catheters. “Aw, come on,” I said, finally giving way to pent-up terror. “I’m nothing special. Just one more conscript in Willie’s barmy army, doing my bit for king and country. I don’t know what I’m pissing, apart from the fact that it’s pink, but I’m absolutely bloody certain that it can’t be worth much, or the boys at GSKC plc wouldn’t be letting me roam the streets and do Mum’s shopping in Sainsbury’s.”

  “You might be right,” was the amiable reply. “But it might just be GSKC that have miscalculated. Our employers’ hackers think so, at any rate—and when the hackers say frog we all jump. Way of the world, old son. You’ll just have to be patient for a few hours. You can manage that, can’t you? I can put the radio on for you, if you like, or a CD. How about a little bit of Vivaldi? Wagner might be a little too stimulating.”