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

by Brian Stableford

  I knew that he was mocking me, but it didn’t seem to matter.

  “Vivaldi will be fine,” I said, with as much dignity as I could muster. “A pot of coffee would be nice, if I’ve got to do a lot of drinking. Cream, no sugar. A few bourbon biscuits wouldn’t come amiss.”

  “It’s not the Ritz, Darren,” he told me—and I could tell from the direction of his voice that he’d got up and was moving towards the door—”but I guess we can stretch to tea if you’d rather have that than water. Lots and lots of lovely tea.”

  Personally, I’d always thought that tea was for chimpanzees, but I was right off water, especially the kind that came from the tap. Tea was probably the best offer I was going to get.

  “Tea’s okay,” I assured him, trying to put a brave face on things.

  “But there’s one more thing we need to take care of first,” he said, in a way that told me loud and clear that I wasn’t going to like it one little bit.

  “What?” I said, although I’d already guessed.

  * * * *

  When I’d handed in the first batch of samples GSKC’s delivery-boy had been careful not to make any comments, but I hadn’t been able to stop myself imagining what he must be thinking. If you’re a sperm-donor, so rumor has it, they just give you a Dutch magazine and a plastic cup and leave you to it, but it’s not as easy as that when your eyes and hands are taped up. I told them that I wouldn’t try anything, but they weren’t taking any chances.

  “Think of it as phone sex,” the Vivaldi fan said, as he left me in the capable hands of his female accomplice—but I’d never gone in for phone sex and even in phone sex you get to use your own hand. It didn’t help matters that I had to assume that she was the same woman who’d stuck a gun in my ribs: fat, fifty-five and fake blonde.

  After that, drinking tea by the quart so that I could piss like a champion didn’t seem as much like torture as it might have. The long wait thereafter was positively relaxing, and not because of bloody Vivaldi tinkling away in the background.

  I was really looking forward to another ride in the back of the van, even though my arms were aching like crazy, when I heard the mobile phone playing the old Lone Ranger theme-tune. It was the Midland accent that exclaimed: “What? You have got to be joking.” I knew something must have gone wrong, and I spent a couple of minutes wallowing in terror while my captor listened to the rest of the bad news.

  Mercifully, it turned out that he wasn’t being instructed to bump me off.

  “I’m sorry, Darren,” the Midlander informed me—and he really did sound regretful—”but there’s been a bit of a hitch. We may need to hang on to you a little longer.”

  “What kind of hitch?” I wanted to know.

  “You were right and we were wrong, Darren. We should have tried bribery. We were trying to save on expenses. Is it too late to start over, do you think?”

  It was an interesting idea. I knew I ought to tell him to go fuck himself, if only for appearances’ sake, but I hadn’t quite got over the complimentary implications of being a kidnap victim. This new departure seemed like another promotion, a chance to skip another few thousand rungs of the status ladder.

  “How big a bribe did you have in mind?” I said, trying with all my might to sound like a man who was accustomed to being on the ball. “I mean, given the inconvenience, not to mention the insult...and this is a multimillion-euro business, after all.”

  “Don’t push it, Darren,” he said. “We all have to make a profit on the deal, and we know exactly what GSKC were paying you. It wasn’t enough, even before...but we have our choices to make too. We could put you up for auction. That’s what the Honey Monster wants to do—but I’m not like him. I can do nice, if it seems worthwhile. How would you like to work for us?”

  “As a piss-artist?” I said, wearily.

  “As a spy. You were right, you see, when you said that if you were making anything valuable GSKC wouldn’t have turned you loose on to the streets—but our employers’ hackers were right when they said that GSKC might have made a mistake. If it weren’t for their cumbersome bureaucratic procedures, GSKC’s troubleshooters would have got to you before we did, but we’re leaner and quicker. The thing is, they don’t know yet that you’ve been snatched. Maybe we can fix things so that they never have to find out. They’ll take you into residential care anyway, so you can forget your mum’s Sunday roast, but you still have a choice: you can work for them, under the contract you’ve already signed—which included a sheaf of self-serving contingency clauses that you probably didn’t bother to read—or you can work for them and us, for three times the money. We pay in cash, so the Inland Revenue won’t be taking a bite out of our contribution.”

  Three times the pittance that GSKC were paying me didn’t sound like a fortune to me, but these things are relative.

  “I want to know what’s going on,” I said, trying hard to be sensible. “Why are my bodily fluids suddenly worth so much more than they were before the delivery van picked up that first crate load?”

  “I’m not sure you’d understand. GSKC are supposed to be operating under the principle of informed consent, so they were obliged by law to tell you exactly what they were proposing to do to you, but my guess is that they didn’t make much effort to make it comprehensible, and that you just nodded your head when they asked you if you understood. Am I right?”

  I hesitated, but there was no point in denying it. “I’m not stupid,” I told him. “Maybe I did only get three GCSEs, with not an ‘ology’ among them, but that’s because I didn’t like school, okay? Maybe I have been unemployed long enough to fall into the national service trap, but that’s because I won’t take the kind of shit you have to take with the kind of jobs people think you’re fit for if you only have three GCSEs. I’m not some sort of idiot you can peddle any kind of bullshit to.”

  “Okay, Darren—I believe you. So how much do you know about the kind of manufacturing process you’re involved in?”

  “They shot some kind of virus into me to modify the cells of my bladder wall,” I said. “The idea was to make them secrete something into the stored urine. The pink stuff is just a marker—what they really want is some kind of protein to which the dye’s attached. They said they weren’t obliged to tell me exactly what it was, but they told me it wouldn’t do me any harm. They weren’t wrong about that, were they?”

  “Not as far as we can tell,” was the far-from-reassuring answer. “How much background did you manage to take in?”

  “Not a lot,” I admitted.

  “Then we’d better start from scratch. It really would be a good idea if you listened this time, and tried really hard to understand. You need to know, for your own sake, why you’re a more valuable commodity than they expected you to be.

  I tried. It wasn’t easy, but with my eyes still taped up I had no alternative but to concentrate on what I was hearing, and I knew I’d have to make good on my boast that I wasn’t stupid.

  * * * *

  Apparently, the first animals genetically modified to excrete useful pharmaceuticals along with their liquid wastes had been mice. The gimmick had promised advantages that sheep and cows modified to secrete amplified milk didn’t have. All the individuals in a population produce urine all the time, and urine is much simpler, chemically speaking, than milk. Extraction and purification of the target proteins was a doddle—but it had never become economically viable because mice were simply too small. Cows and sheep weren’t as useful as urine-producers as they were as milk-producers, for reasons far too technical for me to grasp—it had something to do with the particular digestion processes of specialist herbivores—and interest had soon switched to somatically-modified human bioreactors. Or, to put it another way, to the ever-growing ranks of the unemployed. It was one of the few kinds of modern manufacturing that robots couldn’t do better.

  The pioneering mice had mostly had their genes tweaked while they were still eggs in a flat dish, but you can’t do that to the unemp
loyed, so biotech companies like GSKC could only do “somatic engineering”: which means that they used viruses to cause temporary local transformations in specialized tissues. In effect, what they had done was give me a supposedly-harmless bladder infection. It was supposed to be an “invisible” infection—which meant that my immune system wouldn’t fight it off, although I could be cured by GSKC’s own anti-bug devices as and when required. In the meantime, the cells in the bladder would pump the target protein into the stored urine, ready for export.

  Once I’d grasped the explanation that the Vivaldi fan was so eager to put across, I thought I could see a thousand ways it might go horribly wrong, but he assured me that the procedure was much safer than it seemed. In nine hundred and fifty cases out of a thousand, he told me, it all went like clockwork, and in forty-nine of the remaining fifty the whole thing was a straightforward bust.

  Fortunately or unfortunately, I was the hundredth. What I was producing wasn’t the expected product and the difference was “interesting”.

  “How interesting?” I wanted to know. “Cure for cancer interesting? Elixir of life interesting?”

  “Biotech isn’t the miracle-working business it’s sometimes cracked up to be,” the Midland accent assured me. “Interesting, in this context, means we need more time to figure out what the hell is going on. Where we are now, as you’ve probably guessed, is just a collection point. We can do simple analytical tests on the kitchen table, but we don’t have a secret research lab in the basement. We could probably sell you on with the samples we’ve collected, but that would move our employers into much more dangerous and complicated territory, crime-wise, and they’re very image-conscious. It would be a lot easier for them, as well as more profitable for everyone concerned, if we were to handle you. That’s why you and I need to renegotiate our relationship.”

  “Okay,” I said, way too quickly. “You convinced me. What’s your offer, and what do you want me to do?”

  “We want you to take a couple of tiny tape recorders with you when GSKC take you back in. And we want you to take the principle of informed consent a lot more seriously. Demand to see the documentation—they’re legally obliged to show it to you. They’ll probably be quite prepared to believe that you can’t read the stuff without moving your lips, so don’t be afraid of spelling out the complicated words loudly enough to make an impression on the tape. We can’t use transmitters because they’ll almost certainly have detectors in place, but the simple methods are always the best. We’ll make arrangements to have the first recorder picked up tomorrow— hide it behind the bedhead, if you can. Left hand side—your left, that is. Can you remember all that?”

  “I’m not stupid,” I reminded him. How could I be? I’d just become a secret agent: an industrial mole.

  “If we take the tape off your eyes and wrists, Darren,” my oh-so-friendly captor pointed out, “we’ll be taking a big risk—but you’ll have to take your share of that risk. Once you’re in a position to put us in deep trouble, we’ll have to take precautions to make sure you don’t.”

  Or to put it another way, I thought, once I’ve seen your faces, the only way you can stop me describing them is to shoot me. Once I’m in the gang, resigning could seriously damage my health. It might be easier, I realized, to call their bluff about selling me on as I was—but my arms were aching horribly, and there was a possibility that GSKC might not be the highest bidder.

  “I’m in,” I assured him. “Just get this fucking tape off, will you.”

  “We know where you and your mum live, Darren,” the Vivaldi fan reminded me. “We even know where your gran lives.”

  I couldn’t quite imagine them sending a hit man all the way up to Whitby with instructions to break into an old people’s home and shoot a ninety-two-year-old who usually didn’t know what day it was, but I could see the point he was trying to make.

  “It’s okay,” I assured. “I’m on your side. One hundred per cent committed. I always wanted a more interesting job. Who wouldn’t, when the alternative’s having the piss taken out of you relentlessly, literally as well as metaphorically?”

  I knew he’d be impressed by the fact that I knew what “metaphorically” meant.

  “Okay, Darren,” he said, after a few more seconds’ hesitation. “I’ll trust you. You’re in.”

  * * * *

  The first surprise was that the female kidnapper not only had real blonde hair under the peroxide wing, but wasn’t really fat or fifty-five. I could almost have wished I’d known that earlier, although it wasn’t a train of thought I wanted to follow.

  After that revelation, it wasn’t quite as surprising to find out that the man who supposedly didn’t do nice had also been heavily padded and that his cauliflower ears were as fake as his Honey Monster grin. He really did look fiftyish, but he seemed more bookish than brutal.

  The team leader turned out to look more like a twenty-five-year-old nerd than a gangster. I wouldn’t have cared to estimate how many GCSEs the three of them had between them.

  The gun, on the other hand, was real.

  Once they’d made up their minds they moved swiftly to get me home before anyone knew I’d gone. The only one who told me his name was the Vivaldi fan, and I was far from convinced that “Matthew Jardine” wasn’t a pseudonym, but it seemed like a friendly gesture anyway.

  Jardine lectured me all the way home, but I tried to take in as much of it as I could. I had no option but to be the gang clown, but I knew that I had to make an effort to keep up if I were going to build a proper career as a guinea-pig-cum-industrial-spy. He dropped me on the edge of the estate. Because it’s a designated high crime/zero tolerance area we have almost as many hidden CC-TV cameras around as the average parking lot, even though the kids have mastered six different techniques for locating and disabling them.

  The repacked shopping bags didn’t look too bad, but I had to hope that Mum wouldn’t make too much fuss about the missing wine or the frozen peas and fish fingers being slightly defrosted. I needn’t have worried; she was much too annoyed about the phone ringing off the hook. She hadn’t answered it, of course—she always used the answerphone to screen her calls—but she was paranoid about the tape running out. GSKC had left seven messages in less than four hours.

  I called back immediately, as requested.

  “Mr. Hepplewhite,” the doctor said, letting his relief show in his voice. “At last. Thanks for getting back to us.”

  I had my story ready. “That’s okay, mate,” I said. “I’m sorry I was out, but I was watching the match on the big screen down at the Hare and Hounds. Not a drop of alcohol passed my lips, though—it was bitter lemons all the way, especially when the opposition got that penalty.”

  “That’s all right, Mr. Hepplewhite,” he assured me. “It’s just that something’s come up as a result of the samples you delivered yesterday. It’s nothing to worry about, but we’d like you to come in as soon as possible. In fact, we’d like to send a taxi to pick you up now, if it’s not inconvenient.”

  “Well,” I said, acting away like a trouper, “I don’t know about that. I had plans for later—and Mum was just about to put a ham and mushroom pizza in the oven.”

  “We’ll pay you overtime, of course, as per your contract. We’ll even send out for a pizza.” He carefully refrained from mentioning that they wouldn’t be letting me out again, and I carefully refrained from letting on that I already knew.

  “Okay,” I said. “If it’s that important.”

  I took Mum into the bathroom to brief her and turned the taps on, just in case. You can’t be too careful when you live in a high crime/zero tolerance area.

  * * * *

  The taxi was round inside ten minutes, but it didn’t take me to the general hospital where I’d signed on. It dropped me at a clinic way out in the country, half way to Newbury. As soon as I saw the place I knew how far I’d come up in the world. It was a private clinic—the sort that you have to pay through the nose to get into if
you don’t have an organization like GSKC to pay your way. It was the sort of place where someone like me would normally expect to be hanging around in reception for at least half an hour, but I got the VIP treatment instead. Two doctors—one male, one female— pounced on me as soon as I was through the door and led me away.

  The room they led me to wasn’t quite as palatial as I’d hoped, but the bed seemed comfortable enough and it did have a wooden bedhead rather than a tubular steel fame. The TV was a twenty-six-inch widescreen. There was a highly visible CC-TV camera in the corner, with its red light on, but I guessed that it probably wasn’t the only one.

  The male doctor asked me to undress, and an orderly took away my clothes as soon as I had, but by that time I’d already managed to secrete one of Jardine’s bugs behind the bedhead and another in the jacket of the green pajamas they provided.

  When the female doctor offered me a cup of tea, having condescended to tell me that her name was Dr. Finch, she tried hard to make it sound as if she were merely being polite, but I’d seen enough movies to know what a hidden agenda was.