The Chromosome Game

by Hodder-Williams, Christopher

  Miracle it is. For if there could ever be loveliness in electronically controlled machinery it is here. Indeed, we, the unseen shadow, are conscious only of love — the essence of procreation, the minutes spent by lovers before they conjoin.

  Nothing less than this is to be synthesized, except that those who wanted children so much in their own era that they were prepared to die and be forgotten hundreds of years before they had issue … these men and these women were not present.

  Instead, their spermatozoa and ova were sealed within a kind of honeycomb, an array of cube-trays which now lie, rather like a miniature high-rise building tipped on its side, in vivid perspective. Over each cube is formed a mucus-like substance, an artificial chrysalis steeped in organic chemicals. These are in a state of suspended animation; the double-helix of Real Life development will wind around itself once the nucleic acids held inert are released as a basis for each initial life-cell.

  But first, the tiny, gelatinous partition between male and female cell shall be melted away. Live sperm in each cuboid compartment will travel less than a millimetre, and mate.

  Much must happen before then.

  It has begun. The last of the electric batteries — the much larger element in the sequence which has run for so long — has been triggered. This module generates just enough current to switch on the first of the micro-processors; and if this one fails then the next will do.

  The first micro does not fail. It issues simple orders and these include the starting up of a miniature nuclear reactor right down the far end of the deck.

  It will take some while for this reactor to go critical and provide power — not in the form of steam for cumbersome turbines, but pure electromagnetic energy which, by conversion, will emerge as nothing more nor less than a domestic electricity supply of modest power.

  The multi-matings cannot occur just yet. Temperatures must be exact; humidity control perfect to within 0.001 per cent; the viscosity of the pseudo-membrane guarding each cube and promising the micro-chemical conversions that will produce RNA/DNA reactions must be maintained as exactly.

  We, the unseen shadow, notice something else. The first of the larger computers — the one that had displayed the first unblinking green light — is propagating intricate instructions so that the pre-mating environment is curiously erotic. The effect is spacial, as if an entire universe has been compressed into an operating theatre.

  The central processor of this — the smaller of the three fullscale computers — is mobilizing its arithmetic aids and peripherals. Magnetic-tape decks, much like tape recorders in appearance but manufactured from some of the most expensive alloys ever to be produced on Earth, are undergoing secret processes. What in fact is happening behind the front panels is the breaking of lubrication sachets by razor-edged solenoids. The recording heads, for so long cocooned in vacuoseal, are now exposed to the air and cleaned with drips of Iso Propyl. This must have two minutes in which to dry.

  Shadowlike, we have a little time to explore prior to the next chain of events. We can go where we like, unimpeded by the enormous banks of hardware and storage units.

  We cannot but be amazed. One section of ZD-One, fully a hundred metres long, is packed with freeze-dried food. This monumental storehouse is capable of preparing sustenance, not just in bulk, but in a sequence corresponding to the age in months and years of each pre-incubated Being in every one of the cubes; so that these initial food supplies are, in fact, arrayed in several dimensions: They can serve the numbers required at the specified times; they can pre-prepare the next meal to follow the ones already dispensed; they can vary the diet not just in time-sequence in tune with growth-rate, but, via feedback mechanisms implicit in the Genesis Program, according to individual needs. Who shall be vegetarian? — Which is allergic to normal flour? — How many will yawn at the sight of porridge?

  There are the milk tubes, intricately valved, that run to the bank of incubators which occupy almost the entire length of the ship. These are in turret-wheels, rotatable so that the gentle handling devices, the articulated arms — at present in their sheaths — which will tend them can reach any of the cradles without disturbing any others. First these arms will use tiny tweezer-grips to lift out embryo-cubes and place them in the larger incubators. Umbilical supply tubes attached via synthetic membrane to each embryo must be handled with the delicate touch equivalent to the sensitive processes within a living woman. Such precision will be needed for this oft-repeated operation that the arms will be guided electronically by the intersection of four guide-eye laser beams. Yet these beams, however weak in energy, must not penetrate the forming embryos with energies exceeding just a few photons — a near impossibility … but Technology solved it.

  We, the moving shadow, cannot help being awed. Curiously, we are not chilled by what we see. Our emotions are tuned to the expectation of newly-forming life. Oddly, we feel embarrassed; and soon we realize why. We are voyeurs, probes viewing the processes that occur inside a mother. All that is happening is healthy. We may not carp at the efforts made to overcome the absence of the human parents.

  Once given life, real mothers will emerge from all this and foster the next generation … women — some strikingly beautiful, others rather plain. Some will have powerful intellects; others not. Some will lead whilst others will follow. Most will be viewed as potential mates. Among the men, some will possess specialist qualities; some a capacity for command; others an obstinacy to obey, or refusal to learn.

  But our prevailing mood is not one only of embarrassment; we are, given that this is a miracle, nevertheless perplexed. Knowing what we shadows know about the breed of Man who made all this possible, why are we not afraid? Why no premonition of disaster? Why this sense of beatification?

  We should not search too deep for an answer to the riddle. We shadows cannot predict beyond what we see and feel and sense by instinct. We are the shadows of men and women; and like men and women we are filled with optimism and hope. We cannot bury these instincts — it is impossible. Those of us who are men are conscious of our own store of semen, our own response to the female. Those of us who are women find our vaginas moist; we are aware of the role of our sex, and we are ready for the creation of life. We are not here, in the pre-maternity ward, to cast gloom on the children of the future, to demoralize the mothers, scorn the nurses, spread cynicism where members of our own species are to be formed. Our smiles are for the present: the facts are before us: children of Futureworld shall have their playthings and their joy. We are not here to anticipate the fate of the few who may fall short of their own child-expectations. We have caught the bug of hope and we can’t rid ourselves of it.

  So we forget our doubts and our premature judgment and, instead, take heed of all that Kasiga must mean here and now, rather than when it was constructed. Our fears must slide away lest we infect the souls of the young and the hopeful — not the old and the cynical.

  We are shadow-parents, unable to repress our delight in this electronically-nourished Hot-house.

  But even now, we are freshmen. We have no idea of the prolific detail of this macro-womb. The wonders we are seeing now are nothing compared with the wonder that will light the eyes of the children, once they emerge.

  *

  Aboard Kasiga there came the Beginning; a re-genesis as true to nature as the seeding of new wheat. The illusion was that the miracle was mechanical and manmade. The illusion was false; all that had happened was that Man, equipped as he had been before with the achievements of his intellect, had delayed but not fundamentally changed the processes of conception. No doubt Man had praised himself, but only in the sense that some demented magician might be deceived by his own sleight of hand. Indeed, if the conjurers had maintained a proper humility their direct progeny might have spanned the centuries uninterrupted until the sons and daughters of the Old Age could actually witness the outcome of the trick.

  They were not there.

  Each set of chromosomes, still separated within
each cube, liked and loved their environment and found it warming and nutritious.

  At a command from the Conception Program loaded onto Tape Deck One, a chemical was released into each of the hundreds of cubes, so that the translucent membrane dividing them began to shrink and tear, like hymens of nymph-girls. There seemed to be, on Deck ZD-One, the long withheld release of intense eroticism, each coitus-cube an assignation tree, where notionally the yielding skins of men and women contrived patterns which have never changed, not even now, when machinery stirred genetic memories within a billion genes, and the bodies were remembered, and cherished, and carnally moulded within hungry hands.

  Yet the machines were only catalysts, not even capable of intruding upon the forming of human life, even if they’d had the conscious urge to do so. Like watering cans in the hot-house, they irrigated but did not intervene. They could not: the instincts were unerringly coded within the organic structure of each chromosome, folding now, feeling and searching for the equivalent that swirled within the acids from the other half of the cube, then meeting, for the first time, paralleling, pairing off two-by-two, life leading to life.

  In each cube, the helix formed.

  Entwined in sub-microscopic coil-springs, each helix located, compound by compound, the chemical ciphers of transfer.

  Reproduction began and cell-division proceeded.

  The first tiny beginnings of pre-embryonic Beings could feel and respond to the echo of the wombs from which they had been taken, centuries before. They lived in comfort.

  They were warm and they nourished.

  And after four months, they began to be Creatures.

  Minus Eleven

  As the laser sun rose over the cyclorama horizon the infant immersed in Delivery-Incubator Number 484 kicked healthily and felt the pressure increase inside the membrane bubble. The waters broke and were sucked through the exhaust trap. A throbbing began: artificial womb contractions were set in motion and on the computer indicators the light ‘484’ came up.

  This was the first.

  Baby-484 felt a kind of squeezing, the sensation of passing through a tight-gripping muscular corridor. The umbilical cord passed through the canal and 484 came close to the end of the tube.

  At this cue, the ‘run’ light showed on Cassette playdeck A.

  The loading system selected Mother-tape 01-484 and slapped it into the machine.

  As if passing from the mother’s bone structure to the womb walls, birth-pains reached the interior of Delivery-incubator 484. They were happy cries of pain, spasm and effort, pushing cries, gasps of breath, sudden laughter, then a sort of fun-countdown, and a sharp intake of breath again, then just fast breathing.

  As the glistening head of 484 emerged through the delivery tube, so the filter in the sound system that was there to synthesize womb-wall reverberation was automatically taken out. The mother’s voice rang out clear and fresh. Alive.

  Evidently mother and computer alike knew that 484 was a boy, but the mother could not, it seemed from the recording, resist whispering the fact. She said it several times, it’s a boy, it’s a boy …

  Gently, the baby was driven forward by a sponge-rubber piston onto a chute. This chute vibrated sharply, once, twice, three times.

  Respiration Normal.

  Baby 484 was breathing independently of the ‘iron lung’ device inside the incubator, and the vibrator that started the lungs ceased its churning action, as warm water was released from a spray-pipe, washing away the mucus cocoon.

  Baby 484 arrived delicately on the sorbo-rubber inspection mat, as two closed-circuit television cameras swung on the ends of articulated arms to take a look.

  The videotapes were computer-analysed for birth-flaws, as a brightly coloured mobile was lowered to within two feet of Baby-484’s eyes.

  The eyes were not yet open, but they were being gently douched, whilst leaving the tiny nose and mouth free to breathe.

  Pulse Normal.

  Apparently without purpose, the video screens on the Master Monitor Console displayed for nobody the birth details: Sex: Male. Weight: 7 pounds 4 ounces. Eyes: Brown. Birthmarks: Nil. Name …

  But the mother uttered it, whispered it, just before the display confirmed identification.

  Her whisper was gentle but excited, breathy but jubilant, exhausted and filled with delight.

  ‘Trell? Darling Trell? You’re born. You’re born!’

  Softly came the exquisite melody of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony in greeting, and the baby began to cry in recognition of his surroundings.

  Delicately guided by the cameras, a Finisher was manoeuvred into place, clamping the umbilical cord and — with loving precision — helping nature in the final act of physical severance, with a neat finish at the navel.

  ‘Trell? What do you think of your world?’

  Trell-484 cried approvingly. He seemed content with Futureworld. He could, in his subconscious, hear his mother’s voice together with something his neuronic lattice could certainly not process: the lullaby of strings. Yet, whatever this strange sound was, sound that could in no way be interpreted within his open-circuited brain, it was good. Why, didn’t it make him holla all the better, didn’t it make him kick, and move those tiny arms?

  Did he feel the warm water washing the residual blood from his hair? — the holding pads moving in from either side to ensure that he was in a safe position? — the Caressor giving him an early sense of touching and stroking? … contact, contact.

  Trell liked it. He stopped crying and considered it all.

  *

  The automatic milk supply had been prepared, perfectly synchronized with the delivery segment of the program. Now, the teat was guided to Trell’s mouth.

  ‘That’s right, Trell. You’re a strong ’un, you are. Look how you’re sucking away at it. You’re going to grow up strong, you are …’

  And Trell opened his eyes.

  Although they did not focus, did not process what they saw except in an intensely primitive sense, something inside Trell knew there was sunshine, and colour, and a pleasant spring scent in the air he breathed. Though he could not exactly ‘see’ the mobile which twirled about his head, it seemed to glisten in a funny way, and it made him feel good inside, it made him feel hungry, and he sucked well at the teat.

  The holding pads rocked him, rocked him, and somehow within he knew that he was alive. He didn’t know what he was, who he was, where he was, but he liked Being. It seemed to be Fun. It was a good thing to be.

  What he proposed to do was to go to sleep.

  Which he did.

  And only three days behind him in development was Kelda-275.

  Sex: Female. Weight: 7 pounds 1 ounce. Eyes: Green.

  Respiration Normal.

  Pulse Normal.

  Kelda was a long way down the row of Laypads. Her number, 275, denoted to the computer exactly where she was and who she was.

  The computer also noted, just for the record, that the Rhesus sign of her blood was compatible with 484’s.

  And that they were not blood-related.

  Soon, it was necessary for all three of the main computers to network-run the Production Program. The nursery was awake … Very much so. Auto-nurses, caring for the infants, washing them, keeping up with their bowel and urine effluence, maintaining sweet air, labelling the children, watching for any sign of ill-health and removing the still-born.

  There were only two of these to pass out of the Ejector Chute Aft.

  For these there were sorrowful heart-cries, and a pause in the music, and a change in the lighting.

  For the rest there was health, and crying and sleeping and feeding, and comfort and warmth.

  *

  If there had existed anyone who could observe the deathly husk of Kasiga’s body, it would have been totally beyond their grasp that a huge nursery, deep within her shell, was so rich in human activity. Conceivably, such an individual might have imagined that the rusting remains of recognizable machines might s
till be found atrophying below. But the notion that immensely intricate machinery and electronics, functioning with perfection and to full capacity, was aiding and abetting nature to this extent would have seemed not merely ludicrous, but even revolting.

  For it seemed, within ZD-One, that machines must necessarily understand the secrets of the origins of life. They did not; and even the auto-nurses did not act with consciousness in any meaningful sense of the word.

  True, they were ingenious tools. And since they had hundreds of babies to tend it appeared miraculous that they didn’t get in each other’s way.

  But their guidance systems were disarmingly simple, at least in principle.

  They ran on overhead tracks.

  High over the entire array of Child Care equipment ran a monorail system that would have made the complexities of a large marshalling yard look like the toys of a simpleton. For not only could the tracks be switched; the rails themselves could be raised or lowered at the command of any of the computers and comprised, in effect, a junction extended into three dimensions.

  The auto-nurses themselves were not, of course, robot caricatures of sprucely-dressed females, but Intensive Care black boxes, each fitted with remotely-controlled handling arms. Packed out with everything from heated towels to soothing voices, they each had enough electronics stuffed in them to match the automatic flight systems of huge airliners. They could cope without getting irritable, without needing sleep, rest, or a night at the disco.

  For human recognition purposes the nurses, of course, were useless.

  And so that the infants could get used to the moving human form, both of mother and father, laser-created holograms moved freely around the nursery.

  They were just like people … not flat, projected images on a screen, but free figures that could react to a randomizing program so that they didn’t just repeat the same actions over and over again, but ran through an infinitely variable repertoire, responding, in so doing, to something very like videotape, except that the movement segments were short and interchangeable. Thus, adults were there to tend. They spoke and calmed, and scolded and hummed with the music, and taught the infants to fix their eyes on them, and take in their shapes and movement and method of cerebral/muscular integrity.