Steel, Titanium and Guilt: Just Hunter Books I to III

by Robin Craig

After looking at the video and reading her report, Stone looked up. “Curious,” he said. “Definitely curious.”

  “If it wasn’t for the link the AI threw up about these bigwig supporters of the President, I’d probably file this under ‘prank’ and move on. But we have to show we’ve covered all bases when we have something like this on video. The last thing we want is to be blindsided and find we do have a geneh running around targeting the President’s friends – and they find out we ignored it. Even if it’s someone with a death wish just pretending to be a geneh. It would probably be the last thing we did, at least in these jobs.

  “So, Miriam found this – I’m not sure I’ll thank her yet – and you, Jack, haven’t been as happy as I’d hoped after your promotion. I don’t want to take anyone off what other things they’re doing for this. So Jack, meet your new partner. Miriam, say hi to Jack. Don’t get used to it – I expect your partnership will only last this one trip. But who knows, maybe you’ll surprise me. You’re both going to visit the neither late nor lamented Dr Tagarin to discuss what this thing might be. I shall be surprised if he lets you through his door, but let’s see how persuasive you can be.”

  Stone looked at Miriam. He had never thawed to her and it didn’t look like the ice age was ending quite yet. Miriam wished she knew what she did that bugged him. Stone said, “OK kid, let’s get to work. Try not to get in the way.”

  Chapter 7 – GenInt

  As they drove, Miriam watched Stone out of the corner of her eye. His eyes were watching the road and he didn’t look interested in chatting. “Um. Detective Stone?”

  His eyes flicked to her then back to the road. “You have something against quiet?”

  “No. No. I just thought if we were going to work together, I should get to know you some more.”

  “I think this is going to be a very short-term relationship. And we’re just going to interview some guy. If he lets us. We don’t need to be friends to do that.”

  After a few moments Miriam asked, “Why do you dislike me?”

  He looked at her, startled. “Well, that’s a surprisingly direct question. Most people aren’t quite so open about things like that. Did you miss beating around the bush class or something?”

  Miriam gave up and looked away. “Sorry.”

  “Look, kid, it’s nothing personal. Yet. But I’ve seen you hotshot newbies before – yes, I read your file when you were assigned. That’s why they used to call me ‘Detective.’ When you’re good at school you think you know everything. You get in the way. Think you can change the world. Think everyone else should bow to your manifest brilliance. But you know nothing. Some of you become good cops. Eventually. None of you start that way.”

  “I don’t think I’m that bad. Am I?”

  “I just don’t care to find out. But look at you. They put you in a backroom job to keep you out of trouble and get something useful out of you while you learn how to feed yourself. Then you get lucky and see something and you think, maybe I can impress the boss with this. Maybe get promoted like I deserve. So you march in with your fancy report and get even luckier. So lucky the boss sends you out on the real job you’ve dreamed of, badge on hip and gun in hand. But the trouble with being lucky is people tend to confuse luck with talent. That can get you killed. Luck has a way of running out to buy itself a drink when you most need it to hang around.”

  After a few seconds Miriam said quietly. “I see. I’ll try to keep out of your way.”

  Stone glanced at her. He had expected the usual lifted chin and proud rejoinder. Maybe there was hope for this one after all.

  ~~~

  They parked in the circular drive before the entrance and got out. Dr Tagarin might have been disappointed in how his career had flamed out but he surely could not be disappointed in how he had done financially. His mansion was set in beautiful natural woodland and for all that you could tell it was a fortress it was an attractive and comfortable looking one.

  As they walked toward the gate Stone said, “This guy is a hard case and given his history he won’t like the law. He’ll have his AI preprogrammed on how to deal with the police so this is probably going to be a waste of time. It’ll give us the run-around, and it’ll know we’re asking for a favour and that we don’t have any legal grounds to push too hard. We won’t even know whether he’s talking to us via his machine, or the machine is just blowing us off on its own while he’s sitting in his Jacuzzi with a bunch of blondes.”

  Miriam shrugged. What could they do about it? They were here; they had to try.

  They waved their badges in front of the security system, which automatically queried the embedded electronics. Miriam noticed the Beldan Robotics logo under the speaker grille. Naturally she had heard of the Beldan AIs – very high end and very expensive – and she wondered whether her job would be easier if the department’s budget had stretched that far. Another part of her wondered whether if she had a brighter AI she would be here at all.

  “Please place your palms on the plate for biometric confirmation,” the door said mechanically. They did as asked, Miriam’s opinion of the Beldan AIs dropping a notch in the face of its crudeness. But on confirming their identities the system raised the priority of the visitor interaction, and after a short delay a more sophisticated level of the AI spoke in a cultured male voice:

  “Good afternoon, officers. How can I help you?”

  “We would like to see Dr Tagarin,” replied Stone.

  “Please state your business.”

  “We have a problem that we think Dr Tagarin might be able to assist us with.”

  “Dr Tagarin informs me that given how the law has ‘assisted’ him in the past he is not interested in assisting the law. In any event he can’t imagine how he could help you and has better things to do with his time.”

  “Look, this concerns a string of strange burglaries and there are aspects of the case that Dr Tagarin might be able to shed some light on. Please remind Dr Tagarin that he is a citizen and it is his duty to cooperate with the law.”

  The machine paused, whether thinking through a complex problem, communicating with its master or merely pausing for effect they had no way to know.

  “Dr Tagarin informs me that he is aware he is a citizen and fully aware of his rights as one. He has no obligation to speak to you unless you have a warrant. He further advises me that he would be astounded if you had any grounds for one and he has, to quote, ‘a team of sharks in lawyer robes’ available to sue the city if you try one without proper grounds.”

  “I told you he was a hard case,” Jack muttered to Miriam.

  “However Dr Tagarin is a law-abiding citizen who is willing to assist the police in their reasonable enquiries. Thus to avoid you wasting more of your time he wishes to assure you that he has no knowledge of any burglaries and, given that his habits and activities do not include strolls down dark alleys or nocturnal adventures along the rooftops, he is quite sure he has seen nothing that could help you. He adds that he keenly sympathizes with the plight of our overworked police and therefore recommends you pursue more fruitful lines of enquiry elsewhere.”

  “It is not as a witness but for his specific expertise that we wish to speak to him.”

  “Dr Tagarin refers you to his previous statements and wonders why you think he would provide unpaid expert advice. There are many experts, some of who may not yet have been abused by the legal system whose agents you are. Find one of them. Good day.”

  With that, the pattern on the screen indicating active engagement folded in on itself and vanished.

  “Wait,” said Miriam, and flashed a file to the interface.

  Nothing happened for minute. Miriam looked at Jack and shrugged, “Oh well, it was worth a try,” and turned to leave. Then the entrance said, “Please hold.” Jack raised his eyebrow at Miriam.

  After a few more minutes the gate slid silently into the fence. “You may proceed up the path to the door,” advised the AI.

  They entered and walked
up the path, their feet crunching on the small stones. The path had clear walls on either side with a curved, vine-covered vault over it barring access to the gardens beyond. The vines had fragrant flowers and yellow butterflies fluttered happily among them. The vibrant delicacy of it made a strange contrast to the forbidding walls beyond.

  When they reached the door it opened to reveal a man wearing a formal suit and a neutral, distantly polite expression. He looked like a butler, except that butlers were generally not six foot two, built like fighters and with callused hands and fingers. “I am Dr Tagarin’s butler. You may call me ‘James’. Please follow me,” he said, stepping aside and gesturing inside with a sweep of his arm.

  Miriam and Jack looked at each other and followed him inside, down a corridor and into a small but luxuriously appointed waiting room. “Please make yourself at home. The machine in the corner can supply most styles of coffee. Dr Tagarin will be with you in a short while.” With that, the overqualified butler bowed and exited the room.

  Jack walked over to the coffee machine and said, “Now this is a civilized use of technology. What would you like, Hunter?”

  “Do you think we have the time?”

  “I know how these things work. Unless they want something from you, when someone asks you to wait they’re going to make you wait as long as they think they can get away with, if not longer. Sometimes they do it because they’re jerks exercising their power. Sometimes they’re just pissed off at you. Be thankful this guy isn’t making us wait on hard seats in a freezing room. We might as well make ourselves comfortable.”

  They sat down, sipping their coffees. “Mmmm! Excellent!” said Miriam. “So while we wait – what do you know about this guy? I know the basic story but I was just a kid when it all happened. Anything you think I should know?”

  “Well, when he was younger he worked for an up and coming biotech firm. He had an unusual flair for both IT and molecular biology, and he was instrumental in developing key patents for the company. Those patents enabled a whole slew of medical applications of stem cells for curing disease, including regenerating tissues and organs. The company went stratospheric, and because it was a startup with a good employee share scheme, plus the bonus shares he got for his personal contributions, his own wealth went stratospheric with it.” He waved his hand around the room as if to say, as you see.

  “Anyway, the average guy might have retired, but I suppose the average guy wouldn’t have achieved what he had in the first place. And he had a passion for his work. He didn’t even quit and start his own company, which he had the money to do. He was happy to be given his own research division so he could keep right on working on the science while someone else ran the business. Some of his original patents involved genetically engineering stem cells. You know, to fix genetic defects or give cellular immunity against some hard to cure viruses. There were already enough people up in arms about that – you know, meddling with nature – but then he made his big mistake. He got interested in doing more than fixing nature’s mistakes and started looking into improving it.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad,” said Miriam as she sipped her spicy coffee, the fragrant steam caressing her nose. The coffee itself, she knew, had been genetically engineered. She wondered if that was a subtle message Tagarin intended for visitors.

  “It does when he’s not just trying to enhance some weakling’s muscles, but starts working on using cloning technology to turn his stem cells into a whole new type of human being.”

  “Yes, I remember that. But I thought that kind of work was already illegal?”

  “Not really. The environmentalists and more fundamentalist religious types had been opposing genetic engineering of almost anything for years. One lot hated it for destroying the purity of nature and the environment; the other for playing God. So there were a lot of bans and restrictions in place. But the medical benefits of his kind of research were so great that the government couldn’t bring itself to ban it outright. They just banned it from Federal funding – though of course not from Federal taxation if they made a profit out of it. And he was in a rich company, which had become rich by pushing the envelope: one that didn’t want government grants and the strings that came with them. That kind of thing had been declared unethical by all number of experts but some people just don’t care about that, I guess. And who can say they’re wrong?”

  “So what exactly happened?”

  “Well as I said, he started work on genetically engineering human stem cells to give them new traits and trying to clone them to grow new people. And he wasn’t alone – there were other groups looking into the same things. I guess the technology had finally arrived. The greenies, the religious right – and the religious left, for that matter – went ballistic. If they were against engineering the genes of animals and plants – well, you can imagine how they felt about meddling with ourselves.”

  “Yes...”

  “But it got worse. I have to tell you – my parents were atheists and always taught me the value of science, and I’ve never seen anything in this world to show otherwise. But it seemed like the better technology made people’s lives, the more people like the greenies were against it; and the more science taught us about the real world, the more people turned to religion. Between the masses convinced that technology is dangerous, the masses convinced they knew God’s opinions and the activists on both sides who saw those masses as their road to power – it got ugly.”

  He sipped his coffee with a frown of distaste, but it was for the bitterness of the memories not the coffee. “And then some of the people who had been working on these things felt brave enough to get their experiments to the stage of fetuses – they had artificial wombs by then. Not all of them worked very well – and the activists found out. Even the average mom and pop who weren’t particularly ideological were horrified by some of the pictures that came out of it. So the whole thing spun out of control. It went all the way to the United Nations. All genetic engineering of humans except for direct medical use, and all cloning of humans for any purpose, were banned around the world as fundamental violations of human rights and dignity. And more, any genetically engineered or cloned human was declared an inhuman abomination to be destroyed on sight. All the embryos any of them had developed were destroyed.”

  “The Geneh Laws. But I thought most religions opposed abortion? Why would they support that?”

  Stone gave her a sour look. “As my dad said at the time, for all the church cares about embryos, burning witches is an even more time-honored pastime. And if witches are the Devil’s consorts, engineered embryos are the Devil’s spawn. I guess embryos are blessed with a soul whether you want them or not, unless you want them so much you make them yourself.”

  “But what if someone had actually created a baby?”

  “Ah, well, there’s where I might have something to add besides color. Tagarin and his friends had been fighting the new laws like maniacs, but they went through anyway. The UN had already acquired a lot more power over national governments than it had the previous century, and they set up the new Department of Human Genetic Integrity – GenInt – as a compulsory international regulatory body. It was run by real partisans – as I suppose you’d expect, since who else would take the job? Publicly its purpose was monitoring, oversight and ethics committees, but it had its own enforcement arm in case someone insisted on being unethical. That had to be a matter of public record, but the public – or enough of them – were quite happy to see any such monsters destroyed. Most of them supported abortion anyway, and this wasn’t that different: just killing little horrors that shouldn’t have existed in the first place.”

  “Yes, I see that. I was taught the same thing in school. About the evil of making modified humans, I mean; about how the resulting monsters were better off dead. They glossed over what they did about it if it actually happened. I thought it never had.”

  “And the only people you’d put in something like the enforcement arm are more fanati
cs: you know, true believers in the cause. The kind who wouldn’t have any moral qualms about smashing labs and tossing out embryos. For the higher good and all that.”

  He paused, staring into his coffee as if his memories were residing there.

  “But babies? You mentioned babies?”

  “Yes, well. As you’d guess, Tagarin was the hotshot in the field. He hadn’t made any monsters, at least none he let develop further once he knew. Despite the howls of his critics it seems he had some qualms about how far he went. I guess he thought he could learn enough from his mistakes when they happened without risking inflicting the results on a living being. But anyway, he was further along. Much further along...”

  He paused again. This time, Miriam just waited.

  “So. He did have a newborn in his lab, and a healthy one. What its improvements were I’ve no idea: I never saw it close up. But the Department enforcers found it in a raid. They knew what it was. They killed it there and then. It never made the news feeds of course. GenInt’s charter allows it to keep secrets ‘for the greater good and social order’. Which means they are happy to release photos of monster fetuses that would die anyway, but think the plebs will get confused if they see photos of innocent babies being shot. The plebs are likely to forget that the ‘innocent babies’ are demonic creations bent on destroying society. Tagarin went crazy. He’s lucky they didn’t shoot him too.”

  “But how do you know all this?”

  Jack stared into his coffee a while longer.

  “Tagarin reported it to the police. But he reported it as if he was under attack by criminals – which I suppose to his mind he was. I was a rookie like you back then. We had a bit of a face-off with the enforcers, but they had the law on their side. We weren’t allowed to talk about it. I can tell you, because it was a long time ago and it’s relevant to our case.” He looked around for somewhere to spit, but the décor decided him against it. “Anyway, it wasn’t pretty. But there you are.”