Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK®

by Easton, Thomas A.

  A concrete walk led from the parking lot to the entrance of the main building, a classic structure of contoured ledges and artful setbacks, all white concrete and tinted glass. The metal ductwork of the air-conditioning system showed on the roof, and though the day was so far very nice, Emily knew that that system would be essential later on.

  Someday, she reflected, a bioform might replace the metal, pumping cooled air through the building with the bellows of its breath. Someday there might be bioform appliances in kitchens and toys in nurseries. There might even be broadleaved philodendrons whose every leaf was a veedo screen, or bioform computers, or …

  There were people in Neoform’s labs, she knew, who were working on such things. At a recent seminar, she had seen how flat surfaces—leaves or skins—could generate high-resolution images, their pixels nothing more than single cells that emitted bioluminescence, like fireflies or ocean algae or deep-sea fish, on command. Neural logics and signal processors were also under development, and she could foresee the day when bioform vehicles and other devices would have their controlling computers built in, not plugged in. Houses and offices would be grown not as mere shells to be dried and painted and furnished, but complete, with furniture, appliances, communications, and computers as part of their flesh. Never again would humanity need to build mechanical or electronic devices. If she doubted that industry would give way entirely to a new version of agriculture, and that all the environmental problems that the world had learned accompanied mines and factories and machinery would disappear, well, she had been called a cynic.

  The Biological Revolution was young. Just as that earlier revolution marked by the internal combustion engine had begun with automobiles and aircraft, it had begun with their equivalents. Only much later had the internal combustion engine spawned power lawn mowers and weed-whackers. That bioform air conditioner might be decades away, though already she could glimpse how it would have to be designed: part tree, for the cooling power of transpiration, the same thing that made a tree’s shade so pleasant on a hot day; part beast, for the lungs that could make the cooled air move. Perhaps she could work on it, once the Bioblimp project was out of the way.

  There were advantages to being in on the ground floor of a technology and an industry. Later, it would become difficult to think of new things to gengineer. The bioform houses and hanky bushes, now just beginning to appear, would all have been invented. Now, there was plenty of room for creativity and fame and wealth. The future was limited only by the imaginations of gengineers like herself, working for companies like Neoform. And there were jobs in plenty for all the nongengineers who sold and serviced their products or worked at adjusting society to the impacts of the Biological Revolution, even in such simple ways as replacing pavement with turf.

  She stood before the Neoform building. Here were the offices of the company’s administrators, the conference rooms, the laboratories of half a dozen gengineers like Emily. But before Emily could proceed to her lab, she had to confront the gray-haired receptionist who insisted on being called “Miss Carol.”

  From her throne behind a low barricade just within the building’s door, Miss Carol presided over four things: a small switchboard, a computer terminal, an electronic pad on which each person entering or leaving the premises was obliged to sign his or her name, and the control for the turnstile that blocked all passage. When she spoke, she displayed a deep southern accent.

  Emily opened her thin briefcase for inspection, signed in,said she was glad to be back and yes-Miss-Carol she’d heard of the awful thing that had happened on the expressway and yes-Miss-Carol she expected that the memo on the meeting later on would be in her box. Finally, she squeezed through the turnstile and escaped. As soon as she was around the corner, she sighed with relief. When someone laughed, she started guiltily.

  The odor of pipe tobacco told her who the laugher was before she turned. Frank Janifer, one of the company’s few smokers, was standing in the doorway to the company library. “You didn’t give her much of an opening, did you?”

  Emily smiled. Frank was in marketing, and he knew everyone. “She’ll go for half an hour.”

  “But only if you encourage her.”

  She snorted. “All you have to do is stand still! If you have any dirt to give her …”

  There was nothing slow about Frank. “So you were there?” He stepped into the hallway to walk beside her while she said as little as she could about the day before. As always. he made her feel small when he began to move. He wasn’t tall, but he had the kind of bulk that came only with weight lifting, and that was indeed Frank’s hobby. He wore his blond hair past his ears, and Emily had heard the single women in his department remark that it was a pity that he was gay. “Will you be giving us something to market soon?”

  She shrugged. “We don’t have a patent, if that’s what you mean. But we do have a contract possibility.” When he raised his eyebrows, she added, “It’ll all come out at the meeting.”

  They parted at the door to her lab, where her technician Alan Bryant, offered her the mug of coffee in his hand. “Thanks, Al.” Her nostrils flared as she inhaled the welcome scent. “Anything new?”

  He had a doctorate as good as hers, but he was younger, still new to the world of research. His position was the equivalent of the postdoc of the previous century. He took her briefcase and led the way toward her office cubby at the rear of the lab, in the corner by the window. “There’s that meeting …” They both ignored the computer workstation on the other side of the room. Its screen was running a simulation of the growth of a Bioblimp, from a hydrogen-filled egg floating in air to an adult blimp, its muscular tentacles unloading a ship.

  She rummaged through the pile of mail that had accumulated in the past two days and found the memo. The first item on the agenda was her report on the patent hearing. Second was …

  “And Chowdhury is pushing those armadillos of his.” Bryant’s tone was not approving. The man he had mentioned was abrasive toward everyone, but he seemed to take a special pleasure in his sneers at blacks. Grudgingly, Bryant added, “He’s got a prototype.”

  “He’s wasting his time. General Bodies has that market locked up with their Roachsters.” She paused, sipping at the coffee. Then she looked for her briefcase, found it on a chair, lifted it onto the desk, atop the litter of mail, and opened it. The sheaf of papers she wanted was on top of the stack. “Do we have any kangaroo DNA on hand?”

  Bryant shrugged. “I don’t think so. But we can get it overnight. “

  She pointed at a computer-generated sketch. “While I was gone, I talked to a VP for Mayflower Van Lines. He was at the hearing. He liked the blimp’s cargo-handling and thought it could make a good moving van. But only if it had built-in cargo holds.” The sketch showed a blimp hovering above a house. Tentacles were stuffing furniture into openmouthed pouches on either side of the blimp.

  “Gotcha.” He turned and stepped to the computer workstation. A touch of his finger canceled the growth-simulation program, and a genebank’s long list of genetic stock began to scroll up the oversize screen. The genebanks were accustomed to hurry-up orders. “I’ll get right on it.”

  * * * *

  The meeting was scheduled for ten. That gave Emily barely enough time to sort through the rest of her mail and pull her notes together. The company would want a formal, written report eventually. Right now, it wanted whatever she could give, in whatever form she could manage.

  When she and Alan walked into the conference room, the research head, Sean Gelarean, was already there, marking the air with a touch of lime aftershave. Come to the States with the last gurgle of the British Brain Drain, he had found that his Mediterranean coloring could, for a change, make life easier. He told the story often: in England, he had been just another wog, his Palestinian ancestry weighing more than three generations of loyalty to the Crown. Here, he had
blended in among hybridized Italians, Greeks, Spanish, Portuguese, Afghanis, Lebanese, and more. The old Italian-American family, the Campanas, into which he had, in time, married had barely noticed that he was not one of their particular group. Rumor had it that he had never converted to their Catholicism, that, in fact, he kept a prayer rug in his office closet and unrolled it five times a day to pray to Mecca in the east.

  With the Campana money, he had become one of Neoform’s founders. Not long after that, though still long before Emily’s tenure with the company had begun, he had been the gengineer behind the Hawks that cop had appreciated so much. If further rumor were right, the fact that the Campana money had gone into making police vehicles might make him feel even better. Most of their investments leaned toward the other side of the fence.

  Also present were Frank Janifer and two aides from marketing, an anonymous VP from financial, and two of the firm’s other gengineers, Ralph Chowdhury and Wilma Atkinson. A sharp edge of sweat overlaid the lime, Frank’s tobacco, Wilma’s floral perfume, and all the other less-distinctive scents. Emily supposed the sweat belonged to Ralph, for that odor seemed to accompany him everywhere. He was dark of both hue and temperament, a half Indian whose parents had escaped from South Africa after it went black. He wore flat-lensed spectacles that reflected the room’s lights and hid his eyes.

  Wilma was an asthenic blonde who specialized in decorative plant-animal hybrids. One of her products occupied a pot on a pedestal near the conference room’s one window. Its form was as natural, yet as abstract, as branching coral, it swayed gracefully, and from time to time it emitted a soft, tuneful moan. Her work provided Neoform with one of its most successful and profitable product lines.

  Everyone waited quietly while Emily straightened her notes to one side of the small keyboard and flat screen set flush in the table before her. She stalled a moment longer to plug her graphics disk into the drive slot next to the screen. When she was done at last, and her hands were folded atop her papers, Sean said, “I wish you had called last night, Emily. I wanted to know immediately.”

  Emily shrugged and opened her mouth. But before she could say anything, Frank interrupted: “I don’t believe she was thinking of anything to do with work, Sean. She was on the expressway when …”

  “Ah.” The other nodded his graying head. The beginnings of the bulldog jowls he would wear not much later in his life wobbled. He hadn’t known, he said, though he did not look surprised. He turned back to Emily. “But that’s over and done with. You’re safe, and we’re glad of it.” When the others had murmured their agreement, he added, “It would have been difficult, finding someone to take over your Bioblimp project.” He sighed. “I probably would have had to do it myself.”

  Emily thought that he did not look displeased at the thought. She knew that he had accepted such chores in the past, and somehow, his name had always wound up the only one on the project.

  “Do you feel up to giving us a report?” he said.

  “Of course.” She looked down at her papers, though she had little need to refresh her memory again. Then she told them what had gone on in Washington, adding some detail to what she had told her husband. The patent examiners had agreed that the Bioblimp indeed seemed original and patentable. But then had come the reason why the patent had not simply been issued, and a hearing had been called instead. A Pentagon general had appeared to claim that the Defense Department had already produced similar carriers for troops and cargo. To support the claim, he displayed a single sketch. Then he said that his office wished to classify both the patent application and Neoform’s Bioblimp.

  Wilma’s artwork softly echoed her audience’s groan. “Fortunately,” she went on, “the Hearing Board shot that down. They pointed out that the application had already been published, and besides, the press was present. And then we—I and our lawyers—pointed out that according to the general’s sketch …” She paused to touch the keyboard, and a screen at the end of the room lit up with a lifelike diagram. “According to the general’s sketch, the rootstock was a very different species of cnidarian and the result lacked our cargo-handling tentacles. It had only a rudimentary fringe.” A split-screen diagram emphasized the comparison. She shrugged as if to say that she had done her best. “The Board took everything ‘under advisement,’ and we’ll know their decision in a few days.”

  “Tell them about Mayflower,” said Alan Bryant. Ralph Chowdhury scowled, as if offended by the temerity of a mere technician—or a black—who dared to speak, but he said nothing.

  Emily looked at her boss, Sean, and activated her third computer graphic. “Alan is referring to a conversation I had with the Vice President for Purchasing of Mayflower Van Lines. He was at the hearing, and he thought the Bioblimps, especially with their tentacles, might make good moving vans. If we can equip them with cargo holds. He didn’t want strap-ons, he said, because the straps might break.” Someone snorted. “I know,” she added. “The airlines have no trouble. But we’ve already begun to look into marsupial genes.” Frank muttered to one of his aides, who produced a disk, inserted it in the drive before her, and copied the graphic.

  Sean held a single piece of paper in front of his bifocals. “I understand the Bioform Regulatory Administration posed an obstacle?”

  “BRA just wants a more extensive Environmental Impact Statement. But we can’t prepare it until we know who our customers will be.”

  “Hah!” Chowdhury was scowling at her now. “You won’t have any! Not if I know the military!” He didn’t, Emily thought. But he had never let the truth keep him from attacking everyone within reach, as if he hated them all. His colleagues put up with him because they sympathized with his history, and because, for all his abrasiveness, he was a more than competent gengineer. He was, in fact, one of the best in the industry. Even Emily had to admit that he could do things with a genome that she could never attempt.

  “If the decision goes against us,” Emily replied, “I think we’ll be able to get a military procurement contract. I have a feeling the general thought our design rather better than the one he had. The built-in cargo holds should only help.”

  Wilma changed the subject. “Have you heard the news, Emily?” When Emily shook her head, she went on, “They didn’t find any terrorists at all on that Sparrow. It just stopped responding to its controls.”

  Frank began to look worried. “Do you think there’s a defect in the gengineering? That could hurt sales.”

  “The station said the PLO, the Free Venezuelans, and the Boer Front have all called to claim the credit.”

  Frank laughed. So did Emily. The same thing happened every time there was a disaster that might have been caused by terrorists. Some of the more extreme groups had even been known to claim credit for earthquakes and tornadoes.

  The research head rapped a pencil on the table. When he had their attention, he said, “I don’t think that is our problem.”

  “But, Sean …”

  “Wait until they say there’s a defect. Or that the terrorists sabotaged the Sparrow in some way, which I think is more likely. Now we have a report from Dr. Chowdhury.”

  Chowdhury’s motions, as he shoved a disk into his own drive slot with a loud click, were aggressive. He glared at everyone impartially, though his gaze seemed to avoid Sean and to linger just a little on Emily and Alan. “Such problems,” he finally said, “certainly won’t affect the Bioblimp. That is a dead end. The true future of this company must lie with the armadillo-based vehicles I have been working on.” He gestured, and the screen showed his own first diagram.

  “The problem is the wheels,” said Chowdhury. “When General Bodies designed their Roachster, they had an immense advantage. An arthropod’s shell is laid down by an underlying membrane and is periodically replaced or molted. Once they had gengineered their hybrid to grow bumps in suitable places, beneath the legs …” Most of them
knew what he was talking about with the speech and the diagram he displayed, but review was an essential part of the ritual of presentation. In most people’s hands, it was also a comforting rite; in his, it grated.

  He continued: “Then they could have the membrane secrete a second layer of shell inside those bumps, just within the first. It does this anyway at molting time. The difference comes in the shaping of the layers where the bumps neck down to join the body, so that the end result is a wheel mounted on a central hub. The genimal’s legs run backward on top of the wheels.” Another diagram. “And when the wheel wears out, a molt replaces it.

  “Unfortunately …” A photo replaced the computer graphic. It showed Chowdhury standing beside an armadillo whose back bulged well above his head. Emily thought that the world had seen nothing like it since the South American glyptodont had died out millennia before, if then. The size was comparable. The glyptodont had even had a tail, as did armadillos. But the glyptodont’s shell had not swelled out beneath its legs in four rounded bosses that looked exactly like the wheels of a Roachster. He went on, “An armadillo’s shell is really a system of bony plates embedded in the skin. The plates are covered with horny scales, but the bone is what gives the shell its strength. That’s a more internal tissue, and it is never molted. It was therefore difficult, but I did succeed in producing an armadillo with wheels. However, once those wheels wear out, replacing them is a much more time-consuming process. We may have to fit them with rubber tires. “

  “Why bother?” asked Frank. “With their Roachster, General Bodies has a lock on the wheeled genimal market.”

  “Sure,” said Emily. “Why can’t your ‘Dillo Dillies’ run on legs, like a Tortoise?”