Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK®

by Easton, Thomas A.

  “Who you callin’ a bigot, greenie?” he said.

  The Nickers stopped. Sam tightened his grip on the handle of his briefcase—solid metal and wood, and heavy with books and papers—until his knuckles blanched. He glared. He put all the anger he was feeling, all the menace he could summon up, into his voice as he said, “Get out of our way.”

  Surprise or shock made the other’s face go even slacker. He turned toward his friends along the wall as if to ask for help in cowing his prey, but they did not move. One shrugged and pointed toward the road with a stubbly chin. Sam snatched a look in that direction and saw a long-clawed police Roachster moving slowly in their direction. When he looked back, their accoster was no longer in their way.

  * * * *

  When they reached home, they stopped first in the building’s basement stable. There they fed and watered their Beetle. A vehicle with a strong resemblance to one of the twentieth-century internal combustion automobiles now visible only in museums and parades, it had been gengineered from an insect by enlarging the body and legs, reinforcing the exoskeleton with an internal framework modeled on—but stronger than—that of mammals, and creating a passenger compartment in the abdomen. Its shell was bright red.

  “We should have driven today,” said Sheila, patting the Beetle on its bristly brow.

  Sam shook his head. “It wouldn’t have changed a thing. We still would have heard from Ohmigod.”

  “But that bum!”

  “The harm was already done. He just underlined it.” He put a hand on her elbow and turned her toward the building’s elevator. “Let’s get a little sun and check the mail.”

  But the day’s trials were not done. Taped to the door of their apartment was a crudely rendered drawing of a tree, its trunk warped into a demented face, its branches twisted. Facing it, a man with a cogwheel prominent on his back raised an axe. “It’s a photocopy,” said Sheila. “They must be spreading them all over the place.”

  “Nothing personal, you mean?” She grunted an assent that did not seem entirely confident.

  He activated the living room mail terminal then, and said, “Something from the squad.” A moment later, he said, “That’s personal. Shit.”

  He stepped aside to let her see the screen. The glowing characters spelled it out: The emergency medical squad to which Sam had volunteered his time for years did not need him anymore. There had been complaints, concerns that the viral vectors used in his greening might invade an accident victim through a wound, threats of lawsuits if that should indeed happen.

  Sheila’s arm wrapped around his waist. She leaned her head against his shoulder. His own arm circled her, his head leaned on hers. “Ignorant bastards. Cretins. Bigots.”

  * * * *

  Two days later, Sheila left Sam on his lounge, this time combining the effects of the sunlamps with those of rum, to attend a strategy session for Finca d’Antonio. She did not take the Beetle, for Finca’s ward was small and the meeting was within easy walking distance. When Albert d’Antonio let her into the townhouse, Sheila went directly to the spare bedroom that was the councilwoman’s headquarters.

  Finca never had installed gengineered lighting or snackbushes. The room was brightly lit by overhead fluorescents. On a table to one side sat an electric coffee-maker and a tray of miniature Greek pastries. Half a dozen people sat at the larger table in the center of the room. Sheila Nickers knew all but one. There were no empty chairs.

  “Sheila, dear!” The councilwoman stood up and crossed the room, her arms open for an embrace. She was black-haired, dusky-skinned, short, and, like many politicians, somewhat over her ideal weight. Her eyes were black and lively, and her voice was bright.

  “I want you to meet,” she said, gesturing toward the stranger, a young man who was now looking at the tabletop. “Adrian Bartlett. He’ll be handling the petitions and mailings from now on.”

  Those were two of Sheila’s jobs. She looked again at the table. It finally registered that the lack of an empty chair was deliberate. She said, “Voter transportation…”

  Several heads shook slowly back and forth. Finca nodded her own vigorously. “Yes, that too.”

  “Then…” Her throat seemed to swell, and her voice choked off.

  “I’m afraid so, Sheila. I’m sorry.” Her expression did not match her words. “I have to adjust my positioning a bit, you understand. There are more and more conservative voters out there, and…” Her sweeping gesture said it all. She herself and all the others in the room, all except for Sheila Nickers, were unmodified humans. Sheila was the bright green standout, the conspicuous liberal who would surely cost Finca crucial votes.

  “Is there anything…?”

  Finca d’Antonio simply shook her head. There was no place for Sheila Nickers on the politician’s staff. Nor was there anything the teacher could do to change her mind.

  Sheila got home much earlier than usual. Sam was still on the lounge, still basking, still drinking, though the level in the bottle had not really gone down very greatly. Sheila entered the room, swore, seized his glass, and drained it.

  “Get one of your own, honey,” her husband said. He was just drunk enough to speak his words slowly and carefully. “What happened?”

  The liquor cabinet hid behind one of the room’s palms. She got a glass and a bottle of the sherry she preferred when she drank. She told him what had happened. “She doesn’t want me,” she said at last, the tears bright in her eyes, the pain thick in her voice. “She doesn’t want me anymore, not at all, not anywhere in the campaign. Not even licking envelopes. My spit might contaminate the voters. Turn them all green! I wish it would!”

  She was stripping as she spoke. Now she sat down beside him. When he laid a gentle hand on her thigh, she said, “You’ve had enough sun. Make you fat.”

  “Need a cuddle, huh?” He set his glass down, closed his eyes, and sighed. “So do I.”

  She nodded, groped for his hand, and squeezed it. Minutes later, she was squeezing the control node on their Slugabed, and the genimal’s warm flesh was curling around their bodies, sheltering them from a world that was turning crueler every day.

  * * * *

  A few days later, they found their Beetle dead. Someone had used an axe to sever its legs and head and cave in the side of the passenger compartment. Green paint had then been sprayed over the seats and dashboard.

  The police were unsympathetic, though they did not quite tell the Nickers it was their own fault. They did say, “What did you expect? You must have known that what you did to yourselves would draw attention. So it did. It got them mad. And now…” Yes, there were laws, but…

  Fingerprints? On the Beetle? The cops were sure they must have been there, but the corpse had already been fed to the city’s buses. Not that it mattered. The crime was only vandalism, after all.

  “And,” said Sam as they walked wearily home. “I’ll bet there isn’t a judge in the city…”

  “In the state,” Sheila interrupted.

  “The country, even,” he said. “Not one who would convict an Engineer. They wouldn’t dare.”

  “It’s too bad we’re not covered by the discrimination laws.”

  “They cover only race, religion, sex, and handicaps. Not liberalism, not rationality.”

  “Not us.” Sheila led the way into their building, past the neighbors who now, for the first time in memory, refused to meet their eyes, past the super who… He would not let them pass. “Here,” he said, and he held out a long white envelope.

  “We’re being evicted, right?” Sam spoke sourly. When the super gave a tight grin and a shrug, he added, “That’s all that’s left to happen.”

  * * * *

  The eviction notice was spread upon the table. It expressed regrets, but the message was plain enough: Their sunlamps were ruining th
e apartment’s paint. They themselves were attracting unwelcome attention. They were thus a hazard to their neighbors. And there were rumors that the viral vectors the gengineers had used to make their changes could be contagious. The company that owned the building trusted that they, the Nickers, understood why they had until the end of the month to move.

  Sheila pointed at the wall. “The lights aren’t doing any harm at all,” she said.

  “The unwelcome attention is real enough,” said Sam. “And if it gets bad enough…” He pushed several ragged-edged pieces of paper toward their old friend. “Look at these, Alice. They were on the door. Under the door. Even in the elevator. What the hell can we do?”

  The crude drawings, some of them photocopied, some of them original, were not pretty. The words, block-printed, scrawled, pieced together from scraps of this and that, were worse. They were hatred and venom and prejudice, all distilled from millennia of fear of strangers and change.

  “The worst of it,” said Sam. “The worst of it is that the building has a security system. A good one. People can’t just come in off the street. It has to be other tenants.”

  “We didn’t show them to the cops,” said Sheila. “They weren’t any help before, and we didn’t expect…” Her posture slumped dejectedly. They had told their visitor about the Beetle and the school. They had also told her of how their volunteer work had ended.

  Alice Belle’s sigh was the sound of wind over tall grass. Sam thought that he should not feel surprised. Her ancestors were far more truly, more completely, plants than his. They had been amaryllises; to them, gengineers had added human genes. Over many generations, they had become progressively more human-like. Now they had legs and could walk, though they wore bushy ruffs of fibrous roots around their shins. They had torsoes, though they were sheathed in long, blade-like, spiralling leaves. They had heads and eyes and mouths and lungs. They had brains, though a smaller secondary brain was housed in the bulb they carried between their legs. They did not have hair; their scalps were covered instead by lawns of tiny blossoms. Alice Belle’s blossoms were orange with veins of scarlet on their petals.

  Alice Belle was a bot, a botanical. Sheila had first met her when she was trying to recruit outsiders to visit her classes and explain their work. She had been fascinated to learn that some bots occupied high-level positions as administrators, scientists, and even gengineers. Alice Belle was an administrator with a small research lab.

  Over the bot’s head buzzed a small bee. Sam did not know whether it had followed her into their apartment or discovered her there. Bees often orbited bot heads; for all he knew, they even fertilized the bots’ flowers, though he had heard that when bots wished to mate, they bowed to each other and let their blossoms touch to exchange pollen. Both parents then set seed; there were no separate males and females.

  At last, she spoke: “You will have to move, I think. Even if you could fight this eviction, and even if you could win, you would not want to stay. The environment would be too hostile. You would expect awful things to happen, as indeed they did, to your Beetle. You would turn paranoid.” She shook her head. “I would hate to see that happen. Paranoids are not very pleasant people.”

  “I wish we had a place to move to,” said Sam. “But there aren’t many empty apartments in the city, and those we’ve tried to see…” His face was crystallized frustration.

  “As soon as the agents see us,” said Sheila. “Forget it. It was just rented. Or it’s being renovated. Or the rent is suddenly sky-high. Or—once! as blatant as can be—it’s not for greenies. Or bots.”

  “The suburbs?” asked their friend. “The Engineers aren’t as strong there.”

  “You’d be surprised,” said Sam. “We’ve looked there too.”

  “There aren’t even any jobs for us,” added Sheila.

  Alice Belle sighed again. “I wish I could help. I wish I could share…”

  Sam snorted. “Outdoors? We’re not so close to nature. We need a roof.” From time to time, there were veedo specials on how the bots lived, working at night and returning by day to fenced enclosures in the city’s parks where they could unfurl both roots and leaves and feed from soil and sun while they gossiped, told stories, and sang songs, some of them the ancient spirituals of another race, another age.

  “You don’t understand.” Alice Belle scowled at him as if he should know better, as if he were being no better than the Engineers who persecuted him. She waved an arm to encompass the apartment, its walls, its bright lights, its greenery. “I work during the day, like you, on a human schedule. I rest at night, and I need lights, like these. Photosynthesis is much more important for us. So I have to have a place much like this. And there are others like me. We even have our own building. We own it.”

  “In the city?” asked Sheila.

  “Any vacancies?”

  Alice Belle opened her mouth to speak, but then she hesitated. Finally, she said, “Yes, there are, but…” She took a deep breath. “It’s just us, you understand? Just bots. It would be perfect for you, and you’re good people. You deserve a safe place to live. But, but there’s a rule.”

  Sam slumped, defeated. Sheila stared at the bot, their friend, for a long moment. “Is there anyone you can speak to?”

  Alice Belle slowly nodded. “The management committee.”

  “Would you? Please?”

  She nodded again. “Yes,” she said. “I will.”

  There was another moment of silence. Sheila broke it at last by picking up the worst of the papers they had found pinned to their door and offering it to Alice Belle. “Maybe it would help,” she said. “Show them this.”

  “I will.”

  Chapter Four

  “It’s a waste of money.” Salamon Domenici was one of the Bioform Regulatory Administration’s senior program managers. Now he was glaring at Frederick Suida, leaning aggressively over his portion of the conference table. “Let ’em have the mechin’ dog!”

  The woman beside Frederick stretched an arm in his direction. He did not try to avoid it. He knew what was coming, for she had done it before. When she touched his head and patted, he stiffened; he successfully suppressed the glare he wished to give her, and all those who dared to smile. “Freddy can’t do that, Sal. You’re forgetting…”

  “Of course,” said another of Frederick’s BRA colleagues. “He’s not exactly unbiased.”

  “He’s an axe-grinder. The way he bulled that conversion lab through on us… We should shut it down before the public hears about it.”

  “They should hear about it,” said Berut Amoun. His dark skin and heavy-lidded eyes spoke of Near-Eastern ancestors. He was one of the very few BRA staffers Frederick counted among his friends. “If they thought their new boss might have been the dog they kicked last year, they might act a little more civilized.”

  Someone laughed. “More like, we’d have a mob kicking down the door.”

  “And it’s bound to leak.”

  “It’s a waste of money too.”

  “Enough.” Judith Breger, the agency’s Assistant Director, was slender, dark of skin and hair, her coverall a silvery sheath whose metallic finish proclaimed efficiency. She did not speak loudly, but her voice was firm enough to halt the jabber of rivalry and condescension and outright enmity. “Of course Mr. Suida is biased. That’s why he has the responsibility for protecting gengineered sentients. It’s also why you, Mr. Domenici, do not. Frankly, I have trouble imagining that you would give the assignment anything like the same amount of energy.”

  There was laughter. Salamon Domenici was well known in the agency for his long lunch hours and padded expense vouchers.

  Frederick clenched his teeth and sighed. He should have expected this reaction to his progress report on the attempt to save Renny from PETA’s short-sighted protectionism. Even within the Bioform Regul
atory Administration… PETA and other animal-rights activists had once named the attitude “speciesism.” Now it was just specism. His colleagues were specists. The worst of them held his origin as a gengineered pig, a garbage disposal, against him. Despite his sentience, despite the human form the gengineers’ viruses had given him, they did not see him as fully human. They called him “Freddy” as if he were a child, or a pet. They sneered at him for trying to pass for human. They tried to block his efforts to help others to pass, or to avoid persecution.

  The Assistant Director interrupted with, “Now, we have a number of permits to decide on.”

  “Do we really need any more bioform gadgets?”

  The Assistant Director’s sigh did not stave off Domenici. “I move we table them.”

  “No,” she said. “You’ve tried this before. Let’s get on with it.”

  * * * *

  The meeting had not begun until near the end of the afternoon, and it had run late. Now the building was empty, its lights dimmed, its hallways quiet. But Frederick had not yet left. He had retreated to his office, his mind continuing to churn with anger. Even in BRA, he told himself. Not just on the streets. Not just the mad Engineers. “Specists!” he muttered aloud.

  “Idiots,” said Renny. The gengineered German shepherd was stretched on the carpeted floor near his feet.

  Frederick nodded. Even in BRA, he repeated to himself. It did not seem possible. Ideologues who wanted to restrict gengineering, and not just by holding up permits for new prototypes or production models. The next item on the agenda had been licenses for those new graduates of gengineering programs who had passed their qualifying exams. There had been a move to hold those up as well, on the grounds that society had quite enough gengineers already. He suspected that some of his colleagues had put their true sympathies with the Engineers.