"Of course," Faisal said, holding up one hand to her. "We simply need a second opinion, Ms. Jamison." He pressed the data stick and slid it across the desk to Tecca, the connection feeds unlocked and protruding like the ends of a Taser.
Tecca felt a moment of relief that they hadn't left, although it bothered her that she didn't have a read on them yet. She glanced at Seeta, her arm linked with her husband's. No eye contact. Hunched. Maybe they had some rare genetic disorder they didn't want other Sauds to know about. At least they seemed affectionate with one another. Tecca hated the jobs when the couple had clearly been fighting over the design.
She took the data stick and plugged in into the desk.
"What traits did you get changed?" she said as the surface checker-boarded with sequence chromatograms and karyotypes and methylation heat maps. The tang of ozone overpowered the smell of hot circuits as refrigerant circulated through the desk, cooling it as the software parsed billions of base pairs.
Faisal cleared his throat. "I would prefer that you tell me."
Tecca did a mental stutter-step. Had she misunderstood him? Had he misspoke? No—this must be some bizarre test of her abilities. Her train of thought derailed as the desk pinged: the data were all uploaded.
"This'll take a few," she said, double-tapping the Invitrosoft logo and hoping they didn't notice FREEWARE blaze across the loading screen. Tecca parameterized the freeware's stripped-down algorithms to predict phenotype. With that running in the background, she brought up the map of the design's individual chromosomes.
The karyotype showed twenty-two pairs of autosomal chromosomes. The sex chromosomes showed only a single X paired with a placeholder.
"You've got a master design," Tecca said, glancing at the placeholder. "Could use it for a boy or a girl." She revised her impression of their wealth: families saved money with master designs, if they didn't mind having, say, three identical twins.
They nodded. Faisal waved his hand as if she should hurry up. Tecca kept her focus down on the surface, not wanting her irritation to show. Dismissive hand waving. Wonderful.
The surface flashed beneath her hands: the phenotype predictions were done. She tapped once and the chromosomes f lattened into schematics, the proposed modifications highlighted in red.
She wasn't surprised by what she found. The Big Three, they'd called them back in school.
No fatties. "You want your kid to be trim," Tecca said. "Pretty buff, too."
They nodded.
No gays. "Straight."
They nodded.
And especially no retards. "And, uh," Tecca hesitated. "No learning problems."
They nodded.
Maybe it was the Big Three that had brought them to her. Most geneticists in Seattle would cheerfully remove the chance of morbid obesity or severe brain defects, while not touching sexuality. Rather arrogant, to Tecca's way of thinking. It was the client's design. Client's kid.
She skimmed the last modifications: a lowpenetrance linguistic enhancement through FoxP2; a fussy little change to the androgen receptor's promoter. Just fine-tuning.
Was that it? Tecca stifled her unprofessional disappointment. The Big Three were just popular enough to pay most of her rent. Her first brush with the reclusive Vashon Sauds, and they turned out to be the same as other Seattle parents.
"This is a decent job," Tecca said. "I'll just do a quick proofread through the regulators." Ignoring the grating sound of Jonathan twisting his Rubik's cube, Tecca switched to manual mode and skimmed the gene regulation elements. She really should upgrade from the freeware, but the license cost a month's rent and half a Rubik's cube, to boot. Besides, she'd gotten pretty good at manual reads.
Faisal cleared his throat. "Our shuttle—"
"This won't take long," Tecca said, enjoying this small chance to wave her hand at him. She turned her attention to the sequence chromatogram, reading the familiar peaks and valleys of DNA nucleotides, smiling as the pattern became obvious. Only Seattle Choices had such a bias against adenosine nucleotides. She hadn't done much with SC; they had a rep for being ham-fisted in design, but relatively nonjudgmental. Maybe they also got pushback about designing any damn sequence for money.
Faisal coughed but before Tecca could respond with more hand waving, Seeta touched his arm and he subsided.
Tecca turned her attention back to the display. She had a hard time focusing—Faisal's foot was tapping audibly—but as she read on, the pattern emerged as she came to a familiar gene linked to spatial ability. She might not have noticed, but it was the same gene she'd transfected into Jonathan's great-great-grandparents so they could solve (or rather, be frustrated by) Rubik's cubes. She knew its pattern forward and backward, and something was changed.
Tecca frowned, highlighting the whole gene and querying it against the public sequence databases. The results came back quickly.
It was an artificial mimic of a hormone receptor. The spatial ability gene would only turn on if there was a lot of testosterone.
Only a boy would get the cognitive boost from enhanced spatial ability.
Jonathan knocked his Rubik's cube again. Tecca flinched. She felt hot—no, cold. Chilled, even. Some bizarre mistake? She backtracked and manually scanned the other Seattle Choices' modifications. Some looked perfectly standard, with no signs of the hormone receptor. But all the brain function ones showed the same change. The intellectual boost required testosterone.
With their testosterone turning the enhanced genes on, the boys would be brilliant. The girls would not.
Jonathan's cube rattled in the cage again. Tecca stood up so suddenly that Seeta jumped. "Excuse me a second," Tecca said, turning her back to them and going to Jonathan's cage. The mouse looked up at her, his paws resting on a half-solved Rubik's cube. As she watched, he braced himself against the side of the cage and tried to twist the middle portion. It stuck.
Tecca reached down and took the cube from him. She fumbled until it clicked and came unstuck. Rolling the cube in her cold hand, she stared at the colored squares, the fresh gouges where he'd used his teeth some more.
She'd never designed such a master sequence. Never denied a human a boost that would go to another. The Big Three were one thing. But to design a sequence where the boys got the smarts and looks, while the girls got only looks?
"Ms. Jamison?" Faisal said. "We have our shuttle to catch in twenty minutes."
Tecca laid the cube down. Jonathan snatched it back right away.
"Sorry about the ruckus," Tecca said coldly. She sat down. "He's very bright and gets bored easily, you see, his great-grandparents were the same—they were my first project back in school. If you can make a brilliant mouse, you can make a brilliant human, you know? So much of mammalian genetics is conserved. I named him after Mrs. Frisby's dead husband. Algernon just seemed so overdone, and I..."
Tecca could see in their expressions that she was babbling. Taking a breath, she tapped for more details on the FoxP2 gene and that androgen receptor. How far did they go?
"Your sons will be mathematically and linguistically gifted," Tecca said formally, staring down at the loading screen. "Your daughters will not."
They were as still as the chairs. Tecca's clenched jaw ached as she pulled up the red-highlighted changes. Faisal opened his mouth but, out of the corner of her narrowed eye, Tecca saw Seeta shake her head.
There was more. Tecca felt the small muscles twitching about her mouth. She would have missed it if she hadn't gone into the sequence manually. If she'd owned a proper software package, like a proper geneticist, instead of watered-down freeware.
Seattle Choices had made one final change. As far as any computer was concerned, they had added the androgen receptor to regulate the cognitive genes. But as far as biology was concerned, the sequence for the receptor was defective. The moment this built into an embryo and implanted, the DNA would coil around itself and— pop —out would go the androgen receptor.
The geneticist in Tecca let out an admirin
g whistle: it was a clever variation on natural homologous recombination. And so subtle! You had to go in and look at the blasted sequence, read those DNA nucleotides one by one, and put it together in your head. Like a Rubik's cube.
But the professional in Tecca wrung her hands. The switch was there, but it was disconnected from the light bulb. If they built an embryo with a Y chromosome, they would get a brilliant son, as they wanted. If they built an embryo with an X chromosome, they would get a brilliant daughter.
Which, as far as she could tell, they did not want at all. Tecca closed her eyes. Whoever had done this at Seattle Choices had committed fraud. But by God, did she sympathize. For a moment, Tecca was tempted: sign off on the design. Let the fraud go. Let them build this embryo. Let them learn, goddamn it.
She could hear Jonathan rattling his cube about his cage. It was a familiar and friendly noise, and it pulled her back from the brink of professional suicide.
What would they do to a girl who should have been a boy? How could Seattle Choices do that to a child?
Tecca opened her eyes. "This is—" She hesitated, disconnecting the data stick. It made a whispering noise as she slid it across the surface.
She looked up at them, facing their expectant looks. At the way Seeta hung on Faisal. At the way the abaaya draped over Seeta's chair. Was this what had been happening on Vashon? They were as bad as Christ's Children, although you never caught one of those nutjobs near a geneticist.
But she owed them the truth.
"This is your kid," Tecca said. "And your design. But..." The exhaust system rattled on, belching out cold air against her legs. She forced herself to look up brief ly, to meet Faisal's level gaze, Seeta's wide eyes. Tecca pulled her hands back, leaving the stick alone at the center of the display. "But whoever designed this sequence for you at Seattle Choices committed fraud," she said. "And it's obvious who designed this, by the way. I can read that as clearly as I can read what you want."
Tecca heard the anger in her voice, the way it clipped her words and made them as short and fast as Faisal's. "You want a smart and handsome son. Fine. You want a—a beautiful daughter," she spat. "Only a beautiful daughter. It—" She caught herself. "It's your decision."
There was a small rustle as Seeta pulled her arm from her husband's. Tecca watched the inverted reflections on her display as they turned their heads to look at one another, and then her. Their expressions were tinted with reflected shadow.
"But whoever did this master sequence for you stuck in something else," Tecca forced herself to continue, still watching their shadowed reflections. It was easier than looking up and showing them see her expression. "If you'd gone with an X chromosome, you would've gotten a girl. Who was every bit as smart as your sons."
The exhaust system wheezed once more before shutting off, enveloping them in quiet. Even Jonathan had gone still.
Faisal cleared his throat, breaking the silence. "We appreciate your honesty." His words were slow, but his tone still formal. He tucked the data stick back into his suit.
"How could you tell?" Seeta said softly.
"I'm a freelancer," Tecca said, not looking up from her clenched hands. She wanted them to leave, and embarrassing honesty might get them out faster. "I use a freeware version of the standard design package. I only found the changes because I looked at the sequence manually, since I don't have all the algorithms available to me." Tecca forced her hands apart, stretching the stiff joints. "Whoever did this had the full Invitrosoft package. They probably assumed whoever else looked at it would use the same tools. They're industry standard."
"So it's undetectable by most geneticists," Seeta said.
Tecca nodded, feeling like she was watching herself from a distance. She had never come across such fraud; it should have shocked and angered her, but all she felt was a curious sympathy for the unknown geneticist at Seattle Choices who had sat across from this couple and read repugnance in their genes.
She wanted her office and Jonathan and her thoughts to herself. She wanted them gone. But Tecca listened to her grown-up voice explain invoicing. She watched as the Sauds pressed their thumbs to her desk, authorizing the rest of the bank transfer. She felt her head bobble as she got up and opened the door.
"When you've hired a lawyer," she said. "I can be reached directly by email or chat."
Faisal nodded and left wordlessly. Seeta held back, flipping out her abaaya.
"Are we the first Sauds you've ever worked with?" Seeta said.
"Yes," Tecca said, realizing suddenly as she glanced down at her desk—and not giving a damn—that Seeta had been able to see Tecca's own inverted expression from this angle.
Seeta nodded, pulling the abaaya over her head and working her hands through the loose sleeves. "My husband's father is the present—" Tecca didn't understand the word, but inferred head honcho from the context. "He is a... conservative man. Proud of our heritage. Angry about us living as unwanted guests far from home."
"Mm," Tecca managed. She didn't give a damn about their daddy issues.
Seeta continued quietly as she covered her hair. "Being so close in line, of course, the Saud geneticists will look over our sequence closely before approving it," she said, tucking in a few last strands of hair. "I imagine they will use the latest versions of the software."
Tecca caught her arm, grasping the damp heavy cloth of her abaaya, stung by the slur to her services. "How," she said, the last thread of professionalism snapping. "How could you decide this? How? I don't give a damn about your revelations, about moral relativism. It's wrong, it's wrong and it disgusts me." Tecca took a breath. "I completely sympathize with that Seattle Choices geneticist."
Seeta glanced down at Tecca's hand, then up to her face. She nodded, almost to herself. "As do I, Ms. Jamison," Seeta said. "And my husband."
She gently shook off Tecca's hand. Taking the doorknob, Seeta closed the door after herself.
Tecca stood there, listening to their footsteps fade as they left the run-down office building. Her mind was hot and crowded with a thousand questions that buzzed like bees. She could have wrenched the door open and run them down, screamed at them until they answered.
Instead, she went back to Jonathan's cage. He let her pick him up. Tecca stroked his face with one finger and picked up the gnawed Rubik's cube with her free hand, turning it over in her hands.
It hadn't been fraud. Not by Seattle Choices. It had been camouflage. Genetic camouflage for an ideological battle over—what? Old oil money, family, power? Certainly something very, very old.
She gently placed Jonathan on her right shoulder. "I got rent, little man. And enough left over that I'll get you a new Rubik's cube," she whispered. He squeaked triumphantly at new Rubik's cube. "Well, technically, an old one."
Tecca settled down at her desk and stroked Jonathan's whiskers, trying to soothe her own unease. They were using their child as an argument. A weapon. A weapon she had, however unintentionally, approved.
She set Jonathan on the desk, cupping her left hand over him like a shield.
The brittle old plastic of the Rubik's cube shattered when she hurled it against the wall, the colored plastic squares clattering to the ground.
* * *
Not for Sissies
Jerry Oltion | 3339 words
Nathan was eating breakfast in the kitchen when his husband, Greg, announced that he was going to die.
"It's time," was all Greg said, but those two words were enough. Nathan choked on his egg and sausage, then swallowed carefully and concentrated on breathing for a few seconds.
"It's the third morning in a row," Greg added. "I can't take it any more." He leaned against the doorframe, his blue and white checkered bathrobe hanging open across his hairy chest. He looked like a Norse god, or maybe a Greek one: bulging pecs and washboard abs narrowing down to a slender waist that a single arm could encircle. Nathan felt a moment of passion at the sight, the same passion he always felt when he looked at Greg, but the gravity of the
situation immediately squelched his desire.
"Does it hurt?" he asked.
"Not physically," Greg said. "But I keep waking up out of these dreams where it does."
Nathan frowned. "Wait a minute. You're going to snuff it because you're dreaming that it hurts?"
Greg shifted against the doorframe. His robe fell open a little more, but he didn't notice, or didn't care. "It's eating away at me, Nate. I can't stand knowing that."
Nathan set his fork on his plate. "It's prostate cancer, idiot. It won't kill you for another ten years."
"Ten years of anxiety."
"Have it cut out, then. It's not like you need it."
Greg snorted. "The nerve bundle that controls erection goes right over the prostate, and I definitely need that." He pulled open his robe and regarded his penis, hanging flaccid and small, smaller than Nathan ever remembered seeing it. It looked like a little boy's penis, drawn tight up against his body. That, as much as anything else, made Nathan realize that Greg was serious about snuffing himself.
"You don't know that surgery will sever the nerve," he said. "At least try it first."
"Surgery," Greg said, shuddering. "Gah.
The word alone is enough to give me the creeps. Even if I could find somebody morbid enough to try it, I don't want anybody whittling away at me just to give me a couple more years."
"But it'll be a couple more years with me!" Nathan said. He scooted back his chair and stood, suddenly aware of the effects of too many egg-and-sausage breakfasts, but Greg had never complained. "I may not be the sexiest man alive," Nathan said, "but I'm fun to be around. At least you keep telling me I am. And I love you. Doesn't that count for anything?"
Greg scratched himself and cinched his robe around his waist again. "Yeah, it does, but it doesn't undo anything, and I'm still going to wake up every morning with cancer. You say you love me; do you really want me to endure that? Do you want it on your conscience to know what I'm going through just so you'll still have me?"
Analog Science Fiction And Fact - May 2014 Page 13
