Designer Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution

by Brian Stableford

  The problem, he supposed, was that he had never been around babies much. Nobody had, these days. Even as a baby you didn’t get to be around babies much, no matter how much effort your co-parents put into the awkward business of arranging playtimes.

  Rick did not dare to admit the extent of his confusion and difficulty to his five co-parents—not because they would not understand, but rather because they would insist on understanding, at great and wearisome length. They would schedule a fortnight of evening meetings so that they could all discuss the psychological roots of existential unease and the hazards of bonding failure, and spend hours lamenting the fact that the emotional underside of human nature had been shaped in the long-gone days when it was usual for people to be biologically related to the children they reared. He preferred to suffer their unthinking impatience; one could only take so much five-handed moral support.

  It was in order to subvert his vague annoyance with himself that Rick went back to inspect the imperfect rose. He had to make an effort to pull himself together before he could examine it properly. He couldn’t remember which of his co-parents had pressed so hard for pink decor in the nursery, but it certainly hadn’t been him; he didn’t like wallflowers and he thought that pink roses were terminally cute.

  The rose didn’t look well at all; its pink petals were extensively mottled with ochreous yellow. Rick was tempted to pluck the flower immediately and hurl it into the cloaca to which all the rest of the nursery’s wastes were consigned. Another would grow to take its place, in time. He reached out to do it, but then he hesitated. He realized belatedly that the sickening of the rose might conceivably be a symptom of something serious. The nursery was supposed to be free of all non-functional biota, even kinds that were harmless to everything except wallflowers.

  Rick studied the petals again, more carefully. Then he scanned the neighboring corollas. They too were beginning to show early signs of discoloration.

  “Oh pollution,” he murmured. “Why me?” Carer-of-the-week was nominally in charge of the house as well as the baby, but that was usually a sinecure because nothing ever went wrong with the house.

  There was a screen set into the rosewood half a meter to the left of the yellowing rose, and Rick punched in the code for the house’s cellular troubleshooting program. He entered the location codes, and watched the screen, hoping fervently that no human action would be necessary in facilitating treatment of the trouble-spot.

  But the screen flashed up: ALL CLEAR.

  “How can it be all clear, moron?” he asked, out loud. “It’s supposed to be an eternal bloom, immortal unless picked.”

  Unfortunately, the cellular troubleshooter was a low-grade system. As artificial intelligences went, it really was a moron. Rick pressed RETRY, but he knew it wouldn’t get him anywhere. The message stubbornly held its centre-screen ground.

  Across the room, Steven let go of the teat and began to exercise his lungs again. He was a light but frequent feeder, and he tended to mop up a lot of air when he ate. The feeding-nook was a clever piece of design, but it wasn’t versatile enough to take care of every need.

  Rick hurried over to pick Steven up, and hoisted the naked baby high on to his left shoulder. Then he began walking round and round the cradle, rubbing Steven’s back gently and rhythmically. Inevitably, Steven could not be content with a delicate burp. He brought a few milliliters of milk back with the air, and dribbled it down the back of Rick’s shirt. Rick stripped off the shirt and dropped it into the laundry-port, trying hard not to curse the child.

  The next item on Steven’s schedule was his morning bath. He was, of course, clean already—the cradle was fully-equipped for waste-disposal—but the co-parents knew from their assiduous studies how vital it was to maintain a child’s water-familiarity. The household soviet had designed the carer’s routines with that in mind. The baby-bath, like the cradle, was an outgrowth of the nursery wallwood, but it normally stood empty for hygiene’s sake. Rick activated the tear-ducts, and stood cuddling Steven while he waited for it to fill up. Steven was no longer wailing, and there was nothing to distract Rick’s attention from the gentle trickle of water.

  Because the bath was dark brown, Rick did not immediately observe that anything was amiss. It wasn’t until there were eight or ten centimeters of liquid in the shallow bowl that he realized that the water was discolored. He dipped his hand in and brought out a little of the liquid, cupped in the palm. It was faintly straw-colored, and it had an odd feel.

  He knew then that the problem was serious. A sickly wallflower was one thing, but an unidentified substance in the baby-bath was something else: it was a naked threat to the well-being of the household’s most precious member.

  The household had no in-living biotechnician. Three of the co-parents worked in construction and deconstruction, and therefore knew something about house-systems, but Don and Nicola were away on-site somewhere in South America and Dieter was strictly a mud-and-sand gantzer who couldn’t tell left-handed wood from right. Not only was there no expert help on hand, but there was no one in the house who could reasonably be interrupted at work in order to commiserate with him. Rosa—who was in Ed and Ents, like Rick himself—was busy tutoring. Chloe was plugged into a robominer way down in the mid-Atlantic trench. Dieter had a DO NOT DISTURB sign posted.

  Rick went back to the screen, activated the camera, and called a doctor.

  The doctor was a little slow coming on screen, but at least she didn’t put Rick on hold. The ID code on the screen told him that her name was Maura Jauregy. She looked overdue for a rejuve, but Rick found that slightly comforting. Wrinkles—provided that they were subtly understated—still seemed to him to be somehow emblematic of wisdom.

  “I’m Richard Reece,” said Rick, though he knew that the doctor’s screen would already be displaying his name and address. “I think our house has a problem, but the lar keeps flashing an ALL CLEAR signal. The symptoms aren’t extreme—a few wallflowers that look as if they’re sick, and discolored bathwater—but they’re in the nursery, and we can’t take any chances with the baby.”

  Dr. Jauregy could see the baby, because Rick was holding him up to the camera, and she nodded to indicate that she understood.

  “I’m activating my diagnostic AI now, Mr. Reece,” she said. “Can you lower the drawbridge to let it in?”

  Rick punched out the codes that would open the house’s systems to interrogation and investigation by the doctor’s specialist software. He watched her face while she studied a datascreen to the left of camera. She had an old-fashioned professional frown, which was really quite charming.

  “Mmm…,” she said, speculatively. Then she looked straight at camera again. “Could you help me out, Mr. Reece? Can you remove a few petals from the affected flower, and a cupful of water from the bath? Place them in two separate sections of the dispenser-unit. No need to activate any analysis-programs; I’ll use my own.”

  He did as he had been asked, and then politely placed himself in front of the camera again, so that he and the doctor could look at one another. Her professional frown gradually deepened, until it seemed to Rick to be positively funereal.

  “Very odd,” she said, after a while. “Very odd indeed.”

  “The nursery systems were only installed a couple of months ago,” said Rick, knowing that his input was probably unnecessary but feeling that he ought to make an effort to help out. “We didn’t have our own womb put in; we collected Steven after delivery. The wood and the wallflowers are dextro-rotatory—they’re supposed to be non-metabolizable by all feral organisms and fully immune to all natural pathogens.”

  “Of course, of course,” said Dr. Jauregy, contemplatively. “The trouble is that so much progress has been made recently in dextro-rotatory organics that there’s an awful lot of dr-DNA floating around. It might be something that got into it at the manufacturer’s and lay dormant. On the other hand, it might be something else. Exactly what though.…”

  “You don’t
know what it is, then?” said Rick, feebly.

  “Not yet,” agreed the doctor, obviously choosing her words very carefully. “There’s a slim possibility that the root of the trouble isn’t organic at all. It might be a fault in your electronics, at the silicon/biochip interface. If something in the software were interfering with the nutritional upkeep of your organics, that would account for the fact that your lar won’t recognize that anything’s amiss. You’ve definitely got bugs of some kind rattling around in the walls, but it might not be easy to figure out exactly what they are. Are any members of your household professionally involved in cutting-edge biotech?”

  “No,” said Rick. “We’re just ordinary people. No intellectuals here.”

  “It’s probably something very minor,” the doctor said. “But it will need investigating. I’ll have to come over.”

  “In person?” said Rick, in astonishment. He had never known a doctor to make a house call before—although he supposed, on reflection, that doctors who specialized in the diseases of houses probably had to do it fairly frequently.

  “It makes it easier to prod and poke about,” said Dr. Jauregy, “and although it might well be something utterly trivial, it’s got my AI thoroughly confused. I’ll pick up a robocab and be with you in two hours or so. I’ll leave my systems hooked up, if you don’t mind—feel free to call the cabscreen if anything else comes up.”

  “No problem,” said Rick.

  “I don’t suppose…,” the doctor began, and then paused.

  “What?” asked Rick.

  “Have any of you any enemies?” she asked, trying to imply by her manner that she naturally assumed that the answer would be “no,” but that she felt obliged to check it out just in case.

  “You think someone might be doing this deliberately?” said Rick, utterly horrified by the thought. “You think someone might be trying to poison our house?”

  “I doubt it,” she said with a slight sigh, perhaps also doubting her own wisdom in having asked the question. “As I said, it’s probably something utterly trivial. Two hours, then.” And then, having deftly planted the seed of an awful anxiety, she switched off.

  * * * *

  Chloe was still mentally lost in the ocean-depths, even though her body was peacefully slumped into an armchair in her cubby-hole. Dieter, though he probably wasn’t working at all, still had his systems programd to post DO NOT DISTURB messages in response to all inquiries. As soon as Rosa had finished her tutorial, though, she responded to Rick’s appeal for someone to talk to.

  “Of course we don’t have any enemies,” she said, when he’d recounted the whole of his conversation with the doctor. “Who could possibly want to hurt our house—our nursery? It’s probably an innate fault in the system, which is only just beginning to show up. Have you checked the rest of the house?”

  “All except the cellar,” said Rick. “But I wouldn’t know what to look for, would I?”

  The house’s systems were arranged in the conventional fashion. The inorganic parts of its brain were in the attic-space under the roof; the pump controlling its various circulatory systems was in the cupboard under the stairs. Rick had opened both cubby-holes to look in, but there had been nothing visibly amiss. He hadn’t gone down into the cellar mainly because he didn’t much like the cellar, which was cramped and crowded. All the waste-recycling systems were down there; so were the knotted roots whose growing-points extended deep into the ungantzed substratum on which the foundations were built, scavenging for minerals and water. The lighting down there was minimal; it was the only part of the house that was actually gloomy.

  “It has to be the new systems,” said Rosa, as though trying to convince herself. “It’s not right, though—it’s not as if we cut any corners cost-wise. Those nursery-fittings were the best we could afford. It’s not right.”

  “It might be because they’re state-of-the-art that all the bugs haven’t been ironed out yet,” Rick suggested. “New technologies always have teething problems—just like babies.”

  She didn’t seem to be listening. “You don’t suppose Dieter brought something back on his boots when he came back from Africa, do you?” she said. “He was carer last week, wasn’t he?”

  “He was in the middle of the Kalahari desert,” said Rick. “That’s the last place in the world where you might pick up a bug capable of metabolizing dextro-rotatory proteins.”

  “He came back on a plane,” she countered, combatively. “Planes these days are full of dr stuff.”

  Rick couldn’t help thinking that Rosa wasn’t being as supportive as she might have been, and he felt let down. It was strictly taboo to love one of one’s co-spouses significantly more than the others, lest one be thought guilty of singling, but Rick always felt particularly vulnerable with Rosa. She wasn’t as good-looking as Chloe or Nicola, but there was something about her that always made his heart feel as if it might melt, and he didn’t like it when she was annoyed with him.

  For once, he was grateful when Steven began to whimper; having someone to talk to didn’t seem to be helping much.

  “I’d better feed him again,” said Rick.

  “He can’t be hungry already,” Rosa complained. “It’s not time.”

  “He didn’t have much last time,” Rick answered, apologetically, “and he burped some of that back again.” He realized even as he spoke that there just might be a sinister implication in what he was saying. “Oh pollution,” he said, softly. “I can’t just put him back in the nook, can I? Not if the nursery’s sick. What can I do, Rosie?”

  “Take him to the dining-room,” said Rosa. “The main system can mix baby-milk just as well as the nursery-nook.”

  “But it hasn’t got a teat!” Rick protested. “I can’t feed him with a spoon, can I?”

  “Get the dispenser to mould one out of soft plastic,” she said. “There must be a program for it somewhere in the library. One that fits on to a bottle. It’s a bit twenty-first century, but it’s bound to work.”

  “He won’t like it,” said Rick, mournfully.

  “It’s not good for him to get bogged down in a routine of comforts,” said Rosa, sternly. Because she did so much work in primary ed she considered herself the household expert on child-rearing, although she was very particular about not doing more than her fair share of caring. “He needs a bit of innovation and improvisation occasionally—especially at the elementary level.

  Steven had by now begun to amplify his whimpers, and was getting set for a full-scale bawl. Rick hurried away with him, hoping that he could find the requisite program, and that the dispenser could deliver the goods in time to save his ears from too much torture.

  * * * *

  “There have been some developments, I’m afraid,” said the doctor mournfully, when she arrived at the house. “The lab has completed the scan of the rose’s dr-DNA and the extraneous matter in the bathwater. It all looks a bit iffy. I’ve had to call in some help, but you mustn’t worry. We’ve caught the problem early, and it’s just a matter of backtracking to figure out how it started. When the other people arrive, we’re going to have to seal off the nursery for a while and usurp control of the house’s main systems. You’ll have to wind down any work you’re doing, and you might experience some localized control problems, but everything will be all right and with luck we’ll be out of here in a matter of hours. Don’t worry.”

  The last piece of advice was difficult to follow, and it became even more difficult when the first of Dr. Jauregy’s “other people” arrived. His name was Ituro Morusaki and his ID declared him to be an officer of the International Bureau of Investigation. “I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about,” he said, breezily. “But we have to take precautions, whenever there’s a possibility that a crime might have been committed.”

  “What crime?” asked Rick.

  “Any crime,” answered the IBI man, unhelpfully.

  “You mean software sabotage, don’t you?” said Rosa, with a keen edge of anxie
ty in her voice. “You think we’re the victim of a terrorist attack! But why us? What have we ever done to anyone?”

  Officer Morusaki put up his hands defensively. “No, no!” he said. “We mustn’t jump to any conclusions. We simply don’t know what we’re dealing with, and it could be anything. Please don’t worry.”

  He didn’t hang around to be questioned any further. He disappeared into the nursery, to confer with Dr. Jauregy.

  By this time Dieter and Chloe had been alerted to the fact that something was seriously amiss, and they had joined Rick and Rosa in the main common-room.

  “Well,” said Chloe, “I’m squeaky clean, greenwise. What did you get up to in Africa, Dieter?”

  “Helping to reclaim the Kalahari desert is hardly an eco-crime,” Dieter countered, testily. “The Gaians can’t possibly have anything against me. What are Don and Nicola doing down in Amazonia? That’s the Gaians’ number one area of concern, isn’t it? Maybe they’ve done something to piss off Mother Earth’s Avengers.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Rosa told them both. “They’re only techs, not planners. Gaians don’t send electronic mail-bombs to the likes of us.”

  Steven wasn’t at all happy with the bottle that Rick was trying—inexpertly—to force into his mouth. There was something about the teat that he didn’t like, in spite of the fact that he was hungry. His face was red and his eyes were screwed up tight and he was mewling pitifully. It wasn’t a full-blown tantrum yet, but it was going on that way. Rick gritted his teeth and tried to be patient, yet firm.

  “Do it gently,” Chloe advised. “You’re upsetting him. We all have to keep calm, for his sake.”

  “I heard about some practical joker who used a random-number generator to send copies of a spoiler virus through the net,” said Dieter. “Maybe that’s what happened—maybe our number just got thrown up at random.”