Designer Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution

by Brian Stableford

  It seemed to me that the whole affair had always had a faint air of surreal absurdity about it. The illegal experiments that Hemans and his fellows were alleged by rumor to be conducting were unfortunately conducive to silly jokes, ranging from lame references to flying pigs to covert references to the raid as the Boar War. Even the Home Office joined in the jokey name game; it was some idiot under-secretary who decided to code-name the “target” Animal Farm, borrowing the most popular of the derisory nicknames it had accumulated during the surveillance. It was, alas, my own people who took some delight in explaining to anyone who would listen why the people inside had allegedly taken to calling the project “Commoner’s Isle.” (It was because the place where the ambitious scientist had conducted his unsuccessful experiment in H. G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau had been called Noble’s Isle.) When the inspector in charge of the Armed Response Unit assured us at the final briefing that the people in the manor didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting past his men he couldn’t understand why the men from the ministry snickered. (In Animal Farm, Snowball is the idealist who gets purged by the ruthless Napoleon.)

  In a sense, the inspector was right. When the Animal Farmers found out that they were being raided and ran like hell they didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting past his men. Unfortunately, that didn’t make them stop running and give up.

  The part of the plan that included me involved uniformed policemen smashing their way through the main door and making as many arrests as possible while my people went for the computers and any paper files that were still around. We didn’t expect to get all the records out—we’d been told at the briefing that Hemans, Rawlingford, and Bradby would probably start crunching diskettes and reformatting hard disks as soon as they were roused from sleep—but we figured that there’d be more than enough left to salvage. They were scientists, after all; keeping back-up files ought to have been second nature to them.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t that simple. The Animal Farmers didn’t bother with shredding and reformatting; they just torched the place. Nobody had thought to give us gas-masks, and the fumes that met us in the corridors of the manor were so foul and instantly dizzying that we should have know that they were toxic and turned back immediately. Actually, that was what most of my colleagues did. I was the only thoroughly stupid one. I kept on going, determined to get to the office that was my designated objective. It was hopeless—but it was my one and only Boy’s Own Adventure and I hadn’t been trained to an adequate sense of self-preservation. I was just on the point of blacking out when I heard shots fired in the woods, and realized just how badly awry the operation had gone.

  * * * *

  I would certainly have died if I hadn’t been pulled out of the fume-filled corridor—and by the time my own team got around to noticing that I was missing it was far too late for them to do anything constructive. It was the Animal Farmers who saved me—not the scientists who had actually set up the illegal experiments, but a handful of lesser beings who’d turned back when the shooting started in the hope of finding a safer way out on the other side of the house.

  I woke up with a terrible headache and stinging eyes, coughing weakly. It felt for a minute or two as though my lungs had been so badly scorched that I could no longer draw sufficient oxygen from the warm and musty air that I drew into them—but that, mercifully, was an illusion born of distress.

  I managed to crack open my weeping eyes just long enough to perceive that it was too dark to see what was happening, then shut them tight and hoped that the pain would go away.

  Somebody lifted my head and pressed a cup of water to my lips. I managed to take a few sips, and decided not to protest when a female voice said, “He’s okay.”

  While I lay there collecting myself, a different female voice said, “It’s no good. There’s no way out up there. As the fire draws air upwards, our supply’s being renewed via the tunnel to the old ice-house, but there’s no way through the grilles. They haven’t been opened in half a century and the locks are rusted solid. Hemans should have taken care of them years ago. He should have known that this would happen one day.”

  “There’s a hacksaw in the tool-box,” a male voice put in. “If we get to work right away.…”

  “They were shooting, Ed,” the second female told him. “They’re trying to wipe us out, just like Bradby always said they would. They don’t even want to ask the questions, let alone hear the answers. They just want us dead. Even if we could get to the lakeside, they’re probably waiting for us. We wouldn’t stand a chance.”

  “What chance have we got if we wait here, Ali?” Ed replied. “Even if the fire burns all day tomorrow, they’ll come to pick over the ruins as soon as they can. If they’re still in the woods by then, they’ll certainly be all around what’s left of the house. The tunnel’s our only chance. If we can just get to Brighton, to a crowd. Then London…we can pass, Ali. I know we can. We can hide.”

  I wanted to tell them that nobody wanted to shoot them, that they’d be fine if they sat tight until it was safe to go upstairs and then surrendered, but I knew that they wouldn’t believe me. What on earth had made them so paranoid? And why had the ARU men opened fire?

  “Ed’s right,” said the female who’d given me the water to drink. “If they have the ice-house covered, we’re dead—but all the exits upstairs will still be useless when the fire dies down. We have to start work on the grilles. Somebody ought to watch this one, though—he’s not badly hurt. If he doesn’t come at us, he’ll give us away.”

  “We should have left him where he was,” Ed opined, bitterly. “He’s not going to be any use as a hostage, is he?”

  “He wouldn’t be any use as a corpse,” the unnamed female retorted. “He’d just be an excuse for branding us as murderers, justifying the ethnic cleansing.”

  Ethnic cleaning! What on earth had Bradby been telling them? And who the hell were they, anyway? I couldn’t help jumping to the obvious conclusion, but I refused to entertain it. I was supposed to be a scientist, not some sucker who’d swallow any urban legend that happened along.

  “We don’t know that the others who came in with him all got out,” Ali pointed out.

  “No, we don’t,” the other female admitted, “but we did know that he hadn’t. If we’d left him where he went down, it would have been murder.”

  “It would have been suicide,” said Ed, “But Kath’s right, Ali. They’d have called it murder. They’ll have to justify the shooting somehow.”

  I coughed again, partly because I needed to and partly because I wanted to remind them that I had a voice too, even if I hadn’t yet obtained sufficient control of it to formulate meaningful utterances.

  “You’d better stay with him, Ali,” the male voice said. “If he gets aggressive, hit him with this.”

  At that stage, I could only guess what “this” might be—some time passed before I was able to make out that it was an axe—but I wasn’t about to make any trouble. I was still trying to convince myself that I hadn’t breathed in enough poison to be mortally hurt, and that I hadn’t done sufficient damage to my lungs to prejudice my long-term ability to breathe. I heard two sets of feet moving away across a stone floor, and I forced myself to relax, collecting myself together by slow degrees.

  Eventually, I felt well enough to begin to feel angry. I stopped being grateful for being alive and started resenting the fact that I had come so close to dying. Setting the fire had been an act of pure spite on the part of the mad scientists. People like me—law-abiding geneticists, that is—had collaborated with the Home Office in drawing up the careful legislation that presumably defined whatever the Animal Farmers were doing as unacceptable, but they had simply been too arrogant to comply with the law. On top of that, it seemed, they had taken the view that if we wouldn’t countenance the research, then we couldn’t have the results. They had obviously decided that if they had to go to jail, they’d take all their hard-won understanding with
them—and woe betide anyone who got in their way.

  Once I began to get angry, I didn’t stop. If Hemans and Co. really had been transplanting human genes into the embryos of pigs in order to turn out simulacra of human beings, it was unforgivable, and the murderous fire was piling injury on insult. I’d never been convinced that the Animal Farmers had done what Special Branch said they’d done—I’d gone through the doors of Commoner’s Isle still wondering whether it was all going to turn out to be a big mistake, exaggerated out of all proportion—but the fact that the place had been torched with such alacrity suggested that they must have done something that they were desperate to conceal.

  Unless, of course, that was what we were supposed to think. There was still a possibility that we were all being taken for a ride—that it was all a game, intended to discredit the GE-Crime Unit and the Home Office advisors before they began to get their act together.

  While I lay there being angry, it occurred to me that I might be in a uniquely good position to find out exactly what the Animal Farmers were really up to.

  * * * *

  When I was finally confident that I could hold a conversation, I had already formulated my plan of campaign.

  “Is Ali short for Alison?” I asked. I was able to open my eyes by then, and they had accustomed themselves to the near-darkness sufficiently to let me see that the person standing guard over me was a blonde teenager, perhaps fourteen or fifteen years of age. She was too young to be a lab assistant, so I seized upon the hypothesis that she was probably someone’s daughter. We had been warned that some of the live-in staff at the manor had children, but we hadn’t expected them to be abandoned when the shit hit the fan.

  “Alice,” she informed me, stiffly.

  “As in Wonderland?” I quipped, hoping to help her relax.

  “As in Through the Looking Glass,” she retorted. It didn’t seem to be worthwhile asking her what the difference was.

  “I’m Stephen Hitchens,” I told her. “I’m not a policeman—I’m a geneticist, currently employed as an advisor to the Home Office.”

  “Bully for you,” she said, dryly. I wondered whether she might be older than she looked—maybe sixteen or seventeen—but I concluded in the end that natural insolence, like puberty, probably arrived ahead of its time nowadays.

  “Why did the scientists set fire to the house, Alice?” I asked.

  “Why did armed police surround it?” she countered.

  “None of this is your fault, or mine,” I assured her. “I was just trying to recover the records of the experiments the scientists had done. They should have made sure that you were safe before they started the fire. They’re not your friends, Alice. Did your parents work for Dr. Hemans?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” she told me, as if relishing a hidden irony.

  “What manner of speaking?” I demanded, although I could hardly help seeing the obvious implication. If she wasn’t the child of someone on the staff, she had to be one of the experimental subjects—or, I reminded myself, someone pretending to be one of the experimental subjects.

  “The kind of work you do in a sty,” she replied, casually confirming the inference she must have known I’d take. “The kind of work where your pay arrives in a trough.”

  If it was true, then she certainly had come from Wonderland—but was it true? Wasn’t it far more likely to be a lie, a carefully constructed bluff? Was it to hear this, I wondered, that I had been hauled out of the corridor and brought down here into near-darkness? Could the Animal Farmers be using me, trying to convince me that they had achieved far, far more than they had? If so, what should my policy be? Should I run with the bluff and let her make her pitch, or challenge her and refuse to believe that she was anything but what she appeared to be?

  “You’re telling me that you’re not human?” I said, just to make sure that she wasn’t just making a joke. I knew as soon as I’d said it that I’d framed the rhetorical question wrongly. What she’d actually told me was that her parents weren’t human.

  “Like hell I am,” she said.

  Like Snowball in hell, I couldn’t help thinking. Play along, I told myself. Find out what she has to say.

  “So you think you’re human,” I conceded. “You can certainly pass for it, probably in a far brighter light than this—but if your parents really were pigs, you must understand that other people might not see things the same way.” As I said that I realized that her creators—or drama-coaches—must already have put it in much stronger terms. That was why Ed and Kath had been so paranoid about the possibility of being shot down—that and the fact that the ARU really had opened fire.

  “I know what I see when I look in a mirror,” Alice told me, perhaps to make sure that I’d understood how clever her reference to Through the Looking Glass was. “It’s not the image itself that’s important, of course—it’s the fact that there’s an I to see it. A human I—and I don’t mean an e-y-e.”

  Cogito, ergo sum, she might have said, if she—or whoever had written her script—hadn’t been so anxious about the need to stay viewer-friendly. I hadn’t enough anger left to prevent me from wondering whether Special Branch might always have known exactly how human the Animal Farmers’ experimental subjects looked, and whether their senior officers might have taken it upon themselves to decide that the ministry didn’t need to know until the shooting was well and truly over. If they had, and my captors knew it—or even if they hadn’t and my captors merely believed it—I might be in deeper trouble than I thought.

  “What about Ed and Kath?” I asked. “Are they like you?”

  “They’re human,” Alice assured me, in a tone that left little doubt as to what kind of human she was talking about. She was telling me, in her own perverse way, that they were the kind of humans who were made as well as born: the kind that started off as a fertilized ovum in a sow’s belly before the genetic engineers got to work.

  Dr. Moreau had remade beasts in his own image by means of surgery, but modern scientists had much cleverer means at their disposal—and the degree of success they might be expected to achieve was far greater. I had to remind myself again that all of this could be a bluff run by a thoroughly human child, and that I was only playing along to see how the story would go.

  Alice had relaxed a little since she first started talking, but the way she held her shadowed head and the way she gripped the axe she’d been ordered to hit me with if I got out of line suggested that she wasn’t about to get careless. Now that she’d made her first impression, she was busy reminding herself that she was stuck in a cellar beneath a burning building with a man who might be dangerous. All in all, philosophical discussion seemed the safest way to build a modicum of trust.

  “You think you’re human because you have a human mind: because you’re self-aware?” I said, earnestly—trying with all my might to sound like the dull and harmless scientist I actually was (and am).

  “All animals are self-aware,” Alice replied, calmly. “I’m aware that I’m human. I love and respect my fellow men, no matter what the circumstances of their birth might have been.”

  “How do you feel about pigs?” I asked.

  “I love and respect them too,” she replied. “Even the ones that aren’t human. I don’t eat pork—or any other meat, come to that. How do you feel about pigs, Dr. Hitchens?”

  I eat pork. I also eat bacon, and all kinds of other meat, but it didn’t seem diplomatic to talk about that. “I don’t think pigs are human, Alice,” I told her. “I don’t think they can become human, even with the aid of transplanted genes.”

  Her answer to that certainly wasn’t the kind of answer I’d have expected from an ordinary teenager, or even an extraordinary one. “How did humans become humans, Dr. Hitchens?” she asked me. “A handful of extra genes, obligingly delivered up by mutation, do you suppose? Perhaps—but perhaps not. Just because a human and a chimpanzee only share ninety-nine per cent of their genes, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the variant on
e per cent is solely responsible for the differences. Even if it is, it’s not a matter of different protein-making stocks. It’s a matter of control. The one per cent is almost entirely homeotic.” She might have been parroting something Hemans or one of his co-workers had said, but I didn’t think so. She seemed confident that she was making sense, and that she understood the import of her argument—but she hesitated, just in case I didn’t.

  “Go on,” I said, interestedly. The invitation was enough to set her off with the bit between her pearly, neatly-aligned teeth.

  “Most of what it took to turn apes into men,” she told me, as if it were a matter of absolute certainty, “was a handful of modifications to the ways in which genes were switched on and off as the cells of the developing embryo became specialized. You don’t need dozens of extra genes to grow a bigger brain. All you need is for a few more unspecialized cells to become brain cells. You don’t need dozens of extra genes to make a clever hand or stand upright, either. What you need is for the cells that differentiate into bone and muscle to distribute themselves in slightly different ways within the developing embryo. Becoming human isn’t so very difficult, once you get the hang of it. Cows could do it. Sheep too. Lions and tigers, horses and elephants, dolphins and seals. Dogs, probably; cats, maybe; rats, perhaps; birds, probably not. You have to get right down to snakes and sharks before you can say that there’s no chance at all. We all start out as eggs, Dr. Hitchens, and every egg that can make a pig or a donkey or a goat can probably make a human, if it only invests enough effort in shaping the brain and the hand and the backbone. That might be an unsettling thought, but it’s true.”

  It was an unsettling thought. I had already thought it, and it had already unsettled me—but the fact that Alice was prepared to confront me with it—perhaps on behalf of Hemans, Rawlingford, and Bradby, but more probably on her own initiative—was even more unsettling.

  I reminded myself again that it might be a lie, a careful hoax intended to persuade me, falsely, that the men from Commoner’s Isle had mastered godlike powers—but if it was, it was beginning to work.