Designer Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution

by Brian Stableford

  * * * *

  “Would you like to live as other humans do, Alice?” I asked, ostentatiously leading with my chin. “Would you like to go to school, to university, to get a job, to get married one day and have children of your own?”

  “I do live as other humans do,” she replied, blandly refusing to see what I was getting at. “I’ve been to school. I expect that I’ll do all the other things when the time comes.” Her tone said that she didn’t expect any such thing—that she expected to be pursued and captured, shot at worst and imprisoned at best. Her tone told me that she expected to have to fight for her life, let alone her entitlements as a human being, and that she wasn’t about to take any bullshit from me while she had an axe in her hands.

  “I’m not sure that you’ll be allowed to do anything that other teenagers routinely do, Alice,” I admitted, figuring that it was best to pose as the honest man I really am. “The scientists who shaped your brain, hand, and backbone were breaking the law. That’s not your fault, of course, but the fact remains that you’re the product of illegal genetic engineering. The law doesn’t consider you to be a human being—and nor do the vast majority of human beings. All the things you hope you’ll be able to do depend on the willingness of human society to admit you as a member, and that willingness simply isn’t there. There’s a sense, you see, in which it isn’t enough just to define yourself as human—it’s for human society as a whole to decide who belongs to it and who doesn’t.”

  “No it isn’t,” she replied, promptly. “White people once refused to define black people as human, and German gentiles once refused to define Jews as human, but that didn’t make the black people or the Jews any less human than they were. The only people who became less human because of those refusals were the people who tried to deny humanity to others. They were the ones who were refusing to love and respect their fellow men, the ones who weren’t acting morally.”

  She was carrying the argument better than any fourteen-year-old should have been able to, and she wasn’t trying to conceal the fact. I couldn’t help wondering whether that might be a mistake, if she ever got the chance to plead her case before a wider audience. Nobody loves a smartarse, especially if the smartarse is a jumped-up pig. If you want to pass for human, you can’t afford to be too good at it—and, as Alice had stubbornly insisted on pointing out, real humans frequently aren’t very good at it at all.

  “Do you think the scientists who made you were acting morally?” I asked. “They knew what kind of a world they were bringing you into. They knew what would happen—to you as well as to them—when they were found out, and they must have known that they’d eventually be found out.”

  “I could understand a slave who was reluctant to bear children who would also be slaves,” Alice replied, “but I can also understand those who didn’t refuse. They knew that they were human, and that their children were human too, and they had to hope that the fact would one day be recognized. To have refused to bear children would have been giving in to evil, consenting to its effects.”

  “Why do you think the men who made you destroyed their records, Alice?” I asked. “Why do you think they were so eager to burn them that they endangered your life—not to mention mine?” Because they didn’t want anyone to now the true extent of their success, I told myself. Because they wanted to be able to run this bluff.

  “Because they wanted to be able to use their knowledge as a bargaining chip,” Alice said. “For our benefit as well as their own. If you’d got the records, you’d have put a stop to everything. Because you didn’t, we still have something up our sleeves.” She seemed to think that it was a reasonably good argument—which implied that in spite of all her hard-won sophistication she really was the mere child she appeared to be.

  Theoretically, I thought, an animal embryo modified to replicate human form ought to develop as neotenously as a human embryo, and an animal brain modified to accommodate all that a human brain could accommodate ought not to be educated any more rapidly. If so, Alice shouldn’t be any cleverer than a fully human child reared in similarly exceptional circumstances—but without access to her school records, I knew that it would be dangerous to take too much for granted, or too little.

  “No one will bargain with them, Alice,” I lied. “They broke the law, and they’ll be punished. Perhaps it’s best if their discoveries are lost. That way, no one will be able to repeat their error.”

  “That’s silly, Dr. Hitchens,” Alice said, calmly. “If it’s a mystery, that will just make more people interested in solving it. And if it’s not so very difficult to solve.…”

  She left it there, as if it were some kind of threat. She was still trying to convince me, in her own subtle fashion, that my world had just ended and that another had just begun, and that if she and all her fugitive kind were slaughtered by the ARU’s guns they would be martyrs to a great and unstoppable cause

  “Have you read The Island of Dr. Moreau, Alice?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “What do you think of it?”

  “It’s a parable. It tells us that it takes more than a little cosmetic surgery and a few memorized laws to make people—any people—human. That’s true. Whether humans are born or made, the test of their humanity is their behavior, their love and respect for their fellow humans.”

  “How many naturally-born humans would pass that test, do you think?” I asked.

  “I have no idea,” she replied. “Lots, I hope.”

  “Would I pass it?” I asked.

  “I have to hope so,” she said, casually, “Don’t I, Dr. Hitchens? But I don’t actually know. What do you think?”

  “There wasn’t supposed to be any shooting,” I told her. “The police were supposed to put everyone under arrest. If your makers hadn’t set fire to the house and told everyone to scatter and run, no one would have been hurt. Then, the matter of your humanity could have been decided in a proper and reasonable manner.” I hoped that I was telling the truth, but I had a niggling feeling that the plan to which I’d been admitted wasn’t the whole one. The GE-Crime Unit had called up the Armed Response Unit.

  “Well,” said Alice, “that isn’t the way things worked out, is it? It seems to me that the matter of our humanity, as you put it, has already been decided. You’ll never be sure, of course, that you’ve got us all. Even if Ed and Kath can’t get to the old ice-house, and even if they run into the police when they do, you’ll never be sure how many of us got out under the noses of your surveillance unit before they figured out that the apparently obvious wasn’t necessarily true.”

  She was definitely feeding me a line there, but I couldn’t tell whether she was feeding it to me because it was false, or because it was true. I thought the time had come for me to make a grab for the axe and take control of the situation. I was probably right—or would have been, if I’d actually succeeded.

  I suppose, on reflection, that I was lucky she only swiped me with the flat of the blade. If she’d hit me that hard with the edge, she could easily have fractured my skull.

  * * * *

  When I woke up again I was in a hospital bed. My head wasn’t aching any more and my eyes weren’t stinging, but I felt spaced-out and bleary. It took a few minutes for me to remember where I might have been, if things had worked out differently.

  I learned, in due course, that the fire brigade had found me while searching the cellars for survivors and had handed me over to the paramedics before midnight. Unfortunately, the medication they’d fed me ensured that I didn’t wake up again until thirty-six hours later, so I’d missed all of the official post-mortems as well as the remainder of the action—but the urgency with which the Unit moved to debrief me reassured me that the adventure still had a long way to run.

  “There were three of them,” I told Inspector Headley. “I only saw one of them, and it was too dark to see her features clearly. She had blonde hair, cut to shoulder length, and very even teeth that caught what little light there
was when she smiled. I couldn’t swear that I’d be able to recognize her again, dead or alive. Her name was Alice. She called the others Ed and Kath. They were trying to reach an old ice-house on the edge of the lake, but the tunnel had been blocked off. Did you get them?”

  “What else did they tell you?” Inspector Headley countered, Jesuitically.

  That wasn’t a game I intended to play. “Did you get them?” I repeated.

  “No,” he conceded, reluctantly. “But the tunnel was still blocked off—had been for the best part of a century. Nobody got out that way.”

  “But you didn’t pick up three stragglers in the house?”

  “No,” he admitted, “but if you’ll pardon my pointing it out, Dr. Hitchens, I’m the one who’s supposed to be debriefing you. Yes, they could have been piglets—and no, we wouldn’t have believed that if we hadn’t had the autopsy reports your colleagues carried out on the ones we shot. Personally, I’d have passed every one of the corpses as human, and I wasn’t the only one who wouldn’t believe otherwise until your colleagues came back to us with the results of the DNA tests—but we didn’t capture any of the piglets alive. Now, would you mind telling me exactly what happened to you?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “But there’s one thing I need to know. Was the shooting always part of the plan? Did you always intend to kill the children?”

  He seemed genuinely shocked. “Of course not.” he said. “They wouldn’t stop. They just kept on running. They were warned.”

  The problem was, I knew, that they’d already been warned. They’d had far too many warnings for their own good.

  I recited the whole story, in as much detail as I could remember, into Headley’s tape-recorder. I watched his expression becoming more troubled as I spoke, and I gathered that Special Branch was just as confused as I was as to what might be real and what might be bluff.

  “This has turned into a real can of worms,” he told me, when he’d switched the recorder off. “We don’t know how many of the piglets might be missing. We’ve been waist-deep in lawyers ever since we got Hemans and his friends under lock and key, including lawyers claiming to represent your fugitive friend and her alleged litter-mates.”

  “How many died?” I asked.

  “Only seven,” he said, so weakly that it was obvious that seven was either far too many or far too few. “Three of them were real humans. Unfortunate, but it was their own fault. I think they wanted us to shoot, to put us in the wrong. I think Hemans told those kids to keep running no matter what, because he knew that some of them would be killed. Cynical bastard.”

  I had already told him that Bradby had warned his experimental subjects that an attempt might be made to wipe them out, but I wasn’t convinced that the warning had been cynical. It seemed to me that he might have been honestly concerned, and rightly so. If Alice and the others had got away.…

  “We might not find it easy to prove in court that the other four weren’t real humans,” I told Headley, although that news must already have been broken to him. “Did the DNA tests throw up any evidence that they were transgenics?”

  Headley shook his head. He seemed to understand the implications of the question. Transplanting human genes into animals was clearly and manifestly illegal, but if Alice had told me the truth, that wasn’t what had been done to her. If Alice really was a pig through and through, genetically speaking, then there was a slim possibility that Hemans’ lawyers could argue that what he and his colleagues had done wasn’t illegal at all. And if Alice was as human as she seemed to be in every respect except genetically, her lawyers might have a field day trying to establish exactly what the law might and ought to mean by “human”assuming that the Unit ever caught up with her.

  Whatever had been intended, it was obvious that the raid had been a colossal cock-up. It would be up to the minister to pull everyone’s irons out of the fire, and to look at the broader implications of what we now knew. Men like me were the minister’s eyes and brains, so it would be up to us to figure out what the real implications of the Animal Farm fiasco might be. Governments had been brought down by matters of a far more trivial nature and it was too late to hope that the situation could be contained. The cat was already out of the bag—or the pig from the poke.

  Headley admitted, when I questioned him further, that without the records that had gone up in smoke, there was no way to know for sure how many experimental “piglets” there had been. They had always been kept inside, away from the prying eyes of the surveillance team, who wouldn’t have recognized them for what they were if and when they’d caught glimpses of them. Their creators and the piglets themselves knew the real number, but no one would ever know whether any figure they might offer was to be trusted. Now that we knew for sure that the piglets could pass for human, at least while they were still alive and kicking, we had to consider the possibility that some of them already were passing, in Brighton or in London, or anywhere at all.

  If my evidence could be taken at face value, at least three piglets had escaped. Headley told me that other debriefings had produced evidence that at least two more, both female, might have evaded their pursuers in the woods behind the manor house. He was enough of an intellectual to understand my observation that it added up to a better breeding population than God had placed in Eden or Lot had led from Sodom.

  As a scientist, of course, I wasn’t at all sure of that—engineered organisms hardly ever breed true, and it was perfectly possible that even if the ersatz girls could produce offspring, the offspring in question might have snouts and tails—but we had to consider the worst possible case. Bringing human-seeming babies out of a sow’s womb might sound no more likely than making silk purses out of sow’s ears, but we had moved into unknown territory, scientifically speaking. What did I know, given that I had never dabbled in illicit experimentation? What did any of us know, unless and until Hemans, Rawlingford, and Bradby condescended to enlighten us?

  I suppose that I was lucky to be kept on the project, given that I’d ended up in hospital, but I was needed. I’d been brought in to analyze data, not to conduct interrogations, but the changed circumstances necessitated my taking a new role. My conversation with Alice had put me one up on my colleagues, so I was hustled out of the hospital with a bagful of pills as soon as the doctors could be persuaded to let me go.

  “We haven’t charged them yet,” Headley explained to me, while I was being taken to the police station where Hemans, Rawlingford, and Bradby were to be questioned. “At the moment, they’re supposed to be cooperating voluntarily with our enquiries. We’re keeping in mind the possibility of charging them with arson, kidnapping, and child molesting, but we want to see how they and their lawyers are going to play it before we go in hard. If they’re prepared to come clean and tell us where their backed-up data is—assuming they do have back-ups somewhere—we might still be able to tidy up the mess.”

  It seemed like a reasonable assumption to me, although I wasn’t sure how reasonable our mad scientists would prove to be.

  * * * *

  I went into the interview with Hemans thinking that I was the only one on our side who’d actually thought the matter through, and the only one to have grasped the full complexity of the issue. I thought that I might be approaching the high-point of my career—a taller peak than I had ever dreamed of scaling—if only I could keep my wits about me.

  The interview was being video-taped, of course, but the tape wouldn’t be admissible in court.

  I couldn’t measure the exact combination of emotions that mingled in Hemans’ expression as he looked at me, but there was at least a little contempt and at least a little distaste. I couldn’t understand that. When I’d first met Hemans, way back in ‘06, he’d been working in the public sector himself, helping to tidy up the loose ends of the Human Genome Project—but even before the HGP had delivered its treasure, its workers were being sucked into private enterprise. Comparative genomics was supposed to be the next big thing. I didn’t
hold it against Hemans that he had jumped ship, and I couldn’t see any reason why he’d hold it against me that I hadn’t.

  It was obvious by ‘06 that the attempts that had been made to patent human gene sequences and develop diagnostic kits based on HGP sequencing data wouldn’t bear much commercial fruit in the immediate future, because they’d be tied up in the courts for years. The precedents for patenting animal genes had, however, been established by the Harvard oncomouse and all the disease-models that had followed in its wake. Given that all mammals had homologues for at least ninety-five per cent of human genes, the obvious thing for ambitious biotech companies to do was to steer around the moral minefield by concentrating their immediate efforts on what could be done with animals. Pigs were already contributing organs for xenotransplantation, so they were a natural target for sequencing and potential exploitation, and there was nothing surprising in the fact that Hemans and his co-workers had decided to concentrate their efforts in that direction. What was surprising, though—and disturbing—was that they’d decided to cross the line that the European Court had drawn regarding the uses to which human genes could be put. What was even more surprising, to me—and even more disturbing—was that the way Hemans looked at me when I sat down to question him showed not the slightest trace of guilt or shame. That made me wary, and wariness made me even more punctilious than usual.

  “First of all, Dr. Hemans” I said, carefully, “I’ve been asked to apologize on behalf of His Majesty’s Government for the unfortunate deaths that occurred during the course of the police raid on Hollinghurst Manor. The police had reason to believe that a serious breach of the law had taken place, and they were proceeding in full accordance with the law, but they deeply regret the fact that so many of those fleeing the building refused to stop when challenged, forcing the Armed Response Unit to open fire.”