Designer Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution

by Brian Stableford

  Benjy feared that this might be a prelude to one of his father’s favorite speeches, about how electronic brains were all very well, but at the end of the line there had to be moving parts to get the job done. Jim Stephens made his living servicing the mechanical parts of various kinds of industrial and household robots, and was perversely proud of the fact that he took over where what he called “the software so-called engineers” had to leave off.

  “It’s okay,” Benjy said, deciding that it would be diplomatic simply to ignore the greater part of what his father had said. “I’m almost finished. I won’t be late for dinner. I promised Monica. I just have to do this one thing.”

  “I know the feeling, kid,” his father said, with another of those grins. “I know the feeling. Don’t mind your Mom too much—women always come a bit unstuck when their looks begin to go. Nothing to worry about. It’s all under control.”

  “I like Monica, really,” Benjy said, cautiously. “May too. It’s all okay. I just wish everything could be a little smoother.…”

  “Don’t I know it,” said his father. “All those tranks and still she’s got a temper like a polecat. But her bark’s worse than her bite, and her throwing arm ain’t dangerous in spite of all the practice she puts in. Don’t let her worry you too much—like I say, everything’s under control.”

  Benjy knew that there was no point trying to make himself any clearer. His father was in too ebullient a mood. In fact, he was in the kind of mood that May had lately taken to calling—but not within her mother’s hearing—“freshly-laid.”

  “I’ll see you in a few minutes,” Benjy said, doggedly, trying hard not to make it sound like a dismissive instruction. “I’ve just got to file this stuff—it’s important to keep a full record.”

  “That woman from the university really was interested, huh?”

  “Not that much,” Benjy confessed. “But she did say that the college people liked my design enough to duplicate it in the lab. They’re running a couple of months behind, so it’s too early to say whether they’ll get speciation too, but it’d be real interesting if they did.”

  “Sure,” said Jim Stephens. “Sure it would. But remember what I say, now. You’re only young once—time to be old when you’re old. You only got one life.” Having delivered this advice, in his best paternal tone, he left.

  * * * *

  Benjy wasted no time at all in collating and packaging his results and sending them off to Mutaclay’s and the university’s data-banks. By the time it was all done he felt much better. Monica’s visit and its aftermath had faded into unimportance.

  Maybe, he thought, someone running a similar experiment was keeping tabs on his results week by week. Maybe someone would get in touch with him by e-mail, wanting to discuss the implications of the recent development. Maybe this would really lead somewhere, get his name and picture into the bulletin. Benjamin Stephens, a young mutaclay engineer from a small north-eastern town, has produced an interesting and unprecedented situation while mounting an experiment to prove that Gause’s Axiom does not necessarily apply to mutaclay populations in the laboratory any more than it applies to DNA-organisms.…

  In the great community of mutaclay enthusiasts there were no insurmountable barriers of age or status, so if anyone did take an interest in his work it was just as likely to be a full professor as some other hobbyist adolescent. The whole mutaclay enterprise was so new, so multidimensional, so rapidly moving forward, that anything might happen, to anyone.…

  “The possibilities,” he whispered to himself as he finally left the room, valiantly making the best of his uncertainties, “are endless. Literally endless.”

  4. December 2021

  Benjy removed the developed chromatogram and immediately reset the equipment for a second run. Double-checking the assay results was time-consuming, but Benjy had found that it wasn’t tiresome at all—quite the reverse, in fact. The steady accumulation of his data had attained a momentum of its own, which seemed quietly magnificent. His technique was now honed to perfection; he felt that he could have gone through the whole process blindfolded if he had to. He took real pleasure nowadays from the deft efficiency of his hands as they dissected out and replaced the allotted squares of substrate, and he felt that the way the purple patches migrated across the chromatograms had a fluid grace of its own.

  The last doubts were ebbing away now. It had become abundantly clear that there were now four motile-representative clusters where there had earlier been three. He felt that he had never in his life seen anything half so beautiful as the pattern of separation mapped out on the computer’s time-lapsed series of images.

  “It might be a freak,” he said to himself, as he put the computer through its paces one last time, “but it’s a lucky freak. This is the one-in-a-million precarious situation that works.”

  He winced at the sound of an unprecedentedly loud crash from below. Jesus, he thought. That has to be the table! And it must have been piled high with stuff.

  The voices were very loud—so loud that he paused to wonder how he had been able to ignore them for so long. It wasn’t so very mysterious; when he was concentrating hard he could filter out almost anything, and the sound of raised voices was hardly unfamiliar.

  Now he had begun to pay attention he perceived that it was not just Monica’s voice that had attained its maximum decibel level. His father was shouting at the top of his voice too, and the stentorian blast was colored by a brutal anger that Benjy could not remember ever having heard before.

  Unfortunately, the moment he brought his concentration to bear on the question of what was being said the row broke up, leaving him none the wiser as to its details. He heard a door slam, and then heard footsteps on the staircase. They were his father’s footsteps, and Benjy counted them uneasily, waiting to see where they would lead.

  They led, as Benjy had feared, to the door of the room in which he sat, which flew open.

  “An ouster!” yelled Jim Stephens. “The bitch has only hit us with a fucking ouster!” He was waving a piece of paper in his hand, which he thrust at Benjy as he crossed the room. Benjy took it, cringing as he did so from the force of his father’s arousal. He saw that it was some kind of official document.

  “What’s an ouster?” he asked, querulously.

  “It’s a court order,” his father said, still towering over him, abuzz with unsuppressed rage. “It’s a court order throwing us out of our own fucking home.”

  Benjy looked down at the document again, trying to focus his eyes on the print. “What?” he said, dumbly.

  “The bitch couldn’t be content with filing for divorce,” his father went on, the words still overloud and vibrant with bitterness. “Oh no—she couldn’t just pack her bags like any other washed-up paper widow. She had to go the extra distance. You know what she’s done? She’s practically charged me with sexual molestation of a fucking minor! She’s got an order ousting me from my own fucking house on the grounds that I’m endangering her fucking daughter! Can you believe it?”

  The words were in focus now, and Benjy read through them as efficiently as he could, while the import of the information slowly sank in.

  “She can’t do this,” he said, faintly. “She can’t.”

  “Damn right she can’t,” said Jim Stephens. “You ever see me touch that girl? No! It’s perjury, and there’s no way in the world she can get away with it. No way. We’re going to fight this, Benboy. We’re going to fight it to the end. We’ll be back, son, never fear. This is just the beginning. If the bitch wants a war, she can have a fucking war.”

  Benjy was still scanning the paper, looking at the slightly-blurred dates that had been filled in by an overaged ink-jet printer. “But Dad,” he said, faintly. “This says we have to be out by Christmas Eve!”

  Christmas Eve was less then ten days away.

  “Isn’t that just typical?” Jim Stephens retorted. “Throwing her husband and sixteen-year-old stepson on to the streets on Christmas Eve. D
oesn’t that just say it all? Spiteful bitch!”

  “You have to stop this,” said Benjy, grimly. All the color seemed to have drained out of his voice. He sounded like an antique voice-synthesizer. It can’t happen, he was saying to himself, under his breath. It can’t happen. Not like this.

  “I’ll have us back in just as soon as I can, Benboy. We’ll be in and she’ll be out, just as soon as my guy can get a hearing. They served this thing on me at the office, and I was on the phone right away. It’s clear cut—unless they have independent testimony from a witness, or medical evidence with a clear DNA-spectrum, their word ain’t worth shit against ours. They can’t get away with this kind of ambush by slander. We might be spending Christmas in a motel, son, but it’ll just be a time-out.”

  “You don’t understand,” said Benjy, wondering why he sounded so absurdly mechanical. “I can’t go—not even for a week. I can’t go.”

  Jim Stephens paused before replying to that, but whether he was thinking or just getting his breath back Benjy couldn’t tell. Six or seven seconds passed before he said, “We can’t get a hearing before Christmas, son. No way. The shark says we have to comply—he says if we’re delinquent it’ll count against us. He reckons we’ll win all right, but he says we have to play by the rules and let the other side show up dirty. It won’t be for long, son, I promise you. That bitch is going to get what’s coming to her this time. I’ll show her she can’t mess around this way with us.”

  Benjy scanned the document for the third time, to make certain that it said what he thought it said. It did—but that didn’t make things any easier. He looked sideways at the assay equipment and the pinlamp that illuminated the slopes of the mountain in Tank Four. His cowardly instincts melted away beneath the force of a wholly conscious sense of dire necessity.

  He took a deep breath, knowing that he needed courage now the way he’d never needed it before.

  “I can’t go, Dad,” he said.

  “We have to go, son.”

  “That’s not true, Dad. This doesn’t say that I have to go. It only says that you have to go. I have to stay, Dad. I can’t leave the experiment. Not even for a week.”

  Benjy was painfully aware that his father had suddenly become ominously still and stiff. He watched in trepidation as Jim Stephens’ gaze flickered back and forth between the tanks, the glowing computer screen, and his own upturned face.

  “It can’t be done, Ben,” said his father, finally, in what was obviously meant to be a carefully controlled and scrupulously reasonable tone. “We have to stand together on this. We have to fight it two against two. You have to come with me.”

  “I can’t,” said Benjy, helplessly.

  A single tremor ran across Jim Stephens’ face, but his features were more rigidly controlled now than Benjy had ever seen them. “This is more important than your experiment,” his father said—and now it was his voice that sounded synthetic, unreal. “This is our lives—yours and mine. This is our future, my fucking reputation. You can’t stay here after this—it’d look like you were taking her side. It’d look like you believed what she’s saying.” He paused, and left it to his eyes to carry on. You don’t believe it, do you? his eyes said, bleakly.

  “It has nothing to do with what Monica says—with what anybody says,” Benjy told him, earnestly. “I just can’t leave the experiment. The mutation rate is borderline tachytelic, but the situation’s still stable. The second of the two initial populations is undergoing speciation. Nothing like that has ever happened before, Dad. It’s unique. The duplicate experiment Doctor Shane’s students set up at the university settled into a much duller routine—just a straightforward falsification of Gause’s Axiom, maybe not even that. It can’t be left, Dad. If I miss just one count, just one cut-and-paste procedure, it’ll destabilize. It’ll break down—I know it will. No one else has ever done this, Dad—no one. Hell, Dad, I can’t just walk out and leave it!”

  His father was starting at him, utterly uncomprehending. “It’s just a toy, son,” he said, gently. He really was trying to be reasonable. “It’s just fancy plasticine. It doesn’t matter. We’re talking about our lives here, our actual lives. I need you to help me out here, Ben. I need you to be on my side.”

  “It’s not just a toy,” Benjy insisted. “It’s a kind of life. It’s a kind of life at the very beginning of its evolution. It’s trying to figure out how to become more complex, how to develop real cells, how to evolve into something better. It’s not a toy!”

  Benjy was watching his father’s face, and he saw him switch off the argument and go into parental authority mode. It was just like that—like a change of mental gear. One moment there was a discussion going on, the next there was just an implacable wall. “Pack your bags, Benjy,” said Jim Stephens, in a whiplash tone that forbade any possibility of rebellion. “No buts, no arguments. Just pack your bags. Pack your goddam mudworms if you think you have to, but pack. We’re leaving first thing in the morning.”

  Benjy wished with all his heart that he could find the courage to say “No” out loud, but he knew it would make no difference even if he did.

  Only actions could speak from now on. But what on earth was he going to do?

  * * * *

  Benjy was still sitting at the computer when May came in.

  “Look,” she said, awkwardly, “I’m sorry. I really am. I didn’t have any choice—and anyway, he started it. He’s the one who’s been screwing around. He brought it on himself.”

  “I just talked to Doctor Shane at the university,” said Benjy, quietly. “I asked her if she could send someone out here every third day, to stand in for me and keep things going. She really wasn’t interested—she really didn’t care. Can you figure that? Is it because she thinks I’m just a kid? Or is it that even she thinks mutaclay is just smart dirt, just something to use for playing qualification-games? You have to talk to your mother, May. You have to tell her to stop this, to let us stay. I have to keep the experiment going.”

  “You think I can tell her that?” said May, incredulously. “You think anybody can tell her anything when she’s in this kind of mood? Jesus, Benjy, you must know us better than that.”

  “This is more important than moods,” he told her. “We have to make her see. I have to make her see, if you can’t.”

  May laughed derisively. “Like you made your dad see?”

  He looked her squarely in the eye. “I’m not going, May,” he said, firmly.

  “What’re you going to do? Barricade yourself in?”

  “If I have to,” he said.

  “Shall I ask your dad to fetch you a hammer and nails? What do you intend using? The bed-frame? Not the tables, surely—that would mean disturbing your precious experiment, wouldn’t it?”

  Benjy looked at the door, mournfully. It had a lock, but the lock was electronic and his father knew the code. Even if he reprogrammed it, his reprogramming could be overridden from the house’s central system. He could push the bed up against the door, but that was about the best he could achieve. He knew that he wouldn’t be given the chance to do anything more elaborate.

  “I’m not mentioned in the court order,” he said, in a low tone. “I don’t have to go. He can’t force me. I can get a lawyer of my own.”

  “My mother doesn’t want you here, with or without your father,” May said, bluntly. “She wants you both out.”

  “She asked for my help, once,” he said. “She asked me to talk to him.”

  “If you did,” May pointed out, “it didn’t work. We’re way past that now. She never loved you, you know. She never even liked you much. You were just something that came along with him. Everything she ever did for you she did for his sake. And now she’s had her fill of him, she never wants to set eyes on you again.”

  It was true, Benjy thought. It was all true, and would have been abundantly clear to him all along if only he’d bothered to think about it—if only he’d bothered to look at it with the objective eye of a budding
scientist.

  “It’s all a lie, isn’t it?” Benjy muttered, resentfully. “He never laid a finger on you, did he?”

  “Only because I’d cut it off if he did,” she retorted. “He wants to—just the way you do. I don’t have to tell any lies, Benjy. I just have to say what I’ve seen—what I see every day of the week, when he actually bothers to come home. What you’d see every day of the week, if you weren’t always hiding up here, messing about with your fucking tanks full of fucking mud.”

  “He wouldn’t do anything to you,” said Benjy. “You know that. So does Monica.”

  “Nobody knows,” she said, flatly. “These things happen. It’s a fact of life. Men like your dad are dangerous, Benjy, and not just because they’re incapable of keeping their promises. You’ll be dangerous too, when you stop hiding yourself away every night, trying to figure the difference between one microscopic worm and another. You have the same faithless genes as he does, the same lying eyes. Even you can’t be a kid forever, and when you stop, you’ll be just another chip off the same old block.”

  Benjy stared at her, remembering that she’d come in so that she could tell him how sorry she was. What had deflected her into that tirade? Was it his fault? For the first time, he wondered whether they might be right, and whether he really might be the one who was wrong, the one who was mad. Suppose, he thought, they were right, and the experiment really didn’t matter, and the mutaclay’s achievement was just one more futile, fruitless, meaningless ripple in the primordial slime…what then? Did anything matter?

  “I’m not going,” he said, yet again—but for the first time, the words had an ominously hollow ring, as it finally penetrated to the inmost heart of him that he really didn’t have the power to determine that.