Designer Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution

by Brian Stableford

  There’s nothing I can do, he thought, suddenly swamped by a wave of appalling desolation. Nobody’s going to take any notice; nobody’s even going to listen. They’re just going to blow it all away, without even thinking about it. It just doesn’t matter to them. I don’t matter to them. Nothing matters but their stupid determination to tear one another apart.

  Benjy came slowly to his feet, and looked at the ceiling of his room, and howled at the top of his voice: “I’m not going! I won’t go! D’you hear me, Dad…Monica? I CAN’T LEAVE THE EXPERIMENT!”

  He knew, even as he did it, how ridiculous it was. For years he had sat up here night after night, listening with half an ear to raised voices, knowing full well how stupid and futile it was to think that shouting something at the top of your voice could make it come true—and yet, when you came to the end of the line, what else was there?

  What other way was there to rage against the fallibility of men and the viciousness of fate? He was only human, after all—only a kid. He couldn’t change anything.

  The echoes had hardly died away before Jim Stephens came back into the room. He was still outwardly calm; he had finished all his ranting and raving. He looked at Benjy with naked distaste—not with anger, not with hatred, just distaste.

  “I changed my mind,” he said, as though to nobody in particular. Then he walked over to the table, lifted the lid off Tank Four and reached in with his big, gnarled, unsterile hand.

  One by one he wrested the four layers of the “mountain” from their bed, and one by one he hurled them across the room, each in a different direction. One by one they crashed into the walls, sending minute globules of mutaclay everywhere.

  Jim Stephens wiped his hands on his shirt, turned to Benjy, and said: “Tidy up the mess, Ben. Then pack your bags. It’s over. We’re leaving. We aren’t coming back. You and I, we have to get on with the rest of our lives.” As he strode out of the room again he cast a single malevolent glance in May’s direction, and hissed: “Bitch!” He was gone by the time she managed to lift a rude retaliatory finger.

  “Nice guy, your dad,” she said to Benjy, with feeling.

  Benjy didn’t reply. He was dumbstruck. He just stared at he wreckage of his experiment. Three hundred and fifty-eight days, he thought, numbly. Nearly three hundred generations of the motiles. Two new species. And it all comes to this. Five seconds of destructive wrath. Five seconds, and everything wiped out.

  There were no tears in his eyes. Desolation didn’t permit tears. The enormity of the event was too great to be encompassed by any simple, childish, tear-jerking emotion.

  “That’s life,” said May, after a little while, perhaps not quite as sarcastically as she had intended. “So it goes. When things get out of hand, there’s no way of stopping it. When people can’t get along any more, it all just comes apart.”

  There was no arguing with that.

  Benjy, still desolate and speechless, made no reply. There was nothing to be said, let alone shouted. But he realized, slowly and silently, that the fact that there was nothing he could say didn’t necessarily mean that there wasn’t an answer.

  What would a sentient dinosaur have felt, he thought, on the day when that rogue asteroid came hurtling out of nowhere? Two hundred million years of diversification, speciation, problem-solving…and all wiped out with a single casual flourish, by a bolt from the blue. Would it have cried, or laughed, or simply have shrugged its reptilian shoulders and said, “That’s life. So it goes. Another world ripped to shreds. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, back to square one.”

  He stared, helplessly, at the terrarium whose contents had been so recklessly scattered and smashed, and at the bright pinprick of warm white light that had shone upon the little world twenty-four hours a day for three hundred and fifty-eight days like the star of Bethlehem, full of hope and promise.

  For a moment, there was a tear there. But then he let the light fill his eyes, and drive out all other sensation.

  It doesn’t have to be this way, he said, trying with all his might to invest the thought with the force and authority of divine revelation. Whatever else is lost, the knowledge isn’t. Just because things get out of hand, just because things get smashed, just because everything comes apart, it doesn’t mean that it always has to be that way, now and forever. Whether it’s care that does it or sheer blind luck, things can work, things can grow, things can change and still stay together. If only they get enough chances, things can work out in the end. We’re here, aren’t we? In all our awesome complexity, we’re here, even though we started out as nothing but ambitious dirt, nothing but clever clay. And in the end, one way or another, we’ll find a way to get it all together, to make things work. That’s life, May. That’s what real life is all about.

  He let he thought die away before he even tried to speak, and when he did speak, all he said was, “I’m sorry too.”

  “What?” said May, probably having forgotten that she’d offered an apology of her own.

  “I said, I’m sorry too.”

  “Oh,” she said, uncertainly.

  He turned to her, and put out his arms, not tremulously but with real confidence, real determination.

  She hesitated, but in the end she let him put his arms around her and bid her a proper farewell, on behalf of the past they had shared, the world they had not, and the life they never would.

  HOT BLOOD

  When I first went into the blood business I had no idea that vampirism would ever become fashionable, or that it would provide me with the opportunity to fulfill my mother’s dying wish by saving my brother Frankie from a life of crime. When I built my first bloodshed in one of the less picturesque parts of the Pennines and stocked it with four hundred genetically-modified swine, the business was a simple matter of producing designer blood for xenotransfusion. Biotech companies were busy engineering animals whose blood was far better for patients in need than anything that could be leeched from human donors, because it was augmented with various kinds of healing aids as well as being guaranteed free of inconvenient viruses and prions.

  It might have been a profitable business even then, if I hadn’t been squeezed from every side. Every time I got my head above water the relevant taxes would rise, or the interest on my loans would be hiked, or the stocks I’d removed to the breeding pens would become obsolete, or some franchise consultant with a bee in his bonnet about economies of scale would convince me that I’d never get ahead if I didn’t expand. Even so, I’d probably have stayed completely honest if it hadn’t been for Frankie’s evil influence.

  Frankie had always been the hot-headed and hot-blooded one: the compulsive taker of short cuts, the fanciful wheeler-dealer. He had started his criminal career when neither he nor the century had yet attained their twenties, working for a cigarette-smuggler in Huddersfield. Frankie’s luck being what it was, the bottom fell out of that racket mere months after he had decided to go independent—but Frankie’s luck being what it was, he was just in time to catch the leading edge of the great plantigen panic of ‘29. For the next five years he hawked genetically-enhanced potatoes and carrots out of the back of his van from Manchester to Doncaster, cutting a tidy profit even on the rare occasions when the veg was carrying the subtle merchandise he claimed. His so-called fleet grew from one van to twenty—eleven of them refrigerated—before fate and a couple of dissatisfied customers caught up with him, at which point his newly-acquired wealth melted like snow in July into the black hole of his medical expenses.

  The doctors fixed him up all right—better than new in many ways—but that only made it harder for Frankie to learn the lesson that experience had been trying to teach him. While they were picking the bullets out of his back, they had to pump no less than forty-one liters of designer blood through his system, and while he was laid up for a further six weeks regenerating his pulverised kidneys, they had to give him another fifty-six liters to provide “resident stem-cell stimulation, nascent tissue reinforcement, and analgesic support,�
�� plus twelve more to compensate for “dialysis wastage.” At any rate, that’s what the bill said—and who among us nowadays has the guts to challenge a flesh mechanic’s accounts?

  I suppose, looking back, it’s no wonder that Frankie came out of hospital with a very healthy regard for the value of genemod pig’s blood. Given that he was Frankie, it was also no wonder that he came out with a brand new girl friend: a senior staff nurse with contacts—not the kind that you put in your eyes—and the bulkiest breast-enhancements I ever saw. Human mammary glands aren’t very useful as bioreactors—on that particular playing-field the cows will always win hands down—but there’s a certain kind of woman who reckons that the fringe-benefits more than make up for the low rent, and Janis was definitely that sort of woman. Frankie, alas, was always that sort of woman’s man, and to make matters worse he was going through a phase when he felt that his image couldn’t be complete unless it included a “moll.”

  Frankie and Janis came to stay with me for a week following his release from medical captivity. He told me on the phone that he needed a few days’ rest and recuperation in the “deep countryside” but I knew there had to be more to it than that. I even suspected that there’d be trouble, but I could hardly turn him down, could I? He was my brother, and he never ceased to remind me, with a suitably satirical cackle, that blood is thicker than water.

  I was mildly surprised that he asked me to show him the bloodsheds—I had three by that time—and very surprised that he got through the tour without throwing up, but he never had time to feel queasy when his mind was on money.

  “You know, Jeff,” he said to me, as he crunched the crackling he’d carefully moved to the side of his plate while he ate his dinner, “this place could be a little gold-mine if you could only bring yourself to stretch the regs a bit.”

  “No it couldn’t,” I told him. “The Ministry comes down like a ton of bricks on anyone who sets up unlicensed stock. If you’re thinking of importing black-market pigs from China, forget it. Most of them are dodgier than those King Edwards you used to shift by the sackload, and even the ones with genuine supplements have genetic fingerprints that stick out like a sore thumb when Mr. Maff pays a routine call. I’m thirty-two expecting to live to a hundred-and-twenty, and I aim to keep my license clean for at least another fifty years.”

  “You mistake my meaning, little bro,” he said, putting on a pseudo-parental manner even though he was only eighteen months the elder and hadn’t ever taken care of me even after Mum’s death. “Replacing your stock with illegal immigrants would be a bad move, I quite agree—but there’s more than one way to skin a piggie. I never realized until I had to grow a new pair of kidneys how good a little fresh blood can make you feel. It was a real tonic, I can tell you—but I couldn’t help feeling, towards the end, that the medics were being just a little bit mean.”

  “Not according to the bill they stuck you with,” I pointed out.

  “Not quantitatively mean,” he said, having obviously been practicing his pronunciation. “Qualitatively mean. There was a possibility of addiction, they said, so they had to thin out the analgesics. Those little red cells were stuffed full of all kinds of nutrients, antibiotics, and collagen-precursors, but when it came to the feel-good factor, they felt just a little bit anemic, if you follow my drift.”

  I followed his drift all right. The genetic fingerprints recorded by the Ministry’s field-testing devices are a little bit blurred: they’re reliable as far as detecting which genes are present, but they’re not much good at estimating the level of their activity. What Frankie had in mind—thanks, no doubt, to a crash course in elementary genetics administered by Janis, the senior staff nurse—wasn’t anywhere near as crude as smuggling patent-busting pigs. What he had in mind was tweaking the expressivity of the genes with which my fully-licensed Ministry-approved pigs were already fitted so as to alter the product-balance. He was suggesting that I should increase the concentration of the morphine-analogues in the blood my pigs were producing.

  “Don’t you think the hospitals would notice if their patients were boosted into orbit?” I asked, although I already knew what he was going to say next.

  “Don’t be daft, Jeff,” he retorted. “What would be the point of selling it on to hospitals at list price? Fact is, not all the blood that’s sold to hospitals ends up in the patients—not current patients, at any rate. Some of it gets sold on via the back door, mostly to people who’ve got a taste for it, but also to people who’ve heard how good it is and would like to acquire a taste for it. It’s a growing market, kiddo. It won’t be as big as the plantigen bubble, but it won’t turn turtle the way that one did. The situation is crying out for someone to cut out the middleman and take the product direct from the farm to the consumer.”

  “And Janis knows how you can do that, I suppose?” I said.

  “Bang on,” he informed me. “And guess who happens to have seven refrigerator-trucks sat in the garage doing bugger all?”

  “Haven’t they been repossessed?”

  “The other four were,” he admitted. “The ones I still have were acquired through unorthodox channels. As their existence was always semi-official, at best, they sort of slipped through a hole in the receiver’s net.”

  Frankie went on to explain, in great detail, exactly how he and Janis could fix it up for an engineer to call around and collect a few dozen embryos from my breeding sows. He’d remove them to some university lab—the only way the government can hold down higher education expenditure is to turn a blind eye to the details of their entrepreneurial adventures—and tweak the genes controlling the expressivity of the genes on the artificial chromosomes. He wouldn’t switch anything off, because the therapeutic value of the cocktail accounted for at least a part of the demand, but he’d pump up the volume of the products that had “recreational value.” Then he’d send them back to be reared; with luck, enough of them would beat the attrition rate to establish a breeding population.

  If I could step up the production of my industry standard pigs even slightly, the gradual drop in production distributed through existing channels as I moved the new stock into the bloodsheds wouldn’t look suspicious. The product of the re-enhanced animals would be loaded into Frankie’s trucks and spirited away to a destination I didn’t need to know anything about, and my cut would be payable on a weekly basis, in hard cash. The Treasury had been trying to develop a cashless economy for the best part of half a century, but the people wouldn’t tolerate it. The man in the street loves his fiddles, and without cash, fiddling would become a hackers’ monopoly—and the only thing the man in the street hates more than the Inland Revenue is the hacker who can pick his pocket from the other side of the world.

  I took some persuading, but in the end went for it. Maybe I was weak, but I was getting sick of always having to run faster just to stay in the same place. I was also getting just a little bit tired of always being the sensible one. To cap it all, and despite the occasional hallucinatory image of Mum spinning in her grave, it really did seem like a good idea—a better one than I had ever expected from Frankie the cockeyed optimist.

  * * * *

  Everything went well for the first couple of years. In fact, it went extremely well. The tweaker was an ace, and I reared two boars and a sow from the first batch of re-enhanced embryos. They were not only fit but fertile, and my breeding population increased rapidly. Frankie had been absolutely right about the growth-potential of the market, and I’d been in the business long enough to have learned a wrinkle or two about stretching production, so my regular production didn’t suffer at all. The extra work was hard, of course, but I was used to working sixteen-hour days, and it was a temporary problem. As my cash-flow improved I was able to hire another full-timer and two more part-timers, reducing my own hours by a third.

  During ‘35 and ‘36 I expanded my “special herd” from two dozen to two hundred, and then to three hundred. I had to add an extra bloodshed to my premises and take in more stan
dardized stock, but the rate of innovation had slowed somewhat and there was no need for a large-scale replacement program. I not only passed all four of the half-yearly Ministry inspections but survived a surprise visit from the Animal Welfare Squad. The random geneprintings sampled a couple of dozen re-enhanced animals along with a hundred and fifty others, but all the smudges were well within the tolerance-limits of Mr. Maff’s portable equipment.

  In the meantime, ever-increasing quantities of cash rolled in. By Christmas ‘36 I was able to get a couple of cosmetic enhancements of my own, and a whole new wardrobe of clothes that were smart in both senses of the word. I was beginning to get out a lot more too—so much, in fact, that in the spring of ‘37 I ended up with a girlfriend. Melanie was an engineer in the food industry, who had recently graduated from routine work on cereal-based whole-diet manna-powders to exploratory research in the relatively underdeveloped field of “texture management.” Melanie was much nicer than Janis, because she’d never gone in for any kind of personal enhancement and wasn’t the sort of woman who’d hire herself out as a bioreactor in any case.

  Alas, when things first began to get sticky, Janis turned out to be not very nice at all. With her nurse’s salary, her milk income, and her cut of the bloodrunning business she was clearing a tidy sum, but she was one of those people whose appetites increase as they’re fed, and who can’t tolerate the slightest setback. When our sales leveled off, and then began to slide, she put pressure on Frankie, demanding that he put pressure on me to increase production further and faster.

  Actually, it wasn’t really a production problem. Obsolescence doesn’t affect illicit trade as much as legitimate business, but progress always marches on. When her contacts explained to her that better products were coming on-stream, she started banging on about starting over with a new set of re-tweaked embryos. I was reluctant to do that, partly because it would be expensive and troublesome, but also because I felt that I’d already got what I needed out of the illicit operation. It seemed to me that the hot blood had got me over the hump in my career, and that I could now make a go of the business without its support. I was quite happy to let the sideline cool off gradually and wither away—but I could tell that Frankie wasn’t yet ready to go legit, and never would be while Janis’ bosom was a millstone round his neck. So I procrastinated, figuring that time and increasing competition might settle the question.