Designer Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution

by Brian Stableford

  For once, it was me who was being the cockeyed optimist.

  All the while she was applying pressure to us, apparently Janis was also putting pressure on the people she was supplying to hike their retail prices, in order to facilitate a similar increase in the wholesale price. They couldn’t do it. The market was still expanding, but it was also diversifying, in more ways than one. It wasn’t just a matter of competing products but of competing organizations. Many of them were small independent operators just like us, but as the size of the market grew it attracted other kinds of people. When the old pros began to muscle in on the racket and the principle of natural selection came into force, the business evolved into something quite different and much more dangerous.

  I had to explain to Frankie—although he, of all people, should have understood the logic of the situation—that we were getting out of our depth. If we were to keep going at all, I told him, the only sensible course was to keep our own operation small and unobtrusive, and to accept the creeping obsolescence of our product as a blessing that would help to persuade the new operators that we could not offer them any serious competition. Maybe Frankie tried to explain all this to Janis, but if so, the message got lost somewhere along the chain of transmission.

  “You’re out of touch, Jeff, stuck way out here on the moors,” she explained to me, when Frankie brought her out to the farm to celebrate the second anniversary of our first big pay day. “The queues for elective surgery are growing longer every day, partly because new techniques in cosmetic somatic engineering keep rolling off the production line but mainly because you can’t take the face and body God gave you into any interview anywhere in the city and walk out with a job. There isn’t anyone in the country under forty who hasn’t spent a vacation on the wards in the last couple of years—and that’s not counting the sick, the injured, and the reproductively challenged. Just because the panic’s over doesn’t mean that the Eight Plagues have shot their bolt, and ‘36 was the biggest year ever for Extreme Sports. Everybody and his cousin has tasted xenotransfusion blood by now, and even the ones who get it while they’re comatose come out the other end feeling that something is missing from their lives. This market is going to be huge, and we’re in on the ground floor. All we have to do is keep up. Hell, in ten years time it’ll probably be legal. It’s the opportunity of a lifetime, Jeff, and we have to seize the day. We have to update our stock, and we have to step up production.”

  “Even if I did update the stock I couldn’t build another shed,” I told her, exercising my first line of defense. “I just don’t have the land.”

  Her answer to that, of course, was to buy more—but our profits weren’t that big, and ours wasn’t the kind of business plan you can take to a bank.

  “I can get you the money,” she said. “I have contacts.”

  “So what you want me to do, Janis,” I said, sarcastically, “is to borrow money from one lot of gangsters so that Frankie and I can go head to head with another lot of gangsters in a bloody turf war?”

  The sarcasm was wasted, because that was exactly what she wanted to do.

  So far, I’d managed to rig things so that my staff didn’t know what I was up to, although they must have figured out that I had to be into something dodgy. Even those I’d only been able to take on with the aid of under-the-table cash were neighbors I’d known since I first moved to the area, who reckoned my operation was a thoroughly good thing for the local economy. I’d always treated them well, by their admittedly-meager standards, and they had a tradition of not blabbing to “the authorities” that went back to the nineteenth century and beyond. If I bought more land and built more sheds, though, I’d be seen as a man of disruptive ambition rather than one who had accommodated himself to the existing scheme of things. If I hired any more new staff I’d have to bring them in from further afield. Keeping the lid on the bigger operation would be a much trickier affair. A further issue, of steadily-increasing importance, was Melanie. She didn’t know, as yet, that I was doing anything I shouldn’t have been, but our relationship had matured to the point where I didn’t want to keep secrets from her—and she was certainly smart enough to know that I couldn’t expand on the basis of my honest business. So there were all kinds of powerful reasons why I had to say no to Janis, and that’s what I did.

  Unfortunately, Janis wasn’t the sort of girl to take no for an answer.

  Three weeks later I had a visit from two extremely well-dressed gentlemen who were extremely keen to lend me a lot of money, and very eloquent in explaining the reasons why I ought to take it.

  I said no to them, too, as politely as I could.

  I knew that Janis had exposed us to exactly the kind of attention I was desperate to avoid, but I clung to the hope that the smart men wouldn’t consider it worth their while to persist. Unfortunately, and however paradoxical it might be, it’s often the most unprincipled people who cling hardest to those points of principle they do uphold. Three days later, one of Frankie’s vans was hijacked ten minutes after leaving the farm. The driver wasn’t too badly roughed up, but the van and its cargo disappeared into thin air.

  I summoned Frankie to a family conference and told him flatly that I wasn’t prepared to go to war to defend the illicit side of my business, because losing—or even a hard-fought draw—would undoubtedly cost me everything. I also reminded him about Mum and the probability of her resting uneasily in her coffin. He told me that he was disappointed to hear me using such underhanded tactics, but that he understood where I was coming from. He promised to have a stern word with Janis and set her straight.

  Three days later a second van was hijacked. This time, Frankie—following a plan whose details he hadn’t thought to confide to me—was “riding shotgun.” The driver and one of the hijackers ended up shot in the head, with their brains completely mashed, but even though two of the five remaining hijackers suffered painful injuries they were sufficiently businesslike to make sure that Frankie only ended up in hospital, facing stupendous medical bills and a real blood habit.

  I spent that night slaughtering pigs. It took me until three in the morning to kill all the ones I needed to kill, and it required all of Frankie’s remaining refrigerator trucks to ferry the carcasses to a semi-legal chop shop. Whether any of the crackling found its way to the side of one of Frankie’s plates, hoarded for a climactic treat, I don’t know.

  I had to close down one of my sheds, but at least I’d made my position clear. Janis’ friends decided that they, too, had made their point.

  * * * *

  By the time the doctors brought him out of the induced coma, Frankie was flat broke again, but his lights were all switched on and his heart was back in the right place. Another week passed while he was suspended in a tank, conscious but not able to do much except watch subsurface TV, but once they hauled him out of the gel and into a bed he was allowed visitors. The first words out of his mouth were the ones that told Janis she was history. She didn’t like it, especially because he did it in front of Melanie and me, but we figured that her threat-cum-promise that he’d live to regret it was so much hot air.

  “It’s time to give up the life of crime, Frankie,” I told him. “I know you’re over forty now, but we’re living in the twenty-first century. It’s not too late to start over. It’s what Mum would want.”

  “I can’t,” he said, miserably. “You have no idea what it’s like. I’m hooked, Jeff. Those bastards knew exactly what they were doing. It’s not so much a matter of suffering the withdrawal symptoms—the doctors will pull me through that, at a price. It’s all in the mind. Once you’ve tasted real blood, you can never be content with the stuff in your veins. You’re way too straight to understand, but I’m committed to the dark side, as a customer if not as a supplier. If I can’t work for myself, I’ll have to work for them.”

  He meant that he had to earn his fix, and that if he couldn’t do it as an entrepreneur he’d have to do it as a foot soldier. Even as a small-time entrepreneur
his life-expectancy had looked shaky; as a mere foot soldier he’d be lucky to survive ten years.

  “You can come and work for me,” I said. “Or rather, for Melanie and me. The newest generation of enhanced swine produce shaggy coats at a phenomenal rate as well as superabundant blood, and she’s setting up a factory in my empty bloodshed to process the shearings.”

  “Process them into what?” he wanted to know. “Silk purses?”

  “That’s ears, not fleeces,” I told him. “No, what we’re aiming to do is to produce the ultimate in dietary roughage.”

  He looked at me as if I were mad. “What?”

  “Dietary roughage.” I didn’t normally trouble Frankie with technical details, but for once I let my enthusiasm carry me away. “You see, the trouble with whole-diet products is that although they provide all the nutritional requirements of the human body, they don’t entirely agree with the human digestive system. Whether you take them in liquid form or bulk them out artificially as porridge they don’t have the kind of textural spectrum that your gut feels comfortable with. What the world needs right now is effectively-designed roughage, which has no nutritional value whatsoever—except for the flavorings and maybe a few trace-elements that are inconvenient in solution—but which fills the comfort-gap and the oral reward-gap that mannas leave unsatisfied. You might think that’s easy, but it isn’t. To get the necessary textural flexibility you need a very carefully-balanced blend of cellulose-analogues and keratin-derivatives. The engineers have been trying for decades to persuade plants to do the work, but there are problems with lignin-spinoff as well orchestrating a keratin-deposition system. It turns out that it’s far more convenient to translocate the cellulose-analogue gene-set into pigskin. Melanie’s right at the forefront of the field, and with my talent for coaxing extra production out of the stock we reckon we can steal a march on the opposition. The new products don’t require refrigerator-trucks for transportation, and they’re absolutely one hundred per cent legal.”

  “And what would I do?” he asked, plaintively. “I don’t know the first thing about food tech.”

  “Yours would be a management position,” I assured him.

  “One that would pay enough to supply my need for you know what?” he said, miserably.

  “Absolutely,” I said. I thought—rightly—that there’d be plenty of time later to explain, in more private surroundings, that although I’d slaughtered the right number of pigs, in case anyone was taking a precise count, not all of them had been re-enhanced. I still had a small breeding population of happy-chemical supermanufacturers. I wasn’t selling their produce, and I had no intention of doing so in the foreseeable future, but I certainly had more than enough to supply a few family members and close friends, should the need arise. Being the cool-headed one, if not the cold-blooded one, I always like to keep my options open, especially when I’m under excessive pressure to close them down.

  Ironically, it turned out that Frankie’s need for illegal substances wasn’t quite as desperate as he had anticipated while he still lay inactive in his extremely expensive bed. Once he had thrown himself into his new job—which was a perfectly real job, with opportunities for career-progression as well as a healthy supply of responsibilities—he found that his dependency decreased by slow but inexorable degrees. By the time another year had passed, he was as fit as a flea, and by no means as obsessed with blood. Instead, he had become obsessed with every aspect of dietary roughage: its production, its design, and its marketing.

  “It’s criminal that this stuff should be legal,” he said to me, when we had a little party to celebrate the second anniversary of our new joint venture. “I mean, it sounds stodgy but in fact it’s pure fun. People love the stuff. They can eat it to their heart’s content, savoring every texture, every flavor, and suffer not a single side-effect. It does nothing.”

  “Not exactly—and not for long,” Melanie told him, a trifle severely. “It makes much more sense to accommodate some of the nutritional responsibilities that have previously been consigned to soluble manna-powders into a robust structured matrix. But that’ll only be the start. It also makes sense to transfer some of the medical responsibilities that are currently provided by xenotransfusive blood. Bit by bit, products that are currently expressed in the blood-manufacturing cells of Jeff’s pigs will be expressed in the follicular roots as well—or even instead.”

  “That’s an engineer’s point of view,” the new Frankie told her, “but doing what’s possible—even what might seem perfectly rational, to a superstraight person like you—isn’t necessarily the right way to go. I think it would be a crying shame to start loading our stuff with useful functions, when what we could do is keep working on the fun aspects. It isn’t as if the world’s short of useful things. Hell, there are so many useful things around that we’ve forgotten what a wonder it is to have things around us that have no earthly use whatsoever. Trust me on this one, Mel—let’s not confuse the issue by trying to make roughage into another kind of manna. Leave the demand-management to me, and I’ll make us all three times as rich as we would be if we played it your way.”

  “What do you think, Jeff?” my wife-to-be asked me, loyally.

  “Let’s just take it one step at a time,” I said, in my careful fashion. “Who knows what trends the new year will throw up?”

  To tell the truth, I was still a bit worried about Frankie reverting to type, and I didn’t like to hear him using phrases like “three times as rich.” It turned out, though, that I had never spoken a wiser sentence in my entire life.

  * * * *

  The new roughage was a big hit, not because anybody really needed it, but because it felt right.

  The revolution in human eating habits that had alienated us from our innate digestive technology had happened long before modern times. It dated back at least to the invention of agriculture, and probably to the invention of cooking. We’d made astonishing progress in the interim, in terms of gastronomy as well as nutritional science, but there had always been a little something lacking: a small loophole in our satisfaction. It wasn’t until the ingenuity of biotech engineers was brought to bear on the roughage problem that most people realized the problem existed—but once they discovered that it not only existed but had been solved, they took to the stuff like ducks to water.

  Our early involvement in roughage production would have made us modestly well off even in the absence of other trends, and there was a period when Frankie urged me to get out of the blood business altogether so that we could concentrate all our resources on our most profitable hairlines. I wouldn’t do that, partly because of my habitual cautiousness and partly because I figured that while our animals had no option but to have blood flooding their veins as well as hair fountaining out of their skins, we might as well make the most of both.

  It was perhaps as well that I stuck to my guns, because it turned out that Janis had been right. By the mid-forties the illicit blood business had grown to such awesome proportions that it made no political sense to maintain its illegality. Not only were the laws in question criminalizing an absurdly high percentage of the population, but organized crime was getting out of hand again.

  This time, even parliament and the police understood that the sensible response to that kind of situation was to call off the dogs. Consumer blood became legal in June ‘48, and the whole economic spectrum in which we operated was transformed, so to speak, at a stroke. Vampirism was all the rage by Halloween; no cocktail party was complete without a dozen bottles of the best, and the dossers in the city streets were buying it by the bucketful.

  Suddenly, the demand for re-enhanced pigs far outstripped the supply. Anyone with a potential breeding population, no matter how it had been acquired, might as well have been in possession of a goose that could lay golden eggs. Under the protection of a temporary amnesty, I came clean about my secret sties and gave the little darlings the go-ahead to breed like rabbits.

  Vampirism couldn’t have become so
popular, of course, if it hadn’t been for the new roughage. Manna could supply the nutritional requirements of a vampire, but a digestive system that was already out of sorts because it wasn’t entirely comfortable with manna would have thrown a real wobbly under the further burden of orally-consumed blood. Thanks to the new roughage, though, the human gut could be perfectly at ease with itself while the palate enjoyed the plethora of delights produced by all the new kinds of blood that erupted on to the market.

  Some hardened users, of course, remained adamant that the only proper way to take blood was straight into a vein, but the march of progress went on regardless. There was an aesthetic component to blood-drinking, which went far beyond the taste sensations that could be as easily satisfied by manna and roughage. Vampirism was a style thing: a matter of image. You might think that a practice that permeated every stratum of society wouldn’t be much use as an image-maker, but it isn’t so. Thanks to the ceaseless endeavors of twentieth-century film-makers, there were vampire icons available to suit every pocket and every idiosyncrasy. If there were a thousand kinds of blood, there were nearly as many accompanying rituals of consumption.

  I knew that it couldn’t last, of course, but I was fully prepared to ride the fad while the product was hot. There had never been a better time to be in the blood business, and I was determined to make the most of it. Mr. Maff the Regulator was still a blight upon the land, of course, because even civil servants can spot a golden opportunity, but a number of backhanders changed pockets and twice as many scrupulous eyes were turned in other directions, and for eighteen glorious months we were on top of the world. There wasn’t a gangster in sight, because the gangsters were doing what gangsters always do in that kind of situation, and trying their level best to go legit.