Designer Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution

by Brian Stableford

“So you’ll soon be back on the streets, will you?” the widow enquired, cuttingly.

  “I haven’t worked the streets since I was sixteen,” Anna said, equably. “I was in a Licensed House when Alan met me. I can’t go back there, of course—there’s no way they’d let me have my license back after what happened, even if they could normalize my body chemistry. I suppose I might go back to the street, when I’m released. There are men who like spoiled girls, believe it or not.”

  “You ought to be quarantined,” the widow said, her voice easing into a spiteful hiss. “You and all your rancid kind ought to be locked up forever.”

  “Maybe so,” Anna admitted. “But it was the good trips that got Alan hooked, and it was the withdrawal symptoms that hurt him, not the mutant proteins.”

  A man had joined the widow now: the fascinated crowd’s appointed mediator. He put a protective arm around the widow’s shoulder. He was too old to be one of her sons and too dignified to be a suitor ambitious to step into the dead man’s shoes; perhaps he was her brother—or even Alan’s brother.

  “Go back to the car now, Kitty,” the man said. “Let me take care of this.”

  Kitty seemed to be glad of the opportunity to retreat. Whatever she’d hoped to get out of the confrontation, she hadn’t found it. She turned away and went back to the black-clad flock that was waiting to gather her in.

  Anna expected a more combative approach from the man, whoever he might be, but all he said was; “If you’re who I think you are, you shouldn’t have come here. It’s not fair to the family.”

  Another Isabel, Anna thought. You’d think someone like him would know better. By “someone like him” she meant doctor, lawyer, or banker. Something professional in the non-ironic sense of the word. Alan had been a stockbroker, careful overseer of a thousand personal equity plans. She’d often wondered if any of his clients had shares in the company that owned the House. Like everything else in today’s complicated world, it had been part of some diverse conglomerate; the parent organization’s share price was quoted every day in the Guardian’s financial pages, under the heading “Leisure and Entertainment.”

  “I’m not doing any harm,” Anna said. “You could all have ignored me, if you’d wanted to.”

  “I believe that was the gist of the argument that prompted the legalization of prostitution,” the other replied, mustering a sarcastic edge far sharper than Kitty’s. “It does no harm, they said, and anyone who disapproves only has to ignore it. When the cosmetic engineers progressed from tinkering with shape and form to augmenting bodily fluids, they said much the same thing. The new aphrodisiacs are perfectly safe, they said, it’s all just for fun, they’re definitely not addictive—and anyone who disapproves can simply stay away from the new generation of good-time girls, and let the fun-lovers get on with it. In the end, though, the rot crept in, the way it always does. It all went horribly wrong. Isn’t it bad enough that we had to lose Alan, without having to suffer a personal appearance by his own particular angel of death?”

  Anna felt something stirring in the depths of her consciousness, but the comfort-blanket of her medication was weighing down upon it. It was easy to remain tame and self-possessed while the doctors’ drugs were winning the battle against her own perverted psychochemistry. “I’m sorry,” she said, effortlessly. “I didn’t mean to cause distress.” Like hell I didn’t, she thought, by way of private compensation. I came here to rub your turned-up noses in it, to force you to recognize how utterly and horribly unfair the world really is.

  “You have caused distress,” the man said, accusatively. “I don’t think you have the least idea how much distress you’ve caused—to Alan, to Kitty, to the boys, and to everyone who knew them. If you had the least vestige of conscience, you’d have cut your throat rather than come here today. In fact, you’d have cut your throat, period.”

  He’s a punter, Anna thought, derisively. Not mine, and not the House’s, but someone’s. He fucks augmented girls, and the juices really blow his mind, just like they’re supposed to, and he’s afraid. He’s afraid that one fine day he too might find that he just can’t stop, and that if and when his favourite squeeze goes bad it’ll be cold turkey, for ever and ever amen. Like every man alive his prayer has always been “Lord give me chastity but please not yet!”—and now it’s too late.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, again. The words were the purified essence of her medication, wrought by a transformation every bit as miraculous as the one that had run its wayward course within her flesh and her spirit. The real Anna wasn’t sorry at all. The real Anna wasn’t sorry she had come, and wasn’t sorry she was alive, and wasn’t sorry that this black-clad prick saw her as some kind of ravenous memento mori.

  “You’re a degenerate,” the black-clad prick informed her, speaking not merely to her but to everything she stood for. “I don’t agree with those people who say that what’s happened to you is God’s punishment for the sins you’ve committed, and that every whore in the world will eventually go the same sway, but I understand how they feel. I think you should go now, and never show your face here again. I don’t want Kitty thinking that she can’t bring the boys to visit Alan’s grave in case she meets you. If you have a spark of decency in you, you’ll promise me that you’ll never come here again.”

  The clichés begin to flow in full force, Anna thought—but even the medication balked at sparks of decency. “I’m free to go wherever I want to, whenever I wish,” she asserted, untruthfully. “You have no right to stop me.”

  “You poisonous bitch,” he said, in a level fashion which suggested that he meant the adjective literally. “Wherever you go, corruption goes with you. Stay away from Alan’s family, or you’ll be sorry.” She knew that he meant all of that quite literally too—but he had to turn away when he’d said it, because he couldn’t meet the unnaturally steady stare of her colorless eyes.

  She stayed where she was until everyone else had left, and then she walked over to the open grave and looked down at the coffin, on to which someone had dribbled a handful of brown loamy soil.

  “Don’t worry,” she said to the dead man. “Nothing scares me. Not any more. I’ll be back, and I’ll get that wreath one way or another.”

  She had no wristwatch but the church clock told her that she had five hours in hand before they’d be expecting her at the hospital.

  * * * *

  Anna hadn’t been to the Euroterminal meat-rack for seven years, but it didn’t take long for her to find her way around. The establishment of Licensed Houses had been intended to take prostitution off the streets but it had only resulted in a more complicated stratification of the marketplace. It wasn’t just the fact that there were so many different kinds of augmentation available, or the fact that more than three-quarters of them were illegal, or even the fact that there were so many girls whose augmentations had ultimately gone wrong or thrown up unexpected side-effects; the oldest profession was one that, by its very nature, could never be moved out of the black economy into the gold. Sleaze, secrecy, and dark, dark shadows were marketable commodities, just like psychotropic bodily secretions.

  She didn’t bother to try for a managed stand; she’d spoken the truth when she’d told her dead lover that nothing scared her any more, but she hadn’t time to get into complicated negotiations with a pimp. She went down to the arches where the independents hung out. There was no one there she knew, but there was a scene in which she knew all of them—especially the ones who were marked like her. It didn’t take long to find one who was a virtual mirror-image in more overstated make-up.

  “I’m not here to provide steady competition,” she said, by way of introduction. “I’m still hospitalized. I’ll be back on the ward tomorrow, but I need something to get me through today. Fifty’ll do it—that’s only one substitution, right?”

  “Y’r arithmetic’s fine,” the mirror-image said, “but y’got a lot of nerve. Demand’s not strong, and I don’t owe y’anything just ‘cause we’re two pe
as from the same glass pod. It’s a cat-eat-cat world out here.”

  “We aren’t two peas from any kind of pod,” Anna informed her, softly, “Symptoms are all on the surface. They used to say that all of us were sisters under the skin, but we were never the same. Even when they shot the virus vectors into us, so that our busy little epithelial cells would mass-produce their carefully-designed mind-expanders, it didn’t make us into so many mass-produced wanking machines. One of my doctors explained to me that the reason it all began to go wrong is that everybody’s different. We’re not just different ghosts haunting production-line machines; each and every one of us has a subtly different brain chemistry. What makes you you and me me isn’t just the layout of the synaptic network that forms in our brains as we accumulate memories and habits; we tailor our chemistry to individual specifications as well. You and I had exactly the same transformation, and our transplanted genes mutated according to the same distortive logic, but fucking you never felt exactly the same as fucking me, and it still isn’t. We’re all unique, all different; we offered subtly different good trips and now we offer subtly different bad ones. That’s why some of our clients became regulars, and why some got hooked in defiance of all the ads that promised hand-on-heart that what we secreted wasn’t physically addictive. You don’t owe me anything at all, either because of what we both were or because of what we both are, but you could do me a favor, if you wanted to. You’re free to say no.”

  The mirror-image looked at her long and hard, and then said: “Jesus, kid, y’really are strung out—but y’d better lose that accent if y’re plannin’ on workin’ down here. It don’t fit. I was goin’ for a cup of coffee anyway. Y’got half an hour—if y’don’t score by then, tough luck.”

  “Thanks,” said Anna. “I appreciate it.” She wasn’t sure that half an hour would be enough, but she knew she had to settle for whatever she could get.

  She’d been on the pitch for twenty-three minutes when the car drew up. In a way, she was grateful it had taken so long. Now, she wouldn’t be able to go back afterwards.

  The punter tried to bargain her down to thirty, but the car was a souped-up fleet model whose gloss shouted to the world that he wasn’t strapped for cash, and there was no one else on the line with exactly her kind of spoliation.

  The client was a wise guy; he knew enough about the chemistry of his own tastes to think he could show off. It probably didn’t occur to him that the doctors had taken pains to explain to Anna exactly what had happened to her, or that she’d been better able to follow their expert discourse than his fudged mess. Nor did it occur to him that she wouldn’t be at all interested in the important lessons that he thought were there to be learned from the whole sorry affair. She didn’t try to put him right; he was paying, after all, and the torrent of words provided a distraction of sorts from the various other fluxes generated by their brief and—for her—painful intercourse.

  “That whole class of euphorics should never have been licensed, of course,” he opined, after he’d stumbled through a few garbled technicalities. “It’s all very well designing fancy proteins by computer, but just because something’s stable in cyberspace doesn’t mean it’s going to behave itself under physiological conditions, and physiological conditions is a politer way of putting it, when we’re referring to the kind of witch’s cauldron you get up a whore’s you-knows-what. They say they have programs now that will spot likely mutation-sites and track likely chains of mutational consequence, but I reckon they’re about as much use as a wooden fort against a fire-breathing dragon. I mean, this thing is out of control and there’s no way to lock the stable door now the nags have bolted. Personally, I’m not at all distressed—I mean, I’ve had all the common-or-garden stuff up to here. I never liked whores wired up for the kind of jollies you can get from a pill or a fizzy drink. I mean, it’s just stupid to try to roll up all your hits into one. It’s like praying mantises eating their mates while they fuck—no sense to it at all. Me, I like things spread around a bit. I like it sour and sweet, in all kinds of exotic combinations. People like me are the real citizens of the twenty-first century, you know. In a world like ours, it ain’t enough not to be xenophobic—you have to go the other way. Xenophilia is what it takes to cope with today and tomorrow. Just hang on in there, darling, and you’ll find yourself back in demand on a big scale. Be grateful that they can’t cure you—in time, you’ll adapt, just like me.”

  She knew that in her own way she had adapted, and not just by taking her medication regularly. She had adapted her mind and her soul, and knew that in doing that she had adapted her body chemistry too, in subtle ways that no genetic engineer or ultra-smart expert system could ever have predicted. She knew that she was unique, and that what Alan had felt for her really did qualify as love, and was not to be dismissed as any mere addiction. If it had been mere addiction, there wouldn’t have been any problem at all; he would simply have switched to another girl who’d been infected with the same virus vectors but had proved to be immune—so far—to the emergent mutations.

  The punter wasn’t a bad sort, all things considered. Unusual tastes weren’t necessarily associated with perverted manners. He paid Anna in cash and he dropped her right outside the door of Lambeth North tube station. It was, he said, pretty much on his way home—which meant that he could conceivably have been Isabel’s next door neighbor. Anna didn’t ask for further details, and he wouldn’t have told her the truth if she had. There was an etiquette in these matters that had to be observed.

  * * * *

  By the time Anna got back to the cemetery, the grave had been filled in. The gravedigger had arranged the wreaths in a pretty pattern on the freshly-turned earth, which was carefully mounded so that it wouldn’t sink into a hollow as it settled beneath the spring rains. Anna studied the floral design very carefully before deciding exactly how to modify it to incorporate her own wreath.

  She was a little surprised to note that her earlier impression had been mistaken; there were several wreaths made up of genetically-engineered exotics. She quickly realized, however, that this was not a calculated expression of xenophilia so much as an ostentatious gesture of conspicuous consumption. Those of Alan’s friends and relatives who were slightly better off than the rest had simply taken the opportunity to prove the point.

  When she had rearranged the wreaths she stood back, looking down at her handiwork.

  “I didn’t want any of this to happen,” she said. “In Paris, it might almost pass for romantic—man becomes infatuated with whore, recklessly smashes himself up in his car when she becomes infected with some almost-unprecedented kind of venereal disease—but in Pinner it’s just absurd. You were a perfect fool, and I didn’t even love you…but my mind got blown to Hell and back by the side-effects of my own mutated psychotropics, so maybe I would have if I could have. Who knows?”

  I didn’t want it to happen either, he said, struggling to get the words through the cloying blanket of her medication, which was deeply prejudiced against any and all hallucinations. It really was an accident. I’d got over the worst of the withdrawal symptoms. I’d have been okay. Maybe I’d even have been okay with Kitty, once I’d got it all out of my system. Maybe I could have begun to be what everybody wanted and expected me to be.

  “Conformist bastard,” she said. “You make it sound like it was all pretence. Is that what you think? Just a phase you were going through, was it? Just a mad fling with a maddening whore who went completely mad?”

  It was the real thing, he insisted, dutifully.

  “It was a lot realer than the so-called real thing,” she told him. “Those expert systems are a hell of a lot cleverer than Old Mother Nature. Four billion years of natural selection produced Spanish fly and rhino horn; forty years of computerized protein design produced me and a thousand alternatives you just have to dilute to taste. You couldn’t expect Mother Nature to take that kind of assault lying down, of course, even if she always has been the hoariest whore of them all.
Heaven only knows what a psychochemical wilderness the world will be when all the tailored pheromones and augmentary psychotropics have run the gamut of mutational variation. You and I were just caught in the evolutionary crossfire. Kitty and Isabel too, I guess. No man is an island, and all that crap.”

  I don’t think much of that as a eulogy, he said. You could try to be a little more earnest, a little more sorrowful.

  He was right, but she didn’t dare. She was afraid of earnestness, and doubly afraid of sorrow. There was no way in the world she was going to try to put it the way Ecclesiastes had—in much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrowand all that kind of stuff. After all, she had to stay sane enough to get safely back to the hospital or they wouldn’t let her out again for a long time.

  “Goodbye, Alan,” she said, quietly. “I don’t think I’ll be able to drop in again for quite a while. You know how things are, even though you never once came to see me in the hospital.”

  I know, he said. You don’t have any secrets from me. We’re soulmates, you and I, now and forever. It was a nicer way of putting it than saying he was addicted to her booby-trapped flesh, but it came to the same thing in the end.

  She went away then: back to the tube station, across zones three, two, and one, and out again on the far side of the river. She wanted to be alone, although she knew that she never would be and never could be.

  The receptionist demanded to now why Isabel hadn’t brought her back in the car, so Anna said that she’d asked to be dropped at the end of the street. “I wanted to walk a little way,” she explained. “It’s such a nice evening.”

  “No it isn’t,” the receptionist pointed out. “It’s cloudy and cold, and too windy by half.”

  “You don’t notice things like that when you’re in my condition,” Anna told her, loftily. “I’m drugged up to the eyeballs on mutated euphorics manufactured by my own cells. If it weren’t for the medication, I’d be right up there on cloud nine, out of my mind on sheer bliss.” It was a lie, of course; the real effects were much nastier.