Future Crimes

by Jack Dann

  Mercifully, the man who didn't do nice didn't start to fiddle with my apparatus while we were still in the van. I couldn't have stood that. It was bad enough having to walk around all day with a tube and a glorified hot-water bottle attached to my inside leg and a double-duty condom hermetically sealed to my prick, and I'd had my fill of embarrassment the day before, when I'd handed over my first set of sample bottles to GSKC's collection service. Having some pervert do a removal job in the back of a white van would definitely have added yet more insult to the injury that had already been added to the first insult.

  I tried to lie back against the side-panel of the van and think of England, but it wasn't the kind of situation that was conducive to a shrewd analysis of our chances in the upcoming World Cup. I concentrated on telling myself that once the kidnappers had gotten what they wanted, they'd have no further use for me and they'd turn me loose again. I even started rehearsing the statement I'd have to give to the police. No, officer, I wouldn't recognize the woman again, officer—all fat middle-aged peroxide blondes look alike to me. No, I didn't get the index number of the van and I didn't see any distinguishing marks inside or out.

  The need to piss got steadily worse, but I wanted to hold on, for propriety's sake. It didn't occur to me that if I went there and then they might just take the bottle and let me go, without even bothering to take me all the way to their destination, but that wasn't what the plug-ugly had implied when he'd advised me to hang on.

  I wondered what he'd done with the shopping bags. I had to hope that they'd let me have them all back when the deal was done—but even if they did, Mum wouldn't be pleased if anything was broken, or even slightly bruised. As if in answer to my unspoken question, I heard my captor say: "Naughty, naughty. You're not supposed to be drinking alcohol." He'd obviously found Mum's bottle of Hungarian pinot noir.

  I heard the sound of a cork being withdrawn.

  Somehow, the idea of a kidnapper carrying a corkscrew was deeply unreassuring. I couldn't believe that he'd been carrying it on the off-chance that I had a bottle of wine in my shopping bag when his ugly girlfriend had intercepted me.

  If it hadn't been for the duct tape, I'd have told the presumably unmasked Honey Monster that the pinot noir wasn't for me, and that Mum would have his guts for garters if she ever found out who'd deprived her of her Sunday treat, but as things were, I had no alternative but to let the ex-pugilist believe that I was the kind of person who didn't take obligatory employment contracts too seriously.

  Maybe, I thought, that was the kind of person I really should have been, given that piss-artists are right at the bottom of the totem-pole in the bioreactor hierarchy. I'd always thought that was completely unfair. I suppose one can understand the social status that attaches to pretty girls with loaded tits, but why blood donors should be reckoned a cut above the rest of us is beyond me. Where's the virtue in being vampires' prey?

  "This stuff is disgusting," the man who didn't do nice informed me, effortlessly living up to his self-confessed reputation. "It's been dosed with washing soda to neutralize excess acid, then sugared to cover up the residual soapiness. There's no excuse, you know, with Calais just the other side of the tunnel and a resident smuggler on every housing estate from Dover to Coventry. It's not as if we're living in fucking Northumberland."

  He was displaying his age and his origins as well as his ignorance. I might have failed geography GCSE, but even I knew that there was no such county as Northumberland any more, and hadn't been in my lifetime. Years of exile had weakened his accent, but I guessed that he had probably been born somewhere not a million miles from Carlisle. Anyway, Mum liked her wine sweet as well as fruity. She wouldn't have thanked me for a classy claret.

  The van rolled to a final halt then, and I heard the driver get out. It must have been the driver who opened the side door, although it was the wine connoisseur who seized me by the scruff of the neck and thrust me out into the open again. Wherever we were, there couldn't have been many CC-TV cameras around. I couldn't tell whose hand it was that grabbed my arm and steered me along a pavement and down a flight of steps, then along a corridor, and up a second staircase, through God only knows how many doorways. In the end, though, I felt the pile of a decent carpet under my running shoes before I was thrust into a perfectly serviceable armchair.

  The strip of tape that had sealed my mouth was removed with an abruptness that left me wishing I'd shaved a little more carefully that morning, but the strips sealing my eyes and securing my wrists were left untouched.

  "Sorry about the precautions, Darren," said a male voice I hadn't heard before, "but it's for your own good. You really don't want to know too much about us." I guessed that this man too was from up north, though not nearly so far north as the one who didn't do nice. Derby maybe, or Nottingham: what real northerners would call the Midlands.

  "I can go any time you want me to," I told him, meaning go rather than literally go. "Just take the bottle and drop me off—anywhere you want, although somewhere near home would be nice."

  "It's not that simple," said the Midlander. "We'll need a more generous sample than you can provide just like that."

  "Oh shit," I murmured. It's amazing how half a dozen marathon water-drinking sessions can put you right off the idea of thirst. "How long are you going to keep me here?"

  "A few hours. You'll be home in time for dinner. We'll put the pizzas and the other perishables in the fridge for you. Sorry about the wine—but you really aren't supposed to be drinking."

  "It's for my Mum," I told him, exasperatedly. "You'd better be telling the truth. Mum'll report me missing if I don't turn up by six—that's when the supermarket shuts."

  "No problem, Darren," the voice said, softly. "We'll need to do a few little tests—but we won't hurt you. I promise."

  There was something in that seemingly insincere promise that immediately made me think of dustbusters and catheters. "Aw, come on," I said, finally giving way to pent-up terror. "I'm nothing special. Just one more conscript in Wilie's barmy army, doing my bit for king and country. I don't know what I'm pissing, apart from the fact that it's pink, but I'm absolutely bloody certain that it can't be worth much, or the boys at GSKC plc wouldn't be letting me roam the streets and do Mum's shopping in Sainsbury's."

  "You might be right," was the amiable reply. "But it might just be GSKC that have miscalculated. Our employers' hackers think so, at any rate—and when the hackers say frog, we all jump. Way of the world, old son. You'll just have to be patient for a few hours. You can manage that, can't you? I can put the radio on for you, if you like, or a CD. How about a little bit of Vivaldi? Wagner might be a little too stimulating."

  I knew that he was mocking me, but it didn't seem to matter.

  "Vivaldi will be fine," I said, with as much dignity as I could muster. "A pot of coffee would be nice, if I've got to do a lot of drinking. Cream, no sugar. A few bourbon biscuits wouldn't come amiss."

  "It's not the Ritz, Darren," he told me—and I could tell from the direction of his voice that he'd got up and was moving toward the door—"but I guess we can stretch to tea if you'd rather have that than water. Lots and lots of lovely tea."

  Personally, I'd always thought that tea was for chimpanzees, but I was right off water, especially the kind that came from the tap. Tea was probably the best offer I was going to get.

  "Tea's okay," I assured him, trying to put a brave face on things.

  "But there's one more thing we need to take care of first," he said, in a way that told me loud and clear that I wasn't going to like it one little bit.

  "What?" I said, although I'd already guessed.

  When I'd handed in the first batch of samples, GSKC's delivery-boy had been careful not to make any comments, but I hadn't been able to stop myself imagining what he must be thinking. If you're a sperm-donor, so rumor has it, they just give you a Dutch magazine and a plastic cup and leave you to it, but it's not as easy as that when your eyes and hands are taped up. I told the
m that I wouldn't try anything, but they weren't taking any chances.

  "Think of it as phone sex," the Vivaldi fan said, as he left me in the capable hands of his female accomplice—but I'd never gone in for phone sex and even in phone sex you get to use your own hand. It didn't help matters that I had to assume that she was the same woman who'd stuck a gun in my ribs: fat, fifty-five, and fake blonde.

  After that, drinking tea by the quart so that I could piss like a champion didn't seem as much like torture as it might have. The long wait thereafter was positively relaxing, and not because of bloody Vivaldi tinkling away in the background.

  I was really looking forward to another ride in the back of the van, even though my arms were aching like crazy, when I heard the mobile phone playing the old Lone Ranger theme-tune. It was the Midland accent that exclaimed: "What? You have got to be joking." I knew something must have gone wrong, and I spent a couple of minutes wallowing in terror while my captor listened to the rest of the bad news.

  Mercifully, it turned out that he wasn't being instructed to bump me off.

  "I'm sorry, Darren," the Midlander informed me—and he really did sound regretful—"but there's been a bit of a hitch. We may need to hang on to you a little longer."

  "What kind of hitch?" I wanted to know.

  "You were right and we were wrong, Darren. We should have tried bribery. We were trying to save on expenses. Is it too late to start over, do you think?"

  It was an interesting idea. I knew I ought to tell him to go fuck himself, if only for appearances' sake, but I hadn't quite got over the complimentary implications of being a kidnap victim. This new departure seemed like another promotion, a chance to skip another few thousand rungs of the status ladder.

  "How big a bribe did you have in mind?" I said, trying with all my might to sound like a man who was accustomed to being on the ball. "I mean, given the inconvenience, not to mention the insult . . . and this is a multimillion-euro business, after all."

  "Don't push it, Darren," he said. "We all have to make a profit on the deal, and we know exactly what GSKC were paying you. It wasn't enough, even before . . . but we have our choices to make too. We could put you up for auction. That's what the Honey Monster wants to do—but I'm not like him. I can do nice, if it seems worthwhile. How would you like to work for us?"

  "As a piss-artist?" I said, wearily.

  "As a spy. You were right, you see, when you said that if you were making anything valuable GSKC wouldn't have turned you loose on to the streets—but our employers' hackers were right when they said that GSKC might have made a mistake. If it weren't for their cumbersome bureaucratic procedures, GSKC's troubleshooters would have got to you before we did, but we're leaner and quicker. The thing is, they don't know yet that you've been snatched. Maybe we can fix things so that they never have to find out. They'll take you into residential care anyway, so you can forget your mum's Sunday roast, but you still have a choice: you can work for them, under the contract, you've already signed—which included a sheaf of self-serving contingency clauses that you probably didn't bother to read—or you can work for them and us, for three times the money. We pay in cash, so the Inland Revenue won't be taking a bite out of our contribution."

  Three times the pittance that GSKC were paying me didn't sound like a fortune to me, but these things are relative.

  "I want to know what's going on," I said, trying hard to be sensible. "Why are my bodily fluids suddenly worth so much more than they were before the delivery van picked up that first crateload?"

  "I'm not sure you'd understand. GSKC are supposed to be operating under the principle of informed consent, so they were obliged by law to tell you exactly what they were proposing to do to you, but my guess is that they didn't make much effort to make it comprehensible, and that you just nodded your head when they asked you if you understood. Am I right?"

  I hesitated, but there was no point in denying it. "I'm not stupid," I told him. "Maybe I did only get three GCSEs, with not an ology among them, but that's because I didn't like school, okay? Maybe I have been unemployed long enough to fall into the national service trap, but that's because I won't take the kind of shit you have to take with the kind of jobs people think you're fit for if you only have three GCSEs. I'm not some sort of idiot you can peddle any kind of bullshit to."

  "Okay, Darren—I believe you. So how much do you know about the kind of manufacturing process you're involved in?"

  "They shot some kind of virus into me to modify the cells of my bladder wall," I said. "The idea was to make them secrete something into the stored urine. The pink stuff is just a marker—what they really want is some kind of protein to which the dye's attached. They said they weren't obliged to tell me exactly what it was, but they told me it wouldn't do me any harm. They weren't wrong about that, were they?"

  "Not as far as we can tell," was the far-from-reassuring answer. "How much background did you manage to take in?"

  "Not a lot," I admitted.

  "Then we'd better start from scratch. It really would be a good idea if you listened this time, and tried really hard to understand. You need to know, for your own sake, why you're a more valuable commodity than they expected you to be."

  I tried. It wasn't easy, but with my eyes still taped up, I had no alternative but to concentrate on what I was hearing, and I knew I'd have to make good on my boast that I wasn't stupid.

  Apparently, the first animals genetically modified to excrete useful pharmaceuticals along with their liquid wastes had been mice. The gimmick had promised advantages that sheep and cows modified to secrete amplified milk didn't have. All the individuals in a population produce urine all the time, and urine is much simpler, chemically speaking, than milk. Extraction and purification of the target proteins was a doddle—but it had never become economically viable because mice were simply too small. Cows and sheep weren't as useful as urine-producers as they were milk-producers, for reasons far too technical for me to grasp—it had something to do with the particular digestion processes of specialist herbivores—and interest had soon switched to somatically modified human bioreactors. Or, to put it another way, to the ever-growing ranks of the unemployed. It was one of the few kinds of modern manufacturing that robots couldn't do better.

  The pioneering mice had mostly had their genes tweaked while they were still eggs in a flat dish, but you can't do that to the unemployed, so biotech companies like GSKC could only do "somatic engineering": which means that they used viruses to cause temporary local transformations in specialized tissues. In effect, what they had done was give me a supposedly harmless bladder infection. It was supposed to be an "invisible" infection—which meant that my immune system wouldn't fight it off, although I could be cured by GSKC's own anti-bug devices as and when required. In the meantime, the cells in the bladder would pump the target protein into the stored urine, ready for export.

  Once I'd grasped the explanation that the Vivaldi fan was so eager to put across, I thought I could see a thousand ways it might go horribly wrong, but he assured me that the procedure was much safer than it seemed. In nine hundred and fifty cases out of a thousand, he told me, it all went like clockwork, and in forty-nine of the remaining fifty the whole thing was a straightforward bust.

  Fortunately or unfortunately, I was the thousandth. What I was producing wasn't the expected product, and the difference was "interesting."

  "How interesting?" I wanted to know. "Cure-for-cancer interesting? Elixir-of-life interesting?"

  "Biotech isn't the miracle-working business it's sometimes cracked up to be," the Midland accent assured me. "Interesting, in this context, means we need more time to figure out what the hell is going on. Where we are now, as you've probably guessed, is just a collection point. We can do simple analytical tests on the kitchen table, but we don't have a secret research lab in the basement. We could probably sell you on with the samples we've collected, but that would move our employers into much more dangerous and complicated territory,
crimewise, and they're very image-conscious. It would be a lot easier for them, as well as more profitable for everyone concerned, if we were to handle you. That's why you and I need to renegotiate our relationship."

  "Okay," I said, way too quickly. "You convinced me. What's your offer, and what do you want me to do?"

  "We want you to take a couple of tiny tape recorders with you when GSKC take you back in. And we want you to take the principle of informed consent a lot more seriously. Demand to see the documentation—they're legally obliged to show it to you. They'll probably be quite prepared to believe that you can't read the stuff without moving your lips, so don't be afraid of spelling out the complicated words loudly to make an impression on the tape. We can't use transmitters because they'll almost certainly have detectors in place, but the simple methods are always the best. We'll make arrangements to have the first recorder picked up tomorrow—hide it behind the bedhead, if you can. Left hand side—your left, that is. Can you remember all that?"

  "I'm not stupid," I reminded him. How could I be? I'd just become a secret agent: an industrial mole.

  "If we take the tape off your eyes and wrists, Darren," my oh-so-friendly captor pointed out, "we'll be taking a big risk—but you'll have to take your share of that risk. Once you're in a position to put us in deep trouble, we'll have to take precautions to make sure you don't."

  Or to put it another way, I thought, once I've seen your faces, the only way you can stop me describing them is to shoot me. Once I'm in the gang, resigning could seriously damage my health. It might be easier, I realized, to call their bluff about selling me on as I was—but my arms were aching horribly, and there was a possibility that GSKC might not be the highest bidder.