by Jack Dann
"Bugger all," I said, resentfully. I waved a hand at the paper mountain. "They gave me plenty to read, as you can see, but it might as well be hieroglyphics. Apparently, they stuck some gene into my bladder expecting that it would fill my piss full of some kind of useful protein. It didn't. Instead, I got four different proteins, or bits of proteins. Everybody knew that last night, so something new must have come up in the meantime. Finch was just waffling, but I gather that they've now got interested in whatever there is about me that was making the transplanted gene act up. If the original target protein had been especially valuable, I wouldn't have been walking the streets in the first place, and if one of the four unexpected by-products had been a gold mine, the pirates would probably have hung on to me instead of sending me back, so I'm betting that once they began to figure out what my bladder had done to the target, they began wondering about what it could do to other proteins . . . and what it might already be doing inside me. Right so far?"
"Spot on," he conceded, ungrudgingly. He was obviously surprised that a dolehound with three GCSEs had got that far, but he seemed pleased to know that I wasn't a complete idiot.
"So what is it doing?" I asked. "And what else might it do, with the right encouragement?"
"It'll probably take a long time to work that out," he told me. "Which is why everybody's trying to put a claim in before the hard work starts. All we have so far is hopeful signs—signs that a lot of people have been looking out for, although nobody expected them to turn up in a bog-standard op like this. Have you ever heard of the Principle of Selective Self-Medication?"
"No," I said. "Mum probably has. She watches documentaries on BBC-2."
"Well, put very simply, it means that all living organisms are under continuous selective pressure to develop internal defenses against disease, injury, parasitism, and predation. Any mutation that throws up a means of protecting its carrier from one of those things increases its chances of survival. A lot of the medicines doctors developed in the last century, from antibiotics on, were borrowed from other organisms that had developed them as natural defenses, but our evolutionary history had already equipped us with a lot of internal defenses of our own—like the immune system—which we'd simply taken for granted. Once the Human Genome Project had delivered a basic map, we were in a much better position not only to analyze our own defensive systems but also to search for refinements that hadn't yet had an opportunity to spread through the population. Most of the publicity associated with the project concentrated on the genes that make certain people more vulnerable to various diseases, cancers, and so on—but there's another side to the coin. We've also been able to search out genes that make people less vulnerable to specific conditions: self-medicating factors."
"So Hartman and Finch think I've got one of those: a gene that makes me less vulnerable to some kind of killer disease?"
"Not a gene, as such, although there must be genes that produce the components of the system. What they think you've got is a chemical apparatus that operates alongside genetic systems, influencing the way in which certain exons collaborate in producing family sets of proteins."
"That's enough jargon for now," I told him. "Cut to the bottom line. What am I—a walking antibiotic factory?"
"No. What you've got isn't protection against bacteria, or viruses, or prions—but it might be a defense against some kind of cancers. It might suppress some sorts of tumors by inhibiting the development of modified cells within specific tissues."
"Not just bladder tissue?"
"No—although it'll take time to figure out exactly where the limits lie."
"So I'm immune to some kinds of cancer—but it could take years to figure out exactly which ones, and how many."
"Not immune, but certainly less vulnerable. And it's more complicated than that. There's a selective cost as well as a selective benefit, which is presumably why the condition's so rare."
I could guess that one. Mum had been in her late thirties when she had me, after leading a fairly colorful life. Gran had been just as old when she'd had Mum. "Infertility," I said. "Babies are tumors too."
"That's a crude way of putting it," Hascombe said. "But yes—as well as suppressing tumors, it probably suppresses the great majority of implanted embryos. If it didn't, we'd probably all have something like it integrated into our immune systems. Natural selection couldn't do that for us—but somatic engineers might. What you have isn't an all-purpose cancer cure, and wouldn't necessarily be more efficient than the cancer treatments we already have—but once we understand exactly how it works, it might have other uses."
I nodded, to show that I could follow the argument. Then I said: "And what, exactly, does it have to do with Special Services? Or am I supposed to believe the standard line about all bio warfare research being purely for defense?"
"All our biowarfare research is purely for defense," the colonel said, with a perfectly straight face. I remembered what he'd said about our humble nation not having an enemy in the world, except maybe for Zimbabwe and Jamaica, but that not being enemies wasn't the same thing as being on the same side.
"Once we understand how it works," I guessed, "we might be able to refine it. Maybe it will throw up better cancer cures—but that's not what interests you. I slipped through the net, but if the net were refined . . . selective sterilization by subtle and stealthy means. Not the kind of thing that you could make huge profits out of, in the open marketplace—but Special Services have broader interests than mere profit."
"Now you're being melodramatic, Darren," he said, blithely. "This isn't some conspiracy-theory movie. This is everyday life. We have to be careful to examine every emerging possibility, to analyze its implications for national security . . . its capacity to disturb or distort the status quo. That's what you have to do too—examine every emerging possibility, analyzing its implications for your personal security. . . ."
". . . And its capacity to fuck up the status quo," I finished for him. "What's your offer, Mr. Hascombe?"
He didn't object to my failure to address him by his rank. "Security," he said. "The other parties will only offer you money, but they'll cheat you if and when they can. You could spend a lot of time in court, one way and another. On the other hand . . . did you know that because GSKC recruited you under the provisions of the National Service Act, your notional employer, at this moment in time, is His Majesty's Government? Technically, you're on secondment. I don't have the power to confiscate GSKC's data, but I do have the power to confiscate you. Your mother's a free agent, of course, but your grandmother is a state pensioner, and thus—technically, at least—unable to enter into any contractual arrangements without the permission of HMG. Not that we want to delve into a can of worms if we can avoid it. We'd rather work with all of you as a family, according to the principle of informed consent. We like families—they're the backbone of every healthy society."
I wondered how many healthy societies he thought there were in the world, and how many he expected to stay that way. If he'd told me the truth—which I wasn't prepared to take for granted—I was a walking miracle. I was also a walking time-bomb. Everybody knew that there were too many people in the world, and everybody had different ideas as to which ones ought to stop adding to the problem. Given that everybody and his cousin already had enough of me to start doing all kinds of wild and woolly experiments, I probably wasn't absolutely necessary to the great crusade, but I was young and I was fit, and neither Mum nor Gran had ever produced a milligram of semen, or ever would.
I was rare all right—rare and interesting. Nobody had ever thought so before, but the last twenty-four hours had changed everything.
"GSKC could offer me security," I pointed out. "They have people to look after their people." But I was already reconsidering the question of why Hascombe's oppo had taken GSKC's lawyer by the throat, and what the move had been intended to demonstrate.
"We have an army at our disposal," Hascombe pointed out. "Not to mention a police forc
e, various Special Services, and the entire formal apparatus of the law of the land. The people who look after our people are very good at it. But it's your choice, Darren. I wish I could tell you to think about it, but I'm afraid we're in a hurry. You can have five minutes, if you like."
He didn't mean that I have five minutes to decide whether to go with him or stay with GSKC. He meant that I had five minutes to decide whether to go quietly and willingly or to start a small war.
Personally, I quite liked the idea of the war, but I had other people to consider now—and not just Mum and Gran. It was just beginning to dawn on me that for the first time in my life, I was faced with a decision that actually mattered not just to me or people I knew, but to any number of people I would never even meet.
People had been taking the piss out of me all my life, for any reason and no reason at all: because I was called Darren; because I didn't even know my Dad's name; because I only had three GCSEs and not an ology among them; because I was so desperate and so useless that I'd had to sign up as a guinea pig in order to pay my share of the household expenses; because I was still living with my Mum at twenty, in a miserable flat in a miserable block in an officially designated high crime/zero tolerance estate; and because I was the kind of idiot who couldn't even do a half-way decent job of being a kidnap victim or a spy.
Now, things were different. Now, I was rare, and interesting. I was a national resource. I was a new cure for cancer and a subtle weapon in the next world war. No more Hungarian pinot noir for me; from now on, whatever I chose to do, it would be classy claret all the way.
In a way, I knew, the man from Special Services was holding a gun on me in exactly the same way as the fake fat blonde—but everyone does what he has to do when the situation arises. It wasn't his fault. He couldn't come to me with a fistful of fifty-euro notes, because that wasn't the game he was playing.
But what game should I be playing, now that I had some say in the matter?
I knew that the world was full of people who'd have said that a fistful of fifty-euro notes was the only game worth playing, even though it was crooked. Some, I knew, reckoned that it was the only game in town, because governments and Special Services didn't count for much any more in a world ruled by multinational corporations like GSKC. But even on an officially designated high crime/zero tolerance estate you learn, if you're not completely stupid, that money isn't the measure of all things. You only have to watch enough movies to figure out that what people think of you is the important thing, and that not having the piss taken out of you any more is something you can't put a price on. To qualify as a kidnap victim is one thing, to be a double-agent is another, and to be a walking cancer cure is something else again, but what it all comes down to in the end is respect. Jeremy Hascombe was offering me a better choice than Matthew Jardine or Dr. Hartman, even though he wasn't offering me any choice at all about where I was going and who was going to be subjecting me to all manner of indignities with the aid of hypodermic syringes, dustbusters, and all effective hybrids thereof. He was offering me the choice of doing my duty like a man.
"Okay, Colonel," I said. "I'll play it like a hero, and smile all the while. I don't suppose you brought me anything decent to wear? I don't want to walk out of here in my pajamas."
"No, I didn't," said the colonel, who was too uptight a man to let his gratitude show, "but your mother did. She thought you might need a change of clothes, just in case you could come home for Sunday lunch after all."
It was just as she'd said: family is the backbone of any healthy society. Perhaps it always will be. Who, after all, can tell what the future might hold?
DEATH OF REASON
Tony Daniel
Private eyes have traditionally had to venture all alone down Mean Streets—here we venture down some very mean streets indeed in a gritty high-tech Alabama of the future, as a lone cop battles corrupt officials, the Mob, his own haunted past, and an array of criminals of a sort that don't yet even exist in our day, to unravel a deadly secret before it unravels him.
Like many writers of his generation, Tony Daniel first made an impression on the field with his short fiction. He made his first sale, to Asimov's, in 1990 and followed it up with a long string of well-received stories both there and in markets such as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Amazing, SF Age, Universe, and Full Spectrum throughout the '90s—stories such as "The Robot's Twilight Companion," "Grist," "The Careful Man Goes West," "Sun So Hot I Froze to Death," "Prism Tree," "Candle," "No Love in All of Dwingeloo," and many others. His story "Life on the Moon" was a finalist for the Hugo Award in 1996 and won the Asimov's Science Fiction Readers Award poll. His first novel, Warpath, was released simultaneously in America and England in 1993. In 1997 he published a new novel, Earthling. His most recent books are his first short story collection, The Robot's Twilight Companion, and a major new novel, Metaplanetary, the first part of a projected trilogy.
1
The sky was liquid iron at sunset. The clouds were fiery slag. The scramjet carrying me home banked over downtown Birmingham on approach to the airport. Up on Red Mountain, the Vulcan's torch flamed scarlet for death—the beacon for another traffic accident sponged from the pavement of the city. Twenty-four hours of anonymous remembrance, then maybe the giant iron statue's torch would burn green until somebody else spilled himself out on the black asphalt. The custom was over a hundred years old now, but people kept obliging. I once knew the woman whose job it was to throw the switch on the light. I knew her well. Abby would always have work.
But Vulcan's torch would never burn for my grandfather. His time-sharing license had expired on Maturicell two days ago. He died in his sleep. Peacefully. As they say.
The scramjet turned thrusters down and slotted into a bay at Municipal. Guide lasers flared in long lines of neon Morse code outside the window as the beams passed into and out of pockets of humidity. It was time to disembark, but I continued to gaze out at the sky full of fire and light. Twilight in the Heart of Dixie, bloody and wringing wet as usual. Welcome home, Andy Harco. Back to the city where you were poured and formed. Back to the grindstone that put the edge to your soul.
"You get too hot, and you'll lose your temper," my old friend Thaddeus the poet used to say. I guess that's what happened; that's why I left. I lost my temper in both senses of the word. But in Seattle I'd hardened the edge once again. Birmingham no longer had what it took to dull me down. And I cut back now.
I snugged my op-eds onto my nose, then gathered my wits from under the seat and out of the overhead compartment. Along with my briefcase full of peripherals, I had a bag of toiletries, a plastic Glock nine-millimeter seventeen-shot automatic, and my good blue interviewing suit and wing tips. I had not worn the suit for eight years, but I was reasonably certain it still fit. Granddaddy's funeral was tomorrow evening. I would have time to get it altered if it didn't. I had flown out of Seattle in gray shorts and a T-shirt with the faded hologo of a science-fiction convention on the chest. People had given me strange looks back there, for Seattle was in the midst of a cold snap—the temperatures were hovering in the midfifties in August—due to some frigid air that had descended from the Artic. I was, however, dressed perfectly for Alabama.
I felt like a returning tourist as I got off the plane. In a way, I was. I'd been on a long vacation from Birmingham. Eight years, for my health. That is, if I'd hung around eight years ago, a bullet would have just ruined the nice gray interior of my skull. At least, that's what Freddy Pupillina had told me—more or less—when he sent me the fistful of dead roses. Southern gangsters think they're so damn subtle and genteel. But perfume on a skunk accentuates the stink even more.
But that was eight years ago, back when I was a rookie rental for the Birmingham P.D. and an unlicensed fabulist. I'd had few friends, and an extremely abrasive manner. These days, I have more friends.
I wouldn't be seeing Abby, but Thaddeus was a friend. I would look him up after the funeral. It had been a long time
since we'd gotten together in person.
I should have expected the snoops to pattern me as soon as I stepped off the jet. For the most part, the only people who travel in actual are high-level business jocks, Ideal coordinating nodes, rich eccentrics—and terrorists. Guess which profile I matched up with? I suppose I was preoccupied with thoughts of Granddaddy, maybe of Abby, so I wasn't paying a lot of attention. While I didn't plan on seeing Abby ever again, after seeing the Vulcan from the air, she was heavily on my mind.
The snoop interceptor was a Securidad 50 crank, maybe three or four years old. Cheap Polish bionics suspended in a Mexican-made shell. The City of Birmingham never had been exactly on the cutting edge of technology. I clicked up the 50's specs in the upper right-hand corner of my op-eds and gave them a quick glance. The 50's innards were standard bionic sludge. Its force escalator was knock-out gas, not a very thoughtful option for use in a crowded corridor, such as are found, for example, in airports. Those wacky Poles.
"Mr. Harco, may I have your attention," the crank said. The voice synth needed major adjustment. It was low filtering, and the thing sounded like a rusted-out saxophone. How could it get that grating nasal trill to come out when it didn't even have a nose? Ah, the mysteries of science.
"What is it?" I replied through tight lips. I pointedly looked away from the 50. Who knows? Maybe the thing had enough brains to be insulted. I hoped so.
"Please accompany me," said the crank. Then red letters flashed across the periphery of my op-eds. MR. HARCO, YOU ARE REQUESTED TO FOLLOW THE ROBOT TO AIRPORT SECURITY SCREENING. PLEASE COMPLY. The font was crude, but 3-D. I have organic inner lenses in my eyewear—I don't skimp on any of my peripherals—and the words burned on the cellwork of my op-eds like lash welts.
I blinked twice and popped up my custom V-trace menu. It had cost me six thousand, a chip of my skull's parietal plate, and a year of bureaupain to get a license for the junk. It was not my most expensive piece of exotic junk, but it was damned near. My brain is probably as much vat-formed gray matter as it is natural—and that's not counting the hardware interfaces.
