Gaia's Toys

by Rebecca Ore

  On Sunday afternoon, Dorcas visited her mother, Emily, and father, Paul, who lived in a twenty-four-foot motor home now parked in a retirement garage in the Bronx. Since Dorcas had seen them last, Emily had had her face, neck, and arms reskinned and Paul had had his eyeballs re-rounded. Emily still wore her glasses, but otherwise, she looked about Dorcas’s age, thirty-four. Dorcas thought she’d run screaming if her mother came out of surgery looking younger than her daughter. Emily, now sixty-five, had been forced into an early retirement at sixty-one. Paul, sixty-seven going on forty, arranged to work quarter-time by modem. Nanomachines scavenged their free radicals, ate plaque out of their veins, but occasionally malfunctioned and cut axons, tangled synapses. The Raes were rich enough to buy youth until their brains went. Then Dorcas would be half as rich as they’d been, death duties taking the other half.

  Dorcas said, “I could have interfaced with you easily enough.”

  Her father said, “I didn’t want to virtually see you. You could edit your data before it’s up on my screen.” Her dad never would use goggles, claimed robbers watched the data lines and broke in on people entranced by computer dreams. He preferred fax.

  “Some man was by trying to sell us heroin,” her mother said. “Said if your dad liked alcohol, he’d like heroin.”

  As though reminded, her dad went to his liquor cabinet and pulled out a bottle of clear grain, then added it to a commercial Scotch. “Heroin, oh, wow, let’s shoot up and go on the nod. Wow, a nap.” He drank down his mix of grain alcohol and Scotch and glared at Dorcas. “You ought to lose weight. Liposuction or nanoscavengers if you don’t have the willpower to diet.”

  “I thought I was supposed to be perfect. I had to have braces as a child and now I get fat.”

  “Now, Dorcas, you were the best our genes could do. We didn’t want a transgenetic child. And you know how difficult it is to guarantee expression.”

  “Yes. I’m in the business.”

  Paul said, “If you were in the business end of genetic work you’d be more stable.”

  “I’m an academic.”

  Her father said, “No, you’re stubborn. But that’s true genetic expression for you. I’m stubborn, too. Nanotech, then look for a real job.”

  Dorcas didn’t trust nanomachines even though they’d given her great hair. She wouldn’t put anything in her bloodstream made by the species that put the Nile Perch in Lake Victoria.

  “We’ve agreed that we wouldn’t nag her,” her mother said.

  “I always thought you were going to be an ugly cuss, but then you were almost good looking for a while. Why didn’t you find a man?”

  “Dorcas has a career,” her mother said.

  “You had a career and a child, even if I personally never thought much of the bonsai family concept. The bitch is lazy. She doesn’t write her own papers. Postdoctoral, come on, Dorcas, you’d do better teaching high school. If you really refuse to work for industry.”

  “People don’t teach biology that way anymore. It’s all apprenticeships and interactives.”

  “People don’t learn right from machines,” her dad said. “It’s like machine visits.”

  “Computers let teachers interact with more students,” Dorcas said.

  “You’re both just so stubborn,” her mother said. “We haven’t seen you since we went west.”

  “Isn’t it dangerous to be roving around in something this big now?”

  “We’re armed,” her father said. “The human herd needs thinning. We’re deputies in Nevada, Louisiana, and Orange County, California.”

  “The government elderhostel worker we saw in Tucson suggested traveling in Mexico,” Emily said.

  Elderhostel workers always encouraged more surgery, more nanomachines, drugs, and dangerous hobbies. “You’re looking good, Mother,” Dorcas said, acknowledging the latest surgery for the first time.

  “I feel stiff, but the skin’s supposed to supple up in a month or so.”

  “Bet Dad approves. You look about my age.”

  “I almost died,” Emily said.

  “Emily exaggerates,” Paul said. “I’d do anything to make your mother’s life more beautiful.”

  “So, are you going to Mexico?” Dorcas asked.

  “No, we’re planning to ship us off to Asia.”

  Dorcas wanted to ask if they expected to find good medical service there, but realized retirees had been wandering away from first-rate hospitals well before elderhostel workers encouraged them to take chances in their free, vigorous years. “I hope you have fun.”

  “We’ll disappear over there while driving through Tibet,” her mother said.

  “You really might. It’s been a war zone for years,” Dorcas said. Machines mostly did the fighting now, but occasionally servicemen came home in body bags. The media claimed that the military average deaths weren’t affected by the war. Accidental, homicidal, and suicidal deaths for people in their teens and twenties had always been high.

  “War is invigorating, just like danger,” her dad said. “Good for the economy.”

  The visit felt over, but Dorcas knew they’d want her to eat with them. “I’d like to get home before dark,” she said.

  Emily blinked and said, “I understand.”

  “You worry about us in Asia. What about New York?”

  “My work is here,” Dorcas said. Her father’s disbelief made the work seem trivial. But then she knew he’d approve of her redesigned insects. Having the Feds bust his child would be so embarrassing. “Call me or fax me from Asia.”

  “Remember,” Paul said. “Thieves watch for people sunk in goggle dreams. Don’t go virtual at home.”

  But her parents would sail off to Asia. Somehow, though, old people roving off on adventures made sense. But her parents weren’t that old. They still looked like ordinary people. “I’ve got an old screen somewhere at home.”

  “Get a new one,” her dad said.

  “Okay,” Dorcas said, wondering if he and his could really distinguish a fooler loop from an on-time visual. Better avoid potential nagging and get a high-resolution screen and camera. It’d make Paul happy. Give in on the little shit and keep on making better insects, Dorcas thought.

  Paul said, “You know in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, people died in their sixties. Now, it’s the prime of life. Work done, bodies tuned, we play.”

  “I’m happy for you, Dad,” Dorcas said, wondering what governments would be left when she was sixty-one. What skin cloning facilities, surgeons? “Well, let me go,” she said, using wording that disengaged her from electronic media.

  “I’m not holding you. You’ve got your legs,” her father said.

  “We’ll never be a burden on you,” Emily said.

  Dorcas nodded and left. Her parents planned to go to a Doctor Death at the first signs of feebleness. Thinking about death doctors and her own parents made her uneasy.

  And their bonsai child didn’t bear fruit. Dorcas called for a cab. The visit was over except for the waiting, and none of them said anything. Dorcas heard the cab driver buzz and took the elevator down to him.

  The driver let her in to his cab and asked, “Folks doing okay?”

  “Fine,” Dorcas said. The driver looked like he was in his sixties, no surgery, no nanomachines cleaning his blood vessels, no retirement package.

  “I hope I can retire someday,” he said.

  “By the time I retire, Western Civilization will probably be over,” Dorcas said.

  “I understand that predictions are more about the psychology of the predicter than anything real,” the driver said.

  “You’ll be fine. Whole thing been about to collapse since the 1940s.”

  “It might collapse when I say,” Dorcas said. “Too many depressed people building the systems.” Dorcas wondered if her grandmother still looked as young as her mother. One child, two parents, four grandparents. Thanks to defective nanomachines, electrical storms fouling computer guidance systems, and thieves
from the slums, Dorcas only had one living grandparent by now.

  “When I retire, I’ll take a chunk of my settlement and get new skin, get myself looking about thirty-eight or forty, touch of grey.”

  Dorcas wondered if a taxi driver could afford the internal work that remade the body to match the skin. “You’re the age of your thoughts.”

  “Ah, but I have young thoughts,” the driver said. He locked the taxi into the navigation grid for the East Side and looked back at Dorcas.

  “Modern medicine can’t do brains,” Dorcas said.

  “I’m certified mentally healthy and AIDS-free,” the man said.

  “I’m not,” Dorcas said, half-lying.

  “Sorry,” the driver said. He didn’t say anything more until they reached Dorcas’s house on East 19th Street. “I’d have thought you were more uptown,” the driver said.

  “Didn’t inherit a house there,” Dorcas said before she realized the driver would have thought she lived in a cube or flat.

  “Whole house?” he sighed.

  “I rent out rooms,” Dorcas lied. She tipped him no more than the preset gratuity and waited until he’d driven away. The block guards nodded at her, and she pressed her palm against the lock plate, then punched out the code that got her through the first door. The second door lock scanned her retina before she could insert the old-fashioned key and get completely off the street.

  Rockefeller University installed the security after eco-terrorists kidnapped another postdoc and tried to turn her with a butcher’s version of a brain job.

  Henry hadn’t called. Dorcas went to her fish tanks and fed her Lake Victorian cichlids, noting that she needed to prepare brood tanks for the females holding eggs, checking a brood tank date. That fish needed to be stripped, but she’d do that after she fed everything else. The crippled Peregrine falcon used as an AI sperm donor for Henry’s captive breeding project screamed from the aviary. After feeding him, Dorcas checked the three 40-gallon terrariums where she kept fifteen percent of the known world population of Virginia Fringed Mountain Snail, that rarest of Virginia land snails with shells that looked like fossils, coils not sloping left or right, but straight. Since they burrowed and since they were only three millimeters in diameter, Dorcas monitored each tank only once every three years. To keep diseases from spreading, one tank was in the attic, another in the kitchen, the third in Dorcas’s second floor study. Arking was like recycling. One had to do it to be a respectable academic.

  After feeding the fish and snails, but before she ate, Dorcas took out her baster and caught the brooding female she needed to strip. She dropped the small fish headfirst down the baster, filled it with water from the female’s tank, and lowered the baster into an empty fry tank. Squeeze, squeeze. About fifteen babies tumbled out of the mother fish’s mouth. Dorcas fed them live baby brine shrimp, then put the mother fish back in her species tank.

  Where in the wilds could fish get their babies stripped so they could recover sooner from the ordeal of oral brooding? Dorcas watched the new babies, culled one that had a bent spine, then, finally, microwaved her own dinner.

  By midnight, Henry still hadn’t called. Dorcas took out the kimono he’d given her, the one that his Japanese greatgrandfather gave to his American wife. She dressed in it and pulled out the genome charts for bald-faced hornets, all on fanfolds filled with four letter groups of G’s, T’s, As, and C’s, these letters large and overstruck. Under various groups of large letters, Dorcas could read in small Courier type the commentary on what each sequence did, or was thought to do.

  She wondered if she could build a neuroleptic wasp or hornet that would respond to anger. What combination of scents and body language did angry people display? She knew from mid-twentieth-century Columbia University anthropological work that, cross-culturally, people asked to move a lever in an angry movement moved the lever the same.

  The hornets could cause problems at first, stinging to sleep motorists caught in traffic, women angry with their violent husbands. But could a person be violent without being angry? Sociopaths, perhaps.

  Maybe humans needed to be engineered to give off a pheromone when they anticipated attacking people. The hornets already attacked when one of their own was damaged.

  A pacifist flu? Dorcas decided to check out the chemical paths human emotions took, then went to bed in the kimono even if a Japanese woman would never do such a thing.

  Henry finally came by her house in the morning before work, his driver waiting outside in the car. When he saw Dorcas’s rumpled kimono, his eyes seemed to frown though his face remained controlled.

  “I was thinking of you,” she said.

  “We’re being audited,” he said. “The Feds want a full accounting of all DNA sequences we hold.”

  “That’s impossible,” she said. “Everyone fakes the exactness.”

  “And some of us are working off the books for gene-tech firms and surgeons.”

  Dorcas said, so they understood each other, “Everyone had special projects that might be impossible to fund.”

  “DNA is also everywhere,” Henry said, meaning, Make sure we’ve got the right molecular weights in every sample vial, regardless.

  “Do we have time, or should I get dressed for work?” Dorcas asked.

  “Get dressed. I’ll drive you,” meaning his driver would. Henry followed Dorcas to her bedroom. As she put on her day clothes, he smoothed the kimono out on her bed, then folded it.

  “Do you wish you were more Japanese?” she asked him.

  “I wish you wouldn’t sleep in it,” he said, not answering. “My wife wears them when she arranges flowers.”

  Dorcas knew Henry found a real Japanese wife who thought herself to be totally American. Henry must bully her into kimonos. “So, you’re not going to be able to moonlight for a while.”

  Henry said, “They asked who was working with mantises.”

  Dorcas remembered her mother’s words, Distract men with sex if they question you closely, and tilted her hips suggestively. “Wasps, not mantises, for that pet company. I’ve got to feed my creatures before we go, would you help?” She remembered her mother telling her also that men hated the words could you, because they all could. Would you gave them the option of being gallant.

  Henry fed his falcon mice while Dorcas tended the snails, then he fed flake to the adult fish while Dorcas fed the fry fresh-hatched brine shrimp.

  “Do you ever have the desire,” Henry said, pausing so that Dorcas half expected a kinky sexual request, “… the desire to just smash all these tanks, exterminate all the animals we spend so much time tending out of guilt that shouldn’t be ours personally?”

  Dorcas visualized it and yes, she could see that destroying the arks might give her a tremendous sense of power. “But humans are too powerful already,” she answered. If her trans-genetic wasps and mantises expressed the sequences she built for them, what she done would give her more power yet.

  “We still die,” Henry said.

  “Is that what your off-the-books project is about?” Dorcas asked, not caring if security listened now. She visualized herself calling security to tell them what she’d been doing. What would they do to her if she confessed she was empowering insects?

  Perhaps they’d put her in a cyberia? She’d die in a roller cage with self-generated dreams in her head. Surrender and forget about fooler loops, bald-faced hornet genome maps, the next postdoc. Or the Feds would want her to work for them. Monitored, doing work other people assigned to her, checking everything with a committee—no, Dorcas didn’t think so.

  Perhaps I’m in virtual reality now. Dorcas twisted her head quickly, but her visual field didn’t streak. Unless she was fooled, this was reality, passing at 80 million polygons per second. Computer research stalled out sometime after the invention of the first really good brain machine interface.

  Unless that’s what this virtual reality led her to believe. No, that way lies madness.

  “Are you okay?” Henry
asked.

  “I wondered if this was real or virtual,” Dorcas said.

  Henry said, “Have you done anything that could get you sentenced to rehab?”

  “No.”

  “You’re a touch more maschocistic than’s healthy.”

  “I’m tired. I should give away some of my species.”

  “You need a checkup.”

  “Perhaps I should look for another postdoc?” She hated her whiny tone.

  “That’s not necessary, yet,” Henry said. “And when the time comes, I’ll help you.”

  “I think I’ll appreciate that, Henry,” Dorcas said, deciding at least part of the reason she’d been gradually sinking at her academic posts. She spent too much time on doing the right things, like arking, and not enough time on the necessary thing, like putting her gorgeous raw data into publishable form. She should write up her redesigned insect lung and the retrovirus that tended to place it in the right sequence into publishable form. One problem, she wasn’t registered to work with the DNA she’d used. “Ah, there’s so much to do.” But if she got permission and published, everyone else could do it, too. And she’d be monitored.

  They went down to the car. Henry said, “The car’s secure. Do you have anything to hide from the auditors?”

  Dorcas leaned back against the seat cushions and said, “I made the big mantises.” She felt the earth quit tugging on her, her body drifting in free fall. End of the affair, beginning of the conspiracy.

  Henry said, “Why?” He moved away from her, then looked at her, then began patting his knee.

  Dorcas wished she had one now to tranquilize Henry. “Because I liked the idea of big mantises tranquilizing humans, playing soothing wing music.”

  “Dorcas, did you design the new lung?” At least he wasn’t bored with her now.

  “Yes. They couldn’t grow a foot tall without it.”

  “I must say, they’ve fit in with the drode head culture. Makes the system more stable to have the drode heads calmer.”

  “But you wish I hadn’t confessed to you. You’re my lover. I have to confess to you. Any indiscretions.”