Bethlehem and Others: Collected Stories

by Peter Watts

  Dora had a screensaver that marched around her desk during the lulls between case files, a quote from a Prussian King back in the seventeen hundreds: “Fortunate are those who have never tasted Polish wine.” That quote had inspired her to win Energy & Infrastructure’s very first James Hoar Award for Analytical Innovation, two years earlier. Fortunate indeed, she reflected, and filled out the Fletchers’ home address for the folks in the van with the nondescript Florist’s logo on the side.

  • • •

  THE NEXT FILE WAS straightforward—Mei-Li Badura, a hiker who’d exploded in an outhouse up at Garibaldi. Toilet-related incidents, unsurprisingly, outnumbered all other sponcoms combined; they even had their own acronym on the SR1 (defdet—although despite repeated memos from the Deputy Minister, Great Bowls of Fire continued to serve as an informal synonym even though it didn’t fit into the character field). Too many people stocked their bathrooms with scented candles these days, though Dora suspected that brute-force natural selection might reduce that imbalance over time.

  Evidently Badura had lit a match.

  Dora implicated a leaky can of starter fluid in the hiker’s backback (not even that far from the truth, she reflected) and moved on to Greta and Roger Young of Steveston, whose charred bodies had been found side-by-side in their own bed. Neither had smoked.

  Dora drummed her fingers on the desktop; smart paint flickered uncertain staccatos at her fingertips. After a moment she ran a search on next-of-kin: Five children. Twice as many grand.

  HEL yes, Dora thought.

  She’d always had a fondness for the Human Extinction League. They actually existed, for one thing—or they had at least, even if in reality they’d been strictly nonviolent and their real motto had been lame. HEL-Yes was far punchier, and made a much better match with the crude spray-painted stick-figure families—hand-in-hand, with Xs for eyes—that had begun appearing down the alleyways of urban centers. Not that those granola-eaters would show her much gratitude even if they knew, but it was thanks to Dora’s (admittedly unsolicited) makeover that they’d ever even made it onto the public radar. It was how she’d scored her second Hoar.

  Greta and Roger Young, devout Catholics with a whole flock of sprogs, would have been perfect targets for those Human-extinction radicals. She plugged in the numbers.

  The desk beeped irritably back at her: Rejected - Quota Exception. She cursed and called up details. Gayle Vincent had already invoked the League this month.

  She had to admit it made sense. You couldn’t go to back to the same well too often: people would stop talking about sponcoms and start talking about why the gummint wasn’t doing something about all the murderous enviroradicals. Still, Dora felt a certain possessiveness about the HEL. She V2T’d Gayle’s line: “Thanks for hogging the League again. Get your own terrorists, why don’t you?”

  Sorry Dory, Gayle came back. Buy you coffee, call it even?

  “Maybe. If you throw in a muffin.”

  An amber star ignited in the upper-left corner of Dora’s visual field; she’d programmed her specs for news alerts relating to the biofuel industry. She back-burnered this one for the moment; it would still be there when she’d figured out what to do about the Youngs. So would the little green star that popped up a moment later: a news item that tied specifically to GreenHex. Same story, probably.

  The purple star (Dept of Energy & Infrastructure) appeared perhaps thirty seconds after that, along with a sudden awareness of ambient change: the usual background burble suddenly extinguished, some dense moist mass oozing invisibly into the building, and settling down, and making Dora’s ears pop.

  She leaned back from her cubby and looked down the row: everyone was frozen to googlespecs and desktops. No one was saying a word.

  V2T from Gayle, crawling across her personal eyespace: Holy fuck are you getting this?

  A crimson nova, laser-bright. The Minister of E&I himself. Crown jewel of a bright little constellation grown suddenly ominous in Dora’s zodiac.

  She tuned in.

  • • •

  MACRONET BREAKING NEWS

  the pixels screamed, and

  The Doomsday Smoothie?

  but the image between those headlines showed nothing but a little green helix twisted into a loop: a donut of DNA that Dora recognized instantly.

  “—plug-and-play toolkits that gengineers use to confer special powers,” the voiceover continued, already in progress. “Unlike normal genes, plasmids are not simply passed from generation to generation; these portable instruction-sets jumpbetween species in a process called lateral transfer, letting different kinds of bacteria—or even bacteria and higher life-forms, such as yeast or algae—acquire traits from one another. Custom plasmids turn ordinary microorganisms into little factories that churn out vast quantities of food, drugs—or, in the case of the Biofuel Industry, gasoline.”

  The view zoomed back: one animated plasmid dwindled and disappeared into a swarm of many, dissolved in turn into the vague chlorophyllous soup within a mass of filamentous corkscrews.

  “GreenHex inserts their patented Firebrand plasmid into an algae closely related to these Spirulina, the main ingredient of the popular Shamrock Smoothie—”

  Distinct filaments receded into a goop of green slime; green slime congealed with new-found minty freshness, topped with chocolate sprinkles—

  “—recently rebranded to great success after decades languishing as a niche product in health-food stores.”

  —contained in a paper cup gripped in a hand attached to an arm against a background of beige tiles and suddenly, magically, Macronet’s animation had segued into archival securicam footage looking down into a coffee shop somewhere in the real world. The dissolve had been seamless; Dora would have whistled in appreciation if not for sudden heavy knot of dread slowly tearing a hole in her diaphragm.

  She knew where this was going. On some level, she realized, she’d been expecting it for years.

  “And while we may never know exactly what happened on the afternoon of the 25th in this Burnaby Starbucks, we do know one thing.”

  A sweet old lady in a lemon dumbweave blouse turned from the counter and tottered endearingly towards an empty table, her frail hand clutching a venti paper cup.

  “We know that Stacey Herlihey was very fond of her Shamrock Smoothies.”

  MacroNet’s image-recognition filters ensured that the sight of Stacey Herlihey’s explosive and unexpected immolation was sufficiently blurred to avoid any violation of community standards.

  The screams came through just fine, though.

  • • •

  THERE WAS MORE, of course. Prof. Piotr Dembowski of the University of Maryland, talking about how difficult it had been to crack the GRM. Someone else from Simon Fraser, reporting that something like Firebrand (“it’s always hard to tell when dealing with encrypted genes”) was showing up in some microbe—Bacteroides thetasomethingorother—that lived exclusively in the human gut (“Small mercies, actually. If it was viable in, say, E. coli, everything from puppies to pigeons would be pooping fire and brimstone by now, heh heh.”) The obligatory hastily-called press conference at which a GreenHex spokesman insisted that the allegations were absurd (“It was designed for the warm, wet, methane-rich conditions of our anaerobic reactors, not the human digestive system”), and that even if Firebrand had gotten out it couldn’t possibly have persisted in the wild for anywhere near the year-and-a-half since Greenhex had phased out their lagoon operations and gone 100% closed-loop. Which was briefly reassuring, until some biomedical statistician from the University of fucking Buzzkill went on record about the myth of the perfect failsafe, and how any industry that scaled up fast enough to replace fossil fuels in less than two decades would probably be dealing with a couple dozen accidents a day even if it hadn’t built its entire operation on a product that self-replicated.

  Ms. Disembodied Voiceover returned long enough to announce that GreenHex intended to pursue legal action against both Prof. De
mbowski and the University of Maryland for copyright infringement. Dora’s great-great-grandboss, the Deputy Minister of Energy and Infrastructure herself, assured the people of this great nation that any stories of government collusion with the biofuel industry in “covering up hundreds of deaths a year” were completely absurd, in fact almost treasonous, as an internal investigation would doubtless prove once and for all.

  But by that time Dora Skilette was already calling up her resumé, and the voices still nattering in her head spoke from the far end of a deep, dark well.

  • • •

  THE BREATHALYZER AT Second Cup was gimped. She tried three times and got nothing but a click and a buzz; the door remained stubbornly locked. It wasn’t until a maraschino-haired woman in a chromatherm jacket rapped and pointed from the other side of the glass that Dora noticed the out-of-service notice, taped just below a buzzboard hawking Pfizer antiplasmidics.

  Please use other entrance.

  The redhead rapped again, spread her hands in a theatrical shrug: Well?

  “Gayle?” Dora said uncertainly, and then “Gayle!”

  Well duh, Gayle mimed, although it had been a year.

  “So, wow,” Dora said, clutching a regular Mocha Minx after the obligatory been-too-long hug. “You’ve certainly changed.”

  Gayle touched her hair as she sat back down—“This is nothing”—with a look that said You certainly haven’t.

  Dora set down her drink, spilling a little on some gap-toothed shark swimming towards whatever camera the table was tuned to (Sydney C-bed, according to the logo). “So where are you now?” Obviously not government.

  “You wouldn’t believe me.” Gayle nodded toward the main entrance, past which a fortysomething in googlespecs was trying to get the breathalyzer to work. “Oh, look. Door got another one.”

  Dora rolled her eyes. “I swear I don’t know why we have to use those fucking things.”

  “It’s the law, for starters.” Gayle’s blazer rippled with pastel heatprints as she nibbled her Danish. Dora found it vaguely distracting.

  “They never even work half the time.”

  “They went from CAD to retail in under a year. We’re lucky any of ‘em work.”

  Dora mopped the shark’s face with her napkin. “Even when they do, when was the last time you saw them actually catch anyone? It’s like spending millions of dollars on shark patrols. In Utah.”

  “Fireside Theater. People want to feel safe.”

  “People are safe.” Except for the occasional exploding grandma, of course. Now that Dora thought of it, Stacey Herlihey had gone up in a place very much like this.

  “Think of the boost all those useless gizmos give the economy, though.” Gayle grabbed Dora’s soiled napkin, wadded it up and tossed it in a perfect arc at the receptacle by the wall: Score. “Not to mention the boom in fire extinguishers. My brother got a job with Amarex right after the news broke, and he just bought his second house. More than makes up for a few unemployed purveyors of backyard BBQs, hmmm?”

  And even those markets were coming back, Dora had read. It turned out people were surprisingly willing to move on, just so long as it was someone else’s grandma who bought it. And it always was. Statistically, anyway.

  “I gotta say I’m surprised at how it turned out,” she admitted.

  “What, that people would choose a couple thousand sponcoms over millions of deaths from cancer and heat stroke and killer smog? That they’d rather deal with a few charred corpses than annual oil slicks stretching all the way to the horizon?”

  “That’s not how it works and you know it. You could’ve posted hours of video showing people dying quietly of black lung. Everyone would’ve totally forgotten about it the moment they saw thirty seconds of Grandma Stacey bursting into flames.” She sipped her Minx and shook her head, disgusted at the memory. “Those were the worst fucking optics in history.”

  Gayle shrugged. “You wanna talk about bad optics, try traffic accidents. You don’t just go up in flames in a car wreck; you could get torn limb-from-limb in the bargain, or splatted on the pavement like a rotten pumpkin. And those images are everywhere too, if you take about five seconds to look—” her hands hovered threateningly over the table, poised to surf.

  Dora waved her off. “Take your word for it. Thanks.”

  Gayle withdrew. On the table between them a school of fishy blue silhouettes, too distant for detail, milled where the shark had been. “My point,” Gayle continued, “is: pictures gruesome enough to make granny flambé look like Kittens On Parade and a death rate five times higher than the worst-case sponcom scenario. Optics and hard numbers. Yet people haven’t stopped driving. Driving more than ever, in fact.”

  “Well of course. They’re paying thirty cents a liter instead of a buck-sevent…”

  “Bingo.” Gayle raised a knowing eyebrow. “Plus ca change.”

  Dora stared into her Minx. “Things do change,” she said softly.

  “Breathalyzers that don’t work. Brand new plasmid pills, even if Johnson & Johnson does have to threaten lawsuits against anyone who so much as whispers about drug-resistance. Oh, and let’s not forget the TSA; now they’ve got one more reason to ram their fists up your ass during check-in, because now everyone can be a suicide bomber.” Gayle extended a finger, drew a line across a sprinkle of spilled sugar. “Some things change. Others, not so much.” She gave Dora an appraising look. “What about you, Dory?”

  Dora blinked. “Me?”

  “What are you up to these days?”

  “Oh.” Dora shrugged. “Not much. Temping as a fire inspector out in Langley.” One of the few gigs for which a history with E&I was actually an advantage. It was amazing how much practical knowledge you picked up over two years of inventing alibis for suspicious house fires. “You?”

  Gayle stood. “Let’s walk. I got a craving.”

  • • •

  GAYLE PULLED OUT A PACK OF Rothmann’s when they hit the street, but didn’t light up; she just eyed the little box in her hand and said “This could be a felony before long, you know that? Someone introduced a private member’s bill.”

  “I didn’t even know you smoked,” Dora said.

  “Didn’t used to. Mom died of cancer.”

  “So what changed?”

  Gayle made a sound: half grunt, half laugh. “Me.”

  “You and a lot of others.” Smoking, paradoxically, had only risen in popularity since the news had broken. It was a kind of safe-sign among strangers: anyone who could light up without lighting up was someone you could at least risk standing next to at the bus stop.

  They walked. A public buzzboard across the street flickered with images of some battered desert city smouldering beneath a black and oily sky. “Look at those guys,” Gayle remarked. “They’ve been setting themselves on fire for a thousand years and more.”

  Dora squinted. The crawl said Tehran but these days it could’ve been anywhere east of the Med.

  “Nice change, though, isn’t it?” Gayle asked.

  “What?”

  “That we finally don’t have to give a shit.”

  Dora stopped and turned to face the other woman. “When did you get so cynical?”

  Gayle half-smiled. “When did you stop? I mean, was it my imagination, or did you and I spend a couple of years writing cover stories about spontaneous human combustion?”

  “I guess we did. Seems a long time ago.” Dora shrugged, granting the point. “You never did tell me what you were up to these days.”

  “Working for GreenHex.” And then, at the sight of Dora’s raised eyebrows, “I said you wouldn’t believe me.”

  “There is no GreenHex. Not any more.”

  “Names change. GreenHex goes on. There was GreenHex before it was GreenHex, there is GreenHex after.”

  “What’s that, some kind of corporate benediction?”

  “You know how these things work.”

  “It mutated.”

  Gayle chuckled. “Pretty mu
ch has to, doesn’t it? Genetic engineering’s what we do.”

  “So what do you do there?”

  “Engineering, kid. Just like everyone else.”

  “When did you get a degree in genetics?”

  “Not genetic. Although genes are just—words, I guess. Information. And engineers are just editors. And the one thing both of us crawled out of E&I with was first-class editing skills. They even gave you an award for it, as I recall.”

  Two, actually. “Not the same thing. Those guys are rewriting life.”

  “You’re making my point. People care more about packaging than contents. It’s all just information, but you get—emotional—about the kind that happens to be wrapped up in genes. So any business built on optimizing one kind of info is naturally going to value folks who know how to optimize the other. Some of our most life-changing products would never get to market otherwise.” She finally seemed to notice the cigarette pack in her hand, extracted one. “They’re hiring, you know.”

  “Really,” Dora said.

  “I could put in a word.”

  “Thanks, I—thanks. That means a lot to me.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  “I don’t know, though. GreenHex by any other name, and all. And if you’ll remember, our last editing gig didn’t turn out so well for either of us.”

  “Things change, Dory. Gotta change with them. That’s what life does.” She raised cupped hands against the breeze, lit up, dragged. Wisps of gray smoke trailed back out of her mouth as Dora stared in disbelief.

  “It adapts.”

  She left her card behind. And the memory of that cigarette, flaring to life by the light of the clear blue flame that danced from the tip of her tongue. ■