The soccer players in the park cheered; someone had scored a goal. I left it in.
Landers beamed suddenly, radiantly, as if he was contemplating this strange arcadia for the very first time.
“That’s what I'm creating. A
I sat at the console eighteen hours a day, and forced myself to live as if the world had shrunk, not to the workroom itself, but to the times and places captured in the footage. Gina left me to it; she’d survived the editing of
She said blithely, “I’ll just pretend that you’re out of town. And that the lump in the bed is a large hot water bottle.”
My pharm programmed a small skin patch on my shoulder to release carefully timed and calibrated doses of melatonin, or a melatonin blocker—adding to, or subtracting from, the usual biochemical signal produced by my pineal gland, reshaping the normal sine wave of alertness into a plateau followed by a deep, deep trough. I woke every morning from five hours of enriched REM sleep, as wide-eyed and energetic as a hyperactive child, my head spinning with a thousand disintegrating dreams (most of them elaborate remixes of the previous day’s editing). I wouldn’t so much as yawn until eleven forty-five—but fifteen minutes later, I’d go out like a light. Melatonin was a natural circadian hormone, far safer and more precise in its effects than crude stimulants like caffeine or amphetamines. (I’d tried caffeine a few times; it made me believe I was focused and energetic, but it turned my judgment to shit. Widespread use of caffeine explained a lot about the twentieth century.) I knew that when I went off the melatonin, I’d suffer a short period of insomnia and daytime drowsiness—an overshoot of the brain’s attempts to counteract the imposed rhythm. But the side-effects of the alternatives were worse.
Carol Landers had declined to be interviewed, which was a shame—it would have been quite a coup to have chatted with the next Mitochondrial Eve. Landers had refused to comment on whether or not she was currently using the symbionts; perhaps she was waiting to see if he’d continue to flourish, or whether he’d suffer a population explosion of some mutant bacterial strain, and go into toxic shock.
I’d been permitted to speak to a few of Landers’ senior employees— including the two geneticists who were doing most of the R&D. They were coy when it came to discussing anything beyond the technicalities, but their general attitude seemed to be that any freely chosen treatment which helped safeguard an individual’s health—and which posed no threat to the public at large—was ethically unimpeachable. They had a point, at least from the biohazard angle; working with neo-DNA meant there was no risk of accidental recombination. Even if they’d flushed all their failed experiments straight into the nearest river, no natural bacterium could have taken up the genes and made use of them.
Implementing Landers’ vision of the perfect survivalist family was going to take more than R&D, though. Making heritable changes in any human gene was currently illegal in the US (and most other places)—apart from a list of a few dozen ‘authorized repairs’ for eliminating diseases like muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis. Legislation could always be revoked, of course—although Landers’ own top biotech attorney insisted that changing
An expert in the field at Columbia University said all of this was bullshit: substituting whole chromosomes, whatever the phenotypic effects, would simply be illegal. Another expert, at the University of Washington, was less certain. If I’d had the time, I could probably have collected a hundred sound-bites of eminent jurists expressing every conceivable shade of opinion on the subject.
I’d spoken to a number of Landers’ critics, including Jane Summers, a freelance biotech consultant based in San Francisco, and a prominent member of Molecular Biologists for Social Responsibility. Six months earlier (writing in the semi-public MBSR netzine, which my knowledge miner always scrutinized diligently), she’d claimed to have evidence that several thousand wealthy people, in the US and elsewhere, were having their DNA translated, cell type by cell type. Landers, she’d said, was merely the only one to have gone public—to act as a kind of decoy: a lone eccentric, defusing the issue, making it seem like one man’s ridiculous (yet almost Quixotic) fantasy. If the research had been exposed in the media with no specific person associated with it, paranoia would have reigned: there would have been no limit to the possible membership of the nameless elite who planned to divorce themselves from the biosphere. But since it was all out in the open, and all down to harmless Ned Landers, there was really nothing to fear.
The theory made a certain amount of sense—but Summers’ evidence hadn’t been forthcoming. She’d reluctantly put me in touch with an ‘industry source’ who’d supposedly been involved in gene translation work for an entirely different employer—but the ’source’ had denied everything. Pressed for other leads, Summers had become evasive. Either she’d never had anything substantial or she’d made a deal with another journalist to keep the competition away. It was frustrating, but in the end I hadn’t had the time or resources to pursue the story independently. If there really was a cabal of genetic separatists, I’d just have to read the exclusive in the Washington Post like everyone else.
I closed with a medley of other commentators—bioethicists, geneticists, sociologists—mostly dismissing the whole affair. “Mr. Landers has the right to live his own life, and raise his own children, any way he sees fit. We don’t persecute the Amish for their inbreeding, their strange technology, their desire for independence. Why persecute him, for essentially the same ‘crimes’?”
The final cut of the story was eighteen minutes long. In the broadcast version, there’d only be room for twelve. I pared away mercilessly, summarizing and simplifying—taking care to do a professional job, but not too worried by the loss of detail. Most real-time broadcasts on SeeNet served no purpose but to focus publicity, and to guarantee reviews in some of the more conservative media,
On the evening of the fifth day of editing—right on schedule, reason enough for minor jubilation—I tidied up all the loose ends, and ran through the segment one last time. I tried to clear away all my memories of filming, and all my preconceptions, and watch the story like a SeeNet viewer who’d seen nothing at all on the subject before (save a few misleading promotions for the documentary itself).
Landers came across surprisingly sympathetically. I’d thought I’d been harsher. I’d thought I’d at least given him every opportunity to damn himself with his earnest account of his surreal ambitions. Instead, he seemed far more good-humored than po-faced; he almost appeared to be sharing all the jokes.
Would it matter? The rich had always cut themselves off from the rabble, one way or another. Pollution levels would continue to decline, whether or not algal symbionts rendered fresh air obsolete. And anyone who chose to follow in Landers’ footsteps was no great loss to the human gene pool.
There was only one small question which remained unanswered, and I tried not to give it too much thought.
4
