they’re called. Marcy’s husband seemed to want to hit her whenever she got nervous. The sweat, you see. As you can imagine, it was an escalating situation. She would never press charges. She thought it was all her own fault.”
“She was what? Twenty-one, Twenty-two?” Livvy asked. “A child.”
“About that. A lot of the practitioners who had sold these headaches to the unsuspecting public had scattered like roaches and most of the enhancements were poorly documented, if at all, so they were difficult and expensive to reverse. I tracked down the practitioner who’d given her the enhancement and made sure she got the reversal, at no additional charge, before he went to jail.
“To give the bastard, Marcy’s husband,” Chris added, clarifying which bastard he was talking about at the moment, “… to give him his due, the physical abuse stopped as soon as she got the reversal.”
“The physical abuse,” Livvy said musingly. “She stayed with him all those years.”
“She loved him. And he did stay with her fifty years.”
“He knew her buttons, and she was a willing victim. I give him nothing.
“How did you convince the practitioner to give her the reversal? Did you get him a deal with the DA?” Livvy asked, curious. It seemed pertinent to LLE’s management of these kind of cases.
Chris chose his words with care. “I try to avoid offering deals that dilute the impact of the Laws. It sets a bad precedent. Also, I was still angry when I found him.” He turned to look squarely at Livvy, and said very seriously, “I threatened to break his kneecaps.”
Livvy laughed. “And he believed you? He didn’t realize you’re Enforcement?”
“Oh, he knew. He knew I was LLE,” Chris said, still seriously. Livvy’s laughter slowly faded.
“You’re not kidding, are you?” she asked.
Chris didn’t answer.
“It changed everything, didn’t it?” Livvy asked after a pause. “Even love. I mean, not the enhancements, those are relatively minor. I mean Longevity itself.”
“How could it not? Molebiol beat aging. Gave us eternal youth and biological immortality. The trouble is, they only gave it to those who can afford it. And even if everyone could afford it… humanity needs children around to stay human. How does any sane society reconcile those issues?
“The only reason we’ve made it this far is that we’ve got the Laws that were cobbled together in response to the Riots. Without the Longevity and Enhancement Laws, we’d be in real danger of facing the creation of a master race, all based on power and financial resources.”
“No. No, we wouldn’t,” Livvy said soberly.
“Of course you’re right.” Chris glanced at her and then went back to staring straight ahead. “That is the crux. We had the Riots, but it’s been so much worse everywhere else in the world. We’d claw each other apart, like they have elsewhere, until we destroyed ourselves as a civilization. But you’ve considered all this, or as a well-regarded Homicide detective you wouldn’t have jumped into the LLE rabbit hole. This is hardly a career booster for you.”
“Well-regarded?” Livvy said with mild irony. “You know I used family influence to get here.”
“I’ve been a detective a long time.”
They sat in silence for a while. Livvy suspected Chris must be remembering how close they’d come to collapse once already, and how hard Karen had worked to prevent it. He had been in the center of it all. She could only imagine what it had been like.
“Your wife was Karen DeVoe, the bioethicist who consulted on the Laws, wasn’t she?” she asked, watching him.
He continued to stare out the front window at the scenery passing by. After a while, she began to wonder if he was going to answer, or if she needed to apologize for some reason.
Extending as far as she could see on one side of the highway was one of the largest Naturals ghettos in the nation. Block upon block of 20th and 21st century high-rise buildings, interrupted frequently by squares of the reclaimed green spaces with their gardens and playgrounds. There was no physical boundary, but the ghetto was inhabited by families and businesses functioning behind brittle socioeconomic and philosophical barriers. She knew LLE would seldom have to venture into these areas; licensed facilities were non- existent and hotlabs were rare, although sometimes a group of the less law-abiding residents got enterprising enough to highjack a shipment of Longevity supplies and kidnap a practitioner. But the way she saw it, LLE was mainly for them. LLE guarded the promise that the Laws would keep the barriers passable.
“Things were at a crisis,” Chris said, interrupting her thoughts. “None of it was simple. Of course from the beginning there were those who abhorred the whole idea on principle, and others who reveled in the possibilities but understood what it would mean for society. A lot of people who couldn’t afford minimally useful resets still didn’t want to see Longevity totally abandoned, even if we could have put the Genie back into the bottle, because then their children would never have the chance or the choice. The protests built into the Riots, and it took the politicians a while to understand that it wasn’t just about radicals who couldn’t stand the concept of Longevity or the hard-core discontented who couldn’t afford it, but rational people who knew what it would mean if it was unchecked… if no compromise made co-existence possible.
“It got so bad that they even tried to outlaw Longevity for a while, but the Riots didn’t stop, they just changed. Everyone, including the civic leaders in the ghettos, knew the black market pressures would be overwhelming and unrelenting. The politicians finally got that they would need to work with what we had, and come up with some workable compromise. They were terrified. They finally had an issue that they couldn’t just endlessly debate.”
“I’ll bet they still tried, for a while,” Livvy said.
Chris smiled slightly again, at some memory. “They called in all kinds of experts. Karen testified and then spent hours with government officials, congressmen, and newsmen, lobbyists, anyone who asked for her help. Educating, explaining… It was the first time in her experience that they really seemed to listen. Before then, Congress had just rushed approvals through, eager to get the benefits for themselves and their families, thinking they were appeasing everyone who mattered.”
There was another, shorter silence. Livvy thought about what it must have meant to him to come through all that, and come out with the Laws functioning as they were meant to, and Karen. Karen, expecting a baby, as Livvy’s research had revealed. No one welcomed a baby unless they had a tenacious grasp on hope.
“I don’t suppose you’ve had much exposure to any natural families?” Chris asked at last. “I don’t anymore, myself, but that’s partly because of what I’ve been doing for the last fifty-odd years. The stable natural families may know what we do, but they almost never encounter LLE. They’re not all religious fanatics, or too poor to afford the resets. Nor do they all hate us and the choice we’ve made. Most choose to live in there, in some cases because they believe it is the right way to live.” He nodded towards the ghetto.”
“But you can remember, can’t you? I mean, you grew up in one. A natural family. Your parents got old before they died?”
Chris hesitated, but then answered simply. “Old? Yes, I suppose so.”
“Someday, no one will remember what it was like, before Longevity,” Livvy said.
“If you are serious about trying to understand, and you stick around LLE after this week, we can arrange for you to spend some time with a family. Agnew’s family is Natural.”
The car pulled up to face a home slot and they climbed out so that it could drive in and elevate out of the way for the next returning vehicle. Louie didn’t wait for them to open the door, but climbed into the front and out before the door slid shut. At the office, other than an occasional excursion to Livvy’s side to glean some attention, he was showing a strong tendency to stay within inches of Chris’ left hand.
“What do you think will happen to her? Marcy?” Livvy asked.
“It’s no different here in D.C. than on the West Coast.”
“Meaning, I suppose, that it probably all depends on whether she gets some media-savvy attorney,” Livvy said. “For once not a bad thing. That bird already hit the window way too hard.”
“Whatever happens, we can probably assume that it will be nothing she would consider worse than what has happened already,” Chris agreed. “At any rate, it’s a Homicide case, not an LLE case, although we still each have to prepare a report. If it were an LLE case, we’d handle it differently. But you’ll find that out soon enough.”
They’d reached the squad room. There was a short pause in the underlying buzz of voices when they walked in but it didn’t last long. By tomorrow, she figured, they’d have moved on, and she and Louie would attract no more attention than a firefly on the Fourth. Chris reached his desk and, hooking his chair with his leg, pulled it in and sat down.
