I also had access to a small, well-stocked kitchen and a bedroom provisioned with my preferred brands of soap and deodorant (that was disturbing), and some lab scrubs in my size to wear in the coming days. They had been expecting me.
I worked late into the night and returned to my desk after minimal sleep, exhilarated intellectually—and terrified in every other respect. I worked with colleagues off-site somewhere, and we knew each other only by designations we hadn’t chosen for ourselves. We had voice as well as text communication, but the voices were clearly altered. We discussed the expression of a carefully engineered section in a strain of the virus with one essential question to answer: Would it remain human-to-human contagious in its pulmonary form but not cause deadly symptoms?
The virus by its nature damaged and killed infected cells. The host’s body could react, possibly too strongly, to the damage and inflammation, which by itself could lead to death. As was sometimes the case with cold or flu infections, especially with the delta cold, people developed rapid respiratory failure—very rapid—and if they survived that, they could still fall prey to secondary infections, including pneumonia, which could be equally fatal, or they could die from worsened chronic conditions like congestive heart failure.
We wanted a virus that would irritate the lungs enough to cause coughing to spread the illness, but that would cause no serious symptoms. To accomplish that would require big changes, too many changes to create in one day, maybe in a week, but we had to try.
During our discussions, I insisted on using the terms people and human beings rather than hosts or subjects. Confucius would have been proud. Some of my colleagues clearly lacked his compassion.
The survival of any species involved a constant struggle against death from enemies of all kinds. Releasing the perfected virus (if we ever got it close enough to perfect) would be humanity’s greatest risk ever. We had no margin of error. I, Peng, designer of life and master of its language … I should have expected something like this eventually.
Only ten years ago, I’d had a lot to say about medical ethics. No one listened, in the end. Few even remembered my testimony at a United States Senate Select Committee on Health and Technology. As time went on (but not soon enough), fanatics found unfaded and far more worthy targets.
I arrived for the hearing in a nondescript car that pulled up to a rear loading dock. Meanwhile, at the front of the Hart Senate Office Building with its quaint white rectilinear styling from the twentieth century, hundreds of protesters screamed through bullhorns and shared the event live through video. They feared that I and DNA designers like me could make them second-class humans. Indeed, second-class humans eventually came to pass, but the people capable of creating them thrived in legislative halls, not in laboratories. As everyone learned through hard experience, all it took was a few legally binding words, not a few carefully selected genes.
No matter. Police feared violence and escorted me through back halls. I arrived in my finest pearl-gray suit made of top-quality synthetic spiderweb fiber, incidentally and conveniently bulletproof. I looked female then, walking confidently in formal spike heels, but I didn’t get to cross the building’s beautiful atrium. Too risky, the building security officers said, and I had received enough threats to accept their warning.
I arrived on time according to the summons, only to discover to no surprise that the hearing was running two hours late.
I waited in the greenroom. On the other side of the wall lay the Central Hearing Facility, a boring, functional name for a grand hall with handsome age-darkened wood paneling and, behind the committee-member dais, a gleaming white marble backdrop. The waiting room on the other side of the marble-clad wall offered standard-issue beige sofas, a coffee and tea maker, a watercooler, an adjoining toilet, and walls painted pale green out of tradition. A screen on the wall showed what was happening in the hearing room.
What was happening was a parade of failed genetic engineering.
Senators were gently grilling a ten-foot-tall young man in a motorized wheelchair. Rather, they fulminated against what would have been called in Roman times a monster, an unnatural creature, and these days what we politely called modified, a kinder term. Or some called him a dupe, which was both rude and inaccurate.
“Although my bones grew, my nervous system couldn’t keep up,” he said. “I have little or no feeling or control below my knees or elbows. Even if I did, I could hardly walk very far.” He joked about it, true to his famously stalwart personality. “I can never play basketball.”
I watched as angry as those senators. That poor young man was a botched job. Anyone who knew physiology would have known that bones and nerves were separate systems and both needed tweaks to grow in tandem. Beyond that, hearts could beat only so strong, digestions work only so hard, and lungs breathe only so fast. Humans had limits.
The DNA-modifying engineer responsible for that disaster sat near me in the greenroom, hauled out of his suicide-watch prison cell, waiting to testify, still manacled, and if he had not sat hunched over and weeping, I would have given him something to wail about. Spike heels could make good weapons. He never looked at me, although his police handlers did and seemed to equate us.
Meanwhile, the young man testified to other modified failures who hadn’t survived infancy. Gills that didn’t work even for children born underwater. Tails that involved unviable architectural changes to the spine. Some attempts to improve vision hadn’t killed the thoughtlessly modified children but had left them blind because their brains couldn’t process what their unnatural eyes saw.
“Would you
