| Fiction |
| December 2007 |
| d@rwin |
| By: Mark McCormick |
| EDITOR'S NOTE: The story below, by author Mark McCormick, is a deeply scary, "What If." I recommend reading it through at least twice, because it certainly makes you think. Once again, we are proud to offer Mr. McCormick's talent in the pages of Orion's Child. Also note that, due to display problems in some browsers, phrases in this story that appear "Humanity-1, etc." were originally written as "Humanity1", with the "1" in superscript. |
| Kaeda Akiyama was completely wrong in saying Asher couldn’t understand the persecution they were going through. Did she really understand what it meant to have been utterly unique? To be put forward as the future of humanity? Did she understand what pressure that put on a little boy? How I wanted to shake some sense into her. But I was just an aide. I was not allowed to participate in the negotiations. Although my ostensible purpose was to address questions of fact—and I had the usual equipment for this, the integrated database, the image and audio subsystems, the expansion memory—my real purpose was as an expert observer, to help the Chancellor understand the subtext, what was not being said or what was being actively concealed. My hardware in this area was a deal more advanced and subtle. Asher smiled and took the accusation, but I wondered what he was thinking. Was he remembering all he went through as a little boy? He once told me, “I never knew what a mall was until I was beaten up in one.” I never learned the details of this story, only that it happened when he was a young teen. I can well imagine what must have happened. By then the mall would certainly have been closed. All public gathering places had long been tightly restricted due to dangers of infection. This would have certainly driven the mall out of business. Perhaps the building was not yet condemned. Perhaps the owner still had hopes of making commercial use of the facility as an office building, a hospital, or even a warehouse. I imagined that the mall had had glass double doors set into a glass wall under a soaring marquee. The owner had not depended on glass for security. Plywood walls had been set up before the entryways, topped by wicked razor wire. Bold, somber letters threatened criminal prosecution while curlicues of graffiti danced about like mischievous sprites. Perhaps a way had been cut through the barrier or the razor wire had been torn down. Perhaps Asher went in to explore or maybe he was already being pursued by ruffians, classmates, friends. He may have sought refuge inside, hoping to scare them away with the danger of infection. He must have been sneaking out against his mother’s wishes. He wouldn’t have wanted to call in or face having to explain his own misconduct, the disappointment of his mother, the ensuing punishment—perhaps, as she might have threatened, being locked up tightly in the Clean Center where they lived and never again being allowed to leave, never again to walk under an open sun. Or maybe, he just didn’t want to worry his mom about being out and being in trouble. Maybe he still thought he could just get away. People were already wearing infection masks back then, but Asher had no need of one. He hadn’t learned to blend in, that people were afraid of anyone who was different, anyone who invalidated their very existence. The pursuers had known right away what Asher was, and known he was breaking the law by going about uncovered and by entering the mall. They had been angry, seeing in him a cruel taunt against all they’d inherited, the harsh strictures of the world they’d been born into. Perhaps they convinced themselves they were dispensing justice. Maybe they wanted to punish him for making them obsolete even before they’d entered into adult life. In my mind the mall was eerily quiet, as if the human race had suddenly vanished and only their ghosts remained, the echoes of their forgotten lives. The shops were mostly empty with aluminum gates rolled down over their entryways. Inside, sundry detrtitus lay abandoned: plastic hangers, cardboard, soda cans, a shirt rack on its side, the torso of a mannequin twisted in anguish like a corpse. Did Asher know what any of this was? In an atrium, dead palm trees in huge concrete pots groped vainly for skylights high over head. Trash littered the dry bowl of a fountain. Perhaps a wish or two remained, a copper penny, forgotten and unanswered. Perhaps these went into a boy’s pocket. Molded facemasks were already fashionable then. Theirs would have been terrifying and disgusting expressions of teen angst, calculated to evoke the maximum horror in their exasperated parents. One might have been a mutant—florescent green and lopsided, with mismatched eyes and hairy warts, glistening with sickly moisture. Another might have been a screaming corpse with skin peeled away from the flesh. Another might have been a raging, snarling demon. In my mind I saw the pursuers laughing and egging each other on, but suddenly it turned serious. “This building is closed for a reason. Can’t you read?” “Hey, maybe he can’t read!” “Yeah, maybe he’s stupid or something!” “And what are you doing out here without a mask?” “You’re a danger to all of us.” “Maybe he doesn’t care about that. Maybe he’s trying to infect us.” “Are you trying to infect us, jerk?” “I’m afraid you’ll have to come with us.” Asher must have resisted. They had punched him, hitting him in the face, stomach and back, knocking him to the ground. Maybe they kicked him a few times more. But I knew how brilliant Asher was. I like to think he defeated them by cleverness. “Get away! I don’t want to hurt you!” he might have cried. “I’m a carrier. It can’t hurt me. But you. You touched me. You have to get sanitized! You have to hurry!” They had believed him and been terrified. Everyone was terrified back then. They had known how different Asher was—everyone knew, it was all over the media. But they hadn’t understood what that difference really meant. To the virus he was utterly inanimate. He could no more be a carrier than could a stone. A virus might survive on him for a time, but shortly it would fry under solar radiation or at the next sanstation. Now, nearly twenty-five years later, Chancellor Asher Fawke sat at the beautiful mahogany table, attended by aides and minor officials on both sides. He was not a large man, although his presence sometimes made him seem larger. His wide set blue eyes in an open face enhanced a feeling of honesty and sincerity. He smiled placidly at Dr. Akiyama and graciously bore the accusation. Was his experience at the mall running through his mind? Some other youthful torment? Was he gritting his teeth in resentment? “Perhaps you’re right, Kaeda. I’m not one of you. I can’t understand what you’re going through. I can’t change that fact. But I can be an objective perspective. I can help you make the right decisions, to proceed with caution, and weigh the costs.” Before Dr. Akiyama was a hardcopy of a news story. She fingered the edges of its pages. A bold heading proclaimed, “Humanity-1, Extinction Looms!” I had already zoomed in, captured the image and scanned the story. A prominent statistician had applied regression analysis to predict the imminent extinction of humanity-1. We all knew the danger. Clearly something needed to be done, we just didn’t know what that was. “I’m sorry, Asher, but I can’t help thinking that what you’re really saying is that it’s too politically dangerous. You’re not willing to take the backlash if something goes wrong. You’re not willing to take the risk of saving us.” My video enhancements automatically captured micro- expressions of pain, fear, and disappointment. “Kaeda, my mother was a human-1. Don’t you think I’d do everything in my power to save humanity-1?” “Your ‘mother’ made you in a laboratory, altering your DNA and gestating you ex utero in an ‘oven’. You are the product of engineering.” Even without my enhancements, I could hear the disgust in her voice. I couldn’t believe the harshness of Akiyama’s words given their shared history. Dr. Akiyama had been a postdoctoral student in the Fawke lab when Asher was a young man. Asher had nearly lived in the lab back them. Kaeda herself had done much of the work to help him survive. She must have known Asher for years and years. How could she treat him so? But then I detected the great stress Dr. Akiyama was under as she sat at the table and leveled heartless accusations. Her face was heated, her heart racing. Her voice had soared into the red stress zone. “She was the only mother I had. Engineering or not, half of my genome came from her. You knew my mother. Didn’t she think of herself as my mom? I always thought so.” Dr. Akiyama looked away awkwardly, knowing she’d gone too far, eyes jittering from side to side as if confronted with an obstacle she saw no way around. “This is all beside the point. The point is humanity1 is dying!” She thrust the article across the table. Pages splayed out in seeming panic. Beefy, gray-suited security guards edged forward at the sudden motion. “Kaeda, we’re not just sitting on our arses here. We’re doing everything in our power to stop the virus. We have huge, huge resources dedicated to the task. We’ve dramatically increased research funding. It’s now the lion’s share of the federal budget. And it’s not just us. The level of international cooperation on this is unprecedented. Even the volcano didn’t see this level of coordination. For all practical purposes, research against the plague now has no international boundaries. There are no politics here—just the world coming together to beat a threat to its very existence. It’s only a matter of time before we find a way to crack the viral metamorphism.” The word ‘metamorphism’ always made me think of a shape-shifting monster, so that anything you touched might suddenly transform into a slimy, oozing, multi-limbed behemoth. The reality was much more prosaic. The metamorphic virus some call d@rwin, or the Code Plague, was a just small bit of self-altering code, rendered in RNA and wrapped in a protein shell. Unlike traditional, natural viruses, d@rwin included code to purposefully alter itself, changing both its outer proteins and its core RNA. It was self-mutating, self-evolving, modifying itself out from under vaccines and anti-viral agents with unprecedented speed and virulence. One month it might manifest itself as a hemorrhagic fever like Ebola, transforming its victims into bleeding horrors of infection. A few months later it might evolve into an autoimmune disease like HIV or a poxvirus like smallpox. But unlike those natural diseases, d@rwin was completely artificial, just the efforts, we believed, of some misguided hacker group, some Russian college kids trying replicate hacker techniques into biology. Nobody believed they were trying to create biological weapons, but only to impress their hacker friends and make names for themselves. They would have succeeded. They would all be famous now, except that they were all dead, the first to be ravaged by d@rwin. It wasn’t entirely the students’ fault. If you provide the technology, you can expect people to use it, and misguided souls to misuse it. Genetic engineering had been fully automated in an inexpensive lab-in-a-box the size of a food processor. A digital interface to real live DNA had been created. You could create new DNA simply by typing a few lines of code—Hello world rendered in the stuff of life. Creating d@rwin had been all too easy. No one had thought through the possible uses of the device. It was hailed as “progress” and therefore automatically good. Kaeda looked Asher straight in the eye and leaned forward in her seat. “That’s all very sweet and inspiring and would sound just great in a campaign speech, but the fact is we are dying. We don’t have the luxury to sit back and watch you fail. We need the isolation from the threat that only an extraterrestrial colony can provide. We’ve got stations out there already, on asteroids, on the moon. These can serve as foundations for a new refuge.” “And how long do you think you’d survive out there? I’ve looked into this. I’m not just rejecting your ideas out of hand. Those stations are mostly automated and not intended to support people, much less a whole city of them. The amount of infrastructure we’d have to build to support a large-scale, independent colony would be phenomenal. And we don’t even have the technology to do it. Biosphere 3 failed miserably—“ Kaeda placed her hand flat on the table, a silent slap, a gesture of frustration. “But we’re not limited to the constraints of Biosphere 3. We can mine for oxides or free oxygen from water. We can—“ “It’s not only the raw materials, Kaeda. We don’t have the technology for a closed ecosystem that can support human life on a large scale. You would need massive and continual support from Earth.” “So, it comes down to money.” “No, damnit! It’s about not doing something that can utterly destroy our economy, something that can ruin millions of peoples lives.” “When they’re alive there’s always hope. I’m not sure there’s still hope for us.” “If the economy collapses then all bets are off. War. Disease. There’s no telling what can happen. You’d certainly lose any support from Earth. You’d die anyway.” “Economic collapse is purely hypothetical against the certainty of human-1 extinction. We need some kind of isolation. I really think you’re killing us.” She stood up. “I thought you were better than this, Asher. I thought I could count on you.” “This is not over yet. As long as you’re alive, there’s always hope.” After Dr. Akiyama left with her own set of assistants, Asher remained seated at the table for a time. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking or feeling. Laser spectroscopy and vibration detection, micro-expression analysis, voice stress analysis, heat signature analysis, eye movement and saccade analysis: all of my tools were forbidden against the Chancellor or his staff. There was no one monitoring my use of implants, but I didn’t analyze Asher as a matter of honor. I didn’t have to. I always believed him. With my unaided eyes it was plain that his breathing was unusually slow and deep, enforced but with an involuntary hiccup at the end, like someone trying to stave off great pain. My heart reached out to him, but I remained quiet, professional and respectful. My task was done. I didn’ t have any significant input on Dr. Akiyama. She believed what she was saying and was tormented about having to confront someone she obviously cared for. _______ Outside the Chancellery, were the usual reporters and crowds bearing placards. “GO HOME OLESTRA BOY”, one read, recalling the fat substitute that, like Asher, was a chiral and hence incompatible with normal metabolic processes. Chirality was what made Asher immune to d@rwin, and to almost all pathogenic diseases. All proteins have an orientation or chirality with respect to the positions of their carbon atoms. Almost all life on earth has left-handed proteins. Dr. Kila Fawke had engineered Asher’s DNA to produce right-handed proteins. He was brought to term ex utero, in an oven, with all of his sustenance and developmental hormones carefully constructed to fit his reverse metabolism. He was a mirror image of humanity, the first of a new species. Did Kila realize what she had done to her child? Or was she just a mom seeking the best protections for her child? Dr. Kila Fawke had been castigated for “human experimentation”. She lost her position as director of the Fawke lab at The Aardstad Institute and was even denied access to her son, who had to spend most of his infancy in the lab. He had digestive problems that almost killed him, and he needed constant medical supervision beyond what could be provided even in a state-of-the-art hospital or pediatric center. New intestinal flora had to be engineered. New reverse-chiral hormones had to be constructed to treat hormonal imbalances. But eventually, it appeared Asher would survive, though he continued to have many digestive problems and skin rashes for several years. Kila was finally allowed to raise her little boy. The drama of Asher’s survival and what it meant for humanity was all over the media. Suddenly, every parent wanted their children to be immune to d@rwin. The Fawke lab received huge government grants to refine the chirality reversal process and so save the human race by creating a new one, a new species of human, human-2. Dr. Kila Fawke, the founder of the lab and the originator of Human Chiral Engineering (HCE), was not invited to participate or even given an official apology. She’d possibly saved humankind from extinction, but her scientific career was over. She was actually paid large sums of money to keep Asher in the lab as a subject of scientific study. This was not only a matter of money. Asher needed to be there for his very health and survival. For the first several years of his life, Asher could eat only lab-constructed gruel. Most natural foods were poison to him. The Fawke lab was capable of reversing other crops and livestock, but the priority was toward understanding the effect on humans. Asher was also allergic to sunlight, although that deficiency was overcome in later years—Dr. Akiyama had a hand in this, and Asher now sported a healthy-looking tan by way of compensation. By the time Asher was seven, most of the kinks in chiral engineering, at least with respect to rats and Rhesus monkeys, had been ironed out. D@rwin was already ravaging the population, and people were demanding a solution. Medical ethics seemed less important than the survival of the species, and chiral engineering was applied in the first large scale human trials. A new generation of babies was born. The Second Generation-2, they were called. Asher became the First Boy-2, and later, the First Man-2. Outside the Chancellery, the crowd bore other signs reading “BEHOLD THE SON OF MAN” and “SATAN WALKS AMONG US”, proclaiming Asher to be both the Second Coming and the Antichrist. A fat, maskless man spit at the Chancellor as he passed but missed. The security detail scuffled with the fat offender and pushed him away. A brown-skinned woman in a clear, government-issue, face-mask held a newborn baby and struggled to press through to the Chancellor. People elbowed and pushed and the woman stumbled to one knee almost dropping the tiny infant. The baby awoke and started bawling. Asher turned to the security team and pointed at the woman. The guards started moving toward her, pushing back the surrounding crowd. “Step back please. Make way for the Chancellor.” Asher approached and helped the woman to her feet. “Bless my child! Please…” “I’m sorry, ma’am. I don’t have power to bless,” he said, but Asher put his hand on the baby’s head anyway. “I can only wish you and your child well, and promise to do everything in my power to see us through this crisis.” “Thank you. Thank you.” Asher walked on through the teeming crowd, hurling its imprecations and importunities. Beyond the steps of the Chancellery were the huge oaks and twisting pathways of Stormont Park, now shadowed by a tangled spaghetti of enclosed walkways, snaking between buildings and allowing pedestrians to travel among them without leaving Clean Zones. My online friend Navier used to ask me how it felt to work for someone proclaimed both the Antichrist and the Second Coming, how I could even talk to him. But day-to-day, I saw only Asher the man-2. I saw the great responsibility he bore to help integrate two species of humans, and to save the one from extinction. I saw how it wore on him, the exhaustion, the anger, the frustration. I saw how he cared for people, and how their stories of suffering tore at him. So, perhaps he was larger than life, as if all human achievement and all human suffering resonated through one man. ________ I couldn’t blame them for being angry. When I saw the glowing, district map with its blue squares representing Clean Centers and the growing number of red X’s representing Clean Centers where the virus had gotten in anyway despite the air filters, despite the sanitation halls with their antiviral mists and their UV baths, a cold, hopeless feeling settled into my stomach. To suffer the self-imposed imprisonment in these huge facilities, to believe in their promises of safety, to participate in society only virtually, to be afraid of another’s touch, and then to have d@rwin crack the Centers anyway like a snake looking for an easy meal. I too wouldn’t want to take it anymore. I’d be damn angry— angry enough to walk outside en masse, virus be damned. The media was already calling it the “Long Walk” even before it had even occurred. Thinking about how long that walk might really be was terrifying. “We need to do something to head this off and we need to do it fast,” Asher’s image—the real man, not his avatar—spoke from a glowing wallscreen in the Chancelleric Offices. “If all those people go outside, there’s no telling how many we’re going to lose. If they all die, it will be our fault.” “Sir, they are taking their lives into their own hands.” “That’s not the way people are going to perceive it. And irrespective of how this is going to make us look and what it’s going to do to our party, we’re going to have a crisis of government. We can’t fight the virus if we’re fighting amongst ourselves.” “What can we do?” “We need to offer them hope. I know I haven’t been in favor of a lunar colony and I still don’t think it’s feasible in the short term, but we might be able to send a few people up there, perhaps a hundred. It’s not going to be pleasant. They’re going to have to live in tiny, cramped habitation modules, but they’ll be away from d@rwin, and people will see that there’s at least one safe place, a refuge.” Asher started pacing on the screen, working out details in his mind. “We can send up researchers-1 and engineers-1,” he continued. “They can try to figure out how to set up a colony, how to grow their own food and how to manufacture habitats and machinery from local materials. Until we can do that, there’s no hope of a large-scale colony.” Asher shook his head, frowning. “I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes. The entire weight of humanity-1 will rest on their shoulders. I need you to find out what it’s going to take to make this happen, what it’s going to cost, and what kind of timeline we can offer.” “But, sir, we’re talking about millions of people here, do you think saving a few hundred is going to make a difference?” “No,” he shook his head. “No, I really don’t. But today we’re not talking about saving them, we’ re talking about offering them hope and letting them save themselves, at least for a few more days.” At least for a few more days. Was there really no hope? Asher didn’t believe a lunar colony would be a solution. Were we misleading them? Would it not be better to confront them with the truth and let them manage it as reasonable people according to their personal beliefs? But maybe there was no reasoning with extinction. Maybe there was no rational response but to choose the time and manner of one’s own death, to take a long walk in the open sun and say, “Here I am. Though I may die, I defy Thee. With my last breath, I reject Thee.” But could we really allow that? Could the rest of society really stand for that? ________ It was sometime after that that Asher and Kaeda Akiyama starting seeing one another socially. I didn’t know whether they were dating or simply close friends who’d shared some difficult times. Their relationship was the subject of huge public speculation and also of gossip among the Chancellor’s Staff. Cynical pundits accused Dr. Akiyama of manipulating the Chancellor. But I knew Kaeda cared deeply for Asher even when they were fighting over how to save humanity-1. The ferocity of the conflict just got in the way of any personal connection they might have had. Now that they were working towards a common goal, they were free to care for one another. I was there when Dr Akiyama mysteriously and ceremoniously brought the round basket, a red- checkered napkin covering a mound of something, into the Chancellery. “I have a gift for Asher,” she said to the guards, as if anyone could walk up to the Chancellor and give him a gift. I knew the basket had to have been thoroughly examined and its contents analyzed or she wouldn’t have made it into the building. But still the guards looked confused, as if they hadn’t been informed. There was a well-established procedure for seeing the Chancellor and it clearly wasn’t being followed. Whatever it was, it was intended to be a surprise, and the Security Agency was in on it, putting the door guards in the position of having to decide on the spot whether to allow the diminutive woman through. I called up Asher’s avatar, as I knew the guards must have been doing, and asked whether he would want to be disturbed. “I’m quite busy,” it said, “but I can spare some time for Kaeda.” The guards opened the double doors and allowed her through. Asher sat behind his mammoth rosewood desk and finished writing something before looking up. “Kaeda, come in,” Asher smiled. “I didn’t know you were coming.” With my audio enhancements, I could just hear them speak as Kaeda entered the large, luxurious office. The double oak doors remained open as a hint that the Chancellor was busy. “I know you’re busy, Asher. I won’t stay long. The lab has had a new breakthrough and I brought something I thought you’d like to see… and, well, taste. She pulled away the napkin covering the basket. I couldn’t make out what was inside. “Blueberries!” “Yes, blueberries. The lab was finally successful in reversing the chirality on vaccinium corymbosum. The actual breakthrough was over a year ago, but then we had to grow them, test their chemical content, and make sure they actually tasted good.” “And?” “I can’t eat them. See for yourself.” Blueberries! I’d never had a blueberry, nor had any chiral. Apples, bananas, grapes, oranges, and many vegetables and grains had been converted, but few berries. Until they were engineered to produce only proteins we could metabolize, they were actually poisonous to us. In many cases, we couldn’t even smell a plant until it had been chirally engineered, or sometimes we could smell it but it just didn’t smell appetizing. So smell became a kind of guide for chirals. If it smelled good, we could eat it. Asher put his face down to the basket and sniffed. “I…I’ve never smelled anything quite like it. It smells…” I could see Kaeda waiting in anticipation. “…wonderful!” Asher smiled eagerly and laughed. He popped a few into his mouth. “Wow! That’ s really great. It’s got a smooth flavor, not like grapes at all, and with almost no tartness.” For a moment he was like a boy given a bag of candy, not a public official bearing the weight of human-1 annihilation. “There’s very little citric acid in blueberries, and no tannins.” Asher put his hand on Kaeda’s shoulder and kissed her on the cheek. Kaeda smiled, but I could tell she was a little uncomfortable at the show of affection, a little reserved. I wondered if reports of their romance were really true. “Thank you, Kaeda. That was well worth the interruption. Can I share these with my staff?” “By all means. I can’t eat them.” Only one of the guards was human-1. It wasn’t so much that chirals were favored on Asher’s staff, despite the claims of human-1 interest groups, but that the job required so much public interaction. It was more difficult to interact with others while wearing anti-infection masks. You couldn’t very well have a face to face. And it was very dangerous for humans-2 to go about much without masks, although the Office of the Chancellor had state-of-the-art sanitation systems, and Kaeda put enough trust into the system to remove her mask on entry. The guards held their posts, but I knew what was coming and rose eagerly as Asher came into the room bearing the basket. “Blueberries, anyone?” I darted forward and grabbed a handful, holding them up to my face and getting a smear of juice across my mouth and nose. Asher was right. I’d never smelled anything quite like it. They tasted…wonderful, like waking up and seeing the color blue for the first time. Tears welled into my eyes. I turned away. Sometimes the world seemed like such a foreign place, alien and dangerous. The blueberries were like a welcoming smile from the world, at long last. ________ During the next several months I didn’t see Kaeda much, but Asher seemed more at peace, as if he’d found new reserves to cope with the immense stresses on him. Asher was generally quite tolerant and easy going, but there had been times when he’d snapped at the staff, others when he’d raged at how the virus seemed to circumvent his every effort. But now, Asher seemed to take it with more equanimity. He smiled occasionally, even made jokes. We all worked tirelessly to establish the lunar outpost to support a permanent community of humans-1. The outpost would extend the lunar station on the rim of Shackleton Crater near the South Pole of the Moon. Shackelton Station would become Shackleton Outpost, but the station was an international facility and the extension had to be coordinated across the participating nations. It was easy to send up new habitation modules and then send up 100 people. The problem was to figure out how to do it so they didn’t require a steady stream of food and supplies from earth. The supply requirements could potentially far exceed the initial outlays, and could form an unending drain on economies already strapped for combating the virus. Asher persuaded Germany, Japan and a few other countries to support the Outpost and most of the remaining nations to at least agree to allow the station to be extended. In return, the supporting countries would get to choose some of those 100 “colonists”. Meanwhile, the human-1 population continued to decline, falling to 60% of its maximum of ten billion occurring some 20 years before. The press had taken to referring to the population-1 percentage in terms of school letter grades. The fall to A- had been quite slow, occurring over 10 years, but the B’s seemed to pick up speed, and we went through the C’s in only 3 years. As the media ever reminded us, humanity-1 was at F. We were now failing. D@arwin was a puzzle like cryptography, easy to compute one-way, but nearly impossible to compute another, even knowing the algorithm. The virus itself was simple and easy to modify, but treating it required understanding its effects on the human-1 body, something infinitely more complex. D@rwin could evolve new variants in weeks but defeating each new variant took months and months. The community of scientists was already centered on the problem, drawing a huge funding base from governments and from the Harriett Foundation, by then larger than a fifth of nations of the world. Beating the virus would require tremendous, continuing resources and hence a strong economy. But how do you grow an economy with a shrinking population? The restaurant and tourism markets had collapsed several years before. Urban property values had tanked, and new construction was nearly non-existent except for sanitation remodeling. Three quarters of the world’s airlines had fallen into bankruptcy and many had been nationalized. Only a handful of department stores remained, as few people would risk venturing from their homes to shop. Health insurance companies failed as large portions of the world population-1 sought hugely expensive, cutting edge treatments. Federal banks around the world had dropped interest rates to near zero. The full panoply of economic incentives was put into play, but they were still not nearly enough to heal ailing economies. The trick was to speed up the flow of money. It needed to flow around the world free and fast, like electricity. But people were too slow. We just couldn’t spend money fast enough. We were like human operators on the old phone switching system. Every transaction required a human operator to patch it through. There was a maximum throughput and even if that were attained, a group of economists proclaimed, it would not be enough to compensate for a significantly declining population. More and more people-1 were living as permanent fixtures of their homes and jacking themselves into game consoles and virtual worlds, meeting and interacting through avatars, often fanciful or exaggerated representations of themselves in the digital realm, ever suave and ready with a quick response. The most sophisticated avatars, like the Chancellor’s, looked and acted almost completely real, just like the man-2 himself. Avatars couldn’t get infected, at least not in the meat realm, and they had become quite sophisticated at predicting an individual’s interests and responses. The trick was to give them authority to spend money, to make financial commitments on behalf of their principals. Everyone realized how dangerous this was. In the early days quite a few avatars were defrauded out of large sums of money, but eventually safeguards were put into place. Asher and the Finance and Technology Ministers had a large role in making that happen. Avatars were now less likely to be swindled than were even their principals. With money thus unencumbered by human limitations, the economy was free to ratchet up into a new gear. This was most practical in the virtual realm. Suddenly, every piece of information, every image, sound, and virtual space could be backed by a financial transaction. Everything that could contain advertising content did, and to receive information without advertisement cost money. In the virtual realm Nieland®—I admit to spending a fair amount of time there, avatars performed hundreds of micro-transactions a second on behalf of their principals and occasional larger transactions mediated by strict spending restrictions and government oversight. The principals made money themselves by hosting advertisements, by participating in Nieland®, and by creating their own virtual content. I’d made a little bit of money there myself. In a short time, the virtual economy began to rival the real one. After an initial decline, the world economy began to recover. More and more resources could be devoted to fighting the Code Plague, to researching new antiviral technologies and to preventing the spread of the disease by sanitation and by tightly controlling the ways in which humans-1 could congregate. Social interaction acquired a new layer. People now interacted mostly through avatars. In public, even the Chirals took to wearing masks. Even close friends faced one another impassively, rigid masks locked in a knowing smile or wry grin, while their avatars conversed, principals chiming in occasionally, like directors in a live drama rehearsal. Having solved the problem of economic decline, there were now huge research funds available for fighting d@rwin. But it was not enough to simply throw money at the problem. The Code Plague was like a huge engine speeding down the tracks. Humanity-1 needed to get out of the way, to move off in perpendicular direction and get off the tracks. Maybe extraterrestrial colonies were one such direction, assuming we could prevent the virus from ever spreading there, but I echoed Chancellor’s doubts. I was not hopeful. ________ When Kaeda, as a dual citizen of Japan, was selected to be one of its lunar colonists, Asher was heart-broken. It was rumored among the staff that Asher had even asked Kaeda to marry him and that she had refused. The rumor had the ring of truth and I was not surprised by it. I’d seen Kaeda’s slight recoil at Asher’s touch, her micro-expressions of distaste. I’d wondered if chirality had anything to do with it. Bigotry was still a huge social problem and conflicts arose in all walks of life. Even though humans-1 and chirals were completely identical, you could easily distinguish humans-1 by their sanitation masks—even now, when cosmetic masks were quite fashionable among chirals. Chiral masks were clearly non-functional—flexible and delicate with splashes of glittery color interwoven, and often left the mouth or other parts of the face uncovered. To most chirals, humans-1 were objects of pity, effectively disabled by the strictures of sanitation and disease prevention, largely confined to gigantic Clean Centers, and like true cripples, having little freedom to come and go. But many Second and Third Generation chirals remembered the treatment they themselves received at the hands of the humans-1, when chirals were yet newcomers and humans-1 still ran the world—the outright disgust for, and occasional persecution of a group of people based on a condition of their birth that was completely beyond their control. Humans-1 got what they deserved, many chirals thought. They’ d trashed the world, poisoning the air and the oceans, and exhibited unmitigated cruelty both to themselves and to chirals. Now the Karmic cycle had turned. But I didn’t suspect Kaeda of bigotry. As director of the Fawke Lab, Kaeda worked with chirals every day of her life and had a direct hand in their success. No, I suspected the reason was much more personal. Asher was formally of a different species. Keada and Asher would never be able to reproduce without sophisticated genetic engineering. In fact, unprotected sex could even result in a severe immune reaction. Kaeda’s very body rejected Asher. There was no question that she’d be able to bring a baby to term naturally. It would have come to term in an oven, mediated by state-of- the-art technology. I remembered Kaeda’s disgust in describing the manner of Asher’s birth. That was not the way she wanted to have a child. After six-months of training and quarantine, Kaeda stood ready to board the spacecraft Elpis resting in its launch cradle at the end of long, enclosed maglev track at the International Launch Facility. The facility was nestled in the saddle between the Shira and Kibo volcanic cones on the western side of Mount Kilimanjaro, taking advantage of the mountain’s tremendous height and also its proximity to the equator, so that the spin of the Earth actually participated in propelling the craft into orbit. The name Kilimanjaro had come from the Swahili words for White Mountain, but it had been many years since the mountain was actually white. The snows were long melted away to reveal a barren, rocky surface, harsh and unremitting, mirroring the wasted landscape that would become the human-1 refuge. The enclosed maglev track snaked 800 meters up the Kibo cone to extend another 150 meters beyond the Kilimanjaro’s highest point of 4600 meters, hanging in space without apparent support over the Kibo crater like the barrel of a huge rifle. In a short while, Kaeda and her fellow colonists would be fired from the mouth of that barrel at well over 1000 kph—as fast as a bullet. The solid rocket boosters would engage like a muzzle flash, carrying the Elpis through the sky into a temporary orbit before jettisoning the boosters and proceeding on to the Moon. The press was barred outside the sanitary area, but the Chancellor’s staff was allowed through despite the risk of infection. Even though this was the third launch of colonists, the leaders of several countries had arrived to see them off. The Japanese and German launch ceremonies had already occurred. The prospective colonists looked bored and antsy. They’d already been waiting several hours for the launch. After the singing of the National Anthem, Asher rose to the podium, bracketed by flags of country and the International Community. The Chancelleric Seal gleamed behind him, its broad phoenix wings seeming to encompass the entire crowd. “I hope you all are going to get lots of frequent flier miles for this.” Even though I knew the speech, I couldn’t help but laugh. Asher went on to speak about Hope, Perseverance, and the power of Human Ingenuity. Then he descended from the podium and shook each colonist’s hand, greeting each by name and thanking them for their arduous endeavor. When he got to Kaeda he paused and placed his hand on her shoulder, speaking with a formality that revealed his awareness of the millions of viewers tuned in to the event, the huge swarm of fleyes flitting about the room on digitally reconstructed points of perception. “Dr. Kaeda Akiyama, you have been a special friend to me for many years even in disagreement. It has been a great pleasure and honor knowing you. I’d like to personally thank you for all you’ve done for me and for the whole world. I must say, I’ll be shocked if a couple of hundred-thousand miles will stop you from continuing to challenge my missteps in your usual emphatic manner. I’m already beginning to question the wisdom of that new phone system we set up, heh heh. I’ll never forget those blueberries you once brought me. So I have something for you to remember me by.” He reached into a pocket and removed a small felt box, opening it and removing something glittery on a chain. I zoomed in. It was in the shape of a small maple leaf, lacy and translucent but gleaming with the sheen of various metals, copper, gold, and perhaps platinum. Asher reached around to fasten it around her neck. Tears welled into my eyes as I remembered that Kaeda was Japanese for Maple Leaf. Then Asher hugged Kaeda. She closed her eyes and hugged back, crushing Asher to her chest. When Asher stepped back and Kaeda opened her eyes, they glimmered just like mine. There would be no maple leaves where she was going. ________ Asher rested in his hospital bed behind the glass partition, looking weak and sallow. A nasogastric tube snaked in through his left nostril. How I wanted to be in there with him! But even the attending physician wore full HAZMAT attire, bulky and clumsy like a space suit. The doctor even moved in slow motion like a space walker, but merely to take extreme care to avoid puncturing the suit. D@rwin was now lethal to humans-1 and chirals alike. Scientists didn’t think it was possible for the virus to have morphed itself to produce right-handed proteins. Chiral engineering hadn’t been part of its initial algorithm. Rather someone had to program it to produce right-handed proteins. So now there was d@rwin-2. It was hard to imagine what sort of misguided figure would do this. Was it some human-1 looking for vengeance over perceived mistreatments? Was it some chiral having a psychotic breakdown and wanting to commit suicide taking as many with them as possible? What is it about humanity that it is its own biggest threat, that it seems to long for self-annihilation? Among those of us who still cared, who still valued life and felt there was some point to our existence, brief though it might be, d@rwin-2 was an immensely unifying event. There was no more talk about extinction of humanity-1, and of humanity-2 its cheery inheritors. We were all in the same ship now, and that ship was slowly sinking. We all wore the same masks by necessity and chirals now regretted ever wearing them as statements of fashion. Now, we all huddled together in our Clean Centers, living virtually and sneaking out at dusk like rabbits under the eyes of the Wolf, terrified of the danger but ever-needing sustenance. Human interaction attained the somberness of a ceremony. Each meeting of people might entail an individual’s last words. Each action was taken with unutterable care. There was no future to redeem careless words, our petty self-involvements. Now was all the time we had. And Asher, that fool! When d@rwin-2 came along so many months ago, when it started killing so many chirals who’d thought themselves immune, Asher had been right out there in the midst of it, offering reassuring smiles in open air and pats on shoulders with the warm vulnerable flesh of his palm. How we’d all admired him then. He’d seemed so invulnerable. If he could stand there among us without fear, then maybe there really was hope. But then he, too, was struck down, and we all realized what fools we were. The very words seemed graven across all of human history like an epitaph. What fools we were… The doctors said Asher had only days to live. One of the other aides said that she was coming. None of us had to ask who she was. Kaeda Akiyama was coming down from the Moon. I knew Asher would want to see her. I didn’t think there had ever been another woman for him. The Shackleton Colony was now well established with over 1000 of the world’s top engineers and scientists. It had been nearly two years since the original group of colonists blasted through the muzzle of the Space Rifle. In that time, great strides were made in lunar manufacturing. The Colonists were now mining metals from the asteroid that impacted the Moon to form Shackleton Crater and manufacturing their own habitation modules. They were still largely dependent on Earth for many volatiles and for plastics. It would be several years before they could bootstrap themselves to be fully independent of Earth assuming all the technical problems could even be solved. With d@rwin-2 it looked like Shackleton would not be able to count on support from Earth for very long. There might in fact not be any support to be had. We initiated studies to find out what it would take Shackleton to be able to survive without any support from Earth. Shackleton was well on the way to solving problems of materials and manufacturing. The chief remaining obstacle was one of expertise. The colonists continually relied on Earth for technical support, to diagnose a medical condition or to solve technical problems for which they didn’t have either the research facilities or the know-how. To maintain an independent colony at the modern technological level required a huge base of technical skill. Even gathering the expertise in one discipline, such as medicine, required hundreds and hundreds of people and vast amounts of hardware, such as medical imaging and diagnostic devices. Then, even if they did have all these doctors gathered in one room, there was still the problem of preserving the expertise through subsequent generations. So, they needed a medical school and even more doctors to run it. Then they needed a population large enough to fill the school with students. All in all, experts predicted it would take a colony of at least 100,000 people to preserve technical knowledge through to subsequent generations, or face a slow decline resulting in the eventual collapse of the colony. So, despite their successes, it still wasn’t clear the colony would ever be fully independent, that it could survive without Earth. Scientists still hadn’t addressed the question of whether it was even possible to have healthy progeny in the Moon’s low gravity, at a sixth of Earth’s gravity. However, this question was rapidly being answered. One colonist had had a baby and another was pregnant. The effect of the Moon’s low gravity on fetal development had been a complete unknown as was its effect on infant development. Would the baby develop normally? Did infant development depend on the stronger Earth gravity? Would the bones grow normally? Certainly osteoblasts, the cells responsible for bone growth, were sensitive to the stresses due to a higher gravity. Scientists predicted that someone raised entirely on the moon would have bones that were thin and weak, and there could very well be other complicating factors. They might never be able to return to Earth or face being lifelong cripples there. More and more the realm of scientific research was becoming a Wild West where freewheeling mavericks did what they chose without regard to law, ethics, or codes of conduct. It was as if we’d received too many bad tricks in the saloon card game of our society and were trying to ‘shoot the moon’ on an improbable victory in the midst of our great losses, from performing dangerous human experiments to sending huge numbers of people up to a lunar station for which there was no likelihood of continuing support from Earth, and hence little hope of success. ________ Kaeda arrived at the hospital without fanfare and was quietly admitted past the security detail. She wore a black blazer over a cream colored shirt, black slacks, and sensible shoes. Her straight black hair was held up by a fanciful enameled comb. The maple leaf charm gleamed around her neck in its multi-metallic hues, seeming to capture the essence of fall, the Autumn of our World. The doctors hadn’t wanted to allow her in to see Asher, but she was immune to contagion from him, and having just returned from the quarantine-like environment at Shackleton, there was little likelihood she was bearing on her skin or clothes something that could affect the Chancellor. I bounced a laser off the glass wall of the isolation chamber to detect the vibrations imparted by their voices, filtering out the whir of machinery and hum of air handlers. “Kaeda.” Asher’s voice was dry and raspy, his breathing shallow and heavy. “Asher, you look terrible!” She leaned a hip against the high bed and took his hand. “Thanks, Kaeda. You look…great too.” “Ahhh, Asher. What have you done to yourself?” “I’ve just been, you know, out…saving the world.” “The world doesn’t need any more martyrs. Enough people have died already. Someone’s got to survive to bring us all through this. I’d hoped that would be you.” “I guess I…screwed up again, didn’t I? I’ll…do better next time. I…promise.” “Next time, I’ll marry you.” “You mean it?” “Yes, I guess I really do.” “Thank you. That…means a lot to me. And don’t think I…won’t hold you to that.” “Did the doctors talk to you about the genetic samples I asked for?” “Sure, no problem. I was just glad…you didn’t ask me…to pee in a cup. I don’t have much…control down there these days.” Asher’s lightheartedness was belied by a dry cough that seemed to leave him utterly exhausted. “Thank you. This will help our research immensely. Asher, we’re on the border of a new breakthrough, something that could end this terror, at least for some.” “That’s great, Kaeda. I have…always had great faith in you.” Kaeda visited Asher for many hours over the next three days. She told him about research advances at Shackleton. She talked about her own research in chiral engineering and the difficulties of working with the limited lunar facilities. Then she just read to him for hours and hours. At many points Kaeda became choked up, her throat constricting as if incapable of forming the words. But eventually she loosened up and the story acquired its own momentum, refusing to be denied. Even if it had not been my job to do so, I would have listened, fascinated by the cadence of her voice and the love and sadness that flowed into the story from deep within her. I didn’t know how the words passed from her lips. “In old days there were angels who came and took people by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet people are led away from threatening destruction. A warm hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backwards to the darkness that lies behind them, and in that hand is love.” On the evening of the third day, Asher slipped quietly away. ________ Dr. Akiyama remained on Earth and resumed directorship of the Fawke Lab for Human Chiral Engineering. Surely, she knew the dangers she was facing in remaining on Earth, but perhaps she had her own statement to make. Maybe she had something more important to attend to than dying. Fifteen months later, the news media hailed the birth of a new baby girl whose genome had been engineered to produce proteins in which individual amino acids varied in chirality. The girl, named Aiko, was the child of Dr. Kaeda Akiyama and an unnamed father. I queried on the name. It meant Child of Love. The media reported that the child was neither human-1 nor human-2 and that she would be immune to most existing diseases regardless of chirality. Her birth did not signify the creation of humanity-3. Rather, the new breakthrough allowed each new child to have a completely unique set of chiral orientations within the amino acids making up each protein. Each new child would be a species unto herself. Scientists anticipated that such “meso-humans” would always be immune to d@rwin as the virus would not have billions of similar individuals to train against. As for me, I could have continued in the Office of the Chancellor, but I decided to have my detection and sensing implants removed. Sometimes you just see too much. I would take some time away and see family and friends. Maybe I would return some day as a political researcher or speech-writer. But somewhere out there was a boy named Navier I very much wanted to meet, well, if not face-to-face, at least in person. Online we’d seemed to have so much in common. I wondered if we’d be of the same species. |