Science Fiction
There are many experts who believe that, while most current exciting developments have been in computers and software, the next wave will be biotech-driven. From where we stand now, humans gaining power to control the manifestation of genes would feel like magic. The complexity of our ecosystem is so much greater than we understand, leaving possibilities from devestation to utopia, and just about any stop inbetween.
The orange is for energy, the green for focus, and the midnight blue for sleep. They line the shelves, spells in handy bottles, flavored to taste. Berry and citrus on the left, chocolate and cake batter flavors on the right. I shoulder my way through the perpetual crowd to the pharmacy. The businessman standing by the bottles of cunning gives me a dirty look, like he's some sort of badass or something. Whatever. My new flavor isn't even available to the public.
The bored clerk reads my prescription. Once, twice, then she swallows her gum and runs to get her boss. He comes out, white lab coat still pressed from the cleaners, and takes out his reading glasses. He nods and goes into the back once more.
My dad stood in the doorway, holding his datapad in his hand. I sat cross-legged on the floor, guitar tucked under my arm, my fingertips burning against the strings.
"What's this?" he said, pointing to his e-mail.
Paolo was in the middle of it when Lisa walked in. He had been toying with the tiny gold pill for nearly an hour, pressing it against his thin trembling lips, tasting its burning sweetness on his tongue. He had been careful to allow just the tiniest of doses into his system--until Lisa returned.
She burst in unexpectedly, shooting into the room like a bullet through glass.
He was an impulse buy.
...choose from a wide variety of the finest genes. Galactic athletes, interstellar stars, and even Dr. Habber's own genetic material is on file in our banks. Remember, with the right combination of traits, you'll be giving your child the best start to a successful life!
"Can't you turn that off?" Ned asked. "Is there a reason I have to suffer that insult every time I show up for a check-up? How do you think that makes me feel?"
The waiter had just set our dinners in front of us when Marlie stiffened and dropped her fork.
"Keith," she gasped, "it's time."
Even this close to the desert, the sun finds enough cloud on which to paint its retirement colors. Turner Bray sits beside an almost-dry stream under a Joshua tree while the oranges and yellows and reds and pinks fade into one another, and listens to the birds.
They are not Original birds, of course; the stores of avian DNA were among the many things damaged on the voyage here, centuries ago. They might look like Original birds, and hatch from eggs like Original birds, but they are partly carbon filament and nanotubes, and they grow tiny processors in their brains to guide them--with varying degrees of success--toward Original bird behavior.
"Sleep. Six to eight hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days of the year. Adds up to a lot of time, right?" Diana Tregald swung her hand up like a conductor and her audience murmured its assent. "But if we have learned nothing from SleepNote's meteoric rise and crash these past two years, it is that we need sleep. It is, in fact, a biological imperative. Essential to rebuild ourselves both physically and mentally."
She paused the presentation on a collage of headlines: Sleep Drug Blamed for Office Shooting; Elephant Made Me Do it, Man Claims; 1.5 Million Dead from Stress-Related Disease; Memory Loss Treatment at All-Time High.
Most of Noma's study friends were growing their own boys with the new Vampire, Werewolf, or Wizard Seed kits. Her best friend Celestine invited Noma to the grow room in her family compartment to take a look at a half-grown vamp.
"I specified the golden hair and dark eyebrows," Celeste said, "but he opened his eyes for the first time yesterday, and they're this weird greenish color. I ordered sky blue. Skies were blue, right?"
Marva wanted to keep an open mind, but she suspected that Doctor Kamer wasn't about to help her. Maybe it was the background music playing in his office. Baroque sonatas. Too damn serene. Over-confident. Doctors had ruined her life and this one was like all the rest. And then there was the curved furniture, and the moonscape on his flix. So he had the kind of income that could buy a vacation in space. Blood money, squeezed from other people's misery.
"So Mrs. Gundersen," he said. "Why are you here today?"
You know how it goes. You wake up on a Friday thinking that it's a Saturday, and you lie there in bed for a full minute listening to your wife breathe, thanking God that you don't have to trudge in to the digital salt mines and sit in front of your computer all day. You think of your cramped little office with its north-facing window filled with sorry bonsai trees, happy that you don't have to go in. Then you remember a certain meeting, and the weekend illusion collapses, so you resign yourself to reality, to the mundane motions of shower and shave.
"What are you doing up so early?" asks your wife sexily from the pillow zone, and as you straighten your tie you wish you hadn't yet. Is it worth a little re-tie for a hallowed a.m. koochie-koo? Part of you, the influential part, votes yay.
The packed concert hall was far from silent. People whispered to their neighbors, fancy clothing rustled, jewelry chimed. In the wings, William Reis waited, the sound of his rapidly thumping heart filling his ears.
A sharp tug on his collar dragged his eyes down. Emily's pale hands, beautiful still though her skin was wrinkled and growing translucent, straightened his lapels. The charcoal gray suit belonged to her second son. It was tight across the middle and a little long in the leg but he had forgotten that he would need concert attire until the last minute.
Sandra Barclay awoke to find a whole day of her life missing. She didn't go looking for it, she was used to missing days. On her bedside table the expected note rested, folded in an inverted "V" on the pad it had been torn from. Upon this page Sandra's eyes met a confident, looping scrawl, a sharp contrast to her own fastidious lettering:
June put her nametag on. It was blank. She stepped past the flying carpet hovering beside her bed and whistled. On the wall, the pages of the calendar flapped past April and May, held themselves open until the name "June" could wiggle out from under the mountain wildflowers and attach itself to her nametag.
She smoothed her white waitress's blouse and modest skirt, hoping they would stay modest this particular day.
This was before the change, before the world became transparent as they like to say. I was a thirty-something woman with a son I could not understand, a mortgage that sapped my savings, and no husband to call my own. My world was lies, from simple fibs about age and weight, to complex manufactures concerning my husband's prolonged "absence." Truth was I had never married and never been asked.
Why did I agree to the procedure? I was a mother losing my boy to forces beyond my control. It was a no-brainer at the time.
This city is dying. Did you know that? There hasn't been a press release, but if you pay attention you can find the signs of decay yourself.
It's breathing heavier, for starters. Listen to its breathing next time you're lying in bed at night. I mean really listen. It's laboring just a little more than you remember it, I promise. Soon it'll start having real trouble. You'll be kept awake at night while it takes desperate, ragged, sucks through its pores.
Never mind the slithy toves; let me tell you about the time all the cats splooped into floons.
The streets smelled of trash and human waste as James held his daughter close to his side. He knew better than to let her wander ahead or stray behind. James wasn't eager for her company, but he was told she had to be there. Safety regulations, they said to him. As if safety was any of their concern.
They passed stores with windows boarded, garbage cans burning in decrepit alleys. He pulled her closer. James shivered under his thin coat. The sky was dirty, stained with a dozen shades of gray and peppered with streaks of sunlight seeping through.
Biotech
There are many experts who believe that, while most current exciting developments have been in computers and software, the next wave will be biotech-driven. From where we stand now, humans gaining power to control the manifestation of genes would feel like magic. The complexity of our ecosystem is so much greater than we understand, leaving possibilities from devestation to utopia, and just about any stop inbetween.
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2058-W09-3
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