Science Fiction Story: Amalgam: Gene Pollution

A science fiction story about genetically modified humans:

If Ktashka Naladauk didn’t do something fast, babies around the world were going to grow up with misshapen hands and faces, overgrown tongues, stunted growth and permanently juvenile minds.

Photo: wakeup-world.com

Primitive human offspring had always been accidental. Parents simply reproduced, never stopping to think what sort of genes they were passing down to their children, or what features, blemishes and even handicaps their combinations might cause. With civilization came the ability to custom-tailor a child’s genes in a complementary pattern, and as an added perk, to cater to the fancies of the parents.
And now, on One-Hundred-Fourth-Century Mars, there was the Amalgam. (In our terms, it was the Twenty-Eighth Century, but according to the calendar adopted by the Universal Summit of Sovereign Planets and Federal Alliances of 2446, it was actually the One Hundred Fourth Century.) The Amalgam was made up of material from more than ten thousand individuals, male and female, over ninety-nine percent human and all born on Mars.

Naladauk, a Quality Control Specialist at the sprawling complex that housed the Amalgam, glanced at her reflection by force of habit as she walked past the shiny chrome panels that decorated the walls of the hallway outside her lab. And by force of habit, she put her hair back in place: that one lock that was always springing out, making her look like a mad scientist on good days, and just plain mad on bad ones. When she’d been little, she had blamed her parents. They’d been the ones who had chosen her geneticist, after all, and they’d been the ones who had filled out the forms for the geneticist to work from. But when she’d started learning about genetics procedures and genetics law, she’d realized the unruly lock was actually her geneticist’s fault alone, and there was nothing her parents could have done to prevent it. But she had also learned very quickly in her lab classes how virtually impossible it was not to let one or two annoying little features slip through.

But right now, she wasn’t worried about annoying little features. Right now, she was worried about Down Syndrome - an epidemic of it, if you could use that word to apply to a condition that couldn’t be ‘caught.’

She stepped to the comm and got her boss’ office. “We’ve got a mutation,” she said.

Jack Grady didn’t miss the gravity of her tone. “Be right there,” he answered. In twenty seconds, he was at her side. “How bad is it?” he asked.

“Bad,” she answered. “Twenty-first chromosome, and it’s not a minor case, either. We’re looking at severe Down’s.”

“You’ve double-checked your work?”

“Yeah, three times.”

“I’d like to get Priti to have a look at it, blind,” said Grady, “see if she comes up with the same thing.”

Naladauk nodded. She didn’t mind. But she already knew what Priti would find.
Naladauk was a graduate of Earth’s prestigious Faraday Academy, a progressive private technology school, both junior high and high school, located only a few miles from the Atlantic on North America’s beautiful Champlain Plateau. On the face of it, it was no different from a thousand other schools, but when people talked about the Faraday kids, they tended to use words such as phenom, prodigy, genius, wunderkind, super-child. The technologies these students developed were consistently ahead of the best work of the best students in the Empire’s top universities.

But it wasn’t just a school. In a way, it was also a town - a small, privately-owned town with a rather eccentric population. Because whenever a family wasn’t entirely comfortable with the thought of sending their child off to boarding school, Faraday gave them the option of moving on campus. Naladauk’s family hadn’t chosen to exercise that option; they’d stayed behind on Mars; but the presence of so many families gave the school a very different atmosphere. And Naladauk always wondered if that was why she’d stayed out of trouble, and whether that was why she found it relatively easy to get along with all sorts of people.

Like most of the other kids, she’d applied to Faraday because of its record, because she’d wanted to get the best technology education in the entire Human Empire. Her parents had encouraged her to apply to Faraday because it was tuition-free, admitting students solely on merit.

The Amalgam employed a lot of Martians. There were the security people who kept it safe from terrorists and pranksters, the maintenance people who kept it safe from weather and dust, and QC people like Naladauk who kept it safe from human error. There were the Customer Service Reps, who worked in shifts around the clock (it was always peak hour in one time zone or another) fielding inquiries from possible donors and potential customers. And then there were the geneticists. Because the Amalgam wasn’t like most other creations. It wasn’t like a bridge or a building or even a city park on Earth. It was like Mars.

Photo: longgame.com

Mars was, of course, a terraforming project. Buildings were always being built on Mars, but there always came a day for each building when it was complete. Mars itself was a living thing, a delicate collective organism of plants and animals, of oxygen and carbon dioxide, of water and sunshine and seeds and loam. They’d been building it for centuries, ever since its landmark beginning some six hundred years ago under the leadership of the legendary Kara Madaram, and they were still building it, would keep on building it, as long as there were people living on Mars.

It was the same with the Amalgam: it wasn’t a stagnant dead thing made of rock and wood and metal, it was a living, growing, developing thing like the embryos it helped produce. It responded to scientific discoveries, improved management methods and ethno-cultural trends, which meant that the Company had to employ a lot of geneticists to keep it from getting stale. Their job, one tended to gather from what the PR Department produced, was to screen potential donors and accept only those who were perfect in every way. That, of course, was impossible. By those standards, there wouldn’t be any Amalgam, because nobody’s genes are one hundred percent perfect. So what they really did was screen out certain problems and correct the rest in the lab.

It was Naladauk’s job to be their safety net, to catch their errors. Up to now she hadn’t needed to. She’d had this job for two years now, and this was the first time she’d found a problem.

Priti Svagna was another Faraday grad: a lot of Amalgam employees were. Sometimes that bothered her just a little. She was Martian, after all, and the Amalgam was the red planet’s Golden Child, Martian as Martian could be. So why couldn’t Mars have a school like Faraday, and keep their kids home?

It was Svagna’s day off and she was home, making soup out of leftovers, when the call came. She told Grady she’d be right there, asked her son to watch the soup, and went to the lab. Grady gave her a sample and wouldn’t tell her what it was, asked her to check it. She grumbled. “Where should I start looking?” she asked, but all Grady would do was shake his head.

Two hours later she was in his office. “You might have told me which chromosome,” she said reproachfully.

He shook his head again. “That could have planted an idea in your mind.”

“Well, it’s the twenty-first and it’s a simple fix,” she replied, “time-consuming but simple. May I go home now?”

“Priti, Priti,” he said, and wondered as he always did what she heard when he said that. Did she think he was giving her a compliment, that he was saying, ‘pretty Priti?’ If that’s the case, he thought, then let her think that, but she isn’t. I don’t know what her parents were thinking, because she’s not pretty at all. “You’re missing the herd for the zebras,” he told her. “Yes, it’ll be simple for me to alert Donor Screening. It’ll be simple for Kofi to assign a bunch of geneticists to overtime work and get rid of the flaw. It’s also simple to tell you that if you go home now, you may not have a job to come back to tomorrow.”

She stared at him like she was calling his bluff. “You really would fire me for refusing to work on my day off?” she asked.

“No!” he answered immediately, spitting the word out like she was being ridiculous. “Priti, no, of course not. What I’m trying to tell you is, this flaw wasn’t caused by some kind of slip-up in Donor Screening, at least not directly.”

She frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Before I answer,” he said, “I’d like to invite Ktashka to join us. I asked her to wait for your results.”

“Oh, sure.”

“I’m afraid we may have a much bigger problem than just one flawed gene,” he began, when Naladauk had come in and settled in a chair. “I fervently hope I’m mistaken, but it seems to me that this problem is showing all the signs of a cascade failure.”

Naladauk recoiled and her eyes grew wide, but Svagna pursed her lips skeptically. A genetic cascade failure, the Faraday teachers had said, was pure theory: nobody had ever actually seen it happen. Most of the students agreed that it was just a ghost story, invented by technophobes to discourage genetic research.

“Grady, I don’t know what’s gotten into you,” said Svagna. “The whole planet comes to us because the Amalgam has proven itself over time. And you’re sitting here trying to tell us that after all these years it suddenly, today, just decided to go unstable?”

Grady stared back at her, a dread calm in his eyes. “Yes,” he answered.

“Well,” Priti replied, like she was trying to shake off a bad dream, “this drama game is not for me; you’ll have to find someone else to play with you. Let’s inform Kofi so he can assign his overtime, and let me go home and kiss my son goodnight. There’ll have to be a temporary moratorium on new sales, of course, and a recall of all the samples that just went out. PR will say it’s just a delay, for precaution, and that will only reinforce the public’s trust in us. But it’s not going to cascade, come on!” She rose.

Grady shook his head. “I really hope you’re right, but from what I see, ten to one, as soon as the Donor Screening guys fix this trisomy, it’s just going to pop up in some other chromosome. But even if you’re right, there’s still one thing you’re forgetting.”

Svagna put her hand on the back of her chair. “What?”

“As soon as we put out the recall notice, the Imperial watchdogs are legally mandated to launch an investigation. We’re going to have snoops from Earth infesting every corner of this place.”

“A government compliance audit,” said Naladauk, thinking that maybe Svagna was right: Grady was starting to sound a bit dramatic.

“So?” Svagna replied. “We’re clean.”

“I’ll remind you both about the confidentiality agreements you signed when you started.”

“Yeah?” Even Svagna was beginning to look like she didn’t like where this was going.

“If you ladies will come with me,” said Grady, getting out of his chair.

He led them out of his office, off the QC wing, down six stories to the lobby and out the main front doors. The twenty or so buildings of the Amalgam complex cast dark shadows in the late afternoon sun, and the blue-shift of the oxygen-rich atmosphere mixed with the red dust whipped up by a recent storm to paint the entire sky in shades of purple.

The little group walked across the park-like central quad and down a red concrete sidewalk between two closely-spaced buildings: Main Administration and Public Relations. Grady turned toward a gate in a chain-link fence that surrounded a windowless cinder-block building only one storey high.

“We’re not going in there?” Naladauk asked.

“We are going in there,” answered Grady, who always had trouble replying to convoluted wordings.

“But it’s...” Svagna objected, and finished her sentence by gesturing toward the obnoxious red, black and white sign fastened to the fence.

“Radioactive?” said Grady. “Sometimes I don’t know what to make of that brain of yours, Priti. You don’t believe in genetic cascade failure, but you believe they’d keep nuclear waste in the middle of the Amalgam complex.”

“The isotopes,” Svagna replied defensively. “We use them all the time. We’ve got to get rid of them somewhere.”

“The isotopes are in the containment cylinders in lab storage,” Grady countered. “You use them all the time.”

“Not those isotopes, Grady, the rest of them.”

“That’s all the isotopes there are,” Grady told her. “Each lab has what they need. When they pick up your waste every night, it goes off-site. Nobody dumps it in a building in the middle of the complex.”

They waved their ID’s at the gate and when it clicked they went through it and Naladauk closed it behind them. At the door to the building they repeated the procedure and found themselves in a depressingly plain, narrow hallway.

Grady walked to a door and peered through its small window. After a few seconds he touched his imaginary hat to someone inside. Then he backed up and gestured to the window. “There are your isotopes,” he said, “if you want to have a look at them.”

Svagna looked first, and then Naladauk. The room inside had all the cheer that the hallway lacked. Several low tables dotted the room, each with its own collection of items. On one was a snack of cheese and crackers and fruit juice, on another, lumps of modeling clay of various colors and a few simple tools for working it. Another table was entirely covered with paper, and four tubes of finger paint lay lined up in the middle, their caps still screwed on. Creative scribbles lined the walls, and three huge origami birds hung from the ceiling. Naladauk counted four adults and twenty toddlers.

She felt Grady’s touch on her shoulder and looked back at him. “I’ll show you the next one,” he said, and led them down the hall to another door. This time he didn’t look in, just gestured toward the little window.

Naladauk looked first this time. This room looked a lot like the last one, except the children were younger. In place of tables and paint and finger foods, there were cribs and mats and mobiles and bottles. She started counting the care-givers, but Svagna was getting impatient. She removed her head from the window and commented, “Funny place for a daycare.”

“Really,” Svagna agreed, staring through the window. “Whose kids are these, anyway?”

“We’re getting to that,” said Grady. “There’s one more room I want you to see.” He led them on again, down a flight of stairs to what must have been the basement, into another hallway like the last one, and to a small window in a door again.

Svagna looked first, and she gasped and hogged the window for a long time. Naladauk tried to be patient, but Grady touched Svagna’s shoulder and Naladauk got her turn.

No wonder Svagna had gasped. This room had no little craft tables, no cribs, and no babysitters. Neatly arranged in rows and stacks like the books in an ancient library, were large jars - complicated jars with hoses and wires attached, that looked more like strange robotic squids than jars. And in each jar was a fetus.

She felt Grady’s touch on her shoulder again. “Sorry, but we have to limit how long we leave the light on.” he said. The room with the squid-jars went dark and Naladauk turned her attention back to Svagna and Grady.

“They’re trial babies,” he explained, “guinea pigs, in a test of whether the Amalgam can be used alone, without any other genetic material, to make babies with no parents. The kids I showed you first are the first batch to be viable - so far. The next one is looking good, and the third one is too soon to call.

Naladauk wondered how the previous batches had died, and whether they had suffered, but Svagna exclaimed, “Wow, that is amazing! Can you imagine the applications?”

Grady shook his head again. “Yeah,” he said.

“Parliament spent a lot of time imagining the applications, too: applications like manufactured armies and custom-made sweatshop labor. That’s why they made it illegal.”

Notes:

• I answered a call from Chainbooks.com to write just the first chapters for several novels, and Gene Pollution is one of them. If you'd like to contribute a chapter to Gene Pollution, or check out the other novels-in-progress at Chainbooks, click here.
• Thanks to The Third Sunday Blog Carnival for including this story in your February 17, 2012 edition.