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*****
Appreciate any comments on this, which is intended as chapter 1 of something slightly longer. It's my first attempt to create a slightly futuristic world, and I'm not sure if I'm succeeding.
*****
From West 90th, about a hundred steps away from Broadway, you could still smell a thousand unwashed armpits and hear the swoosh of rubber tyres through rain-washed tarmac. Brownstone apartment blocks lined the gently sloping side street, each one with three stone steps leading up to a sheltered porch, large enough for one man to sleep without getting rained on, if he curled up in a ball. The entry-phones were all fingerprint controlled – no keys required in this salubrious part of the city. Residents were mostly second and third generation genetically enhanced professionals. Well paid, but not rich in a fourth-generation ‘Ferraris, yachts and champagne’ way.
Michael and Carol Bloomington-Normal were typical of the area. Well dressed and well connected, they lived in an immaculate open-plan apartment that smelt of spray-can polish and baby, and that was always ready for visitors. They had one infant daughter called Lisa, who was disfigured, and whose room was meticulously well appointed with every infant-luxury that money could buy. Michael and Carol loved Lisa, but her disfigurement was cloying dirt that stuck to their shoes and stained their tracks. It invited condemnation from strangers, and polite silence from friends. Carol bore it worst. The knowledge that it was her DNA that had contributed Lisa’s disfigurement left her cruelly exposed to censure, like a hedgehog without spines. When eye contact threatened she would hunch herself up, keep walking and pretend to be staring in to the face of her unnatural child.
It had been four generations since pre-selection technology had sanitised the messy randomness of sex, conception and natural selection. Four generations during which accidents like Lisa had been consigned to the unspeakable post-curfew couplings of criminals and the poor, in trailer parks and dumpsters.
It had been an expensive technology at first. Only a few scientists could confidently pre-select the genes that would define their client’s child as intended. Those who had the wealth, the vanity and the dynastic ambition to mould their offspring bid furiously against each other for the services of those few reliable scientists. Captains of industry who believed their success was programmed in to their genes; celebrity beauties who did not want to risk a rogue red-head ruining the family tree; the top political leaders and athletes. These super-rich pioneers spawned children that were genetically optimised for a purpose in life, against which the naturally born had no chance of competing.
The runaway success of the 1G babies led to an explosion in demand for the technology. Governments led campaigns to persuade more scientists to take up the pre-selection profession, and companies began buying the sperm and ovaries of the highly intelligent, the beautiful and the charismatic, correctly anticipating that they could sell these on to the next generation of pre-selection users.
Both Michael and Carol’s grandparents had been pre-selected as part of the second generation. Being able to trace back three generations of genetic optimisation gave Carol and Michael considerable cachet, as well as the benefit of rapidly accelerated family genetics. Michael was a 3G architect – he, his father and his grandfather had all had their genes optimised for success as architects, and had earned renown within the profession. Carol was a 3G medic, and was similarly successful.
*
At six o’clock in the morning, and at six thirty and eleven o’clock every night the curfew-horn sounded it’s long, harsh klaxon. The sound streaked through buildings and streets like a low flying jet-fighter, setting windows rattling, and bringing a momentary, eerie calm to the city’s clatter. Then, when the noise had passed, the scuttling began. Like a tide of beetles, the naturally conceived migrated to their night-time shelters, crumbling tenements, and dumpsters or hid themselves and their brown-paper-wrapped bottles in derelict buildings and wasteland, away from the prying eyes of the curfew. Within minutes the streets were cleaned, so that the pre-selected could travel freely to and from work, and go out at night without fear of muggings and DNA hijacks.
The siren was like barbed wire on the eardrums of Carol and Michael, who were forced to think of Lisa. Sometimes it would be a fleeting thought that would spike the day with a hint of subconscious melancholy. Other times it would spark full-scale parental discussions about how they might enforce the curfew on Lisa, or how she could make friends with their 3G peers’ children.
Frequently they would find themselves recalling the reasons they had opted for natural conception for Lisa. Haltingly they would list them, like bad actors at an audition: there had been speculation of a risk to the collective gene pool as pre-selection led to increasing genetic specialisation. Michael and Carol had been young and adventurous. They had relished the idea that everything about their child, from its gender to its ultimate career decision, would be a mystery that would unfold throughout its life. Michael was feeling the pressure of pre-selection – wondering what it would be like to be in business, or art, or anything other than architecture. They had reasoned that with 3G parents, their child would inherit highly accelerated genetics, so that in the worst case it would be more than capable of peering with 2G children.
They had chosen nature for their child through a sense of adventure and of idealism and, like so many idealists, nature had taken the opportunity to remind them that cosseting impressions of comfort and order frequently mask a brutally random reality.
Seventy years earlier, when people still struggled with Down’s syndrome, and autism, and physical handicaps of all kinds, missing a thumb on one hand would have been little more than a blemish. But in a world where children were everything their parents had chosen them to be and only the poorest had to run the messy risk of natural selection, it made her an outcast. This was one of the reasons that Carol and Michael wanted her to have a brother: to give her some social standing once they had gone.
“I’d like you to be the genetic mother, Carol. You’re brilliant, talented, beautiful and I love you. I want to see you in his face like I do in Lisa’s. And they’re 99% successful in screening out that sort of genetic defect now,” Michael said one evening at curfew. Like he always did, he offered love, reassurance and a hint of emotional blackmail. It was never enough to persuade Carol that she would not be the 1% for whom pre-screening would fail.
“You know what happened to Lisa,” she would say, with sharp finality. “I’ll be the best mother that I can be to her brother, but I don’t want my DNA in there messing things up for him, like it has done for her.”
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Wow!!