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Part 1 is re-write of something I posted last week, having incorporated some feedback. Thankyou Kitten!
Parts 2 and 3 are entirely new, and conclude this work for now.
3500 words split over 3 postings - I guess that counts as a short story?!?
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Carol did not have the luxury of travelling to and from work under the regular hours of curfew, so she was forced to share the subway with degenerates. She sat huddled over a book and acted out the message: ‘I am self-absorbed. I will not respond to you. I'm not worth talking to.’
She had lost a patient that day. Her eyes were locked on the book, but in her mind the rhythmic clackety-clack of the train on the track had taken her back to the beeping of the heart rate monitor, the blood that gushed from a jagged gash in the side of the woman’s head that went deep in to her brain. The woman had been thrown sprawled through her windscreen, and impaled herself head first on the iron railings of a churchyard. Carol’s team were internationally renowned emergency brain surgeons, and she had known the moment she had first seen Selina Soyuz that there was nothing they could do. All Selina’s wealth, and power, and influence did nothing to help her that day. The heart rate monitor beeped, accelerated wildly towards a climax, then stopped.
As the train pulled in to West 85th Carol stood up, and began the short walk home. Broadway was wet from recent rain. Pedestrians moved purposefully with their shoulders hunched, and their eyes facing the sidewalk, avoiding taking in anything of their surroundings. Puddles reflected the geometric zigzags of neon shop signs that competed for attention with street salesmen and beggars. At every corner a gaggle of combative pedestrians bawled at the lights of taxis that streaked past in both directions, their tyres swooshing rain-washed tarmac without concern for who or what their backsplash might hose.
She was smartly dressed, in her thirties, with long brunette hair that stuck to her head in the rain. She was attractive enough to draw attention if she wanted to, but she did not want to. Not ever. Someone was stumbling towards her. She sensed him in time to avoid being forced to acknowledge him, tilted her umbrella so that it covered her eyes and veered away before he was able to ask her for money.
You could still smell Broadway from her apartment on West 90th, like a thousand unwashed armpits. Brownstone apartment blocks lined the gently sloping side street, each one with three stone steps leading to a sheltered porch, large enough for one man to sleep without getting rained on, if he curled up in a ball. Carol held her hand up to the fingerprint monitor and the door to the communal stairwell buzzed open. Like Carol, most people here were second and third generation genetically enhanced professionals. Well paid, well dressed and well connected, but not rich like Selina Soyuz.
Carol and her husband Michael lived on the ground floor. She fingerprinted herself in to their immaculate open-plan apartment. It smelt reassuringly of spray-can polish and baby. They always kept the place 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, 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 genetic optimisation 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. Those who had the wealth, the vanity and the dynastic ambition bid furiously against each other for the services of those few scientists who could practice the technology. 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 in the family; the top political leaders and athletes. These super-rich pioneers spawned the first genetically optimised children, against which the naturally born had no chance of competing.
The runaway success of these children led to an explosion in demand for the technology. Governments led campaigns to persuade more scientists to take up the optimisation profession, and companies began buying and selling the DNA of the role models that parents had for their children. A market was created, and parents competed furiously to ensure that their offspring would be best optimised for success.
Each generation that was born of the technology was more highly optimised than the last, as mankind finally became the master of his own evolution. Those few that could not afford the technology could not compete for jobs, and a genetic underclass was quickly created.
Michael and Carol frequently found themselves recalling the idealism that had led them to choose natural conception. Like bad actors at an audition, they would recite the reasons that had seemed so convincing, but which now sounded hollow and naïve to the point of carelessness.
At around the time that Lisa was conceived there had been a backlash to optimisation. Eminent scientists had warned of a risk to the gene pool, and a movement had emerged that promoted a child’s right to choose their own career, free from the pressure of optimisation. Michael and Carol, who had the benefit of being third generation optimised, knew that a naturally conceived child would benefit from highly optimised DNA from both of them. They had no way of knowing that Carol carried a recessive genetic mutation that would mean Lisa was born without a thumb. Seventy years earlier it would have been little more than a blemish. But in a world where children were everything their parents had chosen them to be, it made her an outcast.
*
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 genetically optimised 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.
Often they would discuss their desire to provide Lisa with a brother. They both agreed that a well-optimised sibling would provide a way for Lisa to connect with other optimised children. They also knew that Lisa would need to be cared for long after they had gone, and hoped that a brother could take on this responsibility.
“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 after curfew, on the evening of Lisa’s first birthday. 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.”
They had been repeating the conversation since Lisa had been born and Carol had shown no sign of repenting, so Michael finally agreed to the use of donor DNA.
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