Rjurik Davidson
BENJAMIN 2073
Gently lifting up the side of the tent… I soon make out in the pitchy darkness two phosphorus-like orbs, which slowly approach.… I can dimly discern by a light shooting up from a few leaves on the almost expiring fire, the long round body of the native wolf or tiger. I get a tighter grip on the handle of my tomahawk, ready to give a warm reception to my night visitor.
“Ellie! Ellie, it’s Benjamin. She’s in the cave. She’s giving birth!” Thien shook me gently awake.
“What time is it?” The darkness outside pressed against the window.
“Four a.m.”
Half asleep, I slipped into my exoskeleton, which clamped itself around my limbs, the little straps tightening magically, the supports clamping into place. It whirred and clicked me up to the command room. By the time I reached the images on the screen, my mind had kicked into gear.
She lay on her side, her back to the camera. We could see the tiger stripes on her hindquarters, all the way to her long stiff tail, but we couldn’t see her face until she raised her head, which might have belonged to a long-nosed dog or dingo. Her breath was coming in ragged gasps.
The other researchers had lost faith even before the funding cuts came. Carla had slouched out with her bags—her final words were: “We’ve only got one life. I’m not pissing mine into the wind any longer.” Samson hadn’t even bothered to explain himself. He had just stood on the helipad and shrugged when I looked at him questioningly. One by one they’d dropped like leaves from a dying tree, until only Thien and I remained.
Thien had once said that the Vietnamese had always been stubborn, that’s how they’d gained independence all those years ago, and that’s why he’d stuck by me. And me? As a child, I’d watched the black-and-white footage of the first Benjamin, the last thylacine kept in Beaumaris Zoo, something like a bizarre offspring of a tiger and a dog. I’d been fascinated by the stunning moment when she yawned, her jaw opening to almost 180 degrees. That Benjamin was the last thylacine to die in captivity, on 7 September 1936. Something stuck in my soul about the species.
You should have seen the love we put into building our Benjamin: constructed from Tasmanian devil cells and the tiger genome we’d carefully pieced together. Nuclei from those cells were eased into eggs from a devil—a process called nuclear transfer—and the few embryos that survived were implanted in a host. The birth was a tense time, and only one of the tiny pups emerged, crawled her way up to the backward-facing pouch. We laughed when she came out of the pouch for the first time, weeks later; she looked so much like a tiny little curious quoll.
And now here she was, out in the cave we’d built especially for her, giving birth! Her blood pressure was up, as was her heart rate. Normal for an animal in labour. Then there was a sudden jag in her heartbeat.
“Something’s wrong,” said Thien.
“No!” I said. “No, no, no, no!”
We found her motionless. The implants had already told us, and we’d seen the shadow on the screens, but something within me refused to believe it until I saw her, her paws clenched, her lips pulled back in an awful rictus. She hadn’t been giving birth at all. She’d been dying in pain. I kneeled down next to her, put my hand against her cold coat and cried.
Thien put his arm around my shoulders. “It’s okay. We’ll try again.”
“It’s not fucking okay. Ten fucking years and it’s never okay,” I snapped at him, and pulled away. He knew I didn’t like being touched. After that, he was silent for a while, hurt. We stayed there for a long time until he said, “Grimley will want to see us.” It was nice of Thien to say “us”. He was reminding me that we were in it together.
“You mean he’ll want to see me and cut our funding,” I said. “What will I say to him?”
“You’ll do what you always do. You’ll convince him otherwise.”
“We’ve got the devils to think about, for starters.” Prime Bureaucrat Grimley walked on the treadmill behind his standing desk. It was pretty standard issue, and he had problems with a disc in his neck. Probably because his head was so big.
“We’re close,” I said.
“The thylacine was in bad shape even before it went extinct,” he said. “It’s been a lost cause since the Australian Museum started at the turn of the century.”
Through the window, Hobart lay serenely. A few electric cars cruised between swathes of greenery. We’d restructured cities so they were filled with hanging gardens Babylon would have been proud of. Vertical foliage covered building walls. Creepers and vines hung from climbing walkways and from between solar panels. Watercourses flowed between the streets, a latticework of irrigation and cleanness. There was a calm to the city now, a serenity people over a certain age still had trouble dealing with. My grandmother, who had brought me up, used to say: “It scares me, all this quiet. Where’s the creation?”
“It’s there,” I said. “It’s just not destructive creation, Ma.”
“It’s just too damned quiet. Reminds me of horror sims, you know, where everything is perfect and tranquil, just before you realise something’s terribly wrong.”
“Oh, you exaggerate.”
“I do.” She smiled—she had missing teeth. You don’t see that much anymore either. “It’s just past my time. I’m all out of place.”
“I’m the one who’s out of place.” I gestured to the exoskeleton, which left little sores on my knees and elbows that never seemed to heal. But without my splendid contraption, I could no longer walk.
“Oh, you’re perfect,” she said, in the way grandmothers do.
Back in the Rehab Department Office, I forced myself back from the memory to look at Grimley. You’d have thought with a name like that, he’d have stayed out of bureaucracy, but maybe the name had imprinted some deep unconscious drive within him. Bureaucrats. Once we called them politicians, but now politics has dissolved into everyone. Without corporations, we aren’t obsessed with growth rates and profit any longer. We all make the policies—“economic democracy,” it was called in the beginning. Now it’s just called “the policies,” usually accompanied by a yawn. We elect those people boring enough to do the admin for our views. They were deliberately and ironically called “bureaucrats,” to remind them of just what they were. It didn’t seem to make much difference. They still fucked up the work of anyone like me trying to actually fulfil a vision.
“Why did they do it to us, do you think, all those people back then?” I said. “Hunting thylacines. One pound for a tiger carcass! Fucking up the weather. Didn’t they think about us?”
“You sound so naïve when you say shit like that,” Grimley said, even though he knew I was thinking aloud. He returned to the subject of Benjamin. “What killed this latest one? Do you even know? Is it the epigenetics, mitochondrial heteroplasmy, or the interspecies conflict? You’re making tiger soup in a rusty pot, aren’t you.”
I looked at him fiercely. “There’s another technique we need to try—we can use stem cells to create actual thylacine sperm and eggs. Then we put them together. Bingo! No nuclear transfer. No problem with hybrid cells and all the rest. We started the process but it’s been on hold.”
“Another technique, another plan, another dream.”
“Come on, Grimley, you’ve cut ninety per cent of our funding. Now it’s just Thien and me. It won’t affect your public approvals. You’ll still get a promotion.”