He scowled, as if I’d poked a sore. He was angling for professional advancement. The Grimleys of the world are always searching for the next step sideways or upwards—out of rehab to something more central like production or social relations or architecture. A bureaucrat’s currency was status.
“What’s next?” he said. “Marsupial lions? Giant wombats? Species snuffed out forty thousand years ago? When do we accept that extinction is extinction?” He waved his arms and his suit tightened around his armpits. Bureaucrats are all fashionistas, and style is so sharp and minimalist nowadays. Edges so hard they can cut you.
“The Russians are working on mammoths.” Somewhere in the background a lonely foghorn sounded.
Grimley pressed his clenched fists to his eyes in frustration. “They’re Russians. They’ve always been wild and utopian and impossible. And you, Ellie: You have some strange nostalgia for the past. It’s reactionary as fuck. We live forward, not backward. You’re needed elsewhere. Be reasonable.”
“Being reasonable got us into this mess in the first place. All those people who let this happen were just being reasonable. ‘Look after yourself. Have children. Use fossil fuels. That’s just how it is. Be fucking reasonable.’”
“You are the most stubborn person I know. You know what your files say about you? Cold, hard, selfish. It’s your condition, isn’t it? That’s what drives you? It’s why I admire you.” He looked at my exoskeleton and then looked away, embarrassed he’d brought it up.
A scowl crossed my face. We were hitting each other’s nerves, just like those doctors with little hammers to my knees and elbows.
He finally said: “You have six months. When you fail, I’m coming out to personally drag you and your shit back. Don’t complain when you get assigned to the rehab of coastal grasses. The mosquitos can be a real pain, but you’re tough. Now get out of here before I change my mind.”
The copter brought me silently up over Mount Wellington and back towards the Centre, to the south and west of Hobart. On the way, I called and Thien’s face popped up on the screen.
“Let’s use the stem cell process to grow sperm and eggs and then inject the embryos into the surrogate,” I said.
My grandmother died when I was twenty-one. I was studying in Berlin at the Institute for Genetic Research and had to attend the funeral virtually, stuck in a little black padded room with a helmet on. My parents weren’t there, of course. I hadn’t seen them in years. They’d dumped me at five years old with my grandmother. You can’t take a five-year-old with slowly worsening muscle atrophy on adventures. Polluted water or food ingested by my mother during pregnancy caused what they now call Enviro-Genetic Dystrophy. Damn near everything is laced with heavy metals and plastics and chemicals these days. I think they felt guilty about it all. They were avoiders. So rather than come to Ma’s funeral, they were off on one of their drug-fuelled adventures, gulping down bliss before BASE jumping from cliffs or dropping vision before spending a week diving on the reconstructed Great Barrier Reef, which was really just the size of a tiny section of the original, kept in an artificially cooled area. I was glad they hadn’t come. After the ceremony, the coffin was lowered down to the ground by automatons. I looked away to where she had been born, to the wide expanse of rolling hills. Immense wind farms stood on the slopes. She’d hated them. Said they ruined the views.
She was the only one who ever called me perfect.
“Six months is not enough time.” Thien picked at the bland all-purpose pasta I’d cooked up. He could whip up Pakistani goat curries, Japanese gyoza, selections of Brazilian BBQ meats … but he refused to take over all the cooking since (as he explained) it would only encourage my lack of life skills. So every second night we ate the kind of food children like: tasteless amorphous compounds composed mainly of carbohydrates and a few indifferently added proteins to keep us going. Poor Thien used to look at the servings with the eyes of a sad puppy. But still he held out. He was doing me a favour, he said. I had to confront real life, even if only through cooking.
“We’ll get as far as we can,” I said. “Then we’ll show Grimley our progress. We’ll convince him to give us more time. He won’t be able to resist. We’ve got logic on our side.”
He laughed bitterly. “We don’t even know what killed the last one.”
“Grimley’s right. It’s the genetic problems caused by the gene editing of the thylacine.”
“Hunting and disease and the bottleneck effect took them out the first time.” The bottleneck effect comes into play when a species population becomes too small. The lack of genetic diversity makes a species vulnerable to environmental changes, diseases or even predators—the worst predator being us, Homo sapiens.
“Damn, you’re a downer today, Thien.”
He looked through the windows to the forest below, then to his K-pop posters where handsome twenty-somethings posed, perfect skin and hair cut in the same sharp angles that had lasted a century. “Maybe Grimley’s right, Ellie. Maybe we should leave this place. Seriously, we could get men in our lives. Get laid for once.”
“You get laid plenty when you go back to town. Look at you: You’re a gay guy’s dream.”
“I was thinking more about you, Ellie.”
I ignored him. “If we use the stem cell process, we’ll avoid most of the genetic problems we’ve faced.”
This was true because we were using actual sperm and eggs from the thylacine, not an egg from the devils. This avoided the “rusty pot” that Grimley had mentioned. The new pot would be as clean as if it were just bought from a shop—if we could get it to work. We’d already started the process a couple years earlier. We developed sperm and eggs through months of painstaking labour, of Thien moaning and wailing about how he could be back in Hobart, of me gritting my teeth silently. At that time we had students doing volunteer work— they instantly regretted it, since we put them on the most tedious tasks. But we eventually set the process aside since nuclear transfer was quicker, easier and more likely to succeed.
“But if it’s the distemper or some other disease that’s killing them, we face the same problem as the Panamanian golden frog,” said Tien. “Those can’t be released because they’ll just be wiped out again by the same fungus that got them the first time.”
“Come on. I’ll learn to cook with spices. I promise.” I shoulder-checked him.
He smiled softly. “Okay, let’s give it a try. If we don’t try, we’ll never know. Listen, I’m heading to town this weekend. I’ll see you on Monday.”
“You’re only allowed to go if you come back as dishevelled as you usually do.”
“I won’t let you down.”
“You never do.”
When I was thirteen I had my first crush. He was called Asim and was already a foot taller than the other boys, with the most magnificent onyx skin and dark soft eyes. I think half the girls at school had a crush on him. We made out awkwardly in the dirt of a park. When he didn’t want to be my boyfriend I didn’t understand. It took one of the other girls to explain it to me: “Look at him, Ellie. Now look at you.”
“Just like little jelly beans!” said Tien. Two months had passed since I’d seen Grimley. Now we watched as the three little pups—hairless, blind, almost helpless—disappeared in the Tasmanian devil’s pouch.
Returning to the process was as exciting for a scientist as leaping from a plane for a skydiver. We were essentially reminding cells that were no longer able to proliferate that they once could have been anything. They weren’t born with defects; they weren’t born with one single path to follow.