I had no answer to that; it was exactly what would happen. I said, “You’re the one who just declared that revival is obscene. You want to see it banned? This can only help your cause. It’s as good a dose of frankenscience as any dumb luddite could ask for.”
Gina looked stung; I couldn’t tell if she was faking. She said, “I have a doctorate in materials science, you peasant, so don’t call me—”
“I didn’t. You know what I meant,”
“If anyone’s a luddite, you are. This entire project is beginning to sound like Edenite propaganda, ‘Junk DNA!’ What’s the subtitle? ‘The biotechnology nightmare?'”
“Close.”
“What I don’t understand is why you couldn’t include a single positive story—”
I said wearily, “We’ve been over this before. It’s not up to me. The networks won’t buy anything unless there’s an angle. In this case, the downside of biotech. That’s the choice of subject, that’s what it’s about. It isn’t meant to be ‘balanced.’ Balance confuses the marketing people; you can’t hype something which contains two contradictory messages. But at least it might counteract all the hymns of praise to genetic engineering everyone’s been gagging on lately. And—taken along with everything else—it does show the whole picture. By adding what they’ve all left out.”
Gina was unmoved. “That’s disingenuous. ‘Our sensationalism balances their sensationalism.’ It doesn’t. It just polarizes opinion. What’s wrong with a calm, reasoned presentation of the facts—which might help to get revival and a few other blatant atrocities outlawed—without playing up all the old transgressions-against-nature bullshit? Showing the excesses, but putting them in context? You should be helping people make informed decisions about what they demand from the regulatory authorities. Junk DNA sounds more likely to inspire them to go out and bomb the nearest biotech lab.”
I curled into the armchair and rested my head on my knees. “All right, I give up. Everything you say is true. I'm a manipulative, rabble-rousing, anti-science hack.”
She frowned. “Anti-science? I wouldn’t go that far. You’re venal, lazy, and irresponsible—but you’re not quite Ignorance Cult material yet.”
“Your faith is touching.”
She prodded me with a cushion, affectionately I think, then went back to the kitchen. I covered my face with my hands, and the room started tipping.
I should have been jubilant. It was over. The revival was the very last piece of filming for Junk DNA. No more paranoid billionaires mutating into self-contained walking ecologies. No more insurance firms designing personal actuarial implants to monitor diet, exercise, and exposure to pollutants—for the sake of endlessly recomputing the wearer’s most probable date and cause of death. No more Voluntary Autists lobbying for the right to have their brains surgically mutilated so they could finally attain the condition nature hadn’t quite granted them…
I went into my workroom and unreeled the fiber-optic umbilical from the side of the editing console. I lifted my shirt and cleared some unnamable debris from my navel, then extracted the skin-colored plug with my fingernails, exposing a short stainless-steel tube ending in an opalescent laser port.
Gina called out from the kitchen, “Are you performing unnatural acts with that machine again?”
I was too tired to think of an intelligent retort. I snapped the connectors together, and the console lit up.
The screen showed everything as it came through. Eight hours’ worth in sixty seconds—most of it an incomprehensible blur, but I averted my gaze anyway. I didn’t much feel like reliving any of the night’s events, however briefly.
Gina wandered in with a plate of toast; I hit a button to conceal the image. She said, “I still want to know how you can have four thousand terabytes of RAM in your peritoneal cavity, and no visible scars.”
I glanced down at the connector socket. “What do you call that? Invisible?”
“Too small. Eight-hundred-terabyte chips are thirty millimeters wide. I looked up the manufacturer’s catalogue.”
“Sherlock strikes again. Or should I say Shylock? Scars can be erased, can’t they?”
“Yes. But… would you have obliterated the marks of your most important rite of passage?”
“Spare me the anthropological babble.”
“I do have an alternative theory.”
“I'm not confirming or denying anything.”
She let her gaze slide over the blank console screen, up to the Repo Man poster on the wall behind it: a motorcycle cop standing behind a dilapidated car. She caught my eye, then gestured at the caption: DON'T LOOK IN THE TRUNK!
“Why not? What’s in the trunk!”
I laughed. “You can’t bear it anymore, can you? You’re just going to have to watch the movie.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
The console beeped. I unhooked. Gina looked at me curiously; the expression on my face must have betrayed something. “So is it like sex, or more like defecation?”
“It’s more like Confession.”
“You’ve never been to Confession in your life.”
“No, but I’ve seen it in the movies. I was joking, though. It’s not like anything at all.”
She glanced at her watch, then kissed me on the cheek, leaving toast crumbs. “I have to run. Get some sleep, you idiot. You look terrible.”
I sat and listened to her bustling around. She had a ninety-minute train journey every morning to the CSIRO’s wind turbine research station, west of the Blue Mountains. I usually got up at the same time myself, though. It was better than waking alone.
I thought: I do love her. And if I concentrate, if I follow the rules, there’s no reason why it can’t last. My eighteen-month record was looming—but that was nothing to fear. We’d smash it, easily.
She reappeared in the doorway. “So, how long do you have to edit this one?”
“Ah. Three weeks exactly. Counting today.” I hadn’t really wanted to be reminded.
“Today doesn’t count. Get some sleep.”
We kissed. She left. I swung my chair around to face the blank console.
Nothing was over. I was going to have to watch Daniel Cavolini die a hundred more times, before I could finally disown him.
I limped into the bedroom and undressed. I hung my clothes on the cleaning rack, and switched on the power. The polymers in the various fabrics expelled all their moisture in a faint humid exhalation, then packed the remaining dirt and dried sweat into a fine, loose dust, and discarded it electrostatically. I watched it drift down into the receptacle; it was always the same disconcerting blue—something to do with the particle size. I had a quick shower, then climbed into bed.
I set the alarm clock for two in the afternoon. The pharm unit beside the clock said, “Shall I prepare a melatonin course to get you back in synch by tomorrow evening?”
“Yeah, okay.” I stuck my thumb in the sampling tube; there was a barely perceptible sting as blood was taken. Non-invasive NMR models had been in the shops for a couple of years, but they were still too expensive.
“Do you want something to help you sleep now?”
“Yes.”
The pharm began to hum softly, creating a sedative tailored to my current biochemical state, in a dose in accordance with my intended sleeping time. The synthesizer inside used an array of programmable catalysts, ten billion electronically reconfigurable enzymes bound to a semiconductor chip. Immersed in a small tank of precursor molecules, the chip could assemble a few milligrams of any one of ten thousand drugs. Or at least, any of the ones for which I had software, for as long as I kept paying the license fees.