I cut in some stock molecular graphics of ordinary DNA, showing every atom in the paired bases which bridged the strands of the helix, and I color-coded and labeled one example of each base. Landers had refused to specify exactly which non-standard bases he was using, but I’d found plenty of possibilities in the literature. I had the graphics software substitute four plausible new bases for the old ones in the helix, and repeated the slow zoom-in and rotation of the first shot with this hypothetical stretch of Landers-DNA. Then I cut back to his talking head.
“A simple base-for-base substitution in the DNA isn’t enough, of course. Cells need some brand new enzymes to synthesize the new bases—and most of the proteins which interact with DNA and RNA need to be adapted to the change, so the genes for those proteins need to be translated, not just rewritten in the new alphabet.” I improvised some graphics illustrating the point, stealing an example of a certain nuclear binding protein from one of the journal articles I’d read—but redrawing the molecules in a different style, to avoid copyright violation. “We haven’t yet been able to deal with every single human gene which needs translation, but we’ve made some specific cell lines which work fine with mini-chromosomes containing only the genes they need.
“Sixty percent of the stem cells in my bone marrow and thymus have been replaced with versions using neo-DNA. Stem cells give rise to blood cells, including the cells of the immune system. I had to switch my immune system back into an immature state, temporarily, to make the transition work smoothly—I had to go through some of the childhood clonal deletion phases all over again, to weed out anything which might have caused an autoimmune response—but basically, I'm now able to shoot up pure HIV, and laugh about it.”
“But there’s a perfectly good vaccine—”
“Of course.” I cut my own words out, and made Landers say: “Of course, there’s a vaccine for that.” Then: “And I have symbionts providing a second, independent immune system, anyway. But who knows what’s coming along next? I’ll be prepared, whatever it is. Not by anticipating the specifics—which no one could ever do—but by making sure that no vulnerable cell in my body still speaks the same biochemical language as any virus on Earth.”
“And in the long term? It’s taken a lot of expensive infrastructure to provide you with all of these safeguards. What if that technology doesn’t survive long enough for your children and grandchildren?” This was all redundant, so I ditched it.
“In the long term, of course, I'm aiming to modify the stem cells which produce my sperm. My wife Carol has already begun a program of ova collection. And once we’ve translated the entire human genome, and replaced all twenty-three chromosomes in sperm and ova… everything we’ve done will be heritable. Any child of ours will use pure neo-DNA—and all the symbionts will pass from mother to child in the womb.
“We’ll translate the genomes of the symbionts as well—into a third genetic alphabet—to protect them from viruses, and to eliminate any risk of accidental gene exchange. They’ll be our crops and our herds, our birthright, our inalienable dominion, living in our blood forever.
“And our children will be a new species of life. More than a new species—a whole new kingdom.”
The soccer players in the park cheered; someone had scored a goal. I left it in.
Landers beamed suddenly, radiantly, as if he was contemplating this strange arcadia for the very first time.
“That’s what I'm creating. A new kingdom."
I sat at the console eighteen hours a day, and forced myself to live as if the world had shrunk, not to the workroom itself, but to the times and places captured in the footage. Gina left me to it; she’d survived the editing of Gender Scrutiny Overload, so she already knew exactly what to expect.
She said blithely, “I’ll just pretend that you’re out of town. And that the lump in the bed is a large hot water bottle.”
My pharm programmed a small skin patch on my shoulder to release carefully timed and calibrated doses of melatonin, or a melatonin blocker—adding to, or subtracting from, the usual biochemical signal produced by my pineal gland, reshaping the normal sine wave of alertness into a plateau followed by a deep, deep trough. I woke every morning from five hours of enriched REM sleep, as wide-eyed and energetic as a hyperactive child, my head spinning with a thousand disintegrating dreams (most of them elaborate remixes of the previous day’s editing). I wouldn’t so much as yawn until eleven forty-five—but fifteen minutes later, I’d go out like a light. Melatonin was a natural circadian hormone, far safer and more precise in its effects than crude stimulants like caffeine or amphetamines. (I’d tried caffeine a few times; it made me believe I was focused and energetic, but it turned my judgment to shit. Widespread use of caffeine explained a lot about the twentieth century.) I knew that when I went off the melatonin, I’d suffer a short period of insomnia and daytime drowsiness—an overshoot of the brain’s attempts to counteract the imposed rhythm. But the side-effects of the alternatives were worse.
Carol Landers had declined to be interviewed, which was a shame—it would have been quite a coup to have chatted with the next Mitochondrial Eve. Landers had refused to comment on whether or not she was currently using the symbionts; perhaps she was waiting to see if he’d continue to flourish, or whether he’d suffer a population explosion of some mutant bacterial strain, and go into toxic shock.
I’d been permitted to speak to a few of Landers’ senior employees— including the two geneticists who were doing most of the R&D. They were coy when it came to discussing anything beyond the technicalities, but their general attitude seemed to be that any freely chosen treatment which helped safeguard an individual’s health—and which posed no threat to the public at large—was ethically unimpeachable. They had a point, at least from the biohazard angle; working with neo-DNA meant there was no risk of accidental recombination. Even if they’d flushed all their failed experiments straight into the nearest river, no natural bacterium could have taken up the genes and made use of them.
Implementing Landers’ vision of the perfect survivalist family was going to take more than R&D, though. Making heritable changes in any human gene was currently illegal in the US (and most other places)—apart from a list of a few dozen ‘authorized repairs’ for eliminating diseases like muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis. Legislation could always be revoked, of course—although Landers’ own top biotech attorney insisted that changing the base pairs—and even translating a few genes to accommodate that change—wouldn’t actually violate the anti-eugenics spirit of the existing law. It wouldn’t alter the external characteristics of the children (height, build, pigmentation). It wouldn’t influence their IQ, or personality. When I’d raised the question of their presumed sterility (barring incest), he’d taken the interesting position that it would hardly be Ned Landers’ fault if other people’s children were sterile with respect to his own. There were no infertile people, after all—only infertile couples.
An expert in the field at Columbia University said all of this was bullshit: substituting whole chromosomes, whatever the phenotypic effects, would simply be illegal. Another expert, at the University of Washington, was less certain. If I’d had the time, I could probably have collected a hundred sound-bites of eminent jurists expressing every conceivable shade of opinion on the subject.
I’d spoken to a number of Landers’ critics, including Jane Summers, a freelance biotech consultant based in San Francisco, and a prominent member of Molecular Biologists for Social Responsibility. Six months earlier (writing in the semi-public MBSR netzine, which my knowledge miner always scrutinized diligently), she’d claimed to have evidence that several thousand wealthy people, in the US and elsewhere, were having their DNA translated, cell type by cell type. Landers, she’d said, was merely the only one to have gone public—to act as a kind of decoy: a lone eccentric, defusing the issue, making it seem like one man’s ridiculous (yet almost Quixotic) fantasy. If the research had been exposed in the media with no specific person associated with it, paranoia would have reigned: there would have been no limit to the possible membership of the nameless elite who planned to divorce themselves from the biosphere. But since it was all out in the open, and all down to harmless Ned Landers, there was really nothing to fear.