The theory made a certain amount of sense—but Summers’ evidence hadn’t been forthcoming. She’d reluctantly put me in touch with an ‘industry source’ who’d supposedly been involved in gene translation work for an entirely different employer—but the ’source’ had denied everything. Pressed for other leads, Summers had become evasive. Either she’d never had anything substantial or she’d made a deal with another journalist to keep the competition away. It was frustrating, but in the end I hadn’t had the time or resources to pursue the story independently. If there really was a cabal of genetic separatists, I’d just have to read the exclusive in the Washington Post like everyone else.
I closed with a medley of other commentators—bioethicists, geneticists, sociologists—mostly dismissing the whole affair. “Mr. Landers has the right to live his own life, and raise his own children, any way he sees fit. We don’t persecute the Amish for their inbreeding, their strange technology, their desire for independence. Why persecute him, for essentially the same ‘crimes’?”
The final cut of the story was eighteen minutes long. In the broadcast version, there’d only be room for twelve. I pared away mercilessly, summarizing and simplifying—taking care to do a professional job, but not too worried by the loss of detail. Most real-time broadcasts on SeeNet served no purpose but to focus publicity, and to guarantee reviews in some of the more conservative media, Junk DNA was scheduled for eleven P.M. on a Wednesday; the vast majority of the audience would log on to the full, interactive version at their convenience. As well as a slightly longer linear backbone, the interactive would be peppered with optional detours to other sources: all the technical journal articles I’d read for my own research (and all the articles they in turn cited); other media coverage of Landers (and of Jane Summers’ conspiracy theory); the relevant US and international statutes—and even trails leading into the quagmire of potentially relevant case law.
On the evening of the fifth day of editing—right on schedule, reason enough for minor jubilation—I tidied up all the loose ends, and ran through the segment one last time. I tried to clear away all my memories of filming, and all my preconceptions, and watch the story like a SeeNet viewer who’d seen nothing at all on the subject before (save a few misleading promotions for the documentary itself).
Landers came across surprisingly sympathetically. I’d thought I’d been harsher. I’d thought I’d at least given him every opportunity to damn himself with his earnest account of his surreal ambitions. Instead, he seemed far more good-humored than po-faced; he almost appeared to be sharing all the jokes. Living off tire dumps? Shooting up HIV? I watched, amazed. I couldn’t decide if there really was a faint undercurrent of deliberate irony, a hint of self-deprecation in his manner which I’d somehow missed before—or whether the subject matter simply made it impossible for a sane viewer to interpret his words any other way.
What if Summers was right? What if Landers was a decoy, a distraction, a consummate performing clown? What if thousands of the planet’s wealthiest people really were planning to grant themselves, and their offspring, perfect genetic isolation, and absolute viral immunity?
Would it matter? The rich had always cut themselves off from the rabble, one way or another. Pollution levels would continue to decline, whether or not algal symbionts rendered fresh air obsolete. And anyone who chose to follow in Landers’ footsteps was no great loss to the human gene pool.
There was only one small question which remained unanswered, and I tried not to give it too much thought.
Absolute viral immunity… against what?
4
Delphic Biosystems had been too generous by far. Not only had they arranged for me to interview ten times as many of their Public Relations staff as I could ever have made time for, they’d showered me with ROMs packed with seductive micrographs and dazzling animation. Software flow-charts for the HealthGuard implant were rendered as air-brushed fantasies of impossible chromed machines, jet-black conveyor belts moving incandescent silver nuggets of “data” from subprocess to subprocess. Molecular schematics of interacting proteins were shrouded with delicately beautiful—and utterly gratuitous—electron-density maps, veils of pink and blue aurorae melting and merging, transforming the humblest chemical wedding into a microcosmic fantasia. I could have set it all to Wagner—or Blake—and flogged it to members of Mystical Renaissance, to play on a loop whenever they wanted to go slack-jawed with numinous incomprehension.
I slogged my way through the whole morass, though—and it finally paid off. Buried amongst all the technoporn and science-as-psychedelia were a few shots worth salvaging.
The HealthGuard implant employed the latest programmable assay chip: an array of elaborate proteins bound to silicon, in many respects like a pharm’s synthesizer, but designed to count molecules, not make them. The previous generation of chips had used a multitude of highly specific antibodies, Y-shaped proteins planted in the semiconductor in a checkerboard pattern, like adjoining fields of a hundred different crops. When a molecule of cholesterol, or insulin, or whatever, happened to strike exactly the right field and collide with a matching antibody, it bound to it long enough for the tiny change in capacitance to be detected, and logged in a microprocessor. Over time, this record of serendipitous collisions yielded the amount of each substance in the blood.
The new sensors used a protein which was more like a Venus flytrap with brains than an antibody’s passive, single-purpose template. “Assayin” in its receptive state was a long, bell-shaped molecule, a tube opening out into a broad funnel. This conformation was metastable; the charge distribution on the molecule rendered it exquisitely sensitive, spring-loaded. Anything large enough colliding with the inner surface of the funnel caused a lightning-fast wave of deformation, engulfing and shrink-wrapping the intruder. The microprocessor, noting the sprung trap, could then probe the captive molecule by searching for a shape of the assayin which imprisoned it even more snugly. There were no more wasted, mismatched collisions—no more insulin molecules striking cholesterol antibodies, yielding no information at all. Assayin always knew what had hit it.
It was a technical advance worth communicating, worth explaining, worth demystifying. Whatever the social implications of the HealthGuard implant, they could no more be presented in a vacuum, divorced from the technology which made the device possible, than vice versa. Once people ceased to understand how the machines around them actually functioned, the world they inhabited began to dissolve into an incomprehensible dreamscape. Technology moved beyond control, beyond discussion, evoking only worship or loathing, dependence or alienation. Arthur C. Clarke had suggested that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic—referring to a possible encounter with an alien civilization—but if a science journalist had one responsibility above all else, it was to keep Clarke’s Law from applying to human technology in human eyes.