by Brian Stableford
Modern town centers are supposed to be very safe places. There are CC-TV cameras everywhere, in the street as well as in the shops, all of them feeding video-tapes that can be requisitioned by the police as soon as a crime is reported. Unfortunately, the promise of safety draws people to the High Street like a magnet, in such numbers that mere population density becomes a cloak sheltering all manner of clandestine skullduggery. Which was how I came to be kidnapped in broad daylight, at two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, as I came out of Sainsbury’s clutching two bags of assorted foodstuffs.
If I’d had any warning I might have been able to figure out how to handle the situation, but who could possibly expect a dumpy and lumpy peroxide blonde with a Primark raincoat draped over her right arm to snuggle up to a well-built lad beside the trolley-rack and stick an automatic pistol under his ribs? It’s not the kind of situation you rehearse in idle moments, even if you have been warned that you might be a target for industrial espionage.
“Make for the car-park, Darren,” she whispered. “Nice and easy.” The woman looked almost as old and homely as my mum, but the gun-barrel digging into my solar plexus seemed to me to be more a wicked stepmother kind of thing.
“You have got to be joking,” I said, more stupidly than courageously.
“On the contrary,” she retorted. “If I weren’t extremely serious, I wouldn’t be taking the risk.”
I started walking towards the car park, nice and easy. It was partly the shock. I couldn’t quite get my head together, and when your thinking engine stalls you tend to follow ready-made scripts. I’d never been kidnapped before, but I’d seen lots of movies and my legs knew exactly how scenes of that sort were supposed to go. On top of that, it was exciting. People talk about going numb with shock, as if that were the usual effect, but I didn’t. Once my thinking engine had restarted after the momentary stall, it told me that this was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me. In my twenty years of life I’d never been able to think of myself as the kind of person who might get kidnapped, and actually being kidnapped had to be perceived as a compliment. It was like a promotion: I felt that I’d leapt a good few thousand places in the pecking order of human society.
Car parks are lousy with CC-TV cameras, so I wasn’t particularly astonished when a white Transit slid past the EXIT barrier as we approached and slowed almost to a halt as we approached. The side door opened as it eased past us, and the blonde reached out with her free hand to force my head down before using the concealed gun to shove me forward. Two hands reached out from the dark interior to haul me into the back of the van, without the least care for elegance or comfort. The woman slammed the door behind me. I presume she walked on, a picture of innocence, as if she hadn’t a care in the world.
By the time I’d sorted myself out and got myself into a sitting position on the hardboard-covered floor I’d taken due note of the fact that the hands belonged to a stout man wearing a Honey Monster party-mask. His ears stuck out from the sides, though, and the way they’d been flattened suggested to me that the guy had probably gone more than a few rounds in a boxing ring, maybe one of the unlicensed kind where the fighters don’t wear gloves. I’m no weed, but I figured that he probably didn’t need a gun to keep me in line.
I was tempted to tell him that he must have got the wrong Darren, but I knew I wouldn’t like hearing the obvious reply.
“You could have tried bribery,” I said, instead. “Kidnapping’s not nice.”
“I don’t do nice,” the masked pugilist informed me. “But don’t wet yourself yet—there’ll be time for that later.”
The back of the driver’s head was stubbornly uninformative, and from where I was sitting I couldn’t see his face in the mirror. So far as I could tell, though, his was also the head of a man who didn’t do nice. The van was still crawling through the heavy traffic, and I figured it would take us at least fifteen minutes to get out of town. We were headed north.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
The only answer I got was painstakingly measured out in duct tape, with which the Honey Monster sealed my wrists and mouth as well as my eyes. I wasn’t surprised. I guessed that the conversational skills of bare-knuckle fighters were probably a bit limited, and that he was more deeply embarrassed by the fact than he cared to admit.
My head was relatively unscrambled by then, so I was able to wonder whether the dumpy blonde would actually have shot me if I’d screamed blue murder and yelled “Look out, she’s got a gun?”— assuming, that is, that the gun was real.
Maybe not, I decided, but I’d probably have been trampled to death in the shoppers’ stampede. It was only a fortnight since some prion-perverted maniac had gunned down thirty-five outside a Macdonald’s in one of the side-streets off Shaftesbury Avenue.
As soon as the Honey Monster’s busy hands were withdrawn I began to feel a growing need to take a piss, but that was only natural.
Ten years ago, I reflected, kidnapping had been the prerogative of optimistic ransom-seekers and desperate estranged fathers, but the twenty-first century had arrived. Nowadays, busty women might be kidnapped for their milk, marrow-fat men for their blood and job-creation fodder of either sex for their urine.
It’s a crazy world, I remember thinking—I’d have said it out loud if I could—but it’s the one we all have to live in.
* * * *
When I’d committed myself to the job at GSKC—under threat of having my benefit cut to nothing at all if I didn’t—the long list of dos and don’ts had taken me by surprise. I hadn’t had a chance to think it through properly. Getting paid for pissing had seemed like a pretty slick idea, given that it was something I had to do anyway, but I hadn’t reckoned on the measures I’d have to take to ensure that my piss measured up to the expected standard of purity.
“No alcohol,” the young man in the white coat had insisted, while he was fiddling with something that looked like a cross between a hypodermic syringe and a dust buster. “No drugs, not even prescription medicines. No shellfish.” Then he got really serious, although you wouldn’t have known it from his smirk. “You have to wear the kit at all times. From now on, everything that comes out goes into our bottles.”
“Hang on,” I said, way too late. “You can’t mean everything. You’re only supposed to be mucking about with the piss.”
“It’s only for a month, in the first instance,” the white-coat reminded me, mockingly. “If we renew your contract after that you get time off in between experimental runs.”
“A month!” I said. “That’s not....”
“Darren,” he said, in that infuriating you-can’t-bullshit-me-I’m-a-doctor way that the clever bastards learn in their first term at medical school. “Have you even got a girlfriend?”
He knew that wasn’t the point, but he also knew that the conversation was on the brink of becoming extremely embarrassing, and not for him.
I’d been suckered, of course. He knew that I hadn’t really listened to the interminable lecture I’d had to sit through before I signed on the dotted line. My eyes had glazed over as soon as the bastard had launched into his spiel about “the many advantages of the human bladder as a bioreactor”. The science had all been double Dutch, the instructions all humiliation, and as for what they had done with the dust buster-cum-syringe...well, let’s just say that I’d begun to have second thoughts about the whole bloody thing long before they told me to go home.
And now, to add injury to insult, I was being kidnapped.
Somehow, the man with the magic syringe had failed to include that in his list of don’ts. If he had included the possibility in his presentation he’d probably have fed me a line of bullshit about trying to keep track of the turns the van made, and listening out for any tell-tale sounds, like trains going over bridges and street-markets and church clocks, but I didn’t bother with any of that. As far as I was concerned, if the kidnappers wanted to steal a bucketful of my piss they were more than welcome, and if GSKC plc didn’t like it, they ought to have been more careful with that fucking dust buster.
Mercifully, the man who didn’t do nice didn’t start to fiddle with my apparatus while we were still in the van. I couldn’t have stood that. It was bad enough having to walk around all day with a lube and a glorified hot-water bottle attached to my inside leg and a double-duty condom hermetically sealed to my prick, and I’d had my fill of embarrassment the day before, when I’d handed over my first set of sample bottles to GSKC’s collection service. Having some pervert do a removal job in the back of a white van would definitely have added yet more insult to the injury that had already been added to the first insult.
I tried to lie back against the side-panel of the van and think of England, but it wasn’t the kind of situation that was conducive to a shrewd analysis of our chances in the upcoming World Cup. I concentrated on telling myself that once the kidnappers had got they wanted, they’d have no further use for me and they’d turn me loose again. I even started rehearsing the statement I’d have to give to the filth. No, officer, I wouldn’t recognize the woman again, officer— all fat middle-aged peroxide blondes look alike to me. No, I didn’t get the index number of the van and I didn’t see any distinguishing marks, inside or out.
The need to piss got steadily worse, but I wanted to hold on, for propriety’s sake. It did occur to me that if I went there and then, they might just take the bottle and let me go, without even bothering to take me all the way to their destination, but that wasn’t what the plug-ugly had implied when he’d advised me to hang on.
I wondered what he’d done with the shopping bags. I had to hope that they’d let me have them all back when the deal was done—but even if they did, Mum wouldn’t be pleased if anything was broken, or even slightly bruised. As if in answer to my unspoken question, I heard my captor say: “Naughty, naughty. You’re not supposed to be drinking alcohol.” He’d obviously found Mum’s bottle of Hungarian pinot noir.
I heard the sound of a cork being withdrawn.
Somehow, the idea of a kidnapper carrying a corkscrew was deeply unreassuring. I couldn’t believe that he’d been carrying it on the off-chance that I had a bottle of wine in my shopping bag when his ugly girl-friend had intercepted me.
If it hadn’t been for the duct tape, I’d have told the presumably-unmasked Honey Monster that the pinot noir wasn’t for me, and that Mum would have his guts for garters if she ever found out who’d deprived of her of her Sunday treat, but as things were I had no alternative but to let the ex-pugilist believe that I was the kind of person who didn’t take obligatory employment contracts too seriously.
Maybe, I thought, that was the kind of person I really should have been, given that piss-artists are right at the bottom of the totem-pole in the bioreactor hierarchy. I’d always thought that was completely unfair. I suppose one can understand the social status that attaches to pretty girls with loaded tits, but why blood donors should be reckoned a cut above the rest of us is beyond me. Where’s the kudos in being vampires’ prey?
“This stuff is disgusting,” the man who didn’t do nice informed me, effortlessly living up to his self-confessed reputation. “It’s been dosed with washing soda to neutralize excess acid, then sugared to cover up the residual soapiness. There’s no excuse, you know, with Calais just the other side of the tunnel and a resident smuggler on every housing estate from Dover to Coventry. It’s not as if we’re living in fucking Northumberland.”
He was displaying his age and his origins as well as his ignorance. I might have failed geography GCSE but even I knew that there was no such county as Northumberland any more, and hadn’t been in my lifetime. Years of exile had weakened his accent, but I guessed that he had probably been born somewhere not a million miles from Carlisle. Anyway, Mum liked her wine sweet as well as fruity. She wouldn’t have thanked me for a classy claret.
The van rolled to a final halt then, and I heard the driver get out. It must have been the driver who opened the side door, although it was the wine connoisseur who seized me by the scruff of the neck and thrust me out into the open again. Wherever we were there can’t have been many CC-TV cameras around. I couldn’t tell whose hand it was that grabbed my arm and steered me along a pavement and down a flight of steps, then along a corridor and up a second staircase, through God only knows how many doorways. In the end, though, I felt the pile of a decent carpet under my trainers before I was thrust into a perfectly serviceable armchair.
The strip of tape that had sealed my mouth was removed with an abruptness that left me wishing I’d shaved a little more carefully that morning, but the strips sealing my eyes and securing my wrists were left untouched.
“Sorry about the precautions, Darren,” said a male voice I hadn’t heard before, “but it’s for your own good. You really don’t want to know too much about us.” I guessed that this man too was from up north, though not nearly so far north as the one who didn’t do nice. Derby maybe, or Nottingham: what real northerners would call the Midlands.
“I can go any time you want me to,” I told him, meaning go rather than literally go. “Just take the bottle and drop me off— any where you want, although somewhere near home would be nice.”
“It’s not that simple, I’m afraid,” said the Midlander. “We’ll need a more generous sample than you can provide just like that.”
“Oh shit,” I murmured. It’s amazing how half a dozen marathon water-drinking sessions can put you right off the idea of thirst. “How long are you going to keep me here?”
“A few hours. You’ll be home in time for dinner. We’ll put the pizzas and the other perishables in the fridge for you. Sorry about the wine—but you really aren’t supposed to be drinking.”
“It’s for my Mum,” I told him, exasperatedly. “You’d better be telling the truth. Mum’ll report me missing if I don’t turn up by six—that’s when the supermarket shuts.”
“No problem, Darren,” the voice said, softly. “We’ll need to do a few little tests—but we won’t hurt you. I promise.”
There was something in that seemingly-insincere promise that immediately made me think of dust busters and catheters. “Aw, come on,” I said, finally giving way to pent-up terror. “I’m nothing special. Just one more conscript in Willie’s barmy army, doing my bit for king and country. I don’t know what I’m pissing, apart from the fact that it’s pink, but I’m absolutely bloody certain that it can’t be worth much, or the boys at GSKC plc wouldn’t be letting me roam the streets and do Mum’s shopping in Sainsbury’s.”
“You might be right,” was the amiable reply. “But it might just be GSKC that have miscalculated. Our employers’ hackers think so, at any rate—and when the hackers say frog we all jump. Way of the world, old son. You’ll just have to be patient for a few hours. You can manage that, can’t you? I can put the radio on for you, if you like, or a CD. How about a little bit of Vivaldi? Wagner might be a little too stimulating.”
I knew that he was mocking me, but it didn’t seem to matter.
“Vivaldi will be fine,” I said, with as much dignity as I could muster. “A pot of coffee would be nice, if I’ve got to do a lot of drinking. Cream, no sugar. A few bourbon biscuits wouldn’t come amiss.”
“It’s not the Ritz, Darren,” he told me—and I could tell from the direction of his voice that he’d got up and was moving towards the door—”but I guess we can stretch to tea if you’d rather have that than water. Lots and lots of lovely tea.”
Personally, I’d always thought that tea was for chimpanzees, but I was right off water, especially the kind that came from the tap. Tea was probably the best offer I was going to get.
“Tea’s okay,” I assured him, trying to put a brave face on things.
“But there’s one more thing we need to take care of first,” he said, in a way that told me loud and clear that I wasn’t going to like it one little bit.
“What?” I said, although I’d already guessed.
* * * *
When I’d handed in the first batch of samples GSKC’s delivery-boy had been careful not to make any comments, but I hadn’t been able to stop myself imagining what he must be thinking. If you’re a sperm-donor, so rumor has it, they just give you a Dutch magazine and a plastic cup and leave you to it, but it’s not as easy as that when your eyes and hands are taped up. I told them that I wouldn’t try anything, but they weren’t taking any chances.
“Think of it as phone sex,” the Vivaldi fan said, as he left me in the capable hands of his female accomplice—but I’d never gone in for phone sex and even in phone sex you get to use your own hand. It didn’t help matters that I had to assume that she was the same woman who’d stuck a gun in my ribs: fat, fifty-five and fake blonde.
After that, drinking tea by the quart so that I could piss like a champion didn’t seem as much like torture as it might have. The long wait thereafter was positively relaxing, and not because of bloody Vivaldi tinkling away in the background.
I was really looking forward to another ride in the back of the van, even though my arms were aching like crazy, when I heard the mobile phone playing the old Lone Ranger theme-tune. It was the Midland accent that exclaimed: “What? You have got to be joking.” I knew something must have gone wrong, and I spent a couple of minutes wallowing in terror while my captor listened to the rest of the bad news.
Mercifully, it turned out that he wasn’t being instructed to bump me off.
“I’m sorry, Darren,” the Midlander informed me—and he really did sound regretful—”but there’s been a bit of a hitch. We may need to hang on to you a little longer.”
“What kind of hitch?” I wanted to know.
“You were right and we were wrong, Darren. We should have tried bribery. We were trying to save on expenses. Is it too late to start over, do you think?”
It was an interesting idea. I knew I ought to tell him to go fuck himself, if only for appearances’ sake, but I hadn’t quite got over the complimentary implications of being a kidnap victim. This new departure seemed like another promotion, a chance to skip another few thousand rungs of the status ladder.
“How big a bribe did you have in mind?” I said, trying with all my might to sound like a man who was accustomed to being on the ball. “I mean, given the inconvenience, not to mention the insult...and this is a multimillion-euro business, after all.”
“Don’t push it, Darren,” he said. “We all have to make a profit on the deal, and we know exactly what GSKC were paying you. It wasn’t enough, even before...but we have our choices to make too. We could put you up for auction. That’s what the Honey Monster wants to do—but I’m not like him. I can do nice, if it seems worthwhile. How would you like to work for us?”
“As a piss-artist?” I said, wearily.
“As a spy. You were right, you see, when you said that if you were making anything valuable GSKC wouldn’t have turned you loose on to the streets—but our employers’ hackers were right when they said that GSKC might have made a mistake. If it weren’t for their cumbersome bureaucratic procedures, GSKC’s troubleshooters would have got to you before we did, but we’re leaner and quicker. The thing is, they don’t know yet that you’ve been snatched. Maybe we can fix things so that they never have to find out. They’ll take you into residential care anyway, so you can forget your mum’s Sunday roast, but you still have a choice: you can work for them, under the contract you’ve already signed—which included a sheaf of self-serving contingency clauses that you probably didn’t bother to read—or you can work for them and us, for three times the money. We pay in cash, so the Inland Revenue won’t be taking a bite out of our contribution.”
Three times the pittance that GSKC were paying me didn’t sound like a fortune to me, but these things are relative.
“I want to know what’s going on,” I said, trying hard to be sensible. “Why are my bodily fluids suddenly worth so much more than they were before the delivery van picked up that first crate load?”
“I’m not sure you’d understand. GSKC are supposed to be operating under the principle of informed consent, so they were obliged by law to tell you exactly what they were proposing to do to you, but my guess is that they didn’t make much effort to make it comprehensible, and that you just nodded your head when they asked you if you understood. Am I right?”
I hesitated, but there was no point in denying it. “I’m not stupid,” I told him. “Maybe I did only get three GCSEs, with not an ‘ology’ among them, but that’s because I didn’t like school, okay? Maybe I have been unemployed long enough to fall into the national service trap, but that’s because I won’t take the kind of shit you have to take with the kind of jobs people think you’re fit for if you only have three GCSEs. I’m not some sort of idiot you can peddle any kind of bullshit to.”
“Okay, Darren—I believe you. So how much do you know about the kind of manufacturing process you’re involved in?”
“They shot some kind of virus into me to modify the cells of my bladder wall,” I said. “The idea was to make them secrete something into the stored urine. The pink stuff is just a marker—what they really want is some kind of protein to which the dye’s attached. They said they weren’t obliged to tell me exactly what it was, but they told me it wouldn’t do me any harm. They weren’t wrong about that, were they?”
“Not as far as we can tell,” was the far-from-reassuring answer. “How much background did you manage to take in?”
“Not a lot,” I admitted.
“Then we’d better start from scratch. It really would be a good idea if you listened this time, and tried really hard to understand. You need to know, for your own sake, why you’re a more valuable commodity than they expected you to be.
I tried. It wasn’t easy, but with my eyes still taped up I had no alternative but to concentrate on what I was hearing, and I knew I’d have to make good on my boast that I wasn’t stupid.
* * * *
Apparently, the first animals genetically modified to excrete useful pharmaceuticals along with their liquid wastes had been mice. The gimmick had promised advantages that sheep and cows modified to secrete amplified milk didn’t have. All the individuals in a population produce urine all the time, and urine is much simpler, chemically speaking, than milk. Extraction and purification of the target proteins was a doddle—but it had never become economically viable because mice were simply too small. Cows and sheep weren’t as useful as urine-producers as they were as milk-producers, for reasons far too technical for me to grasp—it had something to do with the particular digestion processes of specialist herbivores—and interest had soon switched to somatically-modified human bioreactors. Or, to put it another way, to the ever-growing ranks of the unemployed. It was one of the few kinds of modern manufacturing that robots couldn’t do better.
The pioneering mice had mostly had their genes tweaked while they were still eggs in a flat dish, but you can’t do that to the unemployed, so biotech companies like GSKC could only do “somatic engineering”: which means that they used viruses to cause temporary local transformations in specialized tissues. In effect, what they had done was give me a supposedly-harmless bladder infection. It was supposed to be an “invisible” infection—which meant that my immune system wouldn’t fight it off, although I could be cured by GSKC’s own anti-bug devices as and when required. In the meantime, the cells in the bladder would pump the target protein into the stored urine, ready for export.
Once I’d grasped the explanation that the Vivaldi fan was so eager to put across, I thought I could see a thousand ways it might go horribly wrong, but he assured me that the procedure was much safer than it seemed. In nine hundred and fifty cases out of a thousand, he told me, it all went like clockwork, and in forty-nine of the remaining fifty the whole thing was a straightforward bust.
Fortunately or unfortunately, I was the hundredth. What I was producing wasn’t the expected product and the difference was “interesting”.
“How interesting?” I wanted to know. “Cure for cancer interesting? Elixir of life interesting?”
“Biotech isn’t the miracle-working business it’s sometimes cracked up to be,” the Midland accent assured me. “Interesting, in this context, means we need more time to figure out what the hell is going on. Where we are now, as you’ve probably guessed, is just a collection point. We can do simple analytical tests on the kitchen table, but we don’t have a secret research lab in the basement. We could probably sell you on with the samples we’ve collected, but that would move our employers into much more dangerous and complicated territory, crime-wise, and they’re very image-conscious. It would be a lot easier for them, as well as more profitable for everyone concerned, if we were to handle you. That’s why you and I need to renegotiate our relationship.”
“Okay,” I said, way too quickly. “You convinced me. What’s your offer, and what do you want me to do?”
“We want you to take a couple of tiny tape recorders with you when GSKC take you back in. And we want you to take the principle of informed consent a lot more seriously. Demand to see the documentation—they’re legally obliged to show it to you. They’ll probably be quite prepared to believe that you can’t read the stuff without moving your lips, so don’t be afraid of spelling out the complicated words loudly enough to make an impression on the tape. We can’t use transmitters because they’ll almost certainly have detectors in place, but the simple methods are always the best. We’ll make arrangements to have the first recorder picked up tomorrow— hide it behind the bedhead, if you can. Left hand side—your left, that is. Can you remember all that?”
“I’m not stupid,” I reminded him. How could I be? I’d just become a secret agent: an industrial mole.
“If we take the tape off your eyes and wrists, Darren,” my oh-so-friendly captor pointed out, “we’ll be taking a big risk—but you’ll have to take your share of that risk. Once you’re in a position to put us in deep trouble, we’ll have to take precautions to make sure you don’t.”
Or to put it another way, I thought, once I’ve seen your faces, the only way you can stop me describing them is to shoot me. Once I’m in the gang, resigning could seriously damage my health. It might be easier, I realized, to call their bluff about selling me on as I was—but my arms were aching horribly, and there was a possibility that GSKC might not be the highest bidder.
“I’m in,” I assured him. “Just get this fucking tape off, will you.”
“We know where you and your mum live, Darren,” the Vivaldi fan reminded me. “We even know where your gran lives.”
I couldn’t quite imagine them sending a hit man all the way up to Whitby with instructions to break into an old people’s home and shoot a ninety-two-year-old who usually didn’t know what day it was, but I could see the point he was trying to make.
“It’s okay,” I assured. “I’m on your side. One hundred per cent committed. I always wanted a more interesting job. Who wouldn’t, when the alternative’s having the piss taken out of you relentlessly, literally as well as metaphorically?”
I knew he’d be impressed by the fact that I knew what “metaphorically” meant.
“Okay, Darren,” he said, after a few more seconds’ hesitation. “I’ll trust you. You’re in.”
* * * *
The first surprise was that the female kidnapper not only had real blonde hair under the peroxide wing, but wasn’t really fat or fifty-five. I could almost have wished I’d known that earlier, although it wasn’t a train of thought I wanted to follow.
After that revelation, it wasn’t quite as surprising to find out that the man who supposedly didn’t do nice had also been heavily padded and that his cauliflower ears were as fake as his Honey Monster grin. He really did look fiftyish, but he seemed more bookish than brutal.
The team leader turned out to look more like a twenty-five-year-old nerd than a gangster. I wouldn’t have cared to estimate how many GCSEs the three of them had between them.
The gun, on the other hand, was real.
Once they’d made up their minds they moved swiftly to get me home before anyone knew I’d gone. The only one who told me his name was the Vivaldi fan, and I was far from convinced that “Matthew Jardine” wasn’t a pseudonym, but it seemed like a friendly gesture anyway.
Jardine lectured me all the way home, but I tried to take in as much of it as I could. I had no option but to be the gang clown, but I knew that I had to make an effort to keep up if I were going to build a proper career as a guinea-pig-cum-industrial-spy. He dropped me on the edge of the estate. Because it’s a designated high crime/zero tolerance area we have almost as many hidden CC-TV cameras around as the average parking lot, even though the kids have mastered six different techniques for locating and disabling them.
The repacked shopping bags didn’t look too bad, but I had to hope that Mum wouldn’t make too much fuss about the missing wine or the frozen peas and fish fingers being slightly defrosted. I needn’t have worried; she was much too annoyed about the phone ringing off the hook. She hadn’t answered it, of course—she always used the answerphone to screen her calls—but she was paranoid about the tape running out. GSKC had left seven messages in less than four hours.
I called back immediately, as requested.
“Mr. Hepplewhite,” the doctor said, letting his relief show in his voice. “At last. Thanks for getting back to us.”
I had my story ready. “That’s okay, mate,” I said. “I’m sorry I was out, but I was watching the match on the big screen down at the Hare and Hounds. Not a drop of alcohol passed my lips, though—it was bitter lemons all the way, especially when the opposition got that penalty.”
“That’s all right, Mr. Hepplewhite,” he assured me. “It’s just that something’s come up as a result of the samples you delivered yesterday. It’s nothing to worry about, but we’d like you to come in as soon as possible. In fact, we’d like to send a taxi to pick you up now, if it’s not inconvenient.”
“Well,” I said, acting away like a trouper, “I don’t know about that. I had plans for later—and Mum was just about to put a ham and mushroom pizza in the oven.”
“We’ll pay you overtime, of course, as per your contract. We’ll even send out for a pizza.” He carefully refrained from mentioning that they wouldn’t be letting me out again, and I carefully refrained from letting on that I already knew.
“Okay,” I said. “If it’s that important.”
I took Mum into the bathroom to brief her and turned the taps on, just in case. You can’t be too careful when you live in a high crime/zero tolerance area.
* * * *
The taxi was round inside ten minutes, but it didn’t take me to the general hospital where I’d signed on. It dropped me at a clinic way out in the country, half way to Newbury. As soon as I saw the place I knew how far I’d come up in the world. It was a private clinic—the sort that you have to pay through the nose to get into if you don’t have an organization like GSKC to pay your way. It was the sort of place where someone like me would normally expect to be hanging around in reception for at least half an hour, but I got the VIP treatment instead. Two doctors—one male, one female— pounced on me as soon as I was through the door and led me away.
The room they led me to wasn’t quite as palatial as I’d hoped, but the bed seemed comfortable enough and it did have a wooden bedhead rather than a tubular steel fame. The TV was a twenty-six-inch widescreen. There was a highly visible CC-TV camera in the corner, with its red light on, but I guessed that it probably wasn’t the only one.
The male doctor asked me to undress, and an orderly took away my clothes as soon as I had, but by that time I’d already managed to secrete one of Jardine’s bugs behind the bedhead and another in the jacket of the green pajamas they provided.
When the female doctor offered me a cup of tea, having condescended to tell me that her name was Dr. Finch, she tried hard to make it sound as if she were merely being polite, but I’d seen enough movies to know what a hidden agenda was.
“I’d rather have coffee,” I said. “Cream, no sugar. A few bourbon biscuits would be nice, while I’m waiting for my pizza.”
I got tea, and lots of it. Mercifully, they didn’t want any other samples just then.
Dr. Finch really was plump and fiftyish, but she was far from blonde. I waited patiently while they did their stuff, munching on the ham and mushroom pizza they’d ordered in for me—which, to be fair, was a little bit better than the one I’d bought in Sainsbury’s—but I was ready for them by the time they braced themselves to tell me that they were enforcing the clause in my contract that allowed them to admit me for twenty-four hour observation whether I liked it or not.
“I suppose it’s okay,” I said, by way of brightening their day before I began biting back, “but I need to understand what you’re doing. You have to tell me why, don’t you? I believe you mentioned the principle of informed consent. It’s the law.”
“You didn’t seem very interested last time,” the male doctor said, suspiciously. His name was Hartman. I’d never seen him before but I didn’t bother to ask him how he knew.
“I’ve been thinking about it a lot,” I told him. “I’ve even done some reading. Something’s gone wrong, hasn’t it? Your virus has turned rogue. I’m infectious, aren’t I? You’ve gone and given me some kind of horrible disease.” It was all claptrap, but they didn’t know that I knew that. They had to set my mind at rest.
“No, no, no, it’s nothing like that,” Dr. Hartman hastened to assure me. “It’s just that we’re not getting the protein we expected. We think we may know why, but we need to be sure. If there are any awkward side-effects, of course, we can kill the virus off just like that. We need to monitor the situation, at least until we’ve confirmed our hypothesis as to why the translocated gene isn’t behaving the way we expected it to.”
“Well,” I said, temptingly, “I guess that would probably be all right...but you have to tell me exactly what’s going on. It’s my body, when all’s said and done, and I have to look after it. Do you think I might be able to patent my bladder?”
He looked at me suspiciously again, but all he saw was a twenty-year-old benefit scrounger with three GCSEs, and not an ology among them.
“Okay,” he said, finally. “I’ll explain what we’re doing. How much do you know about the Human Genetic Diversity Project?”
“What I’ve read in the papers,” I told him. “Second phase of the Genome Project. Greatest scientific achievement ever, blueprint of the soul, key to individuality, etcetera, etcetera. Individually tailored cures for everyone, just as soon as the wrinkles have all been ironed out. I take it that I’ve just been officially declared a wrinkle.”
“What the first phase of the HGP gave us,” Dr. Hartman said, putting on his best let’s-blind-the-bugger-with-bullshit voice, “was a record of the genes distributed on each of the twenty-four kinds of human chromosomes. There are twenty-three pairs, you see, but the sex chromosomes aren’t alike. We’ve managed to identify about fifty thousand exons—they’re sequences which can be turned into proteins, or bits of proteins—but not nearly as many as we’d expected. Before we’d completed the first draft, way back in 2000, we figured that there might be anything up to a hundred and fifty thousand, but we were wrong-footed.
“The reason for that, we now know, is that we’d drastically underestimated the number of versatile exons—expressed sequences that contribute to whole sets of proteins. Twentieth-century thinking was a bit crude, you see: we thought of genes as separate entities, definite lengths of DNA laid out on the chromosomes like strings of beads, separated by junk. The reality turned out to be a lot messier. All genes have introns as well as exons, which cut them up into anything up to a dozen different bits, and some genes are so widely-scattered that they have other genes inside their introns. Some so-called collaborative genes producing proteins of the same family share exons with one another, and we’re even beginning to find cases where genes on different chromosomes collaborate.
“The HGDP is gradually compiling a catalogue of all the different forms of the individual exons that are present in the human population. A directory of mutations, if you like. Before we knew how many versatile exons there were we assumed that would be a fairly simple matter, but now we know that it isn’t. Now we know that there are some mutations that affect whole families of proteins, which complicates the selection process considerably, because it allows individual base changes to have complex combinations of positive and negative effects.”
He stopped to see whether he’d lost me yet. I just looked serious and said: “Go on. I’m listening.”
“Most of the genes that were mapped before the basic HGP map was complete were commonly expressed genes, producing proteins necessary to the functioning of each and every cell in your body. Exon sets which produce proteins that only function in highly-specialized cells, or proteins that only function at certain periods of development, are much harder to track down, but we’re gradually picking them off, one by one. Finding a protein is only the first step in figuring out what it does, though, and investigating whole families of proteins can be very tricky indeed.
“The exon set that we imported into your bladder cells was big, but by no means a mammoth, and our preliminary observations of its operation in vivo hadn’t give us any cause to think that it was any thing other than a straightforward single-protein-producer, but in the admittedly-alien context of your bladder wall the exons have revealed a hitherto unsuspected versatility. They’re pumping out four different molecules, which might only be disassociated fragments of a single functional molecule, but might be functional in their own right. At any rate, they’re not the expected product. If it’s all just biochemical junk, we’re all wasting our time, but if it’s not...well, we need to find that out.”
“Suppose my contract runs out before you do?” I asked, innocently.
“There’s a possibility of renewal,” he said, and was quick to add, “at the designated higher rate, of course. You’ll be getting all the customary overtime and unsocial hours premiums while you’re here, so this could work very much to your advantage. But to answer your earlier question, if you intended it seriously: no, you won’t be able to patent anything on your own behalf, or share in any revenues from any patents we might obtain. That’s not the way the system works.”
“I figured that,” I admitted. “Am I the only person you’ve tried this virus on?”
This time, Drs Hartman and Finch looked at me very closely indeed. Mum had always told me that I had an innocent face, but this was the first time I’d had real cause to be glad about it.
“No,” Dr. Finch admitted. “We always replicate. That’s standard procedure. But you’re the only member of the cohort who’s producing the anomalous protein-fragments, if that’s what you want to know. People are different, Mr. Hepplewhite. It would be a dull world if we weren’t.”
“Amen to that,” I said. “It’s okay if you’re keen to get on. You can update me in the morning. I’d like to see the paperwork, though—see if I can get to grips with the specifics.”
That was over the top. They knew something was up. “You do realize, Mr. Hepplewhite,” Hartman said, coldly, “that you’ve signed a non-disclosure agreement. In return for our taking proper care to obtain your informed consent to the experiment, you’ve guaranteed that everything we tell you and anything you might find out on your own is absolutely confidential.”
“Absolutely,” I assured him. “But we all have to abide by the principle of informed consent, don’t we. I’m consenting, so I need to be informed. Can I have the paperwork?”
The CC-TV cameras were working to my advantage as well as theirs. They knew that if they found anything really interesting their intellectual copyright claims would have to be cast iron. It wasn’t enough for them to do everything by the book; they had to be seen to do everything by the book.
“All right, Darren,” Hartman said, pronouncing my name as if it were an insult. “We’ll show you the records. That way, you’ll know as much as we do.” He was mocking me, but he was too careful to say out loud that I was too stupid to understand a word of it. I didn’t mind. The assumption would make it all the more plausible when I started spelling out the long words audibly.
There was, of course, a veritable mountain of paper—enough to keep me busy for a month, if I’d bothered to read every word—and I knew after a single glance that I wouldn’t be able to understand it if I had a hundred years to study it, but I was all set to do my level best to sort out the good stuff from the blather. A fresh pot of tea arrived with the mountain in question, plus a pitcher of ice-water, a two-liter carton of fruit juice, three packets of crisps and a jar of salted peanuts. I noticed that the temperature of my room was a little on the warm side, and remembered that the pizza had been rather salty.
I figured that it was going to be a long night, but I didn’t even glance at the cable-TV guide that had been carefully placed on my bedside table. I had work to do.
* * * *
In the morning, Mum came to visit me—and she wasn’t alone. The Vivaldi fan had spruced up a treat, although his blue suit was a little on the loud side.
I figured out later that Mum must have told the receptionist that the guy was my big brother, but that when the data had been fed into the computer the consequent mismatch with my records had set off an alarm. Mum had hardly had time to hug her little boy when Dr. Hartman came hurtling through the door, accompanied by a security man whose cauliflower ear definitely wasn’t a fake.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Hartman said, “but you’ll have to leave. I don’t know who you are, but....”
He was interrupted by the business card that the man in the blue suit was thrusting into his face. There was something on it that had stopped him in mid-flow, and I figured that it probably wasn’t the name.
“Matthew Jardine,” Mum’s companion said, helpfully. “I’m Mr. Hepplewhite’s agent. I also represent Mrs. Hepplewhite, and her mother, a Mrs. Markham currently resident in Whitby, Yorkshire. As you probably know, that’s the entire family, unless and until someone can identify and trace Mr. Hepplewhite’s father—who is probably irrelevant to our concerns.”
I was impressed. Signing Mum was one thing; signing Gran—if he really had signed Gran—represented serious effort and concern. On the rare days when she knew what day it was, Gran had a temper like a rat-trap.
“Darren—Mr. Hepplewhite—signed all the relevant consent forms himself,” Dr. Hartman said, through gritted teeth. “Even if whatever agreement you’ve signed with Mrs. Hepplewhite has some legal standing, which I doubt, you can’t represent Darren. He’s ours.”
“We shall, of course, dispute your claim,” said Jardine, airily. “I think you might find that your forms are a trifle over-specific. While you might—and I stress the word might—be able to exercise a claim to ownership and control of the gene that you transplanted into Mr. Hepplewhite’s bladder, the rights so far ceded to you cannot include the right to exploit genes that he has carried from birth, having inherited them from his parents. I have documents ready for Mr. Hepplewhite’s signature which will give me power of attorney to negotiate on his behalf in respect of any and all royalties to be derived from the commercial exploitation of any exotic native proteins derivable from his DNA.”
While he was speaking, Jardine drew a piece of paper from his inside jacket pocket. It looked suspiciously slight to me, but Hartman was staring at it as if it were a hissing cobra, so I figured that it could probably do the job.
“You told me I couldn’t patent myself,” I said to the doctor, in a deeply injured tone that was only partly-contrived. “That’s not what I call informed consent.”
“Don’t sign that paper, Darren,” Hartman said. “Our lawyers will be here within the hour. If you sign that thing, we’ll all be tied up in court for the next twenty years. It’ll be bad for you, bad for us and bad for the cause of human progress. And if it should transpire that you’ve seen this man before, or had any dealings with him of any sort, you and he will probably end up in jail.”
“Mr. Hepplewhite and I have never met,” Jardine lied, “although I do have the honor of his mother’s acquaintance. While your robots have been working flat out on Mr. Hepplewhite’s genomic spectrograph, a similarly eager company has been working on hers—purely by coincidence, of course.”
“Coincidence my arse,” Hartman retorted. “If you hadn’t got your hands on some of Darren’s samples....”
“Before you level any wild accusations against my client,” Jardine interrupted, smoothly, “it might be as well if you were to check the security of your computer systems.”
“He’s not your client,” Hartman came back. “And hacking databases is a crime too, is case you’ve forgotten. And we both know perfectly well that your hackers couldn’t possibly have got enough out of routinely-logged data to get you into a photo finish in figuring out what’s going on. If you really have been to Whitby and back...you were a fool to come here, Mr. Jardine.”
“If I hadn’t,” Jardine countered, smoothly, “we both know that you’d have robbed my client of his rights by lunchtime. If GSKC’s lawyers are scheduled to get here within the hour you must have summoned them before you sat down to breakfast—and don’t try to tell me that they aren’t going to turn up armed with bulging briefcases, full to the brim with neatly-drafted contracts. Now....”
“Oh, just throw the fucker out,” Hartman said to the security man, exasperatedly.
For a kidnapper, the Vivaldi fan seemed surprisingly unready for the unsubtle approach. He tried to thrust his magic piece of paper into my hand while he reached for the bedhead with his free hand, as if to use it as an anchor.
Even as I reached out to take the paper, Dr. Hartman snatched it from Jardine’s grip and ripped it into shreds. Meanwhile, the man with the real cauliflower ear seized poor Jardine in a full nelson, tore his groping hand away from the bedhead and dragged him out of the door.
“Informed consent, Darren,” said Hartman. “Remember that. I know you’re not as stupid as you pretend, so if your mum just happens to have another copy of that agency agreement stuffed in her knickers, I suggest that you advise her to keep it there until I’ve had a chance to explain to you exactly why that snake is so desperate to net your entire family on his books, even though he knows full well I that the arrangement wouldn’t stand up in court.”
“Right-oh, doctor” I said, cheerfully, as Hartman followed his lame bully, leaving me alone with Mum. I didn’t bother to check the bedhead to see if the tiny tape recorder had gone. I knew that it had. I figured that it probably hadn’t got a single useful item of information on it, in spite of all my heroic efforts, but I was now beginning to figure out how the game was being played. The tape of my conversation with Drs Hartman and Finch and my subsequent semi-articulate mutterings was primarily intended to demonstrate—to a court, if necessary—that the information I’d been given wasn’t sufficiently full or complete to fulfill their obligations under the principle of informed consent, and thus to prove that my contract with GSKC plc was invalid. Maybe a court would accept that and maybe it wouldn’t, but when Hartman had mentioned the possibility of being tied up in the system for twenty years he’d been voicing his worst nightmare. The pseudonymous Mr. Jardine presumably had friends who weren’t particular about the niceties of patent law, who probably had excellent connections in the black market therapeutics business.
“Mr. Jardine’s a nice man, isn’t he?” Mum said. “He brought me a really nice bottle of wine—sweet and fruity, just the way I like it. Just as well, considering that you forgot. He says I’ve got a really interesting genomic spectrum. Rare and interesting.”
“I’ll bet he did,” I said. It had just occurred to me that if I’d inherited whatever the kidnappers-turned-bribers were interested in from Mum, and they’d already signed Mum up, I might be in danger of becoming surplus to their requirements. If that were the case, it might serve Jardine’s purpose just as well to have me tied up in the courts for twenty years as to have me on his payroll. If he’d really wanted me to sign some kind of agency agreement he could have done it before turning me loose—except, of course, that he might have had to explain how he’d been in a position to do it. The only thing I knew for sure was that his side were even less interested in the principle of informed consent than Hartman’s.
“Well anyway,” Mum said, “How are you, love—in yourself, I mean?”
She didn’t really want to know, but I told her anyway, just to soften her up. “Did they really send someone to Whitby to see Gran?” I asked, although I knew it was dangerous, given that everybody and his cousin was probably listening in.
“Oh yes,” she said. “Mum’ll be right pleased. It gets boring in that home, you know. A sea view isn’t everything—especially when the edge of the cliff keeps getting nearer every time there’s a storm.”
“This thing must really be big,” I said, thoughtfully. “I don’t suppose they told you why it’s so valuable.”
“They didn’t say valuable, exactly,” Mum confessed, as she investigated the contents of the tea-urn on my bedside table. “Just interesting. That was nice, though, wasn’t it? I’ve never been interesting before. Not since I turned thirty, anyhow. I was interesting before that, all right—but you have to settle down a bit eventually, don’t you. Not as much as Stan wanted me to, obviously, but...I don’t suppose there’s a chance of a fresh brew, is there, love? I’m parched.”
“You can get tea by the gallon here,” I told her, absent-mindedly pressing the buzzer. Mention of Stan—the husband she’d divorced two years before she had me, whose surname I’d got stuck with even though he wasn’t my father—made me wonder whether Jardine might conceivably be running a bluff on Hartman with regard to Mum and Gran. Signing up all the antecedents he could find might have been a sensible precautionary measure, and he’d obviously pretend that he’d got what he wanted, even if what he really needed was time to try to find the parent from whom I had inherited the Klondyke gene. If so, he’d have a real problem on his hands. Mum had always told me that she didn’t even know the guy’s name, let alone his whereabouts. She might have been lying to deflect my curiosity, but she might not.
I shook my head, dazedly. It was all happening too fast, and my imagination was beginning to run away with me.
* * * *
More tea arrived soon enough, and so did Dr. Finch. She had the grace to look a bit sheepish.
“I’m sorry about all the fuss, Darren,” she said. “We didn’t expect anything like that to happen. I’m afraid, Mrs. Hepplewhite, that you might have been unwise to sign anything that man put before you. He’s not the sort of person I’d want to act on my behalf.”
“What sort of person is he?” I asked, interested to find out what GSKC might know about his erstwhile kidnappers.
“Do you know what biopiracy is?” Dr. Finch countered.
“No,” I confessed.
“I do,” Mum put in. “I saw a documentary about it on BBC-2. It’s where multinational companies go prospecting for rare genes in underdeveloped countries and steal all the traditional medicines that the natives have been using for millions of years, and make fortunes out of the patents.”
“Well, that sort of thing has happened,” said Dr. Finch, judiciously, “but that’s not exactly what I mean in this case. The pirates I’m talking about operate closer to home. They keep a close watch on the research that companies like ours are doing, with a view to pirating our data on behalf of black marketeers who sell counterfeit drugs. Sometimes, though, it isn’t enough to steal a base-sequence. In theory, anyone who knows the base-sequence of a particular gene can build a copy in vitro in order to produce the relevant protein, but some genes need the assistance of other biochemical apparatus to put different bits of a protein together and fold the resultant complex into its active form. Some proteins can only be produced in living cells, and a few can only be produced in living cells with a particular genomic spectrum. Maybe more than a few—but so far, we’ve only found a few. Human proteonomic science is still in its infancy, and because of the unexpectedly large number of versatile exons in the human genome it’s turning out to be a more complicated business than anyone anticipated.”
“What you’re saying,” I said, to make sure that I was keeping up as well as I could be expected to, “is that whatever is happening inside my bladder—but not in the bladders of the other people you roped into the experiment—can only happen inside me, or someone with the same genetic quirk as me.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Dr. Finch parried.
“But you think I might be in danger?” I said. “You think somebody might try to kidnap me—or Mum, or even Gran.” I knew it had to be bullshit, given that I’d already been turned loose once, and that Jardine could have kept hold of Mum instead of giving her a lift to the clinic if he’d wanted to, but I was a spy now and I had use a spy’s tricks.
“You’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick,” the doctor assured me. “What’s at stake here isn’t mere possession of the bioreactor that your bladder has become, or another body which shares the genes responsible for the anomaly. What we need—and what might, in principle, be pirated—is an understanding of the interactions that are happening between your body and the gene we tried to transplant into you. Once we understand the manner in which the exons are collaborating, we won’t actually need your entire body, or anybody else’s, to reproduce the interaction. Any clonable tissue sample would be adequate, although the most efficient technique uses semen samples—it allows us to select out those sperms with the most useful combinations of exons, so that we can fertilize eggs and produce whole series of easily-clonable embryonic hybrids. As your mother pointed out, albeit in the wrong context, biopiracy is all about intellectual property rights. Biotech patents are a real minefield, and this case could be a precedent-setter. It’ll be bad enough if Mr. Jardine’s backers are only intent on stalling us while they try to develop a couple of therapeutic products for black market distribution—if they really do want to go for the big prize, by establishing property rights of their own, that would be a very different ball game.”
I wasn’t at all sure that I was following the details, but I’d seen enough gangster movies to know that the more businesslike Mafia men always want to use their ill-gotten gains to set up legitimate businesses, so that they can start swimming with the real sharks. Suddenly, the fact that the deceptive blonde had gone to the bother of extracting more than piss from my hapless prick began to seem more sinister than embarrassing. I wondered whether the three musketeers had been overtaken by events for a second time, and were now wishing that they had hung on to me instead of trying to turn me into a Judas. On the other hand, I was probably worth far more to them as a willing double-agent than a hostage.
“What do you mean by precedent-setter?” I asked Dr. Finch. “What’s so special about my trick bladder that I’ve been promoted in easy stages from national service nobody to the guy every agent in town wants to sign within the space of twenty-four hours?”
“I think I ought to wait for Dr. Hartman and the lawyers before saying any more,” Dr. Finch said, worriedly.
“Mr. Jardine suggested that you might want me to join in your experiments,” Mum put in, “but he was very insistent that I shouldn’t sign anything without him being with me. He also told me to look after Darren.” She sounded innocent enough, but I’d always suspected that I hadn’t got my lack of stupidity from my Dad.
“Nobody’s going to hurt Darren,” Dr. Finch assured her. I noticed that she didn’t say anything about the possibility of recruiting Mum to the program.
“Mr. Jardine also said,” Mum went on, slowly, “that no matter what Darren’s signed, you can’t imprison him. No matter what he agreed to when he signed your forms, he’s still free to walk out of the door. You can sue him, but you can’t stop him. Not legally. If I wanted to take him home and you tried to stop me....” Mr. Jardine had obviously schooled her thoroughly while he was giving her a lift to the clinic.
“All right!” said Dr. Finch, putting up her hands. “Nobody’s saying that Darren’s a prisoner—just that he has responsibilities. Nobody wants to sue anybody. We want everybody to be happy. He is getting paid for being here.”
“Mr. Jardine also said...,” Mum began—but the door opened before she could start haggling.
I wasn’t in the least surprised to see Dr. Hartman and the security guard, or the two suits that were with him, but any illusions I had about knowing what was what vanished when one of the suits stepped forward and shoved an ID card in my face.
He wasn’t a corporate lawyer. According to the ID card he was Lieutenant-Colonel Jeremy Hascombe of “Special Services”. I’d seen enough movies to know that “Special Services” was the organization that had risen out of the ashes of MI6’s funeral pyre, but I’d never been certain that they actually existed. Apparently, they did.
When the colonel showed the ID to Dr. Finch her astonishment made mine look distinctly feeble. “Oh, Mike,” she said. “You didn’t.”
“Of course I didn’t,” Hartman growled, through gritted teeth. “They had the pirates under surveillance all along. Whatever their hackers got went straight to the spooks. They’re trying to pretend that this thing has defense implications.”
That was worrying. If Special Services knew that I’d been snatched outside Sainsbury’s they must also know that I’d been recruited as a double-agent. I didn’t suppose that Special Services needed to pay any heed at all to the principle of informed consent.
“That’s ridiculous,” Dr. Finch said. “The management will fight you, you know. You can’t just march in here and take over.”
“Show the doctors out, will you, Major,” said Jeremy Hascombe.
“Now just you wait a minute...” the security guard began—but when Hascombe rounded on him and looked him straight in the eye he trailed off. He was probably ex-army, and he still had his carefully-trained habits of respect and obedience.
The same didn’t apply, of course, to the lawyer who came bounding through the door at that moment to take up the slack, but he didn’t get anywhere either. His first sentence began with the words “I insist” but I never got to hear what it was he was insisting on.
“Just get them out,” Hascombe said to his associate. “All of them.”
The associate didn’t look particularly intimidating, but the way he grabbed the lawyer casually by the throat was wonderfully menacing. It wasn’t only the lawyer who spluttered into total silence. The sheer insolence of the gesture was breathtaking. Everybody knew that we were on camera, and everybody knew that they would be held accountable for whatever they did. I wondered what it might be like to have the power and authority, not to mention the sheer front, to grab a corporate lawyer by the throat.
“This,” said Jeremy Hascombe, equably, “is now a matter of national security.”
His associate guided the lawyer carefully through the door. The two doctors and the security guard followed them meekly.
“Could you possibly give me a few moments alone with Darren, Mrs. Hepplewhite?” the colonel said. “No harm will come to him, I promise you.”
Mum looked the colonel straight in the eye, but when she spoke it was to me. “It’s not three any more, Daz,” she said. “It’s ten.” She never called me Daz. She’d always disapproved of anyone who did, even though that had excluded practically all my old school friends.
“Make that twenty,” Dr. Hartman called out from the corridor, although he was too intimidated actually to stick his head around the door. It might have been a stab in the dark, but I got the impression that he knew exactly what the Vivaldi fan had offered me the day before, and what Mum was trying to tell me. Three times the so-called wage that GSKC paid national service recruits was still a fair way short of a doctor’s salary, but ten was a pretty fair wedge, and twenty was adequate by anyone’s standards. I figured that what Dr. Hartman was trying to get across was the suggestion that if I refused to play ball with Jeremy Hascombe, then GSKC plc would look after me as best they could.
I’d seen enough movies to know that big multinational corporations paid way better than governments, but tended to be far more ruthless if they were mucked about.
* * * *
When he’d shut the door behind Mum’s retreating bulk, Colonel Hascombe sat down beside the bed and put out his hand. “Give me the other recorder, Darren,” he said.
I was tempted to tell him to look for it, but I didn’t fancy being searched. I unclipped it from the pocket of my pajama-top and gave it to him.
“Cheap Korean crap,” he observed, as he put it into his coat pocket. “That should tell you something about the people you’re in bed with. The Americans are so much better at this sort of thing. It almost makes you wish that they were on our side.”
“I thought they were,” I said.
“If you listened to the politicians,” Hascombe told me, “you’d think that we didn’t have an enemy in the world, except for a couple of ex-colonies that aren’t talking to us just now. It’s true, in a way— but that doesn’t mean that everybody else is on our side, even if they operate freely on our soil. Do you see what I mean?”
What he meant was that dear old England wasn’t “on the same side” as GSKC plc, but Dr. Hartman had already made that obvious.
“Whose side are you on, Darren?” the colonel wanted to know. It was a good question.
“Mine,” I said, unhesitatingly.
“That’s what I thought,” he said. “Which makes you the weakest piece on the board: all on your own with not an honest ally in sight, with the possible exception of your mother. Not that you’ve had a lot of choice so far, given that everybody else who’s tried to deal with you has been as likely to rat on you as you are on them. They’ll offer you money, of course—and keep on upping the stakes every time you seem likely to turn—but they’re not people you can rely on.”
“And you are?” I said, skeptically.
“I have to be,” he told me. “I’m not a crook or a businessman. I represent the king, parliament and the people. My word has to mean something.”
I didn’t say anything in response to that, but my face must have told him that it was so far beyond believable as to be funny.
“What a world we live in,” he said, with a sigh. “You’d rather deal with pirates than with GSKC, and you’d rather deal with anyone than representatives of your country. What does that say about you, Darren, apart from the fact that you’ve watched too many bad movies?”
“What I’d rather deal with,” I told him, frostily, “is someone who was prepared to tell me the fucking truth about why my market value goes up another notch every time somebody takes another bucketful of my piss. I didn’t want to be a fucking guinea-pig in the first place and I certainly don’t want to end up as a fucking secret weapon—so if you aren’t going to tell me what the fuck is going on, Jez, why don’t you just fuck off?”
He didn’t flinch and he didn’t get angry.
“Okay,” he said. “You’ll need to know, whether you decide to come aboard or not, and I’m betting that nobody else will make much effort to tell you the truth. How much have they told you so far?”
“Bugger all,” I said, resentfully. I waved a hand at the paper mountain. “They gave me plenty to read, as you can see, but it might as well be hieroglyphics. Apparently, they stuck some gene into my bladder expecting that it would fill my piss full of some kind of useful protein. It didn’t. Instead, I got four different proteins, or bits of proteins. Everybody knew that last night, so something new must have come up in the meantime. Finch was just waffling, but I gather that they’ve now got interested in whatever there is about me that was making the transplanted gene act up. If the original target protein had been especially valuable I wouldn’t have been walking the streets in the first place, and if one of the four unexpected byproducts had been a gold mine the pirates would probably have hung on to me instead of sending me back, so I’m betting that once they began to figure out what my bladder had done to the target they began wondering about what it could do to other proteins...and what it might already be doing inside me. Right so far?”
“Spot on,” he conceded, ungrudgingly. He was obviously surprised that a dolehound with three GCSEs had got that far, but he seemed pleased to know that I wasn’t a complete idiot.
“So what is it doing?” I asked. “And what else might it do, with the right encouragement?”
“It’ll probably take a long time to work that out,” he told me. “Which is why everybody’s trying to put a claim in before the hard work starts. All we have so far is hopeful signs—signs that a lot of people have been looking out for, although nobody expected them to turn up in a bog-standard op like this. Have you ever heard of the Principle of Selective Self-Medication?”
“No,” I said. “Mum probably has. She watches documentaries on BBC-2.”
“Well, put very simply, it means that all living organisms are under continuous selective pressure to develop internal defenses against disease, injury, parasitism and predation. Any mutation that throws up a means of protecting its carrier from one of those things increases its chances of survival. A lot of the medicines doctors developed in the last century, from antibiotics on, were borrowed from other organisms that had developed them as natural defenses, but our evolutionary history had already equipped us with a lot of internal defenses of our own—like the immune system—which we’d simply taken for granted. Once the Human Genome Project had delivered a basic map, we were in a much better position not only to analyze our own defensive systems but also to search for refinements that hadn’t yet had an opportunity to spread through the population. Most of the publicity associated with the project concentrated on the genes that make certain people more vulnerable to various diseases, cancers and so on but there’s another side to the coin. We’ve also been able to search out genes which make people less vulnerable to specific conditions: self-medicating factors.”
“So Hartman and Finch think I’ve got one of those: a gene that makes me less vulnerable to some kind of killer disease?”
“Not a gene, as such, although there must be genes that produce the components of the system. What they think you’ve got is a chemical apparatus that operates alongside genetic systems, influencing the way in which certain exons collaborate in producing family sets of proteins.”
“That’s enough jargon for now,” I told him. “Cut to the bottom line. What am I—a walking antibiotic factory?”
“No. What you’ve got isn’t protection against bacteria, or viruses, or prions—but it might be a defense against some kinds of cancers. It might suppress some sorts of tumors by inhibiting the development of modified cells within specific tissues.”
“Not just bladder tissue?”
“No—although it’ll take time to figure out exactly where the limits lie.”
“So I’m immune to some kinds of cancer—but that it could take years to figure out exactly which ones, and how many.”
“Not immune, but certainly less vulnerable. And it’s more complicated than that. There’s a selective cost as well as a selective benefit, which is presumably why the condition’s so rare.”
I could guess that one. Mum had been in her late thirties when she had me, after leading a fairly colorful life. Gran had been just as old when she had Mum. “Infertility,” I said. “Babies are tumors too.”
“That’s a crude way of putting it,” Hascombe said. “But yes, as well as suppressing tumors, it probably suppresses the great majority of implanted embryos. If it didn’t, we’d probably all have something like it integrated into our immune systems. Natural selection couldn’t do that for us—but somatic engineers might. What you have isn’t an all-purpose cancer cure, and wouldn’t necessarily be more efficient than the cancer treatments we already have—but once we understand exactly how it works, it might have other uses.”
I nodded, to show that I could follow the argument. Then I said: “And what, exactly, does it have to do with Special Services? Or am I supposed to believe the standard line about all biowarfare research being purely for defense?”
“All our biowarfare research is purely for defense,” the colonel said, with a perfectly straight face. I remembered what he’d said about our humble nation not having an enemy in the world, except maybe for Zimbabwe and Jamaica, but that not being enemies wasn’t the same thing as being on the same side.
“Once we understand how it works,” I guessed, “we might be able to refine it. Maybe it will throw up better cancer cures—but that’s not what interests you. I slipped through the net, but if the net were refined...selective sterilization by subtle and stealthy means. Not the kind of thing that you could make huge profits out of, in the open marketplace—but Special Services have broader interests than mere profit.”
“Now you’re being melodramatic, Darren,” he said, blithely.
This isn’t some conspiracy-theory movie. This is everyday life. We have to be careful to examine every emerging possibility, to analyze its implications for national security...its capacity to disturb or distort the status quo. That’s what you have to do too—examine every emerging possibility, analyzing its implications for your personal security....”
“...And its capacity to fuck up the status quo,” I finished for him. “What’s your offer, Mr. Hascombe?”
He didn’t object to my failure to address him by his rank. “Security,” he said. “The other parties will only offer you money, but they’ll cheat you if and when they can. You could spend a lot of time in court, one way and another. On the other hand...did you know that because GSKC recruited you under the provisions of the National Service Act, your notional employer, at this moment in time, is His Majesty’s Government? Technically, you’re on secondment. I don’t have the power to confiscate GSKC’s data, but I do have the power to confiscate you. Your mother’s a free agent, of course, but your grandmother is a state pensioner, and thus— technically, at least—unable to enter into any contractual arrangements without the permission of HMG. Not that we want to delve into a can of worms if we can avoid it. We’d rather work with all of you as a family, according to the principle of informed consent. We like families—they’re the backbone of every healthy society.”
I wondered how many healthy societies he thought there were in the world, and how many he expected to stay that way. If he’d told me the truth—which I wasn’t prepared to take for granted—I was a walking miracle. I was also a walking time-bomb. Everybody knew that there were too many people in the world, and everybody had different ideas as to which ones ought to stop adding to the problem. Given that everybody and his cousin already had enough of me to start doing all kinds of wild and woolly experiments, I probably wasn’t absolutely necessary to the great crusade, but I was young and I was fit, and neither Mum nor Gran had ever produced a milligram of semen, or ever would.
I was rare all right—rare and interesting. Nobody had ever thought so before, but the last twenty-four hours had changed everything.
“GSKC could offer me security,” I pointed out. “They have people to look after their people.” But I was already reconsidering the question of why Hascombe’s oppo had taken GSKC’s lawyer by the throat, and what the move had been intended to demonstrate.
“We have an army at our disposal,” Hascombe pointed out. “Not to mention a police force, various Special Services and the entire formal apparatus of the law of the land. The people who look after our people are very good at it. But it’s your choice, Darren. I wish I could tell you to think about it, but I’m afraid we’re in a hurry. You can have five minutes, if you like.”
He didn’t mean that I had five minutes to decide whether to go with him or stay with GSKC. He meant that 1 had five minutes to decide whether to go quietly and willingly or to start a small war.
Personally, I quite liked the idea of the war, but I had other people to consider now—and not just Mum and Gran. It was just beginning to dawn on me that for the first time in my life, I was faced with a decision that actually mattered, not just to me or people I knew but to any number of people I would never even meet.
People had been taking the piss out of me all my life, for any reason and no reason at all: because I was called Darren; because I didn’t even know my Dad’s name; because I only had three GCSEs and not an ology among them; because I was so desperate and so useless that I’d had to sign up as a guinea pig in order to pay my share of the household expenses; because I was still living with my Mum at twenty, in a miserable flat in a miserable block in an officially-designated high crime/zero tolerance estate; and because I was the kind of idiot who couldn’t even do a half-way decent job of being a kidnap victim or a spy.
Now, things were different. Now, I was rare, and interesting. I was a national resource. I was a new cure for cancer and a subtle weapon in the next world war. No more Hungarian pinot noir for me; from now on, whatever I chose to do, it would be classy claret all the way.
In a way, I knew, the man from Special Services was holding a gun on me in exactly the same way as the fake fat blonde-—but everyone does what he has to do when the situation arises. It wasn’t his fault. He couldn’t come to me with a fistful of fifty-euro notes, because that wasn’t the game he was playing.
But what game should I be playing, now I had some say in the matter?
I knew that the world was full of people who’d have said that a fistful of fifty-euro notes was the only game worth playing, even though it was crooked. Some, I knew, reckoned that it was the only game in town, because governments and Special Services didn’t count for much any more in a world ruled by multinational corporations like GSKC. But even on an officially-designated high crime/zero tolerance estate you learn, if you’re not completely stupid, that money isn’t the measure of all things. You only have to watch enough movies to figure out that what people think of you is the important thing, and that not having the piss taken out of you any more is something you can’t put a price on. To qualify as a kidnap victim is one thing, to be a double agent is another, and to be a walking cancer cure is something else again, but what it all comes down to in the end is respect. Jeremy Hascombe was offering me a better choice than Matthew Jardine or Dr. Hartman, even though he wasn’t offering me any choice at all about where I was going and who was going to be subjecting me to all manner of indignities with the aid of hypodermic syringes, dust busters, and all effective hybrids thereof. He was offering me the choice of doing my duty like a man.
“Okay, Colonel,” I said. “I’ll play it like a hero, and smile all the while. I don’t suppose you brought me anything decent to wear? I don’t want to walk out of here in my pajamas.”
“No, I didn’t,” said the colonel, who was too uptight a man to let his gratitude show, “but your mother did. She thought you might need a change of clothes, just in case you could come home for Sunday lunch after all.”
It was just as he’d said: family is the backbone of any healthy society. Perhaps it always will be. Who, after all, can tell what the future might hold?