Distress

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.