Peter James: Perfect People

‘Neither of us are particularly good at sport,’ John said. ‘Why not give him a little help? It would be like coaching him before he’s born.’

‘Before he’s conceived,’ she corrected him, tartly. ‘I’ll tell you what my problem is: if we make him an absolute whizz at these sports, he could end up so much better than all his friends that he won’t have anyone to play with. I’m not interested in creating some sporting superman – I just want my son to be healthy and normal.’

After some moments John conceded, ‘You have a point, I hadn’t seen it that way.’

She pressed her hands together partly for warmth and partly from nerves. ‘Now,’ she said to the geneticist, ‘the next group we come to does interest me – us. John and I read up all the literature you gave us on this last night. All the genes relating to the body’s energy levels?’

John said, ‘You’re able to enhance oxygen conversion efficiency, and to modify the metabolic pattern? What this means, if we’re understanding it correctly, is that our son would be able to convert more energy from less food than normal people, and go longer on this food?’

‘Essentially, yes,’ Dettore said. ‘Better maximization of the nutrients, more efficient conversion of starches, sugars, proteins, better storage and release mechanisms, more elegant insulin controls but without any additional appetite.’

Naomi nodded. ‘These are good things – they’re going to mean he stays in shape easily and he won’t have weight problems.’ She was silent for a moment and then she said, ‘I’m comfortable about these in a way that I’m not about tampering with his sleep patterns.’

John leaned forward and poured himself some more coffee from the metal pot on the table, grinning. ‘You sleep too much, darling.’

‘Rubbish! I need my sleep.’

‘Exactly my point. If you’re not woken, you can easily sleep nine hours, even ten. Dr Dettore is right in one sense – it wastes so much of your life.’

‘I like my sleep!’

‘And if your genes were programmed so that you only needed two hours, darling, you’d like those hours of sleep just as much.’

‘I don’t think so.’ Then she looked away, out of the window. There was a container ship in the distance, sitting high on the horizon, looking so elevated it might have been mounted on a plinth. ‘You have to understand where I’m coming from in my own mind in all of this, Dr – er – Leo. I just want my child to be free of any risk of the disease that killed our son. It’s great that you can also eliminate the other bad genes John and I are carrying, for prostate cancer, pancreatic cancer, depression, diabetes. I want to give our child advantages in life, sure, what parent wouldn’t, but I don’t want him to be too different from other human beings, do you understand that? I don’t want him to be a freak.’

Dettore sat upright, folded his arms and rocked back and forward a few times, like a big child himself. ‘Naomi, I hear what you’re saying. You want your kid to be just a regular guy with corners of talent and occasional brilliance, right?’

‘I – I suppose, yes. Exactly.’

‘I’d go along with that, except there is one thing you have to take into account. You have to compare a model of the world today, with a model of what the world will be like when your son becomes an adult. You’re twenty-eight years old, and the world is not substantially different to when you were a little girl. But, in twenty-eight years’ time?’ He opened his arms expansively. ‘I’m telling you that in twenty-eight years’ time the world will be different. There will be a genetic underclass that will create a divide bigger than you can imagine. You compare the knowledge, skills, advantages you have right now over some poor young woman your age brought up in the Third World, working on a paddy field in China, or maybe in the bush in Angola.’

Dettore stood up, went over to his desk and tapped his computer keyboard for some moments. A map of the world appeared on the large wall screen opposite them. There were some pink blotches, but mostly the countries were in white.

‘There are seven billion people in the world. Do you know how many of them can read or write?’ He looked at John, then Naomi.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t.’

‘If I tell you that twenty-three per cent of adults in the United States, the most technologically advanced nation in the world, are illiterate, does that give you any clues? Forty-four million who cannot read in the United States, for heaven’s sakes! It’s less than a billion in the whole world who can. Less than twenty per cent. Just those pink areas on the map. The average rural dweller in the Third World receives less information in his or her entire lifetime than is contained in one issue of the LA Times. ’

A phone rang; he glanced down at it, then ignored it and after a few moments it stopped. ‘Naomi,’ he said gently, ‘you may not be comfortable with this fact, but you are already a member of a master-race. I don’t think you’d want to go trade places with too many other people on this planet. I don’t think you’d want your child to be brought up on the Russian steppes, or in a Himalayan tea plantation, or some settlement out in the Gobi Desert. Am I right?’

‘Of course.’

‘But you’d be prepared to take the risk that your son ends up in a kind of intellectual Third World?’

She looked at him and said nothing.

‘These are early days,’ Dettore said. ‘In thirty years’ time, all children from families or nations that can afford it are going to be genetically enhanced. You see the options you have on that list we’re working through? At the moment they are just options, but when you start living in a world where every expectant mother is ticking her way through that same list, are you going to leave all the boxes blank? No way! Not unless you want to have a totally disadvantaged kid – one who won’t be able to keep up or compete in the world.’

‘I’ll tell you what really worries me about this whole thing – and I know it worries John, too, because we’ve discussed this endlessly over the past months, since you accepted us, and it’s this’ – she shrugged – ‘this whole eugenics thing. It has a bad history, bad associations.’

Dettore perched on the edge of his desk and leaned towards Naomi. ‘If we human beings never try to improve the genes of our offspring because eighty years ago a madman called Mr Hitler tried to do it, then in my opinion we may have won the Second World War, but Mr Hitler will have won the peace that followed.’ He looked very solemn. ‘Edward Gibbon wrote, All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance. He was right. Any civilization, any generation that does not advance will eventually decline.’

‘And didn’t Einstein say that if he had known that the consequences of his work would have led to the atom bomb, he would have become a watchmaker instead?’ Naomi said.

‘Sure,’ Dettore said. ‘And if Einstein had become a watchmaker, we might today be living in a world where Hitler’s eugenics was our future.’

‘Instead of yours?’ Naomi said. Instantly she regretted the remark. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean-’

‘I think what she’s saying is that it’s one perspective against another,’ John butted in quickly.

‘It’s OK, it’s a valid point,’ Dettore said. ‘Plenty of people have made the comparison. I’ve been called the Antichrist, a Neo-Nazi, Dr Frankenstein, you name it. I just hope I have more humanity than Mr Hitler did. And maybe a little more humility, too.’

He gave such a meek, disarming smile that Naomi felt sorry for offending him. ‘I honestly didn’t mean to make such a crass-’