Michael Kube-McDowell - The Quiet Pools

The proposals varied, but the message was the same: Let machines be our eyes, our hands. Let them go in our stead.

Christopher saw that there had never been any real chance that the machines-first movement would carry the day. Human ambitions must be satisfied in human time frames, and none of those on the point were willing to step aside in favor of a machine or an heir. But, just as clearly, contained within this largely forgotten debate was the intellectual genesis of the Homeworld movement. It was their Federalist , their Das Kapital . The seeds of revolution.

There was a time Christopher would have welcomed the discovery. But now it was the answer to the wrong question. I need to know why we’re doing what we’re doing . Daniel must have misunderstood or been deliberately obtuse. It was not the answer he needed. In fact, it didn’t seem to be about the same thing at all.

At dusk Friday, they met on the Burnham Park levee, near the children’s playground at Thirty-third Street. Between the restless waves of Lake Michigan, the howling Chicago wind, and the screamers climbing out of Meigs Island just to the north, they had all the privacy they could ask for.

“Are you here to talk me out of something, or are you ready to help me?” Christopher asked as they started off at a slow walk along the top of the concrete barrier, known locally as the Great Wall. With global warming, Lake Michigan had risen almost a meter in the last century, swallowing the city’s beaches and forcing construction of dikes all along the waterfront.

“Did you take my suggestion?”

“It wasn’t enough.”

Keith sighed, pushing his hands deeper into his coat pockets. “What do you want to know?”

“What are you really selecting for?” It came out in a half-shout as a commuter screamer passed overhead with a roar.

Shaking his head, Keith said, “We’re not doing the selecting. Not really.”

“Who is?”

They covered another thirty meters before Keith spoke. “There are a hundred thousand genes in a mammalian cell,” he said. “A hundred thousand genes, and enough unexpressed DNA between them for a hundred thousand more. Full of fragments, copies, oncogenes, nonsense sequences that code for no known proteins, programs for traits which haven’t been needed in ten million years. It’s where tails on babies and hind legs on whales come from. A chemical library that rivals the hyper. Not a bad analogy. The hyper is everything we know. The DNA is everything we are.”

“Not everything.”

“Everything. Why is one man addicted to alcohol and another never tempted by it? Look in his cells. It’s all there. All our weaknesses. All our predispositions. Biology is destiny, Christopher. Clinical depression? Homosexuality? Look in the cells. Genius? Madness? They’re there, too. An athlete’s muscles, a musician’s ears, the poet’s heart—just different little bits of clockwork chemistry. Love? A neurochemical cycle—runs about six and a half years. Ever hear of the seven-year itch?”

“I can’t argue physiology with you,” Christopher said. “But we’re learning from the first day we’re alive. That’s part of what we are, too.”

“Sure. But mostly we’re learning how to get what we want. You asked why we do what we do. I would have thought that was obvious. The meaning of life is to make new life. Nothing more. We just never understood the scale on which the drama was being played.”

“What do you mean?” Christopher asked, grabbing at Keith’s elbow.

Keith stopped and turned to face him. “You look at recent history and ask how we could do so many things that are anti-survival. Ocean pollution. Resource depletion. Ozone destruction. It isn’t just that we didn’t know. We kept right on after we did know. Because none of that matters. None of it. In the last hundred meters you give it everything. Because in this race, if you hold back, you die.”

“Are you answering the question I asked?”

“You still don’t see it?”

“No.”

Keith turned away and resumed walking, and Christopher hurried to keep up with him. “The Creator has a master plan, Christopher. And we’ve been following it for four billion years. It carried Eusthenopteron onto the land and Deinonychus into the air. It’s why whales beach themselves and cats climb trees. Do you want to know who God is, Christopher? God is two hundred and seventy-one codons on the twenty-first chromosome of the Chosen.”

“In the Church of Sociobiology, maybe. I’m not a believer.”

Nodding, Keith said, “That’s fine. But it’s a funny thing about Nature. She doesn’t give a high hoot what we believe. Everything goes on just the same.”

“Biology is destiny.”

“And purpose.”

“What happened to free will? What about our choice? Doesn’t it count? Doesn’t it exist?”

Keith stopped and gazed at Christopher, his head cocked at an angle. “Choice is noise on a picture with this scale,” he said. “I’ll gladly trade choice for destiny and purpose. Don’t you understand, Christopher? We are the von Neumann machines.”

Later, as they shared a bench and a bottle of Canadian wine outside the shuttered Field Museum of Natural History—the irony of that was not lost on Christopher—Keith explained himself in less metaphysical terms.

“Whatever it was in the beginning, we’re now talking about a three-gene complex. Pieces or variants of it have been found in thirty-one species, all but three of them chordates. There’s every reason to think that it’s found its highest, purest expression in us. I think of H. sap . as the trustee of the Chi Sequence.

“The name doesn’t mean anything, really. That’s what it was called when it was a very minor mystery in comparative biochemistry. But you won’t find anything about it in Medbase or the NIH Index . They’ve been sanitized—papers withdrawn, copyrights and biopatents bought.

“Three genes, A-B-C. Three messages. Direction—the where. Motivation—the why. And the activator, the little thirty-three codon sequence that says, ‘Go-go-go.’ ”

His initial objections having been beaten down into silence, if not surrender, Christopher had listened with the kind of stunned amazement seen on the faces of young children after their first magic show. It was not his credulity which was being tested, but the agility of his mind. He was being shown marvels, and they had power and poetry even if he did not believe they were real.

“It’s funny what happens when you only get one Chi gene expressed,” Keith was saying. “All the people through history who felt the call of the night sky. All the fanciful invention of heavens and wheels within wheels. They were pointed in the right direction, but never understood why.

“And the way life here has spread into every possible nook and crevice, obeying the second part of the code. B for babies. B for be fecund. Go forth and multiply. Fill the world with your progeny.

“And the activator, the trickiest of all, the one that flips the ambition switch to high. A-positives have to find their own directions, their own reasons. But the restlessness that sends them looking comes from inside. Hillary had it. Thor Heyerdahl. Earhart. You don’t need a microscope to make a list. But if we had a sample of their DNA, we’d find it, right there on the twenty-first chromosome. I don’t doubt it for a minute.”

“So the Chosen really do exist,” Christopher said.

“Not the way you mean it. Three genes gives eight permutations, not even considering mutations and unexpressed recessives. Nothing is ever as simple as a geneticist says it is,” Keith said, showing a smile. “But the triple actives—the pure Chi-positives—they’re the core of the Diaspora.”