Bruce Sterling - Distraction

“I can remember that time.”

“Suddenly there was a lot of offshore baby-farming, embryo-farming. People were taking extreme measures. It made a pretty good topic for an action film. So, my dad cast himself as a vigilante law-and-order guerrilla. He played the role of a two-fisted Chicano abortion-clinic bomber, who gets turned by the feds, and becomes a secret-agent embryo-farm demolisher…”

Whenever he told this story, he could hear his voice shift into a hateful, high-pitched whine. And it was happening now, even as the car’s windows began to steam. He was sliding helplessly from his stan-dard fast-talk into something much more extreme, a kind of chronic gabbling jabber. He would really have to watch that. He was watching it, he was watching it as well as he could, but he just couldn’t help himself “I don’t mean to go on and on about the movie, but I did have to watch that film about four hundred times as a kid… Plus all the rushes and the outtakes… Anyway, Logan was Method acting deep into the role, and he and wife number three had a solid relationship at the time, as Logan’s marriages went, that is. So he decided that as a kind of combination personal-growth move and film-related publicity stunt, he was going to adopt a real victim child from a real embryo mill.”

She listened silently.

“Well, that kid was me. My original egg cell was product sold on the infertility black market, and it ended up in a Colombian embryo mill. It was a mafia operation, so they were buying or stealing human eggs, fertilizing them, and offering them at a black-market rate for implantation. But there were quality problems. With resultant health problems for the female buyers. Not to mention the lawsuits and eth-ics hassles if somebody ratted them out. So the crooks started develop-ing the product inside hired wombs, for a somewhat more standard, post-birth adoption … But that business plan didn’t work out ei-ther. The rent-a-womb thing was just too slow a process, and they had too many local women involved who might rat them out, or shake them down, or get upset about surrendering the product after term. So then they decided they would try to grow the embryos to term in vitro. They got a bunch of support vats together, but they weren’t very good at it, because by this point, they’d already lost most of their working capital. Still, they got their hands on enough mammal-cloning data to give the artificial-womb thing a serious try with hu-man beings. So I was never actually born, per se.”

“I see.” She straightened in her seat, placed her hands on the steering wheel, and drew a breath. “Please do go on, this is truly enormously interesting.”

“Well, they were trying to sell me and their other products, but the overhead was just too high, and their failure rate was huge, and worse yet the market crashed when it turned out there was a cheaper medical workaround for sperm damage. Once they had the testicular syndrome fixed, it kicked the bottom right out of the baby market. So I was less than a year old when somebody ratted them out to the world health people, and then the blue-helmet brigade busted in from Europe and shut the whole place down. They confiscated all of us. I ended up in Denmark. Those are my earliest memories, this little orphanage in Denmark… An orphanage and health clinic.”

He had forced himself to tell this story many times, far more times than he had ever wanted to tell it to anyone. He had a prepared spiel of sorts, but he had never fully steeled himself to the dread it caused him to talk about it, the paralyzing stage fright. “Most of the product just didn’t make it. They’d really screwed with us trying to get us tank-worthy. I had a full genetic scan done in Copenhagen, and it turned out that they’d simply lopped off most of the introns from the zygote DNA. See, they somehow figured that if they could prune away some junk DNA from the human genome, then the product would be hardier in the tank and would run more efficiently… Their lab guys were all med-school dropouts, or downsizees from bankrupt HMOs. Also, they spent a lot of time high on synthetic cocaine, which was always the standard collateral industry with South American genetic black-marketeering…”

He cleared his throat and tried to slow down. “Anyway, to get back to the point of my personal history, they had this blue-helmet Danish commando type who had led the raid in Colombia, and he ended up as the expert technical adviser on my dad’s movie. This Danish commando and my dad got to be drinking buddies on the set, so when my dad came up with this adoption notion, the Danish guy naturally thought, ‘Well, why not one of the kids from my own operation?’ and he pulled some strings in Copenhagen. And that’s how I ended up in Hollywood.”

“Are you really telling me the truth?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Could I drive you back to the lab and take a tissue sample?”

“Look, the tissue’s just tissue. To hell with my tissue. The truth is a much bigger thing than my tissue. The truth is that people have a prejudice against persons like me. I can take their point, too, frankly. I can run a political campaign and I can get away with that, but I don’t think I’d ever actually vote for me. Because I’m not sure that I can really trust me. I’m really different . There are big chunks in my DNA that probably aren’t even of human origin.”

He spread his hands. “Let me tell you how different I am. I don’t sleep. I run a permanent mild fever. I grew up really fast — and not just because I spent my childhood in the L.A. fast lane. I’m twenty-eight now, but most people assume I’m in my mid-thirties. I’m sterile — I’ll never have kids of my own — and I’ve had three bouts of liver cancer. Luckily, that kind of cancer treats pretty easily nowadays, but I’m still on angiogenesis inhibitors, plus growth-factor blockers, and I have to take antitumor maintenance pills three times a month. The other eight kids from that raid — five of them died young of major organ cancers, and the other three… well, they’re Danes. They are three identical Danish women with — let me just put it this way — with extremely troubled personal lives.”

“Are you sure you’re not making this up? It’s such a compelling story. Do you really have an elevated body-core temperature? Have you ever had a PET-scan done?”

He looked at her meditatively. “You know, you’re really taking this very well. I mean, most people who hear this story have to go through a certain shock period…”

“I’m not a medical doctor, and genetic expression isn’t really my field. But I’m not shocked by that story. I’m astonished by it, of course, and I’d really like to confirm some details in my lab, but…” She considered it, then found the word. “Mostly, I’m very intrigued.”

“Really?”

“That was truly a profound abdication of scientific ethics. It vio-lated the Declaration of Helsinki, plus at least eight standards of con-duct with human subjects. You’re obviously a very brave and capable man, to have overcome that childhood tragedy, and achieved the suc-cess that you have.”

Oscar said nothing. Suddenly, his eyes were stinging. He’d seen a wide variety of reactions to his personal background confession. Mostly, reactions from women — because he rarely had to confess it at all, except to women. A business relationship could be begun and concluded without outing himself; a sexual relationship, never. He’d seen a full gamut of reactions. Shock, horror, amusement, sympathy; even a shrug and shake of the head. Indifference. Almost always, the truth gnawed at them over the long term.

But he’d never seen a reaction like Greta Penninger’s.

Oscar and his secretary Lana Ramachandran were walking through the garden behind the sloping white walls of the Genetic Fragmenta-tion Clinic. The garden bordered one of the staff housing sections, so there were children around. The constant piercing screams of young children meant that this was a good place to talk privately.