Neal Asher: The Departure

Saul called up the presentation that King had been working on, and expanded it to fill the entire screen. Here were scans of some newspaper articles from back in the nineteenth century. Speaking off the cuff, he said, ‘The first gene bank, as we know it, was set up in the twentieth century in reaction to the steady extinction of species, though of course seed banks had been around for a lot longer, and for entirely different reasons. But only in the last hundred years have we made a concerted effort to sample every surviving species. Our stated goal here is to compile a complete gene bank of all life on Earth.’

Coran held up a hand. ‘You may have noticed that I’m not a tourist and therefore not here on a guided tour. I understand you’ve been managing to extract samples from museum exhibits of extinct animals, and that further digs were financed to obtain samples from prehistoric species in the La Brea tar pits?’

‘Yes,’ Saul nodded. ‘We were also running wormbots down into the Antarctic and Arctic ice, and then there’s reverse chemical and pattern mapping.’

‘Reverse mapping – that would be the method used to try and obtain the genetic code of . . . dinosaurs?’

‘Not just dinosaurs, but any and all prehistoric life forms we can find.’

Coran nodded slowly. ‘Which strikes me as stepping somewhat outside your remit?’

Saul suppressed a snake of cynical amusement. Here before him stood a man who worked for an organization that had sent hundreds of thousands off for adjustment, approved the experiments in cerebral reprogramming that resulted in many being lobotomized, and which also presided over numerous not so secret executions of various ‘dissidents’. Yet now he seemed to be seeking a justification for the closure of Gene Bank. But, then, that was how people like Coran operated: justified by his vision of the greater good, anything was permissible, including murder.

It occurred to Saul that maybe he himself wasn’t that much different.

‘There are many benefits to be obtained from mapping the genomes of extinct species, and we now have the technology even to reverse extinction,’ he noted, going to the heart of it. ‘Even now a department of World Health Research is growing a lichen that went extinct some twenty thousand years ago, and some of the chemical compounds it produces are used in the newer anti-ageing drugs.’

Coran shrugged. ‘A visible benefit, perhaps, but what is the benefit of keeping on ice the DNA from creatures like that?’ He pointed at the screen.

Saul glanced back, the screen having automatically moved on to some ensuing display.

The last tiger had died in London Zoo forty years ago, but Gene Bank retained DNA samples from every kind of tiger it had managed to jab a needle into over the preceding fifty years, and had then successfully mapped that DNA. Gene Bank possessed digital maps of the essence of tiger and could, using artificial wombs, resurrect the species with all its variations. The tiger had been a great success story for this place, which was doubtless why King had chosen it for his presentation. Saul’s cynical amusement increased, since he already knew what was coming.

‘How, precisely,’ Coran began, ‘can you justify the expenditure of millions of Euros just to save such a species? Where, exactly, will such an alpha predator fit into the society we’re building?’

Real nice society , Saul felt. Of course, there were no more wars, just police actions, though sometimes the truncheon used weighed in at about a kilotonne, and the undertakers had to wear hazmat suits. Despite the world population topping eighteen billion, nobody goes hungry, so there certainly aren’t any food riots – just ‘dissident actions ’. There were no more riots, or rather, they ended abruptly when the Inspectorate used its pain inducers in place of water cannons to reduce the crowd to a writhing screaming mess, whilst sending in the shepherds to snatch up the ringleaders in their sticky tentacles. Committee ideology was environmentally sound and rumours about the problems with the North African desalination plants were untrue. There were fish in the Libyan Sea and southern Mediterranean – pictures were available. The Sahara was green now – pictures of that were available too. And only a month ago didn’t Chairman Alessandro Messina himself say that we are more free than ever before? – after community political officers conducted a survey only last year to prove this point. The Press had greater freedom too, now being government-run and unburdened by financial concerns. People don’t disappear, see; they always come back ready to sing the praises of the Committee.

‘As the Sol system colonization gets under way, perhaps we’ll one day have room here for tigers,’ Saul suggested, though he knew that was about as likely as Singapore rising from the radioactive saltwater swamp it had become fifty years ago.

The Committee’s massive and always expanding bureaucracy was a hungry beast, and its hunger seemed to have grown as urgent in recent years as that of the citizens it governed. Though there always seemed to be good news from space, funding for projects beyond Earth’s orbit was being hacked down to the bone. This was particularly bad news for Antares Base on Mars. The colonists there would not be coming back and, unless they showed great ingenuity, would gradually run out of essentials and all be dead within five years.

Coran allowed himself a superior sneer. ‘I would like to see the mapping computers now.’

‘Sure,’ Saul said, his stomach tightening up again now they’d reached the point where the talking would come to an end. ‘Let me show you the way.’ He smiled at the bodyguard, holding his hands out to either side as he moved round her and led the way towards the door.

Stepping out into the corridor, he again called up a schematic of the building, then made it a realtime overlay updated by Janus. The first room on the left gave access straight through to the main store of sample cylinders. An automated system collected these, one at a time, to take them through to the mapping machines in each separate room. Once the contents of a cylinder had been mapped, it was returned to the store, and once all the samples in the store were mapped, in a process that usually took anything up to a year, a refrigerated transvan would pick them up to take them back to a larger store near Paris, then later replenish them from there. Except the Paris store now lay empty, as places like this were being closed down and genetic sample cylinders rerouted, no one knew to where.

‘I am emptying one clean-crate of cylinders,’ Janus informed him via the bonefone embedded behind his ear, then transmitted another schematic displaying the outline of a human body with augmentations highlighted and labelled. Just as Saul thought, the bodyguard Sheila had some non-standard stuff in there, but it shouldn’t present a problem.

He led the way into the first room.

‘It’s fully automated,’ Saul explained, gesturing to the packed machinery, then walking over to the glass booth attached to the mapper. Inside, a brushed-aluminium cylinder lay on its side, half a metre long and ten centimetres in diameter. Protruding from one end of this were layers of segments separated by thinner layers of insulating foam, all positioned along a single rod. Whilst they watched, an arm terminating in a miniature grab lowered itself over one of these segments, which slid round to present a sample. The claw closed and extracted a thin glass tube, swung it to one side and deposited it in a box that hinged out from the mapper itself, before releasing it. The box closed up into the mapper then revolved out of sight.

‘It took years to map the human genome back in the twentieth and twenty-first century,’ Saul explained. ‘We’ve advanced some since then and can conduct the same process in a matter of days.’