The biodesigner from Ilorin was out of central casting. A hundred and eighty centimeters, plain and tall as an iroko with eyes the color of its bark and deep as its roots. Silk tunic, trousers and gele in indigo neo-adire, sandals that changed shape with the ground, datacloth flowing across the shoulders and tied loosely near the waist. She could have been in a movie, except for one thing – she was old.
You never see an old person from Ilorin in the films. No producer would admit to believing that they’ve really cracked the code for eternal youth, but maybe in their heart of hearts they do, or maybe they think the rest of us do. And maybe they’re not wrong.
Granted, there are reasons. They do a lot more gene editing in Ilorin than is legal in most of the States, and their modifications include some of the traits that make aging more visible. Their bodies are also even more full of nannies than ours are, and some of theirs are custom-made microorganisms rather than machines. But they die at a hundred or a hundred and ten like the rest of us – their record is 125, but so is ours – and even now some of them show their age more than others. And the woman standing before me now was
old – if you looked at her face, you knew it, and if you looked at her eyes, you were sure.
But I couldn’t look too long – I had a job to do, even if it was the kind of job that’s given to the newest person on the project when he really needs to be doing something else. “Welcome to Tanana, Senhora…”
“Amina,” she said. There wasn’t any trace of age in her voice. “Amina bint Laila bint Asma’u Abacar. And I’ve been here before. This has been one of my projects for seventy-five years.”
Damn it, Raven, you could have told me. Yes, now I knew who I’d been sent to greet – one of the directors-general of the Consistory Environmental Section, lords and masters of a tenth of the world’s GDP and more jobs like this one than could be counted. And this had been one of her personal proposals in another life, a project she’d designed and had a hand in since before my parents were born.
All the gene-edits and nannies in the world hadn’t managed to cure embarrassment, and I wasn’t sure which was worse, the embarrassment itself or the realization that I’d been set up for it. Somewhere, my boss was enjoying this far more than he had any right to do.
“I’m sorry…”
Amina held up a hand. “No need. I know Dimitri. You're one of his lesser victims."
"Dimitri" puzzled me for a moment until I remembered it was the name Raven used when he had to be official about things. The sense of recognition lasted for a moment and then brought me up short again. Raven was local, from one of the narodnik settlements on the Kenai Peninsula. Those towns are as traditional as it gets, and folk culture is one of their cherished constants, but Raven wasn't Mitya or Dima or any of the other things you'd expect him to be called. I'd never thought about it before, but there was probably a story to that.
Right now, though, I was standing at the front gate with someone who it wouldn't do to keep waiting. "This way," I said, although I'm sure she knew, and we walked to where the new designs were waiting.
#
The project began two thousand meters under the sea, in the cold methane seeps that we began to explore early in the last century. Down there, methane-oxidizing archaea and sulfate-reducing bacteria enacted a two-step symbiosis; the archaea ingested methane and excreted sulfates, and the bacteria broke the sulfates down into bicarbonate, bisulfide and water. Someone figured out how much methane would bubble to the surface if not for those microorganisms, and at a time when climate change was still a new priority, those figures were noticed.
If microbes could break down hydrocarbons under the sea, why not here in the Arctic, where the warming permafrost was a crisis in waiting? The lakes here are the weak point – the existing methanotrophs are efficient enough to oxidize almost all the methane that comes to the surface through the soil, but much less so in the anoxic lake sediments – so anaerobic water-living symbionts could be just what we needed. We couldn’t just use the ones we found on the ocean floor – the seasonal temperature changes would kill them – but we could use them as a template and design our own. Or, should I say, Amina could.
The microorganisms she built were the first ones ever synthesized rather than edited. There was some cheating involved – she did some of her building from parts, and a passing Methylobacter might recognize pieces of its DNA – but what in this world is truly original, whether in science or in art? It had been a labor of fifteen years with many trials and many errors, but at the end they’d lived: two symbionts that could bury themselves in the lake bottoms and ensure that the methane seeps never made it to the air. They’d performed well in quarantined tests… and for sixty years, they’d stayed in quarantine.
“We can make them mutation-averse, but we can’t make them mutation-
proof on the time scales we need them to be,” Raven had told me when I first came here – it was nothing I hadn’t heard before, but there was a briefing that he had to give and I had to get. “And we can’t guarantee that they won’t crowd out existing bacteria or show up in the water supply. It doesn’t matter how many simulations we run – they won’t let them out of the cage until we can say that they won’t spread out of control or start releasing poisons a hundred years from now.”
He didn’t name the first
they in that sentence, but his voice made plain who he meant: the same people who thought that Ilorin had discovered the fountain of youth. It hadn’t been the right time to tell him that I still had enough of my parents in me to share those concerns. Once a creation was loose in the world, it was beyond its creator’s control: the story, and the fear, were as old as the ancient Prometheus or Mary Shelley’s modern one. Let the methane-eaters remain safe in the lab until we knew they would be safe outside it.
Making them safe had been the work of the past six decades – it had been some of
my earliest work at William and Mary and then at Potosí. The microbes had been taken apart and put together again, rebuilt to be three-step symbionts with other microorganisms that lived only in Arctic freshwater, redesigned with built-in environmental limits. Other advances had come from that work, and some of them were now living in the deep permafrost under the protection of hundreds of meters of earth. But none of its products were safe enough for the lake bottoms – or maybe none were safe enough until today.
We were gathered in the main presentation room – Raven, Amina, the others on the team, myself – with the lights dimmed and the ceiling datacloth inert. Raven stepped back and motioned me to stand apart, and with a word – “David” – he signaled me to begin.
For a moment, I had no words to answer him, and the embarrassment I’d felt at the gate came back redoubled. Raven began to frown, but he was cut off by Amina’s smile.
“I also had a boss once who thought the youngest one should speak for the team,” she said, “and I know how much of the work is yours. Come, show me.”
And I did. I moved my fingers and the datacloth came to life – I’d always been much easier with sign-controls than with voice – and with another motion, a schematic of a microorganism filled the center of the room. I focused on a particular part of it, and as the scale grew smaller and the symbol- and color-coding more refined, I heard Amina draw in her breath.
I’d done so too – in fact I’d done so two times, once when Dr. Yadav at William and Mary had introduced me to the idea, and once when I first realized it was practical. But I’d thought a biodesigner from Ilorin, one step from the fair folk, would be immune. But she wasn’t. She was staring at the single knotted hexagonal lattice-tube where a double helix should be.
“As you can see, we’ve developed another molecular chain to hold the genome,” I said. “It doesn’t code as efficiently as DNA, but it’s good enough for prokaryotes, and it doesn’t vary between individuals – every microorganism that descends from this model would be identical. Without DNA, they can’t become parasites. And we’ve keyed each model to the environment of a specific lake bottom, and outside that environment, the bonds dissolve and the microbe dies.
“I can show you…” I began, but Amina stepped in herself, fingers moving too quickly for me to follow as she focused on structures and bonds and examined embedded codes with the eye of someone who had been studying them for ninety years. I could see minute by minute how they were becoming familiar to her, how she found what she was looking for more quickly and precisely, how the codes became a story to her, albeit one written in a new medium. But something in her eyes didn’t change.
#
“Living things, but not part of a common nature,” Amina said. We’d gone down to a gravel bank by the river and found a fallen tree to sit on; it was late in the day, but at this time of year there was never really any darkness. “Symbiosis, but no sharing.”
She didn’t say more than that, but she didn’t need to – like any apprentice biodesigner, I’d been steeped in Belloist bioethics since before the university. The filmmakers might portray people from Ilorin nearly as fair folk, but they didn’t keep secrets like the land of faerie did – their principles were stated and the debates in their ulemas, legislatures and academic councils were laid bare for all to see. Chief among them was that nothing should be made, or changed so much, that it was no longer part of a single community. They would make no genes that could not be shared – a rule that more than one Malê student at Potosí had cited to me as proof that genetic modification bans were futile. “Banning gene-edits is like banning the wind – they’ll come to your country in the second generation even if you don’t let them in the first.”
What I didn’t say then, and what I wasn’t sure I should say now, was that not everyone would be part of that second generation. No one knew that better than I did – I’d grown up in a sapientist family, and I’d seen the negotiations and exchanges of genetic profiles that my brother and then my sister had done before they married. They would consider Amina an allohuman – a person, a child of God to be honored like all His other children, but no longer a member of the same species, and not to be married lest one’s own children lose the attributes unique to humanity.
Sapientists were a minority in America but an influential one in several states. They’d headed up the campaigns to restrict genetic editing – I remember the “One Humanity” sign my parents had given me to hold, at a demonstration in Columbus when I was a child – and they were part of the reason why our symbionts had been held in the lab so long. And the same thing that made Amina unsure of our new design would be what made them comfortable.
“If they can think of our microbes as biological tools,” I said at last, “something separate from nature and incapable of joining it, then they won’t think of them as a threat to it.”
Amina nodded. She’d no doubt been thinking along the same lines; she may have started as a researcher, but as she rose through the Consistory ranks, she had to become a politician, and she was used to dealing with others’ fears.
“Of course they share,” said Raven. He was a politician too, a project head, and he was speaking to Amina, but he was also using the voice he used to persuade himself – formal, almost stilted, as if he were making a presentation for his own ears. “They don’t have to share genes to share community. The way they live will make the world a better home for all life.”
“That’s the narodnik in you,” Amina answered. “But the microbes break continuity – the narodnik in you doesn’t mind that?”
“The narodnik in me does,” Raven admitted – his parents had been as strong in their beliefs as mine, and they’d raised him to believe that humanity, life, the world were an organism to be nurtured from past to future. “But the Dena’ina in me…”
Raven. I remembered the stories I’d heard when I’d gone down to Valdez for a long weekend – Raven the creator, but also the trickster and the changer, the transformer who would change animals and things and cultures and sometimes himself. And the man who’d been baptized Dimitri Kurin called himself Raven, not Dima or Mitya.
“They will live their fullest,” he said, “and they will help us live ours, because we made them to.”
It was funny, I thought, how Raven and my parents might come to accept our microbes from opposite directions, and I could see that Amina, too, was tempted. She was silent, but she was thinking of what else she might design. If there could be two kinds of genetic coding, there could be many – we might build creatures to live in environments where we never could, or to live in our bodies and do things that were beyond the bionannies we had now. The Malê hadn’t unlocked the fountain of youth, but that didn’t mean they didn’t yearn for it.
“It’s a good thing we won’t have to decide today,” she said at last. “And a good thing it won’t only be our decision.” I nodded my agreement and, after a moment, so did Raven; if we were going to create not only new life but a new
kind of life, then no one faith, no one philosophy could give us the answer. We would all have to decide what community meant.
Our symbionts had been seventy-five years in the making; maybe it would be another seventy-five before they lived free in the lake bottoms. Maybe they never would. They were potential life now. But I’d also been potential life once.
Amina stood, plain and tall as an iroko, and turned back toward the gate. I knew where she was going and I followed. There was a universe that might come alive someday, and we both wanted to see the futures where it multiplied.