Immunity Index by Sue Burke (best fiction books of all time txt) 📗

agree with the majority, perhaps the unanimity of this committee,” a senator asked the young man, “that human genetic engineering ought to be banned?”

“I support natural humanity,” he said—what was he supposed to say? And he used that magic word: natural.

He wheeled himself out, and the abject designer of that failure was called in for a tongue-lashing with a cat-o’-nine-tails. I watched astonished at the senators’ verbal skills and aghast at their ignorance.

My lawyer sipped a cup of minty tea and glanced at the screen. “Five minutes. Any last questions?”

“Any last words?” I answered. “That’s all this is, words.” But I knew that if Congress passed the wrong law (or other countries did, for that matter), my fate was prison.

“Yes. The most polite words are likely to win.” She looked stern. She knew me.

“I’ve spent all last night studying the playbook.”

“Good,” she said. But she blinked for too long, as if she were hoping not to witness what she saw coming.

“These senators have no gist of what they’re even saying,” I complained. “The staff wrote the questions.”

“And if the senators are smart,” she said, “they’ll stick to the questions so they don’t prove that they’re showboating idiots. Remember, the real audience is far away, the people who can still be convinced.”

Good woman, that lawyer in her nice, fashionable haircut. Smart and efficient. If I were going to make a human being, and I had, I might have made her, a pinnacle of humanity. That was all I had ever wanted to do.

So, sworn in, I sat at that table twelve feet from the frowning committee chair, with bright lights overhead, a microphone ready to capture my wisdom, and, as that excellent lawyer had bargained for, I got to read a two-minute opening statement.

“Consider the definition of medically necessary: to prevent or treat an illness, condition, or disease or its symptoms that meet the accepted standards of medicine. Prevention. We do that all the time. Would you outlaw DNA vaccine production, especially after the cholera outbreaks five years ago? Treatment. Would you outlaw gene therapy and tell cancer patients they can’t be cured? Then why not provide medically necessary prevention and treatment before the moment of conception?”

Such blank stares! Obviously, some form of sudden deafness had infected the senators.

“I’ve been accused of attempting to engineer perfection, and it’s true. Perfect human beings are merely ordinary human beings brought to their optimal level: perfectly, optimally typical. Responsible genetic engineering can bring people to their best, but not one step beyond that—because as you have seen, to step beyond normality is to fall into the abyss.”

No one believed me, a humble technician of the language of life. Behind me, an audience watched and tables of reporters placed context and commentary around my words. I might be reasonable, but what about the others? What about the ones who tried to make feathers and wings? What about the ones who would trick grieving parents into thinking they could resurrect their dead child? What about the ax blade of suspicion that fell unfairly on naturally conceived children with some disability or difference and who were tainted by this hysteria?

What about all that? Senators now glowered at me as if I were the ignorant one.

“It’s true,” I explained oh so patiently, “strawberries can be made purple, cows can produce insulin-filled milk, wheat can be perennial, woolly mammoths can be resurrected. Each of these amounts to a parlor trick, not playing god, and we need to be aware that these kinds of tricks are not applicable to the human genome.”

My attorney was right. I was speaking to showboating idiots and beyond them to a panic-stricken world.

“People are like—think of a triangle,” I testified, an explanation designed for nonscientific minds. “An equilateral triangle. You know, all three sides are the same length? The perfect person is like that, balanced on all sides. None of us are perfect. We’re all a little more or less lopsided: taller, shorter, stronger, weaker, smarter, stupider. With a lot of work, we can draw an almost perfect triangle. We must be balanced to be perfect, and the perfectly ordinary human being is the one best adapted to their environment in the many ways that evolution has shaped us.”

I could have gone on, but I was asked instead about deextinction, which I felt passionately in favor of, yet I wanted to say more about the real issue, and eventually someone asked a question I could use to tangent into the facts.

“No, Senator. No one can successfully make a superman. That person would be disproportionate on one or even two sides of the triangle and ultimately fail. People can be made too tall for their nervous system, as you’ve seen. A superbrain would demand so much energy from the body that circulatory and digestive systems would falter. Perfect is balanced, like the scales of justice.”

I didn’t add that perfection was impossible to achieve, like all worthy artistic goals, but I could get close.

And finally I was dismissed. Yes, maybe I believed in limits, but others did not, which the senators knew for certain, and to be fair, they were right. Thus human “designer babies” were outlawed without exception. Justice was skewed by legislation designed to please crowds with loopy definitions that left us in the field not entirely certain of what was and wasn’t legal.

No matter. I had crossed that wavering line with SongLab. By then all I had left from my business were creditors nipping at my knees. And babies, dozens of babies, now toddlers and teens (all of their DNA containing a tiny, inconsequential sequence of me as a signature of my artistry). A few of them were as perfect as humans could be, with occasional parlor tricks like red hair or the ever-popular above-average IQ to enchant choosy parents.

Red hair was easy. Humans could breed for it by their choice of sexual partner if they wanted to. Above-average IQ was harder, actually more likely to be produced by parental expectations and early childhood