Ascendancies (35 page)

Finally he went back in.

Mr. Ferry had pulled a telephone from beneath his cash register. When he saw James he slammed the headset down. “Forget something, pal?”

“I'm troubled,” James said. “I keep wondering…what about those unwritten rules?”

The shopkeeper looked at him, surprised. “Aw, the old guy always talked like that. Rules, standards, quality.” Mr. Ferry gazed meditatively over his stock, then looked James in the eye. “What
rules
, man?”

There was a moment of silence.

“I was never quite sure,” James said. “But I'd like to ask Mr. O'Beronne.”

“You've badgered him enough,” the shopkeeper said. “Can't you see he's a dying man? You got what you wanted, so scram, hit the road.” He folded his arms. James refused to move.

The shopkeeper sighed. “Look, I'm not in this for my health. You want to hang around here, you gotta buy some more tokens.”

“I've seen those already,” James said. “What else do you sell?”

“Oh, machines not good enough for you, eh?” Mr. Ferry stroked his chin. “Well, its not strictly in my line, but I might sneak you a gram or two of Senor Buendia's Colombian Real Magic Powder. First taste is free. No? You're a hard man to please, bub.”

Ferry sat down, looking bored. “I don't see why I should change my stock, just because you're so picky. A smart operator like you, you ought to have bigger fish to fry than a little magic shop. Maybe you just don't belong here, pal.”

“No, I always liked this place,” James said. “I used to, anyway…I even wanted to own it myself.”

Ferry tittered. “You? Gimme a break.” His face hardened. “If you don't like the way I run things, take a hike.”

“No, no, I'm sure I can find something here,” James said quickly. He pointed at random to a thick hardbound book, at the bottom of a stack, below the counter. “Let me try that.”

Mr. Ferry shrugged with bad grace and fetched it out. “You'll like this,” he said unconvincingly. “Marilyn Monroe and Jack Kennedy at a private beach house.”

James leafed through the glossy pages. “How much?”

“You want it?” said the shopkeeper. He examined the binding and set it back down. “Okay, fifty bucks.”

“Just cash?” James said, surprised. “Nothing magical?”

“Cash
is
magical, pal.” The shopkeeper shrugged. “Okay, forty bucks and you have to kiss a dog on the lips.”

“I'll pay the fifty,” James said. He pulled out his wallet. “Whoops!” He fumbled, and it dropped over the far side of the counter.

Mr. Ferry lunged for it. As he rose again, James slammed the heavy book into his head. The shopkeeper fell with a groan.

James vaulted over the counter and shoved the curtains aside. He grabbed the wheelchair and hauled it out. The wheels thumped twice over Ferry's outstretched legs. Jostled, O'Beronne woke with a screech.

James pulled him toward the blacked-out windows. “Old man,” he panted. “How long has it been since you had some fresh air?” He kicked open the door.

“No!” O'Beronne yelped. He shielded his eyes with both hands. “I have to stay inside here! That's the rules!” James wheeled him out onto the pavement. As sunlight hit him, O'Beronne howled in fear and squirmed wildly. Gouts of dust puffed from his cushions, and his bandages flapped. James yanked open the car door, lifted O'Beronne bodily, and dropped him into the passenger seat.

“You can't do this!” O'Beronne screamed, his nightcap flying off. “I belong behind walls, I can't go into the world…”

James slammed the door. He ran around and slid behind the wheel. “It's dangerous out here,” O'Beronne whimpered as the engine roared into life. “I was safe in there.”

James stamped the accelerator. The car laid rubber. He glanced behind him in the rearview mirror and saw an audience of laughing whooping hookers. “Where are we going?” O'Beronne said meekly.

James floored it through a yellow light. He reached into the backseat one-handed and yanked a can from its six-pack. “Where was this bottling plant?”

O'Beronne blinked doubtfully. “It's been so long…Florida, I think…”

“Florida sounds good. Sunlight, fresh air…” James weaved deftly through traffic, cracking the pop-top with his thumb. He knocked back a swig, then gave O'Beronne the can. “Here, old man. Finish it off.”

O'Beronne stared at it, licking dry lips. “But I can't. I'm an owner, not a customer. I'm simply not allowed to do this sort of thing. I own that magic shop, I tell you.”

James shook his head and laughed.

O'Beronne trembled. He raised the can in both gnarled hands and began chugging thirstily. He paused once to belch, and kept drinking.

The smell of May filled the car.

O'Beronne wiped his mouth and crushed the empty can in his fist. He tossed it over his shoulder.

“There's room back there for those bandages, too,” James told him. “Let's hit the highway.”

Our Neural Chernobyl

The late twentieth century, and the early years of our own millennium, form, in retrospect, a single era. This was the Age of the Normal Accident, in which people cheerfully accepted technological risks that today would seem quite insane.

Chernobyls were astonishingly frequent during this footloose, not to say criminally negligent, period. The nineties, with their rapid spread of powerful industrial technologies to the developing world, were a decade of frightening enormities, including the Djakarta supertanker spill, the Lahore meltdown, and the gradual but devastating mass poisonings from tainted Kenyan contraceptives.

Yet none of these prepared humankind for the astonishing global effects of biotechnology's worst disaster: the event that has come to be known as the “neural Chernobyl.”

We should be grateful, then, that such an authority as the Novel Prize-winning systems neurochemist Dr. Felix Hotton should have turned his able pen to the history of
Our Neural Chernobyl
(Bessemer, December 2056, $499.95). Dr. Hotton is uniquely qualified to give us this devastating reassessment of the past's wrongheaded practices. For Dr. Hotton is a shining exemplar of the new “Open-Tower Science,” that social movement within the scientific community that arose in response to the New Luddism of the teens and twenties.

Such Pioneering Hotton papers as “The Locus Coeruleus Efferent Network: What in Heck Is It There For?” and “My Grand Fun Tracing Neural Connections With Tetramethylbenzidine” established this new, relaxed, and triumphantly subjective school of scientific exploration.

Today's scientist is a far cry from the white-coated sociopath of the past. Scientists today are democratized, media-conscious, fully integrated into the mainstream of modern culture. Today's young people, who admire scientists with a devotion once reserved for pop stars, can scarcely imagine the situation otherwise.

But in Chapter 1, “The Social Roots of Gene-Hacking,” Dr. Hotton brings turn-of-the-century attitudes into startling relief. This was the golden age of applied biotech. Anxious attitudes toward “genetic tampering” changed rapidly when the terrifying AIDS pandemic was finally broken by recombinant DNA research.

It was during this period that the world first became aware that the AIDS retrovirus was a fantastic blessing in a particularly hideous disguise. This disease, which dug itself with horrible, virulent cunning into the very genetic structure of its victims, proved a medical marvel when finally broken to harness. The AIDS virus's RNA transcriptase system proved an able workhorse, successfully carrying healing segments of recombinant DNA into sufferers from a myriad of genetic defects. Suddenly one ailment after another fell to the miracle of RNA transcriptase techniques: sickle-cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs disease—literally hundreds of syndromes now only an unpleasant memory.

As billions poured into the biotech industry, and the instruments of research were simplified, an unexpected dynamic emerged: the rise of “gene-hacking.” As Dr. Hotton points out, the situation had a perfect parallel in the 1970s and 1980s in the subculture of computer hacking. Here again was an enormously powerful technology suddenly within the reach of the individual.

As biotech companies multiplied, becoming ever smaller and more advanced, a hacker subculture rose around this “hot technology” like a cloud of steam. These ingenious, anomic individuals, often led into a state of manic self-absorption by their ability to dice with genetic destiny, felt no loyalty to social interests higher than their own curiosity. As early as the 1980s, devices such as high-performance liquid chromatographs, cell-culture systems, and DNA sequencers were small enough to fit into a closet or attic. If not bought from junkyards, diverted, or stolen outright, they could be reconstructed from off-the-shelf parts by any bright and determined teenager.

Dr. Hotton's second chapter explores the background of one such individual: Andrew (“Bugs”) Berenbaum, now generally accepted as the perpetrator of the neural Chernobyl.

Bugs Berenbaum, as Dr. Hotton convincingly shows, was not much different from a small horde of similar bright young misfits surrounding the genetic establishments of North Carolina's Research Triangle. His father was a semi-successful free-lance programmer, his mother a heavy marijuana user whose life centered around her role as “Lady Anne of Greengables” in Raleigh's Society for Creative Anachronism.

Both parents maintained a flimsy pretense of intellectual superiority, impressing upon Andrew the belief that the family's sufferings derived from the general stupidity and limited imagination of the average citizen. And Berenbaum, who showed an early interest in such subjects as math and engineering (then considered markedly unglamorous), did suffer some persecution from peers and schoolmates. At fifteen he had already drifted into the gene-hacker subculture, accessing gossip and learning “the scene” through computer bulletin boards and all-night beer-and-pizza sessions with other would-be pros.

At twenty-one, Berenbaum was working a summer internship with the small Raleigh firm of CoCoGenCo, a producer of specialized biochemicals. CoCoGenCo, as later congressional investigations proved, was actually a front for the California “designer drug” manufacturer and smuggler, Jimmy “Screech” McCarley. McCarley's agents within CoCoGenCo ran innumerable late-night “research projects” in conditions of heavy secrecy. In reality, these “secret projects” were straight production runs of synthetic cocaine, betaphenethylamine, and sundry tailored variants of endorphin, a natural antipain chemical ten thousand times more potent than morphine.

One of McCarley's “black hackers,” possibly Berenbaum himself, conceived the sinister notion of “implanted dope factories.” By attaching the drug-producing genetics directly into the human genome, it was argued, abusers could be “wet-wired” into permanent states of intoxication. The agent of fixation would be the AIDS retrovirus, whose RNA sequence was a matter of common knowledge and available on dozens of open scientific databases. The one drawback to the scheme, of course, was that the abuser would “burn out like a shitpaper moth in a klieg light,” to use Dr. Hotton's memorable phrase.

Chapter 3 is rather technical. Given Dr. Hotton's light and popular style, it makes splendid reading. Dr. Hotton attempts to reconstruct Berenbaum's crude attempts to rectify the situation through gross manipulation of the AIDS RNA transcriptase. What Berenbaum sought, of course, was a way to shut-off and start-up the transcriptase carrier, so that the internal drug factory could be activated at will. Berenbaum's custom transcriptase was designed to react to a simple user-induced trigger—probably D,1,2,5-phospholytic gluteinase, a fractionated component of “Dr. Brown's Celery Soda,” as Hotton suggests. This harmless beverage was a favorite quaff of gene-hacker circles.

Finding the genomes for cocaine-production too complex, Berenbaum (or perhaps a close associate, one Richard “Sticky” Ravetch) switched to a simpler payload: the just-discovered genome for mammalian dendritic growth factor. Dendrites are the treelike branches of brain cells, familiar to every modern schoolchild, which provide the mammalian brain with its staggering webbed complexity. It was theorized at the time that DG factor might be the key to vastly higher states of human intelligence. It is to be presumed that both Berenbaum and Ravetch had dosed themselves with it. As many modern victims of the neural Chernobyl can testify, it does have an effect. Not precisely the one that the CoCoGenCo zealots envisioned, however.

While under the temporary maddening elation of dendritic “branch-effect,” Berenbaum made his unfortunate breakthrough. He succeeded in providing his model RNA transcriptase with a trigger, but a trigger that made the transcriptase itself far more virulent than the original AIDS virus itself. The stage was set for disaster.

It was at this point that one must remember the social attitudes that bred the soul-threatening isolation of the period's scientific workers. Dr. Hotton is quite pitiless in his psychoanalysis of the mental mind-set of his predecessors. The supposedly “objective worldview” of the sciences is now quite properly seen as a form of mental brainwashing, deliberately stripping the victim of the full spectrum of human emotional response. Under such conditions, Berenbaum's reckless act becomes almost pitiable; it was a convulsive overcompensation for years of emotional starvation. Without consulting his superiors, who might have shown more discretion, Berenbaum began offering free samples of his new wetwares to anyone willing to inject them.

There was a sudden brief plague of eccentric genius in Raleigh, before the now-well-known symptoms of “dendritic crash” took over, and plunged the experimenters into vision-riddled, poetic insanity. Berenbaum himself committed suicide well before the full effects were known. And the full effects, of course, were to go far beyond even this lamentable human tragedy.