A week later Meadow got another email: LIVE.NATION: Offering concert tickets worldwide!!!!! An animation showed a W.2 version of a Tech-Jockey conducting music with a Z-Game controller like Nico used to play with. In the background, she saw robots—like Nico used to draw—and red flutes—huge red flutes, like his flute. Was someone trying to tell her something?
Or was she losing her mind?—seeing traces of Nico in every flower in every crannied wall?
The flute in her bag was real, though, delivered by FedEx. And the coincidences seemed too lucky to be coincidences—even if everything online was shaped to give everyone whatever they wanted: the tragedy of the latest school shooting a reason for gun control in the news feeds Meadow read, while she was sure that RedHatters were reading that the only way to prevent such school shootings would be to arm each student—or that the school shooting itself was a hoax that never happened—and each side thinking the other crazy for letting school shootings go on. Had she just been a victim of that?—the ‘boy’ who’d left the flute for her an influencer-bot, or spam-atar?
One Night Only!!!! There was a link to the W.2 location where a virtual simulcast of the concert would be held. Tomorrow night. If she bought a pair of VR goggles, and stayed after work she could go to the W.2 concert using the lab’s Internet3 connection. The university sat right on a node, and its extra bandwidth and wavelength grooming would let her experience the concert live instead of typing in her words the way she did when everyone was in the lab during the day. Or was all of this just a come-on to get her to buy more equipment?
She could hear Gabe and Jak talking in the next aisle: “You doing Da Tour this year?”
Jak was asking Gabe about the illegal bike race that she had competed in for the past three years. It was modeled on the Tour de France except Da Tour stayed within the city limits of Chicago, with Chinatown, Little Italy, Boystown and other Chicago neighborhoods standing in for stages. It was over in hours instead of weeks. But like Le Tour, Da Tour was usually determined by its mountain stage: a series of staircases through city parks, culminating in a race by riders carrying their bikes up 20 to 40 flights of high-rise stairs. Most of the competitors were financial advisors, graphic designers and others who only biked to work or did road trips on weekends. Still, they often gave the pros a run for the yellow jersey because, some said, they didn’t have enough fear of traffic. They’d have enough this year, though, Gabe thought.
Because Da Tour was illegal, it all had to be done under the radar. Just before it was about to start, a tweet would go out announcing the location of the starting line and racers would have about fifteen minutes to form a flashmob there. A gun would go off in the earbuds they wore, and the first leg of the route would be announced. As they raced, they’d get updates on the route, the race-DJ changing the route by monitoring police movements, and redirecting the route of the race to keep ahead of cops who would be trying to shut it down. So the racers had to pay attention to the stream of chatter coming through their earbuds as well as each other as well as the car and truck traffic on the streets.
Last year, two of the competitors had been bearing down on the Uptown finish line, pumping hard to win the stage, neck and neck, a game of chicken with neither willing to brake for the traffic light that turned red. As they shot into the Broadway-Argyle intersection they were simultaneously hit by a fish truck. Flattened like flies. Gabe had been back in the pack, but close enough to see it all.
It had really shaken her up. There but for the grace of God…. She had an indelible image in her mind of their ghost bikes: a matched pair of Treks, chained to a post at the intersection as a memorial—the two bikes in a dead heat forever—tires, handlebars, saddle, frame, all spray painted the same ghostly white. She’d come upon them while riding home just the other night, the white outlines of the bikes caught in the beam of her headlamp.
“I don’t know,” she said softly to Jak. “I’m still thinking about it.”
Meadow continued surveying the libraries of transgenic organisms that Olympia asked her to monitor. Lots of trans-gen insects designed to solve the problems caused by the introduction of previous trans-gen insects: the RiBeetle® designed to eat the larva of the BeetleSanto® which had been created to eradicate the Colorado potato beetle, which had developed resistance to insecticides, but with the rising heat of the planet had become invasive in many regions where previously it couldn’t live. Funny, she thought, how like the nuclear bomb or Prozac, or cars that drove themselves, no one wanted this world, yet here it was.
Most of the new patents were for strains of crops and animals that could withstand the droughts that were creeping all over the globe, and the companies out there seemed to be trying anything to get an edge: Agrobacterium sp. bacteria inserted into soybeans to make a version of soybeans more resistant to herbicides developed for drought-resistant crops; a gene from the Lepidoptera pathogen microorganism Bacillus thuringiensis had been inserted into corn genome to produce the Bt toxins that would poison the insects that had crept north; rice engineered to produce higher levels of beta carotene; NuCOTN cotton engineered to carry a toxin that kills caterpillars by paralyzing their guts….
Every time she visited one of these ordering sites, she couldn’t believe how many more plants and animals were on offer, labs all over the world domesticating molecules as if they were sheep, editing the poem that had been a chicken, pig, mouse, or plant to make a new version. Zeno’s Paradox: the logic by which Achilles could never actually catch the tortoise because no matter how often he halved the distance between them, it could always be halved again. Only here, as played out in the bodies of these tortoises, it was made literal: the gene inserted within CRF1, 59-GAG(G/A)T(T/C)TAGTTGA(T/C)ATTAG-39, positions 2229 to 2208 in the tortoise’s tRNA to create a line that would be susceptible to cancer; then the GFP gene of a jellyfish was added between those two new positions so that the line that was susceptible to cancer would develop tumors that glowed a neon green, and suddenly where there had only been the single, standard-issue line of tortoise, there were four. These four lines became eight with the patenting of a third genetic variable: a propensity to make tortoises obese. When used in combination with the other variable genes, the eight lines became 16, then 32, then 64. Then 64 became 128, 128 became 256, 512, 1,024 with the ability to knock out genetic switches similar to those that had been added. CR1-like LINEs differing at the 39 end of the tortoise Pol III/SINE isolated from Chinemys reevesii….
There were so many kinds of tortoises now—a whole spectrum of tortoises with more shades of disease or genetic propensity than there were hues in a color wheel; when she bent her finger to scroll, their technical descriptions whizzed down the screen, the meaning of the word ‘tortoise’ needing so many qualifiers that to say ‘tortoise’ now was to say nothing….
Same with ‘friend,’ ‘natural,’ and all the old words…. Even ‘Earth,’ now that the Galileo Massive Cloud Orbiting Telescope had begun sending back pictures of an Earthlike planet, its continents and oceans an echo on the original Blue Marble Earth. Only this planet was tinted red—Red Marble Earth—’nearby’ though of course impossible to reach: gasoline on the fire of religious fanatics who went around proclaiming it as a portend of the end of this world….
So many, I had not thought life had brought into existence so many, she thought. Last night, texting her husband hadn’t gone so bad. She’d typed ‘separation’ then backspaced to erase it, changing it to ‘time away from each other.’ But if she’d mentally crossed that line, he probably had too. When she hit the send key, though, she found herself holding her breath, staring at the screen to see if he’d use the ‘S’ word. Or worse, the ‘D’ word. There was a long pause. Agonizingly long. Then the words ‘I miss you’ came on-screen. They’d changed the subject, but the various marketing bots had caught on, pop-up ads for marriage counselors blooming on her screen—and surely his—until they both texted ‘good night.’
Progress, Meadow thought wistfully, scrolling through the database of trans-g insects. One becomes two, two becomes four, blink your eyes and you’re up to 2,048….
When she recalled how everyone used to use Drosophilidae in genetic research because of its large chromosomes, not the hundreds of genetically- created fruit flies that labs used today…. When she thought of the fields and streams beyond the screen, it seemed as though she were living one of those Sci-Fi comics Gabe drew: a world where the whole globe was paying for ignoring the first law of parasites: if the parasites grow too weak, the host kills them; if the parasites grow too strong, they kill the host, and then they both die.
Easy to forget, given that the odds had been so heavily weighted in favor of the host—the Earth—for all of human history. For millennium, people applied themselves to learning how to build shelters against the Earth’s weather; how to generate heat and cold to defeat its seasons; how to wage war on beetles, claw their way above the whims of nature. But then the Earth’s parasites—people—began to become too successful. Too strong. Too numerous. They built too many houses. Owned too many teak countertops. Needed too many trains and planes and automobiles—and plastic cafeteria trays, and TV shows and billion-watt casinos, not caring how much they heated the air outside in order make an artificial arctic indoors. Their efforts to combat their host, their mother, grew too potent as they found ever-more efficient ways to convert her lungs into lumber, her veins into rails and smoke, their numbers and efforts fouling her breath, her rivers, and now their host was dying. And when it died so would they. At least enough of them to put the Earth back into?—What? Not the balance those Paraguayan Indians used to believe in. For surely the Earth was just the Earth: what matter to the Earth if there were two or no ice caps? The Earth would go on completely covered in water as it once was or as the scorching desert it seemed determined to become.
When she thought of the people from her parents’ generation who must have seen this coming her heart ached: some had started projects like the Seed Ark. They understood that the plants and animals that could be found on the prairies had been an absolute kaleidoscope before they’d been reduced to the monochrome bandwidth of field weeds. And they worked to make it possible for some future generation to do for the whole Earth what they’d done for prairies. Restore ten percent. That had been the goal they set, squirreling away seeds in a vault in the Arctic.
Before the vault was flooded by a melting Arctic.
All those well-intentioned people back in 2005, or 2010—or even as late as 2021—thinking they could make a difference with their butterfly nets and garden trowels…. She couldn’t help but give a little, sarcastic snort, looking at the logo on the blue recycling bin: arrows arranged as time’s snake eating its own tail—a closed loop—earnest gardeners with trowels rearranging flowers on the Titanic….
The list of transgenic insects on her screen was suddenly replaced with her screen saver: a picture of Magnolia, her springer spaniel. The dog looked so happy that Meadow smiled to think of the day she’d shot that photo. They’d been back home in Oregon, a craving brought on by the dog’s arrangement of DNA causing it to chase down rabbits, sniff through the undergrowth. Like her, that’s where its biology was most in tune with its surroundings.
She’d always known that biology was more created than born, of course: a Chihuahua—a living toy made out of a wolf—could no more exist in the wild than any other freak of nature, and Magnolia was no different: fed on food created in factories. From fish that had been caught by Bottom Billion refugees, forced to work like the enslaved, she’d found out. After moving here to the Midwest, Meadow had had to keep Magnolia on Flea-Guard all year round because the winters in the Midwest didn’t get cold enough to kill off fleas anymore.
Now, looking at the photo of Magnolia, remembering the wool leggings she wore in the photo but had since packed away for good, Meadow wondered if nature had always been a slave to human imagination—a habit of mind as surely as a nation’s art or architecture reflected its time and place: the Sistine Ceiling’s God-Giving-Life-to-Adam morphing into Frankenstein’s monster receiving his bolt of lightning.
Across the lab she could see Jak and Gabe looking at something on his screen, probably grossing each other out as they liked to do with old photos of dirty and dangerous things that people used to do: the French kissing hello; strangers crowding into wave pools; and most disgusting of all, kids blowing on birthday cakes.... To them ‘nature’ always included fantasy animals without the fantasy. The body, as packets of data. Patentable. Rearrangeable as new bodies. This is what Olympia wanted to do with the lice: create a louse with enlarged salivary glands that will create a lot of SP-12.
Bioinformatics. Designer unicorns, why not? At some point, animal species would be created in labs faster than they could go extinct in the wild. Maybe they were already. Looking at Jak and Gabe, she knew it would only be natural, a nature that would eventually become in its turn naïve, simple and antique to those who followed….