Challenging Destiny #25 Read online

  "Christ, Charlie, let it go. If it's the only one around, you'll drive it extinct or something."

  He nods. “You've a valid point, Miss Karen.” He pulls the beetle out and stares at it, like it's hard to give it up. Then he puts in the grass. “If there's one, there are like to be many others. But I'll not disturb them until I've determined that for a certainty."

  I squint at the glow backlighting the leaves with gold. “We making for the light or what?"

  "Capital suggestion,” says Charlie and starts walking. “The lighting of any habitat is one of its most significant characteristics."

  As we get further into the woods, Charlie's chattering about how this is a something-or-other birch and that one's Number 6, the larch. There's bugs around now—flies and moths and stuff—which makes him, like, scary happy. And the whole time, the light's getting brighter.

  Then, after maybe a mile, we come out of the woods. The trees just stop at the edge of this meadow, and way across the meadow as the slope rises up again, there's this big green castle-like thing that looks suspiciously like a watercolor on an MGM backdrop.

  But the light's for real. It's not blinding, just spilling out gold-from-green, all around.

  "Chivvy-toss Supra Montem,” whispers Pete.

  I ask, “Any of you guys—well, I guess that would be Tea—ever read The Wizard of Oz?"

  "No, I'd not got to that one."

  "Well, I think you're about to get real familiar with it."

  Down on the meadow, in front of the E. C., we can see people, kids I think, running around and playing. Huh. I wonder if they're real or FXy—holo-kids or something. I'm wondering a lot of things as we start walking toward the city. Like is this really the afterlife? some weird, trick-question hell? or a trick-question heaven? or is it just another world? an endless world? Maybe I just got a new lease on “life,” and I'll have all the time in the universe to learn to be like Yoda. Maybe someday I'll know how to get back to Earth, and I'll be a Bodhisattva standing at the doorway between one life and the next, giving a hand up to Mom and Dad and Ahn. Or maybe all I've got to do is tap my heels together—and God's going to fly off in a big balloon, telling us he can't stop; he doesn't know how it works.

  I look at the guys. Pete's got this max-concentration expression, like he's trying to figure out if he's still in Hell or what.

  "How's it going, Pete?"

  When Tea translates, Pete shakes his head at me with this baffled smile. “I do not understand the ways of God ... I know only that the Lord is all merciful and all just ... and so whatever fate he grants to us ... must also be of the highest mercy and justice ... What greater comfort could I have?"

  At first, I think, yeah, if there is all that mercy and justice. But then I get more Buddhist and think, yo, it doesn't matter. You get what you get. Make lemonade, dude—which is pretty much what's Pete's saying when you boil it down. Guy may be way medieval, but he's not stupid.

  "How about you, Tea?” I ask. “Missing the plastic people?"

  He points at the city, which is closer now. “You see that carving up above the gate? That's Hittite.” He chuckles. “It's rather like an H. G. Wells adventure through time. Whatever we may find, there's an allure in the exploration itself that makes me feel quite intrepid. It's hoots."

  Hoots? “Yeah, Charlie's already having a ‘hoot’ with his beetles.” But Charlie's eyes are glued on the kids in the meadow. We can hear them laughing and shouting now. They're wearing different colors: bright, druggie-poppy technicolors.

  "Annie?” Charlie calls. “Is that you, my pigeon?” He darts a look at us. “Why I think ... I think that may be my little girl. If only I could see closer.” And he takes off like a bat out of hell toward the kids.

  I hope it's her, his kid. And I hope Pete finds Heloïse and ... that everything gets found someday. No guarantees. It's scary. Man, my hand's starting to shake.

  Then, there's scratchy little noise, and I realize my iPod's come back on. I whip on the earphones and, yep, it's playing perfect. So I bop along toward the big, green gate, listening to a murdered man tell me it's all good as long as we love.

  * * * *

  A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, Arwen Spicer has been writing science fiction since age fifteen. She is the founder of StarMerrow (www.starmerrow.com), a diverse community of speculative fiction writers and artists working to produce and market quality work. Most of her fiction, including her novel, Perdita (available through StarMerrow), addresses social and ecological conflicts from multiple points of view. She holds a B.S. in biology from Humboldt State University in California and a Ph.D. in English (literature and environment emphasis) from the University of Oregon.

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  Expectations by James Wesley Rogers

  Correction 13 erased a minor flaw in the human genetic code. By repairing a mutant gene responsible for slight chemical imbalances in the brain, the scientists at the Human Genome Application Project (H-GAP) eliminated forever the human afflictions of night terrors, hysterical pregnancy, restless leg syndrome, ice-cream headaches, and the ability to believe in God.

  The last two were a surprise. Earlier corrections had been sparkling successes, wiping out dozens of deadly genetic disorders. Still, the scientists at H-GAP were cautious, adhering strictly to a ten-year testing regimen. The first children born with the correction seemed healthy and happy during the monitoring phase. According to most experts, however, the critical age for formation of personal religious beliefs is thirteen. Thus, three years before the full consequences were even suspected, Correction 13 was added to the international standard birth filter and distributed for free to every man, woman and child on the planet.

  The world changed.

  Some young people continued to profess belief out of respect for their elders, especially in cultures where religious practices weren't exactly optional, but everyone knew they were only delaying the inevitable. In western society, those religions without deep roots, the modern inventions and the fashionable eastern imports, disappeared quickly, as did the older ecclesiastical orders, Catholic and Anglican and Orthodox, which had been slowly dying there for a long time. Still more ancient, Judaism no longer resisted the transformation from a faith to simply a cultural heritage.

  The Protestants hung on a little longer, but not much. When they too could see the writing on the wall, aging Methodist, Lutheran, and Presbyterian clergymen boxed up their hymnals and put their sanctuaries in good order, then closed the doors forever.

  The evangelicals took it pretty hard. This wasn't the sort of apocalypse they were expecting, and they wouldn't accept it. Baptists and Pentecostals and others whose faith was the dominant aspect of their lives went into crisis mode, working themselves to the point of collapse holding rallies and handing out pamphlets on college campuses, trying to convert the unconvertible. But in the end, they failed. Their tracts littered the streets, ignored; their radio and T.V. stations went to static, one by one.

  Unitarians were largely unaffected.

  I was born nine years after Correction 13, which makes me a normal, and I guess I was about twelve when the full sense of obsolescence really hit organized religions. As more and more parents of normals realized that their children would never share in the promises of their faith, they began to question the point of it all. They dropped out.

  Around the country, houses of worship stood empty with “for sale” signs in their lawns, and it was a buyer's market. The great religious works went out of print, although the Bible could still be found in the “fantasy” section of most bookstores, where it sold reasonably well in a trade paperback edition.

  They couldn't reverse it; the scientists couldn't put things back the way they had been. First of all, the younger generation wouldn't have wanted them to, and technically, it would have been extraordinarily difficult, since the correction had wiped out not a single mutation, but a million different incompatible variants. Politically, it was completely impo
ssible.

  Officially, the whole brain-altering fiasco never happened. Nobody discussed it on the news. You wouldn't read in the New York Times that no one could believe in God anymore because of Correction 13. The governments of the world, the ones who practically forced the germ line retrovirus gene filter down everyone's throats, certainly weren't going to admit it. But it was obvious to everyone.

  I was lucky enough to get the inside scoop. My mother was a microbiologist, and she had actually worked as a lab tech on one of the early H-GAP projects the summer before her senior year in high school.

  "I say, ‘people can't believe in God anymore,'” she told me, “because I was raised Baptist and that's what seems most shocking to me."

  She explained that other people would see it differently. They might say, “people can't believe in reincarnation anymore,” or karma, or the Tao, or ghosts, or extraterrestrials. If a normal can't see it, touch it, right here, right now, he won't believe in it.

  "That's what has happened, Parker."

  We started talking about this one night when we drove out to the country with a telescope to look at the stars, and Mom told me she was going to show me little green men. I didn't believe her. That was a year before the accident.

  I was barely seven, but my memories of the accident have never faded, the cold rain, the way the air smelled of wet highway, the red glow of brake lights in the gloom. I remember hearing a bang and the car lurching and then all of a sudden the world was upside down. I remember the convicts pulling me and Dad out of the wreck, the way two of them burned to death trying to get Mom out. I still think about it all these years later, and I guess that's why I helped that convict on the roof.

  People don't help convicts; convicts help people. I know that's not the way it used to be. It used to be that when someone committed a crime, he was just punished, locked up. But that was before Correction 13.

  Suppose you could take something that didn't belong to you, say a candy bar, and leave no evidence, and you knew that no one would ever suspect you. Would you do it? If you were born more than twenty-five years ago, you would probably say, “Of course not, that would be wrong.” But kids today, the normals, would say, “Of course I would. I would lose nothing and be up one candy bar."

  Before Correction 13, my mother explained to me, children had a dreadful fear of the unknown, the dark, of monsters in the closet. It served a purpose.

  "Parents used to be able to tell their kids that if they disobeyed, God would punish them,” she told me. She tapped her chin thoughtfully after she said this and added, “Or a monster would jump out of a closet and eat them. Both approaches worked."

  Children back then had this awful suspicion that someone was watching them and would strike them down if they did something that their parents told them was wrong. It kept them from danger at a time when their intellects were not yet developed enough to curb their basic impulses. They might someday become productive, law-abiding atheists, but when they were little, fear of God and monsters helped to guide them.

  Not anymore. Now they did what they figured was to their greatest profit, in a calculating manner that would have impressed even Ayn Rand.

  So much of civilization depends upon people following the rules voluntarily. The police and judges of the world would be quickly overwhelmed if enough people decided not to obey the law anymore. And it looked like that was exactly what was going to happen. The crimes of young children, like cheating in school, lying to guardians, shoplifting and petty theft became so prevalent that it seriously impacted economies worldwide. And these kids were growing up, graduating to more serious offenses. People began to view the future with a sickening sense of doom. Something had to be done, fast. Something drastic.

  The details of the Samaritan implant were never published. It started out as a sort of artificial conscience for convicted criminals, to replace the one that Correction 13 had destroyed. Whenever a convict so much as thought about committing a crime, the implant in his brain would generate paralyzing waves of pain so excruciating that he would never try it again. Along with a streamlined justice system, the innovation made crime unappealing. Even those who had not received an implant quickly reformed to avoid such an unpleasant fate. Juvenile crime dropped like a rock.

  But a few people thought, “Why stop there?” Why just discourage negative behavior? Why not encourage positive behavior? If a person has the potential to benefit humanity, by saving a life perhaps, or writing a symphony, or discovering a new source of energy, and doesn't, isn't that a crime? Shouldn't that be punished too? If a person with a Samaritan implant doesn't have the self-discipline to study astrophysics or emergency medicine, these people suggested, just zap him until he does. And so the convicts became artists and surgeons and engineers and heroes, which was good, because after Correction 13, nobody was really interested in these types of careers anymore. Most normals grow up with dreams of becoming professional celebrities.

  So convicts help people, but people never help convicts. But I did. I didn't mean to shock anybody, but I guess I must have. Why else would I have suddenly become the fifteenth highest rated high school male in the country?

  "So what happened?” asked Dylan Austin during the interview on TV Prime the next day.

  "We were standing outside the CyberEquity building, my friends and I, watching the fire. The whole place went up like a torch. The heat was incredible.” I spoke to Dylan as though we were having a conversation; that's what people like to see. “All of a sudden, up on the roof, this convict stepped out from the smoke with a kid in his arms. There wasn't any way down, and the fire was closing in. So he took a running leap with the kid hanging on his back, caught a strip of molding that ran along the top of a building across the street, a couple stories lower. He swung the kid up on the roof, began to pull himself up. That's when the molding started tearing off the side of the building. He couldn't move; it just made things worse, and everybody could see he wouldn't last long hanging there."

  If I really wanted to be accurate, I should have added that I had looked around just like everybody else did to see if another convict would show up in time to help him before he fell off and died. But no other convicts showed up, and the idea just came to me in a flash, like my weird ideas always do. I could help him.

  "So I ran into the building,” I continued, “found a service elevator that went to the roof. He was still hanging on. I grabbed his hand and pulled him in."

  Dylan looked at me with kind, interested eyes. “You're a hero, Parker, a real hero."

  I gave him an “aw shucks” kind of grin, sheepish, but not too sheepish.

  Dylan put a hand to his earpiece. “We're cutting away. Tyler Davis is asking Madison Cleary to homecoming right now.” His eyespot flashed and his eyes changed focus. “He's on one knee. This is gold."

  I tried not to look annoyed. “Are we coming back?"

  "Depends on your ratings. You were down to thirty-seven when we started.” He wagged a finger in thin air, flipped some virtual switch, and whistled. “Guess what, kid? You're up to seven.” He squinted at something only he could see, and looked puzzled. “Weird demographic, though. You're drawing huge from the forty and over crowd. Okay, we're back in five, four, three...” He turned to me. “So why did you do it? What made Parker Evans want to be a hero?"

  I already knew how I was going to answer this question. The words had flashed into my brain as soon as I knew I was speaking to the “forty and over crowd.” Voters.

  "It's just the way I was raised, Dylan,” I said. “My dad taught me to work hard, do what's right, and help people whenever I see a need."

  Dylan knew my dad was running for congress, and I think he caught on. “You're lucky to have a dad like that."

  "I sure am."

  When the interview started, my dad had barely sixty thousand dollars left in his campaign fund, and was dead last in the polls. Five minutes after the interview concluded, his account was at half a million and rising, and he w
as projected by most spot polls to win the primary. By nine o'clock that evening, the party was calling him to discuss possible strategies for the general election. I wondered if this was going to blow my plans for Nikki's party.

  Nikki Kennedy went to my high school, but she had never spoken to me. Her father was the incumbent congressman that Dad would be running against. Nikki was a reject, but you could hardly tell. People in her family had always been tall and athletic and well tanned. The only clues you got that her parents hadn't taken the standard filter was that sometimes her face would break out a bit, and the little silver cross she wore around her neck.

  Most people are cool about rejects and don't give them a hard time. But Nikki was rich and very pretty; that made her fair game for any insult anyone wanted to throw at her. In other circumstances, I think she would have been friendly and outgoing, but the years of harassment had taken a toll. She cocooned herself within a tight circle of friends and pretty much didn't speak to anyone else.

  We had one friend in common, Xander Sparks. Xander was the kind of guy nobody could dislike; a big star of the local teen melodrama who knew everyone's name and drew people to him with empathic charisma. Nobody got picked on when Xander was around, and there wasn't a girl in school who couldn't cry on his shoulder if she needed to. He was unusually tall and bright and irresistible to women, and he had inherited none of these characteristics from his parents. One look at him, and you knew he was a tweak.

  Correction One had eliminated Cystic Fibrosis from the human genome forever. Corrections Two through Five did the same for sickle cell anemia, Huntington's disease, Marfan syndrome, and hereditary hemochromatosis. In the years that followed, before the fallout from 13 ended the program, scientists at H-GAP found corrections for a host of inherited human infirmities, including certain types of cancer, growth problems, learning disabilities, and imperfect eyesight, and then moved on to more aesthetic fixes, targeting acne and baldness and overactive fat cells. Still, all of these changes fell under the criteria of correction, the replacement of clearly defective genes.