The Cassandra Complex (36 page)

“It was difficult in those days to build up self-sustaining populations of transgenic animals. Cloning technology was in its infancy, and experiments with sheep, cattle, and pigs were limited by the long life cycles of the animals. In 1999, the vast majority of transgenic strains were mice, simply because mice have such a short breeding cycle. They were the only livestock we had that was prolific enough to allow us to use the bacterial engineer’s favorite tactic—transform a few and kill the rest. Plant engineers were still shooting new DNA into leaves from guns, selecting out the few dozen successfully transformed cells from the thousands that were destroyed or unaffected with herbicide, then cloning away like crazy—but you can’t regenerate a whole animal from a handful of cells, and even if you grow a transgenic animal from a transformed egg, you still need another exactly like it to mate it with before you can start a dynasty. Sex—the root of all the world’s frustrations—was the animal engineer’s great stumbling block.

“Mice were a lot more convenient to work with in ’99 than anything bigger, but they were far from perfect. The process still took too much time, and it was all very hit-and-miss—but when I read about the mass transformation of bovine ova by retroviruses, I figured it was a method that could be taken to its logical extreme.”

He paused, but Lisa wasn’t about to play guessing games now that the tale was underway. She contented herself with a mere prompt. “Which was?”

“Well, I figured that if you could transform eggs stripped from a slaughterhouse organ, you ought to be able to transform them in situ—in the ovaries of a living animal. At first I figured that the best kind of living animal to use was a fetus—because eggs, unlike sperm, aren’t produced continuously throughout an animal’s lifetime. By the time a female animal is born, she’s already lost most of the egg cells she had when her tissues first differentiated, and she keeps on losing them before and after she reaches puberty. Not many animals survive to menopause, of course, but humans display the far end of the spectrum. A woman your age has no viable eggs left at all, having lost all but a tiny few before she ever reached breeding age.”

Unless, of course
, Lisa thought,
she had her remaining stock taken out while she was in her twenties and stored in liquid nitrogen.

“What I tried to do,” Morgan went on, “was to introduce retroviruses into pregnant mice, aiming them specifically at the eggs within the fetal ovaries. The idea was to secure a vast collection of ready-transformed pre-oocytes, which could then be extracted from the aborted fetus. It would have been authentic mass production, on a time scale measurable in days rather than weeks, let alone the years it takes to bring transformed sheep and cows to adulthood. You can see what a boon a system like that would have been to my search for the ideal addressable vector.

“Unfortunately, it wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Nature’s genetic engineers are unreliable slaves—they have their own agendas, and a lot of those agendas are what the man in the street calls diseases: colds, colics, and cancers. The womb has it own agenda too. It has a system programmed into it, and when you have wombs within wombs, things can get very complicated. I couldn’t get effective transmission across the placenta. I had to switch my attention to newboms, although it seemed like a terrible waste. So many eggs have already gone by the time a mouse is born, and the rest are dying in droves day by day. I thought it might at least be possible to do something about the latter problem, so I modified my retroviruses yet again, incorporating a control gene that was supposed to stop the oocytes from committing suicide.

“That one worked. In fact, it worked far better than I’d hoped. In coupling it with the rest of the package, I’d somehow contrived to produce a synergistic effect—one of those million-to-one shots of which I’d always been so flagrantly contemptuous. When you have a hundred thousand genetic engineers trying out hundreds of novel gene combinations every year, though, the laws of probability will give you a million-to-one shot every month. Mine was the only one I ever got in forty years of trying, but it was a big one.

“In those days, we were only beginning to get used to the first principle of genetic engineering—you can never do just
one
thing—so I hadn’t figured multiplicity of effect into my plans, let alone synergy, but they sure as hell came out in my results. Do you ever come across genetic mosaics in your police work?”

“Occasionally,” Lisa confirmed. Mosaics had first attracted attention when biologists contrived to fuse the embryos of two different species. The first sheep/goat hybrids had been produced in the 1990s, and the revelation had prompted people to wonder how often the same thing happened in nature. Whenever a single fertilized egg divided into two to produce identical twins, the result was obvious, but when two fertilized eggs fused to produce a single individual, there was no easy way of telling that the resultant individual was a mosaic. Until DNA analysis came along, there was no way of knowing how many cows in the bam or people walking the streets were actually patchworks of two distinct but closely related genomes. Human mosaics were even rarer than pairs of identical twins, but a world of nine billion people had to contain millions. Lisa had run across half a dozen human mosaics while conducting DNA analyses in the police lab.

“In that case, you probably know that animal mosaics were often created mechanically back in the 1990s. It was an early alternative to cloning that lost fashionability when nuclear-transfer techniques improved. The mosaics I created with the aid of my trusty retroviruses were a kind that nature had never contrived, though. My retroviruses produced a strain of mice whose egg-filled ovaries became benign cancers—not merely benign in the accepted sense that the cancers were harmless, but in a much stronger sense. The transformed eggs became capable of fusing with one another to produce zygote-like bodies that then began to grow, but not like fetuses, and not like commonplace tumors. What they did was to emit a slow but steady stream of new stem cells that could be—and were—distributed throughout the body and gradually integrated into the organs of the mothers. The mothers became, in consequence, a complex mosaic. Their complexity didn’t show up readily in the kinds of DNA analysis that Ed and I taught you to do, because the sum total of all the pesudezygote types was delimited by the original female genotype. I didn’t figure out exactly what was happening for quite a while, and I might have missed it altogether if I hadn’t started working with newborns, but that made it obvious enough that something very weird was happening.

“The long and the short of it is that the process of mosaic reconstruction stopped the aging process in its tracks. The transgenic mice were rejuvenating themselves. Initially, of course, that did my specimens more harm than good because the newborns, which remained newborns by virtue of their new power of self-renewal, couldn’t survive the interruption of their developmental processes. They died of superabundant youth. Once I’d figured out what was going on, though, I soon found out that the retrovirus could also be used to infect adults. Although the effects were variable, some of the inoculated adults were stabilized by the transformation. Their life spans were dramatically extended—and I’m not talking thirty or forty percent. In time, I found that a substantial minority were living ten or twenty times as long as their parents. A few lived a hundred times as long—and the current record holders were still extending the multiplier two days ago. Were the angels of wrath telling the truth when they said they’d torched Mouseworld?”

“Yes, they were,” Lisa confirmed.

Morgan Miller sighed again, but this time there was an element of theatre in the sigh. “It was a long time, of course, before I was convinced that even a few of the mice were authentically emortal, but the cream of the crop has stayed stable, fit, and healthy for forty years. A few were sterile, but not all. The real champions didn’t cannibalize all the fused oocytes; every now and again they gave birth to litters of daughters. Most of the offspring failed to develop, like the newborns I’d transformed myself, but a few grew to maturity before stabilizing. The selective regime progressed by degrees to the inevitable terminus: a population of emortal female mice whose daughters were likewise emortal. It took time, but when the potential’s there and the regime is stern, natural selection is no slouch.

“Long before I was convinced they were authentically emortal, I’d begun introducing the mice to the cities, for exactly the same reason that Chan wanted to introduce his augmented specimens: to see how they’d fare in a stressful and competitive situation. Mine did a little better than his—obviously, or Stella would never have found the transformed mice—but not
that
much better, and not for a long time. When you came along in 2002,1 only had half a dozen potentially emortal mice, and nineteen of the twenty offspring they had so far produced had died paradoxical deaths of superabundant youth. By the time I moved on to experiment with other species in ’09 or thereabouts, I had a hundred adult mice and the survival rate among the new litters was up to one in three. Even then, you see, I couldn’t be
sure
they’d live significantly longer than normal. If I had been, I might have told you … maybe.

“It was all so gradual, so uncertain, so surprising. You should be able to imagine how tentative my conclusions were when I first knew you, how much more needed to be done before I could be confident. Stella came in on the hind end of things, when everything was set and fixed, and she never tried to imagine how it must have been in the long and confusing beginning. All she saw, when she tumbled to what was going on in London and Rome, was a secret that I had kept for forty years. And all she cared about was the obvious—she and her friends didn’t pause long enough to wonder whether there was more.”

“They discovered that you’d found a technology of longevity,” Lisa said. “A technology that might be just as applicable to humans as to mice if the retrovirus could be tweaked. A technology that you had discovered at the turn of the century, and didn’t tell anyone else about until 2041, at which point you approached Dr. Goldfarb and Herr Geyer: both male, and both representative of secretive institutions with hidden agendas. I can understand why Helen Grundy, Arachne West, and other assorted backlash theorists thought that all their worst nightmares had come true. I can even understand why they started using the blowtorch when you tried to persuade them there was a catch that made it all worthless. There
is
a catch, isn’t there?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “The catch to end all catches. I thought I might be able to work around it somehow, but I couldn’t. Maybe no one can.”

“An army would have stood a better chance than a lone hero,” Lisa pointed out. “That’s what science is supposed to be all about, isn’t it? Many hands make enlightenment work.”

“An army might have,” Morgan agreed. “What worried me was that an army might have liked the problem better than the solution. What’s good for mice isn’t necessarily good for humans—or dogs, come to that. We found out soon enough, way back at the turn of the century, that mouse models of human diseases had their limitations, because mice can tolerate some conditions that humans can’t. Mice may seem primitive and stupid to us, but there are some things they can tolerate that cleverer and more sophisticated mammals can’t.”

“Like emortality?”

“Like rejuvenation. People our age think of rejuvenation in terms of getting back to twenty-one and staying there forever. But what if the stopping point isn’t twenty-one? What if the stopping point is one? My survivor mice got past the point at which they were producing offspring that stabilized at a
physical
age estimable in days, but body and mind each have their own aging processes. Mice are creatures of instinct, Lisa—they’re born with ninety percent of what they need to know hardwired into their brains. The little they need to learn can be learned over and over again without too much inconvenience. Even a rat needs to be cleverer than that, and a dog needs to be
much
cleverer. You might not be able to teach an old dog new tricks, but a young dog has to be able to learn a lot and hold on to it all. The problem with the kind of rejuvenation my mice go in for is that it rejuvenates the brain as well as all the other parts of the body. It wipes out learning almost as fast as the learning goes in.

“What my retrovirus produces, even at the farthest end of the selection process, is emortal mice that are physically mature but mentally infantile. By introducing them into the Mouseworld cities, I eventually managed to prove that mice can live like that, even among their own mortal kind, because they can keep on learning the things they need to learn over and over again. The catch is that they’re probably the most advanced creatures that can.”

“The dogs,” Lisa said remembering. “The dogs on that stupid video the ALF circulated. Their voice-over claimed that the first lot they showed had been primed to produce an autoimmune reaction modeling mad cow disease, but they hadn’t. I knew they hadn’t—but I never thought to find out what
had
been done to them. They were yours, weren’t they? Another project you hadn’t referred to the Ethics Committee—another breach of the law. You’d rejuvenated them—and the rejuvenation had wiped their minds clean of anything faintly resembling a personality.”

“If whoever filmed them hadn’t been in such a rush to get the product out, they’d have seen far worse,” Morgan admitted. “Are you still interested in taking the treatment, Lisa?”

“Emortality and murder all wrapped up in one little retrovirus,” she said. “The body lives forever but the human being becomes … not quite a vegetable, but not much more than a mouse. A zombie. Worse than a zombie.”

“That’s about the size of it,” he confirmed. “Not that I’ve tried any human experiments, of course. If I’ve missed my chance to have my little discovery enshrined in the textbooks as the Miller Effect, I’ll just have to take my place in the ranks of the historically anonymous. You can understand now why it didn’t seem like a good idea to share it, can’t you? Your friends couldn’t, and that’s part of the reason they wouldn’t believe me, but
you
can.”