Nothing But Novel Part 2
I'm still away deep in the woods, and so can only offer you the next installment of our epic nonviolent yarn. If you want to read chapter 1-66 of The Other Cheek, the archive is here.
“It’s only two years since I was a student, but they seem so young,” said Cass. She was sitting with Allie at one corner of the cafeteria, watching that year’s crop of SGI fellows hard at work on their first charrette of the year. Professor Kinnison—Mark—had given them a scenario (“European power plants are converting to burn wood, and now they’re importing massive quantities of pulp from the forests of the American southeast. How would you get them to reconsider?”) and now they were arranged in groups of four or five, earnestly at work.
“Only one year for me, but I know what you mean,” said Allie. “It’s hard to imagine that just a year ago there I was with my gun.”
Maria joined them at the table. “It’s nice when everyone’s quiet,” she said. “How are you two?”
“Busy,” said Cass. “The word is out that Professor Vukovic’s archive is digitized, and so people write in every day asking for help. But it’s working pretty well: today it was anti-highway activists in Milan. I searched for ‘die-in’ and ‘traffic,’ and I got half a dozen examples to send them. Of course, they’d rather be speaking with him.”
“Wouldn’t we all?” said Maria. “It feels very different around here with Marko gone. But you’re doing an excellent job of filling in. And what about you?” she asked Allie.
“Cass and I were just talking about it,” she said. “I spent most of the day on the computer too, but it was chatting back and forth with Matti. Trying to figure out what’s going on. You can’t just ask him outright because he just clams up and says it’s all secret, but if you make it seem like you don’t understand something, he loves trying to clear it up for you.”
“What were you asking?”
“I was—well, the thing with the babies seems the most immediate. It’s what MK and Perry are looking into most. There really are tons of companies just kind of waiting to go—they say it’s a market worth trillions of dollars. Because if one kid in the neighborhood is improved, then all the other parents will have no choice. If you didn’t improve your kid, she’d never get into a good school or get a good job,” she said.
“Depends on the neighborhood, I’d imagine,” said Maria.
“Yeah,” said Allie. “I’ve been reading online; none of this would be cheap. One guy who runs a company, a professor at Princeton, he says the improved people soon won’t even want to mate with the ‘naturals’ because then they’d lose their edge. So, anyway, I keep asking Matti if this is real, and he keeps hinting I won’t have to wait long to find out, that something big is going on in China, that it’s happening soon. That New Year’s Eve is going to be ‘out of this world,’ that I won’t be able to miss it. ‘Out of this world’—that’s the phrase he keeps using.”
“Can you tell Professor Lee all this when you have a chance?” Maria asked. “If anyone can figure out if something’s up in China, it will be her.”
“Yep,” said Allie. “We’ve been talking already. We were able to guess his computer password—it’s ‘CassGoldfarb’ by the way,” she said, and Cass blushed a deep red, and looked away. “I told you,” said Allie. “He hasn’t given up on you.” But then she hesitated. “Do you think it’s fair? I mean, me spying on Matti? I feel kind of bad about it—like, he thinks I’m interested in him.”
“Maybe it’s good this is our Sunday for church,” said Maria. “I get why you’re feeling guilty, and it’s definitely not . . . ideal. On the other hand, you’re mainly letting him show off. I think, on the list of sins . . .”
At that moment Maria’s assistant Ron strode up, looking concerned, and hovered at the edge of the table till he caught her eye. “We have a little problem,” he said. “The tree yoga group that’s here for the week? Somehow they’ve heard a rumor that we’re going to cut down our aspen forest and ship it to Europe to burn for electricity. Some of them are currently occupying the trees and refusing to come down.”
“Good grief,” said Maria, rising with a sigh. “Well, at least they’re organizing. Maybe some of the students will get some ideas.”
“The encryption is fine—I’m not worried about that,” said Perry. He was sitting with MK in a storefront brewpub in San Francisco’s Soma district, sipping a Sutro Tower Stout. “The line that connects me to Professor Lee runs through so many routers they won’t ever crack it. By ‘ever’ I mean, in the next few weeks, right?”
“Right,” said MK. “That’s what ‘ever’ means in the digital age.” She reached over and squeezed his non-pint-glass hand.
“What worries me is just old-fashioned surveillance. Ever since they broke into the apartment we’ve known there’s someone watching us, but I have the sense it’s getting closer. Like, when I went into Bluebottle Coffee this morning, there was a new barista, but he already knew what I was going to order.”
“Maybe someone else on the staff told him,” said MK. “Caramel fuzziata with a double shot is . . . memorable.”
“Maybe,” said Perry. “But I think for now we should talk about important things in—places like this. Just random places, and noisy ones. Or, walking. Or, like on BART. Someplace where they couldn’t stake us out, and listen in,” he said, shielding his mouth with his stout. “Even that—I mean, San Francisco doesn’t allow the local police to use face recognition software, but that doesn’t mean the feds can’t. Do you think I should get a tattoo?”
“A tattoo?” said MK.
“You and I are literally the only people our age in this city who don’t have tattoos,” said Perry. “I feel like it makes me stand out.”
“Sweetie, I get your point. But wouldn’t a tattoo actually make it easier to find you? I mean, those guys who took over the capitol? They tracked one down just because he had Rush Limbaugh’s head tattooed on his bicep.”
“Okay,” said Perry. “I mean, what was going to tattoo anyway? I just didn’t think . . .”
“Okay,” said Perry. “I just didn’t think this was all going to blow up so fast. I thought we were going to start this center, and spend a few months just learning what was going on. Learning the ground.”
“I’ve been trying,” said MK. “I spent the day at Berkeley, talking with professors about genetics. It’s interesting—I thought they’d be secretive, and some of them are. The ones with companies, mostly. But a bunch of scientists were almost relieved to see me. ‘I keep wondering why no one pays any real attention to this stuff,’ one lady told me. ‘She said, ‘We are at the edge of changing the world, and no one is stopping us. They’re not even asking questions. Which is too bad, because we’re very smart about how to do something, but we have no more clue than anyone else about if it should be done.’”
“She didn’t have a company?”
“No, and she was worried about the people who did. But it wasn’t just money. ‘The science is seductively interesting,’ that’s how she put it. She said ‘we’d do it for free. Just to be exploring.’”
“Did you get more sense of how far along they are?” Perry asked.
“Sort of,” said MK. “For CRISP-R it’s like there are two tracks. There’s somatic genetic engineering—that’s like when you inject different genes into a sick person to cure them. They’ve actually like cured kids of leukemia. No one seems to have a problem with that. And then there’s germline genetic engineering. That’s the designer baby thing—they take embryos and soup them up. Not because there’s something wrong with them, but to make them ‘better.’ That’s what Allie was talking about with the musclebound pigs. And there are micro-pigs too, the size of cats. For pets.”
“Do not tell Gloria about that,” said Perry. “We petted every dog and cat in a fifteen-block radius. If she’d seen a baby pig . . .”
“Anyway,” said MK, “they’re not technically supposed to be doing this germline stuff—the scientific societies have a kind of moratorium on it. So you can improve chimpanzees, but not people. But everyone thinks there are secret experiments going on, and China is the leading candidate. Because there’s not much religious opposition like there is here, and because since almost everyone in China just has one kid, there’s an awful lot of pressure for him to come out right. I say ‘him’ because if it’s a her it’s already not come out right. Did you know there are already like 200 million fewer girls in Asia than there should be? Because the parents do an ultrasound and if they find out it’s a girl they have an abortion?”
“I didn’t” said Perry, looking chagrined.
“Well, you do now,” said MK. “Don’t worry, it’s not your fault. Although, men.”
“That germline stuff actually all fits pretty well with what Professor Lee and I can find out, and what Allie’s learning from Matti,” Perry said. “The Chinese are definitely planning something, and it’s definitely happening around the end of the year. They limit what they talk about online? They’re obviously worried someone might be listening?”
“Wise, as it happens,” said MK.
“Yeah,” said Perry. “But it’s clear something is happening. They keep talking about something happening at the end of a term. Like a semester?” “Men,” said MK. “Not like a semester. Like ‘coming to term.’ Like, when a baby is due.”
“Well, soon,” said Perry. “Because it takes nine months, right? So they’ve had time to prepare.”
Perry had finished his beer, and they rose to leave, walking out into a nearly empty dusk. The moon was rising over the ocean, and Perry looked at it for a moment. “The Chinese use a lunar calendar, right?” he said.
“Something like that—it’s the year of the pig, maybe?’
“The micro-pig,” said Perry. “Maybe it’s Chinese New Year that they’re talking about. Because they keep talking about the moon, a lot. Which doesn’t really make much sense.”
“No,” said MK. “So, let’s eat Vietnamese. It’s been a long day, and I need some pho ga. My mother would make her chicken soup with peanut butter, but I don’t think there’s a Zimbabwean restaurant here yet.”
“Actually,” said Perry, who was looking at his phone, “there’s one 1.3 miles away but it only gets three stars on TripAdvisor.”
“Vietnamese,” said MK.