Perfect People

43

John felt decidedly unsteady as he walked back from the car park with his boss, hands in his pockets and his coat buttoned against the March wind. He entered the shabby lobby of the tired red-brick building, four storeys high, known simply as B11, that housed the Artificial Life Centre.

He’d broken his resolution to have just one glass with Carson, and they’d managed to get through two bottles between them, followed by a brandy each. Somehow, through the haze of alcohol, they’d managed to crack the design for the experiment John would spend the next three months on. He wasn’t sure how Carson had been able to drive back, although the man had always been a heavy drinker, so maybe it affected him less.

‘It’s Caroline’s birthday next weekend,’ Dicks said. ‘We’re having a little dinner party on Saturday – are you and Naomi free?’

‘Sounds good – I’ll check with my social secretary!’ John said. ‘Thanks.’

The paintwork was peeling, there was a row of Health and Safety Executive notices stuck to the walls, a yellow radiation warning sign, a poster advertising a concert, another advertising a car-boot sale, and a list for names for a three-day coach visit to Cern in Switzerland.

Ignoring the slow and decrepit lift, both of them climbed the four flights of stairs. At the top, Carson Dicks put an avuncular arm around him.

‘I mean what I said, John. If there’s anything you ever want to talk about, I’m here for you.’

‘I appreciate it. You’re a brick.’

‘I’m just glad to have you on my team. England’s lost too many good scientists to the States in the past fifty years. We’re lucky to have won one back.’ He gave John a reassuring pat and headed off towards his office.

John walked along the corridor and entered lab B111-404, a long room filled with computer workstations, seven of which were occupied by members of his team, most of them in such fierce concentration they barely noticed his arrival.

Back in his own office, he took off his coat and somehow managed to miss the hook on the back of the door, watching in surprise as the coat slipped to the floor in a heap.

‘Oops,’ he said to himself, bending down and picking it up. He felt very woozy. Not good. He had a heavy afternoon workload to get through, the first item of which was to try to analyse a very complex set of algorithms.

First, he rang Naomi, as he did several times each day. ‘Hi, darling!’ he said. ‘How are you?’

Her voiced sounded cold and he realized he should have waited until he was more sober.

‘Luke’s just been sick,’ she said. ‘And Phoebe’s screaming. Can you hear her?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘That’s how I am.’

‘OK,’ he said, ‘right.’

‘What do you mean, OK, right?’

He was silent for a moment, thinking. ‘I – I – just – wanted to say that – I’ll try to get home early. Oh – Carson asked if we could go to dinner on Saturday – it’s Caroline’s birthday.’

There was a long silence. ‘Sure.’

There was a reluctance in her voice. John knew that Naomi found Carson’s heavily intellectual wife a little difficult. ‘Honey, I think we should go – if you don’t mind?’

‘I don’t mind.’

‘Great. See you about six.’

‘Six? I’ll believe it when I see you.’

‘I mean it, hon-’

He heard a sharp click. She had hung up.

Shit.

He replaced the receiver. The buzz from the alcohol was starting to fade, leaving him feeling leaden, in need of a sleep, and with a slight headache. He stood up and walked over to the window. It wasn’t a huge room, but it had just about enough space for his desk, filing cabinets and books, and to accommodate a small group of visitors.

Staring down almost directly beneath, he could see the construction site, where the massive steel-and-glass edifice that would eventually house Britain’s largest particle accelerator was starting to take shape.

He watched two men in hard hats attach a girder in a cradle to a crane hook. Workers. Drones. Genetic underclass. Dettore’s expression came back to him repeatedly. Would people be bred to do manual tasks like that, in the future? Had Dettore’s prediction been right that there would be a whole genetic underclass created, to serve the needs of everyone else? How did it happen at the moment? What made today’s workers? A combination of lousy genes and poor education? Just random chance, circumstance, natural selection?

Would it be any worse to deliberately create such workers? Some people thought so. But was it really so terrible to contemplate doing that? What kind of a world would it be if you bred everyone to be a rocket scientist? Wouldn’t that be truly irresponsible of science? To have the power to create a balanced world and funk out of using it, and instead take the easy option of making everyone smart? Maybe that would appeal to some idealists, but the reality would be a disaster.

But how palatable would the alternative be to anyone?

He sat down, wondering whether to get some coffee. But he’d already had two double espressos in the pub. Just deal with some easy stuff for a while, he thought, let the alcohol wear off, catch up on emails.

He glanced down the twenty new ones that had come in while he had been out. Mostly they were boring internal stuff.

Then he saw one from Kalle Almtorp, with an attachment.

John,

This has just come through to me. I’m sorry, I thought perhaps everything had died down, but this does not seem to be the case.

John opened the attachment. It was a news cutting from today’s Washington Post.

DESIGNER BABIES FAMILY DEATH LINK TO DISCIPLES OF THE THIRD MILLENNIUM

His eyes frozen to the screen, he read on.

Philadelphia Police are taking seriously a claim by a religious group, Disciples of the Third Millennium, that they were responsible for the deaths of Washington property tycoon Jack O’Rourke, his socialite wife, Jerry, and their twin babies. With chilling echoes of the Manson gang Sharon Tate slayings, their mutilated bodies were discovered in the O’Rourkes’ secluded $10m mansion in the exclusive Leithwood estate in Virginia. Last year the same group claimed responsibility for the deaths of billionaire geneticist Dr Leo Dettore and Florida businessman Marty Borowitz and his wife Elaine and their twin babies. Despite an extensive worldwide police hunt, no trace of this group has ever been found to date.

There was an icon for a photograph, and John clicked on it. Moments later the image appeared. A photograph of two good-looking people, a man in his mid-thirties and a woman in her late twenties. He recognized them instantly.

They had been on Dettore’s ship. There was no mistaking them. It was the couple by the Serendipity Rose ’s swimming pool who had totally ignored them. The couple he and Naomi had jokingly called George and Angelina.