Variant Correction

An excerpt from Zone 23

And now for something completely different … well, all right, not completely different, but it’s not one of my Consent Factory columns. I’m down with a nasty winter bug at the moment and don’t have the energy to produce a new column, so this is an excerpt from Zone 23, my satirical dystopian sci-fi novel, published in 2017.

I thought it might be fun to read, given the current state of things … although “fun” might not be exactly the right word.

In the excerpt, Valentina Constance Briggs, is in restraints in the back of a Security van, being transferred to Quarantine Zone 23, trying to remember what happened to her. The excerpt is from a chapter called Variant Correction. It’s the middle of the chapter, so, unless you’ve read it, you’ll have to imagine how it begins and ends.

Anyway, without further ado …

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Four months earlier, so in officially December, 2609, H.C.S.T., a considerably better-dressed Valentina Briggs had entered this very marbled lobby, navigated these legions of people, taken the express to the 200th floor, and was sitting on the end of an S-shaped bank of squishy, flesh-tone, faux leather seating in the lobby of Paxton, Wills & Huxley, a Limited Liability Company. Paxton Wills, a leading provider of assisted reproductive services, and a member of the Hadley Medical Group, boasted a nearly perfect success rate on variant-corrected IVF for its healthy Variant-Positive clients. Being a member of Hadley Medical meant they were able to variant-correct their human embryos right there, in-house, eliminating any possible risk of unwanted in-transit embryo incidents. The Fosters, longstanding Paxton Wills clients, were entirely satisfied with the overall service, satisfied with the helpful staff, extremely satisfied with the end results, and would recommend them to friends and relatives. Six months prior, over gluten-free scones, Susan Foster had done just that.

The Paxton Wills lobby was tastefully done in a range of gentle, complimentary earth-tones, the lighting low, warm and yellow, the temperature exactly 20C. The AmbiMood Systems viewing screens were running a series of time-lapse dissolves of orchids, hibiscus, red amaryllis, their delicate petals shuddering open, against what sounded to Valentina like waves washing up on a white sand beach. The Christmas season was in full swing. A crawler above the reception area was running the latest retail figures. Sales were up. Confidence was high. Now was the time to secure your future. Paxton, Wills & Huxley wished you a peaceful, prosperous holiday season and hoped that the Light of the One Who Was Many would guide you upon your chosen Path(s).

"Valentina Briggs," the receptionist said.

Valentina glanced up and smiled. The receptionist smiled. They nodded at each other. Another satisfied Paxton Wills client seated across from Valentina, a birdlike woman with bright blue hair, who looked to be about six months pregnant, turned to Valentina and smiled. Valentina returned the smile. She checked around the lobby quickly. There didn't appear to be anyone else in her immediate vicinity she needed to smile at, so she quickly saved the histology article she hadn’t even started reading yet, dropped her All-in-One in her purse, and headed up toward the reception desk. Behind the desk a bank of screens were running loops of smiling, blue-eyed, cooing, variant-corrected infants. She was almost about to smile at the infants, but she caught herself ... they were just on the screen.

Kyle was late, which was inconsiderate. He had called en route, feeling just awful. Something about an algorithm for some retroactive conversion or something. He thought he had snoozed the reminder on his Viewer, when it turned out he’d actually turned it off. Valentina had forgiven him, of course, but now Kyle would have to forgive himself before he could really let go of his guilt, which, being Kyle, might take a while.

Karen, one of the physicians assistants, who was slightly overweight, and had had some work done, was standing there in the open doorway off to the right of the reception area, smiling warmly at Valentina. "Oh, are you all by yourself today?" she asked, hoping that Kyle was all right and there hadn’t been some kind of horrible accident. Valentina explained about Kyle and the algorithm ... or whatever it was. Karen nodded. She understood. Karen was also Variant-Positive.

Walking down the plushly carpeted hallway of the consultation wing, Karen explained that Doctor Fraser was currently consulting another client, but would be in to see her just as soon he could, and that all Valentina’s last tests looked good, and she said she liked Valentina’s new outfit, and she wondered what Valentina used on her hair, because it always looked so full and silky, and Karen’s hair was always so dry, no matter which conditioner she used. Valentina smiled, thanked her, and told her the name of her hair conditioner, which you couldn’t always find in stores, but which Karen could probably get online, and which Valentina just totally swore by.

By this time Karen had led her into one of the cozy consultation rooms, where the Muzak was always so tasteful and soothing. She smiled, Karen did, and Valentina smiled, and Karen thanked her, and more smiling ensued, and finally Karen told Valentina that they would show Kyle in just as soon as he arrived. Then she stepped out and closed the door. Valentina had always liked Karen. She liked all the other physicians' assistants. She liked Doctor Fraser. She liked the receptionists. Everyone at Paxton Wills was so nice.

Kyle, however, was seriously late, which regardless of whatever algorithm, or whatever it was that had gone kablooey and needed his undivided attention, was inconsiderate, and narcissistic, and was on the verge of becoming a pattern. The simple fact of the matter was, Kyle had chosen to snooze his reminder rather than to stop whatever he was doing, or hand it off to one of his interns, and get to Paxton Wills on time. Whatever it was that needed his attention, Valentina also needed his attention. This appointment had been scheduled three weeks in advance. They’d talked about it just that morning, about how happy they were to be pregnant again, and how it was going to take this time, and how Valentina just felt that it had, and how thrilled Kyle felt that she felt that way, because he did too, and how he knew, despite whatever struggles she’d been having, that everything was going to be OK, and so much better, once they started their family ... and now, here he was, late, and here she was, alone with her feelings, which were definitely veering towards resentment and away from detachment, compassion, and acceptance, which he knew full well was toxic for her, especially given her recent struggles, and her family history, and all the rest.

She closed her eyes and said her mantra.

"The loving, compassionate oneness of the …"

The reminder on her All-in-One went off ... wind chimes in a gentle sea breeze. It was time to take her Zanoflaxithorinal. She got her pill bottle out and took one.

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Three weeks prior, the same Valentina, consciously sedated, her feet in stirrups, had watched between her upraised knees as Doctor Fraser carefully inserted his catheter into her cervical canal and advanced it into her uterine cavity. The catheter was loaded with three human embryos, which Doctor Fraser had grown in a dish. Following a standard ten-day course of ovarian follicle stimulating hormones, along with various hormone antagonists, all of which were completely routine, Doctor Fraser had commenced ovulation, transvaginally retrieved sixteen of her eggs, placed them into a culture medium, carefully added some spermatozoa technicians had sperm-washed out of Kyle’s semen, and allowed them to incubate for eighteen hours. After confirming the appearance of pronuclei, certified technicians had transferred the eggs into a special growth solution, and allowed them to culture for another two days. Once they had, Doctor Fraser, himself, had gender-selected and variant-corrected the three most promising XX embryos for manual transfer into Valentina’s uterus.

This is what was happening now.

"Better to lie back and relax, Ms. Briggs. You’re going to strain your neck that way." Karen gripped and gently guided Valentina’s head down onto the table, which left her staring up at the ceiling, which at the moment was out of focus. Doctor Fraser was between her legs, working his catheter up inside her, trying to get his angle just right. Real-Time footage of her uterine canal, shot by a camera in the tip of the catheter, was running on the screen of an instrument panel, which Valentina could not see.

"Beautiful," Doctor Fraser said. "Yes. OK. Here we go now."

Doctor Fraser was around Valentina’s age, tall, trim, a swimmer probably. He looked like a model in an underwear ad. His hands were warm and firm and gentle, even inside those neoprene gloves. He'd stand there, in his surgical outfit, between her naked, upraised legs, and explain what he was going to do to her, and how it was going to feel, and so on, which Valentina had always enjoyed, not because of what he was saying, but mostly because she just liked Doctor Fraser.

Being a medical professional herself, Valentina understood the process, as did pretty much every other Normal, even if they didn’t quite get all the details or know all the Latinate names of things. It would have been rather odd if they hadn’t. Assisted Reproductive Services, widely available to healthcare consumers for four or five hundred years at least, had, since the advent of variant-correction, become the virtually exclusive means of procreation for Variant-Positive parents throughout the United Territories.

How that had happened went something like this ...

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The year after Valentina was born, so 2569, 5282, or The Year of the Tapir, depending on the calendar, the team of Geiger, Chao and Fournier, working on a grant from Pfizer-Lockheed, finally established a definitive link between sub-normal variants of the MAO-A gene and Anti-Social behavior in humans. The MAO-A (or "Warrior") gene had long been suspected as the primary locus of one or more genetic defects predisposing the human species to a host of Anti-Social disorders ... Oppositional Defiance Disorder, Anti-Social Personality Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, Negativistic Personality Disorder, Paranoid/Schizoid Personality Disorder, Conduct Disorder, Hyperactivity, the list went on and on, and on. According to the leading medical experts, generation after generation had suffered the effects of these various disorders. The history of the human race read like an in-depth pathology report. From its outbreak during the Early Bronze Age to its critical stage in the Age of Anarchy, the epidemic of Anti-Sociality had ravaged and emotionally crippled humanity, destroying entire civilizations, squandering irreplaceable resources, poisoning the seas, the land, and the air, wiping out countless species of animals, tearing apart societies, families, driving men and women alike to steal, murder, rape and torture, to senseless acts of political terror, civil unrest, malicious assembly, and other deviant and destructive behaviors ... but now, finally, the link had been made, and finding a cure was just a matter of time.

In the spirit of the scientific quest for knowledge, the team of Geiger, Chao and Fournier published the results of their research online, foregoing any and all proprietary claims. Whereupon, en masse, like a kettle of vultures, leading biotechnology firms, and the bio-divisions of global conglomerates, like the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin, invested gadzillions in the race to develop, patent, and be the first to offer, prenatal variant-correction technology to the transterritorial consumer market. Given that approximately ninety-nine percent of the global population had sub-normal variants, the potential profits from variant-correction were of a magnitude beyond calculation.

Valentina remembered the day that HH/BioTek GmbH, a formerly Austro-German subsidiary of the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin, announced the first successful correction of sub-normal variants in human subjects. Naturally, no one understood how HH/BioTek had achieved this success, their methods being strictly proprietary, but that didn't matter, because a cure had been discovered, and the all caps boldface BREAKING NEWS message, CURE FOR ANTI-SOCIAL DISEASE, scrolled across every screen in existence. Jubilant crowds poured into the streets, celebrating like it was New Year’s Eve. Prescheduled Content was interrupted. Elated news readers sat there, live, interviewing anyone remotely expert.

Valentina was only six years old, so she didn’t understand the science at the time, but she knew that Anti-Social Disease was the cause of everything bad in the world, and the reason that hundreds of thousands of people had had to go live in the Quarantine Zones. She had learned about the disease in school. She knew she had it. Everyone had it. Her mother had it. Her father had it. So did her teachers and her friends and their parents. It was why they all took their medication, to keep them from doing and saying bad things, and thinking bad things about other people, which the doctors could tell if you were thinking those things. Mostly the medication worked, but every once and a while on the news there’d be a story about some poor person who got real sick and did something bad and had to be sent away to the hospital, or sometimes to one of the Quarantine Zones.

"The disease is cunning," Ms. Johnston warned her.

Ms. Johnston was Valentina’s first grade teacher, peer counseling facilitator, and career advisor. Valentina wasn’t totally sure what "cunning" meant, but she knew it was bad, and she had to watch out, and take her medication, or she might start thinking and saying bad things. She didn’t want to be sent away to the hospital or one of the Quarantine Zones. She wanted to stay with her mommy and daddy, and go to Playhouse Community Day School, and play with Zora and Tammy and Gia, and not get sick and do something bad.

Sometimes Valentina’s mommy forgot to give her her medication, and Valentina, who remembered religiously, had to remind her mommy to do it. Other times it seemed like her mommy forgot to take her own medication, and said these things to Valentina’s daddy that seemed like maybe they were sick and bad. Whenever that happened, Valentina’s daddy would hold his hands up in front of his chest and try to make her sit down and be quiet.

"Lower your voice," he’d whisper to her. Then he'd turn up the volume of their In-Home Viewer. He did that so the neighbors wouldn’t hear and have to report her mommy to Security. Valentina was glad he did that. She wanted her mommy to take her pills, which it seemed like, eventually, she always did, because later she would seem to be happy again and wouldn’t be saying those things to her daddy.

Then the doctors found a cure, and no one had to be sick anymore. Valentina asked her mommy when they could go and get their genes fixed.

"We can’t, sweetheart," her mommy told her.

"Why?"

"Because it doesn't work like that."

"Why not?"

"Because of science, baby. We have to keep taking our medication."

"Forever?" Valentina asked her mommy.

"Yes, sweetheart. Forever and ever."

"Catherine," Valentina’s daddy whispered.

"Catherine" was Valentina’s mommy’s name. Her daddy said it in that way he spoke when it seemed like her mommy was off her medication. They were sitting in the open kitchen area of the townhouse Valentina grew up in, in another Residential Community, almost exactly like Pewter Palisades, except with a different accent color.

"But the doctors cured the Anti-Socialty," Valentina reasoned at the time.

"Anti-Soci-al-ity, sunshine," Valentina’s daddy corrected her, gently. "Yes, they did. But what that means is, all the new babies will be born without it, and then their babies will be born without it, and then, one day, no one will have it."

"What about us?"

"We’ll be just fine, hon. We’ll just keep taking our medication."

Valentina’s mommy coughed, or laughed, or some combination thereof. She pulled a used disposable tissue out of the pocket of her fuzzy robe. The pockets of her robe were full of those tissues.

"And then, one day, when you’re a mommy, you can have corrected babies." She over-emphasized the word "corrected," smiling in that way that frightened Valentina. She hawked and spit into the tissue, then she stuck it back into the pocket of her robe. Valentina didn't get why she did that. Why didn't she just throw them away?

A few years after their historic breakthrough, HH/BioTek bio-engineers perfected MAO-Variant Correction. Their techniques remained proprietary, but the basic science was something every medical professional learned about in college. Valentina was no exception. In Anti-Sociality and Corrective Genetics, a sophomore-level survey course nominally taught by an adjunct professor with a Russian-sounding name who never appeared, and actually taught by graduate students, who sometimes got up on stage and lectured, but who mostly just streamed a lot of Content, Valentina learned the following:

Monoamine oxidase A is a protein enzyme that degrades neurotransmitters, like norepinephrine, serotonin and dopamine. The gene that encodes it, the MAO-A gene, lives on the short arm of the human X chromosome. People have different versions of this gene. These versions are commonly referred to as "variants." To tell one variant of the gene from another, you count the number of tandem repeats of sequences of genetic alleles, which are copies of your DNA, basically. People have different numbers of copies, two, three, four, five. Prior to HH/BioTek’s discovery, geneticists believed that two to four copies was what was "normal" for the MAO-A gene. The geneticists believed this because two to four copies was what it turned out most people had. But then came the Pfizer-Lockheed research, and the findings of Geiger, Chao and Fournier, which led to HH/BioTek’s breakthrough, and the most successful biotechnology licensing franchise in human history.

What HH/BioTek’s researchers had done, first in lab mice, later in humans, is copy and synthesize the MAO-A gene, lock in the number of DNA copies, knock out the gene in the Inner Cell Mass of some Day Six IV-fertilized embryos, insert their synthesized, variant-corrected MAO-A gene into the blastocysts, implant the embryos into a subject, and wait for nature to take its course. In addition to locking in the 4R allele, thus assuring a standardized variant sequence in association with the VNTR region, a number of other adjustments had been made, all of which were, of course, proprietary, and so closely guarded corporate secrets. Isolated members of the scientific community had raised a few concerns at first, as had some members of the general public, regarding this apparent lack of transparency, but once the Internet and other mass media had been inundated with helpful features explaining how there was nothing to worry about, these overly alarmist and borderline-paranoid naysaying voices soon fell silent. The operation itself was simple, something that any competent genetic technician could handle in the space of an hour. What had taken so long in the lab to perfect was the synthesis of an encryptable gene which couldn't be copied by corporate rivals and that didn't cause some virulent strain of metastatic molecular cancer. They worked with the mice for a good ten years.

The final product was a perfectly healthy and otherwise normal common house mouse ... aside from several notable features. For one thing, this otherwise normal house mouse, which one of the geneticists christened "Leo," was exponentially more intelligent than your average beady-eyed laboratory rodent. They (there were twenty-six in all ... so Leos 1 through through 26) navigated their little mazes in under half the time of a normal Mus musculus. Their reaction times and speeds were improved, as were their long-term memory functions. Their ability to follow simple commands and respond to a range of meaningless stimuli, like flashing lights, was quite remarkable. All of which was certainly interesting, but given the state of bioengineering, IQ boosting and genetic enhancement, was not exactly revolutionary.

What was, however, revolutionary, and changed the world as everyone knew it, was that HH/BioTek had engineered a creature utterly devoid of aggression, and not just "active" or "predatory" aggression, but also "affective" or "reactive" aggression, elicited by fear or sense of threat, also known as "defensive" aggression.

However, this absence of reactive aggression did not at all mean that the Leo mice had been rendered incapable of self-defense. On the contrary, in batteries of lab experiments, the Leos, when predatorially aggressed by hostile uncorrected lab mice, exhibited a shockingly intelligent type of cooperative self-defensive behavior.

First, they formed an outward-facing circle, to keep the hostile intruders at bay. (Picture an impenetrable circular wall of raggedy yellow rodent teeth.) Then, by opening a gap in this "wall," which must have appeared to the less-intelligent predator mice as an exploitable weakness, they lured the aggressors, one by one, into the center of their defensive ring ... then sealed the ring up tightly around them. Trapped inside and totally isolated, the aggressor mice were easily neutralized. Designated Leos chewed their throats out, while the other Leos maintained the defense, keeping the aggressors ignorant as to the fate of their now ex-comrades inside. Thus, the Leos gradually degraded the size of the hostile aggressor-mice group, eventually achieving numerical superiority, at which point they simply swarmed their remaining opponents, and chewed their throats out as well.

But it wasn’t the intelligence and cooperative behavior displayed by the Leos that was most remarkable. What was most remarkable was how the Leo mice successfully defended their phyletic social group (i.e. literally gnawing the aggressors' throats out, and in some cases actually severing their heads) without exhibiting any of the symptoms of predatory or affective aggression. In fact, during the entire experiment, their heart rate, blood pressure, and respiratory readings never once fluctuated, not one iota. The typical fight-or-flight response (or "stress response") was simply not there. They appeared to be utterly impervious to fear, and able to carry out acts of violence as calmly as one might flip a light switch.

Another interesting aspect of the Leos was their rather atypical sexual function. Which is to say, they procreated in more or less the usual fashion, but here again, the behaviorists found, the typical neuro-affective activity accompanying coitus was either absent or negligible. It wasn’t that their pleasure centers weren’t working. They definitely were. They registered pleasure. It was just that they registered sexual pleasure no differently than any other type of pleasure (feeding, for example, or grooming each other, or solving one of those spatial puzzles, or responding to those flashing lights). Basically, they conducted the sexual act in the same Zen-like state of detachment they'd exhibited during the commission of violence ... which violence, the behaviorists needed to emphasize, was purely defensive, and not at all aggressive.

And this, of course, was the point, after all. Left unmolested, fed and watered, the Leos were peaceful and cooperative creatures. They were highly sociable, easily trained, intelligent (although not terribly curious), and responsive to visual and verbal commands and many other types of exhortative stimuli. These traits were also the predominant features of the first generation of human subjects, which thanks to a global marketing effort soon became known as "Clarions" or "Clears."

The first few thousand successful births (i.e. outside the lab, to regular consumers) had occurred when Valentina was eleven. She remembered the all caps BREAKING NEWS messages that had appeared throughout the spring of that year. By summer, reports of additional births were appearing routinely in the normal news streams. HH/BioTek (now wholly-owned by the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin's wholly-owned subsidiary, Clarion Corp., Inc.) began its global marketing campaign ... and the rest, as they say, was history.

By 2580, or 5293, or The Year of the Loris, depending on your calendar, when Valentina turned eighteen, variant-correction had become the norm throughout the United Territories. By the time she finished her medical studies and began her histopathological career, the number of births of uncorrected children had dropped to virtually zero.

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Zone 23 is available online from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, Bookshop, Waterstones, and most other fine booksellers, or you can order it at your local bookstore, assuming you still have a local bookstore.