Distraction - Bruce Sterling [35]
“I see.” She straightened in her seat, placed her hands on the steering wheel, and drew a breath. “Please do go on, this is truly enormously interesting.”
“Well, they were trying to sell me and their other products, but the overhead was just too high, and their failure rate was huge, and worse yet the market crashed when it turned out there was a cheaper medical workaround for sperm damage. Once they had the testicular syndrome fixed, it kicked the bottom right out of the baby market. So I was less than a year old when somebody ratted them out to the world health people, and then the blue-helmet brigade busted in from Europe and shut the whole place down. They confiscated all of us. I ended up in Denmark. Those are my earliest memories, this little orphanage in Denmark.… An orphanage and health clinic.”
He had forced himself to tell this story many times, far more times than he had ever wanted to tell it to anyone. He had a prepared spiel of sorts, but he had never fully steeled himself to the dread it caused him to talk about it, the paralyzing stage fright. “Most of the product just didn’t make it. They’d really screwed with us trying to get us tank-worthy. I had a full genetic scan done in Copenhagen, and it turned out that they’d simply lopped off most of the introns from the zygote DNA. See, they somehow figured that if they could prune away some junk DNA from the human genome, then the product would be hardier in the tank and would run more efficiently.… Their lab guys were all med-school dropouts, or downsizees from bankrupt HMOs. Also, they spent a lot of time high on synthetic cocaine, which was always the standard collateral industry with South American genetic black-marketeering.…”
He cleared his throat and tried to slow down. “Anyway, to get back to the point of my personal history, they had this blue-helmet Danish commando type who had led the raid in Colombia, and he ended up as the expert technical adviser on my dad’s movie. This Danish commando and my dad got to be drinking buddies on the set, so when my dad came up with this adoption notion, the Danish guy naturally thought, ‘Well, why not one of the kids from my own operation?’ and he pulled some strings in Copenhagen. And that’s how I ended up in Hollywood.”
“Are you really telling me the truth?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Could I drive you back to the lab and take a tissue sample?”
“Look, the tissue’s just tissue. To hell with my tissue. The truth is a much bigger thing than my tissue. The truth is that people have a prejudice against persons like me. I can take their point, too, frankly. I can run a political campaign and I can get away with that, but I don’t think I’d ever actually vote for me. Because I’m not sure that I can really trust me. I’m really different. There are big chunks in my DNA that probably aren’t even of human origin.”
He spread his hands. “Let me tell you how different I am. I don’t sleep. I run a permanent mild fever. I grew up really fast—and not just because I spent my childhood in the L.A. fast lane. I’m twenty-eight now, but most people assume I’m in my mid-thirties. I’m sterile—I’ll never have kids of my own—and I’ve had three bouts of liver cancer. Luckily, that kind of cancer treats pretty easily nowadays, but I’m still on angiogenesis inhibitors, plus growth-factor blockers, and I have to take antitumor maintenance pills three times a month. The other eight kids from that raid—five of