The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [126]
“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