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CHAPTER 074

The self-proclaimed environmental artist Mark Sanger, recently returned from a trip to Costa Rica, looked up from his computer in astonishment as four men broke down the door and burst into his Berkeley apartment. The men were dressed head to foot in blue rubber hazmat suits, with big rubber helmets and big faceplates, rubber gloves, and boots, and they carried evil-looking rifles and big pistols.

He had hardly reacted to the shock when they were on him, grabbing him with their rubber hands and wrestling him away from the keyboard.

“Pigs! Fascists!” Sanger yelled, but suddenly it seemed like everybody was shouting and screaming in the room. “This is an outrage! Fascist pigs!” he shouted as they cuffed him, but he could see their faces behind the masks, and they were afraid. “Jesus, what do you think I’m doing here?” he said, and one of them answered, “We know what you’re doing, Mr. Sanger,” and spun him away.

“Hey! Hey!” They pulled him-roughly-down the steps from his apartment to the street. Sanger could only hope media would be waiting, cameras ready to film this outrage in broad daylight.

The press, however, was cordoned off across the street. They could hear Sanger as he shouted, and they were filming him, but their distance prevented the up-close, in-your-face confrontation he hoped for. In fact, Sanger suddenly realized how this scene must look through their lenses-policemen dressed in frightening hazmat suits escorting a thirtyish bearded man in jeans and a Che Guevara T-shirt, who struggled in their arms, cursing and shouting.

Sanger knew he must look like a madman. Like one of the Teds: Ted Bundy, Ted Kaczynski, one of those guys. The cops would say that he had microbiology equipment in his apartment, that he had tools for genetic engineering, and he was making a plague, making a virus, making a disease-something horrible. A madman.

“Put me down,” he said, forcing himself to be calm. “I can walk. Let me walk.”

“All right, sir,” one of them said. They let him stand on his feet, and walk.

Sanger walked with as much dignity as he could muster, straightening his shoulders, shaking his long hair, as they led him to a waiting car. Of course it was an unmarked car. He should have expected that. Fucking FBI or CIA or whatever. Secret government organizations, the shadow government. Black helicopters. Unaccountable, the crypto Nazis among us.

Fuming, he wasn’t prepared to see Mrs. Malouf, the black lady who lived on the second floor of his building, standing outside with her two young kids. As he passed her, she leaned forward and started yelling at him. “You bastard! You risk my family! You risk my children’s lives! You Frankenstein! Frankenstein!”

Sanger was intensely aware of how that moment would play on the evening news. A black mother shouts at him, calls him Frankenstein. And the kids at her side were crying, frightened by everything that was happening around them.

Then the cops shoved Sanger into the unmarked car, with one rubber-gloved hand on his head, easing him into the backseat. And as the door slammed shut, he thought, I am fucking screwed.

Sitting in his jail cell, watching the television in the hallway, trying to hear the commentary over the arguments of the other guys in the cell, trying to ignore the faint smell of vomit and the deep sense of despair that settled over him as he watched.

First there was footage of Sanger himself, hair long, dressed like a bum, walking between two guys in hazmat suits. He looked even worse than he had feared. The corporate flunky reading the news was mouthing all the buzzwords: Sanger was unemployed. He was an uneducated drifter. He was a fanatic and a loner who had genetic engineering materials in his cramped, filthy apartment, and he was considered dangerous because he fit the classic bioterrorist profile.

Next, a bearded San Francisco lawyer from some environmental defense group said Sanger should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Sanger had caused irreparable harm to an endangered species, and had jeopardized the very existence of the species by his depredations.

Sanger frowned: what the hell was he talking about?

Next the TV showed a picture of a leatherback turtle and a map of Costa Rica. Now it seemed that authorities had been alerted to Sanger’s activities because he had visited Tortuguero, on the Atlantic coast of Costa Rica, sometime before. And because he had madeserious threats to the environment regarding leatherback turtles.

Sanger couldn’t follow this. He had never made any threats. He had wanted to help, that was all. And the fact was, once he got back to his apartment, he had been unable to carry out his plans. He bought stacks of genetics textbooks, but the whole thing was much too complicated. He opened the shortest of the texts and scanned some of the captions to graphics: “A plasmid harboring a normal LoxP has little chance of remaining integrated in a genome at a similar LoxP site since the Cre recombinase will eliminate the integrated DNA fragment…” “Lentiviral vectors injected into one-cell embryos or incubated with embryos from which zona pellucida was withdrawn were particularly…” “A more efficient way to replace a gene relies on the use of mutant ES cells devoid of the HPRT gene (hypoxanthine phosphoribosyl transferase). These cells cannot survive in the HAT medium, which contains hypoxanthine, aminopterine, and thymidine. The HPRT gene is introduced at the targeted site by a double homologous recombination…”

Sanger had stopped reading.

And now the TV screen showed turtles on the beach at night, glowing a weird purple color…and they thought that he had done that? The very idea was ridiculous. But a fascist state demanded blood for any transgression, real or imagined. Sanger could foresee himself thrown in jail for a crime he hadn’t committed-a crime that he didn’t even know how to commit.

New Transgenic Pets on Horizon

Giant Cockroaches, Permanent Pups

Artists, Industry Hard at Work

Yale-trained artist Lisa Hensley has joined forces with the genetic firm of Borger and Snodd Ltd. to create giant cockroaches to be sold as pets. The GM cockroaches will be three feet long and stand approximately one foot off the ground. “They will be the size of large dachshunds,” says Hensley, “although of course they won’t bark.”

Hensley regards the pets as works of art, intended to raise human awareness of the insect community. “The overwhelming majority of living matter on our planet consists of insects,” she said. “Yet we maintain an irrational prejudice against them. We should embrace our insect brethren. Kiss them. Love them.”

She observed that “the real danger of global warming is that we may render so many insects extinct.” Hensley acknowledged that she was inspired by the work of artist Catherine Chalmers (B.S. Engineering, Stanford University), whose project American Cockroach first elevated cockroaches to a major theme of contemporary art.

Meanwhile, in suburban New Jersey, the firm of Kumnick Genomics is hard at work creating an animal they believe dog owners really want: permanent puppies. “Kumnick’s Perma-Puppies will never grow up,” according to spokesperson Lyn Kumnick. “When you buy a PermaPuppy, it stays a puppy forever.” The firm is working to eliminate unwanted puppy behavior, such as chewing shoes, which gets on dog owners’ nerves. “Once the teeth are in, this behavior stops,” Kumnick said. “Unfortunately, at this point our genetic interventions have prevented the growth of teeth altogether, but we’ll solve that.” She said that rumors they were going to market a toothless animal called a GummyDog were untrue.

Kumnick observes that since adulthood in human beings is being replaced by permanent adolescence, people naturally wish to be accompanied through life by similarly youthful dogs. “Like Peter Pan, we never want to grow up,” she says. “Genetics makes it possible!”