Brain Child

by George Turner

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

David Chance has been raised in an orphanage and, now an adult, finds that he is the child of a man genetically modified before birth by a group of scientists experimenting in increasing human intelligence and creativity. But his father is dead. He pursues the search for the true nature of his father and, through it, the true nature of the experiments and the survivors of the final disaster that ended them. Chance exposes his roots and finds them entangled in horror, deceit, vengeance and perverse scientific illumination. Peace and self knowledge are achieved only at great risk and terrible cost.

Release date: December 4, 2018

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 349

Sample

The trouble with an Orphanage upbringing is that when the College discharges you at age eighteen you are burstingly healthy, educated to the edge of intellectual indigestion and as innocent of day-to-day reality as a blind dummy.

You read of orphanages (with a small o) in old novels and gain an impression of cruelty and exploitation visited upon children as punishment for their insolence in having been born, a picture of institutionalised revenge.

In this century, with the Population Control Laws hovering like the eye of God over the couplings even of the wedded, we children of the unwedded and the overenthusiastic are indeed born in sin but it is the parents who face fines and gaol sentences and occasionally chemical castration. Legal disapproval is at least not vented on the helpless issue by a social system that has raised contraception almost to the status of a competitive art form.

We orphans are treated very well by a State conscious of its humane obligations, but State arrangements (made, like the famous camel, by committees and ratified by point-scoring politicians) are subject to paradox, inconsistency and shortsightedness. Who, for instance, is being punished when the Illegal Issue is made a Ward of the State—the child or the parents or both? Allocation of blame tends to fall on the mother once the hypnotists and truth drug experts have extracted admissions of negligence, willful defiance of the law or unhealthy fixation on a desire to conceive. If you ask the right questions you can get any answer you require under those conditions but she is, by her answers, judged unfit to have charge of an infant.

Psychologists, nursing professionals and social workers may deride, argue and protest but the Control Laws have remained virtually unchanged since their inception in 2019, when the reality of overpopulation set the planet in a law-making frenzy. It was my luck to be born, without blessing of the State, in 2022. Hence the Orphanage.

Separated from my mother at birth, not knowing my father, I have few clear memories of childhood. Life begins at some stage of the Orphanage.

My feeling for the place where I spent my first eighteen years is without serious animus, but it was a dull place. We were schooled, we learned the elements of a variety of fairly useless manual trades (“preserving the skills” in a world gone past them), made “nature study” forays into the countryside (strictly controlled), visited the theatre (“cultural values,” carefully selected) in tutorial parties, practised routine social graces on each other under the impression that people actually behaved like that and submitted to Intellectual Orientation checks twice a year. In his/her eighteenth year each of us was told, on the basis of these checks and tutorial persuasion, what profession we should desire to follow and sent into the world in a condition of smug intellectual satisfaction and total cultural ignorance.

It is hard, now, to credit the degree of innocence with which I entered the real world, harder still to realise how long it was before I took my life in hand instead of huddling timidly in a narrow circle of illusioned wimps like myself. Seven years, in fact.

The flexible outlook that the State did not give us, did not know how to give us, caused despairs and frustrations and withdrawals when we were decanted into an alien culture. One thing we did not learn in College (Orphanage was considered a disagreeable word on the outside) was who our parents were. Parentage and family were not subjects for discussion in the cloister; the College was an extended family, paternalistically guided and maternalistically cosseted. What more could a growing child need or want? The conception “parents” receded in our minds, then rushed forward in pain and anger when we joined a world where everybody had parents and a home and could produce them on demand.

Psychiatric guidance was available—at a price. Most of us had settled—or settled into—our traumas, inferiorities and alienations by the time we were earning salaries large enough to afford guidance. We floated as best we could on the tide of humanity, not so much unhappy as uncontent.

I entered journalism, more or less pushed into it by tutorial insistence, and believed that it was my free choice, the thing I wanted. Perhaps it was what I wanted. I began on the bottom rung of media cadetship, learning the uses of the multifarious hardware and software items of newsgathering equipment, learning what was news and what mere filler, learning the intricacies of “reporting” language, “slanted” language, “opinion-forming” language, “sub-libellous” language, the difference between the spoken word for the vidscreen, the written word for the print press and archival style for the accuracy of files, learning how to set traps for interviewees, how to slide beneath the guards of politicians and public personalities and how to put words into the mouths of hapless bystanders.

Three years passed in computer instruction and street technique before I was permitted to produce anything more publishable than the table of weekend football scores. Then, grudgingly, they let me loose as a police roundsman, where I could do little harm. For a while I was not very good even at that. My editor, normally a kindly man, once remarked that I must have had powerful friends to get me a job requiring an intact brain.

He was dead right, though neither of us knew it then.

I did eventually reach a reasonable level of competence and a feeling of actually earning my pay.

To the public, vidscreen reporters are a marvellous breed, sophisticated, articulate, always on top of the job. Fandom would writhe to see them putting on their personalities with their camera makeup and afterwards falling back into their commonplace selves with the sigh that goes with the removal of tight shoes. Most of them were pretty ordinary and I, who never attained the godhead of vidscreen anchorman, was more ordinary than most.

I did not plunge into the real world and achieve sophistication overnight; I plunged into a slugging round of newscub training by day and a brutal round of Degree study by night. I was ambitious, God help me. I took the full Basics Course for a General Bachelor degree—Comparative Political Systems, Major Religions and Philosophies, Scientific Literacy, Synoptic History, Psychological Systems, Citizen Law and a host of optionals—the Course that makes for a “well-rounded personality.” So they say.

Somehow, in the cracks between learning and earning, I managed to dance badly, to be filled with dismay at a humanity not schooled in Orphanage perspectives and to discover, at the hands of three successive and exasperated idols of my heart, that there was much to be found out about sex as distinct from gender. I failed the day-by-day tests of life because my time was taken up with endless study and my social perceptions were embedded in the genuine but impractical morality of my Orphanage tutors. At twenty-five I remained a comparative innocent. As a newsman I knew the world’s wickedness in terms of headlines and scoopshots; as a citizen I was too busy with work and shy nervousness to observe wickedness in any sort of relationship with myself.

Then my father sent for me and the innocent past went away forever.

He sent for me a quarter of a century ago and I still do not know if I will ever be permitted to publish this account. I suspect not. The events took place in a period of a few weeks in 2047, when I was twenty-five years old, though their foundations were laid much earlier—to be precise, in 2002, when an experiment was launched. My father and I brought it to its disgraceful climax forty-five years later.

As a small child I dreamed secretly of my father’s identity—a footballer or cricketer, depending on the season, always famous, popular and rich—until the gentle, irresistible pressures of College counselling closed him off along with all unproductive thinking.

So my first reaction on receiving his letter was chaotic. “Father” was an idea abandoned long ago and there were no ghosts for the letter to raise.

Mr. David Chance

Dear Son, David,

You are now sufficiently seasoned and professional to undertake the work for which you have been raised and trained.

Please present yourself at Workshop CAG 3 in the afternoon of Saturday next, to become acquainted with the project and with

Your loving father,Arthur Hazard      

PS: Regard this communication as inviolably confidential.

It had to be a joke and not a kindly one.

Inviolably confidential. A magisterial use of language, overblown and fake-dramatic.

Your loving father. After twenty-five years of nonexistence? If not a joker, then mad.

And the signature, Arthur Hazard. Hazard, father of Chance? But what was the joke?

And what of this work for which I had been raised and trained? I had done what attracted me and done my own training.

I scratched for clues to the identity of the jester, resenting the mindless cruelty of the imposition—until a delayed impact surfaced and I toyed with the fantasy of having actually been claimed as a son by a genuine father.

Nor was Hazard a nobody. CAG 3 was an institution of note though little of its work in bio-electronics made noise in the news media and Hazard was the name of the equally quiet, low-profile sibling Group who operated it. The four Hazards—Arthur and Andrew, Astrid and Alice—formed a nebulous, unpublic, reserved entity of genius. (There were four other Hazards, a quartet of artists who, it was said, refused to speak to the CAG 4, professing themselves uninterested in the factory activities they referred to as “inhumanities.” I knew little about them. They were not public personalities.)

Nursery Children.

We tended to forget (and, I know now, were meant to forget) that experiment in totally in vitro genetic manipulation of 2002 that ended in suicides and official double-talk winding down into silence. Now, one of the eight survivors was claiming me as a son.

Yet this was foolishness because it was known that none of the Nursery Children had ever become a parent. It was supposed by the few who thought about it at all (mainly journalists rooting through old files for some other information and lighting accidentally on these dead stories) that their genetic material was fraught with problematic genes whose transmission was banned under the Control Laws. If it should turn out not to be foolishness, I still did not care for the idea of carrying possibly monstrous genes bequeathed by an unnaturally propagated sire.

It was this pinprick of fear that prompted me to vid Public Documents and check the scanty information on my Birth Certificate.

Mother:

Marion Mary Cockcroftd. ofCharles Henry CockcroftandHazel Jane Cockcroft

Father:

Unknown

Any man could claim me—if he had a reason.

I did the obvious, called CAG 3, to be answered by a hard computer voice, poorly humanised: “We do not accept unreserved calls. Please leave your name and vid number and state which Project Officer you wish to consult. Your call will be returned at the recipient’s earliest convenience.”

What happens to people like that if you are trying to tell them that a man with a gun is jimmying open their front door?

Thinking myself spry and cunning, I said, “I wish to speak to whoever claims to be the parent of David Chance,” and for my trouble heard the irritated buzz of a vidmemory flipping through its files. It clacked back at me, “Mr. Arthur predicted your call and instructed that you be requested to confirm your appointment for Saturday next. Do you so confirm?”

Like a jerked puppet, I answered, “Yes,” and the damned answering file cut the connection before I could think up a further protest.

At this stage intelligence should have dictated that I take the letter to the police for routine vetting but I was innocent and something of a romantic, conditions that do nothing for intelligence. In fact I was becoming belatedly taken with the possibility of having an in vitro monster for a father, and let the genes fall where they might.

On Saturday I caught the midday bus for the ninety-minute run to Westerton, the nearest town to CAG 3, and in that dusty, half-asleep farming centre hired its single taxi to carry me the dozen or so kilometres to the workshop.

It is not easy now to recover my feelings on that afternoon journey. Later events remain in sharp detail because they taxed my concentration and more than once threatened my life, but this was so far only a curious happening that might turn out to be a case of simple human error. I know I was no longer sure that I wanted a father, even as a biological showpiece; he might emerge as a fussy, demanding nuisance, though the few sketchy profiles I had been able to unearth painted the Hazards as grimly reclusive.

Hasty rummaging through old newspaper morgues and later computerised files had produced little more than could be called common knowledge. The Nursery Children had been created by genetic manipulation; they were born in 2002; some lived, some died; in 2022, with all of them just a score of years old, the most brilliant quartet committed suicide under circumstances never plumbed, at any rate for public consumption. There was more than that and much more to be discovered in time, but the detailed story is best told as I stumbled, fell and guessed my way through it. The bare bones suffice for the moment.

Of the entire experimental brood only two Groups still survived in 2047: the four artists who revolutionised twenty-first-century aesthetics and the four experimental scientists (one of them Arthur Hazard) who designed and exploited the discipline of bio-electronics.

An odd piece of information that surfaced was that CAG 3 was in fact the old Nursery in which the fabulous children had been created, a fact that had its place in happenings to come.

The building was nearly invisible from the road, set well back in a huge block I estimated at about ten hectares, surrounded by a three-metre hedge and guarded by sliding steel gates and cameras. My taxi driver was recognised by the gate robot as a regular arrival but I was not; I had to demonstrate my identity by documented ordeal of some exhaustive questioning before it admitted—grudgingly, I swear—that I was expected, and allowed our car into the vast, flat space surrounding the workshop.

Beyond the building itself there were only a few outlying sheds and in the distance a handful of sheep keeping the grass down. The whole area was repellently bare save where, huddling round the building itself, well-kept flower beds made a lonely human touch.

The Nursery—the Hazards still called it that—was an unlovable building, a single-storeyed structure of weathered concrete walls broken by windows at mathematically even distances along the wide facade. Given bars, they would have cried out gaol. A view from an angle of the drive showed the Nursery to be extremely deep, running back a good hundred metres into the surrounding grass.

I visualised workers by the hundred; there were in fact just four, the Hazards.

At the top of the front steps stood a tall man in a ragged and dirty dust coat. I saw, as the first hint of an exotic personality, that he stood perfectly still while I paid the driver and walked up the short path between the flower beds—carnations, I remember, and gladioli—and halted at the bottom step.

His stillness impressed me as total self-control, the unnatural immobility of a man who never made an unnecessary movement. I did not believe that by the wildest accident we could be father and son.

He was forty-five that year and as offbeat a human figure as might be assembled in a careless moment, a collector’s item. He was taller than I and large-boned and thin, his wrists and knuckles were knobs and his face a tight mask—a peculiarly brown mask, not the slightly soiled mahogany of sunburn or the darkish brown of, say, an Indian with the tinge of melanin, but a dark, distinctly tan colour. A portrait painter would have mixed a hint of deep red-orange into the skin tone. Faintly negroid features framed green eyes—dauntingly, brilliantly green—under a frizz of African wool. But wherever did you see ripe-tomato-coloured African wool?

Against him I faded in ordinariness. Middle height, middle weight, blue eyes, nondescript brown hair and definitely Caucasian features made me the man unnoticed in a crowd, save for one unwelcome distinction—I was and am not albino but cursed with a very fair, tender skin that suffers in sunlight and itches intolerably with heavy perspiration.

We had each two arms, two legs and one head and scarcely another item in common. He stared down at me with those discomfiting eyes until I said, because sooner or later one of us had to speak, “I am David Chance.”

He answered, moving only his lips, in a careful voice, as if not yet fully proficient in a second language, “I know that. I am Arthur Hazard.”

It was like being addressed by a door robot and I made one of those uneasy jokes that try to cover nervousness, “Hazard and Chance! Is my luck holding?”

His face flickered briefly in what might have been a smile, hastily sketched and discarded. “It probably is. Your surname is indeed a, er, frivolity of sorts; it was necessary to name you at a moment’s notice.” The green eyes registered my astonishment and his expression flickered again with what could have been an attempt, not quite managed, of ruefulness. “Not a very good jest, perhaps. Your uncle Andrew has studied that aspect of the culture more closely than I.”

Whatever that might mean I left for later discovery. “You claim to be my father?”

His voice took on an edge of testiness. “You already know that.”

“I have been told that. I need proof.”

“Ah. Yes. Naturally so.” The idea seemed not to have occurred to him until that moment. He moved very slightly, thrusting his narrow head minutely towards me. “Can you read a genetic match chart?”

“Roughly. I’m no expert.”

“That will suffice.” He seemed to realise that he was still peering down at me from four steps above. “Come up.”

I marched up the steps and stopped before him. After a hesitation he put out his hand with a quick, stiff motion as though remembering that a social gesture was expected and getting on with it before the lapse became embarrassing. As if, also, he did not really care to touch me.

“Welcome home,” he said. Not quite believing my ears, I took his hand. “Son,” he added, and I was sure the word had just occurred to him. He had an extraordinarily strong grip for such a thin streak of a man but now seemed unsure what next was expected of him. He settled rather tentatively for “We should go inside.”

I followed him through thick steel sliding doors, thinking that once I knew what this freak wanted of me I could vid the taxi and go home. Whatever Arthur Hazard might think, “home” was not CAG 3.

What plainly had once been a large reception area inside the front door was now a bare space without table, chair or sign that such civilised excesses had ever been there. In the middle of the floor stood the only decoration in that denuded cube of a hall, a large arrangement of flowers and ferns making a desperate glow in an impersonal void.

I said, if only to hear a voice affirming the existence of life beyond bare necessity, “The flowers are beautiful.”

Arthur Hazard commented without slowing or turning round, “My sisters arrange them. They are your aunts, of course. They care for such activities.”

I gathered that the female determinant gene presented in two of the quadruplet encouraged trivial, time-wasting fancies.

He led me into a huge room whose function I could not guess because its state of disorder disguised all intention. There were armchairs and straight-backed chairs, desks and small tables and one very large table set up with a drafting complex; there were racks and cupboards and a couple of structures whose purpose was unclear. Lying on all of these and piled on the floor as well were files, books, loose sheets, disks, tapes, recording apparatus, vid projectors and anonymous pieces of what looked like samplings from an electronics workshop. The three inside walls carried vidscreens, one of them the largest I had ever seen, about three metres by five and equipped with more special-function terminals than I had thought could exist.

One of the aunts had made her mark on the room with a tall crystal vase of gladioli on the mantelpiece over an old-fashioned fireplace. A more masculine touch was the clutter of dirty cleaning rags, yellow with chemicals, black with grease, tossed around it. The fireplace itself contained a self-heating coffee percolator and half a dozen cups, mostly used.

The man who called himself my father said, probably thinking it an explanation, “I do most of my work here. Practical laboratory confirmation is most often the outcome of orderly thought and computation.”

It was safest to say nothing; if his peculiar genius reached peak performance in chaos, so be it. (Not so. There was, I understood later, complete order here. He worked on half a dozen projects simultaneously and each was deployed in a self-contained sector of the room, with all relevant tools and references assembled conveniently to hand and eye. He knew where every item was and why it was in that particular place. It did not take long to find in him a mind so orderly as to be dismaying.)

“You shall have proof,” he said. “Sit down.” He indicated a chair opposite one of the smaller screens and perched himself on the edge of a desk that (like every other, I now noticed) sported a full console of remote controls, and punched Public Documents. At Selection he punched my name and National ID number.

I asked at once, “How did you get my personal number?”

“I asked for it.”

“For Private Data? Asked who?”

He turned his green eyes on me, considering … what? “In good time,” he said. “The Hazards are not ciphers in the State. What we need, commonly we get.”

He whipped through the Data File to the genetic diagram, the personal “fingerprint,” and there I was, reduced to the ultimate simplicity, an assemblage of symbols on a screen. He said, “Check the diagram against your ID card.”

“No need. I know who I am.”

“But, do I?”

At the confession that he also needed confirmation I began to believe that this fantasy might be truth. I slipped my card into the Spot Check—and the two diagrams coincided exactly.

“Thank you. One must be careful when claiming sight unseen. Now, Marion Mary Cockcroft.” As her data came up, he said, “She died within a day of your birth.”

“Of what?”

He answered without looking at me, “Of, I think, an unwillingness to live.”

“You were with her?”

“No.” I waited for more but it seemed that the question had been answered and that was the end of it. He said, “Here is your proof.”

The genetic diagram of Marion Mary Cockcroft occupied the right-hand side of the screen, major dominants and recessives coloured and tagged. Her eyes, I saw, had been blue and their colour had dominated in mine over the striking, uncanny but recessive (thank God), green of the Hazards.

Before he could bring up the third diagram I said, “My Birth Certificate says Father Unknown and Arthur Hazard is not listed in Public Access Files. Such privacy!”

“It is a necessary privilege. As young people we had enough of being treated as sideshows for idiots. Part of our contract with the State guarantees respect for our need of, uh, insulation.”

Insulation seemed to mean something more than mere privacy. He was not a man to warm to.

He placed his ID card in Spot Check and his genetic diagram appeared with his name, birthdate and place of birth: Arthur Hazard; 4th July, 2002; Victorian Institute of Advanced Genetic Manipulation.

“For advanced,” he said, though without real rancour, “read hit or miss. Now, can you match the diagrams?”

“Not very well; there’s stuff in yours that I don’t follow.”

“Unnatural stuff?” A hint of mockery there?

“Unfamiliar.”

“Of course. Induced hormone balances and gland secretions produced characteristics in the Nursery Children rarely seen in Homo sapiens. Nothing actually new, more like rarities that would normally breed out from normal populations as sports, unintended variations born of the operators having no certainty of what they were about—much less certainty than they thought they had—no sensible appreciation of the millions of side-effect combinations possible to even the smallest interference with multiple-gene expression, my very obvious hair and eye colours, for instance, or the excess melanin in my skin reverting strongly to the extreme pallor of yours. Superficially we are unlike but the cross-interactions tell the tale.”

He wiped my diagram off the centre of the screen, leaving the two parental images at left and right, then built up my central assemblage again from the parental templates, explaining each match and variation. Some of the multiple-influence cross effects were hard to grasp but he carried me through the buildup of each characteristic until I understood it, right through to the point-for-point identification of myself.

I contemplated the indisputable evidence that this freak was my father, feeling like something poured out of a bottle from a laboratory shelf, not at all like anybody’s son, more like the end product of a cheapjack manufacturing process.

“Enough,” I said. He switched off the screen and we stared at each other—warily on my side, bleakly on his—until I asked, “What do you want?” and knew I sounded harsh and quarrelsome. One of the penalties of social insufficiency is an awareness of your lack, an insecurity that raises personality prickles where an ounce of wisdom would counsel a bland approach.

My father’s own insufficiency—not innocence because there was nothing innocent in him—was in its essentials sheer ignorance. He just did not know what reactions were expected of him, but it took time for me to divine this; his hesitations now seemed simple dithering. At last he said, as if it were the best he could do in the way of a holding tactic, “You wanted to be sure.”

“I’m sure. What then?” I was never an aggressive young man; my truculence covered a lack of direction as floundering as his.

At least he tried: “I thought that you would … that you would welcome a fa”— he balked at the word, strange to his tongue, and brought it out as —“a family connection.”

He was at a loss because an expectation had failed. I had not cried Daddy! and leapt into his arms. “I was reared in a State Orphanage. Our thinking was gently but effectively directed away from family fantasies. You couldn’t know that, but it was sensible.”

“Sensible? Yes.” Something flashed in the green eyes, perhaps a mild dislike.

“And now, after twenty-five years, you announce yourself and expect a sentimental reunion.”

He thought about it; I could see him thinking over an aspect he had not considered in his planning. And when he had done thinking he had the situation rationalised. “Your growth was watched. Do you imagine that the son of a Nursery Child would be of no interest to—to scientists and—to ourselves?”

“The folklore says the Nursery Children had no offspring, in fact no sex lives because they didn’t fancy close contact with common humanity.”

“Folklore fostered by the State. Tales of mutant babies would have kept talk alive and media noses to the trail. You are the only one to have been born; some trouble was taken to have others aborted. But that is another tale. As your progress and abilities became apparent I was able to exert a discreet pressure on your training and to guide you into journalism. Yours was not entirely a free choice of profession.”

I should have been angry but felt deflated, a pricked balloon shown that all its ego was hot air and its decision-making nonexistent, its free will bobbing at the end of a remote parental string. “But why?”

He had no hesitation over his answer and no realisation of it as another body blow to pride. “It was necessary that you be properly trained for the work required of you.”

“Required by me?”

“Yes.”

“And if I am not interested?”

He thought awhile on that in unruffled stillness. When he was ready he said, “I have been mistaken in thinking that a mutual affection was a natural concomitant between human parent and child. You must understand that we Hazards mix very little in human society—” (That is what he said: human society, as of some other, lesser breed.) “—and so we make observational errors. The literature also encourages the concept of innate family bonds. I imagined you would welcome me.”

So I would have done … if he had been a working man, a clerk, a shopkeeper, somebody’s gardener, even one of my hero footballers, but not this changeling curiosity.

Then he took me by surprise. He turned his face to look at me and his expression altered, not greatly but enough to suggest a hint of suffering, of helplessness in his inability to reach me. And I, like a cretin, felt a twinge of guilt at my rigidity in refusing to meet him halfway. I said, “For sweet sanity’s sake, man! Do you expect to wipe off a lifetime’s neglect in a few minutes?”

He nodded. “I have been clumsy and ignorant.” His face did its unpractised best to accept blame and to plead—and to this day I do