Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

to. A sort of … of death gene that we carry around inside us. A switch that’s programmed to turn itself on after a certain number of cell generations.”
    “I know Doc Pol,” Olan mused. “I had no idea the old fellow was still alive.”
    Bram finished quickly, knowing he had lost Olan’s attention but not wanting to disappoint the audience he had acquired.
    “At any rate, Original Man devised a synthetic virus to … to infect us with the disease of immortality, so to speak. I’ve seen schematics of it. The viral DNA becomes part of our own genetic material and hides there quietly until the time comes to keep the death gene from expressing itself. The groundwork must have been laid early on, when they discovered how to suppress human oncogenes—cancer genes. We still have them. There’s no way to get oncogenes out of our DNA. They’re thoroughly mixed with our genetic code, and they may even do useful work—like a rotten timber still helping to support a bridge. But we simply don’t get cancer anymore. Because we’ve also got an added plasmid to keep oncogenes from ever expressing themselves.” He finished lamely, “Anyway, I think the mechanism is similar.”
    “What about brain cells?” Jao put in. “Turning off the death switch wouldn’t affect them. They don’t divide anyway. You just keep losing them one by one after birth. We know how to autoclone cortical tissue, sure, but there has to be a limit to brain grafts. I don’t want to be walking around without a brain a million years from now.”
    “I told you it’s not a simple problem,” Bram said. “My guess is that there’s a separate nucleotide sequence to induce the periodic renewal of fetal neurons—at a replacement rate mediated by the loss of our old ones, so as not to disturb our memories.”
    “Well, it all sounds very wonderful,” Olan said absently. “Imagine having an eternity to delve into Bach—not that you’d ever run out of new things to discover.”
    He seemed to retreat into himself. Two of the music students had found a corner at the other end of the room, had broken out their instruments, and were playing something intricate together. Olan slowly nodded in time to the music.
    Mim watched him silently, then turned her huge dark eyes on Bram. “How long will your project take?” she asked.
    “It isn’t only a matter of following Original Man’s blueprint, Mim,” Bram said. “We’ve got to devise our own procedures every step of the way. The Nar took centuries to create the first viable human ovum, centuries more to learn how to bring it to term.” He smiled. “But this is a simpler job, and we’ve got a little more incentive than the Nar had. We’ll do better.”
    She glanced at Olan again and bit her lip. “Don’t take too long at it, Bram. Please.”
    Bram opened his mouth to reply, but Jao’s booming voice interrupted him.
    “Oh, Bram’s got the easy part of the job! He’s going to be in complete charge of a human-run program with human concepts of time. Pity me, Mim! I’m autonomous, sure, but I’m an autonomous bump on a big, slow-moving Nar project that they thought was whizzing along with a completion date of one or two hundred years in the future.” He struck a mock-tragic pose. “ I’m the one who’s got to talk them into speeding up their timetable.”
    Mim smiled wanly in a pale reflection of her vivacity of a short while before. The lack of sleep was starting to catch up to her.
    “Oh, dear,” she said gamely. “First Smeth as a toe, now Jao as a bump.”
    “Isn’t that asking a lot, Jao?” Bram said. “The ramjet probe project is going to represent a tremendous drain on the resources of Nar society as it is—even spread out over a century or two. We … can afford to wait.”
    “No!” Jao roared. Several more people came over from the thick of the party to be entertained. “We’re not going to wait a year longer than necessary! We humans come cheap at the price. We’re going to operate and maintain their roving beacon for them—much more satisfactory than robot systems. We’re going to exercise judgment in their behalf.” He smiled crookedly. “The Nar always preferred living things to machines.”
    “How did you ever persuade the Nar to turn the project over to us, Jao?”
    The question came from one of the people who had drifted over. Soon Jao was happily holding forth about hadronic photons and the uncertainty principle and the gamma factor. Bram and