The Perfect Generation by C.P. James

Author:C.P. James [James, C.P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Published: 2018-02-26T22:00:00+00:00

My relationship with Baz would have struck most people as peculiar, when in fact it was just convenient. We were polar opposites in most respects. I'm messy, he's fastidious. I'm anxious, he's patient. We didn’t like the same kind of food, so we’d often stop at two different places for lunch. I credit these differences with making us a good fit in the lab. For example, he could interpret my stream-of-consciousness rants and rearrange them into something we could eventually publish. Like so many rare and wondrous things, it wasn’t evident on the surface. Still, it was remarkable that he could stand to be around me for any time at all. There’s a reason I never married, and it’s not because I’m gay. I don’t like people and they don’t like me.

I considered Baz a friend, but I doubt he would’ve said the same. Things changed after his son, Perfecto, died—even before we learned why. To dedicate your life to something that kills your adopted son is a hard thing to process.

His was never the most buoyant of personalities. As a first-generation college student, he took himself and his studies very seriously, as though knowing that what he lacked in intuition he’d have to make up for in hard work and tenacity. He could actually be pretty funny once you got him lubed up a bit, but mostly he was a buttoned-down, bookish guy who concerned himself with his work and the needs of others. But when Perfecto died, whatever light there was inside him seemed to die as well. He went away—so much that even his wife, Lucia, to whom he was singularly dedicated, knew that despair would forever be his mistress. They divorced amicably in 2053.

You might say he threw himself into his work, but in fact he simply had more time for it. All he’d ever had beside the work was Perfecto and Lucia, and they were gone. He had money to burn; he could’ve gone anywhere and done anything for as long as he wanted, but all he could think to do was show up at GIG sometime around 7 and leave right around dark. I couldn’t tell you what he did on the weekends, but I imagine him in a chair, reading or listening to NPR. He liked to work in the yard, too. He even liked to remove snow.

We poured millions into reversing or preventing the fatal gene switch, but deep down I knew it was futile. There was a very good reason we administered the Cure in vitro, and without getting into the fine details of gene editing, it’s mostly a numbers game. The number of stem cells in an embryo are manageable. If you can change their DNA, then they’ll retain the changes as they divide. The closer you get to adulthood, those cells—which are specialized by then—start to number in the tens of trillions. That’s a lot of editing. Plus, our cells don’t like to be fucked with, so you need to deal with a potentially life-threatening immune response.

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