Designer Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution by Brian Stableford

Author:Brian Stableford [Stableford, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Short Stories, Biopunk, biotech
ISBN: 9781479409693
Publisher: Wildside Press
Published: 2013-05-01T14:00:00+00:00

HOT BLOOD

When I first went into the blood business I had no idea that vampirism would ever become fashionable, or that it would provide me with the opportunity to fulfill my mother’s dying wish by saving my brother Frankie from a life of crime. When I built my first bloodshed in one of the less picturesque parts of the Pennines and stocked it with four hundred genetically-modified swine, the business was a simple matter of producing designer blood for xenotransfusion. Biotech companies were busy engineering animals whose blood was far better for patients in need than anything that could be leeched from human donors, because it was augmented with various kinds of healing aids as well as being guaranteed free of inconvenient viruses and prions.

It might have been a profitable business even then, if I hadn’t been squeezed from every side. Every time I got my head above water the relevant taxes would rise, or the interest on my loans would be hiked, or the stocks I’d removed to the breeding pens would become obsolete, or some franchise consultant with a bee in his bonnet about economies of scale would convince me that I’d never get ahead if I didn’t expand. Even so, I’d probably have stayed completely honest if it hadn’t been for Frankie’s evil influence.

Frankie had always been the hot-headed and hot-blooded one: the compulsive taker of short cuts, the fanciful wheeler-dealer. He had started his criminal career when neither he nor the century had yet attained their twenties, working for a cigarette-smuggler in Huddersfield. Frankie’s luck being what it was, the bottom fell out of that racket mere months after he had decided to go independent—but Frankie’s luck being what it was, he was just in time to catch the leading edge of the great plantigen panic of ‘29. For the next five years he hawked genetically-enhanced potatoes and carrots out of the back of his van from Manchester to Doncaster, cutting a tidy profit even on the rare occasions when the veg was carrying the subtle merchandise he claimed. His so-called fleet grew from one van to twenty—eleven of them refrigerated—before fate and a couple of dissatisfied customers caught up with him, at which point his newly-acquired wealth melted like snow in July into the black hole of his medical expenses.

The doctors fixed him up all right—better than new in many ways—but that only made it harder for Frankie to learn the lesson that experience had been trying to teach him. While they were picking the bullets out of his back, they had to pump no less than forty-one liters of designer blood through his system, and while he was laid up for a further six weeks regenerating his pulverised kidneys, they had to give him another fifty-six liters to provide “resident stem-cell stimulation, nascent tissue reinforcement, and analgesic support,” plus twelve more to compensate for “dialysis wastage.” At any rate, that’s what the bill said—and who among us nowadays has the guts to challenge a

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