Memories (excerpt)

Kristina stretched out her leg, and her knee had clicked audibly, a sound that had somehow permeated the clamour of an unlikely Tuesday crowd at Bar Mimi’s. 

“Oof,” she’d looked at Peter and laughed. 

Peter nodded and exhaled a smoke trail in amusement. “Get some more beer down you,” Peter said. Oil your joints.” He caught a glimpse of something to the left of Kristina, and momentarily distracted, a smile fell from his lips. 

A man who looked no older than his mid-thirties, with a chubby, unlined face, stood up at the table he shared with his friends and started whimpering. His round, cartoonish eyes had filled with panic as his friends exchanged glances. 

“Sit down, Stephan,” A tired-looking woman said, tugging on his sleeve.

“God,” he kept whispering, tears streaming down his face. His partner rose from her chair heavily to take him outside. But just before she’d guided him out, he’d gasped. “Where...I don’t know why I’m here.” The man had been there before Peter and Kristina. He’d been there for hours. 

Thirty minutes later, Kristina and Peter had paid their bill and left the energetic chatter of the bar behind them. Heading towards the relative quiet of Bilderdijkstraat, they’d found a bench next to a canal, cleared of its boats by the chill of an autumnal evening. 

“Ah, this brings back memories,” Peter stared across the water while raising his collar against the crisp breeze. “Anna and I used to live right over there. That green house, you see it?”

“No shit!” Kristina had clapped her hands delightedly like a child. “How long ago was that?”

“Ah, we’re talking thirty years ago or something. That was a life before everything, before Chloe, before I had a moment to really appreciate what I had.” Peter strained levity into his words despite the bitterness curling their edges. Just saying her name evoked images of her baby legs toddling around the house. She was as light as air when he’d run behind her, pick her up, and swing her. Almost as if she’d never existed.  

Kristina reached into her pocket and extracted a cigarette. 

“You’re really making your new genes work for you, aren’t you?” Peter disapproved of the stench of the habit, even if it no longer caused cell mutations in his friend. It had still done everything else. Stained her teeth, made soft, buttery sounds emerge from her throat as she coughed and breathed. Despite Kristina’s gene sequence alteration also countering any addictive behaviours, her habitual reliance on the death stick made Peter wonder if addiction wasn’t as deeply entrenched in genetics as they’d thought. 

A thoughtful drag, then, “We couldn’t have saved her, you know. Back then, I mean. Things are, well... ”

“Ah,” Peter cracked his knuckles and continued to gaze out to the green beacon ahead. Its memories of Chloe were glazed within, sugary sweet, stuck to every wall and crevice. 

“They’re different now, of course,” Kristina had said, obviously. 

“The pendulum has swung the other way,” Peter agreed, “look at the fucking Hegelian nightmare we’ve created. It’s utter chaos.” He couldn’t be bothered to try and simulate the insouciance he didn’t feel for the sake of a conversation.

“You say this a lot, Pete. It’s unfair - to both of us, actually. We did what we had to to help countless people survive.”

“Ah, and look at us now, huh. Prometheus in the mirror, having our eyes and flesh pecked away by guilt every day.”

“Speak for yourself. I’ve nothing to feel guilty about,” Kristina laid her words out emphatically, a blanket over humanity, over Chloe. “You can’t control everything; this has always been your issue.” Kristina was getting personal now, calm replaced by agitation, which would soon be replaced by another flick of the lighter.

“You needed to control variability, infinitesimally, on a cellular level, its expression, dictate the narrative, the opinions of bioethicists, huh? What the public did with our work… all of this was out of scope, even for a perfectionist like you. When people were accusing us of playing God, you’re the only one out of the two of us who was acting like one.” There it was, the click of flint, then fire. 

“What we did,” She paused to inhale, then exhale. “Was give people a choice. Freedom.”

“Free will, freedom, God’s word…Sometimes stasis is what’s needed”.

Kristina wasn’t disagreeing or agreeing when she said, “You know as well as I do what happens when you stand still. People just go around you. Other geneticists were using our technology to keep raising the stakes. When that child was born….” 

“Ah, fuck it. What’s the point.”

“When that child was born,” Kristina continued, “It showed the world a car crash reality, a future state, simultaneous destruction and creation - none of us could look away. Despite how we felt. We went from gene therapy to engineering PRIORI to keep poor fucks like that guy at the bar sane and alive. What do you bet that his wife is pumping PRIORI through his veins as we speak? That would have been near-on everyone on the planet if it weren’t for us! If designer babies are the consequence of all of that, then so be it. Who cares? They're just born with all the advantages that were previously decided by mother nature’s rickety roulette wheel anyway”. 

“Don’t you put that faux sheen on it,” Peter’s anger was on a leash, held fast by the etiquette of healthy, scientific debate. His tone remained calm, but experience punctured his words. Resentment bled out. 

“We monetised randomness. Our work with Greytone just put a price tag on the human race. Creativity, intellect, the ability to be born without chronic and degenerative diseases, skin colour, eye colour…all the natural diversity civilisation rests on, blighted by our….” 

“If we hadn’t done it, someone else would have,” Kristina interrupted. 

“Scientific curiosity,” Peter finished. “Ah, what do you think the point of all of our research was? To let rich people have yet more privilege? Yet more opportunities to decide how people should live, die and be born?”

“People said the same thing about IVF many moons ago,” Kristina countered, “And the reason you got into all of this in the first place was to stop Chloe from degenerating further than she had. It was a noble thing to do. Don’t obliterate everything we achieved because we couldn’t save her.”

“But it’s war now, Kris. However noble our initial motivations, all those lives we saved with PRIORI, all the blood, sweat, and tears we put into saving Chloe… we allowed our work to be weaponised.” 

Kristina exhaled and threw her cigarette butt underfoot, crushing it into the dirt. Geese overhead screech like old women, surprised by the power of flight. 

As quiet transposed their discussion, Peter had time to consider the scenic landscape. It looked like a snapshot to him, a memory of a star that had since imploded. He remembers walking his doddery old dog, Cass, along the canal bank. He remembers what it was like when Cass was younger and would run alongside him, tongue out, gazing up at him as he rode his bike. 

It was with some regret that he pulled away from this memory to refocus his attention on Kristina, who was saying carefully, “We gave them the thesis, the reaction to the event. They are providing the antithesis. Time will provide the synthesis. It always does.”

Cynically, Peter responded, “Well, that diffuses our responsibility nicely.” Then, “I can’t even begin to imagine what that will look like.”

Kristina shook her head. “Neither can I.” 

Chloe loved Cass. Peter remembers her small hands shaking uncontrollably and the dog lying underneath them, holding her body still under Chloe’s clumsy stroking. 

“Despite our differences in opinion,” Peter said, taking a folded square of tissue out of his pocket and blowing his nose. “I’ve had a great day with you, old friend.”

Kristina had looked at him with surprise. “And that’s it?”

“What?”

“That’s all you have to say on the matter? No berating me until dawn breaks? No beating me over the head with philosophy and lessons from poets?”

“None of that,” Peter had smiled. “Stasis, remember?”