He chuckled. ‘That was a somewhat amusing diversion. A synthetic micro-organism that can metabolise the polymers in the pipes. An act of sabotage. It would have impeded my plans if the exploration company brought too much attention to this island.’
‘Why Utgard?’
‘It’s one of the few places in the world free from the tyranny of demotic morality.’
It was the way he loved to speak. ‘No government,’ I translated.
‘No restraint on the pursuit of knowledge.’
‘No ethics forms.’
I glanced at Louise, but she didn’t react. It meant nothing to her any more — if it ever had.
Pharaoh leaned forward. ‘Let’s start from the beginning, Thomas.’ He was the only person, except my mother, who called me Thomas. He picked a paperweight off the table and hefted it in his hand. A piece of polished jet: I actually recognised it. I bought it for Louise on a weekend in Whitby.
‘Carbon. It’s everything that matters. You, me, the birds and the bees and the flowers — every molecule in our body starts with a carbon atom. When God said, “Let there be life,” what He actually said is, “Let there be carbon.”’
It must be a lecture he’d given somewhere before, though I hadn’t heard it. The phrases rolled out in that irresistible voice. When he said, ‘Let there be life,’ you could almost imagine the molecules jumping into line.
‘But carbon’s a promiscuous little element. Attaches itself to anything. With nitrogen, or hydrogen, it makes the stuff of life. But join it to a pair of oxygen atoms, CO2, and you’re in danger. You know what the more optimistic of the energy people call fossil fuels? Buried sunshine. It’s the light that fell on the planet a hundred million years ago. Plants stored the energy as carbon. They lived, they died, were buried, and under pressure the matter was compressed until the carbon inside them turned to coal, or oil. When you burn it, the carbon is released and joins with the oxygen in the air, and all that ancient life is now a dangerous gas.
‘Earth’s going to change more in the next hundred years than it has in the last ten thousand. We’ve added six billion people in a century, and we’re not slowing down. And the business model for our planet says they all have to buy automobiles, airplane travel, air conditioning and iPads, or the whole economy collapses. You want to talk about carbon? The last time there was this much carbon in the atmosphere, Greenland looked like Connecticut and Philly was seaside real estate. Even if you want to stop it there, we’d have to switch off every engine and power plant in the world tomorrow and not start them back up for fifty years. Instead, China’s bringing a new coal-fired power station on stream every three days. I said coal is buried sunshine. If you count it that way, every year we dig up and release five hundred years’ worth of sun into the atmosphere.’
‘I never had you as a tree hugger.’ As far as I remembered, the only science Pharaoh ever cared about was genetics. ‘So what are you trying to invent here? Some kind of biofuel?’
‘You’re thinking too small, Thomas. That was always your limitation.’ He glanced at Louise, who nodded her agreement. ‘We’ve gone too far, the planet’s not coming back. We’ve tipped the balance, and all we can do is adapt. That’s my interest. The greatest endeavour of them all.’
He always had a good patter. I’ve seen him hypnotise audiences plenty of times, whether it was a prospective student, or a lecture hall, or the people who write the eight-figure cheques. But this was different. More assertive, more about showing off his own certainty than convincing you. Evangelical was the word that came to mind.
‘You’ve heard the term “geo-engineering”? The hypothesis that the solution to the world’s crisis is re-engineering the planet. Giant mirrors in space to reflect back sunlight, or saturating the oceans with iron to absorb more CO2. Even if it were possible, the costs — and the risks …’ He rippled his fingers into a fist, a classic Pharaoh gesture. ‘I’ve chosen to approach the problem from the opposite direction.
‘You’re aware of the theory of Intelligent Design, I presume. Nonsense, of course, dreamed up by theists who are too timid to call their God by name. Their premise is flawed. If they were scientists, they’d recognise there’s neither intelligence nor design at work. Beauty, yes. Awe, most definitely. But from the perspective of design, it’s a mess. A billion years of baggage. Wrong turns, dead ends and obsolescence. All the dirty dishes our genome never got around to cleaning up and putting away.’
He threw open his fist.
‘You know why Paris is more beautiful than Los Angeles? Paris was designed — redesigned, I should say — by a single mind. Elegant, proportional; the old mess swept away. LA just sprawled, millions of people all making their own self-interested decisions.’
‘I think they call it the wisdom of crowds.’
‘The wisdom of crowds is what’s brought us to the brink. You know what happens when a creature’s environment changes faster than it can evolve?’
‘Extinction,’ said Louise. All the time he’d been giving his lecture, she’d sat still beside him, twisting the wedding band on her finger. She never wore one when we were married — said it got in the way too much at the lab.
‘I’m not arrogant. I don’t even claim any special insight. I just look at the data without prejudice. And I have the ability to do this. To re-engineer mankind.’
I laughed out loud, and took some satisfaction from the irritation that flashed across his face. The spell was broken. Sitting at that table with Louise, prim and upright like the couple in American Gothic, he suddenly looked absurd.
‘Is that why you came here? To write science fiction?’
I was hoping I could get under his skin again. But he’d got control of himself, and all I earned was a condescending smile.
‘Synthetic biology isn’t fiction, Thomas. You ought to know that.’
‘You mean the Maryland group?’ Pharaoh may be brilliant, but even back when I worked for him he wasn’t the only one pursuing synthetic biology. There’s a group in Maryland who used the technique to create an artificial bacterium. It made the news a couple of years ago.
‘The Maryland group’s bacterium was a parlour trick. A two-piece jigsaw. I have the whole picture.’
‘That’s not possible.’
‘Let me persuade you otherwise. You think I came here for the climate? Or the social scene? I mean, Maryland may be dull, my God, but …’
‘The science you’re talking about is fifty years off,’ I said. ‘If ever.’
‘Look at World War Two. In six years, they invented radar, rockets, jet engines, the atomic bomb and nylon pantyhose to boot. Why? Because in wartime, nobody looks over his shoulder. That Maryland group? The science was simple — they could have done it ten years ago. The only thing that held them back was the paperwork. You know how long it takes to get ethical approval for creating new life? Think of stem cell research. So much potential, and it’s been tied up with politicians and priests for thirty years.
‘The irony is the hypocrisy. Any dumb kid with a hard-on can create life. And the government will subsidise that with welfare, tax credits, medical programs, no questions asked, even though that life will probably be — and I quote Thomas Hobbes — nasty, brutish and short. But try and do something in a lab that will benefit humanity, expand our potential …’
‘Not possible,’ I said, louder this time.
‘Impossible is merely something no one has yet managed to do. And I have, Thomas. We’ve gone through every codon on the genome. We culled the junk, stripped out the weaknesses and the redundancies. Boosted positive attributes. Then we assembled the entire thing from scratch, all three billion base pairs. Smarter, tougher, more capable. Humanity 2.0, if you will.’
Heavy footsteps rang on the stairs. The door behind me opened. Pharaoh smiled.