Fur of Reason
I did not set out to grow fur, I set out to solve a problem. The problem was cold.
Cold on Mars at dawn when the air in the lowland domes masks itself as spring but the basalt still holds winter. Cold on Europa for the thirty-seven minutes after a drill shuts down and before the backup heater has warmed again the corridor that leads to the sample vault. Cold in the freezer aisle of any future where humans leave their cradle and find that most cradles are made of ice.
You can solve cold with machines, we always did. We pull wires through foam, thread coils around pipes, trap heat in clever pockets of air and call it engineering. But coils fail; foam cracks; pockets leak. The further we go, the more often something fails when no one is there to hold a wrench; or worse, when the only one there is a person too slow, too fragile, or simply too cold.
So I wrote a proposal arguing that biology had answers older than metallurgy. I gathered papers about Arctic foxes, yak hair, the ribbed guard hairs of musk oxen that wick ice away, the way polar bears are not white but hollow and black. The proposal did not mention fur on people. It mentioned “passive thermoregulatory traits,” “non-shivering thermogenesis,” “follicular density modulation,” and, very briefly, “applied chimerism.” That last phrase was the stone I hid in the bread.
The board approved the grant because the numbers lined up in neat columns, because I have spent twelve years being exact, and because I promised to start with mice. We did start with mice. They thrived at -10°C without huddling. Their serum leptin profiles showed exactly what I said they would. They lived longer.
“Fine,” said Kofi, watching a ball of perfused gray snore against the glass. “You have colder mice. When are you going to tell them bedtime stories about Jezero Crater?” “When you stop telling me you’ll retire,” I said, and we both smiled because these were our assigned lines.
The second year we had dogs. The third year we had a volunteer pig with a back slick as velvet that did not frost in the chill room. In the fourth year, someone from the Bureau asked why our models were beginning to skew primate.
“Because,” I said, “the thing that kills people is not cold. It's the five minutes they spend deciding whether to risk the cold. The animal that survives the five minutes is the one that does not have to decide. It just goes.”
They were good rules, lucidly phrased, and if I had written them they would have contained one more: that the rules must not be used to shelter timidity. But the world does not print my footnotes. “Do you need to stop?” asked Kofi, leaning in my door after the envelope left. “Not yet,” I said. “Then you need another volunteer pig.” “Not a pig,” I said. “A person.” He folded his arms. “I knew you were working toward that sentence. I did not guess the subject would be you.” “Who else,” I said, and since he is my friend he did not spend more than one shallow breath on answers to that question that included his own name. He came inside and shut the door.
Into The Unknown
I will not pretend that cloning chooses you because you are noble. Cloning chooses you because you are convenient. I had a full genomic map with fewer flagged regions than most; I had twenty-seven consent forms I myself had revised for clarity; I had the institutional standing to sign them. So I signed them.
“Sel,” said Kofi, using the name only he uses, “you have considered the obvious?” “That I’ll die?” “That,” he said, “you will not.” I looked at him, and he looked back with the steady patience of a man who has stayed up with me through too many nights to count. “If you survive, there are two of you. That is not a metaphysical problem. It is an administrative problem. It is also, if you are careless, a legal one.” “Directive Three,” I said. “Continuing consent.” “Continuing does not mean unilateral,” he said. “Would you like to be my arbiter?” I asked. “No,” he said without humor. “I would like to be your adversary.” We signed the other forms. We escalated to the ethics subcommittee, then to the Bureau’s special docket. There were calls. There were listening sessions with polite questions that ended with impolite silences. There were letters whose sentences arranged themselves into the shape of a threat. There was also the other column of numbers, the one with the two pilots’ names. The docket moved. I have been precise; I will continue to be. We took a nucleus from one of my somatic cells. We took it to a place where it could pretend to be very young again. We made a few, deliberate changes: not a grafted genome from some fox or macaque, not a hybrid chimera with spliced alien islands, but an adjustment of the knobs that had rusted in the course of our primate history. If you give follicular stem cells the right instructions, they will listen; that is what makes them stem cells. We left in place everything that matters about being me, and we tuned only the parts that keep a mammal alive in wind and ice: the regulation of subcutaneous fat; the phase change of hair from vellus to terminal on most of the body while preserving the density and sensitive function of the facial vibrissae (yes, that novelty made me smile too); a recruitment of brown adipose tissue; a tweak in the sympathetic nervous system's norepinephrine uptake to favor non-shivering thermogenesis. It was a careful design. A cautious one. I do not believe in flamboyance when working with lives, even my own. We gestated ex utero. We did not accelerate growth beyond physiologic limits; that is one boundary I will not cross. Time is a biological organ, and if you cut it out you get a monster. She grew at a pace that let her brain fit its skull gracefully and gave her lungs time to argue with their capillaries. When she was born I expected to be unsettled by the mirror. I expected shock. I have always overestimated my capacity for drama. It felt like walking into a room and realizing someone else had answered the same exam questions and arranged them into the same, dry grid of letters. She breathed. She sneezed once, emphatically. The hair on her forearms lay in neat fields like barley. “Name?” asked the nurse, whose job it was to write, neutrally, the world’s first under whatever word we provided. “Vera,” I said. It means truth in the way that names pretend to, which is to say not at all, but truth is what you aim even if your hand shakes. “Vera,” said the nurse, and the world sighed a new syllable. It is unnerving how easily the world learns to talk about something it would have outlawed yesterday.
Vera slept warm. She did not mind the temperature gradient of the ward. She was more sensitive to drafts than I anticipated; her whiskers quivered and she turned to face air disturbances with a concentration I envied. When she cried, which she did at the decent times babies choose, the room filled with a scent I cannot call animal because it was mine, only more present: a clean fat, a salt that dried quickly on my sleeves. I sat with her for hours, thinking of fur as a machine.
Machines have tolerances. We had tuned Vera, but her hair had to grow. It takes time to be ready, even when you are designed.
By the time Vera was two, the Bureau had come back with a list of conditions longer than my thesis. She would be tested for judgment. She would be evaluated for social integration using metrics that would have scandalized any grandmother. She would be seen by a tribunal before she was legally permitted to leave the facility’s grounds without me.
“Do you object?” asked Director Kaminska, who is diffident in person and steely in print. “I object to the pretension that my daughter is a car,” I said. “I accept that we live in a world that needs to check the brakes.” “A car is property,” she said. “We are not prepared to call your daughter property.” “Then what do you call the authority that has her caged?” I asked. “I call it prudence,” she said, and because she said it without relish I did not hate her.
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