Brian Stableford - The Home Front.pdf - Brian Stableford - widez2

THE HOME FRONT

Brian Stableford

NOW that we have lived in the security of peace for more than

thirty years a generation has grown up to whom the Plague Wars are a

matter of myth and legend. Survivors of my age are often approached

by the wondering young and asked what it was like to live through

those frightful years, but few of them can answer as fully or as

accurately as I.

In my time I have met many doctors, genetic engineers, and

statesmen who lay claim to having been in "the front line" during the

First Plague War, but the originality of that conflict was precisely the

fact that its real combatants were invading microbes and defensive

antibodies. All its entrenchments were internal to the human body and

mind. It is true that there were battlegrounds of a sort in the hospitals,

the laboratories, and even in the House of Commons, but this was a war

whose entire strategy was to strike at the most intimate locations of all.

For that reason, the only authentic front was the home front: the

nucleus of family life.

Many an octogenarian is prepared to wax lyrical now on the

reelings of dread associated with obligatory confinement. They will

assure you that no one would risk exposure to a crowd if it could

possibly be avoided, and that every step out of doors was a terror-laden

trek through a minefield. They exaggerate. Life was not so rapidly

transformed in an era when a substantial majority of the population still

worked outside the home or attended school, and only a minority had

the means or the inclination to make all their purchases electronically.

Even if electronic shop-pimg had been universal, that would have

brought about a very dramatic increase in the number of people

employed in the deliv-ery business, all of whom would have had to go

abroad and inter-act vith considerable numbers of their fellows.

For these reasons, total confinement was rare during the First

Plague War, and rarely voluntary. Even I, who had little choice in the

matter after both my legs were amputated above the knee following the

Paddington Railway Disaster of 2119, occasionally sallied forth in my

electrically-powered wheelchair in spite of the protestations of my wife

Martha. Martha was almost as firmly anchored as I was, by virtue of

the care she had to devote to me and to our younger daughter Frances,

but it would have taken more than rumors of war to force Frances'

teenage sister Petra to remain indoors for long.

The certainty of hindsight sometimes leads us to forget that the

First Plague War was, throughout its duration, essentially a matter of

rumor, but such was the case. The absence of any formal declaration of

war, combined with the highly dubious status of many of the terrorist

organizations which competed to claim responsibility for its worst

atrocities, sustained an atmosphere of uncertainty that complicated our

fears. To some extent, the effect was to exaggerate our anxieties, but it

allowed braver souls a margin of doubt to which they could dismiss all

inconvenient alarms.

I suppose I was fortunate that the Paddington Disaster had not

disrupted my career completely, because I had the education and

training necessary to set myself up as an independent share-trader

operating via my domestic unit. I had established a reputation that

allowed me to build a satisfactory register of corporate and individual

clients, so I was able to negotiate the movement of several million

euros on a daily basis. I had always been a specialist in the biotech

sector, which was highly volatile even before the war started—and it

was that accident of happenstance more than any other which placed

my minuscule fraction of the home front at the center of the fiercest

action the war produced.

Doctors, as is only natural, think that the hottest action of the

plague wars was experienced on the wards which filled up week by

week between 2129 and 2133 with victims of hyperflu, assertive

MSRA, neurotoxic Human Mosaic Virus and plethoral hem-orrhagic

fever. Laboratory engineers, equally understandably, think that the

crucial battles were fought within the bodies of the mouse models

housed in their triple-X biocontainment facilities. In fact, the most

hectic action of all was seen on the London Stock Exchange, and the

only hand-to-hand fighting involved the sneakthieves and armed

robbers who continually raided the nation's greenhouses during the six

months from September 2129 to March 2130: the cruel winter of the

great plantigen panic.

I never laid a finger on a single genetically modified potato or

carrot, but I was in the thick of it nevertheless. So, perforce, were my

wife and children; their lives, like mine, hung in the balance

throughout. That is why my story is one of the most pertinent records

of the First Plague War, as well as one of the most poignant.

Although my work required fierce concentration and a readiness to

react to market moves at a moment's notice, I was occasionally forced

by necessity to let Frances play in my study while I worked. It was not

safe to leave her alone, even in the adjacent ground-floor room where

she attended school online. She suffered from an environmentally

induced syndrome which made her unusually prone to form allergies to

any and all novel organic compounds.

In the twentieth century such a condition would have proved swiftly

fatal, but, by the time Francis was born in 2121, medical science had

begun to catch up with the problem. There were efficient palliatives to

apply to her occasional rashes, and effective ways of ensuring that she

received adequate nutrition in spite of her perennial tendency to gastric

distress and diarrhea. The only aspects of her allergic attacks which

seriously threatened her life were general anaphylactic shock and the

disruption of her breathing by massive histamine reactions in the throat.

It was these possibilities that compelled us to keep very careful control

over the contents of our home and the importation of exotic organic

molecules. By way of completing our precautions, Martha, Petra and I

had all been carefully trained to administer various injections, to

operate breathing apparatus, and—should the worst ever come to the

worst—to perform an emergency tracheotomy.

Frances was very patient on the rare occasions when she had to be

left in my sole care, and seemed to know instinctively when to rnaintain

silence, even though she was a talkative child by nature. When business

was slack, however, she would make heroic attempts to understand

what I was doing.

As chance would have it, she was present when I first set up my

position in plantigens in July 2129, and it was only natural that she

should ask me to explain what I was doing and why.

"I'm buying lots of potatoes and a few carrots," I told her,

oversimplifying recklessly.

"Isn't Mummy doing that?" she asked. Martha was at the

supermarket.

"She's buying the ones we'll be cooking and eating. I'm buying ones

that haven't even been planted yet. They're the kind that have to be

eaten raw if they're to do any good." "You can't eat raw potatoes," she

said, skeptically. "They're not very nice," I agreed, "but cooking would

destroy the vital ingredients of these kinds, because they're so delicate."

I explained to her, as best I could, that a host of genetic engineers was

busy transplanting new genes into all kinds of root vegetables, so that

they would incorporate large quantities of special proteins or protein

fragments into their edible parts. I told her that the recent arrival in

various parts of the world—including Britain—of new disease-causing

viruses had forced scientists to work especially hard on new ways of

combating those viruses. "The most popular methods, at the moment," I

concluded, "are making plantibodies and plantigens."

"What's the difference?" she wanted to know. "Antibodies are what

our own immune systems produce whenever our bodies are invaded by

viruses. Unfortunately, they're often produced too slowly to save us

from the worst effects of the diseases, so doctors often try to immunize

people in advance, by giving them an injection of something harmless

to which the body reacts the same way. Anything that stimulates the

production of antibodies is called an antigen. Some scientists are

producing plants that produce harmless antigens that can be used to

make people's immune systems produce antibodies against the new

diseases. Others are trying to cut out the middle by producing the

antibodies directly, so that people who've already caught the diseases

can be treated before they become seriously ill."

"Are antigens like allergens?" Frances asked. She knew a good deal

about allergens, because we'd had to explain to her why she could

never go out, and why she always had to be so careful even in the

house.

"Sort of," I said, "but there isn't any way, as yet, of immunizing

people against the kind of reaction you have when your throat closes up

and you can't breathe."

She didn't like to go there, so she said: "Are you buying plantigens

or plantibodies, Daddy?"

"I'm buying shares in companies that are spending the most money

on producing new plantigens," I told her, feeling that I owed her a

slightly fuller explanation.

"Why?"

"Plantigens are easier to produce than plantibodies because they're

much simpler," I said. "The protection they provide is sometimes

limited, but they're often effective against a whole range of closely

related viruses, so they're a better defense against new mutants. The

main reason I'm buying plantigens rather than plantibodies, though, has

to do with psychological factors."

She'd heard me use that phrase before, but she'd never quite gotten

to grips with it. I tried hard to explain that although plantibodies were

more useful in hospitals when sick people actually arrived there,

ordinary people were far more interested in things that might keep them

out of hospitals altogether. As the fear of the new diseases became

more widespread and more urgent, people would become increasingly

willing—perhaps even desperate—to buy large quantities of plantigen-

containing potatoes and carrots to eat "just in case." For that reason, I

told Frances, the sales of plantigen-producing carrots and potatoes

would increase more rapidly than the actual level of threat, and that

meant that it made sense to buy shares in the companies that were

investing most heavily in plantigen development.

"I understand," she said, only a little dubiously. She wanted me to

be proud of her. She wanted me to think that she was clever.

I was proud of her. I did think she was clever. If she didn't quite

understand the origins of the great plantigen panic, that was because

nobody really understood it, because nobody really understood what

makes some psychological factors so much more powerful than others

that they become obsessions.

No sooner had I taken the position than it began to put on value.

Throughout August and early September I gradually transferred more

and more funds from all my accounts into the relevant holdings—and

then felt extremely proud of myself when the prices really took off.

From the end of September on, the only question anyone in the market

was asking was how long the bull run could possibly last—or, more

specifically, exactly when would be the best moment to cash the paper

profits and get out.

Brian Stableford - The Home Front.pdf

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