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SUMMARY: Hauge remembered his own skeletal, pinched face crimping in concentration over voluminous texts. The explosive awakenings in the midst of nights by dreams in which cadavers he had dissected pursued him, threatening to flay him into so many lean strips.

The Naked Eye

by
Vasilis Afxentiou




"Dr. Hauge, what's this about making computer components out of people?"
Hauge sipped the last drops of his coffee. "Not out of them, dear man, for them: like a heart valve, a skin graft from artificially cultured cells, plastic arteries, and the like. Things that enhance and save lives such as pacemakers or artificial kidneys."
"Go on." Staring hard now, Reginald Marcus, President of International Medical Software Development, bit his lip. Never had he been offered anything to compare with what this young man was offering. In his mind flashed a menagerie of cyberpunk images and endless queues of eager, nail-biting clientele. Meanwhile, dim circumspection tainted him with doubt. Visions of hacked, and patched up heads and defiled torsos paraded in front of him. But in the end he nudged aside the stink of fear and reveled at a euphoria his released capitalistic fantasies induced. Looking out his penthouse window he gazed upon the azaleas flooding the terrace, the pointed and cubed tops of looming skyscrapers with their mirrored black windows, the steel and glass blocks of his empire where the thousands of men and women worked for him like anxious ants. And this man, this obscure Scottish scientist, would be his newest and perhaps most lucrative triumph.
"To put it simply," Hauge continued, "a sample of the subject's DNA is blown up hologrammically. The double helix is much easier to deal with that way..."
Something akin to hunger in that stare, Hauge thought as he lectured the billionaire. You never felt the bite of frost through torn shoes in deep Nor' Loch winter. Never had to eat stale bread and left-over mutton days on end in squalid, pest-infested, Auld Reekie ghettos to save up for coming tuition fees.
"...then the work begins. All genes not supportive to the preset parameters are extracted and replaced by modified ones: genes that heal the crippled, the blind, can make the deaf hear again; genes for mathematical acumen, for musical talent, for body stamina, business sagacity--you name it. The helix is then shrunk back down to its nominal size, superimposed on the original, and with the help of a broad-band laser beam is imprinted..."
Blood, Marcus? Is that what you want? Hauge remembered his own skeletal, pinched face crimping in concentration over voluminous texts. The explosive awakenings in the midst of nights by dreams in which cadavers he had dissected pursued him, threatening to flay him into so many lean strips. And that one child, the little girl, that expired in his arms slowly and lingeringly because the blood pool was empty and her parents could not pay Marcus, the world-wide provider of blood, for the rare vital fluid. What new deal were you striking up, Marcus, at the time?
"Pardon my limited knowledge of genetics," at last Marcus wrenched in the luxurious chair, his hulking ex-boxer's body coercing a tormented squeal from its frame, "but won't that just change the original chromosome's physical shape and not its quality?"
"Ah, but it will.