Writing from the stemistry lab
Love is all we need
by Barbara Gordon
Climate change; flooding; disease; the ballooning of populations — the people of the Earth had given up their fight. The land had been reduced to a few mountain ranges in a matter of months. There were no icy Poles to chill the Earth, but the scorching effect of the sun was moderated by water evaporation from the vast oceans that now covered most of Planet. From the devastation of global warming, however, there had emerged a delightful, eternal Spring. Even so, it would have been surprising if any form of life had survived to enjoy these agreeable conditions — but it had.
Too old to flee the Catastrophe like his colleagues, who hoped to find a place of safety, Prof. Roberto Canegallo stayed on at the Bio-Lab, high in the Dolomites, and it was here, all alone and quite by accident that he managed to produce the ‘Infinity Cell’ — a self-replicator needing no further scientific intervention. The trauma of the Catastrophe had led him to abandon the rules, to forget about morals and ethics and to pursue his life-long quest to create the super-clone. It was his fascination with Fibonacci numbers and their sequences, as well as the taking of pro-creative liberties, that had at last allowed him to break the genome code. On a plateau surrounded by rocky outcrops and gushing waterfalls, high enough to escape the lapping waters, a small, strange community began to evolve — whose purpose was simply to replicate to provide empirical data.
Roberto managed to successfully grow his super-clones to maturity, but was unable to extend their life span beyond just a very few years. Despite his success, however, Roberto was facing a dilemma — one that he could never have envisaged. He started to become attached to his ‘girls’. And possibly because he knew his own time was short, he began to regret his detached scientific manipulations. He was deeply troubled by conscience. He was overwhelmed by a need to ‘humanise’ his girls. What Roberto really wanted was to grant them that most human of emotions — the capacity to love.
But of course this was not Roberto’s gift to give.