"What color eyes should he have?" Norton asks, typing away at his computer. He is old fashioned and prefers tactile response over touchscreens or neural interfaces."I don't know. Brown?" Mason isn't paying all that much attention to Norton. He's too busy trying to keep track of constantly updated results on a synthetic hormone he's currently testing on several phase two subjects. He's rather pleased with the drug. It boosts cognitive abilities and intelligence using hormones he developed. Nootropics have been around ever since humanity discovered caffeine was a stimulant, but Mason's drug isn't some basic neurotransmitter, it's a hormone, those magical chemicals capable of passing through cell walls. Mason's predicting money in his future as desperate college students buy up the synthetic drug for those midnight crams or that calculus test they forgot to study for.
He has a second project that's more important than Norton's stupid question. Artificial lesions. Back in the dark ages of psychology when governments were scared of drugs and dead hacks like Freud were the face of psychology, it was hard to examine how the brain worked. A lot of valuable information could be learned by examining people with brain injuries and neurological disorders, but who was going to sign up to get deliberately injured?
Mason lives in the modern world, where governments have fallen away for corporations that don't give a damn about something as profitless as outlawing drugs. In his spare time, Mason develops artificial drugs that target specific neurotransmitters to create temporary lesions.
"Brown? Uh, boring!" Norton talks like a teenage girl. Mason does his best to ignore it, but it's really annoying.
"Idiots! You can't just mess around with a SNP in isolation. A single letter change in the nucleotide can have wide ranging effects." That's Norton and Mason's partner, Elizabeth Greer. She's a hot blond and a genius in the fields of behavioral psych and cognitive science.
"We know Elizabeth . . . we're not stupid,” Mason grumbles. He boasts a degree in biochemistry from Berkley and Mandrake Corporation doesn't hire idiots, but Elizabeth is a ***** that way. "Anyway, it doesn't really matter. The proteins for his eyes are taken from feline DNA. That's a brand new set of problems." Mason is being generous. A single gene can do multiple things, and sometimes it will do something you have no idea it could do because of some unknown external variable. You couldn't just switch out proteins like a kid's legos. Remove one strand of code and suddenly another gene doesn't work correctly, or maybe you suddenly give a patient a defect you don't realize existed until the patient comes back with a crippling disorder. It's all interconnected.
"You sure he's not going to end up with fur?" Norton asks.
"The supercomputer crosschecked several million genes. It took some tinkering but we managed to isolate the correct nucleotides." Supercomputers are awesome. Mason is smart, probably one of the smartest people alive, but there are billions of protein letters in human DNA. The smartest bastard on the planet wasn't going to be able to crosscheck all those genes to make sure they would do what you wanted. You need a supercomputer to do the number crunching for you.
"Did we work out the problems with increased intelligence?" Elizabeth asks.
"You mean avoiding a host of mental and emotional handicaps?" Mason shrugs. "We've done our best."
"And what does that mean? You 'did your best?' Will he be an emotional wreck or not?" Maybe its because she's a woman, but Mason thinks Elizabeth is way to worried about a person that doesn't exist yet.
"We correlated the proteins with several thousand test subjects and even developed synthetic hormones and neurotransmitters to help regulate his pattern recognition and problem solving processes. He's going to be fine."
"Have we gotten word yet from the guys in the behavior department?"
"Eric told me they have almost finished assembling the code for the synthetic behavior glands. He's hoping to build upon the already existing glands, but we may have to engineer some new ones."
"Wait, hold on a minute. If you developed synthetic hormones and neurotransmitters to help regulate his problem solving abilities . . . how will those mesh with the behavior modification hormones?" Elizabeth folds her arms and stares down at Mason with her slightly glowing purple eyes.
A while ago, she got her eyes removed in favor of synthetic replacements. It gives her the ability to see on multiple spectrums and nifty magnification and image optimization options. She also thinks they're pretty because she got them custom made with purple contacts that hide the machinery feeding her brain with data it wasn't designed to understand, but **** evolution. Bateson had it right when he said that, “All receipt of information is news of difference and all perception of difference is thus limited by threshold.” Elizabeth found the low resolution threshold of the human body's original sensory equipment to be debilitating. Differences that are too slight or too slow to activate sensory circuitry are not perceived and therefore, for purposes of everyday understanding, do not exist.
Elizabeth is a scientist and treats information the same way a dehydrated man in the desert treats water. At the same time, there was such a thing as too much information. Too much data to process, like trying to drink a freshwater lake. That is what supercomputers are for, to sort out the junk and find the patterns. Elizabeth's brain isn't a supercomputer, but she has daydreams about the idea.
Elizabeth has money—Mandrake Corporation treats its professional employees well—and got a complete neuropackage enhancement, with advanced data processing capable of interpreting information on multiple wavelengths. It required her to get her thalamus upgraded, which is no simple surgery, but the upgrade in signal relay from her thalamus improves her cognitive performance significantly. It also lets her control her sleep cycle and decide when she wants to get tired and when she wants to wake up. She has to consume far more calories than the average person to power all of that machinery, but it gives her an excuse to eat like a pig.
“I sent my data over to Eric. His team is incorporating the information into the code." Mason hates it when Elizabeth stares at him, because he knows she can measure his temperature and heartbeat just by looking at him.
"Eric had better get his stuff done right then . . . and to think these are just the minor details."
"Minor details? This isn't minor, this is transgenic genome modification we're talking about!"
"Yes, and we don't have a supercomputer capable of predicting the staggering huge array of external variables he will be exposed to. A lot of genes aren't even activated until something external activates them." Elizabeth scowls. Mason should know this. She hates having to explain things to people who should know better. “We can't control every aspect of his experience.”
“And why not Elizabeth?”
“He's going to be a person, complete with emotions, thoughts, dreams, hopes, and goals.”
“So? We'll just decide for him what those emotions, thoughts, dreams, hopes, and goals will be. Just give me the right external stimuli and chemicals.” Mason thinks this is part of Elizabeth being a woman again. Maybe that is sexist, but really, at this point the person they are talking about isn't anything more than data in a computer.
“You know, isn't that kind of assuming we'll even know what stimuli to use? He's not going to be human. Hundreds of years of research into human behavior isn't really going to give us much of a map when dealing with how he's going to respond.” Trust the biochemist not see the bigger picture.