3.
Eugenics merely asks that we do something to lessen the dangers of falling in love — to render it more safe for young people to form attachments, to marry, and to rear offspring without discovering later on that their mate springs from a hopelessly tainted family, and that their children must be born in the world biologically disinherited and everlastingly condemned to eke out their existence in association with the lower levels of human existence.
The science of eugenics and sex—life, love, marriage, maternity: the regeneration of the human race
W.J. Hadden, C.H. Robinson, and M.R. Melendy
The impeccable, clean lines of Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired architecture ran throughout the entire aerospace complex, a subtle, sharp watermark, influencing even seemingly casual places as the main cafeteria. Immaculately trimmed plants in a pseudo-arboretum setting bordered the hundred-odd umbrella-tipped tables for four. Soft classical music murmured through hidden speakers as sunlight trickled in, warm and bright through the translucent dome, enhancing the lush greenery and dissipating shadows, the closest you could hope for any high-budget paradise, south of Eden.
In the hours between twelve and fourteen hundred, a steady trickle of employees would meander in, each one in their neatly pressed suits, picking up their trays and silverware, moving through the queue in a well-dressed conveyer line.
For Meg Giry, lunch time was prime specimen watching hour, the single largest conglomeration of everyone's imperfections laid bare. You could tell a lot about a person by the lunch they ordered. A New York strip, medium, obviously had no fear of failing the cholesterol test or the de rigeurs of the weekly physical exams. But those were rare. More common were the strictly regimented diets, the whole-grain sandwiches filled with rabbit food or, skipping the bread altogether, some sanitary, wholly unappealing mass of lawn clippings they had the gall to call a salad.
Meg was, admittedly, one of the slightly-imperfect types who should have been looking more at a spinach bowl with low-fat, calorie free dressing. However, the possibility of increasing her lifespan by a whopping three-and-a-half hours was not enough to separate her from the particularly delightful piece of salmon almandine sitting atop a bed of sticky rice. Ignoring the jealous glances sprinkled in her general direction, she chewed her bit of repast with all appropriate gusto, complete with accompanying noises suitable for soft-core pornography.
"You really need to try this." Impaling a chunk of fish on her fork, she waved it enticingly in front of her dining companion. "It's divine."
Christine merely flipped a page in her stack of music, before absently stabbing her own utensil into the bowels of a rather wilted-looking salad.
With a sigh, Meg, popped the piece into her own mouth, gaze darting around the room as she continued to take in her surroundings. To her left, an engineer swallowed a handful of capsules for allergy prevention. Two tables over, a navigator she recognized as Hoffmann, slipped her sachet of pills back into her purse. Across the room, Standridge delicately swished down a packet of blood thinners before shoving her fork into a bed of something unappealingly green.
More common though, were the apparently healthy, the paranoid desperately trying to stave off the most minimal probabilities — of even the mere possibility of disease, of unwanted, inherited traits; preventative medicine at its most pervasive echoing in the cacophony of pill boxes randomly popping open and shut. And all of them had salads on their trays.
Reductio ad absurdum, her mother had once called it, as she dropped a blood sample into the analyzer. Utter foolishness! Letting a piss test dictate your life. What an odd statement, coming from the director of the testing lab. Her, of all people.
Meg's eyes fell on the small plastic case on the tray opposite hers. Even the woman across the table from her.
There'd a time when Christine had been equally as careless, when all her thoughts were of being a singer, and Meg, a dancer. They'd shared a place, a loft on the east side with enough room for the both of them to move comfortably about. And although Meg had far too many disadvantages to ever take dancing as anything more than a hobby, she dreamed, secretly, through her best friend. After an exhausting eight hours of assisting with blood tests, physical examinations, and staring at DNA sequences, she would come home and Christine would grab her hands and, with unabashed giggles and much merriment, they would dance all around the open floor.
Raoul would visit three times a week and he would treat them to dinner. Arms linked on either side of his, they would stride down the sidewalk, laugh and tease the flyboy mercilessly before hopping into his Thunderbird convertible. From there on, the laughs would turn to shrieks as he gunned the monster down the road in pure guy-style revenge.
Everything had been easy then.
Auditions came and passed. Meg never knew what had transpired, though she'd more than an inkling. Upon returning, Christine had been uncharacteristically tight-lipped, only offering in way of explanation, "Some people were not made to sing."
A week later, she'd begun a strict regimen — vitamins, blood thinners, gemfibrozil, niacin, cholestyramine and a handful of other designer health drugs.
Another month later she'd moved in with Raoul to his condo overlooking the beach.
Not too long after that, Meg had returned from her lunch, surprised to see Christine sitting there in the lab, hair knotted up at the back of her head, bound from neck to toe in a conservative blue pantsuit.
"You have to grow up some time," she shrugged, handing her the filled specimen cup.
It was only natural, then, that the younger Giry would find herself in nonplussed at seeing her best friend, after three years of, well, nothing, buried headlong in a stack of music for the second day in a row. With an exasperated sigh, her fingers tucked into the top fold of the sheets, bending them down to reveal the face of her dining companion.
"Christine," she said sweetly, as the other woman blinked at her. "Was there something you were planning to tell me?"
All she received in response was another distracted flicker of baby blues. "Such as?"
"This sudden renewed interest in opera? Singing? Private lessons, perhaps?"
"You could say that," came the evasive reply. It was really too bad Christine was such a terrible liar. Charming, in a way. But still...
"Are you're having an affair?"
"What?" That seemed to have snapped her out of her music-induced daydream. "No! Of course not. It's singing, all right? Just singing." A small, pensive smile edged onto the corners of he lips. "I'd almost forgotten how it felt. How glorious it was."
Now they were getting somewhere. "So tell me then," Meg grinned, "this...tutor...you've been making all this beautiful..." She flipped up the cover sheet. "Bizet with? Anyone I know?"
"I, ah, can't really say," muttered Christine.
"So, it's keeping secrets from best friends now?"
Silence.
Hurt, Meg abruptly stood, grasping her tray.
"Wait!" A hand shot out to catch her arm. "It's not that." Glancing nervously about, Christine sank lower into her seat. "It's just...I don't know."
"I see." Actually she didn't, but there was no point in letting that particular nugget loose. Mollified for the moment, she settled back down into her chair.
Twenty minutes of hushed explanations later, accompanied by the requisite fidgeting and napkin-twisting on Christine's side from the battery of embarrassing and rather pointed questions on Meg's, the latter's state of incredulousness was summarily brought to a head by her final verdict of:
"I hate to say it, but this whole thing sounds a wee bit, oh..."
"Absurd?"
"I was heading more towards creepy, but I suppose absurd works."
"It's not as if he's instructing me to stay at home sharpening knives! This is Gattaca. Safest place in the world." Christine sighed, passing a hand over her face. "It really is ridiculous, isn't it?"
"Admitting it is half the battle. Now, what are you going to do?"
The fork, busy mangling the now even sadder salad, paused as she raised her eyes. "What do you mean?"
"You're going to just keep loitering on rooftops, singing for a violin-playing ventriloquist who slips notes and music in your desk?"
"...no?"
"Try it again, this time with a little more backbone."
The poor, abused utensil clanked onto Christine's tray with disgust. At the next table, three suits from programming collected the remains of their lunch.
"What do you expect me to do? Have him sequenced?"
Meg thoughtfully rubbed her chin. "Actually, that's not a bad idea."
"That...that's great, Meg. Do I just hold out a cup and say, 'Hi! Mind filling this for me?'"
"Smartass. At least give me something to work with. I'll even take a fingerprint. Bag it up and I'll send it through the machines."
After all, there were advantages to being a lab brat through and through. Every technique, every bit of shufflery used to swipe honest samples from prospective employees, the younger Giry had learned from the expert — her mother. A print off a doorknob. A handshake. A bit of eyelash, perhaps, could reveal a secret. Even spit off the lip of a water cup. At the worst, a drug test could be readily administered. It kept the system...fair. Well, as far as Gattaca was concerned.
"This—it doesn't seem right." For reasons unknown to Meg, the very thought of it appeared to agitate Christine.
"It's only information," she reasoned. "Common, at that. And it's not as if you haven't done it before, or do I disremember the full sequence you had run on Raoul?"
A grimace. "He insisted."
"Now there's a man with his priorities in place. I venture he's at least a nine. I'd say a... "
"Nine-two." Leaning over, Christine picked up the valise that lay by her left foot and tucked the libretto inside, before setting it back down.
Meg whistled, impressed. "When's your fiancé supposed to be back, anyway?"
The smile that lit up Christine's face could have rivaled the incoming afternoon rays from the overhead dome. "One more week." It dimmed considerably as she reached for her pill box, snapping the lid open and shut. "He's not my fiancé."
"Uh huh." Meg leaned over and playfully flicked at the necklace partly hidden in the collar of the other woman's blouse. "And the two-carat rock hanging from that thing is just his way of saying 'let's be friends.'" As she shifted back into her chair, she studied the woman before her "You miss him, don't you?"
"Terribly."
"When can I expect a wedding invitation?"
The other woman merely shrugged.
Her temper exploded in a large sigh. "I don't get you, Christine. Nine-two! The guy's a serious catch. He's gorgeous, intelligent, funny—"
"I take it you've heard about his 'Condos on Titan' project, then?"
Her lips quirked up. "He is a bit of a goofball, isn't he?" She shook her head. "But he adores you. He's probably going to do something revoltingly romantic when he comes back, like shower you with flowers right before sweeping you off your feet and...I have no idea why you're looking like you've been forced to attend an execution."
The lid snapped shut as Christine rolled the case over in her hands, eyes abstractly fixed on the remains of her repast. "It's not that. I agree, Raoul's wonderful. More than everything I could ever hope for. He's practically..."
"Perfect?"
Her fingers stilled, pill box gripped so tightly, its edges dug painfully into her palms, as she continued to stare disconsolately at her salad.
"Yeah," she said, making a hopeless sound of sad amusement. "Perfect."
The distant echo of engine report drifted to her hears as Christine entered through the stairwell door, breathless from haste. She turned to the sky, eyes following the plume of booster trails streaking away, twin stars of thrusters glowing in the distance.
"You missed it," the voice greeted her.
"Held hostage by paperwork," she apologized. "Sudden budgetary changes came through the channel. Did I miss you play?"
"I waited for you."
For some absurd reason, that pleased her immensely.
"After all, what is an opera without its diva?"
So went the practice, line by line, the French still somewhat foreign in her mouth, but he patiently guided her through the passages, every word, every accented pitch of his voice a dark, thrilling timbre in her ears.
Les tringles des sistres tintaient
avec un éclat métallique,
et sur cette étrange musique
les zingarellas se levaient.
More verses in and her confidence and voice grew. And when Christine came to the tra-la-la, she smiled mischievously, slipping back into her old repertoire:
Beat out that rhythm on a drum,
Beat out that rhythm on a drum,
Beat out that rhythm on a drum,
And I don't need no tune at all!
She could almost hear the ghostly shudder, that low hum of mild exasperation. Chuckling in a rare fit of unabashed delight, she strolled to the edge of the rooftop, taking in the hues of the setting sun.
"I missed it," she murmured, a bit mournfully.
"There will be another one tomorrow."
A barely discernable shake of her head. "If the cutbacks go through, it might be the last one for a while."
"Do you only come here to observe the launches?"
"No," she whispered. "Not anymore." Turning in what she thought the voice's direction came from, head tilted slightly, she asked, "With no more flights, who will you play for? After all, isn't that the only reason you come here?"
There was a chunk of uncomfortable silence. Then, "Not anymore."
And for just one single moment, that tiny, unmarked space of time, her breath caught.
"It's strange being up here, sometimes," Christine finally sighed. "Almost surreal. It feels like another place. Another country. Another planet." A breeze ruffled the collar of her jacket and her arms made their way, almost by reflex, to wrap around her body. "Would you play something?"
A quiet bit of pause passed, and then the strains of Vivaldi rang through the air. Autumn from the Four Seasons, she recognized. A second rustle of October wind blew across the rooftop, wrapping the sound about her ears.
Slowly, as if in a trance, she slipped out of her heels, drifting towards the music's source, stockinged feet soundless against the wind and notes, as her ears sought to pinpoint their origins. Each step brought her closer, marked by the fractional increase to the music's volume. Across the rooftop she slinked, arpeggio dancing in her veins, weaving between the columns, realizing, this, this was as close as she had ever managed to get.
A wall ran partway across the rear of the landing, a sharp right turn beckoned at the end.
Close. So very close. Christine could almost taste it, touch it, the sharp strokes of the allegro invading her fingertips. She ran them lightly over the painted brick, tracing their vibrations, as her heart pounded painfully in her ears.
The music stopped, like a needle being pulled off a gramophone.
Swiftly, she turned the corner...
...And was met by a retaining wall. For several moments she stared stupidly at the dead end. Then, in silent frustration, smacked her fist up against it.
Stupid, stupid! Her eyes slipped shut at the utter futility. He'd known. Of course. He'd known all along.
When she opened them again, prepared to retreat in defeat, she almost missed it. It was tiny, nearly insignificant in contrast to the whitewashed concrete, and for several seconds, she merely stared at it, at the ground, incomprehension clacking through her head.
A small gust angled down, lifting it into the air, and with quick reflexive action that surprised her, Christine bent and quickly snatched it, mid-float, before the wind had a chance to take it away.
Clutched between index and forefinger, she held up to the fading light, a strand of fine, black hair.
