The application forms arrived on the doormat, a hefty wad of instructions, and endless pages of boxes to fill. Petra thought: paper forms? A little backward. She unsealed the brown envelope and scanned tiredly through the notes on completion.
“DO NOT lie on your insurance renewal application form. This will void your policy and prevent you from receiving your medical support.”
Petra exhaled slowly and thought about her mother. She had died from breast cancer five months ago, aged just 52. Petra’s mother, a dry yet vivacious woman, jolly yet cynical, dissatisfied but content, had been given a genetic test as part of her diagnosis. The clinician’s aim was to match the treatment to the type of cancer. They did so, but they couldn’t control its shedding of cells, seeding new growths in Petra’s mother’s bones. The test found that Petra’s mother had a mutation in a gene called BRCA1. Bricker One, Petra called it. There was a fifty per cent chance that Petra had inherited the mutation too.
The accident of a person’s birth has always determined their life course; this was truer than ever now. The so-called greatest revolution in modern medicine since antibiotics had reversed social progress worldwide. Nowadays, advantage was granted by the dealing of the genetic Tarot cards. Chit-chat about a person’s genome substituted for gossip about their family or prospects; everybody became armchair geneticists. Quite legally, managers hired and fired on the basis of genome sequences: ‘Dan, mate, turns out your genome isn’t quite shipshape. We have to let you go.’ And that was that; Petra was the breadwinner and Dan lay around and lamented his ‘hypertension predisposition’ genes.
Leaving the forms on the little plastic table and tapping Dan’s legs to get him to shift, Petra dumped herself on the threadbare couch. She was the taller of the two, skinny by necessity, looking older than she was. Dan used to be more handsome, but his sleepy and grizzled look of late did him no favours. The pair stared at the TV. The Minister for Health and Wellbeing was out justifying himself again. …Policy is predicated on unprecedented honesty about ourselves… tribute to our open society… advances in embryo screening… disadvantage needn’t be passed on…
Petra pictured herself, nano-ised, crawling along the Ministers DNA, yanking apart base pairs, karate chopping the double helix into ticker tape that would rain down on his innumerable diagnoses. She would swing proteins about like a hammer-thrower and give the bastard prostate cancer, non-Hodgkins lymphoma, kidney tumours… breast cancer, she thought numbly. Petra left Dan on the sofa and went to bed. She dreamed of an insurance form with a single question printed on pure white paper: Are you human? Yes/No.
On the next day, Petra awoke defiant, with the burr of a nefarious scheme snagged on her mind. She flicked on the TV and searched the web for ‘genome clean up’. There were countless links to government condemnations of the illegal practice, but eventually she came across Born Free Genomics. The website was almost devoid of content; there was simply an exhortation to call an international number to speak confidentially to BFG about ‘genome optimisation’. The domain was .kz.
She called and a suspicious voice answered. The woman asked Petra a host of questions about her life, seemingly to establish her authenticity and that she wasn’t an informer. Petra asked if the company could help her with her health insurance form, explaining the Bricker One situation.
“You will have to take a government-regulation blood sample, 100ml. Send it to us high-security. Our geneticist will correct any faults in the code in every cell in the sample, so it is totally clean for sending to the insurance company. This takes a week. Our charge is 1000 US dollars per sample.”
Petra whistled through her teeth, a habit her mother had always grumbled about.
“Your premium will be five times that per year if you have BRCA1 mutation,” said the voice down the line.
“Alright,” breathed Petra. “Give me the address.”
She hung up after writing it down and went out to the pharmacy for a sample kit. The pharmacist gave her a sympathetic glance as he handed over the plastic vial and sealed needle. “The bottle is pre-treated with anti-clotting compounds already, so no need for the gel.”
At home, Petra got Dan out of bed and into the bathroom with her. “You take my sample,” she said. “I can’t stick myself.”
Dan, when he had a job, was the sample taker for a company that checked other firms’ employees for genetic fraud; they could be called in at any time for spot checks ordered by the management. Dan had been involved in exposing dozens of dodges and lies by the genetically inferior; ironically, the more advanced testing developed by his company exposed his own potential blood pressure problems. Seamlessly, he tied a flannel as a tourniquet around his wife’s upper arm and tapped the veins. He opened the needle packet and drew out the huge sample. He transferred the blood into the bottle and screwed on the cap, while Petra sat on the toilet lid with her eyes closed.
“Thanks,” she whispered.
Dan, as though exhausted by reprising a small parcel of his day’s work, went back to bed. Petra went and posted her sample special delivery, along with a money transfer chip holding $1000. It was ten days before the sample clanged back through the letter box. As though they knew exactly when she was receiving it, BFG called just then. It was a different person on the phone, a man this time.
“Petra, I trust you have received your sample. You can look forward to very low insurance premiums for the next ten years. Perhaps you will think of using us again, when your renewal is due.” He spoke quietly, carefully – like her mother’s doctors, thought Petra. She measured his words, sensing the implication.
“Why, will I need the clean-up in future?” she asked.
The man hesitated. “Are you asking for details on what we found in your genome?”
Petra pondered the power of such knowledge; and the terror. If she knew that she had the Bricker One mutation, she could do all sorts of things. But they were perverse things: prophylactic mastectomies, preventative chemotherapy.
“No,” said Petra, and she rang off.
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