No Biomass

Themes involving genetic selection and the termination of pregnancy in a dystopian society.

“One step. Just one step.”

My hand settles on my stomach without thinking. A simple instinct. Nothing more. Yet sharp goosebumps run down my spine, as if someone had poured a handful of ice chips down the back of my collar.

What if it’s a mistake?

I ask myself this for the hundredth time, standing rigid before the doors of the Office of Genetic Control.

Like forty-nine years ago, when Diau — the Digital Augures, the genetic oracle — told my mother she would give birth to a sterile daughter. Diau had never been wrong. Not until now. Because I’m pregnant.

For twenty-four years I have walked into the main Office of Genetic Control. Just beyond the access scanner I step onto the travolator, which recognises me without any devices, glows with blue light, and carries me to the lift platform. My office is on the top floor.

I have done this 6,177 times.

The number glows on the smart-glass screen in front of me.

Today it looks enormous.

The building looks enormous.

The whole world seems to swell and grow heavier, pressing on my shoulders, and for several minutes now I have been unable to move.

Because I know that this time the travolator will glow orange, not blue, and the lift will take me down, not up.

To the Biomass Control Department.

In my entire career I have gone down to the BCD six times, only to inspect equipment and award the engineers and doctors who designed it. Afterwards, I sent thousands of women there.

And today, by law, I must go through the procedure myself.

I am not afraid of Diau.

Nor of the scans or injections.

Only gifted people work with that equipment — people raised in a proper, humane society. The ideal society I have protected and served for twenty-four years.

I know what my mother would have done. And her mother. And hers before that.

They went through it, every time telling themselves that it was only a step.

I never quite understood that.

But now I don’t know what to do.

There has never been anything in my life except work. As a child I was taken to libraries, where I read and studied and learned from the mistakes of our ancestors. I know what overpopulation leads to. A hatred of war runs in my blood. The well-being of the planet comes above all else.

The best specialists safeguard it.

The best. I can’t rid myself of that word. Only bookworms like me use it — best, talented, exceptional. Dead slang.

For more than a century our society has had no one who would once have been called an ordinary person.

Diau analyses every foetus, checks the genes, and delivers its verdict. Only children with a perfect symbiosis of intellect and morality are permitted to be born.

The rest are classified as biomass.

All women carrying biomass are sent to the minus-first floor.

Yesterday I received my results from Diau.

Unfit.

I am carrying biomass beneath my heart.

Now I must go down to the Biomass Control Department and undergo the prescribed procedures — humane and painless. Talented people work there; people Diau has allowed into this world. They perform their duties flawlessly.

Not because they are forced to, but because they love their work and are well rewarded for it.

In our world no one overworks. No one feels like a powerless slave. There is prosperity everywhere, full social security, and four holidays a year anywhere on the planet.

It is the perfect society.

I gave the best years of my life to maintaining this order. Diau allowed me to exist, and I was born for this work.

And yet I cannot make myself step through the scanner.

“One step,” I whisper quietly — the motto of the BCD.

The words my great-great-grandfather, the creator of the genetic predictor, used to conclude his speech at Stanford.

“The path to a great breakthrough — just like the path to great degradation — begins the same way. Either you make the effort and step upward, or you falter and step down. It is only a single step, but it sets the direction.”

My fingers clutch the jacket over my stomach.

“It’s only one person!” A tear slides down my cheek. “There are three hundred thousand of the best people in the world! Exceptional people! How could one child possibly disrupt a perfect society? I could raise it properly! And an eighty-seven per cent predisposition to violence isn’t a sentence! With the right upbringing and a mother’s love, that number could be reduced… couldn’t it?”

I look around helplessly, searching for support.

Morita-san walks into the building beside me and bows politely. I quickly wipe away the tear and smile back, but I catch the confusion in his face. I must have spoken too loudly.

The doors close.

I see the blue glow of the travolator.

It’s only one step. My great-great-grandfather was right. Weakness cannot be allowed. He devoted so much effort to genetic cleansing across the world. How hard he fought the old belief that every human life must be saved at any cost. How long it took him to change those stereotypes.

Remember his speech in Beijing — the trial where he proved Diau’s accuracy. Before the murderer’s death sentence was delivered, he opened a sealed envelope containing the results of a test that had remained unopened for thirty-one years.

The test had been taken from the killer’s mother in the fourth week of pregnancy. The machine predicted a predisposition to violence — even murder — eight months before the child was born. But the mother insisted on giving birth.

Her son later took the lives of one hundred and forty-six people.

All of it could have been prevented by simply not allowing the killer into this world.

After that sensational case my great-great-grandfather opened dozens more sealed envelopes containing test results — both positive and negative. Every one of them described the person precisely.

That was how Diau was proven infallible.

But it was wrong about me.

I am not sterile.

Which means it might also be wrong about my child.

I look up.

The doorway looms above me like a guillotine.

As the head of the organisation and a leading Diau specialist, I know the machine can make minor errors regarding the physical data of an embryo. And if a pregnant woman changes climate zones, those errors can increase.

If such errors exist, perhaps there can also be errors in assessing a child’s moral qualities.

The machine could have been wrong. A month ago, I travelled to Easter Island and visited Kathmandu.

I cannot change the test results… but I could enter a false report of an injection into the database. Then I could find a suitable positive result and assign it to myself. No one would notice.

I would have the chance to test Diau’s accuracy in a negative case. I could create my own programme for raising an “imperfect” child.

Turn biomass into a human being.

Perhaps I could even found a new social cluster. After all, in a perfect society how could someone grow up imperfect?

All I have to do is take one step back.

I’ve worked so hard. I deserve a small reward.

My own child.

My mother once admitted she had gone down to the Biomass Control Department seven times.

I was the eighth.

Diau saw in me high indicators of social responsibility, duty, and justice. Only the numbers on the moral scale were slightly scattered — but “this will not affect future work in the cluster.”

Her mother — my grandmother — had the injections a little less often. My mother was her sixth attempt.

But I am forty-nine.

And I will never have another chance to become a mother.

Before now, I never thought about it. Work came first. Work was my life — my only creation.

Because I believed I was sterile.

And now a stone has smashed into that system of values.

This machine has played a cruel joke on me.

I must betray either the person responsible for the fate of the planet… or the life inside me.

My sense of duty will not allow either.

Desperately, I search for a compromise that does not exist.

Numbers whirl through my head. I remember how genes and upbringing shape a personality. The latter clearly outweighs the former. The machine’s purpose is to balance those numbers to produce ideal people.

No one knows how Diau calculates that balance.

But I believe an ideal human being can be raised from any child. Aggression can be extinguished. Moral values instilled. Etiquette taught. Empathy nurtured.

They are only numbers in Diau’s report.

Numbers that can be changed.

All I have to do is take one step back.

And my life will become even better.

My life…

I look at the people around me and cannot decide.

Children feed pigeons and squirrels from their hands, carefully stretching out their fingers so the birds and animals can reach the food easily.

Young people in the park tidy away their rubbish.

A young man walks beside his elderly grandfather, supporting him by the elbow.

Newlyweds stand on the avenue discussing something clearly unpleasant. Yet they talk it through — and at the end of the path they embrace gently.

Reconciled.

I look at the neat flowerbeds and rooftop gardens on the towers. I glance at the municipal screen opposite the office.

Temperature, air purity, the Earth’s magnetic field.

All perfect, as always.

I want to keep this world exactly like this.

“One step. Just one step.”