“To say, for example, that a man is made up of certain chemical elements is a satisfactory description only for those who intend to use him as a fertilizer.”
-- H. J. Muller 1890-1967: Science and Criticism (1943)
The source of the Yellow Dog is a remote place, a land of isolated hideouts and non-flaneurs. Where the river is a half a mile wide, invisible beneath two feet of ice. Atop the ice, the snow is four feet deep. East and west as far as the eye can see there is unbroken whiteness. Here the sun is felt as an absence, a smokey warm sign that gives the intractable cold its relative value. The landscape is as emotionally seductive as it is physically unforgiving, its strangeness at once beckoning the imagination and warning it to flee.
On this desolate tract, just west of the Huron Mountains and north of Michigame, where the Huron dumps into Lake Superior, there is an abandoned mine shaft. This portal is the entrance to a network of underground compounds. According to Plutonian protocol, these quarters are collectively known as Drang nach Osten.
At Three Lakes, while observing Stilz's driving suspiciously, Bokasa points north. They grind on, winding into the pine through intermitent Birch stands, craggy rock overhangs, and blinding blasts of freezing fir pollen. Careening down the grade, they skid dangerously and come perilously close to sliding into the gulleyed shoulder. Stilz has no touch on the brake and gas, driving the Hummer like a tank instead of a sled. He's leery, wary of the mirrored reflection of a pursuing Navigator, paranoid.
Coming through the S curve at Eagle's Nest they nearly lose it to an enormous Maple, its massive trunk’s invitation-“die here." They barely miss it. The ice from iron bumper smashes the windshield with such force they instinctively duck, the sun blotted out.
As the pinpoint brilliance of the sun bows to the dull glare of brief sunset they arrive, finally, at a half buried Quonset hut that marks the edge of Pluto's domain--Drang nach oster. The barely tolerable chill of day is now a harsh twilight cold, slouching toward the night’s deep bonechill.
"Take me to Peacock," Bokasa barked at no one in particular. Random bursts of condensing vapors obscure them as they entered their voice and palm prints. Inside, the floors are immaculate reflections of obscure Tibetan, Mayan, and Ogibway glyphs that move the eyes toward the lab area. Peacock's techno-lair is a clinically lit, scrupulously anal, glassily sculpted, strategically administered world. And there, Peacock: pear shaped, hair artificially swept across the pate, coke bottle eyeglassed in his wheelchaired flatulence.
As Bokasa jockeyed his withered legs into position to use the catheter, Peacock spoke.
"Please signifier, my rat. Xerxes. Note his agility, his grace on the trapeze and wheel. Hail Xerxes! Don't you see? A miracle."
The half-cocked head signaled that dreaded mix of skepticism and unbridled rage Bokasa was notorious for, but he let Peacock continue.
"We have extracted the immature cells of adult rats, nursed them to grow and implanted them in the gap where Xerxes's spinal cord was severed. Only two weeks ago Xerxes lay paralysed, unable to move. But now, behold! You will walk, Signifier. We will all walk!"
"Hold your tounge," Bokasa whispered menacingly. His wary disbelief voicing a tone of denial so pervasive, so ingrained in that cruel moment of being that was his life, that he now refused to imagine that what he had so long dreamed of.
"How did you do it?"
Knowing Bokasa's intolerance for shade, nuance, and digression, Peacock chose his words carefully. "We took spinal-cord cells that had matured to the progenitor stage from adult animals, developed, or differentiated enough, to belong generally to the spinal cord, but not enough to be assigned to any specific part of the cord. Then, in a petri dish inside an incubator with the proper nutrients, heat, and oxygen supply, the cells regenerated into a large enough population to begin tissue growth. However, at this stage we prevented the cells from differentiating. We hoped that the spinal cord might function in a way that the mass regeneration of spinal tissue would reconnect the severed section. This was in opposition of course to the traditional wisdom, which holds that these spinal connections require a precision anagolous to the reconnection of electrical wires. On this hypothesis we introduced the not-fully differentiated progenitor cells in a four-millimeter break in Xerxes' spinal cord. The motor skills of the creature you see before you are evidence of the gaps' regeneration into a new functional section. We rightly assumed that the undifferentiated progenitor cells, if left to their own devices, would sort themselves into the right order, and produce all the necessary functions. And this is precisely what happened. What we have accomplished is unprecedented."
While Peacock explained, Bokasa imagined himself whole. Not, psychologically, he would never be that, but physically. What new cruelties his mobility might allow him was only a secondary concern. The idea, to walk, to stand, to have others perceive him as whole, unwheeled, freestanding, was overwhelming. He suddenly imagined himself standing, moving freely about, substituting his physical liberation for others'incapacities, envisioning a pent-up vengance yet inflicted. Bokasa's reverie, his blessed, profound distraction, was such that he was unable to hear how Peacock's research had also identified a gene that prevents the brain and spinal cord from rewiring themselves after an injury.
"We have solved the mystery of why the connections in the central nervous system--the brain and spinal cord--can't repair themselves, when the connections in the peripheral nervous system can." Peacock's animated enthusiasm, his ecstatic tone, only heightened Bokasa's self-absorbed incomprehension.
"The answer is that the "Blox" protein, a substance that prevents nerve cell connections from regenerating after they are cut, is present in the central nervous system, but not in other nerves. Our team has created an antibody that blocks the "Blox" protein."
Bokasa listened in stunned silence. It was one of those moments that signal a boundary between what one is and what one is about to become, that epiphany that marks a shift in one's paradigm of self definition, from perception to comprehension, this was that moment for Bokasa. He was re-conceptualizing the harsh reality of disability as a nightmare he might awaken from. Like the chrysalis that becomes a butterfly, he was on the verge of seeing life as a dream, a light that illuminates a dark lifetime of past behavior, offering a beacon into what might be. It was not that Bokasa wouldn’t speak as much as he couldn’t.
"Signifier, Signifier. Are you listening?" Peacock inquired warily. "We have developed a three-pronged therapy involving a 'Blox' blocker, an agent to boost nerve growth, and spinal cord cells transplanted from fresh cadavers that has restored Xerxes's motor skills."
Though Bokasa couldn't know it, the crippled nature of his response system now served him well. If character is given us by our circumstances, and that range circumscribes the possibilities of identity, then Bokasa was given little; but even that limited scope available to him lay unexplored. "What other miracles has your research wrought,” Bokasa said, his singular blend of dispassionate sarcasm disguising his hysterical hope.
"This is only the beginning, Signifier. Not only can we make you whole, we can extend your life, the life of our founder, and the lives of the inner circle." Peacock's unbridled enthusiasm, mirrored in Bokassa's far away eyes, spurred him to newer, even more wondrous revelations.
"We can now control the destiny of human embryonic stem cells--dictate that they become a fresh heart or glistening new muscle. We have found a way to produce spare parts that can prolong life indefinitely. We can clone your cells, Signifier, thus creating an early embryo, which would create spare parts."
"We have acheived the grail of eternal life. The embryonic stem cell is the key to immortaliy. This single cell has the potential--the genetic coding and biological adaptability to become any cell, any tissue, or any organ. We have found the key to triggering its potential to become lung tissue or heart muscle, or retinal cells that cure blindness!
"Each and every tissue derived from these stem cells would provide and exact, immunological match. The single biggest obstacle to organ transplantation, matching tissue, has been overcome. Alzheimers disease, paralytic nerve damage, multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy--all disorders that have plagued our Signifiers--will be no more. Virtually every part of the human organism can be replicated. We can stop the aging process at any biological age we choose."
"But even better for our purposes, most Holy one, we can replace the brain, thus manipulating self-identity itself--that thing that defines who we are! And this, Signifier, brings me to the third, and perhaps most important aspect of our three pronged strategy. Besides restoration and reinvigoration, we can also reprogram. We have identified family and ethnic clusters, groups of genetically related individuals who manifest the relevant symptoms, or tendencies to develop certain conditions and behaviors. We can, in genetic terms, harvest these psychological predispositions."
"In short, we can dictate the dynamics of our followers' moral value systems, and, in this sense, control the intensity of their ideological conviction--their faith in the Plutonic mission."
Bokasa's eyes lit up with that kind of thoughtful menace cultivated by a life of cruelty; A look of gloating self-certainty; of his unswerving belief that an innate Machiavellian aggression at the most personal level was normal, and not deviant, behavior.
Peacock continued. "As are all animals, we are innately ruthless in our desires; but we are born into a web of arbitrary and inexorable social expectation. We may have the capacity for gentility, but this is no more self-evident than our need to vent aggression, to dehumanize, to inflict pain, to demonize, to torture and murder. This is in our genes. The status of the moral sense--values associated with right and wrong--has no evolutionary foundation. Moral codes are ideological conceptions, not biological dispositions. The myth of a moral inner compass is a construct of competing interest groups. The conquest of the weak by the strong is the decree of nature. The science of evolutionary psychology has opened the way for us to map and control the dynamics of thought, of consciousness as having an organic basis. By manipulating hormones, enzymes and stem-cell factors we can literally produce a world-view. Voila! Instant weltanschaung. Canned conviction. Test-tube faith. Chemically induced philosophies of belief!
We can create criminality. We have isolated genes that bring about mental illness, and discovered how the manipulation of oxytocin levels can control the inclination to love, or hate. Our drives, urges, passions, politics, and spiritual beliefs are reducible to the sciences: genetics, molecular biology, pharmacology, neurology and endocrinology.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is a U.S. government agency that was created as part of the Aviation and Transportation Security Act passed by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush on November 19, 2001. The TSA was originally organized in the U.S. Department of Transportation but was moved to the U. S. Department of Homeland Security in 2002.The agency is responsible for security (sic) in all modes of transportation.
