Biopunk

Yes, I realize I haven’t posted for nearly a month. Finals, post-finals fun, and a lack of motivation.

This is kind of a development of Future History. The world where New Orleans is all floody and there are Drones who do all the work. I’ll be riffing on some stuff in there.

Biopunk is a subgenre of science fiction originally rooted in cyberpunk. Cyberpunk started off in the late eighties and early nineties with books like Neuromancer and Snow Crash, which predicted rightfully that the internet would become a central facet of life in the very near future. Cyberpunk also predicted, to varying degrees of accuracy, that corporations would overpower conventional governments, bodily modifications would become absurdly easy to get, and everyone would quickly get addicted to drugs within the early twenty-first century. It also paved the way for the Matrix.

The ideas presented in biopunk are older than those in cyberpunk. Ever since we started to decode the genome, it’s become unsettlingly easy to figure out what makes what go in our bodies, and for the most part it’s rooted in the double helix. Our bodies are almost predetermined to form and behave in a certain way by our genes. To a certain extent, our bodies are just big cases to amplify our DNA. So what makes the idea of biotechnology so fascinating is that it revolves around modifying our predestination.

The story I’m writing in the Future History world is a biopunk story, but having actually read some real biopunk since I started writing it, I’ve realized that it actually leans much farther towards the cyberpunk end of the spectrum. Biopunk posits a future where everything is absurdly varied, where you can buy high-quality slaves who bear up to five different species in their family history, where the government of Chicago employs a fleet of manatee/human splices to defend against assaults by ecosystem-destroying plants, and where poor kids from the slums express their individuality by having giant, functional cockroach limbs and shells grafted onto their bodies. In contrast, my story has a lot more in common with the anti-conformist grit of cyberpunk. So this is the post where I’m going to turn it all around and go completely fucking insane.

Here are a few ideas to start us off.

1. Reffie: Reffie is a drug that has become extremely popular in New Orleans, mostly because it turns you into spiderman. Reffies amplifies your coordination, balance, perception and reflexes 500% – when you’re on a reffie kick you can climb sheer walls, run twice as fast as normal, and sprint tightropes. However, as may be expected, when you crash, you crash really, really hard. Coming down from feeling like a demigod is incredibly tough to do, and most people need more reffie immediately after they first stop. The effects don’t really become any less intense, because it doesn’t have the same effect as heroin or cocaine to block your receptors, but you need more. Reffie is also the reason it’s impossible to detox New Orleans – it doesn’t really matter how well-trained your troops are, because half the population of New Orleans can run at thirty miles per hour and escape by climbing ninety-story buildings. Not to mention the fact that most of them are more fish than human. Which brings me to my next point.

2. Transhumans: People are weird. People pierce their noses, get tattoos, and develop eating disorders. Naturally, in a world in which complete body modification is cheap, available, and well-advertised, there are going to be some (a lot) of people who screw up their bodies. Some (a few) of them will die. Having your genes reformatted in even a small way while you’re not a fetus is more than likely to cause a protein imbalance and kill you instantly. However, going for grafts done by a skilled surgeon or having your fetus “edited” is usually risk-free. So people do it.

Often it’s the corporations, as we’ve seen. They take the children of their workers, put them in vats, and shoot new DNA into them. When the kids come out, they’re complacent, stupid, and strong. They grow quickly, go through puberty early, and work well until they die. Often, this is achieved not through actual modification of the human genome – this is extremely complicated and risky – but through implantation of animal DNA. People work better if they have ox genes. That’s just a fact. They’re also dumber and more willing to follow orders.

However, this is not nearly as widely-publicized as splicing for pleasure. Especially in the Southwest, parents often have their children edited in artificial utero. In the rich Southwest, this is often done purely for beauty, and rich kids with moth wings, prehensile tails, or biological camouflage are fairly common. In poor areas this is done out of necessity. New Orleans is populated heavily by people with gills, fins, and swimming eyebrows, just so they can get around easier in a flooded city.

These modifications don’t even necessarily have to be genetic, or even permanent: certain semilegal clinics called body shops specialize in speedy bodily change. In a few hours, they can graft acid-secretion glands, suction fingertips, or whatever the hell a customer asks for. And they can take them off the next day and give the customer a refund if they don’t work.

(If this was a mumorpuger [mmorpg], this would be a source of imbalance, nerf complaints, and awesomeness.)

That’s all for now.

~ by pieboy on February 7, 2008.