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impossibility.
This didn't make human beings happy at all. They talked about how maybe it was
still possible to have a small, contained war. A little war. If you like, a
warette.
They spoke of conventional wars, limited wars, and this insane option might
even have worked, if only people could have agreed on a new set of rules. But,
people being people, they couldn't.
War was out. War was a no-no.
And like a small child suddenly deprived of its very favourite toy, the human
race mourned and sulked and twiddled its collective thumbs, wondering what to
do next.
Towards the conclusion of the twenty-first century, a solu-tion was found. The
solution was sport.
Sporting events were, in their way, little wars, and with war gone people
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started taking their sport ever more seriously. Scientists and theoreticians
channelled their energies away from weaponry and into the new arena of battle.
And since the weapons of sport were human beings them-selves, scientists set
about improving them.
When chemical enhancements had gone as far as they could go, the scientists
turned to genetic engineering.
Super sportsmen and women were grown, literally grown, in laboratory
test-tubes around the planet.
The world's official sports bodies banned the new mutants from competing in
events against normal athletes, and so a new, alternative sports body was
formed, and set up in compe-tition.
The GAS (Genetic Alternative Sports) finished 'normal' sport within two years.
Sports fans were no longer interested in seeing a conventional boxing match,
when they could witness two genetically engineered pugilists - who were
created with their brains in their shorts, and all their other major organs
crammed into their legs and feet, leaving their heads solid blocks of
unthinking muscle - knock hell out of one another for hours on end in a way
that normal boxers could only manage for minutes.
Basketball players were grown twenty feet tall.
Swimmers were equipped with gills and fins.
Soccer players were bred with five legs and no mouths, making after-match
interviews infinitely more interesting. However, not all breeds of genetic
athletes were accepted by the GAS and new rules had to be created after the
2224 World Cup, when Scotland fielded a goalkeeper who was a human oblong of
flesh, measuring eight feet high by sixteen across, thereby filling the entire
goal. Somehow they still failed to qualify for the second round.
American football provided the greatest variety of mutant athletes, each one
specifically designed for its position. The Nose Tackle, for instance, was an
enormous nose - a huge wedge of boneless flesh that was hammered into the
scrimmage line at every play. Wide receivers were huge Xs - four long arms
that tapered to the tiny waist perched on top of legs capable of ten-yard
strides. The defensive line were even larger, specifically bred to secrete
noxious chemicals whenever the ball was in play.
Genetic Alternative Sports were a huge hit, and the techno-logical
advancements spilled into other avenues of human life.
Cars were suddenly coming off the production line made from human mutations.
Bone on the outside, soft supple flesh in the interior, and engines made from
mutated internal organs - living cars, that drove themselves, parked
themselves and never crashed. More importantly than that, they didn't rely on
fossil fuels to run. All they required was carfood - a special mulch made from
pig offal. Cars in the twenty-third century ran on sausages.
The trend spread. GELFs, Genetically Engineered Life Forms, were everywhere,
and soon virtually every consumer product was made of living tissue. Gelf
armchairs, which could sense your mood, and massage your shoulders when you
were feeling tense, became a part of everyday life. Gelf vacuum cleaners,
which were half kitchen appliance, half family pet, waddled around on their
squat little legs, doing the household chores and amusing the children.
Finally, the bubble burst. The Gelfs rebelled, just as the Mechanoids had
rebelled before them.
The unrest had been festering for half a century. The di-chotomy was that,
although Gelfs were created from human chromosomes, and therefore technically
qualified as human, they had no rights whatsoever. Quite simply, they wanted
to vote. And normal humans were damned if they were going to file into polling
stations alongside walking furniture and tw-enty-feet tall athletic freaks. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]