LeCompte: A Genealogical Story

Ancestral Connections
© Copyright 1997. Kirkwood Adams LeCompte. All Rights Reserved.

"Who is my great-grandfather?" A simple question and all Cathy had to do was think it. It had been over 100 years now since the first octium³ processor had been implanted into a human brain. A person’s IQ was no longer as important as the speed of the upgradeable crystal chips in their cerebrum. Actually, these days it was usually inserted just under the shoulder blade, but it was certainly connected to the brain. More importantly it was connected to the Galactic Network. So Cathy’s simple question returned with an answer in a millisecond. The delay in a response signaled to her that the answer may not be so simple.

"In name you have 8 great-grandfathers." In her mind’s eye Cathy could now see what all eight looked like, and she now knew their names and their wives’ names. She now knew their birth and marriage dates and in the case of one pair, she saw a wedding video. Too bad she couldn’t taste the cake or smell the flowers or really feel what a guest might have felt at the occasion. But with the latest upgrade in chip technology, she might be able to record such things for her great-grandchildren.

"Do you want to know about your biological great-grandparents?" Cathy thought this was what the first answer had revealed. She always found this interactive feature of the brain implant annoying and usually had it turned off. But this time she welcomed the follow-up question. She wondered whether she were adopted.

"Aren’t these people my great-grandparents?" Certainly when recording a family tree there are many challenges: divorce followed by remarriage, kissing cousins, and adoptions. But what Cathy didn’t know was that her family history had posed challenges that genealogists only a century ago had barely considered.

For them it was still basically a binary hobby. A person had two parents, each of whom had two parents, and by the time you traced all those parents back ten generations, you found 1024 parental ancestors. Usually you found a few less than that, because in small villages like Colonial America or the Amazon Basin, you always found out that cousins of some degree had come together and so some parents shared the same ancestors. Of course, if you think that never happened in your family, try going back 30 generations, a mere 800 years or so, you would record well over a billion names of grand-parents. But the total number of humans between 10,000 BC and 1,500 AD hadn’t even been over 100 million. Everyone is much more closely related than they realize. Especially now, as Cathy was about to learn.

"You have 16 birth grandparents, but you have 52 genetic grandparents." Cathy’s confusion was quite evident to Sam. Sam was the name she had given to her interactive agent on the Galactic Network, the same agent who was now answering her questions about her family. Sam’s job was to find, sift, and report information to Cathy when she couldn’t recall it from her local storage. Humans called their local storage brains, but Sam found them rather prone to error, and welcomed opportunities to correct Cathy. What Sam didn’t know, was that Cathy usually had Sam muted for just that reason. But there was little that Sam couldn’t answer with his network connections, although a particularly clever question could take him as long as a minute or two to answer. But the current questions were easy since they were all a matter of public record and properly indexed.

"Your grandparents Nathaniel, Jr. and Anne were the first to introduce gene selection into a LeCompte embryo. For the most part they selected specific features of their own genetic material including eye color and gender, but they also introduced new genes for thyroid regulation, anti-depression, and hair growth." Cathy could now see the charts that had been scanned and recorded at the doctor’s office. All the choices of both her parents and grandparents. Choices that generations of parents had wished for in vain had been a mere checklist for Nathaniel and his wife. It seemed too much to Cathy.

The LeComptes had actually been rather conservative. Many parents weren’t even choosing their own genetic material at all. Potential parents were being offered a menu of choices including combinations with as many as a dozen geniuses, musicians, engineers, doctors, and body builders in one. Having a child was like a shopping exercise where the product was custom fitted to your specifications. Many feared that people would choose exact copies of previous individuals, but that rarely happened. More often people tried to build the perfect child, and so individuals were being born as unique as ever.

Cathy knew about the ethical debates, but hadn’t known until now that she was at the center of them. Her immediate feelings were that she had no great-grandparents, after all she couldn’t point to two people and say she was the result of that union alone. She felt angry that she didn’t have just two genetic parents, but instead had dozens. But soon she realized that maybe it wasn’t all that different from what she would have been anyway. After all, without alteration, she still would have been the product of genes passed down through hundreds of generations. Many of the genes her parents selected were probably in her family tree anyway, only now there was some control over exactly what she received. Rather than waiting for chance and hundreds of years, science could deliver a specific combination. Perhaps, she thought, we are all made of the same stuff. We are all related much more closely than we realize. And maybe it is not where we came from that matters so much, but where we are going and how we choose to get there with what we have.

Cathy turned Sam off. She had enough to consider, and sometimes she enjoyed wondering about the possible answers rather than getting them instantly delivered by her interactive agent. After all, could anyone really answer whether there was another one just like her out there in the universe. Probably not, she thought.