Fabula Rossa
The very last redhead, an infinitely improbable concatenation of recessives, was born on June 26th, 2217, in Milan. No one knew he had red hair when he was born, of course: back then the power of the Italian Church still made it impossible to run even the most basic prenatal gene profiling.
His name was Silvio, Silvio Horan, and apart from his orange hair, he was a perfectly normal child. He skimmed the wrong mindnet sites and flew his hoverboard gleefully over the heads of the professional protesters in the square of Il Duomo. The police smiled and looked the other way as he pelted the demonstrators with pebbles. They knew the government paid the protesters more than it paid the police.
All was right in Silvio’s world. At a very young age, his progenitors had sold off some mountain land that the rising sea wouldn’t reach for decades still and they now had carbon credits to spare. So he went to the best schools and fenced with scions of the great houses. Versace, Armani, Ferragamo and Cerruti children all knew him well. In fact, all of the royals had met and liked the flame-haired boy.
But his life held one great grief. Everyone, from the highest fashionista to the lowest banker’s daughter, asked him the same thing: “Why, oh, why, little Silvio, did your parents edit your hair that way?”
Silvio had learned from a young age not to answer the question honestly, for in the world he lived in, people were above and beyond the reach of anything as mundane and populist as the will of the Church. The truth would ostracize him, demote him to world of the little people in his friends’ eyes.
The question followed him from cloud city to seafloor hotel and from mind orgy to the Venetian carnival until he was finally utterly fed up with the whole thing.
He was twenty-three and his investments in airborne recreational drugs had paid off; he could afford to die for a while.
So, without further ado, Silvio shot himself. He knew it was a barbaric way to go, but a true artist appreciated the classics. And besides, the guy from the antique shop had taken one look at his expression and refused to let him anywhere near the guillotine. Art was fine, but people hated the cleanup.
The funeral was a resounding success. Update!, the biggest site on the mindnet, called it the social event of the year. The Modern Socialist put it first on its list of the most decadent, oppressive and hateful events for 2240. Silvio couldn’t have asked for more.
Being dead was fun. Heaven was as good as advertised. The rest of the mindnet had its good spots, of course, but there were so many things one couldn’t do in polite society. But since nothing was illegal for the deceased, the really good stuff was behind the deadwall.
He wondered what the Modern Socialist would have made of Mohammed’s Paradise, or, worse, Slavetown? They’d have to ditch that old mainstay ‘decadent’ and think up a new word. And those were just the ones that involved submissive sex. The real abuse of the downtrodden happened deeper in Heaven. He’d heard excellent reviews of New Rome. Of course, none of their readers or editors would ever be allowed inside, so it was all good.
But even Paradise grew old after a while if you can experience it in a simulated environment at whatever clock speed you wanted, so after enjoying death for a few millennia and becoming truly debauched, Silvio decided to revive. It wouldn’t do to miss his twenty-fourth birthday.
The big decision, the one that he dreaded but had to make before printing a new body, delayed his return: should he just print himself out as he’d been before? There was cachet in wearing your birth genes, of course, but that red hair was really annoying.
Eventually, he decided that it was just too annoying.
Armed with black hair, he set out on life again with renewed gusto. There was nothing like being dead for a while to give one a healthy appetite for life, so Silvio flitted across the landscape of glittering parties and passionate women like a shooting star.
It was a new world. Spaces were made for him in circles, and he passed unnoticed through conversations that, before, would have faltered when he appeared. When he took a girl upstairs, no one batted an eyelash; they didn’t watch their every move. His old friends were still his friends, but he found it much easier to make new ones. The loss of a certain amount of notoriety was a small price to pay for living a life of unscrutinized hedonism.
Except it made him angry. He should be able to wear his genes proudly. Everyone else could, after all. The pale Russians, the Singapo-Kenyats, the Sudameros. Everyone. But walk around with red hair? You’d be better off gengeneering yourself to have two heads. Many people did so, in fact, and enjoyed with the perfect acceptance of society… at least until they got into a fight with themselves. The legal fees of body divorce were often horrific.
He seethed. Each social triumph caught in his craw, each voluptuous conquest became a well of bitterness.
So Silvio acted. It wasn’t in his nature to seethe in silence. Another investment had come good—x-ray vision implants for security people—and he was afloat in more carbon credits than he knew what to do with.
The liquidity was quickly transformed into equipment and processing space. Quantum-optics buzzed with calculations and Silvio soon held a beaker of something never seen before: infinitely self-replicating undetectable gene-editing nanobots programmed to be completely innocuous to life and limb, but to make one very specific change to human DNA.
It was a terribly irresponsible thing to create, and it was downright sociopathic to release something like that into the water supply in every city in the world. Silvio laughed to himself as he did it. If worse came to worst he could spend some time dead until the statute of limitations ran out.
It worked like a charm. Soon, the New Socialist was denouncing a sudden outbreak of red-headedness among people who’d had healthy geneprints up until that moment. But no one, not even people who had the flames coming out of their head, believed it could happen until Update! told them it was true. That made it official. Old men complained that they’d earned their white hairs. Pop singers shaved their heads in protest. No one could find a cure, and no dye would work on the new hair. Making sure of that had been the most expensive part of the research.
Silvio was still laughing about that when the police arrived. They were beating down his door in a most insistent way, so he shot himself again.
He was amused, watching from Paradise while digital houris did unspeakable things, to see that they tried him in the Italian courts. It was pretty much a mess.
In the end, he was charged with ten billion and three counts of property damage to people’s hair, sentenced to ten billion and three sentences of one month in jail, all to run concurrently. He stayed dead for six months just in case, as people accepted their hair and realized that it was going to stay ginger until someone could get a grant and do something about it.
When he finally printed himself a new body, he went back to his old computer and popped out another batch of elixir, with a slight modification. He drank it down and looked in a mirror.
Silvio chuckled. Black hair actually made him look a lot better than the red stuff did.
He decided to keep it.
Author’s Biography
Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer with over four hundred stories published in fifteen countries, in seven languages. He is a member of Codex and a Full Member of SFWA. He has published six science fiction novels including one trilogy, four monster books, a dark military fantasy and a thriller. His short fiction is collected in Pale Reflection (2020), Off the Beaten Path (2019), Tenth Orbit and Other Faraway Places (2010) and Virtuoso and Other Stories (2011).
In 2019, Gustavo was awarded second place in the Jim Baen Memorial Contest and in 2018 he received a Judges Commendation (and second place) in The James White Award. He was also a 2019 finalist in the Writers of the Future Contest.
His website is at www.gustavobondoni.com
