Conville & Walsh

Set in a future where the city of Polis is divided into the genetic elite (the Enhanced) and those less fortunate (the Naturals or the Dreggies, depending on your point of view), GEMX tells the story of two teenage boys who live on opposites sides of the tracks. Maxo Strang is a GemX (the latest version of the Enhanced). He lives a protected life of perfection and food pills, ambi-suits and virtual date palaces. Stretch is an angry young man from a Dreggie estate. He owns nothing, not even a proper name. But what’s really gnawing at him is the loss of his father who went ‘missing’ after responding to the call for ‘clean genes’ to support the city’s Clodrone programme.

Between the two boys is Gala, a young girl from the estates whose mother is dying of a disease that those with genetic protection no longer die from – so there are few available drugs, and what drugs there are, are prohibitively expensive. Gala has no money.

One day Maxo Strang sees something strange on his perfectly formed GemX face – a sort of line at the edge of his right eye. The only place he’s seen something so horrible before is on old Naturals (the Enhanced have a life expectancy of 130 years) – and he thinks these cracks are called ‘wrinkles’. What can be happening to him? It soon becomes clear it’s not just Maxo’s problem: MediAlert has logged 11,000 Web hits from concerned GemXs. And it’s not just physical degradation the GemXs are suffering: something is also beginning to happen to their minds, something that makes Enhanced Maxo fall helplessly in love with a Dreggie face that he sees on a securi-screen. The face is Gala’s…

At one level GEMX is a fast-paced futuristic adventure story. What is really happening to Maxo? Will Gala be able to save her mother? Can Stretch find his father? Who is going to fall in love with whom? At another level it’s about whether our technological capabilities are about to outstrip our morality and cause an unbridgeable gulf between Haves and Have-Nots – and what really makes us human.