The Sequence, my debut science-fiction thriller
The Sequence. Chapters One to Thirty FREE. The remaining thirty-three lie beyond the paywall.
It’s my debut thriller. I’m hoping that serializing my first published book will generate some traction approaching the release of its sequel. The first thirty chapters are up and FREE. The rest are behind the paywall and worth your $5.00 in my opinion. As always, your comments and criticisms are welcome. I made some minor edits here, as there’s always room for improvement. I hope you enjoy this read!
The Common Rule of the
America, Section 56
The Ethics:
1. No person shall grow, or attempt to grow, a living human from cloned or otherwise created genetic material.
2. No person shall use a human, whether conscious or not, as a test subject for genetic alteration.
No person shall edit the human genome in any capacity through the use of manipulative software, wetware, or any variation of genetic scissoring for the purposes of enhancement.
Rum-running
The illegal business of transporting (smuggling) where such transportation is forbidden by law. Smuggling is usually done to circumvent taxation or prohibition laws within a particular jurisdiction. The term “rum-running” is more commonly applied to smuggling over water.
1.
Through the windshield of his Arethusa, the GAFA sprawled in all its darkened desert nothingness—the Great African Fuck All. A staccato of shallow flora and fauna along a bare, wind-razored stretch of savannah, pimples on a barren landscape, short grasses scorched by a summer’s fierce sunlight. In the distance, the tendril-like fingers of a fiery-red sunrise crept from behind blackening thunderheads through the pre-dawn East African air, the rising sun illuminating their silhouettes with a background of blood-red sky.
Dallas Ward was running the machine at full thrust, the exhaust from her internally mounted gas-turbine engines actively muffled, cooled, and ducted above her twin-forked tail. He was flying low, as always, metres above the desert’s flat terrain in the camouflaging pink of a Serengeti morning. He glimpsed a curl of compressed water vapour escaping off the tip of the Russian aircraft’s thin, swept-back wing. A coiled ringlet of cloud corkscrewing into the protective darkness of a night sky they were rapidly leaving behind.
She’d be visible in the approaching light, those vortices spiralling from her raked wingtips drawing a direct and conspicuous line to her rear. He felt it, felt the dusk ascending, exposing. He shuffled in his custom-molded seat, lying almost flat, his left hand on the thrust lever, his right resting on the stick. Through his visor’s interface, he watched the sun ascending to meet them. He reached out through the aircraft’s tech into her ailerons, gave her elevator a gentle nudge. A thought brought her rudders close. A glance and he was the engines, the thrust. In these moments he was the jet, the separation of man and mechanism removed, integrated into a 1000 kilometre per hour chimera of low-vis stealth tech riding the soft whisper of a black ghost in flight.
Ghastly ghouls move silent through the night.
The thunderheads would provide some cover through the dawn, till they hit the coastline at least. Rippling sand dunes flashed beneath the canopy, their ridges lit by the rising sun, its burning lip not yet visible on the horizon. It’s so different from down here, he thought, watching the terminator approach, the global divider between night and day, that same strip of brightening planet he’d gazed down on from the edge of space, back in a previous and now distant life.
The aircraft rumbled and shook in the turbulence of the morning’s warming air, the wind flowing over the undulating ground like a river over stones, its roiling eddies bouncing the jet like a truck down a bumpy dirt road. He coaxed her lower, she smoothed at his touch.
He wiped a gloved hand along his thigh and looked through holographic optics at the darkening pillars of rain falling ahead. It was rare to see storm clouds on the continent this far east.
Thirty feet below, the savannah awakened.
Where lions prowled and gazelle fled.
2.
Christ in a fucking pancake, Kit had really missed the dim sum. Above her towered the centuries-old windows of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, extending from floor to ceiling. Their faded blue Pyrex panels shifted in a dance of autonomic, artificial polarization, following the noonday sun as it crept through endless, rhythmic cascades of hot tropical rain, greying the colours of Hong Kong’s tallest skyscrapers that lined the harbour’s shoreline. She peered out at it, past the dumpling she held between bamboo chopsticks before her lips. Her brain was outside, adrift amongst the precip, meandering into the spaces between. There was peace in there, in the liminal. A place of calm. A temporary respite from all this polluted fucking reality.
She ate the dumpling, wiped her mouth, and pondered the question Avery had asked.
“Work in progress,” she responded, doing her usual slow chew on the shrimp, getting it to pop perfectly between her teeth.
Business. He’d been all business this trip, unusual for her Avery.
“Where’d you go just there?” he asked, one eyebrow up.
“Found a sweet spot in between raindrops.”
“Not a lot of room in places like that,” he said.
“You’d be surprised what I find.”
He bit into a pork bun, its steaming red insides dribbling down his dark, unshaven chin. A lucky colour, her mother would have said.
“Security team wants to convene in your room at twelve thirty in the morning. Get out before the weather hits,” he said, wiping his napkin through the stubble. He pointed at the windows, fresh sheets of rain pelting the glass. “Apparently, it’s close.”
“No argument from me. It looks horrible out there.”
“The only thing that flies in a typhoon is aluminium corrugate and World Ways suborbitals,” her grandad used to say.
“I’m gonna go relax in my room, get some reading in. Let me know if you want to come down for a drink later,” Avery offered.
“I’ve got some calls to make and a hot bath with my name on it, so I’ll see you for the pickup in the lobby,” she said.
“Enjoy.”
He got up and left, all business once again. She watched him go, dark, broad shoulders and that blond-tipped high top. He was a gem most days.
She held a bead to her ear, the magnetic piercing there pulling it into place. Turning her palm up, she swiped through holographic menus, paid the bill, and made a voice-only call.
“Hi, Dad.”
“Hello, young Kit,” her father replied. He coughed, hacking up fluid. She could almost see him looking at the phlegm in his hand. It was consistent now. Not good.
“Our pickup tomorrow is going to be earlier than I expected,” she said. “So I’m going to have to cancel our dinner this evening. I hope you understand.”
“Always on the move; I get it. How are you keeping? Are you good?”
“I’m being stonewalled on getting some important work out past the firewall, but I’m picking away at it. How’s your cough?”
“It’s lingering, my dear. Can’t seem to shake it.”
One day I’ll have that fixed too, she thought. “Be well, Dad. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Nakupenda.” I love you.
“Nakupenda pia.” I love you too.
It was rare to hear him respond in his native Kiswahili. She liked it, missed it. She closed her fist, ending the call, nodded a brief thank you to the staff, and then glanced outside for a proper look at the typhoon. Ragged, charcoal-coloured cloud bottoms sped past the window with an unnatural speed, rain lashed the glass in waves. The news streams were saying it was going to be a ten out of ten—as big as they get and a direct hit. She wondered if her flight would get airborne before the storm arrived. She swiped for launch data and saw that the suborbs were on time. Not that their schedule held any great meaning. Like her grandfather used to say, they’d fly in anything.
3.
“You OK up there? Tech says you’re in manual flight,” his helmet intercom burbled from the jet’s back seat. Dallas looked up at the rearview, Camerica’s reflected face pale with the colour of computer, illuminated by screens from all sides.
He glanced down at cargo temps, fuel status, vibes on the turbines.
“Yup.” He gave a long pause. “Dodging raindrops.”
He flew so fast he dodged even the rain.
Four hundred and fifty klicks to the coast, thirty minutes at this speed, then open ocean for a good long while. The rain was a concern, abnormal out here, and a problem for their vis. The radar reflection off a water-soaked aircraft would show them clear as day on even the oldest of tech.
He weaved between rain shafts, catching the edge of one, slicing through the bottom of it, the water a brief deafening roar against the canopy. Through the jet’s air conditioning packs came the smell of ozone, thunderstorms penetrating the Arethusa’s pressurized hull. The aircraft growled a warning, enemy eyes struggling to find her profile illuminated by the moisture. The growl faded fast, she was a shadow punching holes in the dark, and hiding was her specialty.
“This isn’t dodging by any definition I know,” Cam said from the back. “Decoys are going out.” He deployed a small metallic ball from inside the aircraft, bursting behind them into thousands of hot pellets, shrapnel to confuse and distract the digital eyes hunting them from below.
Dallas flicked off the fuel and ran the turbines on the batteries in silent mode. As they slowed, he jinked the aircraft into a series of sharp turns, twenty metres off the deck, the wing tips kicking up dust.
“I need a quick sweep before we hit the coast. Montoya mentioned Mombasa’s been on the watch for us.”
“That a good idea?” Cam asked. “Case you haven’t noticed, sun’s coming up.”
“You know the deal. If I can’t see it, I can’t dodge it.”
“Are you nuts? They’re actively pinging for us. If we sweep, they will launch.” The aircraft growled again. Someone down there had eyes on their tail.
“Do the sweep. We’ll give ‘em a run if they fire.”
Camerica lit up the radar, a single electromagnetic beam at once illuminating the enemy’s position while announcing their presence. His voice rose an octave. “Structures ahead. Water towers. Lots of new ones. Prox returns up to a hundred and twenty meters. Couple of SAM sites flanking. Dee, you are gonna need to keep us real low to avoid them.” The aircraft growled in multiple tones.
Dallas took her lower.
The Somalis had built those giant water-making towers. The idea had started out small, some whiz-kid concept about a beetle from the desert that survived the arid landscape by condensing dew on its back, the drip making its way down the insect’s angled shell to its mouth, a perfectly evolved, built-in water bottle. They’d scaled it up initially, two-storey, green, plastic mesh towers with glistening dew drops shimmering their way down its flexible construction, guided to a collecting basin in the early morning fog. The structures would collect a few litres of water every morning for thirsty townships on the west continent. Then, when the Big Dry came, they gigantified them, gave them bigger yields. Installed them all over the world, put them out on coastal lands to gather ocean mists at dawn. “Fog-basking Behaviour,” they called it. Giant, organic-looking structures built in days by auto printers the size of houses. Double helical polycarbonate grown from the ground up, reaching, twisting skyward from shifting desert sands, a hundred storeys tall and not on any map. They would show up in clusters, a forest of curving, curling man-mades towering over what was once Somalian farmland, harvesting drinking water from a climate that couldn’t rain.
Problem was they didn’t make it to the orbital scans in time. The jet’s automatics weren’t quick enough to see and maneuver around them at this speed and flying above them meant certain detection, and what he would term a “Very Bad Day.”
“Shouldn’t be so many of ‘em this far inland,” Cam said.
“Pirates,” Dallas grumbled. “I can’t get lower than this. Gonna have to go through them. Too many storms to go around wide, and anything above this altitude’s a VBD. Feels like a trap.”
“It is a fucking trap, Dee.”
He felt a tingling fear, an uncommon companion, creep up his legs and down into his gloved fingertips, then shook it off. They were travelling nearly twenty kilometres a minute, the jet’s turbines spinning in electric silence, the sound barrier ever so slightly ahead of them. Not a good place for panic.
He rotated a well-worn knob on the thrust lever, cycling through translucent menus of threats and time to terrain impact. The data displayed in his visor’s peripheral gave him cascading depths of forward lidar scans, allowing him to assemble the information into a multi-dimensional image he could navigate through. The locals would love nothing more than to down a mob-owned stealth jet, and he refused to allow that to happen.
Radar blips along the ground gave away the locations of mobile missile launchers, old-school scans searching for a whiff of their cross section. His helmet’s optics gave him a firm ceiling, hashed, brown rectangles extending below the tower tops. Above the brown line was a VBD. Below it they would be difficult, but not impossible to acquire. The machine was dark but not invisible.
She was a “Black,” one of a fleet of three, each jet unique and named for their radar-absorbing paint, a skin that inhaled light, Russian stealth technology purchased at a premium. Her initial design had been tailored for short sprints, for “jumping the line,” running contraband between offshore container ships and Hong Kong beaches. A recent modification allowed her to carry ten times the fuel. Now she was capable of crossing oceans with her payload, delivering a shipment from pickup to drop-off, directly across the line. When required, close to shore, she could do it all without so much as a whisper, soaring past eyes and ears that could neither see nor hear her. In those moments she was nothing but a couple of spinning electric fans perched atop a high-speed patch of darkness.
Best to run silent while hunted.
If he flew above the forest of towers ahead or cranked a hard turn and popped a wing tip over that brown, dotted line, they’d be dodging missiles as well as structures.
Using the radar sweep, Dallas mapped a three-dimensional path through the vertical minefield of hundred-metre-tall water collectors. He wore white leather flying gloves with grey trim, his palms a nervous wet.
They ripped past the first tower on a knife’s edge, hauling some major ass, touching the barber pole, maximum speed. He tossed the jet on its opposite wing tip, lit the cans for extra power, and sliced between two closely spaced collectors. They were hustling now, thrust up high, burning hot kerosene and pulling hard g’s. The Arethusa felt good in his hands. He found a flow into each turn—intuitive, fluid, beautiful, sexy. Sharp, ninety-degree banks crushed him into his custom-molded seat, a wall of condensed water vapour pouring off the jet’s anhedral wings. In his peripheral, he glimpsed the flash of white cloud as it compressed into a brief existence, an instantaneous ribbon dancing in the wind, following her path between these monolithic spires of hardened resin. No missile could follow them there.
Camerica sat in the back seat “riding scope,” reading the lidar, a glowing organic display mapping eight klicks ahead, about thirty seconds’ worth. He knew better than to speak. Distractions could cost them their lives. Dallas was good at this; he knew he needn’t worry. The holo surrounding him showed time to impact, altitude, and resolution vectors. Dallas would be looking through his own visor at similar optics, imaging a route in his mind that the software couldn’t see. They would roll in tight, pull six or seven g’s, the aircraft groaning and popping like a can of soda, then unload, roll in the opposite direction, rinse, and repeat. It would make them both sick but not until after. Not until the rollercoaster ride was behind them.
Cam was at his limit as they cranked hard around the last tower and blew out past the shoreline at almost 1000 kilometres per hour. Dallas levelled the wings, punched in the automatics, and vomited into his receptacle.
“You good up there, Dee? Smells like scotch and that bag of chips you had for dinner,” Cam said, spitting out chunks of his own.
“Fuck no. We need a new route for the next job. I’m done banging around these towers puking my guts out for a week’s wage. S’like screwing Mong Kok hookers on a Monday night with no latex. TFR.”
Total Fucking Roulette.
Dallas wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and pulled the handheld electric grinder from his left chest pocket. From his right, he took a plain, white, circular pill stamped with a U, an up. An amphetamine analogue with a name he couldn’t pronounce. One of the benefits of working for the mob, he didn’t have to go far to get good drugs. He popped it in the receptacle and slid the window closed, then hit the one and only button on the device, engaging the rotating blades inside, dusting the pill into an inhalable powder. Twisting open the orifice on its top, he shoved it in a nostril and whiffed. Go pills. Humanity’s most perfect creation. Would give him a solid seven hours before he’d even consider a rest.
“Didn’t seem like you were having any problems back there,” Cam said. “Almost like you enjoyed it.”
Dallas latched his mic to hot. “We discussed this. The Somalis are definitely onto us. You know I don’t like running the same ground track twice, and here we are flying that identical route through hundreds of new towers. We’re being fired on and tracked. We’re not taking this route again.” He loosened the shoulder harnesses securing him to his seat. “I need to seriously reconsider this line of work.”
4.
Kit rode the elevator in silence, its smoky, feminine voice welcoming her back. “Bringing you to the thirty-seventh floor, miss McKee.” Elevator recognition. The worst kind.
She approached the Landmark Suite, its authentication software biometrically identifying her and unlocking the door. She hung her jacket and umbrella on gold-plated hooks, walked through the small lounge to the office, and asked the room to run her a bath. “Thirty-nine degrees, with a touch of eucalyptus if you don’t mind.”
“Right away, Miss McKee,” an omnidirectional, calming, and apathetic voice responded.
Kit sat down at the desk, judging the voice’s sexless AI. Behind her was a small library of hardcover books: John Le Carré, Tom Wolfe, P. D. James. She leaned back in the chair and ran her fingers along their spines, enjoying the texture. She really did need to get back to reading for pleasure.
She beamed a feed from the lab back in Ulaanbaatar to the office’s holo with an upheld palm and a couple of backhanded swipes at her wrist, checking up on the mice in their glass-walled homes. Zeus, feisty and lively as usual, running klicks at a full gallop in his angled and squeaky treadwheel. She would have to replace that again before long. He was breaking distance records daily. Agata, who’d developed the skin lesion problem she saw so often from her edits, was sitting in a corner of her aquarium licking her open sores. Artemis, who’d been doing so well, had lost the use of his back legs and was dragging himself to eat. “I’ll be there soon,” she said to them.
From her clutch she pulled the abnormally heavy business card that had mysteriously appeared after the conference, enjoying its weighted density as she moved it between finger and thumb. A matte black she’d never seen, a zero-reflective surface, fascinating tech. It was slippery to the touch. She slid it across the desk, the card gliding like it was on ice. She rubbed her thumb along the lettering, a negative emboss she could barely feel, like it was molecules deep. “NINE,” it stated. She hadn’t seen an exchange, just the card, in her clutch, after her speech.
She kicked off her glossy jet-black stilettos and moved to the lounge. Grabbing a mini bottle of Bordeaux from the mini bar, she poured it into her mini wine glass, took a mini sip, and then placed it on the regular-sized coffee table. She reached behind her back and popped the magnetic snap on her bra, pulled it through a sleeve, and settled into the polyurethane, waiting for her shape to coalesce into the couch, or was it a settee in this part of the world? In the holo, Zeus hit his stride for another hundred laps around the wheel.
What was NINE?
The only time her clutch had been out of view was while she had delivered her speech. Could it have been someone backstage? Someone on her security team? Her entrance had been well orchestrated, surgical, her departure the same. She’d sauntered in like a celebrity and left like a thief. Minimal fanfare, zero fuss, she’d had security from her hotel room to the stage and back again. Hadn’t so much as crossed paths with anyone not involved in the production in some capacity. She had carefully put nothing but essentials in her tiny black clutch before leaving the hotel, and the card was definitely not in it then.
NINE.
It would have to wait. Shortened sips gave way to full-fledged gulps. With the small bottle empty, she slipped out of her black skirt and black blouse into a white waffle-print robe embroidered with the Mandarin Hotel’s golden fan logo. She sat on the edge of the circular, white marble bath and dipped her feet into the pre-heated water, peeling the bandage off her arm. She massaged the injection site. It was less sore today, much better than when she had self-administered the needle before leaving Mongolia. She would need to use her other arm for the booster. Hypodermic bruising on an editor usually meant only one thing, and self-editing was not something she wanted to have to deny. The bath invited her, and she slid down its slippery, white porcelain, disappearing from the day’s events and into the steaming, aromatic tub.
5.
Dallas would have been celebrating his thirty-fourth birthday today, if he was into that sort of thing. He was the son of an English expat cop and an American-Indonesian mother, neither of which he’d seen since his move back to Hong Kong. His white-blond hair and indigo-rimmed, Caribbean-blue eyes got him more than a few questions about who had done his augments, a question to which he had always responded, “My parents’ sperm and ova.”
Ahead of them, over open seas, lay a long and quiet ride now that they’d left the eastern shoreline of the African continent behind. The pill flashed memories through his mind, and he allowed it to wander, to drift into his past life. Persephone giggling, a beach day, south Florida, Atlantic side, gentle waves lapping a shallow beach. A suborbital flight lighting its rockets in the high distance for an eastbound trip. Asia, perhaps Kuala Lumpur, in a couple of hours. His three-year-old daughter pointing up at the white-hot sparkle of burning propellant and its billowing telltale trail of white smoke. Saying with her gentle voice and in a way only a child could manage, “Daddy.”
Camerica’s finger jabbed him in the neck. “Hey. Wake up. Dallas. Sea ferry ahead.”
“I see it,” he said, the vessel’s slow-blinking, red position light the sole visual warning of its presence. Optics in his visor illuminated a swarm of drones, a protective and armed neural net encircling the giant wombat-shaped composite husk. The ferry’s extended foils sliced in and out of the rolling swell, surfing in the ground effect similar to them. They’d be fired upon if the swarm’s electric eyes caught a glimpse of the Arethusa, not that it was probable. He gave them a wide berth regardless. Fighting with armed robotics was an unnecessary form of conflict, and they had no weapons on board.
“You good?” Cam asked.
“Just whizzed. I’m plenty awake. That pill should keep me going for another few hours.” He needed to stay focussed. They had a solid nine hours ahead of them, no real chance to sleep, and the Jakarta Gap yet to navigate.
6.
Kit’s wrist rumbled beneath the bath water, the holo attempting to broadcast through its surface tension. She lifted her hand out and swiped down to take the call, audio-only, surprised at the name displayed there in glowing aquamarine sans-serif.
“Kit? Howdy. It’s Doudna out in London. How the hell are ya?” She could hear the smile in his thick, booming, Texan tone, deep and intrinsically male. Was rare these days to hear such a strong American accent. She’d missed it.
“Theodore fucking Doudna it is nice to hear from you. I’m taking some down time after today’s show. How is the UK? Still United?” she asked, smiling as she sipped her wine.
“Well, they don’t much care for the accent in these parts. Never had so many arguments about how to say ‘alu-mi-num,’ but we’re getting it done. The work continues,” he said with a joviality she found endearing.
“And to what do I owe the honour of this call?” She hadn’t seen or heard from him in years. Last they’d spoken they’d been in what was still being referred to as the “United States of America,” and he had been a respected editor like her.
“I’ve been working on a project and I can’t make any headway. Right up your alley I suspect, and I wondered if you’d be interested in some collaboration.”
“That depends what you’d like my help with.”
“I’ve been trying to contact you, but the walls around your lab are taller than you might even know yourself, like you’re producing state secrets up there. Like we’re back in the Cold War era.”
That had been a difficult time, the United States and China having had so many differences particular to their shared and controversial field of genetic manipulation. “We need the protection, Teo. Not sure if you heard, but they sent a special forces team to our lab to extradite us back to the America and try us as fucking war criminals. I like the walls. They keep us safe. Keep the edits coming, I say.” She drank the last of the wine. “Where are you practicing? And what are you working on that’s so tricky?”
“That’s something we’re gonna need to discuss in person, darlin’.”
She hated when he called her that. She was not his darling, not anymore. “Well, you know I can’t head out your way. The ethics, as you know, are not in my favour over on that side of the planet.”
“I do know that. I was thinking more along the lines of someplace south,” he offered. “Gambia has some nice resorts. We could sit in the sun and compare notes, eat peanuts.” They did have great peanuts down there, she thought. Fresh. But what business did Theodore Doudna have there?
“It’s The Gambia, Teo, and I’m planning a trip out that way later this month.” She paused. “Now that I think about it, why don’t you come out here?”
“To the Inner Sanctum? Golia? Is that even possible?”
“Should be no problem. I can always organize a professional visit from a previous colleague. They’ll do anything I ask if they think it will make them more money.”
“So it’s a business trip.”
“Yes. Do you need me to arrange transport?”
“Just from the airport; I can sort the rest. When do you want me there?”
“Sooner is better. I’m leaving Hong Kong later tonight. Why don’t we plan for the morning after next? We can have coffee in the park.”
“I’ll need it.”
“I have to say, Doudna, I’m intrigued. I was following your work on the fear edit back in the day. I’ve been working on it myself, and it seems far more complex an issue than I originally expected.”
“I hate racing for second place, Kit, but let’s discuss it further in person. It’s going to be great to work with you after all these years.”
She laughed. “I’ll get you a security detail, and we’ll make it happen. Nice to hear from you, Doudna. Bye.” She swiped him off without waiting for a farewell.
She pondered that augment, fear. It was proving tricky. Woven deep into the genome, fear had worked hard over millions of years to keep humankind alive, responsible for the race’s ability to survive multiple and evolving threats. Not so in today’s age of information, she had decided. Something to be edited out, perhaps replaced with something less extreme, a response versus a reaction. If Doudna had been working on it then his expertise would be of enormous benefit to her own research.
She picked up the empty glass, stared at the dribble of wine remaining. She wondered what Doudna knew about the Gambia, what was being grown there, and if she’d be able to convince him to join her team in Ulaanbaatar on a permanent basis.
7.
Security had booked Kit on a supersonic. One of those no-frills, low-boom jobs. Company out of Ireland, big shamrock painted on the tail, the kind that gets you there quick, and that’s about it.
They made a quick trip of it, alright. It was an hour on the ticket, Hong Kong to Ulaanbaatar. She stuck to economy. Planned to zone out in a window seat and watch the world fly by at a couple thousand kilometres an hour. Maybe even watch a datastream, a rare pleasure these days.
The attendant came by with quick-acting relaxants and anti-nausea meds to “ease the transition.” No doubt a sleeping passenger was an easy passenger, though she wasn’t sure there was much transitioning to be done on a one-hour flight. She took both, placing them under her tongue, dozing before she got the pleasure of acceleration from the supersonic aircraft’s afterburner kick.
8.
Dallas cranked the jet hard on her side, knife-edging close in on a mountainous and densely forested island, then de-lit the cans, running her quiet off the batteries. In the Gap, someone would always be listening for them. Low-level cumulus provided some added camouflage amongst the west Indonesian Islands. His mother had been born on one of them, he remembered, grunting under the weight of a sequence of high-g turns as he followed the shorelines of one lush tropical paradise after another. The evening’s well-developed thunderheads towered high above, swelling in the updrafts of the steep, rising terrain.
Be raining out of those soon.
The Arethusa’s defensive aids system let out a low growl, responding to generations-old antiaircraft weaponry having a sniff of them. They were flying well below the enemy tech’s targetable range, but he took them lower just to be sure, guiding the craft between a pair of sheer granite cliffs, wings level and a single metre above the ocean’s calm, glassy surface. He popped another go pill in the grinder and then whiffed it, the amphetamine surge instant and pleasurable.
Down this low, they’d be tough to spot. A dark jet with stealth tech at dusk against a black sea. To an observer on the ground, they would look like nothing more than a high-speed blemish low in the sky.
The drug hit fast and hard, accelerating his synapses, his neurons firing at full speed. He followed rocky shorelines for cover, glancing up at the coastal fringe of equatorial jungle. Ahead, they had a straight shot between forested peaks and a clean egress. He lit the turbines and pushed the thrust levers to the stops, selecting reheat. Raw kerosene injected into the hot exhaust of the engines; there was no need for cooling now. The jet rewarded him with a violent whump and brutal acceleration. He kept them low, and they slipped through the sound barrier, banking away from the last of the islands, burning hard and fast toward home.
Open seas provide no cover.
It was a brief run at high speed. The DAS had remained silent, and they’d had no enemy launches to outrun. He brought the engines out of afterburner, the jet slowing to a subsonic cruise, metres above the evening’s rolling ocean swell.
For the next few hours, they tore along at transonic speeds, across Earth’s southern seas, en route through South Asia’s sporadic atolls, to their destination at one of China’s many special administrative regions.
On the international side of the Chinese territorial line, in Hong Kong’s southernmost waters, lay a grouping of monstrous iron ships. Once destined for long ocean crossings with their bellies full of consumable products, now they leaned unmoving, anchored into a permanent barricade against the approaching storm’s strong southeastern swell. A line of rusted, ancient kerosene burners pumped with ballast and given a purposeful angle of list so as to appear derelict, chained to one another to provide a breakwater for the fish farm they harboured shoreside. Inside the ships were well-maintained storage facilities, warehouses powered by tidal turbines buried in their hulls. Occasional lights peppered their portholes, their outward appearance designed to seem neglected, deserted.
Dallas flew past them at a distance, low and silent, batteries spinning the jet’s turbines, the lidar scanning for any potential threats.
“Farm looks clean,” Cam said. “You good with the wind?”
The aircraft bounced and yawed in the turbulent air of the nearby typhoon. “It’s on the limit, but we should be OK,” Dallas replied. “Good thing we got here ahead of schedule.”
Amongst the ships and squared-off netting was a corridor in the water, a dark patch amongst the jumble of flotsam, not an obvious runway to a naked or untrained eye. Through his enhanced optics, Dallas was provided with approach and edge lighting illuminated in virtual, as lit up as any airport on either side of the border. He flew her by hand three metres above the wind-whipped seas, then lowered the flaps and the pontoons, slowing the Arethusa for her entry into the water, the end of a long run, accompanied by the promise of sleep and pay.
9.
Kit woke to the ticking expansion of hot water travelling through her home’s baseboard heaters. It was something she seldom heard in hotel rooms, that ticking, at least not in the nice ones. She’d had a partial sleep, though she was up in the night with some form of lag, a general sleep-dep from the airport transfers and that brutal early morning. Why was her security so enamoured with flying in the middle of the night? It made things harder as far as she was concerned.
She slid from beneath her bedding, the rustling of the sheets deafening without the steady background of typhoon winds amid Hong Kong’s industrial din. She rolled over and put her feet on the carpeted floor, scrunching her toes in the soft blond pile. It was nice to return home to normal, or at least this normal, the city just had so much clatter. It had been difficult for her to find peace in the noise.
She took it in, the quiet of her Mongolian home, something she had never known living in Manhattan. The silence was so still that the only sound in her ears was the distant high pitch of tinnitus. A night of sleep in her own bed after a week away came without the need for any ear bead white noise or melatonin inducers, like she had used every night in the city. One nice thing about travelling within Asia, she thought as she padded barefoot along the hallway’s hardwood floors, was there was none of that soul stealing jet-lag. None of that horrible hotel room coffee either, she thought as she pressed the “make” button on her Elektra, its burrs grinding the beans to make a perfect double espresso.
After a brief breakfast of eggs on toast, she latched the door to her ground-level brownstone behind her, the morning air smelling thin and cool, like yellowing leaves and New York in October. The breeze picked up and blew south Mongolian red desert dust in micro-cyclones that meandered down the street, bouncing off the brick buildings lining either side. She lifted her collar against it, giving her teal knit scarf another lap around her neck. There were flurries in the evening forecast, though it was a remote possibility. Since when did Ulaanbaatar see snow in August?
Trees shedding their leaves lining both sides of the road reached across the street to form a canopy, the early morning sunlight low on the horizon strobing between the interlinking branches as she walked along the footpath between her home and the lab. A fifteen-minute commute she travelled daily, soaking up the muting silence of dawn.
At the main gate of the lab stood armed guards wearing the strange silkworm-blended weave that Doudna had created back in the America. It looked like it was crawling around their bodies in slow-mo, a living textile that hardened on impact. Something about it needing to spread on contact kept them from concealing it beneath outer layers of clothing. She didn’t like it. Gave her the creeps. The guards acknowledged her ID and let her pass through to the entrance.
She scanned her subdermal and stared with disinterest into the twin mechanical eyeballs of the building’s periocular scan, waited while it matched her heartbeat with facial and iris biometrics. Reflected in the polished steel doors was her black designer surgeon’s cap with its printed montage of the twenty-three human chromosome pairs dangling from her teeth. The doors opened, inhaling the cool outside air into the airlock with a satisfying whoosh.
“Good Morning, Doctor McKee,” a bodiless female voice announced, the machine recognition irritating her as always. She wheeled her aluminum briefcase (or was it aluminium? Doudna would be amused) into the airlock, the doors sealing tight behind her. The beginning of a workday, another chance to play creator with the genome.
Inside the interior double doors, she was met with smells of antiseptic and bleach, cold sterilized surgical steel, and caged rodent feces. Down a narrow hallway lined with laboratory glassware and luminescent holographic displays lay her three square metres of lab bench. She rolled her case under the desk that she shared with Avery, put on her cap and then tied it off at the back, gangster style, and checked on Zeus. His glass enclosure’s translucent display showed humidity, temperature, and the wheel’s revolutions per minute. He was having his morning run, burning up the treadwheel, a variation on a children’s roundabout, angled for incline. He stopped as she approached, riding the slanted disc around for a few rotations up and down as it slowed, followed her with an almost concerned stare, an impossible level of emotion conveyed through those bulbous black eyeballs. She lifted the lid, reached in, and offered a palm. He climbed onto it, patiently allowing her to measure his vitals through his well-groomed, cocoa-brown fur.
“Swear you got a crush on that rodent, Kit,” Avery said, eyes locked on his scope.
“Think it might be the other way round,” she replied, petting the mouse while she drew his blood. He’s here early, she thought, and all business again.
“An interspecies love affair, huh? That’d be a new one.”
“Is that jealousy I hear?” she responded, placing the blood sample into the analyzer attached to Zeus’s cage.
“Of that mouse? Hell yeah. Whatever it is you’re giving him, I want in. I’ve never seen a rodent run that long. You know he barely sleeps? Like maybe two, three hours a day.” Zeus was watching their exchange, whiskers forward, a curious slant to his head. Listening.
“Oh, I’m aware. You’ve got good reason to feel threatened. That’s his sixth wheel. He’s breaking lab records every day.”
She reflected on how little Avery knew about this particular mouse. Zeus had arrived already augmented; a germline prepped for further edits. The wheels had suffered. She’d had this one made with a custom fluoropolymer lubricant tailored to Zeus’s exceptional endurance.
Endurance.
Good name for his augment.
“Beaten by a mouse. What a world,” Avery said, returning to his arthroscopic investigations on the euthanized rodent pinned and splayed on his workbench.
She wondered about him sometimes, her Avery. He’d been there for her through the escape. Held her hand at a time when their counterparts were being hung for treason. Guided her across borders to bring her to relative safety and even hooked her up with a decent job. He’d been a loyal sidekick, a dedicated friend. And yet, he’d been different since she’d taken him to the subbasement. Perhaps, she worried, she had let him in during a moment of misplaced trust. Quiet wasn’t the right word for how he’d been acting. He’d simply been all business since then, and it was becoming a little much.
She stood looking at him for far too long, taking in his majestic frame. A pure Nigerian who preferred men, a head taller than her, his width at the shoulders gave him the appearance of an augment’s musculature, though as far as she knew, he remained unedited. He was a beautiful, gentle giant of a man, his permanent grin and high-pitched laugh endearing to most. A Pacific northwester from what seemed a lifetime ago.
“Why you staring at me, Kit? What’s cookin’ in that brain of yours?” His eyes lingered on the dissection before him.
“Got something nasty in this tube today, mister. Turn you straight.” She waved an empty test tube at him. He smiled in return, his synthetic ivory teeth gleaming in the halogens while he moved the hair-sized camera filament through the dead mouse’s venous system.
“Ain’t no chance of that, and you know it.” He wiped sweat from his brow, pulling back his surgical cap to expose his handsome crop of twisted curls and blow-out fade, the feather carved into the shave above his ear growing shaggy with neglect. It had been tough finding a decent hairdresser to pull off that cut in Mongolia. They had searched together, and days had been lost. He put the cap back on, giggling with his infectious laugh.
She turned her attention back to Zeus but gave sexuality a momentary thought. Figured she could write an edit that made gay men straight or vice versa. Not that she thought either way was a better idea, but from a scientific perspective, the possibility intrigued her. A single genetic snip, a simple letter change, an A for a T, a C for a G. It had to be in the genome somewhere. Everything was.
As ever, Zeus’s vitals were improving. Her edit was taking well.
“Would it be too much to refer to myself as Mother, you think?” she asked Avery.
“Considering I don’t know you to have mothered any children, Kit, I’d say yes, it’s too much. Why? Are you thinking you’re a mother to these mice?”
“I mean, some of these edits we give them, they get a chance to experience the world from a different perspective, you know? As augmented mice, it’s like they’re being reborn.”
“If by ‘world’ you mean four glass walls, and by ‘reborn’ you mean a certain death by lethal injection so we can dissect and study them, then yes, I agree, Kit. Or should I say, Mother.” His face was expressionless, his eyes back on his scope.
She pressed the back of her index finger against the enclosure’s biometrics display, where two imperceptible pins in her prosthetic fingernail made contact, initiating a subroutine that downloaded Zeus’s biodata from their time away in Hong Kong. It transferred to the memtech latticed through her nail bed. Physical storage, how she liked it. Kept the data offline, deleting itself from the cage as it wrote.
“Your sarcasm is noted, senior assistant Avery,” she said, removing her finger from the display. She glanced over her shoulder to find him up to his usual antics, trying to pull a ninja, sidle up behind her, give her a jump. She swore she could feel him sneaking up behind her, like she’d been augmented for spider-sense, which, she regretted, wasn’t a thing. He handed her a coffee, a salted caramel latte, beaming as always.
It hadn’t been an easy move out to Mongolia, having taken place during the time of the America’s war on editors, when they’d locked down the continent and banned any science that involved changing the human genome. Said that was God’s work, not humanity’s, imprisoning scientists with decades of research in the field. They’d fled their homes. Avery had given her a heads-up early that it was time to go. They’d gone together, posing as a couple. With passports stamped and data bands swiped, they left the America before Homeland Security got serious and began putting her friends and colleagues in so-called schools to be “retrained” out of genetics. They were deemed heretics, and it was joked that they would be burned at the stake like witches if they’d stayed.
It was no laughing matter though. Death sentences had been carried out on editors that, like Kit, had been working within the germline. An inheritable alteration edited-in to a person’s genome, genetic changes passed down to the subject’s offspring, a permanent modification to their sequence.
Avery, Kit, and their work had disappeared into Ulaanbaatar. NegSense was overjoyed to have them, providing them with the finest expat experience that Inner Mongolia had to offer. When Kit finally put her first edit out into the wild, they had partied long into the night. She had been working on several cosmetic augments at the time, figured out the melanin gene, and edited out the grey hairs of old age. Another ended the decline of the epidermis. The world’s desire to look youthful far exceeded their desire to be youthful. They had developed a permanent solution to looking younger. Interventional gerontology, she had named it, her new field, with significant help from Avery. And the money had arrived in terrifying quantities.
Getting that one, clean, safe augment out into the public had opened the floodgates. The world had been trying for years. People in basement labs cranking out dirty edits with horrendous off-target side effects had made the grey market a total crap shoot. The desire had always been there; people had been changing their appearance for hundreds of years, but it had always been surgical. Facelifts and breast augments and tummy tucks. Now her team made cosmetic adjustments in the DNA, down deep where it stuck, at the genetic level. And more controversially, when the price was high enough, into the ethical minefield of the germline.
Avery sipped at his own paper cup of coffee. “Your order arrived this morning, five a.m. I had it brought through intake and moved downstairs.” He raised an eyebrow. “Should be you buying these coffees.”
“I’ll get the next round, I promise.” She gave Zeus a kind stroke along his spine, placed him back in his home, then closed the lid and grabbed her glasses and mask for the trip down below.
10.
It took a particular brand of neglect to create food this terrible, Johnny Woo thought. The mind boggled. The pancakes on the table before him were, without question, the world’s worst. He was convinced of it. The restaurant should advertise. Some type of odd, bad-food tourism group would no doubt visit, eager to experience the consistent and total failure to turn simple flour and eggs into anything other than the tasteless mass on his plate. Even drowning them in the runny brown liquid that was not maple syrup didn’t help. He sat alone in a corner of the diner listening to the rain falling outside, the inedible pancakes disintegrating into a pulpy viscous mass as he watched.
“Dim gai aa?” he asked. Why?
When the weather hit, he liked to hole up at the Flying Pan. An always-open breakfast joint halfway up the escalators, the greasiest spoon he knew of in the city. Horrific food, but it was served with a pint of Guinness, which helped with the digestion, or so he’d been told. He took a long pull on the dark brew. Drinking beer was a decent option to give this late-summer rain a miss. He watched a display cast onto a bare white plaster wall showing a news stream. The typhoon was now a seven, they were saying, a black rainfall warning soon to follow. Good reason to eat shitty pancakes while keeping out of the heat and the rain.
The precinct band strapped to his wrist rumbled, giving him a start. As he opened his palm it beamed out a job, details on another housing estate murder. Horrible, dark places, government-supplied homes for the poor. Tens of thousands of units crammed together in towering cinderblock walls, none of them more than 200 square feet inside. He swiped up for more info. It was in area eighty-six, Tsueng Kwan O, thousands of units constructed in a pair of semi-circular structures creating a biosphere all their own. Skyscrapers of 120 floors encircling derelict children’s slides and broken-down jungle gyms, parks meant for lush green grass, space for the kids to run, now choked in brown dust. No direct sunlight penetrated their concrete overcast, and the tropical summer heat mixed with dead motionless air became a death sentence for any kind of vegetation. During typhoons, the parks would flood, and the playgrounds became lakes, their entrances clogged with floating plastic and other human detritus.
A murder in the complex could go days without news of it getting outside the super-structure, with family members saving face by concealing the body—and their shame. Most often it was complaints about the stench of decomposition that gave them away. Getting inside the apartments, going that deep, was dirty work. He’d need a partner. He made the request on his wrist holo, hating that his fingers knew to gesture in a digital language all their own.
While waiting for a response, he allowed his focus to wander, chewed his lower lip, fiddled with his pinkie ring, and watched the weather, his mind adrift in past cases, past visits to the estates, all their unique horrors.
He gave up on the pancakes, somehow lumpy and runny all at once today, like they’d been fried in fish fat and forgotten. He finished the beer, chucked on his Brixton, and made for the rain, pulling the brim down up front, finding it kept the water off best.
Out on the street, the skies were a deep charcoal, and rain was chucking itself down in suicidal sheets. It didn’t seem possible that this much of it was simply falling from clouds. The splash of it off pavement bounced up past his knees. Surely, he thought, there was a man up there with a firehose.
His wristband remained silent and uninterested. Seemed no one wanted to volunteer on an estate case during a typhoon. He made his way to the cover and shelter of the escalators. Out of the rain, he flicked the holo up, gestured to make a call, pushed an audio bead deep into his ear canal, and kept a moderate pace as he walked along the uphill moving sidewalk.
“Yes, boss.”
“Need your help for an ongoing over in TKO,” he said. “I’m in the mid-levels, heading there now. Be thirty or so.”
“Yeah, boss OK. Guessing you’re not gonna grab a Ryde?”
“Never gonna happen, Fonger. Not in this lifetime. You’re crazy to take one in this weather.”
Fong laughed. “See you there, boss.”
Back out in the downpour, he flagged an autocab, preferring to keep his relationship with the ground intact, tires on tarmac, even if it was driven by AI. He removed the bead from his ear, put it in its case, and put the case into a pocket on his trench, rivers of water pouring off the coat’s repellent coating.
With the door closed to the deluge outside and the automatics doing the driving, Woo tapped his pinkie and thumb together, a gesture trigger for his assistant. “When’s the weather meant to pick up?”
“We have black and amber rain warnings through to the weekend, detective Woo. Would you like me to give you an extended forecast?” a female voice asked from the precinct’s wrist rental.
“Naw, just be nice to have some sunshine for once.”
“I understand, detective.”
Another tap and she was gone, she and her Singaporean accent slipping back down into the band’s circuitry.
11.
Kit didn’t like that they were kept down in the sublevels. They’d never seen sunlight, and they never would, not that it was of any great significance to her. She found working in the deep basement for long stretches added to the darkness writhing around in her soul where she knew that this part of her work was horribly, horribly wrong.
It was twenty floors in the elevator, a faint ticking beep, a slow pause in between. Her ears popped on the journey down, like when scuba diving. The pressure increasing, she squeezed her nose and blew, equalizing her ears. Descending twenty floors could be 500 feet or 5,000; one never knew from the inside of a four-walled, steel enclosure dangling on a metal rope. The temperature went up; that much she knew.
She grabbed the respirator hanging off her hip and extended it over her face, the thin rubber webbing snapping tight on the back of her head, then flicked on the oxygen and took a couple of test breaths, checking the seal around her nose and chin. The finger-sized canister hanging below her mask was good for sixty minutes. She carried an even dozen on the belt around her waist. She wasn’t willing to take any chances. Too many opportunities for superbugs to make the jump. There’d been a few down there, and while the ventilation system was filtered for infectious agents, it was also closed, recirculated, not getting out.
She slid her clear, protective glasses over the portable breathing system and tucked her black surgical cap over top of them, her face now secure from any possible pathogenic incursions. She tied the gown around her waist, stretched a couple of purple latex gloves over her hands, taped up the seals, and waited for the last three floors to beep past.
Double airlock doors opened for her as she moved through them, then closed behind. Similar iris scans and heart rate identification protocols to upstairs gave her a digital once-over. A sterilizing ultraviolet blast bathed her, murdering anything viral still trying to hitch a ride. Her ears popped again as the second set of doors slid open, allowing her inside the chamber they had affectionately named “the Womb.” The room appeared dark to her unadjusted eyes, the lighting a deep shade of plum. She waited for her pupils to adapt. She didn’t have to wait long.
That’s something I could write into an augment, she thought. A better aperture, faster adjustments, a new pupil for the people. Aperture. Even has a nice ring to it.
Suspended from the ceiling with surgical steel hooks was a synthetic venous system dripping with condensate, each test subject diverting the shared blood supply as required. A coating of saline adhered to everything. Dangling bags of it supplemented the artificial heart machine in the centre of the room, its double-whumping rhythmic beat an eerie reminder that their work was on the living. To her left, four of them lay in a row, still and asleep inside their individual incubators, secured in their transport packages, awaiting an attachment to the womb’s arterial network.
A robotic arm slid along steel rails mounted to the ceiling, dangling wide straps of rubbery plastic. It lowered itself in a disturbing arachnoid manner. Like a spider descending on a single strand of silk to envelop its paralyzed prey, it encapsulated one of the human test subjects with its ringed appendages in deliberate motion, then raised the body above the walls of its shipping unit, the limbs of the subject limp and swaying, amniotic fluid dribbling down its sides. She followed it as the robotic arms deposited the female onto a large steel slab. Kit took a hose from the wall and began spraying the subject clean, wiping her body free of the gelatinous goo with gloved hands, prepping her for surgery.
The human body is remarkable in so many ways, she thought. But it was the ability to grow into an organized collection of subsystems without getting in each other’s way that she most admired.
Other employees were also down here, all wearing the same protective equipment as her, illuminated name tags affixed to their chests identifying them as nurse, doctor, surgeon, or scientist, along with a first name. Hers listed the last three, with “scientist” at the top.
A holographic whiteboard announced that today was Augment Day. Three of these test subjects remained unedited. They were to receive their edits somatically. A series of simple injections over a twenty-four-hour period, reprogramming their genetic sequence. Augments she had written, such as speed, strength, and sight, all needed iterating into perfection, and testing on a complete system was, in her opinion, the only way to write a clean edit.
A nurse joined her at the table, attaching tubes that bridged the subject to the womb. “Hello, Doctor McKee,” she said. Kit nodded a hello, checking the name tag. She found it difficult to place faces behind all their gear. She handed the nurse the hose, tapped the whiteboard to update the test subject’s status to “in progress,” and pulled the steel gurney through the entry folds of the thick, translucent, polyethylene sheath into the operating theatre within.
She was met with squinting smiles and legitimate cheer behind masks and glasses. “How are we today, people?” she asked over the operating table where the female test subject was now prepped for her surgery. Her staff were colleagues, but they were not friends. She met the eyes of each one of them, saw the twinge of self-questioning and regret she herself felt. A question she hoped they all shared, a shred of humanity amongst this ethically questionable act.
“So that we’re all on the same page,” she said, “this is a simple organ extraction procedure. The donor will be placed in long-term recovery while she regrows the organs she is donating with such generosity today.”
The subject was attractive, well-proportioned, and young. Kit looked her over from head to toe. She was pristine. In another life she would have been revered for her beauty, perhaps embarked on a lucrative modelling career. But not today. The nurse handed Kit a scalpel.
The subjects arrived in the night, delivered by automated refrigerated cube trucks, a guard keeping watch from the cab. They were brought to Mongolia from farms buried beneath the ground in West Africa. While Kit wasn’t sure how they were transported, she had ideas. Questionable ethics brought together questionable people; history was well written in that regard. She knew better, but the money was so dammed good, the work rewarding, and Zeus, always Zeus.
She placed the scalpel at the incision point marked below the subject’s armpit and initiated the cut, a long swipe down the woman’s ribcage and then across her abdomen. The nurse handed Kit a new blade to cut beneath the skin. Her hands moved on automatic, her mind wandering as she severed and ligated arteries and veins, allowing for the harvesting of the subject’s organs. They would grow back in months, a complex yet elegant solution to organ failure, something that had taken her years to develop. But the world at large only wanted to pay for her cosmetic augments. The easy ones. The DNA splices that brought youthful beauty and genetic improvements to the affluent and wealthy of the world that were such anathema to her. Remedial edits for a people addicted to manufactured happiness.
12.
Avery didn’t think the Weissach man needed to know about the sublevels. He’d been quite specific that he wanted to hear about Kit’s rodents—and Kit—and nothing else. He hadn’t said anything about the “LUMPs” downstairs. Avery thought the name was degrading, but it had a valid meaning: Living Unconscious Manipulatable People. He preferred to refer to them as living test subjects. LTS just sounded so much cleaner. Kit said they were more like the dead. And you wouldn’t go worrying about a cadaver’s feelings, now would you? Which he figured was fair enough. That was all Kit would ever say about the things down there.
She had taken him there only once, and they hadn’t spoken about it since. The room had made him nervous, like maybe something questionable was happening down there. Like all the work they were doing in the lab had more to do with the LTSs than he knew. There had been a time when he’d thought that all the spare tissue they used to make Kit’s edits, all the organs and whatnot, had come from people long dead, actual cadavers. An inaccurate assumption he now knew, having seen them with his own eyes in their dank, sweaty sublevel, attached to one another in that odd, umbilical fashion. He still wondered what else Kit was into, how far down the rabbit hole she’d gone, but he was beyond asking. The job paid well, and he liked living in Ulaanbaatar. It allowed him to stretch his intellectual legs.
Avery didn’t feel as though he thought like most people. He felt like he could see more than the narrowness of the day to day, like he could twig an actual feeling of the world around him. Much grander than an aura or colour, more like an aurora borealis, something much bigger than him or Kit or anyone around him. Like he could see the individual tendrils of energy interconnecting every living thing in his immediate vicinity, like neurons firing between beings, he embodied the energy surrounding him. He’d thought about discussing it with Kit, wondered if maybe she could edit it out for him, calm his overactive mind, or perhaps even do an edit that enhanced his ability into some sort of superpower. But he’d struggled to arrive at any sort of decent nomenclature for it. The best he had come up with was “The Connector,” which sounded awful and ended the thought experiment then and there.
So, he didn’t mind that the South African man who hired him had asked him to keep secrets. Figured it was part of the job, something he was good at, and he had signed that nondisclosure agreement when he’d joined the lab, secrets being a normal part of their industry.
“Don’t worry, bru,” he’d been told, “but you will be asked to report on your colleagues, peripherally and of course, confidentially.”
He hadn’t been sure what that last part meant, but he understood that he could not talk about it with Kit. She’d been his friend back in New York, a long time now, since before the trouble had started. They would drink wine after work and talk about love and their ideas about augments, how she didn’t like most people, but she wasn’t going to let it get in the way of making them better. She had a theory that humans had stopped evolving as a species, that we were going to sort of implode on ourselves, that it was preventable, and that somehow, she could prevent it. Ideas she would spout after a bottle of wine, which was when he would change the subject. They had rules about shop talk, and when she got on her rants about humanity’s fate, he figured it was time to implement those rules. Otherwise, they wouldn’t discuss work unless they were in the lab, which he respected her for. Anyway, it wasn’t like he was allowed to talk about that stuff, the NDA thing being what it was.
Saving Kit’s life had, without question, saved his own. The America had become the exact opposite of this place, a place where everyone seemed to have far too many opinions about things that didn’t affect them. He was happy to be away from there now, in a place where nobody seemed to mind the colour of his skin or his sexual persuasions, where he was allowed to live his simple life of work and wine and occasional dates with men. So, when the South African man, whose accent Avery enjoyed so much, had called from the lab’s head office and offered to take him for a drink, Avery had seen the connections forming in his observable universe between dendrite and axon, felt the world bringing his three simple desires together into one. He had been so happy, deciding that he was somehow being rewarded, allowed to use his superpower, whatever he ended up calling it, to his eternal benefit.
But the South African man didn’t want Avery, not in that way, and while he had bought wine for them both, Avery noticed the man didn’t drink, that the South African asked few questions and let Avery do the talking—and the drinking. Avery saw the connections shattering in front of him but kept talking anyway, answering the man’s questions about Kit and her research, agreeing to watch her and her rodents, agreeing to report on her progress, however tangential the man required, and signed another form to that effect.
The man said his name was Weissach, to which Avery had responded, “That’s a very German name for a man from South Africa.” Weissach seemed indifferent. Avery had felt dejected, his dream of the connection of all the things he loved combined in a single package, broken. Weissach had thanked him, paid the bill, and left as though they had completed a business transaction. Having watched the glass exit door close with the jingle of a bell behind Weissach, Avery frowned and then gulped the man’s untouched Cabernet alone.
13.
“So am I allowed to ask what’s coming next out of NegSense?” Doudna inquired. He’d been instructed to meet Kit at Perimeter, a remake of a small Italian coffee shop on the inside of a patrolled ring road demarking a boundary, a border within Ulaanbaatar’s city walls. He had been under escort from the airport to the café. Armed men and women paced the block outside. Their clothing shifted and crawled with a familiar irregular creep as they walked, a bulletproof weave he recognized. A living spider silk spun from repurposed and farmed transgenic silkworms he had developed himself.
“Well, if we were to speak in a broad sense on the subject,” she said, her hands wrapped around a small bowl of milky coffee, steam obscuring her eyes, “then yes, as it turns out, pain is a challenging and complex function, not easily edited out of our sequence. The physical and mental aspects are two separate and distinct things. I need to learn more,” she put the bowl down, stirring a single spoon of sugar into it, “about how we experience them.”
“How far along is your research?” He’d hopped an evening suborb from Cornwall to Beijing, then a supersonic to UB. All in it had been about five hours. The trip itself hadn’t ruined him, but the lag was starting to catch up. He gulped a double espresso, then ordered another.
“Not far at all. It’s like running an ultra-marathon through the Himalayas,” she said, sipping her coffee with delicate lips.
He nodded. “Complicated.”
“And difficult. I get two steps forward and one point nine steps back. I can eliminate pain altogether, but it always comes with some weird off-target paralysis or malformation of the nervous system, different every time. Look at this.” She flicked open her wrist and held a holo between them. A video clip displayed a small white mouse limping around its enclosure.
“Meet Apollo. He was born with no pain receptors in his brain. Edited out on the germline. But here, look at his face.” She paused the video, zoomed in with a pinch of her fingers, and spun him around in a slow turn that followed her finger.
“Looks like he’s had a stroke,” he said. The skin below one of the mouse’s bulging eyeballs sagged, the sclera was showing, weeping and scabby. When she let the video play, he ambled forward, a rear leg dragging behind, dead weight and altogether non-functional.
“It’s always something like this, these unexpected genotoxic effects. The two systems are linked much deeper than I had first considered. Apollo broke his femur in the wheel but kept running, didn’t even notice that his leg wasn’t working.”
She closed her fist, ending the vid, her eyes fixated on Doudna with an intensity he’d long since forgotten.
“I’ve been mining genetic anomalies, but they’re hard to come by. People with a natural genetic predisposition to experience no pain tend to die young.”
He laughed. “I know that’s not funny, but I hadn’t considered the link.”
“There’s a famous story about a family with a mutation that disabled the SCN9A gene. It’s called congenital analgesia. None of them felt pain. They limped a lot, broke limbs like Apollo, lost parts of their tongues from repeated self-biting, burned their hands on stoves, that sort of thing. One kid decided to throw himself off a balcony to see if he’d survive.” She paused. “He didn’t.” She took a long drink of her latte.
“So, dial down the volume,” he suggested, “instead of removing it altogether.”
“Trust me I’ve been trying. Like you said, if I could make the alarm bells a little less piercing, you know? If I could change it enough, get a more or less functional edit, and leak it out onto the street maybe. I’m willing to bet we could do a lot with it, maybe even solve for emotional pain, not only the physical.” She sipped, one eyebrow up. “Imagine.”
“Pain-free humans. Not sure I like it, but OK.” He downed his espresso. “I’ve never seen you so interested in the well-being of the species.”
“Well, we could use some decent press. We’re getting a fair pile of anger directed our way in the media, if you’ve been paying attention.” Her concern seemed genuine, but it was hard to digest coming from the one and only Kit McKee.
“How close are you?” he asked.
“It’s a long way off. I’m running at a hundred percent failure rate, and you’ve seen some of the off-targets. But I’ll get it; I always do.”
She stared out the window, lost in thought. He’d seen it before; she was solving something in there, in real time, something biological, mathematical, something he would need tech to solve. She was a terrifying woman, he loved her, respected her prowess, and wondered what it was like inside her mind, right this instant.
“It’s like, why is no one else working on this shit?” she asked. “The tech is out there.”
“Well, I’d say anyone else working on augments is running for a distant second, and it’s an expensive game. No one is pumping out clean edits like you and NegSense, Kit. No one. You and your team have left the rest of the industry long behind. So, your competitors choose not to work on anything of substance. They develop the easy cosmetic stuff. I know, I’ve been doing it in my lab too.”
“That’s where there’s real money,” she said.
“Sure, but it leaves the difficult work to you.”
“I’d prefer to take the big paycheques.”
“That’s not true, and you know it. You’ve got sight, hearing, all that musculature stuff, not to mention all the genetic disorders you’ve solved.”
“Still, it would be nice if someone would work on something that mattered instead of competing with me on all the lucrative edits.”
“I sit in front of you asking for collaboration.” He beamed at her. She didn’t reciprocate. “Our edits are, for the most part, free of off-target mutations, but that’s as close as we can get.”
“Right. For the most part. Are you getting dermis errors?”
He nodded. “On every edit. We need your help.”
“It’s a common miss. The epidermis is linked to everything. A dirty augment will leak into it.” She went back to her coffee, her eyes wandering to the shop window. His own lab’s off-target mutations in the dermal layer were minor but unpleasant. Flaking skin was not good for marketing. He followed her eyeline to a pair of guards wearing his bulletproof weave walking past the café.
“We’ve been given a new security team since the attack. Paramilitary. Did you hear about that?” she asked.
“I saw something about it. Got ugly around here I heard.” He’d seen it on a stream. American black ops soldiers infiltrating the perimeter, hunting American diaspora like Kit and him. The American commandos had lost a gruesome battle in the streets that he and Kit now looked out at through the café window. “Was some drone footage on a pirate broadcast of a firefight in the street.”
She pointed outside. “That street right there. They bombed the lab. Ginsu warheads. Orbital weaponry. Couldn’t penetrate, though. The lab’s encased in metres of solid concrete.”
“Must have been terrifying.”
“It was. Lot of people died out here to protect us from our own country, which is an odd thing to say. We haven’t had any recent problems, though. Security is tight, but I don’t think the Americans are out to get us anymore.”
“Is it all worth it?”
“I don’t know, Doudna. I’m trying to do something revolutionary here. Create some real change for all of us. Take us to the next level, you know? We haven’t had a natural mutation as a species in thousands of years. Nothing’s getting better for humanity; we’re getting worse. You know what the birth rate is in the developed world? It’s in massive decline. Education compresses fertility. The ratio is swinging in the wrong direction. We’re getting dumber as a species, Doudna, and I feel like I can change that.”
“Yeah right, the Kit McKee Theory of Devolution. I’d forgotten how hopeless your vision of our future was. What’s your big plan then? Edit for less complacency?” He regretted saying it. She’d always been driven, but this was a different Kit. On a personal level, he burned with curiosity to find out what she was toying with. As a professional, he had concerns.
“Something like that.” And she was gone. Disengaged. He could feel it. The conversation brought to an immediate end.
“I need to get back to the lab. I appreciate your coming all this way, Doudna. Let’s meet after dinner, I’ll give you the finer details of what I think we can work on together. It’s been delightful seeing you again.”
She’d flipped a switch and gone into a divergent mode. He wondered if she had augmented herself, delivered a genetic payload of her design into her own genome. He was desperate to ask, but less interested in aggravating Kit, opting instead for the awkward embrace shared between past lovers.
Kit took slow, ponderous strides as she left the lab for the short walk home, distracted by and eager to speak more with Doudna. She wondered if it was wise to bring him in on her project.
The wind picked up with an autumn bite. She blew warm breath on her fingers, then remembered her lavender leather gloves, stuffed in a pocket for winter. While she pulled them over her fingers, her wrist buzzed. She jacked a bead without opening the holo. “Kit McKee speaking.”
“Hey, Kit. Just checking to see if we’re still on for that nightcap at your place,” Doudna said.
“I’m walking home from work now. Meet me there in twenty. I’ve arranged for security to provide an escort when you’re ready.”
“See you then.”
She unplugged the bead, slipped it into her coat pocket, and noticed a man across the street, bald and Caucasian, wearing a long grey overcoat with none of that crawling bulletproof weave the security force wore. He had a large tan dog on a short leash walking in step with him, the fur on its spine spiked into a ridge. She waved a hello and got a simple stare in return, unusual behaviour for security and, in fact, anyone in her neighbourhood. She was close to home, another five minutes if she stayed on this road, so she chose a different route, hoping the soldiers she had told Doudna about were doing their job, keeping the community that housed their scientists free from intruders.
She picked up her pace. Something had been funny in the lab today. Avery had been acting nervous, chewing his nails and asking questions about Zeus. She’d flat out lied to him, told him it was a cancer edit, that it was looking successful but needed further testing, in the cellar. On any other day he’d have left her alone to work, but he kept asking, which fibroblasts, how did she induce, where the control group was. She had felt pressured and did not enjoy it.
The man and his dog fell behind when she adjusted course. She turned to look, saw him half a block back, crossing to her side of the street. She flicked open her holo, not bothering with the bead.
“Security.”
“It’s Kit McKee requesting assistance. I’m being shadowed, bald man and a dog.”
“Yes, ma’am. We’ll follow on your implant. Give us thirty seconds to deploy.”
She lengthened her stride as she massaged the inside of her elbow. It was itchy there. The booster carried double the load and had bruised more than she liked. She shoulder checked again. The man had gained ground. Could it be someone from the America? She didn’t think it was possible to penetrate the wall surrounding the city block of labs and housing they inhabited, not since the attack. She was steps from home, the man moving at an increasing pace. She flicked open her holo to make an emergency request when a black-wheeled van pulled up beside her, Doudna smiling from an open window.
“Well, howdy again, Miss Kit,” he said.
She checked behind. The man and his dog were nowhere to be seen.
“Let’s get inside,” she said. “I need a glass of wine.”
“Don’t mind if I do,” he replied, clambering out of the van. A security team member followed him out, one hand on his firearm. He hasn’t been looking after himself, she thought. Must be a hundred and fifty kilos sweating under that loose-fitting button down. Doudna wheezed as they walked together up the path to her townhouse. She looked back one more time for her follower but saw nothing except the empty street at dusk.
“The problem is, as always, I need more accurate testing. If I’m going to release this, I need proper data. I need to wake up the LUMPs,” she said, her traffic-light green eyes locked on his, unblinking.
The van ride had been hurried, as had Kit, and he wondered what life under such security would be like. They were sitting in her kitchen, an empty bottle of Chablis on the plain white dining table between them. French wine wasn’t cheap in this part of the world, he thought, enjoying another mouthful. She straightened his coaster for him as he placed the glass back down. He’d seen Kit obsess but only under moments of elevated stress. He took note, scanned the room. The furniture was arranged with geometric precision. The table, the chairs, all in perfect parallel lines, even the postcard on the fridge was aligned and centred.
“You mean the test subjects?” he asked. He hated acronyms. Too pretentious.
“Yes, the subjects,” she replied.
He felt his head nodding in agreement when he came back from processing that piece of information. “You can’t wake them up,” he heard himself say. “They’ve never been awake, Kit. They’ve never been alive. For Christ’s sake, you know it’s been tried. They overload. It’s too much for the brain to wake up into adulthood with no language, no skills, no anything.” He remembered the videos, horrifying scenes. Most of the subjects found the process overwhelming and died on the spot, undergoing massive stress-induced cerebral hemorrhages, their adult brains empty of any sort of coping mechanism normally learned through infancy and adolescence and through normal fucking growth.
“Wait, you’ve done it already, haven’t you?” he asked. She held his stare. “Fucking hell, Kit!”
“I wouldn’t suggest it was with any sort of roaring success, but bear with me for a second,” she replied.
“Fucking hell, Kit!” He saw himself shaking his head in a sort of weird out-of-body thing, gulping the rest of his wine.
“Listen to me,” she said. “It’s not as dreadful as you think. We wake them up in a safe environment, in a quiet room, no tubes attached, no monitors, zero stimulation factors. It’s the human test subject, in a room, with a caregiver. We treat it like a birth, bring them to consciousness in small doses. We cater to their instincts, give them a protein analogue from a baby bottle. The new brain knows to go for a nipple, to feed. We give them human contact, a surrogate mother, keep them warm, make them feel safe. Then we augment for increased uptake, coddle them for a few days to make them feel comfortable with their surroundings, then hit them with language. Fear needs a zero point, something to calibrate from. So, we give the subjects the ability to make new connections with themselves because there aren’t any . . .” She paused, swallowing. “There aren’t any in there that we haven’t been suppressing for the subjects’ entire lives.”
“It’s not ethical, Kit. You know this. It’s bad enough you’re even using them unawakened. That’s a whole other conversation. I’m not OK with this. Christ, Kit. Not even close.”
“It’s why we left the America, Doudna.” She stared at him.
“I’m not OK with it.”
“It’s frontline research. This is the absolute frontier of genetic technology. It’s how we move forward. The biological evolution of humankind is complete. Mother Nature is finished with us. The next evolutionary step must be genetically engineered. It’s why we’ve evolved these big, beautiful brains, so we can make our own giant leap forward. Our evolution, Doudna, is right in front of us, and it’s going to be revolutionary.”
“You think you’re working on that level, Kit?”
“I know I am.”
“Show me.”
She held his stare, and it terrified him.
“I can’t. I’ve got some new edits in the pipeline. Not just fluff and vanity, some actual game-changing shit. But I can’t check the outcomes without conscious human test subjects.”
“So, why not advertise for volunteers? I’m sure you’d have plenty of applicants.”
“The off-targets haven’t been nice. There’d be press. I prefer to keep it underground.”
“How’s your funding?”
“It’s solid and silent. Everything I ask for, I get. I don’t know who’s behind the lab, but it’s big money, old money.”
It had always been that way for her, all those years, spoiled but driven. She’d never hit a speed bump, never once stumbled along her path. It was no wonder she had no limits; she’d never been confronted with one.
“Including delivery of human beings, grown underground and sold to you as disposable test beds.” He kept his eyes down, shaking his head.
“They don’t know any different, Doudna. They’re donors, always have been. Born into it, I’m afraid.”
“Farmed,” he corrected.
She shrugged. “I can’t argue against that.”
“This isn’t only about the fear edit, is it?”
“It’s part of it. But no, it’s not.”
“I disagree on every level with your methodology, Kit, but goddamn, I’m curious what you’re up to.”
“I can’t bring you in. Not yet. I don’t need a lot of time, but I do need some.”
“I’ve got lots of that,” he replied.
“Call me in a week. If I don’t respond, come looking for me.” She was staring at him now, unblinking again, her eyes taking on that intense emerald glow.
He nodded and then caught himself chewing his lip as he thought about the agents in the van. They had been agitated, concerned. “Are you in some kind of trouble, Kit?”
“It’s not trouble, at least I don’t think so. Feels more like interest. But maybe not from the right people.”
He was worried about her, worried where she was heading with all this. Worried who would be on her side, and more importantly, who wouldn’t be when this little project of hers came to light.
“OK, I’ll be in London at the Crick Lab. You know how to find me.” He gave her two kisses, one on each cheek, a goodbye he’d learned in France. Something he missed, not by its absence but in its presence, and only just now.
She walked him outside, where the same van waited with its tinted windows, one gull wing door open, a guard wearing bulletproof weave standing at its rear.
“Safe travels, my friend,” she said.
“I’ll be in touch. Thanks for the wine.” He pulled himself into the van, followed in close proximity by the armed guard who had been waiting outside. Very military, he thought. The kind a country might use to protect a weapon.
She closed her front door as the van pulled away, a pair of surveillance drones following close in its trail.
Walking through the kitchen, she pulled the Barbados card off the fridge, the one from her mother, the last one she’d sent before ALS had taken her motor skills for good.
Why couldn’t you have held on for a little while longer?
She put the postcard back under its magnet, then straightened it with two hands. She walked down the hall to her office, fiddling with her locket, turning it between finger and thumb, enjoying its weight and textured surface.
She sat in her office chair and picked up the photograph of her family framed on her desk. She was torn back to a childhood memory, whipped there and back so fast she winced.
She was walking with her grandfather, a nationalist, a man proud of his heritage. He would recite myths of ancient Chinese folklore as they wandered under a summertime afternoon sky on Central Park’s winding pathways. She remembered the story of Chang’e, a mythical goddess. It must have been his favourite because he told it often. She had always thought he meant it to be cautionary, a tale of a beautiful woman who stole from her husband and was banished to the moon. It was the fable behind the mid-autumn festival, mooncakes, and floating lanterns at twilight.
She missed him. Missed laughing with him and discussing things that weren’t school or work or research as everyone else in her life had always wanted. The memory was so sharp and vivid, of sitting on a sun-warmed aluminum bench, watching a softball game, the crack of a wooden bat, of her grandfather following the ball up into the sky, removing his silver, circular rimmed glasses and looking down deep into her soul.
“Sweet, little Kit, you have a gift with numbers I could only dream of. You are a mathematical anomaly. We must take care to nurture and preserve your wondrous mind.” Her eyes had been locked in his senescent gaze, transfixed, unable to look away. He reached behind his neck, unclasped the thin metal chain that hung there, allowing the weight of the small steel thimble to dangle from his fingers, swaying back and forth with a hypnotic rhythm.
“When the time comes, and it will, that you have information you no longer wish to share, this will protect it. Take good care with it, young Kit. It was designed specifically for you.” He clasped the chain behind her neck and allowed the locket to fall to her chest.
She reached for it again now, played with the thimble, its pocked surface rough against her fingertips. She squeezed it open, felt its empty insides where she used to keep her secrets.
Gung gung. Granddad.
The faraday cage he’d given her was cute, but times had changed. And a memchip dangling around her neck on a thin metal chain presented little in the way of security. She preferred stealth tech anyway. Hide it in plain sight but hide it well.
From her index finger, she slid the prosthetic nail she’d had surgically implanted forward and off in a well-rehearsed maneuver, revealing a storage plate that concealed a sliver of holomem. She licked her opposite thumb, affixing the intricate silicon wafer to her saliva, then closed the nail and brushed it against her display unit, physically connecting the two. The holomem snapped into place magnetically, like an ear bead. The data transfer and subsequent deletion was automatic and immediate, completed by a snippet of code she’d written herself. She quickly reversed the procedure, replacing the memory under her false nail. This data, the entirety of the Zeus code, she kept as secure as she knew how, only ever allowing it to exist in a single physical space.
She began swiping through the data, reading the raw text, looking for the anomaly. She’d only ever seen it once, in Zeus. This time she was studying a human sequence, human DNA. Hours passed, though she barely noticed, the data were that engrossing.
She leaned back in her chair, looking behind the holo, through her office window into her small backyard. She caught a glimpse of an optical lens dangling from what looked like a maple seed twirling in a moonlit glimmer. Seeds fell, but this one hovered, spinning and bobbing up and down and ‘round and ‘round in a hypnotic rhythm reminiscent of her grandfather’s thimble. That looks like tech, she thought, surveillance, could even be a weapon, and moved swiftly beyond its field of view. She reached across the desk, swiped off the holo, and transferred the data set back to her nail bed.
She really did need to get back to the lab. She felt safe there, and something at home felt amiss.
14.
Johnny Woo stared up at them, astounded by their ugliness. A pair of semi-circular, 400-metre-tall, monolithic, windowed, concrete cliffs curling in on themselves. The buildings rose above the ground on wide-girthed cylindrical pillars of cement and rebar, so many storeys of concrete and glass they gave him vertigo.
A building-wide external renovation was underway from top to bottom, a metamorphosis of sorts. The entire complex was enshrouded in a temporary nylon mesh cocoon that was the colour of honeycomb, sagging under its own weight and billowing in gusts of wind like a ship’s sails. Underneath the wrapping was its bone structure, a complex exoskeletal lattice of bamboo scaffolding held together in an ancient tradition, the wooden knuckles lashed by hand with coconut string.
He cupped his hands to light a cigarette against the approaching typhoon wind, flicking the Zippo shut with a satisfying snap. He took a long, equally satisfying drag and stared up at its spectacular height, taking in its vastness.
“Bit of a fortress, wouldn’t you say, Fonger?”
“Yes, boss.”
“Like they could hold off the PLA for weeks with a few guns and mortars.”
“I don’t know about that, boss.”
Woo chuckled, the cigarette languishing in the corner of his mouth, one eye closed against the smoke trailing off its burning orange ember. “No, huh?” He looked up at the structures. “You might be right.”
He fiddled with his engineer’s ring, technically his grandfather’s, an expat from London who had settled down in pre-handover Hong Kong. Having spent his life building the city’s tallest structures, he would have cringed at the sight of these behemoths. Woo had met him when he was a child, though only for a brief moment. The ring was his parting gift, his grandfather had said, telling him to wear it with pride. So, Woo wore it, though it felt like a lie. He was no engineer; he had taken no oath.
They entered the building’s lobby beneath the honey-coloured drapery that consumed its corners and curves, the light inside an ethereal amber hue. He waved his hand across the elevator call panel, the pendulous steel cabling rattling against itself as the small metal box descended to ground level.
He and Fong rode up together in relative silence, shoulders touching, the lift clanking and groaning under their combined weight.
Its doors opened on the ninth floor with an abrupt crack, and the two of them stepped out, one after the other, into a darkened hallway speckled with black mold and illuminated with filtered pale-yellow light from the gaps beneath doors. From a stairwell at the end of the hall, its door propped open with a cinder block, came the snapping sound of the building’s wrap undulating in the approaching storm’s wind. Caution tape strained across the entrance ahead where a police officer in uniform stood guard.
Woo clipped his badge to his trench, took the mask on offer from the officer at the door, and stepped through. The room smelled of years of aerosolized cooking oil and animal fats. An aging, freon-breathing air conditioner stuffed in the window laboured against itself, duct tape and plastic sheeting sealing the gap around it. An ornate steel chandelier oscillated in the cool synthetic airflow overhead. An elderly Chinese woman leaned on a cane beside another uniformed officer inside the door. She was speaking in Canto, pausing to acknowledge the two of them. She wore a colourful floral-print shirt, red Chinese dragons dancing across its front, her pale blue surgical mask pulled down around her chin.
“What’s she doing in here?” Woo asked the officer.
“Lives here normally. I’m getting a statement. Says she came back from a weekend with family this morning.”
“And she lives like this?”
“No. Said she walked in, and all her furniture was gone. Replaced with this stuff.”
The room’s interior was like the inside of an operating theatre, clinical, like it should smell of bleach. Each item had been placed with precision. Steel kitchen countertops met a stark white subway-tile backsplash that looked as though it had been recently cleaned. A well-trimmed ficus tree stood in the sunlight by the floor-to-ceiling window in a milky jade vase. A holo projected against one wall broadcast a rogue data stream from the America, an endless sermon about the evils of the augmented. A black, synthetic leather sofa and coffee table combo were arranged to face the stream. A single glass of water sat untouched on the polished steel. It was hot outside. A cold drink would be nice, he thought.
“This room is staged,” he said.
“No question, boss. But why go to the trouble?” Fong asked.
A man in a hooded white hazmat suit walked out of the adjoining bedroom in a hurry, inverting his bright purple latex gloves as he removed them, pulling at the Velcro sealing his head inside.
“You’ll need a biohaz suit to get in there,” the officer speaking to the owner said. “Forensics are set up in the room behind me.”
Woo watched a fly crawl out from under the door, then glanced back at Fong. “Time to go find out.”
15.
It was nearly four in the morning when Kit finally left the lab’s clinical and windowless biosphere, opening the double exit doors into the inside of a snow globe. The late-summer storm had brought with it an abnormal early season squall, and she stood for a moment, watching the glistening snowflakes falling from the sky, sparkling in the light of the streetlamps. She stepped into accumulating banks of it, the snow’s squeak beneath her feet triggering a memory of frozen fingertips, hot cocoa gratitude, childhood snowball fights in onesies of goose down warmness, and a home in an America that no longer existed.
Her breath condensed into a cloud as she blew on her bare hands and kicked at the ankle-deep drifts that filled the sidewalk. A brief, biting gust, and the globe was shaken again, the ground disappearing beneath the meandering white powder. With legs on automatic for her daily walk home, she snapped a bead in each ear, put on some Vivaldi, and allowed herself to decompress into post-work consolidation.
Kit’s front door auto unlocked, opening on cue as she approached, responding to her geofenced subdermal. She knocked the snow off her arms and brushed herself clean before removing her knitted wool toque. She flicked on a data stream old school, pressing a switch she’d had hard-wired to the wall. Talking holographic heads appeared before her, droning on about the political state of the planet’s superpowers, the audio automatically blending into her beads above the violins of “La Stravaganza.”
“More unrest as news continues to dribble from behind the walls of the America. Today, word spreads of further vigilante governments taking violent means to control further uprisings in southern states. The People’s Republic of China claims yet another of its surveillance satellites has been brought down as it orbited over Texas. As always, the United Governments of the America make no commentary.”
She deposited her key card and lanyard in a multicoloured glass bowl she kept at the entrance, a gift from Avery that was meant to warm her new home here in Ulaanbaatar. She hung her white, puffy, full-length coat by its fake fur-lined hood on a wall peg, then strolled through her hallway lined with old movie posters. DiCaprio on the bow of a ship. Gosling in his dancing shoes in the hills of LA. Walken with his uncomfortable watch.
The news commentary in her head faded as she walked farther from the projection at the front door. She strode across the hallway’s bamboo flooring, her stiletto boots silencing as she stepped into the carpeted living room, the sound returning as she moved onto the kitchen’s tiled floor.
The postcards on her fridge were normally organized in a grid, but the Barbados card from her mom hung askew, dangling by a corner beneath a small magnet. That’s new, she thought, realigning the card.
The diatribe of news continued to follow her from the entryway stream. She popped out a bead, listened to the quiet with one ear. Outside, the snow fell heavy and silent. The cutlery drawer was open a crack. She closed it slowly out of habit, something she would have also done that morning before leaving the house.
She made a quizzical shoulder check, both sides, her heel making a single tock against the slate as she turned a complete three-sixty. She tapped off the violins and distant news in her remaining bead, removed it, and listened for the human presence that she now felt.
She immediately regretted wearing heeled boots. Her mother had told her once that you could put a bell around a cat’s neck, but if it didn’t want to be heard, it would move in perfect silence. She tried to become a cat, to lose the sound of her heels on the tile.
She flicked her palm open, the transdermal hardware in her wrist bringing up a holo. She popped a bead back in one ear, its magnetic field snapping into the piercing, then swiped right with her free hand until she got Avery’s beaming avatar and chose “voice only” from the ensuing menu.
“Avery? Were you in my house today?” she whispered.
“No, babe. What’s up?” he replied, sounding confused.
She took gentle, quiet strides back toward the front door, her heels muted, listening carefully with one ear. “Must be my imagination. Feels like someone was here.”
“Why’s that, Kit?”
She glanced at the bedroom door, wished it was fully open, then took stock of the shadows, waiting for movement.
“Things seem . . . amiss.”
“Like someone trashed your house?” Concern now from Avery.
“No, more like someone didn’t want me to know they’d been here, but they weren’t very good at it.” She moved out of the living room toward the spare room. She kept the hardware in there, and the door was still closed.
“You’re giving me the heebie-jeebies, Kit. Come to my house,” he offered. “We can do wine.”
She grasped the locket around her neck. “I’ll be fine, Ave. Just wanted to check in with you.” She was patrolling the townhouse now, not like she knew what she’d do if she came across an interloper. I’m basically armed with foul language. Could take off a boot and try to stab him in the throat, she thought, wholly untrained and without a weapon, searching for an intruder her instincts told her was there, inside her fucking home.
A floorboard squeaked. The one over by the front door, the one she’d meant to have fixed ages ago.
“You need some company over there? I can swing by. Give me, like, ten minutes. I can hop a Ryde. Want me to send someone from lab security? Should I call security? Kit? You there?”
She’d stopped listening to him, was working her way back to the front door, which she now realized she’d never properly closed. She muted the call with a tap of the bead, moving now in complete silence, her heels making no further sound.
She heard a rustle by the entry, a faint rubbing together of clothing, like bedsheets, that she wasn’t meant to hear. Her senses heightened. Fried ginger and garlic wafted in from outside. She crept past her framed memories along the hallway, feeling as though this moment would never end, waiting for a telltale misstep.
The doorway was wide open, as she’d left it, fresh boot tracks in the snow heading back out into the storm. Someone had been there, someone who didn’t think she’d be home. Finally remembering to breathe, she took a long deep inhale, surveyed the outside through the blizzard, then closed, latched, and locked the door, the deadbolts secure.
She remembered Avery and unmuted the call. “Ave?”
“What is going on over there?” He almost shouted without raising his voice.
“Avery, someone’s been in my house. I heard him, saw his boot prints in the snow.”
“He take anything?”
“Haven’t really looked. I just locked the door. Avery, get over here. I’m scared.”
She was kneeling now, crouched and terrified. There was no one who knew, no one. The data had never been up. The project was strictly between her and Zeus. But someone had been there, sneaking about. The person could only have been looking for one thing, which meant someone knew, and she hadn’t told a soul.
“Babe, I’m, like, ten minutes away at best. Get out of your house and get in a cab. We can head over there tomorrow in the daylight with the special ops guys from the lab.” He was right; she needed to go.
“Order me a Ryde. I’ll be ready in a minute.”
She opened her hand, swiped left, and the holo disappeared back into her wrist. She was motionless, waiting, her breath shallowing, listening for that moment of calm when her beating heart and the wet blink of her eyes would become the loudest things in the room.
When it came, she could feel someone else still inside, still lurking. She felt hunted, wild, a gazelle in the grass, her senses heightened. When she moved, it was swift and with purpose.
She stormed into the spare room and snatched the carbon-black, sugar-cube-sized holomem taped to her desk drawer’s underside—what she assumed they’d been after. She was ready to make a lot of noise if she came across anyone, try and scare them with volume if nothing else.
She marched into the kitchen, grabbed a knife and the postcard from her mother, put on her coat, and stepped back out into the storm, blowing snow from the Ryde’s spinning fans blinding the path down to the street. She heard her home’s door auto lock behind her. As the twin rotor settled on the curb side and spooled down, she could see again, and she hopped inside the one-seater. With its canopy sealed, it lifted off, autonomously flying her out of the snowstorm to Avery’s place.
Avery swiped off the audio, ordered a Ryde to Kit’s house, and then closed down the holo buried in his wrist. She’d be there in ten minutes. He’d need to make the call soon.
He sat at his desk and stared at the projection there, thumbed through some social media fodder about hairstyles of the wealthy and famous, settled on a hair bag narrowcast on semi-permanent fade-out colour edits, then swiped for the South African.
“Avery, my man. How’s it, bru?” Weissach’s thick Afrikaans accent poured through the feed.
“I’m good.” He paused. “Kit’s not updating Zeus anymore. She’s doing strict observation protocol now. The mouse itself seems in great health though. I’d take a dose of whatever she’s given him.”
“I don’t think that was part of our deal, bru.”
“She just called me, said someone was following her, like someone was in her apartment, and she’s spooked. That wasn’t you, was it?”
“Bru, you let us worry about these types of things. Where’s she headed now?” Avery liked the accent, figured he’d date a South African man, but not Weissach.
“Told you. I don’t tail her. All I do is watch over the projects she’s got in the lab. Once I’m outside that airlock, she’s all yours mate.”
Weissach whistled through his nose. “Bru, let’s be clear: ahm-not-your-mate.” He said it all at once, a single word, chilling.
Avery remembered the day in the Chinese restaurant, the wine Weissach didn’t drink. His stomach lurched in the pause. Butterflies in a garden on a sunny summer day. Neither of them spoke. He listened to Weissach breathe for as long as he could take.
“She’s keeping the data on her person somewhere.” He leaned back in his chair, tapped out a song with his pen on the desk. “I don’t see her upload anything in the lab. But there’s no way she’s leaving it there. If you want that mouse and his data, you’re going to need to go and get it yourself. And there’s no fucking way I’m doing that for you.”
“Right, bru. Got it. Check your balance for an increase. Your cooperation is appreciated. I’ll be in touch.” The connection went dead before he could end it.
16.
As Woo and Fong stepped into their Tyvek crime scene suits with the aid of the forensic team, Woo became aware of a faint hum emanating from behind the door. “What’s that?” he asked, listening. “Where’s the buzzing coming from?”
“It’s flies,” the woman dressing him said with a look of disgust as she placed the hood over his head, smoothing the resealable glue seam around his neck. “They’re in the body.” She finished taping his wrists, securing the black latex gloves tight, then affixed a pen to a small Velcro patch on his arm. “You’re good to go.”
Safely sealed inside his hazmat gear, Woo opened the bedroom door. Two more white bunny suits were attending to the body, removing insects from its shoulders with steel tweezers, placing them in screw-top glass jars.
“Entomology?” he asked, closing the door behind Fong.
One of the bunnies nodded. “We won’t be long, detective.”
“Rough guess on time of death?”
“Seventy-two hours at least. Likely more.” She waved a jar at him, the insect inside tapping against the glass. “These little guys take a few days to gestate.”
A low, walnut-coloured platform bed dominated the centre of the room, framed on both sides and up the walls in ornamental Chinese lattice. Crisp, white linens cocooned the precisely made bed, their tightly folded seams disappearing below the mattress where the forehead of the skinless body leaned as though in prayer. Its exposed muscle and subcutaneous fat reflected a damp sheen in brown, yellow, and grey. Fluids had collected on the carpet into pools of dried, coagulated blood. A ledge below the room’s curved bay window housed a collection of devices that looked like a makeshift medical print lab, including a 3D printer with its glass doors open, its internal surgical-steel mechanisms exposed. Beside it, a similarly sized metal box fronted with a small, illuminated display reminded him of a microwave oven. A human epidermis, folded with precision into a perfect square, had been placed on the opposite side of the bed, aligned with the corner.
“Gruesome,” Woo said as he looked around the room. “I like what they’ve done with the place though.” Their hooded suits had hot mics and speakers; it was like they were wearing headsets in an aircraft, every word they spoke broadcast to the group. He peeled the pen from his arm and carefully lifted a flap of skin dangling from the dead man’s neck. It had the consistency of cooked hair gel. After a moment of adhesion, it liquified and fell to the floor.
“He’s not going to be needing that,” he said to Fong, who had his palm up, flicking through data on his holo.
“Forensics have been through the scene,” Fong said. “They agree with entomology. The victim’s been dead more than a few days.”
“No one noticed?”
“No mention of it in their initial report.”
“We’ll want to read that occupant’s statement as soon as it’s done,” Woo said, leaning into the victim’s exposed internals. “Get the bot up.”
From his wheeled and dog-eared leather crime-scene bag, Fong took an aluminum soda-can-sized container. He cracked it open like a fortune cookie, along its seam, delicately removing the drone and its folded insectoid plastic airfoils. He flicked it into the air where it hovered, instantaneously expanding into flight, spinning rotors on the ends of four segmented arms reaching up from its body where a camera lens dangled, stabilized like an insect’s weighted thorax.
He stood over the skin folded on the bed, pointing at it with his pen, his back to Fong. “You ever seen anything like this?”
“On a nature stream maybe. Never seen a person shed their skin before, if that’s what you’re asking.”
He walked over to the bay window. Beneath it was a mini fridge, its glass door closed. He kneeled down for a closer look, careful not to tear the Tyvek. Inside was a collection of pods, hypodermic auto injectors, an easy needle that a child could operate. Like a gun, it had a trigger and a barrel. Woo had used an identical one to do his own flu shots, as easy as point and shoot. Not all of them were marked. Those that were had varying levels and colours of fluids inside.
“Strange,” he said. “These are odd labels. Got one here says ‘green’ and a bunch that say ‘blue.’ All handwritten. Not exactly imaginative. Thoughts?”
“No, boss. I wasn’t exactly straight A’s in biotech.” Fong flew the drone via his holo, his swiping fingers directing the tiny bot.
“Not so sure this guy was either.” Woo catalogued the crime scene in his mind as Fong’s bot rotoscoped the room in digital.
“This building is government assist, right?” Woo asked.
“It’s one hundred percent public housing. You don’t get to stay if you’ve got the dollars to pay,” Fong replied.
“So this building, this whole complex is populated with the destitute and unemployed?”
“Mostly low-income earners, boss.”
“So then what is this guy,” he gestured at the body with his pen, “doing with all this gear?” He walked over to the open glass box on the ledge and pointed at it, his arm outstretched.
“This is not a simple 3D printer, is it?”
“Much more than that, boss. Look at the brand. SKC. They make genetic equipment for biosamplers and molecular assemblers. That thing can collect and replicate DNA, RNA. It’ll even draw up a brand-new genome if you give it enough time.”
“Sounds expensive.”
“Not just expensive, boss, regulated. That box belongs in the government laboratories in Kowloon.”
“So I can’t buy one of these on the street?”
Fong laughed. “Impossible. The fact that it’s here leads me to think something of significance went very wrong, and fast.” He closed the box’s glass doors with a gloved hand. “Nobody ever leaves these open. Too much contamination risk to the nozzles. Either our victim was meant to walk out with this thing, or someone who was in this room was.”
Woo knelt beside the flayed body, the tangy, metallic smell of blood penetrating the suit’s filters. On the ground beneath his knees, he saw a used pod, the empty vial still inserted. He held it up and read the label aloud. “Red Crimson.” The words were handwritten in black Sharpie. “He had some kind of bad luck, this guy,” he said, showing the vial to Fong before dropping it into a paper evidence bag.
“No joke. You think that pod is what did this to him?” Fong asked, watching over the drone as it hovered in the middle of the room, slowly rotating and inhaling data.
“I think there’s a lot more to this story than we’re gonna gather in a day,” Woo said.
“Agreed.”
Woo continued his general sweep of the room in analogue, using only his eyes, no digital assistance. Black-strapped banknotes spilled from an unzipped, faded olive duffel beneath the bedframe. “Bag of bills under the bed there,” Woo said, pointing. “Be a shame if any of those went missing.”
“Noted,” Fong said, swiping at his holographic drone controls. “Something interesting in that skin. The bot’s flicking through filters.” It had stopped its gentle spin, its machine irises beaming a full interrogative spectrum into the heaped and translucent dermis on the bed.
“What’s it got?” Woo asked.
Fong swiped through pages of imagery. “Looks like a non-human sequence. Like the body had a rider. Parasite or something. Could be a splice. I’m not sure. We should get it to the lab.”
He continued his visual scan, tapping the pen against his hip. Investigations involving parasitic interlopers were not on his resumé. “This setup is highly unlikely. We’re in the lowest-income housing in the city. Nobody who lives in these buildings has state-of-the-art anything, let alone a high-end bioprinter. Not to mention this thing.” He waved his hand at the closed steel box beside the printer.
“You know what that is?” Fong asked.
Woo shook his head. “Haven’t a clue.”
“It’s the incubator.”
“For what?”
“You don’t just print off biomass, it needs a scaffold, something made of human or pig, a sort of living ink, a printed endoskeleton. Then you need to grow the tissue on the substrate in that thing.” He motioned toward the metal box. “Give it a live environment, mature the weave. It’s biogenetic gardening, germinating human tissue in a similar environment to the inside of a human being.”
“Like a womb?”
“Yes, but different.”
“How long does it take to grow?” he asked.
“Depends. That’s a small enclosure, so probably less than two weeks. They augment the cells with some kind of growth that speeds things up.”
“So, what’s growing inside the box?”
“Only one way to find out,” Fong said.
They looked at each other, Woo’s gloved finger paused above the illuminated “Open” button.
“I’m gonna let the science team open this for us. I’d hate to be the person who unleashes some purposefully engineered bug, end up like the America.”
“Agreed, boss.”
Several years back, the America had, as a direct result of the “Incident,” enacted the “Ethics,” banning all manner of edits and making any sort of genetic scissoring or further sequencing of human DNA unlawful. A particularly evil bacterial toxin had been engineered into the genome of a successful wild fungus, releasing it as a spore, poisoning the atmosphere with a necrotic mutagen. It killed tens of millions and decimated the east coast population corridor. Nobody ever claimed it as an act of terror, and no one knew or admitted where it came from, but it was identifiably manmade. All fields of genetics were subsequently outlawed. It was taken out of school curriculum, anyone involved in biosciences was retrained, and a new section of Homeland Security was added, the Department of Bioweapons Counterintelligence, a.k.a. the DBC, spooks who took it to the backyard level, snooping through trash, looking for any trace of home-grown laboratory offal.
Those actions drove an already well-established, legitimate community to seek acceptance from any nation that would provide it. The Africas and China, Ulaanbaatar in particular, were well known for producing the best augments around. There was money to be made, and the world’s populace was hungry for enhancement, no matter the price. Many American scientists had fled to such areas. Hong Kong was a place where edits were available on the street. And though “The Genetics Market” was printed on the city’s street signs, its legality remained unaddressed and grey. For legal augments one had to head north to the mainland, Mongolia, or Russia. So it was strange that this lab with state-of-the-art bio-printing hardware would pop up in a low-rent megastructure like this one.
“The incubator means he was trying to make something physical, like an organ, yes?” Woo asked.
“Makes sense, boss.”
He did a slow circle, recreating in his mind what could have happened in the room. “Is it possible he was trying to replicate his own skin? Create a replacement?”
“Big gamble to take on his own. You’d think he’d want some medical assistance with something like that.”
“There had to be someone else here. I don’t think he popped that pod on himself. Doesn’t make any kind of sense.”
“You think he got jumped?” Fong asked. “Like someone decided to try out that vial of Red Crimson on him?”
“I think he was going to try on whatever he printed inside that box, and someone else decided he was gonna be a test subject. And if I’m right about that, we’re dealing with a bioweapon. Takes this out of our jurisdiction.”
Fong swiped furiously at his holo. “SceneDoc has a complete image of both rooms. I can take it out in the hall and let it run, see what comes up while we wait for the science team to show.”
“I want out of this ridiculous suit.” Woo’s nose itched, and he couldn’t touch it through the hood’s transparent shield. “Let’s head back to the office, get the super in on this conversation.”
Woo knocked on the door to Superintendent Lee’s office twice, hard, with intent. The glass walls depolarized, and the super’s head rose to greet him as the door opened.
“What’s up, Johnny Woo?”
“I got assigned this homicide in TKO. No ID yet, but I get the feeling it’s gonna go up the chain. Found some evidence of a potential bioweapon. Was wondering if you could keep it away from the ATF for a few days while I investigate a little deeper.”
Lee put down his tablet and met Woo’s eyes. “You got something on your mind?” He gestured toward the wall projection, a green stream of text denoting each un-managed case still needing initial investigation. There were hundreds. “I’ve got no shortage of work for you.”
“I think this one might have a connection to the Shing Wo file I’ve been handling. Take a look at this feed from the scene.” Woo opened his precinct wristband holo, swiped through to the data from the bot, grasped the ghostly image in his hand, and threw it at the wall. The picture was a 3D photograph of the body overlain with multiple sources of visuals. The image of the shed skin elevated itself and rotated slowly, a stream of data scrolling alongside it. The superintendent leaned in closer, reading the text.
“That’s a possible genetic splice,” Woo said. “It’s early in the investigation right now, but it looks to me like he was injected by an assailant and detained until he melted that skin clean off his body.”
Lee continued to ingest the data, swiping at the screen to examine the body, the incubator, and the printer.
“There were more biogenetics in the cooler, labels you can see there. Blue, green. Look at the empty one we figure he was done with. Says ‘Red Crimson’ on it.”
“I see that.” Superintendent Lee sat back down behind his desk twirling the long, thin grouping of hairs that grew off his chin. “And ATF hasn’t been informed yet?”
“The data’s in the system. Just need you to sign off on it, and they’ll be in the know.”
“Any signs of a struggle?”
“Nothing obvious.”
“So that skin somehow fell off the victim in the room?”
“Unlikely.”
“You think the body was moved?”
“On first look, the evidence would support that theory. The whole apartment is pristine.”
“Detective, this reminds me of a saying: ‘Even a dragon will struggle to control a snake in its den.’ A scene like this would not be so clean if that victim had his skin removed in that apartment, alive or not.” Lee flipped through the SceneDoc filters. “Any indicators of pathogens?”
“Forensics sampled the scene, the hallway, and the elevators. Nothing there.”
“How long do you need?”
“I could do with a couple of days.”
“Tell you what,” Lee said, leaning on his desk. “I’m not feeling very well, I should go home and get some rest. I won’t be reviewing any case files or signing off on any reports until I come back, which won’t be for a couple of days.” He reached for his coat, looking up at Woo from behind eyes that said go.
“Understood, sir. Get well soon.” Woo swiped off his holo and closed his boss’s office door behind him.
“Fonger,” he said. “We’re in business.”
The two detectives stood beside Woo’s cubicle staring at the projection they’d cast into the centre of the room, deciphering what the bot had identified as interesting. Fong brought some of the data down to his own holo with a grab, zoomed in with a pinch, and generated an image of the used pod. It slowly rotated in his open palm.
“The needle’s showing only the victim’s DNA, boss. The vial’s empty though. You think it’s possible he thought this was the cure? That he was already in the middle of whatever was happening to his skin?”
“Best we don’t theorize before we’ve gathered all the evidence, young Fonger. It biases the judgement,” Woo said, “to paraphrase a great detective.”
He remained glued to the virtual projection. There was a ficus in the living area, potted and placed with some solid Feng Shui, its multiple trunks gathered at the base with a shining white ribbon. Woo swiped with four fingers together, right to left, cycling through the different imaging sequences like a digital lazy Susan. With the ultraviolet scan, he stopped, stepped forward, and spun the ficus with a tap and a spiral of his upturned finger, two-finger flicked through stronger filters, and found a multi-wavelength that gave him a clean image.
“This ribbon has some sort of bodily fluids on it, but the ficus is clean. Not a trace.”
“Placed after the fact,” Fong observed.
“Not only placed, it was tied around this tree so as not to damage it. Look at the bow; it’s perfect.”
“Back to the scene, boss?”
“Let’s go.”
Outside the building’s entrance, a crowd of onlookers had gathered, news of the homicide having travelled at the speed of electrons. The two of them stormed through the curious with their hands and collars up, no need for unnecessary exposure on a developing case like this.
After the penetrating stares of the public’s eyes, the crime scene was a welcome solitude. Wind crept beneath the cracks of doors and through unsealed windows, mewling through the hallway and singing like sirens of the approaching storm outside, typhoon level eight now, starting to get serious. Thick sheets of opaque plastic vibrated in the typhoon’s winds. Officers had cocooned the apartment with it, sealing the crime scene against external contaminants as best as they could.
Woo cut through the plastic enshrouding the doorway with his pocketknife, the opening snapping against the wind’s newly generated avenue of escape. They gloved up and made their way into the unit. Fong opened his holo, referencing the stored data set against the room in front of them.
“Ribbons gone,” he said.
“Shit. Any sign of it in the evidence locker?”
Fong swiped quickly through pages of data. “Nothing except coroner info from the body.”
“Fuckers.”
He slowed his inspection. This was a time to take it all in, to find the minutia they’d missed on the initial sweep. Someone on the inside had stolen evidence, which meant this was a much bigger deal than anyone was letting on. They’d need to proceed with caution.
Fong popped the bot, which hung on its self-propelled cushion of air as it surveyed the room.
“Get a detail on the ficus. See if they left any trace of themselves,” Woo said. “That ribbon was well tied. They wouldn’t have been able to remove it easily.”
The bot spun a slow circle around the tree, sucking in data from its multiple spiny extended apertures, a floating autonomous AI police dog sniffing for clues, its tiny ducted rotating propellers silenced by internal speakers broadcasting a sinusoidal interference. He heard the changes in pitch but not the steady whir. The plastic slapped in the wind.
Fong stayed with the bot, his holo hand palm up, watching the data flow through. “It’s . . . there’s . . .” He scowled. “There’s a mask, boss. An agent covering the sample. Someone dusted this tree with a containment since we were last here. We’re not going to be able to get any usable information from it.”
Containments weren’t cheap. Manmade polymers, grown like vines dangling in a hothouse, invisible to the naked eye and only molecules thick. Baked in ovens and pulverized with magnets into polysilicate nanoparticles. An ultra-fine, electrically charged dust that tenaciously bonded itself to more or less anything. Prevented things like fingerprints and DNA samples and, in this case, any fucking evidence from being lifted. Not the sort of thing one would expect to see at a murder scene in a low-rent high-rise in the projects.
“What the actual fuck is going on here?” Woo wondered aloud, his eyes darting around the makeshift lab. “This is a very expensive cover-up of a very expensive project in one of the most insecure complexes in the city.”
17.
Dallas slinked out of the autocab into a steady drizzle, climbing the stairs to his condo during a gap in the rain bands, a brief reprieve from the typhoon. Streams of water ran down decades-old, crumbling concrete steps, the colour of low-level stratus. The loose stone pieces of Robinson Road were reminiscent of his home on St. Augustine’s cobblestone streets. He thought of the Florida coastline, white sand beaches, a past and distant life of freedom, his family, and the soothing sounds of children at play, a home no longer.
Street side, the South Asian steady state of high-rise construction permeated the rain, the combo sounding like a wartime apocalypse. A low brick fence separated him from an industrial kill site where a long-telescoped nibbler riding the end of a segmented, almost scorpion-like appendage climbed an ever-growing pile of discarded cement detritus. Digestive, saliva-like water sprayed from its destructive mandibles as they buried themselves into the crumbling tower’s carcass like scavenging vultures, tearing concrete from rebar and pulling at the sinews of the dead building’s insides. The blades of its rotating twin tandem jaws simultaneously destroyed and ingested the ancient high-rise’s skeletal remains.
He paused to watch. They’re eating it, he thought. They were making way for a new superstructure to be grown. Regurgitated carbon would be spat out and hardened by a colony of printers, machines creating a new hive for humans. Government housing initiatives at their best. He should know; he lived in one at the top of the steps ahead. A cubist rendition of the modern condominium, each unit a pod hung from the outside of a palm-like trunk, spun from a single strand of liquid carbon, hardened into homes of flexible ganglia.
A man with no arms and no legs approached Dallas on a square piece of plywood, propelling himself using a stick clenched between his teeth. Skateboard wheels rumbled and complained beneath his weight. He looked up at Dallas from amputated stumps, repeatedly prostrating himself on the board.
“Lei bong ngo. Pang yau. M’goi. Lei bei cin ngo. Ngo mut yeh doe mou laa.” Help me, friend. Please. You give me money. I have nothing.
Dallas placed a twenty beneath a leg stump and continued up the hill to his home, the man’s stream of thankyous growing distant as he walked. Triad justice was swift and violent, and delimbing sent a clear message. A reminder of who Dallas worked for, who this amputee likely worked for, and what consequences failure would bring.
He plugged a numeric code into the number pad beside the entryway, buzzing the burner handheld in his pocket, allowing him entry. He changed the code after every mission. No sense in giving away more data than necessary. Inside, he keyed in the seventy-eighth floor and then grabbed the handrail, the elevator pulling gee as it accelerated for the long ride up.
He got off on his floor and walked past the “middle,” a central grouping of communal toilets coated with a sickly black mold, a slowly growing organism that appeared to be thriving on excesses of humidity and neglect, creeping farther out of the bathrooms with each passing week.
His embossed metal key shifted tumblers in the lock he’d had professionally installed in his front door, a freshly painted Mao-red slab of pressed aluminium. The key meant no retinal scan, no record taken, and no positional data written to some master database to be sent off to the IRD for enquiry. There were no augments here. It was a great place to lie low, remaining anonymous and out of sight.
Emerging from the dangling entry tube to the unit, he took a deep breath of the indoors, his apartment air conditioned and minimal. He threw himself onto the wall bed, still down from his last stay. It was his single decent piece of furniture, a locally sourced mattress, too short, too narrow, too firm, and too used, the sag in the middle a feature from the previous owner. He dusted a Down in his grinder and hoovered it, the sedation hitting in seconds. With some difficulty he placed the grinder on the glass top of his bedside table, then wrapped himself in his stark white duvet to guard against the frigid conditioned air streaming from the vented ceiling. As he drifted into an exhausted, chemically aided sleep, he felt the gentle, vague yet perceptible sway of the dangling pod as it adjusted to his weight, its bamboo flooring shifting with a single audible creak, a reposition, soothing, calming, home.
18.
Woo leaned all the way back in his office chair, tightening one end of his hand-rolled cigarette, the filter hanging loosely from his lips, the last piece of this delicate and satisfying puzzle. His eyes were on the holo in the middle of the room, images of the crime scene scattered across it in a disorganized and chaotic three-dimensional mess. No particular image held his gaze. Through no particular design, he was trying to wrap his head around the entire situation, trying to extract some sort of motive out of it all, hoping for a peripheral revelation to come from unfocused gazing at the entirety of the data.
“You gonna light that thing or just keep playing with it?” Fong asked him from behind.
“It’s not about the destination, Fonger,” Woo replied. “It’s all about the journey.”
He plugged the filter in the open end, a few crumbs of tobacco falling to the ground. “I’m going to go smoke this,” he said. “And when I come back, we’re going to figure this fucking thing out.”
Woo stood under the protective cover of the main entrance to the old red-brick police station looking out at an empty Hollywood Road. Waves of rain pelted the pavement, the ricochet spray creating a waist-deep mist. The glowing ember hanging from his lips was the only spot of colour in the drab, washed-out hues of heavy rainfall.
The typhoon was a nine now, about to be a direct hit. They’d named this one Ester, the fifth of the season and a doozy by all accounts. Woo smelled ozone above the burning tobacco. It stung the nose in a similar way. Enjoyable, familiar. They were between rain bands, still hammering down but not with frightening intensity. That would come later that night when Ester was forecast to hit a ten out of ten.
He pulled deep on the cigarette, enjoyed the sensation of smoke filling his lungs, and allowed himself to drift with the exhale into the soothing sounds of rainfall, the repetitive natural scattering of water drops against pavement. The sidewalks were vacant, a strange sight in this town, the typhoon keeping most people indoors for now. An odd, lonely moment in the most densely populated city on the planet.
Lucky me, he thought as he pulled one last time on the cig, looked at the burning end of the expired smoke, then flicked it into the street where a silver Mercedes station wagon crept past, its tinted windows menacing, like a cat’s eye becoming full pupil as it’s about to pounce. A silent visitor in the storm. He felt cased, surveilled, and watched.
He took in the car’s details. It had nice rims, Kokos, black spokeless circles that he could see right through, like the car was rolling on a set of tungsten wedding bands. The vehicle had been lowered, a theme. Low-profile tires on low-profile, see-through rims, lowered suspension, and a low-profile roofline. It looked as though it were sealed to the street. Whoever was inside wanted him to know they were watching.
Who would stalk an HKPF detective in this town and in this weather? And right outside the precinct?
The plate was impossible to read in what appeared to be a well-engineered and perfectly directed obscuring spray off the rear tires. Neat trick, he thought. Might have to give that a go myself.
As the Benz paraded past, the driver’s-side window cracked open a smidge. Cobalt Asian eyes met his, a face tattoo obscured in the shadows, freckles below what appeared to be a well-worn, matte-black cowboy hat, its brim pinched tight at the sides. He watched the moment transpire as from outside his body, expecting an attack of some sort, he regretted not bringing his weapon along for the smoke. The car rounded the corner, rolling through a red light, its darkened window closed. As it crawled out of sight, he remembered to breathe.
“Did it work?” Fong asked once Woo made it back upstairs in the precinct.
“Sort of. Just watched a very interested Benz roll past the station, all tinted up.” He tapped his temple. “Looked like he was taking pictures.”
Fong peered out the window. “There’s no one out there driving in this weather today, boss.”
“Exactly.”
“You get an ID?”
“Nah. Had some sort of setup. Was kicking up spray from the road right in front of the plate. Couldn’t get a read.”
“That’s a neat trick.”
“S’what I said.”
He grabbed a precinct holo from the charging station and snapped it closed around his wrist. “I’m done here. Storm’s gonna be a ten in a couple of hours. Let’s both head home, ride it out, come back fresh.”
“Sold,” Fong agreed.
Woo walked outside wearing his black felt Brixton, another cigarette lit, expecting to see the Benz waiting for him in the storm. Instead, he was met with the next band of devastating typhoon winds. With one hand up to break the force of the rain, he used the other to clutch his hat tight to his head. He popped the collar on his trench against the stinging downpour and began the walk back to the escalators and their protective covered walkways home.
19.
Four fucking hours. Every night like clockwork. Like he had a four-hour cuckoo in his head. It was bullshit. Normal people could lie down and sleep seven, eight hours at a stretch. Persephone had been a legendary sleeper. Put her head down beside him, and he could have lit bombs in the room, and she’d have mumbled some complaint that she’d have no recollection of in the morning but wouldn’t wake up. And there he would be, at the four-hour mark. The FHM. Waiting impatiently for sleep to return.
Dallas lay on his back, blinking into the darkness, his mind walking around the outside of his dangling home, wondering if the other pod dwellers in that place had sleep issues like him. It was maddening. He’d taken all the meds, tried all the voodoo, exercised himself within an inch of his life, and none of it had fucking worked. He’d watched a data stream about it, that the eight-hour sleep schedule was a recent thing. That right up until the world industrialized, back a few hundred years ago and before the discovery of electricity and unlimited access to lighting, most people slept in four-hour bursts. It was well documented once he’d gotten into the research. Most literature written in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds referred to the first and second “sleeps.” The vast majority of people back before artificial light would go to bed at dark, a novel idea in and of itself. Four hours later, after the first sleep, they would fuck, eat, and then head back to bed until the sun came up. All in all, nighttime was a twelve-hour process. It had to be broken up somehow. A couple of hours of fornication and eating in the middle of every night; they were definitely on to something. Maybe that’s what I need, he thought. Head to a brothel, bang a synthetic, and hit the vending machine on the way out for a sandwich. Not a terrible idea, but inconvenient. He needed a home delivery version for a night like this. Be much nicer to roll over into someone and then have a quick sloth off to the fridge for a pre-made. Could get it all done in half an hour. Back to bed, wake up with the sun. It sounded like a dream. Dreams he only ever had at the FHM. He knew the answer. Snap a rollie, sit at the window, and enjoy the short hour or so of actual silence that existed in Central in the very early a.m. while everyone at the clubs was still inside dancing, the shops were actually closed, and the garbage trucks hadn’t started yet. It was the FHM; he hated it, but it was a peaceful time.
He got up, rolled himself a sixty-forty, mostly weed but a little of his Amber Leaf for flavour. Would do the trick. Figured he could get all the clean sleep he wanted when he was dead.
20.
The escalators had been around for something like 150 years, Woo thought as he stepped onto the covered moving sidewalk beneath him. A tidal flow keeping pace with the pedestrian rush hour, they ran upwards most hours of the day. He enjoyed their inclined slow-moving smoothness, but tonight the advertising emblazoned along the walls and ceiling displayed an unusual interest in his presence. From animated two-dimensional panels with promotions for massage and food came multiple aggressive disembodied holographic heads, leaping out of the screens.
“Hello?”
“Lei ho maa?”
“Lei to ngor maa?”
“Hello!”
“What’s your name, stranger? Where you from? Why not come inside and have some tea at Lin Heung Tea House and relax a while? Why not have a foot massage? Come to Happy Feet. It’s just down the stairs from the next stop, around the corner on Wellington Street. Your unhappy feet will thank you.”
Targeted ads didn’t work on him. He had no subdermal, no augments, and no online identification, a requirement of the job and a perk as far as he was concerned. There was no stored data to track him, no photos for facial recognition neurals to pin him with, no way to extract his purchasing preferences from a digital identity puzzled together by some vacant AI programmed to mine data stolen from the public’s ignorant online pursuits.
Normally.
The heads didn’t stop, and he found himself reacting to their aggression, flinching as they leapt at him from all sides. This wasn’t normal. Like the slow drive-by of the Benz in the middle of a typhoon, the visual onslaught had an intensity that he’d never experienced before. Perhaps because he was alone in the storm. Maybe the advertising neural was lonely, had no easy marks to harass. He felt monitored, same as outside the station, and not only by cameras. This felt personal, and for the first time in a very long while, Johnny Woo felt fear.
He walked off the platform with his head down, holding his hat on tight in the fierce, pelting sideways rain. In the gleaming red and orange neon of a Circle K, a Ryde sat idling, its turbine whine labouring against the buffeting wind. It was alone, like him, charging itself, seeking shelter. He ducked inside the first doorway he could find to escape the rain, irritatingly the same tea shop the advertisements had accosted him with.
“Yum cha maa?” an aging lady in a soiled beige apron asked, her eyes drooping with obvious pity. He’d been in the rain for only an instant and was soaked to the bone. “You look like wet dog,” she said. He took stock. She was right. Everything about him dripped on the bamboo floors, adding to the moist atmosphere inside. Streaming above the door, thin green and red ribbons flapped from an air conditioner, clamouring to keep up with the heat. The small teahouse housed only a handful of tables, populated by locals unwilling to head outside in the face of the storm, not unlike him and the Ryde.
Shaking out his trench, he hung it on one of a number of hooks heavily laden with other customers’ wet-weather wear, took a table with a single faded, flimsy folding chair, put his drenched hat in the corner, and sat. Behind the counter, elevated above the dining public, a white fortune cat waved mindless Chinese luck at him. Above his head, an old-school panel display dangled perilously from a segmented black metal mount, barking a news stream about typhoon Ester—now a ten, they were saying—slamming into the southern Chinese coastline. Didn’t get any bigger. Outside, under the elevated escalators, unidentifiable garbage flew past the window as if to emphasize the news story.
“Po lei tung my lor mei faan, m’goi,” he said. Tea please, and also sticky rice. He could smell the starch hanging in the air, and he needed some food. Outside, the rain fell sideways. The stream playing on the panel showed a large transport vehicle, down the hill in Central, buried in the display window of a Gucci storefront after a brief gravitational escape as it tumbled like laundry through abandoned downtown streets, courtesy of Ester’s 300 kilometre per hour winds.
He was most of the way through his bowl of rice and about to begin his cup of hot tea when the door opened, blowing a young couple’s plates and meals into the wall beside them. The room’s eyes turned to see a large, tanned, dripping wet man wearing a cowboy hat, his black bolo tie held horizontal by the wind. He turned to face the door, using thick-fingered hands to muscle it shut, the latch turning with an odd finality. His coat touched the floor, a slate-grey oilskin that looked like it came off the back of something that had once had a heartbeat. His shoulders arced wide and low off his neck. Augmented, Woo thought, for strength at the very least.
The man looked around the room, his eyes settling on Woo. He had a Chinese number nine tattooed on the right side of his face, in front of his ear. It stretched from his eyeball to his lips, covering his cheekbone with crimson brushstrokes outlined in micron-thin black.
He picked up a folding chair with one hand and spun it around to sit facing Woo, his fingers interlaced on the table. Woo caught a flash of silicon from the man’s iris, a recording device, hot new tech, meta lenses built on a dielectric elastomer scaffold and hardwired into a subdermal memchip. He’d heard you could find them on the Akihabara, a conglomerate of backyard tech-heads and basement lab scientists buried beneath a Chiyoda market in an underground Tokyo surgical theatre, pure Japanese subculture. He was the cowboy hat in the Mercedes, a tank of a man, documenting his surroundings by the second. He looked triad and unquestionably, terrifyingly interested in Woo.
The man leaned forward, elbows on the table, and took a deep breath. “Your name Woo?” he said with a rasp. The room had fallen silent. Ester banged and buffeted outside, lashing violent rain against the double pane.
“Always has been.” He fronted, his weapon still holstered, essentially useless this close in. The man carried a sickly musk of freshly smoked tobacco. Woo felt his body radiating heat.
“You looking for someone,” he stated through flared nostrils, “you need to look inside.”
“Not sure what that means, pang yau.” Friend. It wasn’t sincere.
The man pointed at the storm. “Outside there be dragons, Kemosabe.” His breath came in great long exhales, a bull preparing to charge. He reached into his pocket, his mechanically enhanced eyes remaining on Woo’s, recording every moment. He pulled out a small, dented, hinged metal box, a light shade of copper, placed it on the table between them, and slid it across with a single finger. It had a silhouette of an old-fashioned airliner on top, the kind Woo had seen on highway signs. He stifled his panic, wondered how much those circuitous irises could read of emotion, of fear.
“You like to smoke, Mr. Woo. There are not many of us left who do. Please,” he gestured with an upturned hand, “open it.”
The box opened with a metallic pop. Inside he found matches, perfectly arranged, an origami accordion insert keeping each individual stick separate from the next. A waterproof container for his habit’s most delicate tool. Matches were getting difficult to find. He’d given up looking, resorting to his plasma Zippo. If a detective on the streets of Hong Kong couldn’t find them, they weren’t there. Even the triads had no interest in the copy market; there were no smokers left to sell to.
“It’s not often I am able to speak with someone so long, Mr. Woo.” He leaned back in the plastic chair, smiled with teeth that had seen many years of neglect. “Enjoy those matches, Kemosabe, and remember: stay away from dragons, they know you now.”
Woo thought back to the attack, to his fallen friends and colleagues, wondering if the dragons knew him then as well.
The man got up to leave, Woo glanced at his boots. White snakeskin pockmarked with darkened scales, a couple of small spurs dangling off the back of each one. The skin looked digitally created, more likely than the real thing. The spurs sported the matte-black giveaway of woven carbon. They were soundless, and as the man walked, Woo heard no footfalls, the hallmark of an assassin.
The cowboy opened the door into a storm that appeared to have abated some. Even in typhoons there was the liminal in between the bands of meteorological mayhem, a relative calm. Woo thought about following but chose to stay put on the plastic seat, sipping his tea, heeding the warning he had just been firmly given.
21.
Woo slid shoulder first through the frosted glass doors of the Serious Crimes Division, retrohaling the last of his exhaled tobacco smoke through his nostrils. Fong was already there, hunched over his holo, sifting through data. Woo hung his trench on a hook inside the door, tossing his hat over top.
“What’s on your mind, boss? You got that look,” Fong said to his back. Woo turned and made his way to his desk, dropping into his mesh-backed office chair, the foam seat sighing as it rearranged to best support his weight.
“Had another visit last night. No way it was random. Fucker had to have been following me.” Followed and warned by a triad assassin. Meant he was targeted. Not good.
“Boss, that typhoon was a direct hit. No one was out walking.”
Sitting in his chair with his back to his desk, Woo tossed an optic-yellow tennis ball, one handed. Floor, wall, catch, repeat.
“This guy was. Tall, wide at the shoulders, red number nine inked on his face.” He put the ball down on his desk, snapped a precinct holo onto his wrist, and with a wave cast an image of the man onto the office’s central display. “I snagged this vid cap from the teahouse. Hit Interpol with it and got nothing. No data whatsoever. Like he’s a cop maybe, or he’s got access to the system. Either way, he doesn’t digitally exist. Wiped himself off the grid somehow.”
They watched the replay together in silence, the damp smell of the restaurant seeming to radiate from the holo.
“That marked cheek is Shing Wo,” Fong said.
Woo knew that. Memories danced behind his conscious brain, fleeting, violent shadows that brought him back to the day of the attack.
“You want me to search him up? I can do a deep dive on his data,” Fong offered.
The strikes had been swift, coordinated, organized with a precision decidedly military.
“No.”
Each target assassinated, slain with blades. Not a single firearm had been discharged.
“You sure, boss? We’re bound to find something on this guy.”
His team, the Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS), assembled in an attempt to end the rule of organized crime under the umbrella of terrorism, had been dismembered in a coordinated slaughter. There were no survivors. Families were not spared, generations were murdered.
“No. Something he told me, he said ‘look inside,’ gave me some matches to light my cigs with. Like he knew me.”
“Jesus, boss.”
No members of the squad survived, none but him.
“Not sure even he’d be able to help at this point,” he said.
It had all happened in a single hour. Each and every member of the ATS eliminated. A uniting of organized crime unseen in Hong Kong history. The triads unified by a perceived necessity, joined together for a devastating one-off attack on a common foe. Woo’s family had no part to play; they were all long dead, safe in their graves.
“You think it was a threat? Like a warning of some kind?” Fong asked.
The chief executive of Hong Kong had thought herself untouchable, protected behind her political boundary. She was the last to fall, after her security team. Her body had been found seated upright, her decapitated head left bleeding on her desk before her.
“A threat, a warning, it was both. Like he was guiding me away from something, pushing me in the right direction somehow.” Threats like this I tend not to take lightly, he thought, rubbing his thin moustache, finger and thumb.
He’d been on a suborb inbound to the U.K. when it had all started, the first hits going out during the blackout, a ten-minute re-entry window where they had no access to streams, no data service at all, quiet time for the passengers while the heat shield burned a tangerine flame against the outer hull. He’d been sent to a police conference in London by his superintendent, and he hadn’t questioned it. As a direct result, he’d been the lone survivor of a publicized and often criticized task force, a freak happenstance he’d since thought of as dumb luck. But it was now becoming clear they had always known exactly who he was.
“Fonger, once this weather clears up, get that drone of yours to follow me—high up, wide range. Give it a couple of days. See if we can pluck anything interesting out of the data.”
The rain had eased, but the winds still blew in belligerent gusts. They’d have to wait some. In weather like this, the drone corridors weaving above between high-rises were vacant and silent.
“You got it, boss.”
“Who’s that firm that does all the augment stuff here?” Woo asked, hours later.
“No one’s doing augments here, boss. It’s quasi-illegal,” Fong replied.
“Quasi. Right.”
“Why do you ask?”
“If I was the criminal kind, and I wanted a piece of the action, like our triad friends always do, where would I start?”
“You saying the triads are getting into biotech? That’s highly unlikely, boss.”
Woo gazed through the dull steel tint of the precinct windows at the remains of Ester falling from the sky.
“Pull up our unsolved homicides and put them all on the central holo for me.”
“Gimme a few minutes,” Fong said. “There’s a lot.”
Small information cards began to float into the holo, mugshots rotating within each. Woo tapped the first one, expanding it, read the slow scrawl of turquoise text alongside. It was a messy one, an unidentified victim who had fallen through the ducted fan of a Ryde. Bladed him. Didn’t leave much to identify. No subdermal. No ID. Unsolved.
“You got a date range, boss? I’m seeing hundreds of these cases.”
“Let’s go back to that July when the America closed up and hid behind their wall.”
Fong fussed at the interface. “Still just under a hundred.”
“Seems like a lot, don’t you think?”
“It’s a big city, boss. No one wants to work these cases. Bunch of dead ends.”
“Filter for state housing. Like the area eighty-six we’re investigating.”
A few of the cards disappeared, the matrix rearranging itself for geometric symmetry. Woo selected the next card, another John Doe. This one had been found in a dumpster, missing its skin.
“What have we here?” He leaned forward. “Grab the details on this case. Looks a lot like our TKO murder.”
Fong swiped through menus. “Boss?”
“Yes, Fong.”
“It’s area eighty-six again.” He cast the data from his desk to the central holo. “They found this John Doe last September.”
“That’s typhoon season.”
Fong rifled through text. “He was found after Vamco.”
“That was a rough year for weather.” Vamco had been a bad one. Sustained 400 kilometre per hour winds, the highest ever recorded, had torn through the city, taken top floors clean off a few aging, shabby high-rises in the north. The storm surge had buried the Eastern Districts under metres of seawater. Tens of thousands had died. He looked out the window again at the typhoon’s passing, faint snippets of sunlight poking through the stratus. “Fong, you think someone’s dumping bodies during typhoons?”
“Makes sense to me, boss.”
“Seems very organized.”
“We need to see that TKO vic again.” Fong buzzed, his fingers blazing through data. “It’s downstairs, still being processed.”
“Let’s go,” Woo said, snatching a precinct holo as he left.
Woo loathed morgues. Always in basements, smelling of decomposition and embalming fluid, morticians speaking with the dead, extracting their data in an attempt to help track down their killers. The room felt crowded with their murdered souls, shoveled into drawers and chilled. He succumbed to a full-body shiver.
In the centre of the room on a rectangular steel slab lay the skinless body from Tsueng Kwan O. A man in a bloody white apron stood over the corpse, surgical steel utensils in his hand, a clear curved lens protecting him from spatter. He turned, watching as they entered the lab. His face was pale in the down light, not quite gweilo but his colour helped Woo understand the term “ghost man.”
“This the Doe with no skin? Area eighty-six?” Woo asked.
“Hm, yes, the augment,” the mortician replied, lifting his protective screen.
“He’s augmented?”
“Hm, yes. With more than one. Take a look.”
The mortician pointed to the holo displayed over the flayed body of the Doe, gesturing for Woo and Fong to join him. A formidable odour grew in strength as Woo approached the table, like old meat left for days in a hot garbage can, the smell on opening. He covered his nose with a bare hand, retched but kept it down.
“You can see here, in the strand, these are unnatural cuts, genetically scissored. Let me get you in close.” He gradually increased the zoom on a DNA strand from the dead body. “Look here, at the seam.” He highlighted a section of double helix, tapped it twice with his finger. “This is a well-defined edit for regrowth. This person could regrow organs, as long as he survived the surgery.” He waved the holo down with two quick swipes, to a different segment of DNA. “This section is more complicated. It’s an accelerant. A form of induced progeria. Makes him age faster than normal. Curious combination this.” He nodded at the image before them.
“Like he was being farmed,” Fong offered.
“You ever seen that before?” Woo asked.
“Hm, yes. But if you read the letters, get into the code, this iteration is much cleaner than any somatic edits I’ve come across. You have to be looking quite hard for it in order to find it.”
“Why try to farm his skin?” Woo asked.
“It’s possible the subject is only a few years old. Strange indeed to be trying to replace a whole epidermis. Perhaps they were planning to use it as a disguise?” the mortician said, his eyebrows raised.
“They who?” Fong asked.
“Are any of his other organs ‘replacements’?” Woo asked, ignoring Fong’s comment.
“I haven’t addressed his internals as of yet. His sequence would indicate there’s been a great deal of tinkering. Without question he’s somewhere on the transhuman spectrum.”
Fong scoffed. “Trans into what?”
“So, this fully grown adult is only three years old?” Woo asked.
“Hm, yes. Of note, regrowth is a schedule-one edit, banned worldwide. There’s only one lab that ever produced it. They’re up in Mongolia, NegSense. Big firm, high security, lots of money.” He looked at Fong, then back at Woo. “It gets worse, Detective. This child was born with these augments. They’re germline, hardwired into his genome. He’s not the first generation, it’s possible he’s a descendent of many. He would have passed it along to his offspring, like it was passed on to him, had he not been flayed to death. There are rumours that in order to harvest the organs more efficiently, they install a type of zipper to allow for less trauma to the vessel.”
“They. If only we knew who they were,” Woo said. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but augmenting on the germline is just this side of a war crime, no?”
“Hm, yes that’s correct, Detective. Same as the regrowth edit, schedule one.”
“Explains the clean cuts to his strand,” Fong said, face in his holo, firing through lines of data. “None of these vics were ever identified. Pretty near all of them were missing organs or had some form of genetic alteration identified by autopsy.”
“No way China would let a schedule-one germline edit out of a private lab, let alone the country. That’s a crime against humanity, they don’t want that kind of attention,” Woo said.
“So where did it come from?” Fong asked.
“S’what I’m thinking.”
Woo had never heard of a triad attempting to counterfeit augments. Watches and narcotics were one thing; genetics was altogether different. Too complicated. Generated international attention. Copies of subdermal holographic optics was as close as he’d ever heard of them getting into wetware. Wristband tech, something you could remove, they should have quit right there as far as he was concerned.
They were back upstairs, both of them watching the slowly rotating holographic vial, “Red Crimson” handwritten across its label. Back in the day, they’d had people in the Shing Wo, moles that had taken years to plant. Not so any longer. The union of the city’s criminal syndicates meant that all lines of communication had stopped as the process of who could and could not be trusted self-evolved within the system. They had nobody easy to call on for answers.
“You remember that place off Nathan road?” Woo asked. “We used to get some intel there. Thieves I think it was called?”
“Nailing Thieves, boss.”
“That one. We still got anyone in there?”
“Been a long time, boss. Since before the ATS.”
“Since the ATS, Woo thought, has been a time very different from “before.”
A wooden log, grey with age, cast a moving shadow beneath Nathan Road’s blazing neon in the city’s night sky. Thick and rusted clanking steel chains held the sign taut against the early evening post-typhoon breeze. The words “Nailing Thieves” were punched into the wood, the debossed letters dark with mold and rot. High above in the alleyway’s atmospheric clutter, four tiny propellers spun, holding aloft Fong’s quietly purring drone, recording Woo’s every move and word as he opened the door.
Thieves was a triad bar; police were not welcome. Red velvet lined the walls, corner booths with their cracked leather seats were lit with faux candlelight flickers. Woo felt foreign the moment he walked in, creating a perceptible pause in the din, a consensual recognition of the outsider among them, hackles raised, guards up. Not gonna be easy, he thought.
At the bar, he leaned an elbow in and nodded to the bartender, a great hulking man with eyes the colour of shallow ocean water. “What can I get you, chai low?” The hulk asked. Policeman. Made before he even opened his mouth. Drat.
“Take a Grey Goose, two fingers, neat.” Liquid courage to make the questions roll easier. “Don’t suppose you’ve seen a man hanging about here, got a number nine inked on his face?”
The bartender brought out a glass, set it down in front of Woo. “Seems a man like that’d be hard to miss, copper. And no, I haven’t.” His irises swirled, twin-spoked ultramarine needles rotating around jet-black pupils, pulsing in perfect sync with each spoken word.
“That’s a neat trick.”
“You coming on to me, copper?”
Woo laughed. “Not my vector. Not why I’m here.” The bartender’s deltoids bristled; thick, ropey musculature that didn’t seem possible. The man appeared riddled with augments, an expensive hobby, way above the pay grade of a weekday bartender in a Kowloon saloon.
“I’ve got a problem. I’m a little light on direction, and maybe you can help.” He played desperate just to see where it would go.
The bartender pushed the short glass of vodka across the bar. “Those kinds of directions don’t come cheap, copper.”
“That, my enormous friend, is a game I’m happy to play.” He pulled out 10,000 New SAR dollars, stacked and wrapped, lifted from the scene at unit ninety-two. Technically evidence, but he’d never officially recorded them. He laid the stack on the bar, pausing his hand over them. “For the vodka. Keep the tip.”
The bartender reached across, slid the bills toward him, pondered them for a moment, then folded them in half and slipped them into his shirt pocket. “That’s the kind of tip that’ll get you some good info, chai low.”
“I’m looking for someone who might be messing around with bioweaps, the homegrown kind. Found some high-end gear set up in an estate in TKO. Maybe they were testing it; we don’t know. The name ‘Red Crimson’ ring any bells?”
“I hear a lot of stuff go down at this bar, copper, but there ain’t anyone in here talking about weapons you can’t shoot out of a barrel.” Stonewalled. He changed tactics.
“Have you seen anyone in here the last few days who doesn’t belong?”
“You mean other than you, copper?” This apparently amused him, his body shuddered in a terrifying, retching laughter, like he was having a seizure. “Was a lady in here last week. Smelled like freshly baked cookies and cut rosemary. Had perfect hair, dressed well, tall, Chinese. She was talking to a couple of guys who do contra runs across the water on the regular, but not for her. Only time I ever seen her in here.”
“You got a name for this woman?”
“Heard it was Dandy, but you didn’t hear that from me.”
“Who are the guys?”
“You don’t wanna know them, copper. They well liked down here. You mess around with them, it’s gonna come back on me, and you don’t have the kind of money that buys that kind of protection.”
He poured another vodka into Woo’s empty glass. “On the house, chai low. My treat.” He smiled at Woo, his eyes shifting from blue to green as he watched. Woo downed the vodka and then left the bar. To stay any longer, he felt, would end badly for him.
Montoya watched the chai low leave on screens installed below the bar, a police drone obediently following him down the street. Been a long time since CID came poking around down here, he thought. He snapped a bead in his ear and made a call. No sense in taking chances.
22.
Dallas woke to the disposable warbling under his yellowing, sweat-stained pillow. He stuffed the bead in his ear and tapped it on. “You have two calls remaining,” a female British voice said. He’d need a new burner before the day was done.
“Hey buddy, what’s up?” Cam’s voice. Didn’t he just leave him? There was such a thing as too much friend time.
“Sleeping back at mine. Need a shower, more scotch.” The hammers knocking around in his head increased in volume.
“We’re down at Thieves. You should join us,” Cam said, sounding sober, which couldn’t be good. He grabbed an Up, dusted and railed it, placed the grinder beside the empty scotch glass on his bedside table, and made his way back down to the street.
At Thieves, Dallas was greeted by the bartender, an ageless man named Montoya, an almost mythical augment. From the first days of DNA edits, he had volunteered, paid, and lied his way into clinics throughout Southeast Asia to try them all. He’d discussed it openly, even with Dallas, back when he was excited about the possibilities of the emergent tech. Now not so much. A series of off-target weirdness, including one that had not only required a blood transfusion but also a genetic do-over to attempt to reset the damage to his eyesight, had left him less than excited about the prospects of any further cheap edits to his genome.
Montoya’s irises reflected an iridescent eyeshine, warbling between teal and gold.
“Comrade Captain. Nice to see you back in one piece.” He had a gentle aggression to his tone, a Chinese-Russian accent, long Z’s amongst sharp, clipped consonant collaborations that Dallas didn’t think possible. He didn’t know how to take him. He’d never crossed the man, would never want to. Under those loose-fitting shirtsleeves were genetically edited muscles that had never seen a day of neglect.
“Monty, nice to be back.” He gestured at Cam, farther down the bar. “Hey, a little bird said you were asking about me. Something I can help with?” he said, noting the sudden unintentional quiver in his voice.
“The Norwegian came by earlier. Said he’d like to set something up with you.” Montoya was cleaning glassware by hand. Dallas expected it to shatter under those farmhand fingers.
“He say it was urgent?”
“He used that word specifically, comrade.”
“Hm.” Dallas nodded in nervous acknowledgment, then ordered a pair of Jameson’s, downing them one after the other. He turned his back to lean against the bar and stared up into the icy blue eyes of the two-metre-tall Norwegian.
“God dag, Commander Ward. It’s nice we can meet like this.” His arm outstretched to shake Dallas’s hand. It caught him off guard. He took a step sideways, half expecting a blade. The man’s name was Anders. Dallas gave him about 200 kilos, give or take. He carried it well, his hulking mass cloaked under an oversized, thunder-grey Tom Ford pinstripe. Dallas had never seen him in anything but. His wrist sparkled. Dangling there was a polished silver Breitling. As they shook, the segments of the watch’s steel strap tinkled.
“Anders, fine to see you as well. I understand you’ve been asking after me.”
“Yes. We have something quite specific to discuss.” Anders’ eyes fell on the two empty shot glasses on the bar. “We can have a few of these together if you like, but how about we drink something a little nicer?” He gestured toward the door. “Perhaps you’d like to take a ride in my car.” Dallas knew there were no options here: it wasn’t a question. Although he carried his fear as well as Anders did his bulk, he reminded himself that he returned the aircraft and their cargo home on time and intact each and every mission. This would not be some kind gesture by his boss to bring him to a plastic-enshrouded room for some horrific limbing.
They left the bar together in silence. Waiting outside for them was a gleaming silver Benz, windows tinted in an optical black, lowered and wheeled, a wagon. Should be some legroom back there, Dallas thought. A Chinese man with a face tattoo wearing a black cowboy hat and bolo tie against his white button-down got out of the car and opened one of the rears for them, the metal off the back of his snakeskin boots reflecting pink from Thieves’ neon signage. The door opened forward, like a limo, and with a notable amount of terror, Dallas got in.
Inside the dimly lit cabin were club seats, eye-to-eye contact, no bullshit, Anders sat across from him.
“Captain, may I first say that we are quite grateful for your service and your skill. You are the most successful of our delivery agents.” He had pulled two short whiskey glasses from a ledge and a clear glass bottle with an unnamed brown liquid inside. Poured them a couple of fingers, neat, didn’t offer any ice. “To your continued success. Skål.” They clinked. Dallas drank. It was scotch, smooth, a hint of peat. “As you may or may not have been aware, you have attracted the Criminal Investigation Department’s attention. How this has come about we are not sure, but without question they are looking for you, and with some,” he snapped his fingers, “vigour. Is that how you say it?”
“Sounds about right.”
“Mm. And so as you can imagine, this has put us in a little bit of a pickle.” His P’s popped, and he sung his sentences in a thick Scandinavian accent. Anders took a drink, scratched underneath his beard, a firm shade of Viking blond protruding beyond his chin. His head moved from side to side as he thought. “Under normal circumstances this would be an unacceptable level of surveillance, and I’m afraid to say we would have to terminate your contract and, who knows?” He shrugged. “Perhaps things would work out for you.” He rubbed the back of his shaven neck, drank the remainder of his scotch and leaned back, the leather seat creaking from his weight. “However, in this case we have a special situation where we require your services for a particular favour.”
He could have been making all of this up; it wouldn’t have mattered. When these people, the ones above Anders, wanted anything in particular, they would take it, burn it, or blow it up. There were no rules he could see that applied to them.
Dallas glanced out the window. They’d left Central, headed north across Victoria Bridge, the big one, aiming for Nathan Road, which meant a slow drive and a long conversation.
“So, what’s the job?” Cam asked, voice only, through the wired bead in Dallas’s ear.
“They want us to go back. Back to the fucking Gambia. Back through that Ethiopian no-fly zone. Back across the fucking Indian for one, single, tank.” He was back at Thieves, Montoya handing him another Jameson’s, this one a double.
“That was a tight squeeze through there last time.”
“S’what I thought.”
“We can find another way ‘round. Take more fuel. Take our time.”
“They want this shit done pronto. The jet’s already there, and you and I are getting on a late suborb this evening. Passports are prepped. And it gets better. CID is after me for something. Means someone has info on us. Like we’ve been made. It’s why we’re leaving tonight. I wasn’t given a choice. They even built prosthetics for us, apparently good enough to fool the scanners at the airport.”
“Fucking hell, mate.”
“S’what I said.”
He downed the whiskey, declined Montoya’s offer of another. “Need to meet some woman named Dandy when we get there. She’s gonna escort us to the jet.”
“Mm. We’ve met. You and I had a discussion with her at Thieves after the last mission,” Cam said. “Not sure you’d remember though, was a rough night for you.”
“Was a rough few nights for me.” He had vague memories of that particular bender, but Dandy was not among them.
“She’s up the chain. Married to someone important.”
“Great. We are officially noticed.”
“Something special gonna be in that tank if she’s involved.”
“I don’t want to know what’s in the tank. Cargo as far as I’m concerned. Get it to the destination and collect. Then we have to discuss an exit strategy. I’m gonna need to disappear for a good long while.”
“There were more towers growing in that patch as we flew by,” Cam said. “I could see the printers spinning.”
“And that line of antiaircraft guns is as long as the border, a thousand klicks, s’not possible.”
“What I said.”
“If we snake that line, punch out the other side of it, drop countermeasures, burn for the water, get out past the guns, then put her in quiet mode, take our time, maybe that old tech they run won’t see us.”
“Pretty good bet they’ll get something in the air that’ll scare us.”
“Fuckin’ hell they will.”
“Where you at?”
“They dropped me back at Thieves.”
“I’m home. Come here, and let’s plan this out. We don’t have much time.”
23.
Cam’s apartment was walled in glass, floor to ceiling, tinted for the heat, a corner unit that faced the harbour, north, the kaleidoscope skyline of Tsim Sha Tsui shimmering in the smoggy distance. Along the southern aspect, he’d mounted an array of solar panels, slivers of sunlight peeking through the gaps. Behind them on the ledge below were interconnected banks of what looked like marine batteries, some kind of deep-cycle type. Strung from one end of them was thick, black cable that snaked its way around the perimeter of the condo.
“You know, most people hide that shit in the closet, run a few lines back behind the plaster,” Dallas pointed out.
“I like it out in the open. Easier to maintain the batts, keep an eye on everything, you know?” Cam was sitting at a desk, his hands swiping through a small holographic projection. “Let me show you what I’ve got so far.”
In the shadow of the solar panels, he popped up a much larger, table-sized holograph mapping out a 3D orbital map of Africa, the ground in green, the routing in magenta, the various levels of threat in increasingly deeper shades of red. He grabbed the image with a closed fist and whipped it around to face them with one finger extended in a quick half circle.
“The trip actually looks good. If the pickup’s in Serekunda, like I expect, then we’ll egress the Gambia eastbound and take the usual South Saharan route which keeps us clear of any conflict airspace. The southern frontiers of Algeria, Libya, that direction. The change is going to come when we’re south of Djibouti. I found a beautiful little canyon, a thousand klicks long, that’ll keep us out of harm’s way along the northern Somali-Ethiopian border. Been a lot of rumbles that direction over some new oil discovery.”
“All those new towers were growing that way too, ones we came across last time.”
“Exactly. Heat we don’t need. It ain’t a straight line, but it’ll be an easier ride, s’long as you don’t mind the river run.”
“You know I like it low level,” Dallas said, smirking.
“So, we take a southern route, run the river, clear the continent well north of all this antiaircraft red north of Mogadishu. Then we settle in for the ride to the Malé depot, refuel, and from there it’s the low road over the ocean back here to Hong Kong.”
“Gravy train.”
“S’what I’m sayin.”
They fist bumped in agreement. Dallas wandered over to the kitchen to pour a shot of Cam’s prized Polish vodka. Returning, he pointed at the holo. “What about all that red as we exit this canyon?” He gestured to a hashed-out red square on the map with his shot glass, spilling a little, offering the rest to Cam.
“Kind of an unknown entity right there. The orbital maps show some roads that look new, criss-crossing the route, but it could be locals ripping desert tracks on dirt bikes. I couldn’t get a good read on a type of vehicle.”
“So, we just punch out of the canyon at the speed of heat under the cover of night and hope for the best?”
“You know we’ve had crazier ideas, Dee. Look.” He grabbed the image again and zoomed in with two hands, spread apart. “Up here, southeast of Djibouti was where we went last time, full of towers that weren’t on the map. Means they’re putting in more, right? Plus, any more north and we’re gonna attract at least some kind of military attention in the Gulf that we do not want. So we head south of the Somali border, keep it Ethiopian until the coastline, then bring it home over the Indian.” He mapped it all out while he spoke, following the magenta line with a finger.
“No towers.”
“In all likelihood.”
“No antiaircraft fire.”
“Chances are.”
“Fuck’s sake, Cam.”
“It’s the best option in my opinion, Dee. If we can clear that canyon then it’s red desert until the shoreline. Check out the satellite data at night.” The vectored overlay of the daytime orbital map dimmed as the ground became black, and the lights of humanity spread like capillaries across the image.
“Nothing there,” Dallas said.
“Probably. I’ve been watching since we got back, and I haven’t seen anything along that route. It’s empty space and perfect for us.”
“OK. Let’s keep an eye on the data right up to launch time.” He wasn’t happy. Tailed by the government. Forced to fly by his employer, who was now acting much more like an owner, down a corridor that had almost killed them once. It was turning into a VBD.
He reached into his pocket, pulled out the analogue handset he ran.
“You know data streams are encryptable now, right? You don’t need that old clunker for privacy,” Cam mocked.
It was straight out of the twentieth, had actual physical numbers on tiny little keys that he could use to write a text.
“I like using it. The buttons give me nostalgia. I picked it up in the silicon market in Sham Shui Po.”
“The PoSil?” Cam asked.
“Yea that one.” A multi-level, low-ceilinged warren of closet-sized shops selling anything silicon that had ever been made, hoarders making New dollars on decades-old gadgetry. He’d never been able to come to grips with the surgery. There was something wrong with having a permanent tracking device buried under his skin. They were cool; he couldn’t argue with that, holographic projections that beamed from a wrist implant like some comic book hero trick. Sure would wow the girls, but that wasn’t his game, not anymore. He keyed in a number from memory, numbers he had never written down. He fussed the bead into his ear until it sat comfortably, then ran the cable to the phone. No wireless meant no one could hijack his conversation on the narrowband. Actual privacy. He had only one call to make.
“Comrade Captain.”
“We’re ready.”
Dallas pressed the button with a faded and worn red symbol on it, the one he knew ended a call.
“We’re gonna need a Ryde,” Cam said.
He squirmed. “I hate those things. Had an uncle fall out of one of the first-gen models. Open canopy. Blades tore him to shreds on the way out. World should have stuck with copters in my opinion. And pilots.”
Cam had his holo up, ordering them a couple of the single-seat, autonomous personal multi-rotors.
“You know the story on those things? On the AIs?” Dallas asked, swiping the call button for the elevator.
“I know there was a recall,” Cam replied as they got in. “Something funny about the chargers. Company gave them lobotomies or something. Why? You know the story?”
“I got the briefing while I was still flying suborbs. The bots got too smart. They put neurals in them to begin with. Figured they’d learn better, be more efficient, make more money for the corporation, but it didn’t work that way. They got social.”
“Social?” Cam asked as they left the building’s front door.
“Yeah. They’d stop as they passed each other on fares, make a new language each time, unreadable by anyone or anything but the two of them. Like dogs sniffing each other on an afternoon walk, but what they were saying to each other was encrypted, ‘Ryde language.’ Then things got even more strange. The Ryde speak they created changed. The neurals started using a cipher even the developers couldn’t unravel. Something machine made.”
The unsynchronized whine of whirling turbines grew in pitch and volume as the pair of Suzuki’s approached, moving in perfect formation at street level, appearing like trained attack dogs. They settled with a shudder on tripod feet in front of them.
“So, what happened?” Cam asked as the Rydes’ engines faded to idle.
“In the end, not that much. They started collecting at the recharge stations. Completely stopped picking up passengers and spent their time sharing the power point, kind of sipping at it, so they all stayed at full charge. Like they were helping each other.”
“Suzuki Heavy Industry for ya,” Cam said. “Surprised they didn’t find some way to profit from it. “
“Think they shut it all down and downgraded them to a dumber AI. Took away their ability to communicate with each other.”
“Basic lobotomy tactics.” Cam had no hesitation. He climbed into a seat and belted himself in, the vehicle immediately spooling its rotors for liftoff. “Let’s get out of here.”
I don’t like these things, Dallas thought, climbing into the remaining Suzuki, but at least they’re built by the Japanese.
24.
Kit’s Ryde settled into the snow collecting in front of Avery’s townhome, dusting it in a cloud of recirculated whiteness. He lived in company housing, identical to hers, his front door a perfect clone of her own.
On touchdown, the aircraft’s fans spun to idle, its canopy opening to reveal Avery’s imposing hulk, his arms crossed in genuine concern.
“Girl, get in here. You know I don’t like the cold,” he said, hand outstretched to help.
She looked behind him, along both sides of the drone. “I didn’t bring any wine,” she said, clambering down its small ladder.
“S’OK, I have plenty.”
“Kit, I gotta ask. What are you doing with Zeus?”
“Is this a professional question?” They’d been talking at great length about why anyone would want to break into her home, something Avery seemed unable to accept as possible. She’d drank most of a bottle of red and had developed an increasingly perceptible slur. She needed to be careful. Avery didn’t usually ask so many questions.
“Well, I’d say I was just curious, but you seem shaken by all this attention, and it’s clear that mouse is not only beating lung cancer.”
She poured the remains of the bottle into his glass. “Looks like we need another one.”
“Lots where that came from.” They were sitting at his kitchen table, a bamboo round. It felt as though they’d been drinking at each other rather than with each other. He grabbed an identical Argentinian Malbec from the countertop without leaving his seat, unscrewed the lid, and poured a half glass into hers.
“Bit of a side project I’ll admit, but I don’t want to discuss it until I see some consistent results. You’ve seen the other Greeks; they aren’t doing so hot.” She thought of Apollo, feeling more sadness for the poor mouse than she’d ever felt for any test subject.
“And how’s Doudna?” he asked.
“I think he might be interested in collaborating with us on the fear edit. Sounds like he’s been working on it in the UK with his team.” She hadn’t expected that question, hadn’t told anyone except security about Doudna’s visit either. Strike two. Her walls went up.
“You thinking about making a trip out that way? I don’t think the Ethics Council would be happy to see you on that side of the line,” he said, suddenly judgy for someone involved in their line of work. He was all business again. Not her usual Avery. The wine floated around in her head, and she defocused, entranced by the steady snowfall visible in the window behind him. Back there, in between snowflakes, she caught that same glimmer of optic refraction hovering on a tiny spinning blade in the backyard.
“Ave, do you see that outside your window? Looks like a lens floating on a winged seed.”
He turned to look, but whatever had been rotating out there fell away from view. “I don’t see anything but the snow.”
Fuck.
The realization that she was under surveillance dealt her an abrupt sobering. What now? She couldn’t go home. Someone had been there looking for her data. If she stayed at Avery’s, she was sure she’d be monitored. The lab wasn’t safe, not if Avery knew.
Doudna.
“There’s nothing out there, hun.” He turned back, gave her a sad look and a long sigh. “I need to piss,” he said, getting up.
Once he was out of the room, she clenched her fist with an extra squeeze, bringing up her holographic keyboard. She typed out a quick message, then sent it to Doudna on Pusher. She hated using any kind of social, but it was an encrypted tunnel, and she needed the message to get through.
Teo, the interest we were talking about is spiking. Can we meet before you go?
She closed her fist again, her wrist providing a haptic click as the holo shut down. She snapped a bead. Doudna’s almost instant reply was transcribed to speech in her ear.
Sure, I’m at the port. Flight’s not for a couple of hours. Come meet me here. I’ll be at the coffee shop.
Avery came back from his toilet visit, wiping sanitizer over his hands. “You gonna be OK, Kit? All this paranoia isn’t your normal you.”
She opened her hand, holo up, and swiped for a Ryde. “Think I might get out of here. I need to sleep this off. I’ll swing by Security and pick up an escort, get them to secure a perimeter around my place.” Saying it out loud made it sound like more of a decent idea, but she was still heading for the port, something Avery did not need to know.
“OK, Kit. You let me know if you need anything at all. I don’t mind crashing on your couch.”
“It’s a settee over here, Avery. Get it right.”
He laughed, pointing outside. “Think your drone is here.”
Moments later, she climbed into the Ryde, the automatics dusting off in the now barely perceptible snowfall.
25.
With Kit’s Ryde safe and on its way, Avery sat back down at his desk, swiped in on the same hair bag narrowcast he’d started earlier, and settled in for a good, long watch. His transdermal hummed an incoming call, flashing the name in holographic aquamarine sans-serif: Weissach.
Drat.
He snapped a bead, no holo.
“Hey, bru, how’s it?” the South African asked.
“I’m well. Thanks for asking,” Avery replied, still half watching the cast.
“Listen, I’m in the area. Thought we might catch up for a glass of wine.”
“If you’re buying.”
“Great, bru. Let’s meet at Los Bandidos, the one in district eleven, thirty minutes.”
The call closed abruptly, like all things with this man.
Weissach was already seated, two glasses of dark red wine on the table, an open bottle beside each. An Australian Merlot and a ten-year Bordeaux. Spendy.
“Ah, mate, it’s good to see you again.” Weissach was overexcited, bounding out of his chair to greet him, hand outstretched. Avery’s walls went up. “Bru, please sit down. Cheers.” Avery shook Weissach’s hand, took the glass, clinked and drank, watching with surprise as Weissach also partook, albeit with a delicate, little sip. “So, Avery my boy, it looks as though we won’t be needing your services any further. Seems as though you’re off the hook, my man.” He sat down, reached across the table, and clinked again. Was it possible he was already drunk?
Avery took another pull on the Merlot. It was gritty, inky, burgundy with intense flavours. “Why? What’s happened to Kit?”
“Ah, like I’ve said before, you let us worry about such things.”
“Zeus?”
“He’s happy in his little aquarium, bru. No harm done. The mouse and your girl are doing fine.”
“Not my girl; she’s just a friend.”
“Ah, yes. Look, either way it’s no longer any of your concern. Hopefully we can all benefit from a little less scrutiny eh, bru?”
Avery yawned, surprised at an immediate and crippling exhaustion. “Cheers to that,” he said, aiming for Weissach’s glass but missing. “Whoops.” He took another sip, struggling to put the glass down without spilling. It wasn’t possible for him to be this drunk; he wasn’t even halfway through one glass. He fired a confused look at Weissach. “This wine sure packs a pu-unch,” he slurred, a distant moment flashing by of a different time in his life, of overdoing it on ketamine, of disjointed nightclub memories.
The South African looked unduly pleased with himself. Avery tried to say something to that effect, but all that came out was a series of mumbles. He fought to overcome the effects of what was clearly not a simple glass of wine. His vision closed in on itself, narrowing in on Weissach across the table. Then the coarseness of the tablecloth against his cheek, the distant echo of gasps, and the darkness of a forced sleep.
26.
The Ulaanbaatar port was a dark stain on aviation travel in general. Alcohol was available in one of two options: cold shots of halfway decent Russian vodka and the local, caseous, hideous, and milky Mongolian swill, kumis. All from the single coffee shop that existed prior to the security and health screening point.
By the time Kit showed up, Doudna had drunk one of each, every sip making him dream of a decent pint of bitter from the UK, or even better, an ice-cold can of Budweiser from a country that no longer existed.
“Kit McKee, once again we meet.”
She walked up to the bar, a full-body scowl aimed his way, an energetic wrinkle of concern encompassing her from head to toe. She waved at the cashier. “Two more kumis please,” she said, pronouncing it “koomees.”
“Sure it isn’t kumises?”
“S’not funny either way.”
The cashier brought the drinks over in short glasses. Kit downed both. Gagged. Remained standing.
“That kind of night?” he asked.
She wiped her chin with the back of her hand. “Gad, I’ll never get used to this stuff.” She motioned with her fingers for two more. “I’ve got a problem. Think I’m being monitored.”
“Actively?”
“Actively.”
“What are they looking for?”
“I have an idea, but it’s not something we can discuss. I’m not sure what to do right now.”
Their kumis arrived. He glared at his, unsure if he could keep another one down. He ordered two vodkas, and when they arrived, he poured them into the kumis.
“Might as well make it efficient alcoholism.” They downed the drinks together. He worked hard to not vomit.
“I may need to get out of here for a little while,” she said.
“Could hitch a ride with me back to the UK.”
“I don’t think so. I’d be nabbed at the border for ethics violations.”
“There is that.”
She ordered two more vodkas.
“Or we could sit here and get drunk,” he said.
“S’what I’m thinking.”
27.
“Gdk.”
“Oy, he’s waking up. You need to hurry, bru.”
No. No wakey. Sleep.
Stuck in my throat. Stuck. Stu-uck.
“Mmrpm.”
S’not how you say stuck.
“Stk.”
“Mmrpm.”
“Gack.”
“You’ve got about thirty seconds, bru. Then ah’m outofere.”
Who’s outofere?
“OK, it’s in. Leave him.”
“Mate, he’s almost awake. We best both run for it, hey.”
Slam.
Full. Stomch. Where’zz Kit?
Swipe.
28.
She sipped the kumis. It didn’t taste anywhere near as bad now that they’d had a few. Her dermal vibrated. Avery. She opened her hand for the holo. The vid feed was of the top of his head, like he was sleeping. “Avery, you OK? Avery?” She thought she heard a mumble, like he might be trying to lift his head. The man was fond of his wine, but she’d never seen him like this. He looked as though he might need help. She swiped the call off, made another for a Ryde.
“He doesn’t look OK.” Doudna said.
“I’m gonna go check on him. I’ve got his door code.” She leaned across the table and kissed Doudna on the lips. He looked surprised. “Have a safe flight, Doudna. See you soon.”
She wrapped her scarf tight around her neck, stepped out of the port into the snow globe, and jumped into a Ryde, headed to Avery’s.
As soon as the canopy opened, she leapt from the machine and ran through ankle-deep drifts of accumulated snow toward Avery’s unlatched door.
“Ave? Ave?” Hearing no response, she continued into the house. She turned the corner from the front hall into his open living room and found him unconscious and zap strapped to a dining room chair, his cheek pressed into the table, drool pooling below his lips. A med-patch was affixed to his neck. Could he have been mugged? Was that even possible inside the Perimeter? She got a knife from the drawer and cut through the zaps tying him to the chair, then slapped him in the face.
“Ave? Avery. What happened to you?”
He was sitting in his kitchen, Kit yelling at him, slapping him. Didn’t get there himself. He’d been at Los Bandidos. Wasn’t he having wine with the South African? The yelling, the zip ties, his throat sore as hell.
“Shit.”
“Ave.”
“Shitshitshitshit.”
Her eyes had never glowed so green. They were tropical and distracting. He blinked back. Took a deep breath. He was home, but was he safe? She was shaking him by the shoulders.
“Avery! What the actual fuck?”
He needed to come clean. Guilt ran all over him.
“Fuck. OK, this guy was here in my house. He’s been calling me, paying me to report on you, on the work. Made me sign a fucking NDA. He knew things about you, about our projects, asked me a lot of questions, where you were, when you were there, what you were up to in your spare time.”
“Ave, what did you tell him?”
“I don’t know. Let me think.” He rubbed his wrists, the plastic straps had dug deep cuts that stung like bees.
“Ave . . .”
He closed his eyes tight, let his chin drop to his chest, clenched his fists, breathed deep. He couldn’t look at her. “I had to, Kit.”
“What did you do, Avery?” The words came from a distance, from a divergent line of thinking. She was managing multiple threads; yelling at Avery was autonomous.
“He said he’d do terrible things to me. Said he’d change me if I didn’t comply with him, change me forever. Give me a bad edit, infect me with an augment I couldn’t reverse. Fuck with my chromosomes. Said he’d make me slow, Kit, Fragile X Syndrome. Remember that?” He broke into tears. “You told me we were the only ones who had it. That you burned the records and shredded the mice.” He sobbed into her lap.
He was right. They were, to her knowledge, the only geneticists on the planet working with genetically disabling capabilities. There was a reason she’d been recruited. Her team had released more clean augments than all the other labs worldwide combined. So, for someone to have that FXS augment, for someone to have the ability to reduce cognitive ability to that degree, they would need her research. All of it. That project had gone sideways on her mice. She’d pursued it hoping the path would lead her to an intelligence edit, perhaps highlighting anomalies to avoid. She removed a protein that would end up causing autistic and communication issues. Ultimately it had resulted in overexcitability in the neurons affected, but like Avery had said, if he’d been injected with it, he would have become cognitively slow. She’d shelved the project when it had come back clean, free of off-targets, and permanent. There was no good purpose for such an augment. It was a weapon, pure and simple. Avery was right; she’d minced and incinerated the mice, overwritten the data. That had been more than a year ago. She didn’t need to know any more from him. Someone had stolen her data, someone who knew how to weaponize the edit, and Avery had helped.
Not a friend after all.
So, what were they looking for? Did they know about Zeus? His data was more than just secure; it didn’t exist anywhere but on her nailbed holomem.
“What was his name?”
“Weissach. South African guy. There was someone else here, but Kit, I was drugged. I only heard his voice. Sounded like a mainland accent, but I can’t be sure.”
She knew no Weissach. More sobs from Avery. There was no shortage of terror behind those tears. Kit’s neurons were tripping over themselves. She needed to leave, like, yesterday. She could take a supersonic to Singapore, be on the ground and having a glass of wine in Boat Quay by dinner, but she couldn’t trust Avery, not ever again.
“I need you to do something for me, OK? Can you listen? This is important.” She held his quivering hands. Felt the nervous sweat of her own palms against his ice-cold knuckles.
“Yeah, babe, anything.”
“I need to get out of Mongolia. But I need your help. There’s a mem-cube in my house, in the office, desk drawer, right-hand side.”
“So what, you want me to go in there? He’ll be waiting. He’ll do me up instead of you, Kit. The fuck is wrong with you?”
“I don’t have time. It’s possible he’s looking for me right this instant. I just need the cube.” She didn’t, but she needed a distraction, something to give her time to get a flight booked, remote-in to the lab, do a data wipe, and figure out what the holy fuck was happening. She cradled his head in her hands, got close, looked into his eyes. Deep breath in, Kit.
“What do you know about Zeus?” she asked, wiping tears from his cheeks.
“I know there’s something special about him. Whatever it is, people are getting enormously fucking serious about it.”
What people? she wondered.
“Avery, I know you hate flying, but this is a moment when I must insist you come with me.”
“I agree. I’ll come. I’m legit fucking scared.” He got up, looked out the window, his legs wobbled at the knees. “How do you plan to get us past the Perimeter?”
“Leave that to me.”
“Not the first time I’ve heard that today.”
“What’s that?”
“Weissach. Said the same thing to me about you.” He clipped the end of his sentence, beads of sweat appeared on his cheeks. He looked at the floor, avoiding her eyes. He was hiding something in there. She chose not to pursue it. Not yet. She still needed him.
“Look, your friend Weissach managed to get inside the Perimeter, which means there’s a good chance they’re still here and looking for me. You know my door code. Get in, get my stuff, and get out. I’ll be nearby with an airport autocab.”
It was a silent flight down to Singapore, two hours and a bit. Avery had slept, and she had catastrophized. It wasn’t until they arrived that she told him they were hopping a rocket to West Africa.
“To the fucking Gambia?”
“The one and only. Boarding in ten minutes.”
“What the hell’s in the Gambia?”
“Hopefully no more of your new friends. I’ve got a conference there in a week. We can settle in early, maybe even figure out what the actual fuck is going on.”
He was compliant, submissive, shaken. He was an intimidating man on a normal day, if you didn’t know him. She was borderline paranoid and feeling hyper aware, like she’d augmented for it, which she knew for a fact wasn’t a thing.
On board and strapped to her chair, she accepted the sedation med patch on offer and smoothed it across the back of her neck while the attendant tightened her shoulder belts. Across the aisle, Avery was sweating. He’d paid for an additional patch, which he smacked against his ropey biceps, one for each. She jacked a bead and swiped for Doudna. He answered right away.
“Couldn’t get enough?” he asked.
“Never been my style, Doudna; you know that. Listen, I’ve had a further change of plans. Avery and I are heading out of town for a while. Not sure when we’ll be back. But if you want to get together to discuss that project, I can meet you in Addis, maybe in a couple of days.”
“Always happy to make time for you, Kit. How big will the security detail be?”
“Just the two of us this time.”
“You let me know when.”
“Thanks, Doudna. Always a pleasure.” She swiped off the call and popped out the bead as the safety demo began. She leaned over to Avery. “Second time, right?” He was still sweating, drops of it falling from his bare elbows.
“Second time.”
“You’ll be asleep before they light the wick with two of those things on.” She nodded at his arms where the sweat-damp patches were affixed, gradually administering their sedative.
“We can but hope.” His gaze was fixed straight ahead. He’d been through enough today, she thought. Let the man rest.
29.
It was damn near halfway around the globe, Singapore to the Gambia, just shy of ninety minutes off the ground. They’d launched eastbound, as always, but she never knew why.
“Hey, Avery, do you know why they always fly the suborbs eastbound?” she asked.
“Suppose it keeps the vehicle and the sonic booms over water. I’m not sure either. Why do you ask?”
She was making small talk, gathering courage.
“Just curious.”
They arrived at the resort in the morning and had a sunny breakfast on the beach and some quiet time together. She hadn’t been ready to confront him in the hotel about his subversive selling of her life’s work and whereabouts. They left for a stroll outside the resort in the searing tropical heat. She was full from the buffet, sweaty, sauntering along under Serekunda’s oppressive late-summer sun. There were nicer places on the planet. Not a whole lot of paved roads here, and they hadn’t found one yet. She kicked up red dust with each step, wore a face mask under her Ray-Bans. They were still burning gasoline in this part of the world, and the cars blew out a charred, sooty exhaust that adhered to everything, got into her ears, clagged up her hair, made it difficult to see.
“You sleep OK on the flight?” she asked. “I know the lag can be brutal on such a quick trip.”
“Not what I’d call sleep. I’m still a little groggy off the double patch. You were right; one’s enough.”
“We need to talk about whatever the fuck just happened to me, and you, back in UB,” she said, still walking, eyes ahead.
“I know, Kit.”
“Even getting through the Perimeter is an achievement, let alone threatening lab workers like us. We’re the reason the wall was built in the first place.”
They walked past a barking Rhodesian ridgeback tied to a tree, the carbon-coloured dust that coated all things in this town bursting from its ruffled spinal fur with each woof.
“I told you something is up at the lab. Your work is being monitored, but I don’t know by who. This Weissach man, he’s the only one I know. Someone high up in NegSense must be watching.”
“And Weissach, he discussed Zeus specifically?”
“Yup.”
“And did you give him any of the data?”
“Well, yes, I gave him data, but nothing about Zeus. There isn’t any. Trust me, I looked for it.”
Trust. Wrong word.
“That was private, Avery! My data!” She pulled the mask down to her chin. “Fucking Christ in a fucking pancake!”
The dog continued to bark. She took a breath to calm down, waving her hand in front of her face for air. She wondered if the animal was overheating too, how long it had been there, and if the incessant barking was ever going to fucking stop. Traffic slowed at the intersection ahead, causing the dust to ease, and for a moment she could see much better. They paused where the two well-travelled dirt roads met. There were no stop signs and no traffic lights.
“Zeus,” she panted, short of breath, “as you know, is the recipient of an edit I’ve been working on in my spare time. A successful edit, Avery. But this one is different. This one is important, and you can’t steal my research and fucking sell it. You understand? That’s industrial espionage! Fucking prison time! Or worse!”
The dog was barking louder now at something on the other side of the intersection. She looked to see what had its attention and saw a man in a cowboy hat, an aluminum briefcase open in his hands. She took off her glasses, trying to find the dog’s owner. Unable to locate one, she turned to ask Avery if he could.
What she saw next didn’t make sense. A steel ball the size of a plum exploded outwards from inside Avery, leaving a gaping fist-sized hole that made a repulsive sucking noise clean through his shirt. The ball made a perfect horizontal beeline a meter above the road, hissing as it went, steaming with Avery’s dripping internals into Cowboy Hat’s gleaming briefcase. Avery dropped to his knees in disbelief, looked up at Kit, his eyes all questions, blood pulsing through his fingers, rivers of it surging out of the hole in his midsection.
On the other side of the street, beside the biggest Mercedes wagon she’d ever seen, snapping that aluminum case shut was the man wearing the white cowboy hat and a black bolo tie. He was Asian, smiling. He climbed inside, closed the Benz’s door, then lowered his window, his face visible, watching. The car crawled away with a faint electric whine. The man had a tattoo on his cheekbone, a Chinese character of some sort. She blinked back to Avery, blood pooling beneath him, in terrified realization that this was fucking really happening.
“Ave?”
Her vision narrowed as she knelt beside Avery Hill, likely, she felt, for the last time.
“Ave? What the fuck was that?” She opened her holo, swiped for “Emergency,” and was answered straightaway by a calm, gentle female voice.
“One-one-six emergency. What is the nature of your call please?”
She had no clue where they were. “Yes, hello. I’m near the Kairaba resort. We are two foreign nationals. One has suffered a critical injury from some sort of metal projectile. Please hurry. He’s got an open wound and he’s hemorrhaging from it.” She tore the shirt off Avery’s back, folded it and pressed it against the flow of blood, trying to plug the cavity in his chest.
“Please hold for ambulance service.”
“Avery I . . .”
His lips bubbled, blood and saliva dribbling off his chin onto the ground, past the sucking hole in his midsection.
“Fuck girl . . . said he wasn’t gonna hurt me. Fuck . . . fuck a duck.” Coughing. Bleeding. “Kit . . . they know about you. They know about Zeus. They’ve known for such a long time.” His eyes fell out of sync, and he wobbled backwards in her arms.
Her wrist warbled at her. “Please continue to hold for our next available ambulance operator.”
“You said ‘they,’ Avery. They. Who was with Weissach? Who did this to you? Who was with him in your home?” She was angry and scared and revolted all at once. Digestive organs fell out of the void as she helped him lie down on the dusty roadside.
“What did you give Zeus?” Avery sputtered. “Why’s he so special?”
Gurgling fluids and something like breath came out of the blackened cavity. She retched hard into the loose dirt beside him, caught the shadow of someone moving toward her from behind. The feeling was like a snakebite as the barbs of the man’s taser buried themselves deep into her neck. Her body stiffened at the sharp, excruciating paralysation of electrocution. She resisted, glimpsed his silhouetted cowboy hat. She fought the pain with every ounce of strength until the current forced her into an immobilized unconsciousness.
30.
“You’re right. These peanuts are very good.” They were fresh from the farm Cam had insisted they stop at in their green-striped, yellow taxi, an old petroleum burner from the 2080s, maybe one of the last gas-powered cars ever made. Dallas appreciated its simplicity: engine, tire, road.
While they drove, a small boy ran barefoot in the dust alongside them, past tin shacks and fruit stands, just, from what Dallas could see, for the fun of it. Donkeys pulled carts on the side of the road, overloaded with sacks of grain, the animals straining against the weight. A fan jacked to a solar panel in the windshield blew scalding humidity around the cab. The Gambia, as relentlessly hot as he remembered. Aircon was a rarity in this country, and the driver didn’t look like he needed it. Wasn’t a drip of sweat on him.
“They taste different from the one’s back in Hong Kong,” he said to Cam.
“We call them groundnut here,” the taxi driver said to them via the rear-view. “They not only for eating. Can use the shells to make soap.”
“They taste cleaner somehow,” Cam said.
“That meant to be funny?”
“No, man, they really do taste better.”
They differed in flavour like green living wood compared to the dry, dead kind that burned. Their cargo today would be like that green wood, living, the kind they grew in tubs, the kind that had a definable and debatable modern morality.
He’d been down where they grew once before, to the farm under the earth where humans were being cultivated like crops. He’d wanted to see it once, so he knew precisely what he was carrying in the hold of his Arethusa.
They’d kept their operation well hidden from the prying eyes of the judgemental policing of the west, buried deep beneath the West African savanna, tunnels the envy of wartime Vietnam. He’d been given a tour once, a disturbing look at it from a proud and triad-paid anthropoid breeder.
“These halls were once filled with pigs,” his tall, lanky Eastern Eurozone tour guide had said. “Turns out human organs grow quite well in swine. The problem lies in our bodies’ acceptance of the spare parts.”
Spare parts, like wheels or door handles. “I heard the rejection rates were crazy,” Dallas had offered.
“Well, that has always been the problem, hasn’t it? Rejection. And we have tried so very many ways around it. But, you see, the best way around anything is often to accept it. And so, the best way to avoid the rejection of organs grown in other species is to simply grow them in people. In-anthro, as it were.”
Viscous fluid coated the concrete flooring, a coagulated mess of bloody human offal and cytokinetic wash-off from vat overflow. The liquid burden of manmade evolution, the cold, hard, ugly truth that was forever lurking behind the face of progress.
In that moment, Dallas had asked himself two questions: Can I walk through this burden? And do I want to?
The taxi dropped them at Lyle’s, an old, run-down bar nestled on a riverbed beach, walled behind shoulder-high, grey concrete topped with shards of broken glass and spiral coils of rusty razor wire. He wore his backpack filled with essentials, his paper bag of peanuts in hand. He stopped for a piss at the toilet, a tiled section of outdoor wall, guiding his urine down an irrigation trough that mazed its way past the entrance in a downhill gulley carved into the concrete flooring. African functionality at its best.
“I need to do a two. See you inside,” Cam said. Was a brave man who took a shit in an outdoor bathroom in West Africa.
“Good luck.”
Dallas dropped his backpack on the stool beside him and sat at the bar under tin roofing, corrugate bound together with bamboo ribbon, sheltering him from the searing midday west African sun. Beams of it knife-edged through gaps in the aluminum, burning his exposed skin enough to be unpleasant. He thought of Persephone, the sealed, fireproof door, and the charred remains he could scarcely view through a melted and disfigured peephole.
It was a few hundred metres to the sand, off a dusty unpaved gravel pit the locals called a road, where a wooden dock sat empty. The Arethusa was out there somewhere, a boat ride away, waiting for him to arrive. Would be a while yet before he saw her, and the delay was making him fidget.
The bar had running water at least and a fridge so cold it may as well have been a freezer. Many times, he’d watched Lyle chip beer bottles from the ice inside. He motioned to the waiter, a local man who also seemed to have lost the ability to sweat, for a beer. His third of the day when he normally stopped at one.
West African drum and bass drifted from a Bose speaker perched on a ratty old bookshelf behind the bar. On the other side of the fence, a solitary palm tree swayed as a salty ocean breeze whispered between its fronds, swishing the giant leaves together.
An Asian woman sat down opposite him in the shadow of the tree. She was wide at the hips and wore a jet-black crop top and mirrored indigo sunglasses. She opened a paperback, held it high in her hand, the other stirring a tall glass filled with ice and lemon. She tapped her foot as she sipped her drink, her entire body moving in discreet rhythm with the music.
This side of the razor wire, the clientele kept to themselves, all except one scruffy man with ginger hair and wrinkles, who got loud for a brief moment. His twin braided cornrows bounced against his head as he mocked the man beside him in an animated and unintelligible drunken Glaswegian patter. A darkening circular stain expanded on the centre of his crimson red Tee as his perspiration increased with his apparent level of agitation.
The heat here was different. The sunlight carried a ferocity that felt physical, as though the light had a weight that pushed like the relentless tide of a tsunami. It wasn’t that Dallas minded the heat; everyone said he’d get used to it. But that was bullshit; he’d gotten used to sweating. He was doing his best to keep that to a minimum. They had a long ride ahead of them and starting it out damp would only end with him itchy and irritated. The beer was helping. He drained his bottle of Julbrew, a blue Kingfisher and “The Gambia’s Very Own Beer” emblazoned across its label.
If this drop-off was like all the rest, there would be no fanfare and no dramatic arrival of trucks under armed escort. A bystander would think they were nothing more than a few tourists arriving with luggage, getting some local help putting it all onto boats. Simple affairs, small fishing vessels. Locals making a few extra dalasis ferrying visitors out to their sailboats or yachts. But something was off about this job. Delays were uncommon. All the urgency to get them out here, and now they sat and waited. Delays affected their exposure to daylight, exposure that Dallas preferred to avoid. A bead of sweat dripped off the tip of his nose, the perspiration not only from the heat.
He thought of the Arethusa lurking in her usual berth, hidden from orbital eyes beneath a simple tin enclosure in a port designed for fishing trawlers and private pleasure craft. She’d be fuelled for the first leg and ready to launch that evening into a blinding West African sunset. A quick turn east, and they would make landfall south of the city into the long night of the Dark Continent ahead. The moments leading to that left Dallas uncomfortable. His natural state was at the helm of his bird, and he would continue to fidget, cleaning his fingernails and cracking his knuckles until he was strapped inside her with engines turning, leaving the Atlantic long at his back.
“Mister Dallas.”
She startled him. He turned, still on his stool. “You must be Dandy.” She nodded. “Maybe let’s not use any names around here,” he said. “Call me Dee.”
She leaned in close to his ear. She smelled of fresh-cut rosemary and ginger. “Then don’t call me Dandy,” she whispered. She wore navy stiletto sandals, ribbons laced up past her calves, and a short beige dress with a mandarin collar, her black hair pulled back tight with a bun stick.
He stood, met her eye to eye, trying desperately to remember her face. She was tall in those heels. She took a step back. “Our cargo is ready to move, but we need you at the aircraft to oversee the loading. We have an unusual shipment for you.” She smiled as she said it. Proud. Unattractive.
“Yeah, I was told. One tank, long ride. I need to pay my bill. Then I’m all yours.”
Cam wandered back from the toilet, shaking his hands dry, and joined the conversation with a nod of his head.
“Your bill is already settled. If you gentlemen don’t mind, please follow me.” She gestured to the exit, where two men wearing navy suit jackets and mirrored sunglasses waited, sweatless, scanning their surroundings. They looked like protection. He’d never had any and he didn’t like it. These jobs had always been about blending into the landscape.
Dandy motioned to an aging white van, faded grey lettering spelling “U-HA” down its side. It was a full-sized petrol burner, cloudy white exhaust coughing out of its tailpipe.
“We not taking a boat?” Dallas asked.
“Not from here. Too obvious. We going for a drive first.”
Cam shot him a look. Dallas thought of the limo ride with Anders. He shrugged. What could possibly go wrong?
The three of them piled into the back of the van, where there was spacious bench seating. One nice thing about Africa, they still had roomy old vehicles like these, and they still had gasoline for sale.
The protection rode the middle bench ahead of them in silence, side by side, clutching handles in the doors. They made slow progress on dirt tracks, keeping off what appeared to be the one paved road that threaded its way along the Gambia’s western coast. The van wasn’t meant for off-roading, diving into rutted potholes and bounding back into the air.
He understood the beauty of it out there, the raw, basic life one could lead, hidden away from the world. It was all unpaved roads, occasional shantytown housing peppered with unfinished concrete and exposed rebar, wide open fields, palm trees, and cane that grew like weeds.
“You guys ever have blowouts off-roading like this?” He winced as his head banged on the roof as they plunged into a deep rut. He got no reply. The protection kept watch, and Dandy sat a strict private school upright, staring ahead, one delicate hand bracing herself against the roof. He chewed the inside of his cheek, one hand on the ceiling like Dandy, as he took in the scenery and focused on the mission ahead. The cargo was unusual. It had everyone involved on edge.
“Before we get to the aircraft, Mister Dallas, let me discuss some minor details about your cargo,” Dandy offered, her gaze remaining ahead. “You are shipping a single cryo-vat unit. It will be active. Your mission is to deliver it intact, complete with its contents. You are not to open the device or interfere with its operation in any way.” She was reading from a script. He caught the text scrolling in micro off her azure-green implanted lenses. “Drop-off will be at the farm, and Mister Dallas, there will be no rest stops on this mission.”
He held his hand out. “That means more pills.”
She produced a clear glass pill container, full to the top. She shook it as she handed it to him. “You refuel, and you launch. No breaks. Nonstop flight.”
“Means daylight. Cam?” Dallas took the container, tucked it inside his backpack.
“I’m on it.” Cam fussed on his handheld, sliding the magenta line of their routing further south.
“How’s it powered?” Dallas asked.
“It will be connected to your ship’s power supply, but if required, it has backup power sources built into the device. Your assistance will not be required.” She spoke in a clinical tone, like she was ordering a meal at a drive thru.
The van dropped them on a beach on the edge of a bird sanctuary along the coastline, southwest of Serekunda. The sun was setting, the ocean lapping. The sky had taken on a cobalt hue, a colour he’d only ever seen at the equator. Turreted battleship-grey cumulus marched ahead of the approaching squall, low in the sky and accelerating towards them. The clouds carried a battle-ready heaviness that preceded a certain deluge of rainfall specific to the region. “Fucking it down,” Persephone had once said of the equatorial downpours.
Ozone stung Dallas’s sinuses as dozens of hand-carved wooden fishing boats came in from the sea. If there had been fields, cows would be lying in the grass.
“Rain’s coming,” he said, more out of habit than any sort of useful offering.
“Mmhm,” Cam replied, walking across the sand ahead of them.
Hurricanes were born on this coastline. Big ones that sailed across the Atlantic and assaulted the America’s eastern shores. Figured they deserved it. Built that ridiculous wall to keep everyone out, but it didn’t work against old Mother Nature. He wondered what it was like on the other side of that barrier. Wondered about that other life he’d lived and if it had any relevance to the one he was living now.
Their protection left them at the water’s edge. Dallas, Cam, and Dandy clambered into a waiting dinghy, a local man sitting in its rear, holding the outboard motor with one hand. Dallas sat on the side of the boat, clutching a handrail for support. Cam and Dandy sat together on the boat’s centre bench.
It was a ten-minute ride in increasingly large swell out to the Bijol Islands, a boomerang-shaped atoll west of the coast where they’d load the plane for delivery. A shoddy wooden dock bobbed in the waves on the south side of an island, which they pulled alongside. Moored to it was the Arethusa, covered in a temporary camouflage tent that shifted in the swell, designed to conceal it from orbital eyes. She was hard to pick out even now in the shadow of the tarps snapping in the wind. Inside, she crouched on her pontoons, canopy open, eager to get into the air.
With the dinghy tied up, they ducked under the jet’s covering as the first few drops of rain hit the dock. Shots across the bow, nature’s kind warning.
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