SEQUENCE
By
Wearmouth & Barnes
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ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
This edition published in 2015 by Vast Horizons
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this work are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication maybe reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the publisher. The rights of the authors of this work has been asserted by him/her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
PROLOGUE
Yuri knew it wasn’t human despite what everyone had said about it. Sure, it looked like a man, with its muscular torso and shaved head, but the way it just stood there, staring, unmoving as though it were an inanimate sculpture… it freaked him out.
Frozen condensation crusted around the corners of the window. Yuri pulled his thick coat tight around his body. The chill in his spine wouldn’t warm—not until he could finally get out of this place.
His shift was coming to an end, but he had one more task to complete.
He leaned over the desk, raised the laptop lid and waited for the proprietary operating system to boot. It took just a few seconds to bring up the sparse interface of a black screen and a blinking cursor.
At the top of the screen, white text informed him that the computer was connecting to the network. It reported access to over three thousand nodes. Most were within the facility—inactive, with a few dozen in other locations around the world.
But he was only interested in one: node 272, awaiting instruction in the next room. A few commands later, he connected. The damn thing didn’t move a muscle to indicate it was online.
Behind Yuri, the metal door creaked on frozen hinges, letting in a blast of chilled air. Yuri’s boss stamped his feet to clear the ice and snow from his heavy boots.
“Well? What are you waiting for? The trial should have been done by now.” The man arched an eyebrow and then stepped forward to place his hand on Yuri’s shoulder.
He hated that, the familiarity, the unspoken gesture of dominance.
“I’m connected,” Yuri said, turning back to the computer.
“Then send the program. I wanted to watch this myself.”
Yuri’s boss smelled of expensive soap and single malt whiskey. Probably already celebrating some breakthrough with the plan.
“Yes, boss,” Yuri said, tapping in the command on the laptop to bring up the new test program. Once loaded into the system, Yuri executed it and waited. He didn’t want to look, so he kept his vision down at the laptop, but his boss’s hand gripped his shoulder.
“I want you to watch,” his boss said, twisting Yuri to face the small observation window.
A door on the right side of the cell opened and a prisoner wearing a blue coverall staggered inside before the door shut with a metallic clang behind him. Yuri’s shoulder hurt beneath his boss’s increasingly tight grip.
With no warning, the shaved-head man launched forward to the prisoner, grasped him by the side of the head, and with a single, powerful movement, lifted the prisoner off the ground and twisted his neck. A dull crack came through the wall speaker.
Yuri shuddered as it threw the prisoner’s limp body to the ground like a discarded child’s toy and stared back at them through the observation window.
“Good,” Yuri’s boss said, smiling.
The older man turned away and pulled a cell phone from his jacket pocket. After a few moments, he said, “Doctor, yeah, we’re good to go. The new software is confirmed. You’re free to move forward with the plans as discussed.”
Yuri’s boss turned back to face him, the cell phone still at his ear.
“Yes, Doctor, he’ll be taken care of. Consider it a bonus test.” Then to Yuri: “I need you to go and retrieve the body.”
“But, boss… it…”
Yuri’s boss placed the cell phone back into his suit jacket and pulled out a Beretta pistol. He aimed at Yuri’s face. “Do I really need to repeat myself?”
Yuri thought of begging, but he knew it was too late. He knew this time would arrive—eventually. “No,” he mumbled, leaving the observation room, trying not to let his fear show as he staggered toward the cell on legs that trembled with each step.
When he entered the cell, the humanlike thing looked up and glared at Yuri with ice-cold blue eyes. It was then Yuri knew what he was truly looking at.
And that it would be the last thing he ever saw.
CHAPTER ONE
6 p.m., Day 1, Alaska
Jacob Miller crouched behind a rock and contemplated his destiny.
His breath froze in the spring Alaskan air. Nightfall wasn’t far away, the sun already touching the horizon, backlighting the miles of pine trees. Three hundred yards ahead of him stood a hangar-like building with a secure perimeter fence. XNA Industries, the brainchild of Dr. Julian Gray, renegade geneticist and the murderer of Jacob’s childhood friend—amongst other crimes.
This was the moment Jacob had anticipated for the past three years. Tonight, he would find irrefutable evidence. Tonight, he would expose Gray to the world.
Jacob lifted the two-way radio and depressed the button with his gloved hand. “Tucker, you reading me? Over.”
The radio squelched with static for a brief moment before a crackly voice returned. “Roger that, Jacob. I hear you loud and clear. Over.”
“Is the coast clear?”
“Yeah. Camera’s off, the last of the researchers left an hour ago. I’m the only one here.”
“And you’ve got that security camera loop footage I sent? They won’t realize the cameras are off?”
“Relax, man, I got it covered. They won’t know a thing. Knock twice on the fire exit and I’ll let you in.”
“I’ll be right there. Out.”
Jacob placed the radio in the side pocket of his backpack and took a pair of binoculars from the main compartment. He focused on the building.
At the front gates, held aloft by a pair of tall poles, were the unmistakable square shapes of security cameras. Neither pointed outward, scanning potential arrivals as usual. Tucker had done his job, it seemed.
Jacob vaulted over the rock and sprinted, light on his feet, toward the gate.
Tucker was right; no one else was there. The car lot was empty apart from Tucker’s beat-up old Ford Explorer. The facility was too far out in the middle of nowhere for anyone else to arrive without a vehicle, apart from Jacob, but then a ten-mile cycle ride in the freezing weather was only a small discomfort for the prize of finally nailing Gray.
He knew the doctor and the rest of the company had left town earlier that day on their Gulfstream jet. Although he didn’t know where they were heading or why, this was an opportunity not to be missed.
For three long years Jacob had been stuck up here in his ratty trailer, compiling evidence against Gray, whom he blamed for the murder of his friend Steven Baker. He was a researcher on Gray’s previous XNA team back in California. Gray lost his shit and set up on his own. Steve went missing.
Jacob wasn’t a believer of coincidence.
The official line was that Steve had gone traveling, on account of his passport going missing and, later, photographs of him apparently in Thailand posted to his Facebook page.
It was a cover-up. Jacob was sure of it. Steve refused to fly, drove everywhere, and hadn’t responded to a single email or message.
Jacob arrived at the gate to find it unloc
ked and, although he trusted Tucker, felt the need to stick to the shadows and keep the scarf up around his face.
Knocking twice on the fire exit, he waited.
At first nothing happened. No footsteps, no sounds of locks being released. Despite himself, a wave of paranoia hit him. What if he was being set up? What if Julian Gray was waiting for him right now? Jacob shook his head, tried to focus, tried to remember his journalism training.
He’d worked on Tucker as an undercover source for three months before this point. They shared the same bar—the only bar in town.
“Call it a journalist’s hunch,” he’d said to Tucker when he told him what he thought about Gray. He let the slow drip of information build up over the months, until Tucker came around to the idea that Gray wasn’t all he appeared to be, that he wasn’t this kind, calm genius, but was in fact a psychopath with a God complex who thought nothing of killing someone who learned too much.
The door opened. Heat washed out, wicking away the sweat on Jacob’s forehead.
“You took your time,” Jacob said. “I thought…”
“You thought what?” Tucker said, his thick, dark eyebrows meeting together with the question.
“It doesn’t matter. Are you going to let me in? It’s getting cold out here.”
The cavernous building lay mostly in darkness with only a small pool of light coming from an office window fifty yards away. Dozens of computer stations filled the open space. They created an eerie, almost sentient hum, like a flock of birds, the tones rising and falling as if they were communicating some secret message.
“Come on. I’ll take you to the main part of the facility,” Tucker said.
Jacob stopped and made to move toward one of the bland cubicles. Inside, a single monitor, switched off, sat on a beige desk. “Can you access this?”
“I dunno,” Tucker said. “Admin and researchers use these. It’s split in two, see.” Tucker held out his hand to indicate the two parts of the building, separated by a door. “The business stuff, then the science stuff.”
Tucker headed toward the office that separated the two parts, but Jacob remained in place, rolling a flash drive in his palm, wondering if he could use one of the terminals to get some solid information on Gray’s technology.
“Trust me,” Tucker said, “you’ll love what I’ve got to show you. The cryo-chamber. That’s where you’ll likely find evidence of whatever it is you believe Gray’s done.”
Jacob snorted. “What? You still don’t believe me? After everything I’ve told you? Everything you’ve seen and heard?”
The burly security guard shrugged. “It’s hard to tell the difference from rumors and fact, ain’t it? And as far as I see, it’s Mr. Murphy who’s the asshole in the company. I ain’t ever had any real issue with Gray.”
“Then why are you helping me? You know you’ll never be able to come back to work after this, don’t you?”
“I left my resignation on Murphy’s desk. He’ll get it when they return in the morning. I’m gonna go back to school.”
Tucker opened the office door and led Jacob down a dark hall. As they passed each office, Jacob peered through the windows, trying to take it all in. He took his digital SLR from his backpack and checked that the flash mode was on. He knew Tucker wasn’t comfortable lighting the place up, but he’d hopefully get away with a few shots.
Tucker stopped at a steel door with a red circular wheel attached to the front. Even through his gloves, Jacob could feel the frosty chill on the metal.
“Here’s the cryo-lab,” Tucker said. “I ain’t ever been inside it before, but this morning, during the change of shifts, I managed to see the access codes used. You wanna go in?”
“Does a bear shit in the woods?”
Tucker laughed and entered a code on the numbered panel. A metallic clunk came from a mechanism within the thick steel. He turned the wheel and pulled the door open. Frigid air wafted out, making Jacob choke as the back of his throat tickled with the coolness.
“Well, go on, then. I’ll wait here,” Tucker said.
Jacob moved forward, then hesitated. The lab was in near darkness; only a low blue glow amidst the fog of frozen air gave the room any sense of size and shape. A chill crinkled on his skin and he raised his scarf up around his face.
“We ain’t got all day, Jacob. Go in, grab your shots, and we can both get out of here.”
That damned paranoia reared its ugly head again—Jacob imagined the door closing behind him and the heavy lock clunking shut, trapping him inside.
This could be it, he told himself. This could be the evidence to take Gray down and make him pay for his crimes. The world would know that this genius of a man was no friend of humanity.
It took just two steps and he was in, the chilled air snaking around his legs as he refused to look back at Tucker, refused to entertain that part of his brain that believed the government were spying on him, that they were covering up alien technology and altering weather patterns to use as weapons in a secret climate war.
He ignored the little voice representing his fears, telling him the walls were too narrow, the ceiling too low, and approached a row of ten cylindrical cryogenic chambers. They stood over seven feet tall like brushed-steel sentinels. Much like the computer area, they sang together a song of white noise.
Beyond the row of metallic tubes, a pair of computer monitors sat on a desk. In the gloom, he could just make out a flashing yellow LED from a rack of hardware behind them. Jacob edged forward and realized it was a server.
He pressed the power buttons on both monitors and their screens flashed into life. A stream of data flowed down one window while another displayed data from each cryonic cylinder: temperatures, pressure, and other metrics he didn’t understand.
Searching the rack-mounted server, he found a USB port and inserted his flash drive. A new device icon popped up on the monitor and initiated the drive for use.
Jacob used the mouse to navigate through the PC’s file system, looking for anything useful. There were gigabytes of information on XNA-to-DNA coding, test results, and log files.
Unsure of what to take, he started a general copy of the system files, hoping to grab as much as possible. He’d go through the data when he got home and had more time. The drive had enough space for 128 gigabytes, surely enough to have something incriminating.
Tucker poked his head around the door. “Get your photos and let’s go.”
“Sure, one minute.”
Jacob let the files copy over as he took his camera and approached the cylinders. The hairs on his arms and neck tingled as he reached out a gloved hand and wiped the frost away from the window of the first cylinder.
There, frozen behind the glass, was what he’d always dreamed of: undeniable proof. He lifted the camera and snapped a picture. Tucker shouted into the room, making him jump. “Someone’s coming. Hide, I’ll be right back.”
Tucker turned away, letting the door close behind him.
“No! Wait.” Jacob ran forward and reached for the internal wheel.
The door closed and the lock mechanism whirred shut, trapping him inside.
CHAPTER TWO
6 p.m., Day 1, Washington State Convention Center
Dr. Julian Gray relaxed back in his leather chair and thought about the Sequence Project. An initiative he’d set up to create the perfect human—as he saw it, that is. Today was a watershed moment. A chance to bring Sequence to the world in the least painful way—if the group of international investors could understand his vision and the tech’s potential.
Tanya Merriweather, the XNA Industries marketing manager, stood on the opposite side of the bland preparation room and pored over a disorganized stack of papers. She shot him a worried glance. He replied with an appreciative nod.
Merriweather had dreamed of being a news anchor for a major network. She had no chance, but she was perfect for XNA Industries because she didn’t ask questions. Her ambitions clouded her objectivity, which was just
fine as far as Gray was concerned.
Quentin Devereaux, with his black-dyed hair slicked back in an attempt to hold on to his youth, purposefully strode over to Gray’s chair. Devereaux provided the financial muscle and contacts that would enable Gray’s plans to be fast-tracked, although Gray planned for this to be a temporary situation.
Devereaux peered down at the screen of Gray’s cell. “What are you looking at, Doc? Have we got our ducks in a row?”
Gray slipped the cell into his pocket. “It’s all in hand.”
“Don’t forget,” Devereaux said, jabbing his finger at Merriweather, “bring the military angle in early, right?”
She nodded and straightened her light blue business suit.
Gray sighed. “Of course she will. We know to cast the net wide.”
He hated using a corporate cliché, but this was the world in which he had to momentarily operate. Gray’s world was the lab.
Since graduating, he’d spent his career making breakthroughs in the field of genetic and electronic integration as well as fighting the bean counters. His ideas were viewed as too radical in the supposedly intellectual circles of the science community, and too financially risky for the bankers. Issues of morality regarding the clone tech and the XNA chip integration got in the way, but only for a short while. Luckily for Gray, there were other countries that could see beyond the obstacles of morals and ethics in the interests of furthering humanity’s technological capabilities.
But for all those that were cautious, there were also those that were greedy, like Quentin Devereaux. Son of a former oil magnate and now investor in the sciences, Devereaux was happy to take a gamble; he just didn’t realize how high the odds were stacked against him.
“We need to sing from the same hymn sheet. No screw ups,” Devereaux said.
“Relax,” Gray said, returning the older man’s icy stare. “Everything will fall into place, you can trust me on that.”
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