Her face went still as she registered the implication. He could hear the struggle as she tried to keep her voice light.
‘Do they know anything more now than they did yesterday? Or the day before?’
‘They’re even more certain now of what they thought yesterday and the day before. It’s degenerative. If they can’t find a treatment soon, it will become terminal.’
He heard himself deliver the news in a voice as flat and even as if he were describing a programming problem or projecting the latest algae harvest, and wondered at the calm he now felt after his terror and tears of only a few days ago. He knew in a vague way that it had something to do with the unfolding puzzle of the genestock thefts; something about it which both diverted him from his own prognosis, and gave him hope. It too had the whiff of pending inspiration, of a connection waiting to be made. But one that would have to wait a bit longer, because now it was Gwen whose face was crumbling from apprehension into anguish, and who was starting to cry.
He hauled himself out of the chair, leaving the tablet behind and pulling her up into a hug. He was mortified to feel how limp she was, as though she had suddenly found herself a weight too heavy to bear, and how she shook against his chest.
‘Gwennie, I’m sorry. Don’t. Stop. Gwennie, it’s okay.’
‘It is not bloody okay!’
It came out muffled, shouted through sobs. He stroked her bound-up hair and murmured to her in twin-speak, and was relieved when she pushed away from him with her usual supple strength after a few minutes, drying her eyes on the jumper.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have said it like that … but Gwennie, it’s no different from what they told us before, it’s just confirmation … and … and you weren’t so upset then, I didn’t think you’d …’
‘I didn’t believe it could be true. How can it be true? You don’t seem any worse.’ She sniffed loudly, glaring at him now, still wiping her eyes with the backs of her hands. ‘You get better, you go right back to normal, you always say you feel fine …’
‘I do, but it takes me longer each time. They understand why now.’
She had herself under control, finally, and he spun the heavy chair back into its accustomed position and sat down. She sank back onto the bed, listening.
‘Every attack makes the next attack more likely. The more often they happen the less time my muscles and nerves will have to recover, which means the damage will accumulate, which means the next attack will do even more damage.’
‘So the key is to stop you having attacks in the first place.’ Her focus was coming back, she was thinking about solutions. Good. A distracted, self-absorbed Gwen might leave him feeling neglected; a weeping, shaking, panicking one threatened to throw his entire world out of balance.
‘Exactly. They think the cure – if there is one – will have to be some kind of epigenetic therapy, a drug that suppresses the right molecular switches in the right order for the right amount of time. It would need to be very precise, or it might do more harm than good.’
‘Do they know how to make it?’
‘They’re pretty sure they could if they had my genetype, and comparing your genome with mine is helping them work out where the trouble spots are. But it’s not isolated to one chromosome, it’s not even just in the DNA. It’s the whole protein environment.’ He could feel his own frustration mount, a coil of anger and fear in his chest as he described the problem. He sighed it out, leaning forward with elbows on knees, running his hands over his hair. Another version of a classic Aryel gesture. He was annoyed rather than amused by the flash of insight, but even as aggravation overtook him he knew it for a warning.
‘We are so engineered, Gwennie. We’re so fucking altered. Anyone else with genetics this weird would have some obvious purpose, they’d be able to breathe water or read binary or fucking fly. The doctors could look at their phenotypes, their physical reality, and say Aha! We can compare you to this gem or that gem, someone else that they do have the full assembly manual for. As it is, working out what they need to know from the genome data alone is like trying to reverse engineer a … a …’ Rhys looked for a simile, failed to find one. ‘I don’t know what. A planet, a galaxy. There’s nothing else living that’s as complicated as we are.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Work with the doctors. Do my own research. Stay as busy as I can. Try not to get into the frame of mind where I have an attack.’ He fished the tablet out from beneath him, dropped it onto the bed beside his own overnight bag. ‘This helps, believe me.’
‘What I can’t believe is that you’re taking it so well. Staying so calm.’
‘I have to stay calm. I’m not saying it’s easy. I cried my eyes out with Callan, the other day.’
‘Are you sure – are you absolutely certain – that you’re safe with him?’
‘I’m sure. I know it sounds bizarre with this hanging over us, but underneath it all he makes me so happy. I’m safer with him than with anyone else, except you.’
*
When they got home Sharon and Callan were both waiting on Aryel’s spacious balcony-living room. They took in Gwen’s redrimmed eyes and subdued greeting, and looked alarmed. Aryel herself, leaning casually against the finger-thin safety rail along the edge of the drop, closed her own eyes for a moment in silent acknowledgement of the story Gwen’s told, though her face did not change. Rhys felt the tension in the room like a blow against his already aching body, and sighed.
‘Stop it, all of you. It’s not good news, but no worse than it was, really.’ He dropped his bag on the floor and let Callan pull him into an embrace. They held each other tight for a long moment, before Rhys pushed gently away. ‘I’ve got some stuff I need to tell Sharon, then I’m all yours. In the meantime, Gwennie can fill you in, okay?’
Callan nodded wordlessly and kissed him, the soft smooch on the corner of his mouth that had become habit, that filled him with such a surge of contentment it seemed impossible he could ever be ill again. Over Callan’s shoulder he saw his older sister’s expression shift, bright blue eyes shadowed in thought and the firm lines of mouth and jaw that told him she was already scoping, assessing, casting the net of her own ferocious intelligence wide in search of a solution.
I’m not sure you can fix this one, Ari. But please, please try.
He watched her usher Gwen and Callan towards the kitchen, then turned back to Sharon.
‘I headed over when I got your message,’ she said tightly. ‘But I didn’t expect you to be working while you were in hospital, Rhys. It can wait …’
‘Thank goodness I did work. Kept me from going crazy. And no, I don’t think it can.’
He flopped onto a sofa and pulled out his tablet. ‘I know what the link is. I know why these particular stock samples were taken, and I think I know who may have taken them.’
Sharon sank down beside him as he activated the tablet. The tree-like structure reappeared on the screen. ‘There is a relationship between the genetypes, and this is it. It’s a genealogy.’
‘What?’ She shook her head. ‘That can’t be right. We checked to see if any of the stock had been traded between gemtechs—’
‘Maybe the stock hadn’t, but these key sequences have. Traded or stolen, I don’t know.’ His fingers slipped across the screen, pulling up infographics to demonstrate. ‘We’re not talking about normal parent-to-child transmission or sibling-to-sibling variants here. The relationship is limited to specific segments which have been spliced into otherwise completely unrelated genomes, engineered for completely different purposes. If you organise those sequences by the genetype file dates you can see how they change subtly, over time, as more and more alterations are made.’
‘So you’re talking about something like generations? Parent, child, grandchild?’
‘Exactly, but generations as defined by manipulations in the lab, not natural procreation. Think of it as a genealogy of the engineering.’ He tapped bac
k to the original schematic. ‘The majority of the genetypes lie in parallel, not in sequence – like lots of kids out of the same parents – and came onto the gemtech datastreams over roughly a fifteen-year period, which ended roughly twenty years ago. The sequential ones are iterations, subsequent tweaks of the same segments of code. That’s why there were three Gempro samples missing, two Recombin, and so on – even though within Gempro, within Recombin, the samples were from completely different product lines. Which tells us something about the sequences themselves – they must have been incredibly powerful, incredibly important for something, to be used this much over this long a timespan.’
‘So someone was trying to get hold of …’ Sharon stopped and thought. ‘Of all the descendants from a single sample? One individual?’
‘I think so. The similarities at the point they enter our picture here’ – he tapped at the trunk of the tree, a mangrove-like structure with multiple lines that split and split again – ‘are very close indeed, sometimes just a couple of base pairs. But it’s not every descendant, it’s not going all the way to the end of the line. This is the main difference between what the hacker was looking at and what the thief ultimately stole. They followed up on some lines for a generation or two, stopped right away at others, but whenever they lose interest it seems to be because the next stage is a major transition. Sometimes it’s an end product and sometimes a dead end, but either way something completely transformative happens. I was able to check most of them. This one was a gillung precursor. This one forms part of the Recombin super-sensory lines. And this came from the archive of one of those cybernetic graft labs that was shut down around eighteen years ago.’
Sharon shuddered at the memory. ‘Who was the ancestor?’
‘You mean the original genome? I don’t know. The lab was probably working from a cultured cell line, it’s impossible to tell anything about the individual it came from. Whoever they were – and bear in mind we’re going back at least forty years here, maybe longer – they must have had some mutation that proved particularly useful in a whole range of alterations. So much so that the gemtech that owned it kept on modifying and supplying the same sequences for literally decades. You can see how the engineering markers accumulate over time.’
‘Can you tell what the mutation was?’
‘No. I’m guessing for such a wide range of applications it had to be something really subtle that would have an impact throughout the organism, something that enhanced the primary modification. Or complemented it. Maybe it made metabolism more efficient, or sped up neural development. Something like that.’
The thought that had been nagging at him, unshaped and inchoate, nagged at him some more and then fled again. He resolved to focus on it, try to bring it to the surface and understand what his enhanced intuition was trying to tell him, later that night when the business of the day was done. For now he held himself upright against the cushions and stayed quiet, watching Sharon’s face as she did her own processing.
‘Right,’ she said finally, slowly. ‘So the point of the hacks was to identify and locate every engineered version of a particularly potent set of genetic sequences that somehow got distributed throughout the entire gemtech industry. The point of the thefts was to secure physical samples of each of those versions, right up until the point where they got amalgamated into an end product. They don’t want the end products, but they do want all the steps along the way.’
She looked at him for confirmation. He nodded. He suspected she was rehearsing the report she would be making to Masoud.
‘Okay, so. Who took them, and why? What use are they to anyone now?’
‘That last one I don’t have an answer for, but I think they were taken to complete a collection of the entire genealogy. And I think the key to who lies in the sequences that aren’t here. Look.’ He tapped in a command and pointed to the gemtech logos which now pulsed above each avatar of stolen genestock. ‘Who’s missing?’
She scanned them quickly. ‘All the big gemtechs are there, except for Bel’Natur. We knew that already.’
‘Yes, but Bel’Natur should be there. And I know that because of this.’ He pointed to three mangrove trunks that arose at a later point on the time axis from the main clump, and bloomed into the logo of Gempro. ‘The obvious assumption is that Bel’Natur simply never acquired any of that stock, so there was nothing for our hacker-thief to steal from them. But thirty years or so ago Bel’Natur supplied the key sequences for these genetypes to Gempro. And the stock from Gempro’s work with those three was stolen. They’re the same sequences. Bel’Natur did have them. I’ve got them showing as a gap in the genealogy.’
‘Why weren’t the Bel’Natur versions stolen as well, then?’
‘They couldn’t have been, because they were never at the EGA. I checked. And the genetypes aren’t in the Bel’Natur datastream archive either. But they have to exist.’
‘Fucking hell,’ she muttered. Her face had gone a bit grey. ‘They would have had to be pulled out of inventory and excised from the records before the confiscation orders were even issued.’
‘They must have been. There would have been a window between the date of the hacks and the government clampdown. A narrow one, but enough.’
‘So either Bel’Natur is behind the whole thing – or they just withheld their own samples of that stock and tampered with the datastream, knowing there was some value in it worth the risk. In which case the thief will probably try to steal theirs too. If he hasn’t already.’
‘I think the first of those is far more likely, though I don’t know if the culprit is the company itself, or a former employee. I’ve got you a suspect.’
He swiped the screen with its jungle of genetypes away and called up another app. A face appeared on the screen, and Sharon started. The dossier of facts from the Met’s own investigation scrolled up beside it.
‘This one always felt a little weird to me, a little too obviously in the clear, so when the rest of it started to fall into place I went back and did some digging. Technical director of a highly regarded integrated-ops datastream company gets hired by the new European Genome Archive, nothing strange there, except it was his old firm that installed their system in the first place. He knows it inside out. And look at where he worked before.’ He tapped at some links that were not part of the Met file Sharon had supplied, and sat back in triumph.
‘That’s just another private company. Wait, what—?’ She leaned forward, squinting in disbelief at what had popped out of the opened links.
‘It’s a wholly owned subsidiary, once you track it back through a couple of shells.’
‘Holy. Fuck.’
The face continued to swivel slowly on the screen, left-profile to full-face to right-profile: square, self-satisfied, thoroughly respectable. Sharon stared at it as though it had just sprouted horns.
‘I need to haul him in. Work out what his angle is, if he’s working for someone …’
‘Yes.’ Rhys squirmed, looking and feeling momentarily embarrassed. ‘I did almost hack his credit account, see if I could find evidence of a payoff. But then I thought you probably wouldn’t be okay with that.’
‘Rhys.’ Sharon barked out a laugh with little humour. He could see the tension in her shoulders and hands, the way she sat poised on the edge of the sofa as though about to spring into action. ‘No, I’m afraid I would have had to disapprove if you did that. Leave the breaking and entering to the professionals.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
Her smile held real warmth now. ‘This is amazing. You’ve cracked it, do you realise that?’ She grinned. ‘Achebe will be beside himself.’
‘Thanks, but I’ll feel better about it once we know what he’s done with the stock.’ Rhys frowned at the tablet. ‘I still can’t work out why anyone would want those sequences now.’
‘Where did they come from in the first place? Who was the supplier? We need to hunt through their archive, see if we can understand what makes them so
important.’
‘That’s another mystery. It’s a gemtech I’ve never heard of. They’re not in the EGA datastream archive, and I couldn’t find any record of them other than what’s right here. There’s no trace at all.’
Sounds a lot like KAG, came the whisper in the back of his brain, and part of the connection he had been groping for clicked sweetly into place. It startled him so much he almost lost the thread of what he was telling Sharon. ‘Some outfit called Phoenix.’
FIRESTORM
21
1703114AS
TO: Zara Klist
FR: Jonah Wycliffe
RE: Phoenix Project – UPDATE – CONFIDENTIAL
The audit has been accelerated as per your instructions, though I am of the view that, so far at least, it raises as many questions as it answers.
To summarise: the Phoenix Project appears to have begun as an attempt to understand, exploit and mediate the properties of a uniquely mutated genome. There is no indication of where your late great-uncle procured the original Phoenix genestock; the corresponding genetype did not bear any obvious engineering tags, certainly none that identify it as a product of Klist Applied Genomics. It has been suggested that it may have been developed by a rival establishment and come into his possession under questionable circumstances, and that this would explain the truly remarkable arrangements he put in place in order to keep it a secret. I must say I consider this explanation to be unlikely. As a stratagem it is far in excess of requirements, but more pertinently it does not accord with my memory of Dr Klist, who was a man of unimpeachable character. I cannot imagine him stooping to such unsavoury practices.
What is clear, however, is that he was aware of the remarkable regenerative power of the Phoenix genome. It appears that it was this which allowed it to accept ever more radical modifications, many of which we have indeed seen filter back into the broader KAG genetype pool, to our undeniable benefit. (Though some, I fear, may also have filtered OUT, and made their way into the inventories of our competitors. While it was Dr Klist’s edict that any commercially useful discoveries be returned exclusively to KAG – mirroring the standing order he left with Finance that any such offers from the Phoenix Project be accepted without question and fairly compensated – there has in practical terms been no mechanism in place to ensure that his instruction to THEM would be carried out. From the reports I have received regarding their ambitions for expansion, I have doubts as to whether what they earned from KAG over the years constituted the entirety of their commercial income.)
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