The Black Market DNA Series: Books 1-3

by Anthony J Melchiorri

  The doctor dabbed a cotton ball with alcohol and cleaned a spot over a vein on Chris’s arm. “I take it you were exposed to someone else’s blood directly. Correct?”

  Chris nodded.

  With a quick thrust, the physician stuck in the small needle. “Do you know the individual?”

  “No.” He wondered if he should tell the doctor the enhancer apparently knew him. He tried to swat the idea away, but it persisted like an uncatchable housefly.

  The doctor attached a small plastic tube to the butterfly needle and squinted as it filled with blood. “So, you probably don’t have the answers, but I’ve got to ask. Was this individual a drug user?”

  “I have no idea.” At least he could say that with honesty.

  “Figures.” He withdrew the needle and rubbed a cool gel over the insertion point. The spot ceased bleeding, and the physician examined the small vial. “So, I take it you don’t know whether or not this individual used genetic enhancements either.”

  Chris’s heart stopped. “Uh, I think he did.” In fact, I sold him his enhancements, Doc. What do you make of that?

  The physician cocked his head to the side, his eyes wide. “He did? You think he was an enhancer?”

  “He said as much before he died.” His stomach twisted. He feared the dark tunnel this conversation plunged into.

  “Good lord,” the physician said. “Why didn’t you tell me immediately?”

  “Why? What do you mean?”

  “Hold on. I need someone else down here.”

  “What’s going on?” Chris asked, but the doctor flew out the door.

  A couple minutes passed before another physician barged in. She stared at him with round brown eyes, her thin lips pressed closed tightly. Beneath the white coat fluttering around her like a cape, she cut a lean but fit figure. “Christopher Morgan, right?”

  “Yes.”

  Her brow furrowed and her nut-brown ponytail whipping, she grabbed his arms and squeezed. “You aren’t an enhancer, are you? Your muscles are too small.”

  A shade of embarrassment flickered through him. He’d never felt so emasculated by a single gesture from a medical professional. Not even during his time in prison dealing with the surly and impassionate white coats there. “No, of course not. What the hell is going on?”

  The doctor leaned back and crossed her arms. She didn’t answer. Her eyes glazed over in thought.

  “What happened to the other doctor? He ran like the devil was chasing him.”

  “He’s been on call for the past thirty-six hours. Just a little frazzled.” She tapped at her comm card. “We’ll have your blood sample analyzed and the results returned to you in about thirty minutes.”

  Her voice emanated a clinical calmness, but he could sense a certain tension behind her words. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “Truthfully, I’m not worried about diseases that might show up on the assay. We can treat HIV or hepatitis easy enough.”

  “But what can’t you treat as easily?” Enhancements. The answer rang out in his head.

  “Well...” The doctor pulled a stool closer to the examination table and sat down. “I want you to answer something honestly. I’m not about to call the cops or report you.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Have you ever used a genetic enhancement?”

  “A genie?” Chris shook his head. “No. No way.”

  “Have you ever come in contact with one?”

  He opened his mouth to protest. But lying wouldn’t help. “Yes, I have. In a laboratory setting.”

  Her eyes widened, and she appeared ready to ask him more, but she recomposed herself and straightened out her back. “I understand.” She clasped her hands in her lap.

  Chris squinted at her name tag. Robin Haynes, MD. Pediatric Oncology. “Wait a second. I’m not a kid, and as far as I know, I don’t have cancer. Can you please answer my question, Dr. Haynes: What the hell is going on?”

  She exhaled. “I’m not exactly sure. A couple of my colleagues have offered wild speculations, but I don’t have any concrete evidence.”

  “Evidence of what?”

  “Mr. Morgan, I’m afraid your exposure to genetic enhancements puts you in an at-risk group.”

  “Please, can you speak to me straight?”

  “We’ve discovered a disease afflicting individuals involved in illegal genetic enhancements, particularly those with recent enhancements.”

  His fingers clutched the edges of the examination table. “I’ve never taken a gene mod, though.”

  “Sure, I believe you,” she said. “But we can’t accept the risk. We don’t know what we’re dealing with, so we’re going to need to put you in quarantine for forty-eight hours. That appears to be when the first symptoms arise after exposure. If you’re clear afterward, we can release you.”

  Forty-eight hours was far longer than he’d planned to be in the hospital. It would delay his meeting with Jordan and any chance he’d had of immediately delving into his work to determine if the enhancements they’d sold were fatally flawed.

  “And if I’m not clear?” The enhancer’s bloodshot eyes and mottled face exploded in his mind.

  Dr. Haynes’s brown eyes seemed to convey a deep-seated pity for him. “Then I’m afraid the prognosis isn’t favorable.”

  Chapter 4

  With a careful swipe, Veronica painted an orange cloud on the canvas. She wanted to recreate a calming sunset. It should have been a simple enough task. Nothing that pushed the boundaries too far, nothing too exotic. In the realm of landscape paintings, it was a common but alluring trope.

  She wanted it prove to herself that she could create something beautiful again. Something inspiring calmness. Something evoking serenity.

  Instead, the fiery golden ball reflected across the churning waters of the canvas and lit up the sky in a brazen explosion of crimson and yellow.

  She stood and stepped away from the easel. Looking up, she stared at the exposed beam where the men had thrown the nylon rope and hoisted her arms above her head until they dislocated her shoulders. She cringed.

  No matter how hard she tried to repress those memories, they came back. Trying to hide from those images was like running along the beach and expecting the waves to stay in the ocean, to stop rolling up on the shore.

  Veronica kicked the easel over, and the canvas flopped onto the hardwood floor. She stomped on the painting. Then she crouched and pounded her fists into the fiery sky until it became nothing but a muddle of multicolored shreds. Paint covered her hands.

  She wanted to leave, to move, to forget about all this.

  But they wouldn’t let her.

  Her comm card lit up, and she grabbed it, smearing paint all over the plastic device. She looked at the caller ID, and her heart sank.

  “What do you want?”

  “Where’s Morgan?” Trevor answered. The man with the leather jacket had become her main contact since the leader of the group had levied those threats against her and her family. “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know! I told you already. I tried calling him, but he hasn’t returned my call. Just said he’s busy.”

  “Not good enough.”

  “Aren’t your spooks watching him?”

  “Tell us what’s going on. I’d hate to have to find out after we talk to your sister. We need to know more than ‘he’s busy.’”

  “Fine.” She wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. She could feel the paint smudge across her skin, but she didn’t care. “Don’t touch her.”

  Trevor laughed. “What would you possibly do if I did? In case he hasn’t told you, we’ve gotten word Chris is in the hospital. We need to know why.”

  The line went dead. Veronica tugged at her hair and gave the shredded canvas a final kick. Another piece of her artwork ruined by those men.

  Chapter 5

  In the sterile white room, Chris lay on the hospital bed. He flipped through channels on the holodisplay. Nothing held hi
s attention like the thoughts plaguing his mind. If he did end up with the disease he’d seen in the enhancer, if it all was his doing, then it seemed rightful penance that he should suffer the same as his customers had.

  His comm card lit up, signaling an incoming call, and he muted the display.

  Veronica hadn’t quit calling. He didn’t want to worry her or add to the stresses he had already caused her by unloading the day’s events on her. He certainly didn’t feel equipped to impart to her the terrible revelations he’d discovered regarding his past activities in dealing enhancements.

  But she would not relent, and this time, he answered. “I promised I would call when I could.” He fought to remain calm, to keep the emotion out of his voice. “Is something up?”

  “No,” Veronica said. “I just...I just needed to talk.”

  Maybe he wouldn’t have to say a word. Just get her to speak, to take over. “What did you want to talk about?”

  “I feel like I’ve said enough.” Her words came out terse. “I’ve bored you to tears with my sobbing, so what’s going on with you?”

  “No, no, no. I don’t want you to think that.” He wanted the attention on her. Not him. “I don’t want you to stop talking to me. I’m sorry if it seemed like I was ignoring you. I promise, I wasn’t.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Can you tell me now what the hell has been going on?”

  “I don’t want you to worry—”

  “Don’t sugarcoat it,” she said. “Stop treating me like a porcelain doll. I need your support, but I also want you to be honest.”

  Chris furrowed his brow. He still didn’t understand Veronica’s bipolar nature. One moment, she told him she missed being with him, missed seeing him in person, how she needed to talk her emotions out with him, and the next she scolded him for treating her too delicately. He thought he had known her well when they dated. He had even considered proposing to her shortly before getting tangled up in the enhancement business. But now she seemed like an entirely different woman—a stranger calling him with everything from emotional breakdowns to demands he tell her what he was up to.

  He understood she might be suspicious of him. She had the right to be. She might be worried he planned to fall back into illegal enhancements with Jordan and would undoubtedly be nervous she would be another unintended casualty in the business, as she’d been before.

  But this needed to stop. He wanted to know exactly what was going on with her, and she needed more help than he could ever hope to provide.

  Yet maybe helping with her problems would temporarily distract him from his own.

  “Well, what’s going on?” She sounded agitated. “Why have you been avoiding me?”

  Chris sighed. He’d left the holodisplay on, and it now showed a daytime drama taking place in a solar system far from Earth. Recent manned missions to Mars and beyond had bolstered a national fervor for anything and everything space related. He found himself wishing he’d been on one of those new shuttles blasting off from this planet. “I haven’t been avoiding you. You want me to be honest, I will be. I watched a stranger, an enhancer, die at my feet today.” He snarled as he spoke. “And before he died, he blamed me for causing what ailed him. Then I went to the emergency room because I got the man’s blood all over me. Now they have me in quarantine because they think I might have a fatal disease, and they won’t tell me a goddamn thing about it. Hell, they don’t even know what causes it.” He inhaled. “My enhancements might’ve caused it. My products. My fault. Good enough recap?”

  His chest rose and fell in deep breaths. He’d been too harsh, too angry, but he found it hard to vocalize an apology now.

  “Are...are you okay?” She sounded meek, worried.

  “I don’t know yet, honestly, but I’ll tell you when the doctors tell me something, which doesn’t seem likely anytime soon.”

  “I’m sorry to hear about all this.”

  “I am too.” He paused. “Look, Vee, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I just didn’t want you to worry about all this. I didn’t want you to be scared.” He combed a hand through his hair. The IV line from his wrist caught on his ear, and he brushed it off. “And most of all, I think I messed up. You always warned me, you told me to be careful.”

  He heard her breathing as she waited for him to continue.

  “I don’t want to involve you in all this. I don’t want to scare you off again.”

  “What scares me is when you go off grid. You know, maybe you think I’m only scared for my own ass, but for some godforsaken reason, I still worry about you, Christopher Morgan.” She chuckled. Chris could tell she’d forced it, but he smiled at the gesture. “You stubborn asshole.”

  For a moment, they both remained on the line, silent.

  “How likely do they think it is you have this disease?”

  “Dr. Haynes, about the only doctor who actually talked to me, told me she thinks it’s highly unlikely. But they have to keep an eye on me anyway.”

  “That’s good,” Veronica said. “I hope she’s right.”

  “Me, too.”

  After speaking to her for another thirty minutes, relaying the day in more detail, he ended the call and turned the holodisplay’s sound back on. The news stream replayed a recorded speech by Maryland Senator Arthur Sharp. The congressman had been ill for a couple months, refusing public appearances, but remained active in politics through his holopresence at Senate sessions and hearings. Half the congressmen refused to show up in person anyway, preferring to attend virtually, so Sharp’s lack of physical attendance didn’t hamper his popularity in the polls.

  “I promise we will exterminate illegal enhancements if my friends on the other side of the aisle choose to support this bill,” Sharp said, his voice tinny from being transmitted through his holo in the senate and then through the holodisplay. “A vote against it is a vote condoning a black market plaguing the American people.”

  A cutaway showed a senator from the opposing party. “Senator Sharp’s bill, though well intended, will put unnecessary burdens on biomedical companies. These law-abiding businesses are not only supporting the American economy, but they are integral to providing the cutting-edge technology keeping us healthy.”

  Chris agreed with the dissenting senator. If Sharp’s bill went through, all companies performing genetic research would be required to pay an extra tax to support auxiliary regulatory specialists whose job would be to constantly report all experimental gene inventories to the FDA. He figured such a process could be easily monitored through computers or some kind of government-sponsored network, but Senator Sharp argued software could be manipulated far too easily, and the FDA needed to ensure the integrity of all incoming data. He claimed doing this would dissuade company workers from stealing samples from labs to manipulate and sell on the street.

  Chris understood the point, at least. He had been one of those employees that stole company technology. Still, he thought those occurrences were relatively uncommon. Far more unscrupulous genetic enhancement manufactures simply produced their wares by using home laboratory equipment. Such setups had long since become mainstream with the biopunk movement. Just as people had enjoyed tinkering with computers at the turn of the twenty-first century, homegrown scientists and startups were now exploring the realms of biology and genetics in their garages.

  In addition, he had a more selfish interest in the senator’s proposed strategy to curb illegal enhancements. He and Jordan had founded their own genetic therapy company at Chris’s suggestion. Though Jordan had fairly deep pockets, they were still bootstrapping the business, and supporting a government-approved regulation specialist to watch their every move would add a tremendous financial and time burden to their work.

  Chris jolted up. He’d forgotten to call Jordan and update his friend.

  When Jordan picked up, Chris retold the day’s events.

  “Well, I’m certain everything will turn out fine,” Jordan said, his voice calm as usual. “If this disease or whatever
it is only affects enhancers, you’ll live.”

  “I appreciate the confidence. But I’m more concerned about the others that won’t. We did this. We sold these enhancements.”

  “I’m not so sure, my man. Maybe some of these guys used our genies to give them extra muscle mass, but those same individuals are just as likely to have bought enhancements from all kinds of shady people. We tested our wares. Hell, we practically threw our products through the gamut like companies developing FDA–approved therapies.” He paused. “But the other guys, Chris...I doubt everyone had—or has—the same standards as we did. These enhancers screw their genes up with all kinds of injections and manipulations. If anything, what those doctors are seeing is just the result of humans experimenting on themselves and their DNA.”

  “I see your point.” Chris mulled over Jordan’s statements but couldn’t conjure up the same confidence his friend expressed. Jordan hadn’t dispelled their potential culpability in this terrifying new disease. Any good scientist sets up experiments and tests to see if they can disprove a hypothesis. And he didn’t think he could live with himself if he didn’t put forth the same effort to disprove this one. “But I can’t just take your word. I set out to make money, but I never set out to kill people.”

  “I understand your concern, and when you’re out of there, we’ll do what we can. But we need to be careful. Especially you.”

  “This enhancer disease may not be the only thing going viral.”

  Chris straightened in the bed. “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve got my holodisplay on.”

  “Couldn’t give me your full attention?” He realized the question sounded like a joke, but it wasn’t meant as such.

  “Frankly, you’re kind of boring.”

  Chris imagined the toothy grin spreading across his friend’s face. Even in the direst situation, Jordan managed to maintain a sense of humor. He appreciated this characteristic most of the time, especially given his own admitted occasional pessimism. But currently, it only frustrated him. “I’m serious.”

  “All right, all right. So am I. A news stream is on, and so is a video projection looking to have been taken outside your place. Shows the enhancer flailing around and bleeding out. You’re in the background for a second.”