Epilogue
A week later, Chris and Veronica sat in the conference room at TheraComp. The glass partition between the lab and the office area had been reconstructed. The place appeared just as it had before the night of the ill-fated robbery.
Hugh, Margot, Mandy, and Jordan all worked to fulfill the recent demands on TheraComp technologies. The company that had sent a representative a few weeks ago, Caninex, had made a preemptive order of CDXT, too. In addition, Chris and Robin had begun investigations into the commercial viability of the therapy they’d invented to reverse genetic enhancements. Garnering investor attention was easier since the successful use of HDXT at the Baltimore hospitals and its increasing application at other hospitals where the cancer showed up. Jordan, Robin, and Chris had discussed the future of the treatment not just as a therapeutic to treat the cases of rhabdomyosarcoma but also as a possible remedy to enhancers who wanted to become natural again. People who wanted to erase the mistakes they’d injected into themselves. Some people still suffered from botched black-market enhancements mangling their DNA—including sight enhancements that instead turned users blind, neural mods that caused paralysis, and supposed stimulant enhancements that induced insomnia—and this treatment might be able to reverse that previously irreparable harm.
It would take plenty of time and money to develop, but Chris liked the idea of helping these people rectify their pasts and return to normal lives. As a result, he and Jordan had recently hired several other scientists, engineers, and lab techs to fulfill the demand on their research schedule to investigate the new uses for their products.
“I feel stronger,” Veronica said, her blue eyes glittering in the white sunlight washing over her face.
“Are you sure? All the modifications to your genes should’ve been eliminated.” If HDXT had done its job, there would be no more altered DNA in Veronica’s cells, no more enhancements to bestow her with inhuman strength.
Slight wrinkles formed in Veronica’s brow before her lips parted in an understanding grin. “That’s not what I meant.”
Chris opened his mouth to ask her to explain, but the door swung open and cut him short.
Dellaporta sat down without as much as a nod to greet Veronica and Chris. “Sure is busy around here, Morgan. You can assure me you aren’t peddling street genies again, right?”
Chris laughed. “Why? Are you in the market, by chance?”
Dellaporta rolled her eyes. She placed her comm card in the middle of the table. “Since you two preferred I come to you rather than go down to the station, do you mind if I record our conversation?”
“Fine with me,” Veronica said.
“I can deal with that, too,” Chris said. “Are your colleagues still certain I had something to do with this mess?”
“It’s hard to convince most of us an ex-con has changed his ways so drastically, Morgan. You’re going to have to be patient.”
“What about Sharp?”
“What about him?” Dellaporta countered.
“Is he under investigation?”
“You know I can’t answer that. And besides, we’re talking about a U.S. senator. That kind of investigation and federal involvement is slightly outside my jurisdiction. I’m a lowly Baltimore PD detective.”
“I’ve got a question for you,” Chris said. “Hypothetically, why the hell would Sharp take telomerase enhancements if he already had a LyfeGen Sustain?”
“Hard for me to say.”
“Hubris,” Veronica said. “If I were to guess, I’d say he wanted to ensure his immortality. I mean, I personally think most politicians are flagrant egoists. And a man so in love with his own life and self-importance is bound to do whatever is necessary to preserve his continued existence—even if that means throwing away logic in an unbridled race for the fountain of youth.”
“Poetic,” Dellaporta said and cracked her knuckles. “Before we get into anything else, I just wanted to let you know your family is still doing fine in protective custody. Once we’re certain we’ve rounded up everybody involved in Tallicor’s enhancement schemes, the Feds will relax their watch on your parents and sister. Granted, they’ve assured me they’ll still keep an eye out for them—and for you.”
“I know,” Veronica said. “How close do you think they are to unraveling Tallicor?”
“I think we at least have the bio side of things figured out. As far as we can tell, Tallicor is, as you all suspected, responsible for the telomerase enhancement that caused this whole mess.”
“Figures,” Chris said. “They pushed the enhancement out without much testing, and that sure backfired. From what we saw, it looked like the product they had designed to extend lives was interfering with other genetic modifications in people’s bodies. If we understood it correctly, the enhancements would mutate and lead to uninhibited cell growth, ignoring the normal on-off switch cells have and resulting in the rapid spread of tumors. ”
“Right,” Dellaporta said. “That’s what it seems like. This world of corrupt biotechnology is quite a bit more complicated and dangerous than we’d once assumed.”
Chris thought back to his own ventures into genies and his time spent in prison as a consequence. Even then, he’d never realized how deep the roots of the biotech black market were buried.
“We’re still missing some key players associated with Tallicor.” Dellaporta gestured over her comm card. “Ms. Powell?”
Veronica nodded.
“I want to show you images of the people we’ve brought in. Let’s see if we can identify who’s responsible for the criminal organization using Tallicor as a front. We haven’t had any luck in cracking them, so I was hoping you might help. From everything you’ve said, we suspect the man that tortured you in your apartment last February is our guy. According to your statements, the three men wore masks, only revealing their eyes and mouths. It’s a longshot, but do you think you can take a look and see if you recognize any of them from that day?”
The painful memories hidden behind Veronica’s blue eyes appeared in her expression. Chris’s stomach sank as he watched the color drain from her face.
“Okay,” she said weakly. “I can try.”
Dellaporta scanned through the projected images above the table. Each time, Veronica dismissed the potential suspects with a head shake.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, absolutely,” Veronica said as she waved away another image. “I’ll never forget his eyes.”
More hologram faces appeared and then vanished with Dellaporta’s gesturing. None sparked Veronica’s recognition.
“I’m sorry to put you through this,” Dellaporta said. “But I’ve got a few images of other individuals who have been supposedly employed by Tallicor at some point. These people haven’t been found, arrested, or brought in for questioning. Most have flat-out disappeared. Is it okay if we review these, too?”
Veronica offered a feeble nod.
Again, Dellaporta gestured over her comm card, and the air above the table filled with a menagerie of floating heads. She selected several, but Veronica denied recognizing any of them. Sighing, Dellaporta zoomed back out of the individual images. Smaller pictures of all the people associated with Tallicor appeared.
“Wait,” Veronica said, pointing to one in the corner. “That one.”
“This one?” Dellaporta selected the image, and the man’s square face grew larger. Wavy black hair sat atop a forehead etched in straight creases, as though the man was perpetually lost in thought. His bright-green eyes seemed to complement a friendly smile. “He’s deceased.”
Chris’s stomach twisted into a knot, and he stopped breathing. He, too, recognized the man. It was someone he’d once thought of as a friend, even if for only a few months.
“Did he die recently?” Veronica said.
“No,” Chris said. “He died in prison. He died during the riots when I was attacked.”
“That’s right,” Dellaporta said.
“No, it’s not rig
ht,” Veronica said, her voice rising. A red hue replaced the pallor in her face. “That’s him. That’s the man that came after me in my apartment. I swear to God those eyes are his. He’s not dead.”
Chris didn’t want to believe her. But her blue eyes burned in a dark fury. She appeared undeniably certain of how she recognized Jeremy Vincent Kar, and she could not be persuaded otherwise.
Vincent, as Chris had known his cellmate in prison, had been associated with the black-market DNA movement. But Chris had never known how or why he was involved.
“That’s impossible,” Dellaporta said. “He died.”
“No,” Chris said. He too had assumed Vincent was dead when he’d returned to an empty cell after recovering from his own wounds during the prisoners’ uprising. “Do you know what happened to him after the riots? Do you know what supposedly happened to his body? Or was it all just reported by the prison—by the prison doctors?”
Dellaporta remained silent. Chris saw the doubt fester behind her eyes. She had no answers for him.
None of them had the answers.
This meant that Vincent was probably still alive, probably still pulling the strings in whatever portion of his criminal organization that had escaped Dellaporta’s bust. Chris knew that he, Veronica, Jordan, and now Robin were still not safe.
His dreams of driving TheraComp’s success with Jordan and continuing the development of HDXT with Robin seemed trite when faced with the reality of the lingering dangers Vincent and his organization represented. But Veronica’s words echoed in his mind.
“I suppose the best thing we can do is move forward,” he said.
Dellaporta leaned back. “That’s my plan. If he’s still out there, I’m not stopping until we bring him in.”
A sense of determination filled Chris. No matter how successful TheraComp became, no matter how his work and his hopefully budding relationship with Robin progressed, he couldn’t escape his past in the underground biotech trade. But maybe he could sublimate his experience and mistakes into progress. After all, the knowledge he’d gained from developing enhancements and working with organizations dabbling in those same endeavors might yet prove useful.
“Anything you need, anything at all, let me know. I want to see this bastard taken down.”
“Glad to hear it, Morgan.” Dellaporta gestured over her comm card, and the hologram of Vincent disappeared. “Because we certainly have our work cut out for us.”
Variant
Anthony J Melchiorri
Variant (Black Market DNA)
Copyright © 2015 by Anthony J. Melchiorri. All rights reserved.
First Edition: April 2014
http://AnthonyJMelchiorri.com
Cover Design: Paramita Bhattacharjee
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.
Printed in the United States of America.
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Prologue
August 25, 2059
Baltimore, Maryland
The ethereal blue glow of Ross Garret’s holoscreen lit up his face. Shadows settled over the Baltimore Telegraph’s offices as the sun sank beyond the horizon. The other desks in the bullpen were devoid of life except for the miniature herb garden Amy Park kept at hers.
Even in the daylight, most of the workstations remained empty. The Telegraph had evolved into the digital age of instant news like the remaining media giants around the country. To produce and publish articles in a manner consistent with the immediate gratification Americans had long since grown accustomed to, Net-based software parsed through natural language—or the written word—to concoct stories with varying degrees of accuracy. There wasn’t time to fact-check, and hype sold better than stories that passed the long-since defunct model of going through a human editor and fact-checker before publishing.
Somehow, Ross was expected to stay ahead of the tide of computer programs and algorithms crafting stories with tantalizing titles like “Biotech Group Tallicor Responsible for Deaths of Hundreds.” Never mind the sensationalism or the veracity of such a headline; people ate it up.
Ross jotted notes on a yellow legal pad. Several of the top sheets were wrinkled and stained with spilled coffee, but he refused to write his research in any computer system or server, no matter how secure, no matter whether it connected to the Net or not.
Maybe he was paranoid, but he couldn’t risk losing this story to a computer program that would scarf up his words and regurgitate them on a news stream flowing through subscribers’ comm cards. He’d heard the horror stories from colleagues who claimed their cards or computers had been hacked by a rival journalist desperate for a scoop.
No, this byline was all his.
He deserved the recognition. Hell, maybe there’d be a book deal. Not like many people possessed the patience to read an entire book anymore, much less a nonfiction one, but he’d give it a whirl. Besides, the story he was preparing to tell was better than the cookie-cutter, software-produced genre fiction stories rampant across the literary market.
Ross rubbed his eyes. Goddamn computers. It was tough to be a writer, but he couldn’t imagine himself doing anything else. His wife, Emma, hated to hear him say that. She’d begged him to find something else, another job with more earning potential than his lofty ambition of making a living as an investigative journalist. She pleaded with him to think about their daughter Kelsey.
And Emma couldn’t have a job. Though she’d had a successful career as a nurse and would’ve been more employable than Ross, she was also the one to stay home with Kelsey as their daughter underwent rounds of nano-treatments for her aggressive leukemia. The treatments were slowly working, but the bills had piled up, and the collectors were already calling.
I need this story. Ross slammed his fist on the legal pad. He’d discovered what he thought signaled a larger conspiracy in a corporation called Blackbird Organics. The company produced nutritional supplements derived from natural products for a variety of purposes ranging from improved memory to flu prevention.
Hell, even his wife bought them. She swore by their neonatal pills and took the supplements while nursing their daughter. Maybe he was paranoid, but Ross wondered if his daughter’s cancer and the supplements were connected. His wife called him crazy. But he’d discovered the incidence of disease associated with the nutritional supplements Blackbird Organics produced was a tad too high.
FDA reports demonstrated several unconnected deaths due to a neurodegenerative disease that could be treated if caught in time. Ross had found two victims of a neurodegenerative disease that had consumed a battery of pills produced by Blackbird, ranging from vitamins to enhance eyesight to natural remedies for the common cold. He’d always doubted the validity of these nutritional supplements anyway, especially since the FDA only required companies to prove such products didn’t cause any harm to a person. Whether or not the supplement actually lived up to its claims was another matter entirely.
He found it intriguing that the conglomerate Advance Industries was in the midst of selling off Blackbird Organics to another company. Advance also happened to own a pharmaceutical business called Protiomics. As luck would have it, Protiomics offered the treatment for the neurodegenerative disease.
He threw his pencil down and sighed. He still couldn’t figure it out. He still hadn’t found how, why, or if the Blackbird supplements caused the disease.
Ross stood and closed his holoscreen. For a moment, the entire office appeared black as his pupils adjusted. Enough light sifted in through th
e neighboring buildings and the crescent moon hanging in the dark sky to illuminate his path into the break room.
Much to his coworkers’ dismay, his manager had let him construct an amateur laboratory setup in an empty room conjoining the space where the few human employees of the Baltimore Telegraph gathered for lunch.
On a couple of wood-laminate tables sat several devices called microfluidic labs on a chip. While Ross didn’t quite understand the science behind them, they were supposed to serve as at-home testing to ensure your food, medicine, or nutritional supplement was safe. The conspiracy theorists purchased the chips in droves and didn’t trust the government to tell them what was okay to eat and what was contaminated with who-the-hell-knows. While Ross had once ridiculed those individuals, he found himself empathizing with them as he dug into his Blackbird Organics story.
Hundreds of open bottles of pills sat across the tables. He needed proof—a virus, a live bacteria sample, a prion—any type of vector or disease-causing agent that might be discovered in one of these plastic containers.
For what felt like the thousandth time, he cut a gel-encapsulated pill and separated its contents into several small allotments. He inserted the samples into the buzzing machines on the table. With the tests underway, he slumped onto a chair. His eyelids sagged until he could no longer keep them open.
A piercing alarm jolted him awake. He jumped. One of the chips glowed green, and he gasped. A green light meant a contaminant had been found.
Finally.
Hologram text projected above the coffee mug–sized machine. Evidence of a viral vector. But not just any viral vector. An artificial viral vector.
The Black Market DNA Series: Books 1-3 Page 51