KILLER T

by Robert Muchamore

  ‘What was I doing when the lights went out?’ Charlie asked herself as she peeled off her disposable blue gloves, dropped them into a trash can, then grabbed a clean set out of a wall-mounted dispenser.

  Mango had moved her gene-editing lab out of Development Kitchen 2 a few weeks before the law made it illegal to own unregistered gene-editing equipment. Over the following year and a half, Charlie had worked in a variety of homes and shuttered retail units, before Mango came up with the idea of using an RV.

  The vehicle had been purchased new, its double bed and TVs replaced by refrigerators, storage cupboards and an extra sink. Oak kitchen cabinets and homey décor in the main cabin had been retained so, when the lab equipment was stowed, anyone peeking inside saw nothing but a vehicle in storage, awaiting its owner’s next expedition.

  ‘Six jobs, two complete,’ Charlie sighed, looking at rows of trays and bottled solutions.

  Before Mango trained her, Charlie envisaged gene editing being done with a giant microscope and a miniature knife, slicing strands of DNA like a microsurgeon. In reality, once a client’s DNA was extracted and modified genes printed, the chopping and cutting was handled by enzymes and involved nothing more glamorous than mixing two clear solutions in a test tube.

  The creation of edited gene sequences required concentration and the mastery of some temperamental machinery, but once Charlie had done it a few dozen times it felt no more exciting than flipping burgers, except she earned twenty times as much money and faced serious jail time if the FBI burst in.

  ‘When’s Mango getting our new machines?’ Juno asked irritably as she loaded a tray of glassware into a dishwasher and began wiping her workspace down with chlorine to avoid sample contamination.

  ‘She says good gear is getting harder to find,’ Charlie explained. ‘Illegal equipment manufacturers used to get around it by adapting stuff used in other fields. But now a lot of that gear must be registered too. Printers and sequencers have to be smuggled out of China or built from scratch. Plus, the people manufacturing zombie drugs and non-targeted mods have the big bucks.’

  ‘I thought we were getting two state-of-the-art eleventh-generation doodahs,’ Juno said. ‘This equipment is at death’s door.’

  ‘I complain every time I see Mango,’ Charlie said as she dropped a bone-marrow sample into a DNA-extraction unit and locked down the lid.

  Juno huffed. ‘I bet Mango would shell out for newer equipment if she ever came and worked here herself.’

  Charlie shared Juno’s frustration but liked Mango and was willing to defend her.

  ‘Mango does all the treatment plans and research on safe techniques,’ Charlie said. ‘And she’s got the twins and two older ones to look after.’

  ‘I’ve got a baby younger than her two,’ Juno pointed out. ‘If the power goes down again, I have to bounce no matter what. Patrick’s sitter can’t stay no later than one.’

  ‘I’ll finish and clean up,’ Charlie said, loathing the prospect.

  ‘You can’t drive after dark yet,’ Juno said. ‘Paying taxis all the time ain’t right.’

  ‘I take the cab out of expenses. We both make good money.’

  Juno worked slower and made mistakes when she was in a mood, and lately she was always in a mood.

  When Charlie first met her, Juno was a straight-A student going for a Navy scholarship. But when that fell through Juno spiralled down. Dropping out of school and hooking up with Seth, a small-time crook with a violent temper.

  Charlie cared about her friend, but she hated that Juno had become the teen-mom cliché that people expect from girls who grow up in state care.

  ‘You didn’t put the music back on after the power went,’ Charlie noted, hoping it would help Juno focus. ‘I need noise to stay awake.’

  Tunes helped an hour pass. Charlie got knocked out of her groove when she picked the wrong sample out of a warming cabinet. Getting a sample mixed up could have horrific health consequences and Mango had trained Charlie and Juno to follow strict labelling and task-separation protocols. But the screw-top bottle in Charlie’s hand had no label at all.

  ‘What’s this, Juno?’

  Juno looked up from a spinning centrifuge and seemed startled.

  ‘Oh, that’s mine,’ she said, reaching out to grab.

  Charlie would have accepted a labelling error, but they were almost out of syringes and a short time earlier she’d noticed there was only one sterile pack left in the cupboard, when there should have been two. She’d also noticed extra glassware in the dishwasher.

  Charlie jiggled the sample, refusing to hand it over. ‘What is this?’

  ‘I had a sample jam in the sequencer. So I started from scratch, rather than find out it had gone wrong after I’d done another two hours’ work.’

  It was a credible excuse, but Charlie didn’t buy it.

  ‘If the sequencer had cooked one of your samples, you’d have moaned like hell,’ Charlie said.

  ‘OK, it’s off the books,’ Juno admitted. ‘A private job.’

  ‘Pardon me?’ Charlie said, eyes growing wide. ‘A job for who?’

  ‘A guy Seth knows.’

  ‘Some guy your boyfriend knows? Do you even know what you’re making?’

  ‘He’s a personal trainer,’ Juno admitted. ‘It’s a non-targeted therapy that boosts muscle and endurance.’

  ‘There’s a reason people save for months and pay ten grand for individually targeted therapy,’ Charlie spat. ‘Broad-spectrum gene edits have a massively greater risk of tumours or other long-term damage. And if they don’t take auto-immune drugs and there’s a reaction …’

  ‘I’m making enough E. coli for a thousand doses,’ Juno said. ‘They sell for a hundred bucks a pop. Mine and Seth’s half share comes to fifty grand. It’s enough to get the deposit for a nice house, for my son, your godson. And this one job makes more than Mango pays me in three months.’

  ‘I’ve been to prison once,’ Charlie said, shaking a fist. ‘Do you want to go too? Do you want to see Patrick dragged off by social services?’

  ‘Mango is ripping us off,’ Juno spat back. ‘Two hundred fifty an hour for you, one fifty for me. Sounds like a lot when you compare it to working a register at K-Mart, but I’ll bet she’s making eighty or ninety thousand dollars from the six treatments we’re doing tonight. We’re doing all the hard work, and we’re getting less than ten per cent of the money.’

  ‘Mango’s a qualified doctor. She pays all the expenses and you just got a five-thousand-dollar bonus,’ Charlie pointed out. ‘Most importantly, Mango shields us. She’s our only point of contact. We never see clients. Mango and her wife were the only people who knew I was doing this work, until I told her I couldn’t cope without an assistant and brought you in.

  ‘Mango also encrypts everything she does online. Does this random guy Seth met at the gym do that? Or did he download the gene sequence at home and bounce it to Seth’s regular Gmail? It only takes one tiny slip for the Feds to sniff out a lab.’

  ‘I don’t know if he uses encryption,’ Juno admitted. ‘But Seth has kept my name out of it. He told his client that stuff is made by a guy he was with at Arizona State. And the previous two batches didn’t cause any problems.’

  ‘Previous two?’ Charlie blurted. ‘Juno …’

  ‘I want a nice place to bring up my kid,’ Juno interrupted. ‘Somewhere in a gated development, with a good pre-school and full biosecurity, so Patrick can play outdoors when he starts walking.

  ‘I was going to do a couple more batches to see how things went, then I was going to tell you about this and offer to bring you on board. You’ve said you’re quitting this racket when you leave for college. But why not bank a couple of million, instead of a couple of hundred thousand?’

  ‘Mango’s been decent to me,’ Charlie said.

  Juno snorted. ‘Mango just moved to a six-million-dollar house. Do you think muffins paid for that?’

  ‘I trusted you,’ Charlie said. ‘Now you�
�ve made me feel like an idiot.’

  ‘So, am I fired?’ Juno said, dramatically ripping off one disposable glove.

  ‘You’re my friend,’ Charlie answered, angry but with no idea how to deal with it. ‘Patrick’s my godson – I love him to bits. You’re a great lab partner, but you lied to me. And you’ve put my freedom at risk without consulting.’

  ‘You’ve got a blind spot where Mango’s concerned,’ Juno said. ‘You should be on a percentage … And …’

  ‘And what?’ Charlie asked.

  Juno sighed. ‘I don’t know why Mango’s so tight about buying us decent equipment. Seth and I have been putting feelers out. There’s gene-editing equipment available. The good stuff’s not cheap, but after a couple more batches I’ll have enough to buy a set-up better than the junk we’re using here.’

  ‘You want your own lab?’ Charlie gawped. ‘You’ve only been doing this for a year.’

  ‘We could be partners,’ Juno said. ‘And you don’t need to be a genius to do this. The patterns for every popular mod can be downloaded. We’re lab monkeys, doing the same tasks, over and over.’

  Charlie shook her head. ‘I don’t want to go back to prison. Maybe Mango could have paid me a fatter share, but she’s shielded me from the risks that you’re now taking. And I never wanted millions, just enough to pay my way through college.’

  ‘So what now?’ Juno asked.

  Charlie looked at the unlabelled sample bottle she’d been holding the entire time. ‘I suppose your personal trainer is expecting his delivery. Take it, finish the batch. But if you’ve got time to do extra jobs under my nose, you can damned well stick around and help me clean up.’

  Juno looked remorseful as she took the sample. ‘What about long term? Are we still friends?’

  Charlie’s vision blurred as she tipped her head back and looked at the ceiling.

  ‘I’ve been at school all day,’ Charlie said, sighing deeply. ‘Right now, I need the energy I have left to get through this job list. Everything else can wait.’

  40 LOVE SHACK

  Harry’s bed sheets were tangled and sweaty as he peeled them back. He kissed Gemma’s shoulder and the pretty teen rolled over and whined.

  ‘My uncle’s barbecue wouldn’t be so boring if you came.’

  Harry flashed a cheesy smile. ‘Harry would come, but he can’t be bothered.’

  ‘You’re an ass,’ Gemma said, grabbing and flinging a cushion.

  Harry ducked and kept teasing. ‘Will your hot cousin Cari be there?’

  Another cushion flew and this time Harry caught it and flipped it back.

  Gemma rubbed the bed. ‘If you go to my family party, I’ll make it worth your while.’

  Harry wasn’t tempted. ‘Matt’s on his way here,’ he told her. ‘Gotta shower and make myself beautiful for Axl’s party.’

  Harry stepped naked into his bathroom. His apartment was on the forty-third floor and the window over his jet tub had a prime view towards the Las Vegas strip. After peeing, Harry checked himself in the mirror.

  Gemma had an annoying habit of clawing Harry’s back when they had sex and he turned round to inspect a bloodied, slightly stinging right shoulder blade. But these scrapes and a few acne scars from spottier days were Harry’s only major imperfections.

  After Charlie broke his heart, Harry used $26,000 from his Vegas Local earnings to have gene therapy on an epic scale. Seven changes to Harry’s genome had more than doubled his muscle mass, strengthened tendons, enhanced respiration, subtly darkened the pallid complexion he’d inherited from his Russian father and reduced the output of the hormone that caused his acne.

  The therapy came from a respected underground lab. On their doctor’s recommendation, Harry had additionally paid for longer term enhancements that would reduce his chances of going bald, improve memory, eliminate susceptibility to several viruses, reduce the risk of early-onset dementia and – most crucially – repair a faulty section of his genome that gave him a one-in-four chance of developing bowel cancer by age sixty.

  Harry did the whole thing behind Kirsten’s back. She only found out when an auto-immune reaction made him pass out in school. She broke down in tears and grounded Harry for a thousand years, but Harry was fine after three nights in hospital, a change in auto-immune medication and a couple of weeks’ bed rest.

  He began outrunning Matt with ease, hit the weights to max his enhanced physique and started catching the eye of some seriously fit Queensbridge girls. Around the same time, Kirsten sheepishly asked Harry for the clinic details. She had the same cancer-causing defect as her nephew and while that got fixed she had a few other mods, including a controversial one that was supposed to slow down the ageing process.

  Harry stepped out of the shower and kissed Gemma before she hopped into the cubicle to clean up. He was towelling off in his bedroom as Matt strode through the open door.

  While Harry’s fragile ego had led him to gene therapy, Matt had registered his unaltered DNA with the United States Athletic Federation and stood to lose a USC athletics scholarship if he had any mods done.

  ‘Have you spent the whole day in bed?’ Matt asked as he mischievously hooked Gemma’s panties on the end of his pool shoe and flicked them deep under the bed.

  ‘Not all day,’ Harry grinned. ‘I went to the kitchen and made grilled cheese.’

  ‘I sent you a message after training,’ Matt said. ‘I changed the top story on Vegas Local and Reno Local to the Chinese soldier thing.’

  Harry looked baffled as he took briefs out of a drawer. ‘What Chinese soldier thing?’

  ‘Your back’s bleeding,’ Matt pointed out. ‘How can you not have watched it?’

  ‘You said you’d handle this morning’s updates,’ Harry said defensively. ‘I didn’t get home from the house party till three. I’ve not seen the news all day.’

  ‘Matilda,’ Matt said, addressing their apartment’s AV system. ‘Open the Vegas Local home page on Harry’s bedroom screen.’

  The web page popped up on a big projector screen.

  ‘Matilda, play the video at top right, full screen.’

  The clip began after a WARNING: Graphic Content banner. It was taken from a surveillance camera in a bleak sports hall, draped with banners written in Mandarin. A time code in the top corner of the screen suggested the clip was a couple of years old. The video quality was excellent, but there was no audio.

  Two outrageously broad-shouldered men in army camouflage were doing exercises, lifting giant tractor tires over their heads, while a tracksuited trio looked on.

  ‘Where’s this from?’ Harry asked, as he squinted and saw that the men exercising had boyish faces and small heads.

  ‘Remember that giant Chinese intelligence leak a few months back? When sixty million Chinese military files got dumped on a public server? Most were encrypted, but hackers have been crunching away and they’ve decoded videos and paperwork from an enhanced warrior programme.’

  Genetically enhanced soldiers had been in the news a lot. The US government claimed to have only done theoretical research into the possibilities, but Russia had openly announced an enhanced soldier programme, and other nations were suspected of doing so in secret.

  The subject was controversial, because a lot of voters and religious groups said altering human DNA was against God’s will and should be banned. But pragmatists pointed out that the US Army would be in trouble if they went to war against a nation whose soldiers were seven-foot-tall hulks who could flip a car and run fifteen miles without breaking a sweat.

  ‘Here comes the juicy part,’ Matt warned, pointing to the bottom right corner of the image.

  A small tracksuited woman holding a computer tablet was giving the two muscle men instructions. But something upset one of them. He set the five-hundred-pound tractor tire rolling violently towards a wall and approached the instructor. The clip had no audio, but it didn’t take a genius to see that she was ordering the giant to return to exercising.

&
nbsp; ‘If she’s five feet tall, that monster must be close to eight,’ Harry calculated.

  ‘You certainly wouldn’t want to shoot hoops with him,’ Matt observed.

  After a brief face-off, the pin-headed hulk grabbed the woman by the shoulders and yanked the arm holding the tablet.

  ‘Oh!’ Harry winced, as he watched the monster tear the woman’s arm off.

  ‘He rips it off like a chicken wing!’ Matt said, smirking. ‘They’re calling him Chinese Chewbacca.’

  ‘Matilda, go back fifteen seconds,’ Harry said, so that he could watch and gasp all over again. ‘Play at one third speed.’

  The clip ended as the monster chased several other officials out of the sports hall, while the one-armed woman lay spasming in a pool of blood.

  ‘Best of all, the Chinese government are saying the video is a fake created by Taiwanese agents,’ Matt explained. ‘So there’s no copyright. We get to keep all the ad revenue.’

  ‘Could it be a hoax?’ Harry asked.

  ‘Nobody seems to think so,’ Matt said. ‘The hackers have decrypted hundreds of other files relating to this warrior programme. You can’t see what the warriors look like on that video, but they’ve released photographs that show how young those hulks are. Kids make the best subjects, because their bodies regenerate faster and soft bones adapt more easily to large scale genetic changes.’

  ‘So that monster was a kid?’ Harry gasped.

  ‘Thirteen or fourteen. There are genetic templates in the decrypted files, which suggest they’re experimenting with gorilla DNA. Apparently, gorillas are nine times stronger than men, and their genetic make-up is near identical.’

  ‘Where does all this craziness end?’ Harry said, mostly to himself.

  ‘Too much scary shit going down,’ Matt agreed. ‘Did you hear from your relatives in London?’