Project Cyrano: A Genetic Engineering Technothriller (Genetic Engineering, TechnoThriller) Read online

  PROJECT CYRANO

  A Genetic Engineering TechnoThriller

  Amy Taylor

  © 2015

  Disclaimer

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter 1: Sky Discovery

  Chapter 2: Mind Project 2103

  Chapter 3: Operation West 1935

  Chapter 4: Quarantine

  Chapter 5: Escape

  Chapter 6: End of Cyrano

  Chapter 1

  Sky Discovery

  Jeffrey McKusick, world famous geneticist and head of the Human Gene Therapy Project at Stanford University, stared out the plane window in complete and utter boredom. His two younger colleagues, reclining in their enveloping, padded chairs, occupied themselves with gleaming electronic tablets or hologram games. He glared at Special Agent Catalina Sosa, a relatively short woman of Argentinean descent.

  Sosa glanced at the geneticist out of the corner of her eye and smiled. Five years they’ve worked together and he never changed. He always hated the uneventful return after a mission. “Mader tells me it’ll only take another hour or so, McKusick.”

  He scowled. “We’ve been on this plane for two hours.”

  “Two hours is fine time when it’s from Greenland to northeastern Canada. Why not read a book or something? You complain about being bored after the mission we just did?”

  McKusick turned back to the window. Then he jumped up in surprise and put his palms against the glass. “Sosa, look at this.”

  She hauled herself out of her chair and went to the window. Her head just met the geneticist’s shoulders, which were broad and thick from his Virginian lineage. “What? Is it an eagle?”

  “No, that.” He pointed towards a grayish cloud. “There’s something up there.”

  “Yes. It’s a cloud.”

  He glared at her. “There is something there. I saw it. Tell Mader to fly to the cloud.”

  Sosa lifted her eyebrows. “I always knew you were slightly crazy, McKusick, but now you’re seeing things. Are you sure your brown hair hasn’t turned gray?”

  McKusick walked past her and limped up to the cockpit, favoring his left ankle. “Mader.”

  The pilot inclined his head back at him, though the holographic helmet prevented McKusick from seeing any of his expressions. “I told Sosa we’ll be there…”

  “I want you to go somewhere.”

  Mader removed his helmet. He had the high cheekbones and red-tan skin of a Native American, with a few well-placed war scars to add a bit of flair. “Pardon?”

  The geneticist ran his hand down his face. “You heard me, Mader. There. Fly into that cloud. I bet we’ll find something worth looking into.”

  Shaking his head, Mader put his helmet back on and the plane veered to starboard. McKusick crossed his arms over his chest. The cloud grew larger and larger until it filled up the sky, and the plane glided into its ethereal embrace. Then the plane catapulted to the side, sending McKusick slamming into a series of control panels. Lights flickered. The panels went dim.

  Sosa dashed into the cockpit. “What happened? McKusick, what did you do?”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  Mader fought to regain control of the plane. His hands darted over the machinery, pushing buttons and inputting commands. The lights flickered back on as the aircraft slowly rolled back to a level position.

  Anders, a tall, thin Scandinavian man, poked his head in. “You may want to look at this. I think McKusick found something.” His eyes gleamed with a curious and mischievous fervency.

  Even Mader got out of his chair and everyone went to the large set of windows on the left side of the place. Sosa touched the glass with trembling fingers.

  An expansive floating platform, perhaps ten square miles, spread out before them. There were massive geodesic domes, some in metal, some in glass, and scores of towers, some two hundred feet tall, but all monumental and black. Pulsing gravity engines glittered blue and green. But everything else was vacant and empty, lifeless, with a fine sheen of moisture reflecting the light of the sun. Bolts of blue energy occasionally flashed in the distance. This facility boasted an electromagnetic field. There were no planes on the docking platform, no internal lights or guards at the doors.

  Mader said, “I guess I’ll land.”

  Sosa whirled on him. “No, you can’t. We don’t know what this place is. We are not getting near it. Its field almost took out the plane.”

  McKusick slapped her on the shoulder. “Then call your CIA director and get permission, but we’re going down there if I have to gag you and put you in a containment pod.”

  Her eyes seethed. She stomped to a room in the back of the plane. She returned a couple minutes later, dejected, and said, “He’s letting us go. What did I do to deserve this? I just wanted to go home. Five months undercover, and now this. We could be here for years.”

  Mader danced back to the cockpit. They touched down on the base, which Anders decided to call Cyrano. Sosa forced them to put their engagement suits on. The base of the suit was a thin, canvas-like fabric, though for all its lightness still proved incredibly tough in battle. It was fitting to the body, but not overly tight, and allowed full movement. Sosa and Mader’s suits were blue, while McKusick’s was green, and Anders’ was a light gray.

  Sosa gazed up at the huge hangar bay doors. They still had old type consoles, flat blue things where you had to actually press buttons instead of just thinking about the door opening. “How old do you think this is, Anders?”

  The man hovered a transparent tablet over the door console. “The data log says…wow. 2103. It’s two hundred years old. Could people even build a place like this in 2103? When was the gravity engine invented?”

  “2095.” Sosa said. “This is quite the find, McKusick. You found a piece of scientific history. What about a country of origin, Anders? And please get the door open. McKusick is about to burst into pieces.”

  “No country of origin listed, so if it’s governmental, they’re not saying.” Anders bent over the pad for some moments. “This code is so archaic. I may be a very good programmer in the CIA, but even I have trouble with old operating systems like Linux. It’s like the difference between an abacus and a computer. Give me a minute.”

  The hangar doors opened a few minutes later with a melodramatic screech. Anders was about to go in, but Sosa clamped a hand over his shoulder. “Don’t touch anything if you don’t know what it is.”

  Anders pouted. “That was three years ago, Sosa. You only lost a finger and you have a perfectly good replacement.”

  “I repeat. Don’t touch something if you don’t know what it is.” Sosa pulled her helmet on, initiated the night vision, and turned on her suit’s protective shield. She took out her beam pistol from its holster on her belt and held it in front of her. “Major Mader, please come with me up front. I don’t like surprises.”

  She
and Mader took the fore with Anders and McKusick behind. They methodically searched every room and hallway they passed before progressing to the next. Anders spent his time finding a map of the Cyrano facility in the database, and this demonstrated to be more difficult than he thought. Once secured, he counted off places as they went. The place was gray, empty, and surprisingly uninteresting. Everything looked the same. Sosa surmised the architects put their energy elsewhere rather than interior decorating.

  They came to a large, rather important looking door. “This goes into the main dome.” Anders said. “Everything branches off from it.”

  “Lock the other doors before we go in. You haven’t gotten the life detection system up, and I don’t want to be surprised.”

  He did so and then they entered forth. Morning light filtered down on them through the clear glass dome. They marveled at its height and brilliance. All the colors of the prism reflected off the soft outside dew and beamed into the dome. There was no furniture, but doors were every twenty or so feet on the perimeter wall. The map showed that all main halls converged on this one large dome.

  Sosa put her hands on her hips and looked all around her with a huge smile on her face. “I think this is a wonderful place to set up a base, don’t you think, McKusick?”

  “Yes.” He gazed up at the dome. “It is beautiful.”

  Mader took that as his cue and returned to the plane for all of their supplies. Anders pointed to a nearby door. “There are a series of labs down that hall and a control room over there. I’ll seal them off just to be sure, but you may want to go look at them. There are dozens of labs here.”

  Sosa said, “Was this a place for scientific research?”

  McKusick limped towards the lab door.

  She chuckled at him. “Anders, go find out anything you can. I need to make a report.”

  Some hours later, Sosa checked in on McKusick. He was bent over a series of microscopes and had four different tablets providing him information from the lab’s database. He went from microscope to tablet to another microscope and back so quickly Sosa didn’t know how he kept himself straight. The light from the microscopes shed stark light on his pale face.

  Sosa touched the door console and the room’s main lights flicked on. McKusick reeled back with a grunt and covered his eyes.

  “Don’t do that, Sosa.” McKusick blinked several times and glared at her. “What’s wrong?”

  “I am checking on your progress. Have you been able to find this lab’s purpose, what they were researching?” She strode over to him and looked down one of the microscopes. “So fancy.”

  McKusick handed her one of the tablets. “Some type of genetic engineering. Early early genetic engineering. It’s so elementary I feel embarrassed for them.”

  Sosa slapped him on the shoulder. “There was a time when everything was new. What were they working on?”

  “Implants and injectable syrums. They called it the Mind Project.”

  “Oh.” Sosa sat down on a stool. “Did they have implant technology back then?”

  “Somewhat, but it was highly experimental and still being tested on animals. That’s what I remember from genetic history class. That was a long time ago.” He looked around the lab with its long rows of benches, hosts of complicated machines, and thousands of glass flasks. “I haven’t found out what animals were used here. The logs don’t say whether it was rats, dogs, maybe even monkeys. Every subject is listed only as a number.”

  Sosa said, “Okay. What type of implants? We have all sorts of stuff now. Surprise me.”

  “As that tablet says, intelligence and strength amplifiers, implants for vision, hearing…they were still at the base level. They probably never thought about increasing mitochondrial efficiency or curing Niemann-Pick in the first trimester, like we can now. They wanted....Superhumans.”

  “Amplified people...Not necessarily changed people, right?” Sosa said. “How was their success?”

  The corner of McKusick’s lips turned up in an ironic sneer. “What do you think? They failed miserably, at least in the beginning. We’ll see if they managed to get further. How was your report to your CIA director?”

  She snorted. “He wasn’t pleased, but he’s given the project a go. He liked Anders’ name, so the base is named Cyrano.”

  Chapter 2

  Mind Project 2103

  As soon as McKusick heard that Mader discovered a chemical library, he hobbled over as fast as his body would allow him. “This, this is what I need!” He exclaimed when he abandoned Sosa completely.

  The geneticist gazed at the thousands upon thousands of stored chemicals, he would later come to find there were around nine hundred thousand distinct compounds, and gorged himself on the database. Sosa, Anders and Mader took a short break just to watch him for the entertainment value.

  It took McKusick an hour to realize they were there, but when he did, he ordered Sosa to help him. “Make yourself useful. You’re an agent, so why not? Get #154366. I don’t know that one. Maybe it’s something they made.”

  She aided him like this all day.

  After dinner, McKusick started up an old PCR machine. “You know, Sosa, it used to take hours and hours for one of these to replicate DNA for testing, and it was only as reliable as the primers. Tricky business. This one takes forty-five minutes. Now we can isolate and replicate any sequence we want in thirty seconds by manipulating the replication machinery. Genetics has come so far in the past couple hundred years.”

  She nodded and kept her mouth shut. Best not upset the world-class geneticist.

  “Get #734921.”

  Sosa bit her tongue and went about her business. She took the glass jar down from its place. As she began to walk, the whole room began to shake and rumble. Flasks clanged in their compartments, while crashing sounds echoed through the halls. Rotten metal screeched under pressure as it twisted and warped from the movement of the facility. Sosa cried out and plummeted to the floor. The flask flew through the air and shattered against a cabinet. The liquid inside vaporized into an opaque, yellow gas. Just then, piercing alarms sounded one after the next down the eerie corridors of the facility.

  McKusick clutched the lab bench and shouted into his communicator. “This is McKusick. Explain!”

  Anders answered in an upset, shaky voice. “One…one of the gravity engines acted up. I think we’ve been taking too much energy from the base. I’m on it.”

  “Turn off these alarms.”

  “I’m trying. I don’t know if it has anything to do with the engine.”

  The geneticist ran over to Sosa and helped her to a chair. Her suit glowed purple along her shoulder, arm, and hip to indicate blunt damage. She winced as she sat down. “Are you okay, Sosa?”

  “The flask.” She glanced at her infuriated suit. “The flask broke.”

  “What?” All the blood drained from his face until he looked like tallow. “Where?”

  Sosa motioned with her head.

  McKusick saw the broken glass, noticed that there was no liquid, and almost fainted. His knees gave out and he crumpled to the floor, his eyes filled with horror. “That’s what the alarms are.”

  “What are you talking about?” Sosa tested her shoulder and whimpered. At least it was not dislocated.

  “A quarantine.” He whispered. “We’re in a quarantine. Cyrano shut itself down. Do you know what that means? That was a class I or II compound. We could have inhaled it and be dead tomorrow. We have no way of knowing, and I can’t test it to see because it has gone into the ventilation system. Do you understand?”

  Sosa said, “You have our blood samples in your tablet don’t you?”

  “Well…yes.”

  “Then take new samples and compare.”

  McKusick ran his hands down his face. “That won’t mean anything, Sosa. Look at where we are. We’re in a genetic engineering facility. Genetic. Engineering. It could cause secondary, tertiary, quinary mutations knowing how ignorant these researchers were. It cou
ld cause a signal cascade that could destroy your body’s ability to utilize vitamin C, or your hemoglobin’s ability to transport oxygen, or all manner of things. This isn’t something you can just fix with a wave of your hand, Sosa. I should know. I’ve invented those things and trust me. That was not it.”

  “Then what can we do?” Sosa cried. “Can Anders shut off the ventilation from this area and stop the spread?”

  “Too late.”

  Anders’ voice came through their communicators. “The engine is back online and I’ve reduced the base’s power consumption to sustainable levels. Are you two okay?”