Invasive (5 page)

T
he sun isn't up yet and Hannah is pacing the hallway outside Ez Choi's office in the faculty science building. Her boots echo on the cheap tile. Her phone is pressed tight to her ear—it's only 5:30
A.M.
here in Tucson, but it's already 8:30 back on the East Coast.

“Pretend I'm dumb,” Hollis is saying. “In fact, don't pretend, because when it comes to this sort of thing, I'm pretty goddamn stupid. You are telling me that our victim was killed by ants? And that these ants were made—genetically engineered, in fact—by persons unknown?”

“I think so.”

Silence on the other end. It goes on long enough that she's about to continue, but then Hollis makes a sound: a long, nasal sigh. “God damn it.”

“Yeah.”

“My gut had it right.”

“I'm sorry?”

“Bringing you into this. I knew things didn't add up. I checked my gut and my gut told me to find you in my contact list. When the going gets weird, the weird needs Hannah Stander.”

This sticks Hannah with a swirl of complicated feelings. On the one hand, it's good to be wanted. On the other hand, is that what she wants to be? Spooky Mulder? She tells herself:
This is just part of the gig. It's what you get when they introduce you as an FBI futurist.

Hollis is saying: “Are you listening to me? Did I lose you?”

“Sorry, I think I dropped the signal there for a second,” she lies. “What were you saying?”

“I asked how your bug friend knew the ants are a GMO.”

“She said she found genes—indicator genes, marker genes. Labs use them in genetic engineering to determine if a modification in a plant or animal was successful. If they're still present after breeding, then that gene mod is viable.”

“So. The next question: Who did this?”

“I don't know. I don't know how we'd even find out. The ants got there somehow. This was purposeful. Are we sure they're what killed him?”

“Blood tests suggest our victim died of shock—though whether from anaphylaxis or having his skin bitten off by tiny insects, I don't know.”

“It's officially a crime scene, then.”

“Looks like murder.”

Murder by genetically modified organism,
she thinks. The future really is a door. And it looks like ruination is winning.

Ez comes back with breakfast tacos—chorizo, egg, cheese. She sits at her desk, hunched over like a starving person, while Hannah picks at hers.

Hannah's too wound up to eat. Her mind races with a grim, disturbed excitement. She expected that any GMO angle in future crimes would be somewhat obvious: a murder over a seed patent, or someone modifying a bacterium to create a rampant superbug—some new strain of tuberculosis or cholera.

This, though? Ants? Insects?

It's like Ez is reading her mind. Around a mouthful of breakfast taco she says, “You know, this shit is unprecedented.”

“I was just thinking about that.”

“That's a good thing.”

Hannah arches an eyebrow. “How so?”

A hard swallow and Ez explains: “This isn't the work of one
person. It's not like some loony white guy who can go pick up an AK-47 at a gun show, or some foreign terrorist who cooks up an amateur bomb so he can duct tape it to his body and run up alongside a city bus. This takes resources. This takes
infrastructure
. Modifying organisms is a game of inches—you tweak little things here and there. But those ants? They're a huge leap forward. Like I said,
unprecedented
. There's hardly anybody out there with the money and the talent to do this. Your range of suspects will be a lot smaller than you think.”

It hits Hannah then: “Companies patent their creations, right?”

“Yeah.” Ez looks up at the ceiling, and it's almost like she's watching a lightbulb click on over her own head. She hurriedly wipes her mouth on a napkin. “Holy shit. They do. That might be the key. Compare the DNA sequence and the particular marker genes—see if anybody else is using them.”

“Like a stamp.”

Ez grins. “Like a
signature
.”

The university lab is makeshift: one wall is a bookshelf, except on it are wooden frames instead of books. Hannah pulls a few out while Ez works on her computer. Under the glass of each are dead bugs. Butterflies. Scarabs. Something called
dermestids,
which are a kind of beetle.

Next to the shelf is another set of shelves, these ones lined with terrariums. Hannah sees a caterpillar in one, crawling up a leaning stick. From the back corner of the same cage dangles a cocoon—or is it a chrysalis?

Her eyes glide over each terrarium: she sees huge cockroaches in one, and crawling beetles and worms in another. As she moves downward, Ez calls over: “The bottom two shelves are all spiders, by the way. If you're squeamish.”

Spiders have never really bothered Hannah. But these spiders are
a step above. Tarantulas, mostly. Some of them are fuzzy—some of them are so fuzzy the description has to be upgraded to
downright hairy
.

Ez says: “I can take one out if you wanna play with it. We have a Chilean rose tarantula in there named Delilah. Her little legs on your hand feel like the tickle of Q-tips.”

Hannah laughs. “No, I think I'm good.” She sees one terrarium with what looks like a very real human skull inside—and, she thinks at first, no spider. But then she peers into the skull and sees the gangly, bristling limbs of something hiding in the eye socket. Wisps of white, diaphanous web drift from the holes like the ratty curtains in a gothic house. Webs surround the skull, too, stretched across the floor of the terrarium—barely seen, each as thin as a whisper.

One of the legs recoils as Hannah gets close to the glass.

“I can't let
her
out,” Ez says. “That's OBT.”

“OBT?”

“Orange Bitey Thing. Okay, actually it's the orange baboon tarantula.
Pterinochilus murinus.
One bite from that grumpy bitch will put you in the hospital. And she doesn't warn you before she attacks. If I wanna move her from one terrarium to another, I gotta use a special suit. Hip waders and gloves and a mask.
Just
in case.”

“Wow.”

Ez snaps her fingers and gestures over her shoulder. “Go look across the room there.”

Hannah does. Parallel to Ez's desk, stands a metal rack full of plastic Tupperware-style dish bins that slot into tracks, each open bin hanging above the next. It hits Hannah that these are probably from the cafeteria: bins, rack, and all. She pulls out one of the bins like a drawer—and almost screams.

Ants. Little ants like black pinpricks. Swarming over a couple of dead crickets and little ampules of goop that looks not unlike pink Silly Putty. Inside is also something that looks like a beaker sealed up with cotton balls at the top. At the corners of each bin
are smeary, dark-stained piles. Scattered about, too, are these round black discs—like hockey pucks with holes in the side.

Suddenly Ez is hovering near her. “You found Antlandia!” she says.

Hannah swallows. Feels the ants crawling on her even though they aren't. “I don't get it.”

“Don't get what?”

“Are all these bins full of ants?”

“Cool, huh? Each is a different kind of ant. Argentine. Odorous. Carpenter. These are the elegantly named ‘little black ants,' aka
Monomorium minimum
.”

“How are they not swarming all over the lab?”

“Fluon. Liquid Teflon. Spray the edges of each bin and they can't get past. Occasionally one or two sneak out, but for the most part it contains entire colonies. And by the way, these black discs? Formicariums full of colonies and queens.” Ez taps the top of one of the hockey pucks. Ants suddenly stream out, carrying what look like little white eggs.

“What's the dirty stuff in the corners?”

“Midden piles. Ants are tidy little fuckers. They clean themselves religiously—so perfectly, in fact, that nanotech designers are trying to figure out how to mimic their cleaning habits to keep microscopic devices clean. The ants take out all the trash and dirt—oh, and their colony mates' corpses—and put them in what are essentially little anty landfills.”

“Is that why those ants were cutting skin and carrying it away?”

“Doubt it. Probably a food source. But hey, anything's possible in the wild, wacky world of inventing entirely new animals.”

While Ez goes back to work, Hannah pops open her laptop and researches who in the world—publicly, at least—is attempting to genetically modify insects or other invertebrates.

Globally, only a few meaningful players emerge. Most companies are understandably focused on modifying crop plants: corn, wheat, and soy in particular. Agriculture is big business. It's good money and, when the patents run out and the modified seeds go global,
it has the potential to be good for the rest of the world. (Hannah knows it also has the potential to harm the rest of the world.)

Whatever the case, those doing work above the cellular or plant level are few and far between. She's peripherally aware of some of these players. Rumors have long suggested Monsanto is working on genetically modifying honeybees to protect them from colony collapse disorder, though the company has just as long denied it. Empyrean AgroScience, GmbH, a German company, has begun initial steps in modifying an insect known as the European corn borer, a moth whose caterpillars destroy cornstalks by boring tunnels through them. The company's goal is to create a self-destroying insect: the first generation breeds aggressively with borers in the wild and passes along a lethal gene that wipes them out.

Other companies like Agra-Sci, Johnston Hybrid, and Mar-Gene, Inc., are like Monsanto: rumored to be working on genetically modified honeybees, but they deny, deny, deny.

Scientists at various universities have modified insects and even fish and mice—usually only for a single nonreproducible generation and frequently only to make them glow fluorescent. (Hannah imagines a bunch of mice escaping their confines, glowing blue or green from jellyfish genes. How long would it be before the average homeowner found a bioluminescent mouse scurrying across the bedroom floor—or a whole colony of rats glowing green inside a city Dumpster?)

But do such laboratories have the resources to pull off creating a new species? That takes money. And time. It takes
systems
.

And it's not like murderers would be making their work public.

Unless they are.

It strikes her: the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety.

It takes some finagling on a late-night conference call to get what they need. Ez and Hannah sit in the university lab (with Ez's teaching
assistant, a peppy preppie named Hank), with Hollis on the other end on speakerphone.

“I don't know anything about any of this,” Hollis says. One of his favorite refrains. He likes to reassert how he's old school and doesn't know a damn thing about hackers or genetics or any of this crazy stuff. Hannah thinks it's an act. “But looks like there's a database of GMO organisms. A product of the Cartagena biosafety protocol.”