Project Cyrano: A Genetic Engineering Technothriller (Genetic Engineering, TechnoThriller)
Authors: Amy Taylor
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.
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.”