CHAPTER TWO
“What are you doing?” the sheriff bellowed with exasperation forty minutes later. He’d ordered the women to stop touching evidence and go outside for the fourth time. After the initial hysterical hugging and questions, the women began compulsively tidying up the damage.
Harmony came over to soothe the sheriff ’s ruffled feathers. She understood his frustration, but she had no intention of letting the man get in her way tonight. Her daughter had been in danger tonight and, worse yet, it had happened inside Floracopia. If any place in this world should be safe, it was the little splicer company she had built with her own two hands.
The problem was that the Floracopia Co-op employed practically everybody in town in one way or another. So the Somata Sisters were the closest thing to local celebrities they had around here. Harmony did feel it was idle vanity to recognize that. The identical quadruplet sisters would have been local celebrities anywhere, though. Harmony smiled proudly when she thought of her daughters.
All four of them were short and curvy with blond curls, green eyes, and, unfortunately, a reckless disregard for the laws of reality. Harmony frequently wished she had spliced away that characteristic. It would have made their lives so much easier. Constantly getting mistaken for each other had stopped being funny when they were about eight years old, so now they went out of their way to look different. Harmony knew the townspeople really appreciated it. Although most people believed they could tell them apart anyway. It was a very small town.
Harmony remembered the day, over twenty years ago, that old Myrna Hix had finally asked the question everyone in town had been dying to ask.
“Missy, are you pregnant?” she rasped.
“Yes, ma’am,” she’d answered, determined to keep her voice level. She reflexively put a hand on her belly.
Myrna had sniffed. “Well it don’t surprise me, what with all your people dead and you running that devilish gene business. It don’t matter that it’s all legal now, Jesus don’t like it.”
“I have to go now, ma’am,” Harmony said politely and moved away.
Myrna was having none of that. This was the hottest gossip of the year. “And who’s the daddy?”
Harmony had sighed. “That’s my own business,” she replied.
“Did you mix ’em up in one of your satanic gene buckets?” Myrna asked.
Harmony couldn’t keep her voice level this time. “Human gene splicing is illegal, Myrna,” she snapped. “Don’t ever suggest my girls are strange. You know what would happen if the government thought they were spliced.”
Myrna had paled and blinked hard. Harmony was kicking herself inside. She just knew the old lady would spend years making her pay for raising her voice to an elder. The subtle gossip in a small town can drive you mad.
“Well,” sniffed Myrna. “Congratulations.”
Harmony had watched the old woman scuttle off. And that was the last time anyone had asked her where her girls had come from. Which was good since she had no intention of telling. And they were all strange.
Clio, the splicer, spent most of her time in her lab so she usually wore loose, comfortable clothes like the cotton yoga pants, lab smock, and running shoes she had on this evening. Her sister, Terpsi, kept trying to make her sit in a corner and drink something warm, but every few minutes she erupted in outrage as more people pawed through her precious lab equipment.
Terpsi was what most people thought of as ‘the responsible one.’ She seemed far too young to be a married doctor with two little boys. Harmony felt much too young to have grandchildren, but she doted on them. Terpsi occasionally worked with the Co-op whenever they had a germ or medical project. Harmony did not like to take medical projects, so Terpsi maintained her own clinic in town as well. She always kept her long hair up in a smooth twist and wore sensible, conservative clothes. Tonight, she wore a soft plain shirt and matching loose cotton pants.
Kalliope was her wild little engineer. That girl always had tools and mad machines hidden in her pockets and grease smears on her face. She was given to wearing overalls, thick boots, and an ever-changing parade of party colors in her hair. Tonight she’d roared up on her homemade steamcycle with bright purple hair, sporting a thin nightgown over jeans. Harmony could see more tattoos on that girl than she’d known a person could have. She resisted lecturing her daughter, but it took effort.
Thalia was the only one of the Somata sisters not here. She was in California this week collecting samples for their next genetech project. Harmony was thankful. Thalia was too charming and persuasive for her own good. She just kept chattering until somehow she got what she wanted.
Harmony kept up a soothing litany as she gently steered the sheriff away from all those interesting cages. The man looked like he would very much enjoy poking around. Not all of the projects Floracopia took on were totally legitimate and she just didn’t need any more complications tonight.
“Oh, sheriff, be reasonable. Half the town is tromping around in our parking lot. We’ve just had a major breech of security. We’ve got to make sure nobody else gets in,” Harmony said sensibly as she patted the frustrated sheriff on the shoulder. She swept him out of a big lab room and into the hallway as graciously as she could. He craned his neck looking for the monsters the local kids always swore were in here.
“Now, it looks like the intruders opened the locks pretty easily, so either they had extremely good equipment or they had clearance to be here,” Harmony said as she showed him the outer doors of the lab building. “Naturally, we prefer the employees do not come in after hours, steal specimens and shoot up the place, so we are looking into that aspect of it. We’ll keep you updated with any information we have.”
Harmony knew that if the girls were local celebrities, she herself was something like a minor deity around this town. She patted her hair to make sure it was still secured in a neat bun and checked her clothes for wrinkles or smudges. Although she always tried to dress and act in a way that was reserved, she couldn’t avoid the looks her shining bronze hair drew, any more than she could avoid the whispers about her past.
Well, a single woman with four girls to raise and a cutting edge genetech business to run is sure to draw some comment. And if she was able to use her influence to direct local policy, it was only natural. She knew that any policy that helped Floracopia would help the locals. She grew up here too, after all.
“What are these scratches?” asked the sheriff, bringing Harmony back into the moment.
“What?” she asked innocently.
He pointed to the deep scratches along the walls of the hallway. “They look like they could have been made a pack of large dogs, maybe. But I don’t know of any dog that could gouge concrete like that.”
Harmony laughed nervously. “Oh look sheriff. I think your men need you.” She quickly pulled him in to Animal Lab Two. The scratches were also at the base of the door. The sheriff continued to frown at them despite her attempts to draw him away.
“Is that blood in the corner?” he asked, but a police officer came up with questions that distracted him. Harmony slumped against a wall with relief.
Animal Lab Two was bursting with police and lab personnel sifting through things, taking pictures and bagging evidence. The sheriff smiled in appreciation.
“I do like a well-worked crime scene. Much better than monsters any day of the week,” he said as he waded into scene. He looked with disappointment at some of the cages. “They look like normal animals to me.”
Harmony decided to ignore his fascination with the specimens and filled him in on what she thought he should know. “It looks as though they made off with some specimens and some notes on our procedures for various techniques. Since the specimens themselves have no real value, we think perhaps a rival business or foreign government are looking to steal some of our intellectual property.”
“Most likely it was our government,” the sheriff remarked aloud. He was distracted. He had been watching a little mouse shoot out an impossibly long tongue and pull a loose pen into its cage. Its cage was labeled ‘Garbage Mouse, Batch 42.’ It gulped down the pen audibly and began eyeing the sheriff ’s shiny badge. The sheriff took a step back.
Harmony gave a tinkly little laugh and shook the sheriff ’s shoulder like she was trying to wake him from a dream. “Oh sweetie, why of course our government would never do such a thing. They’d ask for it nicely and we, as good patriots, would give it to them. Of course, poor little small business owners that we are, we have nothing worth the government’s time,” she said loudly.
She looked pointedly at the gaggle of uniforms behind him. He got flustered, realizing he’d slipped and criticized the government where others could hear him. These days, even a police chief could get snatched by Homeland Security and labeled as a terrorist. Harmony knew he had two kids in high school and couldn’t afford to have everything he’d ever owned seized by the government as ‘terrorist funds.’
“Of course, of course,” he agreed hurriedly. He moved away from her to speak to the other police officers present.
“Good patriots are we, Mother?” chuckled Kalliope quietly. She had walked up behind her mother a minute before. Harmony hushed her with a look. Now that she was free of the sheriff, she could get some work done.
“What did you find?” she asked as she pulled her three daughters into a storage room, one of the few places free of outsiders right now.
“They took some of the Peruvian monkeys and the notes about that project,” Clio said without preamble. Whatever Harmony had been expecting her to say, that wasn’t it.
“What? Seriously? The monkeys? Are you sure they didn’t make a mistake and mean to grab those stupid fire-breathing cows or the electric sheep?” Harmony asked in disbelief. “I could see industrial espionage for those guys, but Peruvian monkeys?” Clio shook her head. Harmony still couldn’t wrap her head around it either.
Kalliope snickered, “Were they sea monkeys by any chance?” The others look at her blankly. Kalliope could never get her family interested in the finer points of twentieth century popular culture. They just weren’t much on history.
Harmony shook her head and turned back to Clio. “They really took the monkeys? But we’re releasing the stupid smelly monkeys into the wild to help rebuild their population. They could just go to Peru and pick some up and no one would ever know.” She trailed off for a minute, lost in thought. Then she shot a sharp look at Clio.
“Did you do something to those monkeys, girl? Sweet Mother of God. Someday your tinkering is going to land us all in a maximum security torture jail,” she said accusingly as she put her hands on her hips and used that tone only mothers can achieve.
Clio shrugged. “Nothing exciting. Had to get a little fancy and do a p-mod. Thalia was only able to bring back a few and they died so easily. I couldn’t clone them any better than we could raise them in captivity. You remember? I don’t understand how such a cute primate could be so difficult. Probably why they were going extinct before I got hold of them.”
Harmony nodded thoughtfully. “A p-mod? Oh my baby girl, you are brilliant. Maybe that’s it. A p-mod is awfully difficult and your method was very successful. I remember reading the outcomes. I was proud of you, honey.” Clio brightened up a bit. Harmony knew she was not the best at overwhelming displays of affection so she did not try for a hug at this point.
“But next time you do something brilliant, do it for the paying customers and not the charity cases,” Harmony added severely. She was a scientist first; a businesswoman second; and a mother third. Somewhere way down at the bottom of the list, she was a lonely middle-aged woman.
“OK, gene nerds, what’s a p-mod?” Kalliope asked with the thinning patience of one who loves gears and pumps, but grew up in a house full of people chattering about biology and genetics. She’d never been interested in their consuming passion and they’d never listened to hers. But they were family, so what can you do? Part of the reason Terpsi was the only married one was the tightness of their family unit. It was hard for others to break into such a close-knit family and even harder to find someone willing to try.
“The Peruvian monkeys were almost completely wiped out. They live in the cloud forests of Peru and those are pretty thin these days,” Clio explained patiently to her sister. “We could barely capture enough to get a full genomic work-up. That is, a complete library of their DNA. We had a terrible time cloning the eggs to test in the lab and totally failed to splice up a variant that would breed in captivity.”
Kalliope looked at her blankly. Harmony quickly interjected, “P-modding, short for phenotype modification, is what we call it when we introduce a change in the genes of an adult. Imagine your genes are like a book of recipes for your life. Your body reads the various recipes when it wants to make something. So to make changes to the book of their life, we first need to know what it says. That’s a complete genomic work up. You remember? We talked about that before?” She paused and looked at Kalliope, who nodded.
So Harmony continued, “Usually splicers have to work with eggs or seeds and cultivate modified species from there. In other words, we change the story in their book of life before it’s printed. P-modding is trying to change the story of an individual who has already been born. That is, whose genetic book has already been printed. It’s technically difficult, but not totally impossible. You see what I’m saying?”
Kalliope nodded slowly. “So your DNA is the recipe book for your life. It’s easy to edit the book before it’s printed, but really hard after it’s been printed. Got it. Why is that? Because it will damage the book? Or just come out as nonsense?”
Clio gave her sister a big grin. After only a quarter of a century, some of it was finally sinking in. “Exactly. If it damages the book, who knows what happens? Usually something bad like cancer or heart attack. If it comes out as nonsense, your body will just ignore those pages. That’s what usually happens. Nothing, in other words.”
She gave her sister a minute to think about that as her mind wandered to the pollution fish in the Aquatics lab that she was developing for the Great Lakes. Clio just loved her job. She remembered how frustrated she’d been with the monkeys.
“So how did you do the p-mod in the monkeys then? What did you change?” asked Kalliope.
“I ended up modifying the genes of a fruit that wild monkeys loved to eat. The fruit produced chemicals and proteins that caused the desired changed in the adult monkeys. Plus, let’s just say their libido got juiced up. Which made for a population explosion. They were able to survive at lower altitudes and eat a wider variety of foods.” Clio thought it was funny that she had produced the primate equivalent of a goat. The spliced monkeys could and would eat almost anything.
The result was wild adult monkeys that reached maturity faster and produced more babies. Usually any changes you could manage to make to an adult were not likely to be passed on to their babies, but Clio had some techniques that ensured the babies possessed the same ability to grow up quickly and make lots of babies. The resulting population explosion brought the monkeys back from the brink of extinction.
Clio was now working on a subspecies that could be more easily raised in captivity. Those were the monkeys that the intruders took. Clio had added a few changes to the fruit that resulted in a greater proliferation of the Peruvian cloud forests as well.
Clio had slightly changed a few of the proteins in the fruit to break down as they passed through the monkey’s digestive tract. The digested proteins enriched the local soil dramatically. Now monkey manure, by the pound, was worth more than gold in Peru. All in all, she was pretty proud of that project.
Harmony began pacing. “Gene research is so secretive now, it’s hard to know where the other splicers are. The private labs don’t publish their results for fear of a competitor using their own research to get an edge. The government has snatched anyone worth anything at university labs for their never-ending war projects and everything those guys even think about is classified. And that’s assuming any of them have the funding or the brains to do anything really interesting in the first place. Maybe someone really did want the p-mod technique and thought this was an easy way to get it,” Harmony concluded, turning to her daughters.
“But why would they get all in a lather about a primate splice? There are so few primates left and none of them are really commercially viable. I mean, there’s not much you can do with primates that results in a profit,” said Clio.
“Flinging poo and scratching fleas never did make anyone rich,” laughed Kalliope.
“Humans are primates. Maybe they want to use the splice on humans,” said Terpsi.
“Don’t be silly. Human gene modification is so illegal it isn’t even funny,” Clio scoffed.
“If the war project labs had a useful p-mod technique like that, they’d use it to make zombie soldiers and human bombs and god knows what else. Do you think anyone in the military really cares about what the UN thinks is legal or illegal?” Terpsi asked. She had a point.
“Heck, it sounds like they could cause gene mutations in people through food with that technique thingy of yours. They could modify people who weren’t even aware of what was going on. There are a lot of people in our government who would find some mighty nasty uses for that kind of tool,” Kalliope exclaimed.
Clio scowled. Everything she did could be used for cruel purposes. She hated it, but it was something she’d come to terms with long ago. “Even with my notes, it would be difficult to take a technique that worked with monkeys and apply it to people. And that’s assuming they could understand my notes,” Clio replied.
“Back to the original issue,” said Harmony. “Anyone with the power or money to get access to our lab like this could just have broken into our network to get the technique. So why didn’t they?” She looked around the room as if the answer might be written on the walls.
Clio blushed and stammered. “I didn’t upload my notes. It was laziness.” The other women smiled, but didn’t laugh. They knew Clio was monomaniacal about her work, but didn’t care about much else.
“So let’s say they wanted the p-mod. They must have gotten someone with access to help them. Even with all the money in the world to break the locks, they couldn’t know exactly where Clio kept those notes unless they’d been here before. That’s the scariest part.” Harmony tried to maintain a brisk, business-like attitude. “Ruling out everyone still hanging around in the parking lot right now, we only have a handful of likely suspects for betrayal. I’ll get working on that.”
“It was lucky I was here tonight,” remarked Clio.
Harmony gave an unladylike snort. “It was lucky you weren’t shot.”
At this point, Terpsi finally stopped scanning Clio with her palm-sized diagnoser. “So they came to steal a technique. Why take the monkeys and the notes? Why not just scan the notes into a handheld? It would take like five minutes and then no one would ever know they’d been here.”
“I think that was the plan,” Clio replied. “Only I was here and caught them. Oh, and the Lepus bunnies attacked them.” She did not explain that her horrible handwriting had kept the intruders from figuring out exactly what they needed to steal. She could only hope that, however embarrassing, it might also keep the thieves from using the notes they had taken with them.
“So they panicked and grabbed everything they thought they might need. Then the rabbits freaked them out so they shot up the place. And that’s fair. Those rabbits freak everybody out, Clio,” Terpsi looked at her sister severely. She was, of the family, the most realistic. The other sisters secretly called her ‘the grouchy one.’
“So then. Who would want it? Who would do this?” Terpsi really wanted to resolve this and get back to bed. Her kids were going to wake her up again in five hours.
Harmony and Clio looked glum. “Rival companies, foreign governments, our government,” Clio answered.
“We have no idea,” Harmony concluded. “But at least we should be able to find who our turncoat is.”
“If it happened once, we should expect more.” Kalliope chimed in decisively. “I’ll start looking into better security systems. We’ll have to hire out for most of that. I never could get into the digital stuff. If they are after information, then it’s a tech company that we’ll need.”
Harmony cleared her throat significantly and paused. “Just so I understand clearly. There wasn’t anything they might have noticed in the lab that they shouldn’t? There wasn’t anything they took or anything about those monkeys that might indicate that you have certain hobbies, shall we say, that the government would frown upon?”
The girls looked at each other. They knew what their mother was talking about, but didn’t want to break their mother’s continued policy of ignorance.
“They didn’t take anything or see anything that would indicate that Floracopia engages in illegal activities,” Clio replied carefully. “But if they had spent a little more time, they might have gotten the impression that some of our projects were not strictly legitimate.”
Harmony tapped her fingers against a table and frowned. She looked for a minute like she might embark on one of her epic lectures, but then she just sighed and rubbed her temples.
“We are definitely going to need better security. And maybe move some of your less justifiable work to a different lab,” she gave her daughters a steely look.
“Oh, this is all so stupid.” Clio cried in exasperation. “If they could afford to break in and they wanted it that badly, why didn’t they just try to buy it from us? Or if it was the government, why not just demand we give it to them? Both of those would have probably worked.”
“And that’s the big question,” Harmony sighed and ran her hand through her straight brown hair. “Well, we won’t solve the problems of the world tonight, girls. Let’s wrap this up and try to get some sleep.”
They gently ushered all the excited police and worried friends out into the dark, but none of them got any real sleep that night.
Clio was completely exhausted once she got back home. She owned a snug cabin on fifty acres of untouched Edwards Plateau woodlands just behind the lab. She didn’t think anything could keep her awake. Just before she drifted off, she remembered something she forgot to tell her family. Four of her rabbits were missing. Since they couldn’t possibly have been carried off, they must have gotten loose.
As anyone who has ever thought too hard about the Fibonacci sequence will tell you, four rabbits can do a lot of damage in a short amount of time. Clio didn’t sleep for a week after that.