"The Transgenic Falcon"

When the elevator doors hissed shut, both Belinda and Johnny sagged a little.

“You’ve got some big, swinging, clanging huevos, Hunt,” Johnny said, putting his thumb on the reader and then pressing the middle button. “No one talks to Johnson like that, it’s dangerous.”

I shrugged, “It’s not the same for me I don’t work for him. Besides its good for everyone to be reminded they are not as mighty as they think.”

“Maybe, but you work for him now.” Johnny said.

“No, I took a limited term job, I didn’t hire on to Gen-Tech.”

“Eamon,” Belinda put in, “tread lightly. Johnson, he has this way of collecting people who interest him. What you did in his office? Be sure that you have his interest now.”

Hnn, so Otho tried to fill his hole with people as well as things and food. Not an insight I really needed confirmation of. I gave them a wave as if brushing unimportant things aside, but inside I had no doubt I’d be thinking about this again.

We stepped out the CEO Express into a major hallway. Somewhere north of fifteen feet wide; carpeted in a big chessboard pattern in gray and darker gray, it led away into the distance on the left. To the right it met with another hall the same width beyond which was what looked like the entrance to a cafeteria.

“So where would you like to start?” Johnny wanted to know.

“Chapter two.”

“Chapter two?” Belinda asked, lost.

I pulled a dog-eared and coverless paper back from my back pocket. I held it up so she could see it. “Chapter two of the Fifteen Steps to a Private Investigation; clues and physical evidence.”

Belinda’s face was frozen for a moment, then she said in a low voice, “I risked my career to hire a detective who still carries around a how-to book?”

I shrugged one shoulder, “You never know when you might need a reminder,” I said with a sincere smile.

Belinda’s green eyes blazed at me, then she looked down and started silently mouthing. From the cadence she was counting, but the shape of her mouth didn’t match English words.

“Latin?” I asked Johnny.

He shook his head, “Worse, Mandarin.”

“Does this happen a lot?” I asked, growing concerned.

“Only the once. Then there were screams, blood, and lots of paper work for the insurance.”

Belinda had stopped counting and was staring at me levelly, looking calm. I wasn’t fooled; big cats all look calm before they pounce. I might have pushed her a little too far. “Seriously, ’Da, it is all part of the process, book included. You’ll see.”

“Don’t call me that, we’re not together and you don’t rate a pet name for me,” she said coldly. She turned that too calm gaze on Round. “You’ve worked with him before, is this some kind of joke?”

Round put his hands up in surrender, “No, I’ve seen him with that book every time he’s on a case. It’s a little strange that he carries a book instead of a tablet but lots of detectives have a quirk. If it helps them, you don’t mess with it.”

“Fine, then, chapter two,” she agreed, her voice cold like wind off a glacier.

“Great, let’s go take a look at where the bodies were found.” I said eager to get past nearly pushing Belinda to homicide. Johnny nodded and then led us off to the right. I knew why I had pushed Belinda like that, I really didn’t want to go look at the bodies.

I don’t want to give you the impression I’m squeamish about bodies. I’ve taken college level human physiology. We dissected former humans and I never scrupled to use the scalpel. But it’s different when you visit a crime scene. The bodies there are new, and there is something unbearably sad about them, no matter how they died. Something hangs in the air, the fresh loss of all that potential, good and bad, now gone forever. Like a light switched off in a condemned house. What was once useful and needed is gone.

A lot of cop’s channel this into anger, it fuels them, makes them righteous in their pursuit of the perpetrator. I’ve never been able to do that. It’s a fool’s game anyway. Righteous anger becomes jaded detachment too fast. It burns out when all you do is hold the line, never progressing to a final win. Investigations find out who and sometimes why, but they don’t solve anything. It’s a wicked world and if we are very, very lucky we keep it from getting worse in our general location. That’s the win. If you can’t live on such thin gruel, get a nice safe job. Doing what I do will eat you up.

These uplifting thoughts got me and my minders to into Cho’s primary lab complex. It had taken three card swipes and the personal say so of Johnny Round to get from the main hall to here. A lot of security but it didn’t take a lot of time. There was one of Round’s officers standing by the door of the lab, guarding it against the chance of tampering.

Being a bit of a nerd, the image of Cho’s lab I’d built up was evil sorcerer meets mad scientist, but, of course, it was nothing like that. Instead of being dark with weirdly bubbling vessels and half seen abominations in jars of murky fluid, the lab was neat and well lit. The room measured out at approximately fifteen by fifteen. A black, but slightly rough, counter ran around the three sides I could see as I stood in the doorway. A couple of sample fridges lurked under the counter, opposite a large glassed in work-hood. There was a central isle with a sink and machine that had the look of a non-production prototype sitting near by.

This was the real magic in the lab, the Gen-Tech Genome Editor/Splicer. The GES is based on a particular group of enzymes that bacteria use to protect themselves from viruses. The Cas-9 enzyme could find a particular sequence of genes in any DNA strand, and cut it. This was augmented with the ability to insert a new gene sequence. The basic tool had allowed the development of gene-therapies for living humans and targeted treatments for any cancer. But it was only the beginning. Gen-Tech had perfected an artificial womb. With that breakthrough, the age of designer animals had begun.

The lab looked dirty, like any crime scene will after the forensic teams have been in. Everywhere there were smudges of various colors, showing the location of latent finger prints.

“You used aluminum dust?” I asked Johnny, “Won’t that have contaminated the samples for DNA analysis?”

Johnny nodded, “Yeah, DNA scanning isn’t going to be a lot of help in here. There are so many trace fragments from the work they do; we’d get far more false results than real. Sometimes the old ways work best in a high-tech environment.”

I could see four small puddles of brown-black dried blood on the floor. None of them were big enough to have been the cause of death. Still, I wouldn’t want to do anything but lay around after losing that much. There was still enough to give the room that distinctive smell of death; coppery, and cloyingly sweet yet disgusting. It hits the human brain like forty foot tall neon sign flashing danger, in the frequency that causes seizures. A little left over from the distant ancestors that lived, the ones that took the hint that bad things happened in places that smell like this. I told my hindbrain to go back to sleep, adrenaline wasn’t going to be useful in this situation.

“I thought you said there was not sign of physical violence?” I asked my companions.

“There wasn’t, isn’t” Johnny said, “What’s there leaked out post mortem.”

Yuck. Well, there was no putting it off, I needed to see what they saw when they found the scene. I nodded my chin towards the four pylons set up in the corners of the room. They stood about seven feet tall, each having three soup-can sized protrusions spaced along their length. The soup-cans were the scanning heads of the high definition holo-recording rig.

“You’ve been recording from the start?” I asked Round.

“Sure, its our standard procedure”

“Who set the rigs up?”

“Me. I wanted to be sure nothing was contaminated. I had two of my officers record me while I did it.”

That was good, things had obviously been removed from the lab, but as long as Johnny was telling the truth, I’d be able to get a good look at what they had seen before they started their evidence gathering. “Let’s fire up the projection set, full coverage to start.” I told him.

Johnny punched a few commands into his handheld and the scanning heads began to spin. In the center of the room a cloud of laser interference speckles appeared. The cloud seethed and pulsed, as bits of monochromatic light glittered. All at once the cloud became a single color, ruby red, then green, then yellow, then blue. Finally it turned into pure white light and seemed to rush to the edges of the room all at once, dazzling me.

When my sight cleared again, the cloud was gone and the lab had changed. Gone were the smudges, there was a lidded mug on one counter, and a long lab coat. The puddles of blood were still there, now joined by the bodies that had given birth to them.

I carefully walked over to the three-dimensional image of the late Dr. Cho. A couple of the bodies of the Eolin-I were closer, but they were collateral to whatever had killed Cho, so I wanted to start with him first.

The good doctor had been a big man. He had the blocky powerful build you see on Koreans, especially the ones who grew up here in the States with a diet heavy with dairy and meat. The tan slacks and black open collared shirt Cho was wearing were probably custom tailored; the odds of anything off the rack fitting and accenting his body like that were in line with those for the local lottery. He was sprawled on the floor, right below a stool near where the mug and lab coat were on the counter.

The image of the corpse stared at the ceiling, its face looking like a low budget horror movie. The skin was tight and pale, with rigor mortis just beginning, pulling a frown onto the dead mans face. The eye lids were open, but the eyes themselves were a mass of blood, which had brimmed and run down Cho’s face after he fell. Looking more closely I could see the surface of the eyes looked churned, the smooth gel of the cornea had become spiked in places, hard little shafts sticking up above the basic level of the rest of the eye.

I looked down at Cho’s hands. They were long fingered and perfectly manicured. Very Metro-sexual, as my unlamented father would have said. They were also completely devoid of blood.

“Whatever killed Cho did it fast” I said.

“Why’s that?” Johnny asked, playing the role of useful idiot for my first sweep through the crime scene.

“No blood on the fingers. Cho died too fast to even put his hands up to his eyes as they, uh, dissolved. He was dead by the time he hit the floor.” Johnny didn’t reply, it wasn’t his place to push me in any particular direction, but rather to allow me to process and come to my own ideas.

Looking at the face again there was a very little bit of blood on his lips, but none ran out. I looked as closely as I could inside, but even ultra-high resolution holo-scans miss areas out of view of the heads. There was only a dark cavern beyond his lips.

“Why did you decide to move the bodies?” I asked.

“Standard procedure when we have a death in the lab complex.” Belinda said. “If something biological kills someone, we need to isolate it as soon as possible.”

I looked up, that didn’t seem right to me. “Don’t the labs all have high level bio-containment ratings? So why not just close the doors and seal everything up?”

Johnny fielded this question, “It goes back to when Gen-Tech was built. The fear was we’d make something that then got loose on the general public. Since we are the leader in genetic engineering we are the ones most likely to find a cure. So the policy is to move any bodies to the forensics complex.”

“Don’t you loose some evidence that way?” I asked a little put out.

Johnny shrugged, “I can’t say, this is the first time it’s happened. Is there something missing?”

I shook my head, it wasn’t my place to tell Round how to run his department. In any case I could take a look at the bodies down in the morgue. I looked back to the job at hand. The crotch of Cho’s tailored pants was wet. Not that unusual for people who died in their clothes. The Reaper has no use or time for dignity and rips it away along with life. Not that the dead care, but its one more little stab for the living.

The stain was too large for urine, and too dark. It was definitely blood, confirmed by the small puddle between the man’s legs. Uck, I hadn’t seen that before. After a couple of more scans of the body I decided I’d seen all I was going to see from Cho, and turned my attention to the six dead Eolin-I.

They were spaced around the island in the center of the room as if they had all been looking at something on that counter when they died. The created beings were short, all but one of them below five feet. They were dressed in identical powder-blue jumpsuits, each with a holo-fiber Gen-Tech logo at the left breast and what I assumed was a name tag on the right.

The names were odd, Samma-sha, Domteo, and Ametro were the ones I could easily see from where I stood. I hoped they were names and not project designations of some kind. If they were, I was probably going to hammer some scientist’s nose flat to his or her face.

The bodies beneath the jumpsuit were bilaterally symmetrical, two arms, two legs from a basically rectangular torso. The heads were hominid, looking nothing like humans did. For a start they were fur covered, even the faces. Short luxuriant brown fur streaked with gold coved their features like the fur on a Boxer or Bulldog. At the brow and along the jaw it swept back into a mane, reminding me of a Golden Lion Tamarind I’d seen once at the Houston Zoo.

I knelt down next to the image of one and took a closer look at the face. It was an odd combination of human and simian. The nose was like that more human than ape but was still upturned and showing two slits in the face, unlike the hooded nostrils of Man. The face itself was flat like ours, but was crowned with heavy brow-ridges.

They looked so small and pitiful sprawled limply on the floor. Like a group of grade-school kids had been playing Planet of the Apes when death swooped down on them.

Blood had flowed from the ears, eyes, nose and mouth of all of the Eolin-I. Not much had reached the floor; their beautiful fur had matted and absorbed most of it. They all had the same blood stain at the crotch as Cho.

I stood and looked at Johnny and Belinda, still standing in the open doorway. “Any idea why the Eolin-I were in here?” I asked.

“No,” Johnny said, “Cho must have let them in with him, they all have their own key cards but the logs don’t show any of them carding through.”

“That happen a lot?” I asked.

Round shook his head, “No, it’s a pretty serious violation of protocol. Plus the ’lin-I would have resisted not following the rules. About the only one who would have been able to talk them into it was Cho. They loved him and even after the project was handed off he kept close contact with them.”

“So, Cho comes in late, brings them all in here on his card. The door shuts and sometime later they all fall over dead at the same time?” I said thinking out loud.

“Yep, your classic locked door mystery,” Johnny said, a sour smile on his dark face. “Why do you think you’re here?”

I didn’t answer, but kept looking around the image of the lab projected over the real thing. The island had a few blood collection vials on it along with a small pile of syringes. Next to them was a lonely stylus from a handheld. Nothing was jumping up and saying “Look at me! I’m the clue that will break this case wide open!” I suppose that happens to some detectives, but it never had to me. Even though I’d be able to call up the holo any time I wanted, I took a moment to fix as the scene in the lab in my mind. That done there was nothing more for me there.