Hammerjack by Marc D. Giller Page A

beautiful, isn’t it?” His hands glided across the control console, punching up another display sheet. The numerics that had been hovering in front of them disappeared, and an electron scan materialized in their place. It showed a single bare strand of DNA, magnified fifty thousand times. Dex zoomed in on it some more, revealing the complex series of proteins that formed a sheath around the strand.
    “Look familiar?” he asked.
    Cray recognized the pattern. It was artificial—genetically engineered, perfect in every way. “Looks like standard flash.”
    “On the surface,” Dex countered. “Inside is a different story. For one, this baby can encode a hell of a lot more information than anything I’ve ever seen before. My guess is that whoever designed it overcame the inherent problems we’ve had with leaky sequencing. They’ve pushed the bonds to almost full capacity.”
    “That’s about fifty times better than the high end,” Cray said, frowning. “You sure you got this right?”
    “The floodgates are open, my man. You saw how my network had trouble swallowing this stuff.”
    “So this is something new.”
    “Yeah—but that’s not the interesting part.” Dex zoomed back out again, freezing the playback while he spoke. “Flash is designed to act as an inert virus. It adapts the characteristics of the host, so it doesn’t trigger an immune response. Under those conditions, it can reside in the bloodstream indefinitely—which is why it’s the medium of choice for information smugglers.”
    Dex leaned back in his chair and pointed at the virtual display.
    “Watch,” he said, restarting the playback.
    The strand of DNA was still. After a few moments, Cray noticed a slight quivering at the edge of the frame. A single, nucleated cell was cruising into the picture.
    “I use a variety of eukaryote constructs for cultivation media,” Dex explained. “I got curious to see what would happen if our friend here caught a whiff of one.”
    The strand immediately sensed the cell’s presence and moved toward it. Hovering around the cell, it found a spot on the exterior membrane and attached itself—drilling a hole through the protective layer and inserting itself into the body of the cell.
    “
Damn
. . .” Cray began, unable to get his voice above a whisper, unable to believe what he was seeing.
    “I knew you’d be impressed.”
    “This is
real
time? This isn’t accelerated?”
    “Twenty-seven seconds from start to finish. This guy doesn’t like to mess around, even for a genetically engineered virus. But here’s the weird part.” Dex flashed forward, punching up a still scan of the cell several hours
after
the flash had invaded. “A virus uses the genetic mechanisms from a host cell to replicate itself—destroying the host in the process. But our guy has other plans.”
    The cell didn’t look any different. Dex clicked forward through a dozen more scans, advancing one hour at a time—but no deteriorating effects were visible in any of them.
    “What happened?” Cray asked.
    “Nothing,” Dex answered, “or so it would seem. I haven’t had a chance to run pathology on the cell construct yet.”
    “Any ideas?”
    Dex crossed his arms in front of his chest. “A reverse virus,” the GME decided after a few moments. “Instead of replicating itself, it mutates the genetic code of the host cell. Then it spreads like an aggressive form of cancer—but like flash, it doesn’t provoke any kind of immune response.”
    “Zoe didn’t show any of the signs?”
    “Blood series came back clean.”
    “So her body accepted it.”
    “Like it was the most natural thing in the world,” Dex said. “Nothing has
ever
been designed to do this.”
    So this is what Zoe was carrying around,
Cray pondered, and at least one thing became very clear:
Phao Yin knew about this stuff—that’s why he wanted it so bad.
    “What about the numerics?” he asked. “You figured those out yet?”
    “There’s an