The End of Ordinary

by Edward Ashton

  Wilma17: Oh yeah. Soon as I figure it out.

  Jordan cleared his throat. I looked up.

  “Rude,” Marta said.

  Jordan nodded.

  “Extremely.”

  I looked at Micah. He shrugged, glanced over at Jordan, and put away half of another blintz.

  “Anyway,” Jordan said. “The reason we brought you here is that we have something very important to discuss.”

  I turned to Marta.

  “Very important,” she said.

  “Micah,” I said. “What are they talking about?”

  He shrugged again, chewed slowly and swallowed.

  “Don’t ask me,” he said. “Marta’s our conspiracy theorist. I’m just in this for the blintzes.”

  I looked at Jordan then.

  “Explain?”

  “Well,” he said. “Actually, I’m not one hundred percent sure what the issue is either. Marta, however, has been very clear that there is some serious shit going down.”

  “Mostly clear,” Micah said.

  Jordan nodded.

  “Right. Mostly clear. Tell her, Marta.”

  Marta glanced back and forth between them, then gave me a long, critical look.

  “Who did your cuts?”

  Micah froze in mid chew. Jordan opened his mouth, then closed it again and turned to look at Marta.

  “Uh . . .” I said. “What?”

  Marta rolled her eyes.

  “You’ve got a brow ridge, Hannah. That doesn’t just happen. That’s also not a part of any standard package I’m aware of. So, who did it?”

  Again, remember—this was six years after Hagerstown. I can’t even think what the equivalent question would be today. Maybe asking someone for the name of their smack dealer?

  “Marta,” Micah said around a mouthful of cheese and crepes.

  “No,” I said. “It’s fine, Micah.” I gave her my best glower. She didn’t flinch. “My dad did the design work.”

  She nodded.

  “I figured it was something like that. Custom work like that isn’t cheap, and you don’t look like a trust-fund kid.”

  “Said the queen of trust-fund kids,” Micah said. Marta shot him a hard glare, then turned back to me.

  “Right. Your dad’s an engineer?”

  I nodded.

  “Who does he work for?”

  “Seriously,” Jordan said. “What’s with the grilling, Marta?”

  “Got a hunch,” Marta said. “Spill, Hannah.”

  I looked from Marta to Jordan, then back again. My dad had drilled it into my head since I was a little girl that this was not a topic to be discussed with anyone, let alone with random Spooky girls in IHOPs. Between the people who would be inclined to stab me in the eye because gene cutting is the devil’s pastime, and the ones who would be inclined to kidnap me because they thought engineers were all richer than Croesus, it just wasn’t a great idea to talk about what Pops did for a living.

  For some reason, though, Marta didn’t strike me as particularly stabby, and she apparently didn’t have the need for ransom money.

  “Bioteka,” I said. “He’s a project lead or something now, but he used to be a front-line engineer.”

  She leaned forward then.

  “I knew it. What’s he working on? What projects, I mean. Don’t care if he’s cooking up new versions of you in his spare time.”

  I started to say something snippy, then closed my mouth and shook my head.

  “Why are you asking about my dad’s projects, Marta? Is this a corporate espionage thing or something? Because I have to tell you, I’m already spying on him for one rando. I’m starting to feel like maybe I should be prioritizing family a little bit more.”

  “Yeah,” Micah said. “I don’t know exactly where she’s going with this, Hannah, but I’m pretty sure it’s not corporate espionage. This is Marta Longstreth. Her dad owns your dad.”

  It took me a moment to realize that my jaw was hanging open.

  “No,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Jordan said. “For reals.”

  I looked back at Marta. Now that they’d brought it up, I remembered that Marta was the name of Longstreth’s kid. I’d never seen a picture of her, but this girl was about the right age anyway.

  “Uh . . .” I said. “Okay. Jordan, why are you hanging around with Marta Longstreth?”

  “Long story,” Marta said. “Answer the question. What’s your dad been up to lately? Has he thrown any funny-sounding code names around at the dinner table?”

  I’d already told Inchy about DragonCorn. No harm in telling the boss’s kid, right?

  “Maybe,” I said. “Does the word DragonCorn mean anything to you?”

  Marta leaned back then, and folded her arms across her chest.

  “This is too perfect,” she said.

  “Wait,” Jordan said. “I think I missed something. What does DragonCorn mean?”

  “What it means,” Marta said, “is that Hannah’s dad has been busy for the past year or so helping my dad to cook up the end of the world.”

  17. In which Jordan freaks the hell out.

  “Wait,” I said. “What?”

  “Well,” Marta said, “not the end of my world. Or Hannah’s. Or Micah’s, as far as I know. Definitely yours, though.”

  My stomach gave a warning rumble. I was starting to regret the half-eaten plate of Swedish pancakes that was sitting in front of me.

  “My dad doesn’t do doomsday plots,” Hannah said. “He makes stuff for farms. I’ve heard him talking about DragonCorn. I’m pretty sure it’s literally about making some new kind of corn.”

  “Ooooh,” Micah said. “Sentient, malevolent corn! NatSec’s never gonna see that one coming.”

  I raised one hand.

  “Can we back up? Why is this the end of my world, specifically?”

  “Who cares?” Micah said. “Let’s keep our focus on the sentient corn.”

  Hannah shot Micah a withering glare.

  “Seriously,” I said. “Marta? What the flark are you talking about?”

  She looked around the table. She wasn’t smiling anymore.

  “You guys know what a retrovirus is?”

  Hannah rolled her eyes.

  “Yes, Marta. I’m pretty sure we all graduated from third grade.”

  I actually had no idea what a retrovirus was, but that didn’t seem like the right time to bring it up. Luckily, Micah didn’t care if Hannah thought I was an idiot.

  “Just to clarify,” he said, “Jordan’s more of a Gentleman’s C kind of guy than a scholar. Mind telling him what you’re talking about?”

  That got us a long, awkward silence. Hannah turned to look at Marta.

  “Oh,” Marta said. “Me? I don’t know either. That’s why I asked if any of you did.”

  Hannah looked at Micah, then back at Marta, then at me. I shrugged and gave her a half smile.

  “Seriously?” Hannah asked. “None of you stayed awake through the first week of GeneChem?”

  Micah leaned forward, and lowered his voice to a stage whisper.

  “You may not have noticed, Hannah, but Jordan’s one of the idle rich. He’s not taking GeneChem.”

  Hannah sighed, rubbed her face with both hands and pushed her hair back from her forehead.

  “Fine,” she said. “But what about you, Marta? Your dad runs the biggest genetic-engineering company in the world. Shouldn’t you have some kind of a clue about this stuff?”

  “I’m not planning to take over Daddy’s business someday,” Marta said. “I’m an artist.”

  Micah snickered. Marta turned to glare at him, but her scowl wasn’t anywhere near as impressive as Hannah’s. You wouldn’t think that little bit of a brow ridge would make such a big difference, but it did.

  “Fine,” Micah said. “I think we can all agree that Hannah is smarter than we are, right?” He looked at Marta. She rolled her eyes. “Good. Now maybe she can give us the condensed version of Retrovirus 101?”
>
  Hannah winced at that, and it occurred to me that maybe this wasn’t the first time someone had said something like that to her. I leaned across the table, patted her arm, and said, “We still love you, Professor.” Micah snickered again, but Hannah gave me a quick smile.

  “Fine,” she said. “You know how a regular virus works, right?”

  Micah gave her a quick head shake.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Really.”

  “Okay,” Hannah said. “Fabulous. Apparently none of you took basic biology either, so here’s the executive dimwit summary: retroviruses get into your cells, cut up your DNA, and swap out their own code for yours. Retroviruses can rewrite your genes.”

  “Oh,” Marta said. “That’s not good.”

  “Well,” Hannah said. “It can be good, bad, or in between, actually. It all depends on what part of your DNA they’re overwriting, and what they’re overwriting it with. I mean, HIV is a retrovirus, and that’s pretty bad—but then a whole branch of gene therapy is based on engineered retroviruses, and that’s pretty good. Mostly. Then again, that whole zombie super-soldier thing they were doing in Siberia was bad, I guess, and that was retrovirus-based too.”

  “So,” Micah said, “all in all, a mixed bag.”

  “Yeah,” Hannah said. “That’s pretty accurate.”

  “Great,” I said. “Got it. Mixed bag. Can we please get back to what this has to do with me, specifically? If you want to focus on the whole ‘end of my world’ thing, that would be good.”

  “Right,” Marta said. “When I got out of your car after our little date, I told you to look up my mom. Did you?”

  I looked over at Micah. For just about the first time since we’d sat down, he wasn’t smiling.

  “Yeah,” I said after a pause. “I did.”

  “So you know what happened to her.”

  I nodded. Micah just looked uncomfortable.

  “I don’t,” Hannah said. She looked at me first, then Micah. We both looked at Marta.

  “Well?” Hannah said.

  “A mob of UnAltered doused her with gasoline and set her on fire,” Marta said. “In the middle of the street, in the middle of Bethesda, on a Tuesday afternoon. She was one of the first casualties of the Stupid War.”

  Hannah looked down at her hands.

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah,” Marta said. “So, as you can probably imagine, that did some really bad things to my dad’s head. Mine too, honestly, but in a different way. The company kept things quiet, but Dad was basically comatose for a long time afterward.

  “He’s better now, but he’s been stuck on the idea that the Stupid War never really ended, you know? He doesn’t believe that the UnAltered will ever really let it go. That’s why we live in what’s pretty much a fortress in Nothing, New York, instead of the mansion we used to have in Bethesda. That’s why I have to practically break out of jail now to see anyone my own age.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So your dad’s a paranoid trillionaire, holed up with his private army, waiting for Stupid War II. He’s not the only one of those. Can we get to the part that has to do with me?”

  “Well,” Marta said. “He’s not just waiting. For the last year or so, he’s had something going on. Closed-door conferences, late-night calls, etcetera, etcetera. So, a few months ago, I started snooping. Turns out his electronic security is outstanding, but his listening-through-the-door security sucks. He has meetings every week with a guy named Marco Altobelli. They talk about a lot of stuff—football, the markets, Marco’s kids—but mostly, they talk about Project DragonCorn.”

  “Okay,” I said. “And what, exactly, do they say?”

  “Well,” Marta said. “That’s kind of the problem. I don’t understand most of what they’re talking about. There’s definitely a lot of retrovirus this and recombinant that, but none of that means much to me.”

  Hannah leaned back in her seat.

  “So for all you know,” she said, “they could just be talking about ways to make bigger corn kernels. What makes you think there’s something sinister going on here?”

  Marta’s eyes slid down, then off to the side.

  “Well, I guess I don’t know for sure. I did hear Marco say something about super-herpes last week, but my dad laughed at that, so he might have been joking. I’ve definitely heard them use every possible variant of the term ‘final solution,’ though.”

  “Okay,” Micah said. “That’s a little ominous.”

  “Yeah,” Marta said. “Also, they’ve got their own private name for DragonCorn. They call it Project Snitch.”

  I glanced over at Micah. He looked just as confused as I was.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Project Snitch,” Marta said. “That’s pretty scary, right?”

  Micah nodded solemnly.

  “Snitches get stitches.”

  “Right,” I said. “And wind up in ditches.”

  Hannah looked back and forth between us.

  “What are you two talking about?”

  “Dropping a truth bomb,” Micah said. “Boom.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You can tell it’s true, because it rhymes.”

  Hannah shook her head. Marta leaned back, looked up at the ceiling, and groaned.

  “Okay,” Micah said. “I think we can also all agree that Project Snitch is a stupid name. Can we circle back to the whole ‘final solution’ thing, though? That actually did seem kind of doomsday-ish. Also the super-herpes. That sounds bad too.”

  The waitress came by then, with a pitcher of iced tea and another of water. She refilled our glasses while we sat in silence and waited for her to leave.

  “So,” she said. “Everyone doing okay here?”

  “Yes,” Marta said. “Doing fine.”

  “Can I get you anything else? Dessert? Coffee?”

  I started to say something, but my stomach gurgled in a way that said, “If you send a pie down here, we’re going to have a problem.”

  “No,” Marta said. “I think we’re good.”

  After the waitress was gone, I looked at Marta and said, “So what, exactly, do you think your dad is cooking up the final solution to?”

  “Come on,” Marta said, “I think that’s pretty obvious, right?”

  They all turned to look at me.

  “What?” I said.

  “Um . . .” Hannah said.

  “Um what?”

  “Well,” Marta said. “I’m pretty sure he’s working on the final solution to you.”

  It was later, when we were back at Hannah’s house and she’d sent Micah to round up Devon Morgan because she said we needed at least one other person in our little cabal with a three-digit IQ, that Marta finally explained to me what, exactly, was going on.

  “Look,” she said. “There’s a mark. Everybody who’s Engineered has it. It’s like the artist’s signature on a painting, except that it’s coded into our genes.”

  I looked over at Hannah. We were sitting on the floor of what she called her solarium—a big, empty room with a spongy rubberized floor, and one wall made entirely of glass. Marta was leaning against the window-wall, rubbing absently at the spiderweb tattoo on her neck. I was looking out at the overgrown field outside, and contemplating the fact that Hannah’s house was probably almost as expensive as mine, but that a mob of peasants would still pass it by without a second glance. Hannah was sitting with her legs spread in front of her, stretching.

  “It’s true,” Hannah said, then lifted her nose from her right knee and lowered it down to her left. “It’s right in the middle of hromosome 12. Codes for a protein that doesn’t do anything in particular, but that you can pick up pretty easily in a blood test. The original idea was that the government wanted to be able to keep track of who had been modified and who hadn’t, so that if some horrible new disease cropped up, they could tell right away if it was the result of natural processes, or of some engineer’s screwup. Some of the early custom jobs probably don�
�t have it—folks like Tara Carson’s mom, I mean—but everybody whose mods came from Bioteka or GeneCraft or one of the boutique shops definitely does.”

  “Right,” Marta said. “The thing is, though—if you can keep track of who has been modified, that means you can keep track of who hasn’t, too.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I think I’m with you. So you think your dad’s gonna try to round up all the unmodified or something? Because I have to tell you, I don’t think that’ll work. I get that your dad has a ton of cash and an army of sentient corn and all, but there’s still a lot more of us than there are of you.”

  Marta shook her head.

  “I don’t think he’s planning on rounding anyone up, Jordan.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So what is he planning?

  Hannah pulled her feet in close, soles together, and pressed her knees down to the floor with her elbows.

  “I’m not sure,” she said, “but I think Marta’s dancing around the idea that maybe her dad and mine are cooking up an engineered retrovirus that’s designed specifically to go after people who don’t have that particular protein in their blood.”

  I looked at Marta. She shrugged.

  “However,” Hannah said. “I can tell you that this is total bullshit, because my father would never be involved in something like that. Marta’s dad might be a crazed super villain, but mine is not. The fact is, they’re both unmodified themselves. If they set loose some kind of targeted virus designed to take out everyone who’s not Engineered, they’d wind up taking out themselves—not to mention practically everyone they know who’s their age or older. It doesn’t make sense. They’d both have to be completely crazy.”

  “Well,” Marta said. “My dad’s not completely crazy. I’m not one hundred percent sure he’s completely sane, though. I could definitely see him doing something that would hurt him if he thought it would keep me safe.”

  Hannah crossed one leg over the other and twisted half around.

  “Huh,” she said. “When you put it that way . . .”

  Marta nodded.

  “It’s starting to make sense, right? Tell me your dad wouldn’t step in front of a bus if he thought he needed to do it to save you from a mob of UnAltered.”