Biohack

by J D Lasica

  Bundt came up from behind, drew his pistol, and aimed at the guard’s head. “No witnesses.”

  “No!” Kaden reached out and grabbed the gun barrel, spinning it away from the guard as the shot went off. She stepped toward Bundt, locked onto his right hand, and then surprised him and spun to his backside. She grabbed him around the waist and dropped him to the hard pavement, restraining him there. The pistol skittered away. Nico retrieved it and stashed it in his satchel.

  Shouts in Italian erupted to the right of them, still in the distance but drawing closer. At the same time, a deep, angry rumble came from high overhead.

  “No time for this,” Kaden shouted and released Bundt from her grasp.

  The three started running toward the heliport, carrying their satchels of bones. Kaden tore across the grassy field and stooped down at the edge of the landing pad. Suddenly, a brilliant light startled her from above. Dust choked her throat, the air ripped at her hair, her head swam with the roar. The chopper dipped down and landed for a few seconds.

  All three of them pitched their bags into the bird. That was a relief. The package was safely on board.

  She waited for her operatives to board first. Nico climbed in and extended his arm for Bundt. She looked back and saw a band of guards bearing down on them, guns glinting in the moonlight. A hail of bullets whistled by, slamming into the helo’s tail boom inches from her head.

  As Bundt reached up to pull himself aboard, a bullet pierced his left shoulder, and he fell backward to the ground, writhing in pain.

  Kaden bent down over Bundt’s prone body, choking on the whirlwind of dust. She draped his left arm over her shoulders and pulled him to his feet. She stumbled forward through the gunfire toward the chopper.

  She helped lift Bundt into the cramped cabin, with Nico pulling him aboard. As bullets tore into the helicopter’s windshield, she saw the pilot signal that he was taking off. The chopper began to lift off, arching right to reposition the cockpit away from the volley of gunfire. The bird began to rise as it moved forward .

  She sprinted to keep up—it was already too late to jump and catch one of the landing skids. The chopper rose five, ten feet above her head.

  Nico threw down the rope ladder and shouted, “Grab hold!”

  She ran, leaped, and grabbed one of the wooden rungs fluttering just above the ground. She hung on and yelled to the pilot, “Go! Go! Go!”

  The chopper ascended swiftly above the Vatican’s tall brick walls as a final burst of gunfire deflected off the helo’s undercarriage.

  It took another thirty seconds before they were out of range of the guards and Kaden began to raise herself rung by rung until she reached Nico’s outstretched arms and pulled herself up into the cabin. She lay there a few seconds to gather herself, then looked at Bundt. It was a flesh wound—he’d be all right. She finally stood and inspected the content of the bags.

  The package was intact.

  God knows what they were planning to do with it.

  2

  Dallas, August 8

  S terling J. Waterhouse climbed out of the limo—the first self-driving car he’d ever used—and emerged into the morning heat gathering above the pavement. He strode twenty feet across the slate walkway and paused in the middle of Birthrights Plaza.

  He tilted his head skyward and took in his creation, the main building of Birthrights Unlimited. Set off from the Dallas skyline, the tower stood apart here at the city limits, where land was still pricey but cheaper than downtown.

  Waterhouse had hired a world- class architect to design Birthrights Tower, a gleaming homage to the DNA double helix in the form of side-by-side blue-and-white spiral buildings that curved above the landscape like the writhing shape of a woman’s body during a night of steamy sex.

  He stepped into the light-filled atrium—not a lobby, like most unimaginative office buildings, but a statement . A homage to wealth and taste .

  The immense light-filled space featured an imposing but tasteful Carrara-marble guard desk … banks of gleaming glass elevators … the Visitor Empathy Lounge with its lush leather seats … a half-dozen customer service reps, tablets in hand, assigning clients to the proper genetic counselors. Hovering above them all like a mythical Greek god was the centerpiece, a custom-made metal art sculpture that glowed crimson red, royal blue, olive green, before it assumed a new position every five minutes.

  Some people swore they could see a weeks-old embryo in the work, but Waterhouse saw nothing more than an overpriced, artsy undulating balloon.

  “Mr. Waterhouse,” the guard at the front desk sputtered, no doubt surprised by his late arrival.

  For the past five years he almost always strode into the tower straight up at seven a.m., assuming he had not spent the night in his furnished penthouse in the building—not a perk so much as a convenience for the hard-charging CEO who puts in a hundred hours a week.

  He checked his Zenith Christopher Columbus watch. Fifteen minutes to go before the big event. To Waterhouse, his Zenith was more than a rare six-figure timepiece—it was a metaphor for boundless unfettered individualism.

  “Sir, you have a visitor.” The second guard—whatever his name was—nodded toward the Empathy Lounge.

  Randolph Blackburn rose from a cream-colored leather sofa, took a few short steps, and stopped, waiting for Waterhouse to meet him more than halfway.

  “Randolph, you’re looking well,” Waterhouse lied. “What brings you out here from the Left Coast?”

  Blackburn wore his usual dark suit, as if he might be invited to a funeral at any moment, but the formal look only accented the creases—no, fissures —on his seventy-year-old face. In recent months, for whatever reason, the miles were beginning to show, despite his being one of the wealthiest men on the planet. Can’t the man afford a facelift?

  “Waterhouse. I’ll cut to the chase.” Blackburn thrust out his plutocratic jaw. “We got the job done on our end. What about your end? No time to waste!”

  Impatient as always, Waterhouse thought. But he had to be respectful. After all, Blackburn was the big money behind Birthrights Unlimited. This tower wouldn’t exist without him.

  “The Lab is running tests on the bones right now. It’s too early to say what we’ve got.”

  Employees started to gather along the edges of the lower wings to peer out into the atrium, and an excited buzz began to build.

  “Listen, Randolph, now is not a good time. Let’s get something on the calendar for next week.” He plucked out his smartphone and set a reminder to update Blackburn on the DNA Legends project.

  Blackburn frowned and nodded, then returned to his seat.

  Looks like Blackburn will be staying for the event.

  Waterhouse climbed the large spiral staircase trimmed with Swarovski crystals. He crossed the walkway bridge connecting the two wings on the second level. At the top, he noticed a smudge on the balustrade, pulled out a handkerchief, and wiped it clean. From the corner of his eye, he saw Sharon Sullivan approach.

  “Ready? Big day!” Sullivan gushed.

  He allowed her an extra dose of fervor, given her role as chief marketing officer for Birthrights Unlimited. She was wearing black high heels and a form-fitting, ruby-red sheath dress with black panels that ran up her thighs and across her waist. Waterhouse approved.

  They approached the protruding overlook where they’d be giving their annual State of the Startup talk. Henry Lee didn’t move but extended his hand .

  “Partner,” Lee said. The two exchanged a lifeless handshake.

  “Lee,” Waterhouse grunted, a little more effusive than he intended.

  Lee was under the mistaken impression that they were co-equals—partners! Waterhouse found the notion preposterous, even though it was technically true that Lee was co-founder and CTO of Birthrights Unlimited and they were both quite rich on paper. Waterhouse could have put any gene geek in charge of the Genomics Lab.

  “Randolph Blackburn is here,” Waterhouse said, pulling Lee asi
de. “He’ll want an update soon.”

  “My team hasn’t had a chance to start in yet.”

  “All right. Make it a priority.”

  “Do I want to know?”

  Lee was asking, Do I want to know anything about the specimen or how we managed to acquire it? The answer was always the same.

  “Need to know,” Waterhouse said with a wry smile. Their little ritual.

  Right at nine a.m., Sullivan stepped forward and welcomed the assembled staff. She gave a pep talk so laced with superlatives that he pictured her lighting a school spirit bonfire in the Visitor Empathy Lounge. A real spitfire, this one. Her talk nicely aligned with the brand tone and public messaging they’d approved.

  After Sullivan finished, the famously gruff Henry Lee stepped to the mic and said, “Good morning.” He then did an about-face and returned to his seat.

  You’ve heard of a people person? Waterhouse thought. Lee was an anti-people person.

  Time for the main act. Leave it once again for the alpha dog to save the day. … The Trailblazer of the New Epoch … Pioneer of Genetic Enrichment … Father of the New Enhanced Family. His head swam with new titles to try on like so many Armani suits.

  Waterhouse straightened his handmade foulard necktie and brought his lean six-foot-one frame to the railing. He scanned the sea of faces. Perhaps half of the 1,240 employees in the company’s Dallas headquarters had gathered in the foyer and along the atrium’s railings.

  “Good morning! As you may know, today is a special day. Ten years ago Henry and I founded Birthrights Unlimited. And five years ago we moved to our new campus. We had—what was it, Henry?—just sixty employees in the Genomics Lab back then.”

  “Sixty-two.” Lee’s voice was barely audible.

  Waterhouse turned back to the collage of faces. “Even in those challenging days, we had a strong and clear vision. To usher in a new age. To become the go-to brand for planning an optimized family. To become the world’s leading center for safe, innovative genetic screening and enrichment. To fight for freedom of genetic choice and to champion the right to be born with the right kind of genes! As we’ve scaled up our team here and worldwide, we’ve held true to our core mission and recruited the world’s best and brightest. All of you!”

  He spread his hands, and the atrium erupted in cheers.

  “Damn straight!” someone in the crowd shouted.

  Waterhouse’s eyes lit on the faces below him. Gregor Conrad, his veteran security chief. Lance Harrison, general manager of Bioinformatics. Brilliant young microbiologists, genetic sequencing specialists, big data engineers, lab coats—I’ve put together an all-star team.

  Part of his job was to ignore the self-imposed roadblocks that lesser genomics companies had erected. Birthrights’ Genomics Lab was a magnet for scientists from countries that weren’t so squeamish about the new frontiers of reproductive genetics. A shortcut here, an end-run there, rafts of experiments that would make a bioethicist blanch. But it was the only way to achieve growth that was not just incremental but exponential .

  “What does the next decade hold?” Waterhouse lowered his eyes to the foyer and spotted Blackburn, who had financed last week’s grave team operation at the Vatican as a trial run. That’s just a taste of bigger things to come.

  “Our great journey will encounter obstacles, resistance, pushback from the religious right and doctrinaire left. We’ll face opposition from special interests making billions by preying on people’s misery: drug companies, the cosmetics industry, the therapy lobby. After all, we threaten the status quo. Well, I welcome the battle. Let us disrupt the old order. Let’s move fast and break things. We’re all biohackers here, hacking the future of humanity!”

  This was the mindset he had impressed on every employee. They were joining a company that embraced disruption, change, experimentation—the very spirit of hacker culture.

  Was Birthrights still a startup at the ripe old age of ten? Yes and no. Internally, the company culture still reminded him of his years as a product manager at various Silicon Valley startups—better that than the alternative of a timid, restrained, slow-as-you-go research center and fertility clinic. He was determined to emulate the handful of startup unicorns—now tech behemoths—that had kept their mojo going past age ten. So signage and messaging throughout the campus emphasized growth hacking, rapid testing, prototyping —the whole Lean Startup package. The goal was to grow at such a rapid pace that it would usher in a dominant, compelling, irreversible reality for humanity: the New Enhanced Family.

  Externally, though, Birthrights Unlimited told a somewhat different story. The company was touted as an ultra-safe, venerable, trusted, exclusive upscale brand where clients could design the family of their dreams. Waterhouse was the unifying force that brought the private vision and public brand together. No easy task, given the colossal supply chain challenges with scaling Birthrights’ offerings to a global audience. The more successful the company became, the more serious the shortage of surrogates. But his connections with the right business syndicates in Belarus, Moldova, and China were already paying dividends.

  Time to wrap this up.

  “Over the next ten years, let us not shrink from being bold, from pioneering the new nuclear family, a family that’s personalized, optimized, and enriched. Family planning once meant planning not to have kids. Today it should mean planning for the right kind of family. Why is it okay for people to choose the best schools, the best neighborhoods, the best houses and colleges, but it’s not okay to choose the best child possible? Let this be the last generation where children are born based on a roll at the genetic craps table. Let us seize the power to reshape humanity’s destiny!”

  Another burst of applause.

  “I’ll end with one announcement. The first Birthrights Unlimited Island Retreat takes place this weekend in the Caribbean. We’ll be unveiling our Virtual Profile Simulator to a select group of clients for the first time. And we’re sold out.”

  Murmurs of approval from the crowd.

  “As always, we’re in a trust bubble. Everything said here today falls under your confidentiality agreement. Now, I’ve kept you long enough. Let’s get back to our mission.”

  A final brief flurry of applause. Waterhouse lingered a moment, watching his people disperse to their offices, labs, and data centers. As the crowd thinned on the foyer floor, one figure stood motionless, hands in pockets, head tilted up, meeting Waterhouse’s gaze with an unwavering stare.

  Petrov!

  Waterhouse turned from Lee and Sullivan without saying a word and descended the marble stairway to the ground floor. He had last seen the man back when Birthrights Unlimited was just eighteen months old and nearly out of cash.

  Dmitri Petrov removed his yellow-tinted sunglasses from his too-prominent nose and tucked them in his linen blazer. He wore a white silk shirt and gray slacks that ran down to—what was this?— a pair of red sneakers. He was wearing a pair of red Keds for his visit. The insolence! Petrov smoothed back his dark hair—thinner than Waterhouse remembered and now sporting a gray flare around the temples. He still looked fit—more bulked up in his upper torso. Must be hitting the gym back in Minsk.

  “My friend, we need to chat.” Petrov gestured toward the doorway.

  “Of course.” Waterhouse followed him out of the tower. Waterhouse knew Petrov liked to discuss business affairs outside, always avoiding conversations in offices, cars, or other enclosed spaces. Can’t be too careful these days.

  They walked side by side across Birthrights Plaza toward the row of low-slung office buildings in the Data Zone of the business campus. A large black Mercedes SUV with dark windows and a military pedigree shadowed them. A minute passed.

  Petrov finally broke the silence. “Do you remember when we first met?”

  Waterhouse nodded. It was a different, brutal reality back then. Waterhouse had recruited a talented core team of research scientists and had already been running experiments with reproductive genomics e
ven before he founded the company. Some experiments had gone well. Many more had not. Eighteen months after formally launching Birthrights, their burn rate had become unsustainable as their runway began to run out. When no investors stepped forward to underwrite his world-changing vision, Waterhouse flew to Belarus to meet with Petrov.

  “Such an audacious pitch,” Petrov recalled. “You spoke about how the human genome was like the gold hills of 1849 California, just waiting to be plundered. A mere $44 million and your genetics factory would dominate this new market, right out of the gate. ”

  Waterhouse never used the term genetics factory, but he let that slide. “And we’re on our way.”

  “So you are.” Petrov clasped his hands behind his back and nodded his head.

  Waterhouse had never wanted to approach Petrov’s investment group in the first place. He had pitched every angel syndicate and venture capital outfit with the remotest stake in genomics, but all of them were skittish about the undeniable risks and liability involved with reproductive biotech. When the money was about to run out, Waterhouse put his misgivings aside and reached out to Petrov, with his murky reputation and reputed ties to Russian oligarchs. If Petrov’s group hadn’t stepped in, Waterhouse’s grand plans for dominance of the space would have come crashing down.

  Desperate times, desperate measures.

  They reached the main office building in the Data Zone. While companies the world over were rushing to put all their data into the cloud, Birthrights Unlimited was doing the opposite: hoarding it all internally, storing exabytes of data in a secure, air-gapped server farm that not even the NSA could breach from the outside.

  Petrov stopped and wheeled on his red tennis shoes. “I am not a scientist. What you do on your campus is your affair.” He cleaned his sunglasses with a silk handkerchief. “I am a simple businessman. I invested in your company not for the quarterly profits but for something unique you bring to us.”