Prologue

In the year 2032, at an upscale high rise in Ft Worth, Texas, a handsome man in his late thirties smokes a hand wrapped Cuban cigar in a darkened office.

Nathaniel Hawthorne sat behind a mahogany desk; the word custom defined his office well. He put his cigar in a marble ashtray and tapped his manicured fingers on the polished surface while viewing a bank of six screens on the wall. The top three featured closed-captioned headline news from the Middle East, South Africa, and Russia, while the bottom three streamed global stock market quotations.

He pushed a button and spoke in a southern accent, "Move a million shares in blocks of ten thousand from our Russian concerns to retail investments in the Bahamas, and then move every penny we have in the Palestinian efforts to the technology portfolio in the United States."

"Yes sir," a British accented woman answered. He pushed the button again, and the line went dead. One side of his mouth curled in a smug grin.

Nathaniel triggered a small light sensor with his foot while twisting a blue diamond ring on his pinky. A paper-thin screen slid up from a hidden niche. He typed in a sophisticated pass code on a translucent keyboard; four folders displayed on the screen. Opening a file labeled, Biological Enhancement Experiments, he leaned forward and focused for a few moments.

Most subjects are not viable and killed soon after birth, a few seem to be enhancing physically as planned, but have some mental abnormality. We still cannot nail the genome precisely. It may take twenty more years before we completely master the enhancements. An interesting by-product is that women reaching puberty have elevated hormonal levels. We have no idea why.

Nathaniel typed in a few strokes on his keyboard. A dark man in a white lab coat working in a pristine laboratory appeared on the screen and looked up, a sound obviously harkening him to view his vid-phone. Sounding frustrated at the interruption, he asked with a heavy accent of British and Hindi, "Nathaniel, what is it?"

"We're ready to move the project to South Texas. Leave first thing in the morning—my Mexican operatives will deal with the clean up in Matamoras."

The top geneticist's dark face furrowed, and he whispered between clenched teeth, "We aren't ready."

Nathaniel's body stiffened, and he became angry, "I will not have you question me, Gupta. Think of your family back in India, beginning with your two daughters. The cause overrides all personal interests. We must not waver in our commitment, and some lives must be sacrificed for the greater good."

Dr. Gupta frowned, resigned to continue his immoral task, and then he took a deep breath, "We'll get started."

"Better," said Thorogood, the tension in his face relaxing. He sat back and took a calming puff on his cigar.

Dr. Gupta flipped off the screen and turned to his handsome light-skinned Hindi wife, who had stopped working with the test tubes and looked at her husband with tears in her brown eyes. The short, fit woman, an expert in biology, stasis, and gene splicing, approached him slowly. She took her fingers and touched the man's lips. The two hugged—a hug of shared torment.

"I'm sorry I got us into this," Dr. Gupta told his wife, wiping the tears from her eyes.

Placing a finger on her lips, she signaled for him to be quiet, knowing of the specialists in Dallas who analyzed recordings and videos of their conversations. She pointed her chin to the small office, a room they knew how to shield for secretive conversations. Dr. Gupta nodded, and kissed his wife of fifteen years, married when she was eighteen and he nineteen, both attending Johns Hopkins at the time.

Holding hands, they walked to the office and entered. His wife stood in front of a small mono-filament camera, scribbling a small note on a pad. She slipped the note to him. Dr. Gupta read the note, and then tore it into small pieces, putting it in his pocket to later burn. The two looked at each other and briefly touched foreheads. After a moment of silence, he looked back up, worry lines creasing his dark face. He caressed her hands, for he loved her with great depth, rarely finding time to sate her pain caused by their genetic fetal experiments.

With the tips of his fingers, Dr. Gupta feathered the smallish woman's cheeks, whispering, "I love you, my little one," he moved his hand down and patted his wife's stomach.

Mrs. Gupta took his hand and held it tightly against her cheek, kissing his soft palm and rubbing it across her face. With his other hand, the man tenderly clutched her still firm breast. The two moved to a warm embrace, stirring the need for intimacy they seldom had time to share. Dr. Gupta pushed her back against the desk, not caring about the camera.

Chapter 1 »