The Clone who Didn't Know (The Genehunter)
Acknowledgements
Thanks once again to Stephanie Lorée for the invaluable feedback, and for pointing out that Devi is female.
The Wrong Tom Jacks
Simms is a genehunter, paid by megarich collectors to track down the DNA of the famous for their private zoos. He's employed to locate the genetic code of Tom Jacks. But not the rock star Tom Jacks, just an unknown namesake.The job bugs Simms. Something about it is wrong. Someone is playing him. Problem is he doesn't know who or why. None of the illegal plug-in technology filling his brain is much damn use. The one person who can help him is an ex-lover, but she's also the one person on the planet who never wants to speak to him again.
The last thing he needs is Agent Ballard of the Genetic Monitoring Agency pulling him out of the jump network to interrogate him about someone he's never even heard of.
Someone called Boneyard...
Volume 1 of the 5 volume Genehunter series. Find out more at
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,
Amazon (US)
,
Goodreads
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simonkewin.co.uk
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The Zombies of Death
Simms begins to uncover the truth aboutBoneyard
. Problem is that nearly gets him badly killed and now he has to walk a line between a bunch of religious fanatics and the GMA who want him to spy on them.
Meanwhile, just to make life interesting, he’s employed to find the DNA of the members of punk band
The Zombies of Death
. To do
that
he needs the help of his old friend, Devi. But she’s gone completely AWOL. And he's finding it hard to concentrate anyway because of what he’s learned about his ex-love, Kelly...
Volume 2 of the 5 volume Genehunter series. Find out more at
Amazon (UK)
,
Amazon (US)
,
Goodreads
,
simonkewin.co.uk
or on
.
Simms plummeted from the top of the stacktower. The cracked, grey concrete of the deserted London street rushed up to greet him like an enthusiastic puppy. As he cartwheeled through the air, arms flailing, his brain plug-ins measured the precise distance to the approaching ground, performed a simple calculation and presented their conclusions to his conscious mind. He had 4.5 seconds to live.
His main emotion was relief. He’d feel no real pain as he hit; his cranial hardware would see to that. And then all his troubles with Kelly and Ballard and Gideon Jones and the whole damn lot of them would be over. He felt weirdly calm, almost like he wanted it. Was that it? Had he suspected this was going to happen? He should have been suspicious when the client insisted on meeting at the top of a deserted building. Hell, he
had
been suspicious. Still he’d gone along. Told himself the client had seen too many old movies. He’d made sure the guy was alone, unarmed, yada yada, then like an amateur handed over the DNA he’d been employed to track down.
And the client, instead of wiring across the money, had detonated the explosive charge he’d rigged, hurling Simms over the side of the building.
He would have laughed at how ridiculous it all was if not for the rushing air sucking the breath from him. It hadn’t even been a big job. Two hundred K for the DNA of a little-known twentieth century soul diva. It was a doodle, a distraction, a filling in of time. He really was like some rookie no-name starting from scratch. He wondered how much Devi would laugh when she found out. He wondered whether Kelly would laugh or cry.
His last thought was of a baby girl he’d never met. He guessed she’d never know anything about him now.
1.5 seconds. His brain shut down as he flew at the ground.
He was aware of painful white light even with his eyes shut. For the briefest moment he thought he’d made it to heaven after all. Hell, more likely. Or, more likely still, he’d managed once again not to die. A moment of regret washed through him, a sense of burdens being hefted back onto his shoulders.
He squinted open his eyes, the bright light sharp on his retinas. He could make out the silhouettes of three figures standing around him. No wings or horns on any of them.
‘Where am I?’ he asked. ‘Who are you?’
Hardly his most original opening. He wasn’t at his best. He tried to stand, only to realise he
was
standing, strapped to some sort of metal frame, arms outstretched, completely immobilised. Jesus, didn’t anyone just sit you down to talk to you any more?
‘Hello, Simms.’
A woman’s voice, not one he recognized. His plug-ins hailed hers for IDs but got nothing. People were so damn paranoid these days.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘So, you saved my life because you wanted the fun of killing me yourself?’
‘What makes you think we want to kill you?’
Simms struggled uselessly against his tight bonds. ‘Seems people keep wanting to.’
‘Do you know who we are?’
Simms squinted but the light was too sharp. GMA? Forty Days? MegaMeta? Could be any of them. ‘You’re trying to sell me life insurance and this is your sales technique. It’s not great, I have to say.’
He got an ID from her plug-ins then as she opened up enough to let him see who she worked for. He’d been wrong again. It was the
other
bunch of trained killers out to get him.
‘Ah. You’re clONE, not travelling salesmen. Easy mistake to make.’
His eyes were beginning to work now. The light was still too bright to look into but he could see the square, red tiles of the floor around his feet. They looked familiar for some reason.
‘So,’ he said. ‘You were walking past that stacktower and caught me? Sweet of you. I’m grateful.’
‘You hit the horizontal jump node we’d concealed.’
‘So the client, the guy on the roof …?’
‘One of ours, obviously. See, we knew all about you but we needed to be sure. We’re not the fanatics people claim.’
‘Really? Oh, good. You can untie me and I’ll leave, then.’
‘That’s not going to happen.’ Another voice, male, again unknown to Simms. It didn’t really matter who any of them were. They were a clONE death squad and pretty clearly that meant they were going to kill him. What he didn’t understand was why they hadn’t already. What did they want from him? Why the hell did people always seem to want something from him?
‘We tested you,’ the man continued, ‘to see if you really would supply the genetic code of Gina Paradiso. So many of your type are incompetent frauds. But you’re for real aren’t you? A genuine DNA Detective, making your living buying and selling people like they’re
things
.’
Here it was. The great moral debate. Just what he needed.
‘I didn’t sell anyone,’ said Simms, shaking his head. ‘I sold a bunch of numbers, As, Cs, Gs and Ts in a particular sequence. It wasn’t alive. No one died. No one got born for that matter.’
‘Is that what you tell yourself? To help you sleep at night?’ The woman again. He could see her features now: dark hair, young face. She’d be pretty if it wasn’t for her angry scowl. Beyond her, plain whitewashed walls. It was hot, too. Damn hot. A dry, desert heat. Lines of sweat trickled down his back.
He suddenly knew where he was. Did Kelly really hate him so much?
This
was her answer to all his attempts to get in touch? His whereabouts handed to a bunch of clONE killers?
‘Look,’ said Simms. ‘You spend your time defending the rights of clones. So, shouldn’t you be thanking me if I help bring more of them into the world?’
He didn’t see the fist coming. The woman’s blow crunched into his nose. A brief spike of pain hit him before his plug-ins could smother it. Blood filled his mouth.
‘You’re disgusting,’ the man said from behind her. ‘All of you. You think you can treat people as commodities. You’re no better than slave-traders, selling DNA to collectors so they can fill their private zoos with living, breathing people. Do you know what happens in places like that? And do you know what happens to those who don’t make the grade? The mutations? The rejects?’
Simms shook his head, spat out blood onto the red tiles. ‘I’m not responsible for the actions of others.’
‘Then you’re either stupid or self-deluded,’ said the woman.
Simms shook his head again but didn’t reply. Without looking up, he lashed out with an EM attack plug-in, hoping to overwhelm their defences, inflict some pain at least. He was still going to be strapped to a metal frame inside their compound, no one coming to help him, but it might make him feel better.
His attack got nowhere. He looked up to see the three assassins watching him, the man shaking his head pitifully.
OK. They had good hardware, too. No great surprise.
The third spoke now, another woman, older, her ID also unidentifiable. He figured she was the squad leader, standing there at the back and watching. She had long hair: black or dark brown. From the way she stood - poised, balanced - she must be a street-fighter or a dancer. Maybe she was both.
‘Tell me, Simms,’ she said, ‘Do you think about the people who get made from the DNA you sell? Do you wonder what happens to them?’
He did, of course. What did they think he was? But he had to make a living didn’t he?
‘Look,’ said Simms. ‘We’re not going to agree about this. Your job is to hunt down the illegal cloners. Since you seem to include me in that, you’d better get on and kill me now.’
‘Maybe that’s what we should do,’ said the woman. ‘But we’re not going to. We’re going to let you live.’
‘Why?’
The woman turned away from him and began to pace the room, as if he’d asked a fascinating question she’d never considered. ‘You are cruel, amoral, pathologically selfish,’ she replied. ‘But there are those in our organization who believe you’re not beyond redemption.’
‘Who?’
