Double Helix Ch. 01

The car slid backwards and into a tight turn as soon as I was clear, reversed and headed down the street the way we had come. I watched it go with a heaviness in the pit of my stomach. I felt like I had forgotten something, and quickly realized it was because most of my pockets were empty. My phone and car keys had been confiscated and destroyed within minutes of my being picked up by the agency. My wallet had been given back to me after being stripped of any ID and credit cards.

Hefting one suitcase and a canvas bag, I walked slowly up the driveway, past a yard filled with lava rocks bordered by beds of multicolored gravel. The door opened before I reached it, and a blonde-haired woman peered out at me. She was slightly overweight, but carried it well. Mentally, I guessed her age at forty, maybe forty-five years of age. "Good evening, come on inside," she said. She spoke perfect English, but her voice was heavily shaded with a Russian accent. She stepped back to give me room. The interior of the house was as well-kept as the outside, right down to the spotless, nearly white carpeting. "I am Sasha Gray," the woman said, putting out a hand.

I put down my suitcase and took her hand to shake. "Norm. Nice to meet you." I had been drilled on this point for over two hours at the agency's processing center to ensure that the lie would come quickly and naturally. My old name, by now, would have been entered into national and international watch list databases. My new name was really a descriptor of who and what I was, a kind of code to distance me from my old identity.

Sasha smiled in response. The effect on her appearance was immediate and dramatic. She looked ten years younger, forcing me to reassess my first impression. She picked up my suitcase before I could reach for it. "A good answer, my friend. Come with me, I'll introduce you to the others."

Seeing a pair of shoes sitting on the tile at the entryway, I removed my own. "No. Take them with you, please," Sasha said. I felt like kicking myself for the slip. A pair of large men's shoes lying in her entryway would almost certainly attract unwanted questions from visitors.

"My mother lives here with me," she said, as though responding to my thoughts. She led me through the living room and into the kitchen. "She's in the early stages of Alzheimer's, but she's coherent most of the time. She knows about the agency and the guests I have here, but she can get confused now and then. If that happens when she is with you, stay calm and keep talking to her. She's sleeping now, but I'll bring her to meet you soon."

Sasha had stopped next to a door just off the kitchen. It opened to reveal a walk-in pantry. She rapped her knuckles against the bare wall at the back before pulling her phone from a pocket. "The lock is electronic and keyed via bluetooth," she said, tapping the phone's screen. After a moment, she pushed on the wall, and it swung back, creating an opening that exactly filled the space between the shelves to either side. I could see how the seams had been carefully concealed by the shelf supports. A narrow stairway sloped down to the right. "The lock can be manually opened from the other side," she said, showing me the mechanism. "I have a low-light pinhole camera here." She pointed to a tiny camera mounted high up and pointing in through the wall of the pantry. "And a touchscreen monitor there." The screen was mounted high up and angled down, where it could be seen from the stairs.

"Is this the only way in or out?" I asked.

Sasha shrugged. "I asked the agency about putting in another exit, but they assured me that it would be pointless. If the feds ever discover this place, they'll lock down the whole subdivision before moving in. This is here to keep you safe from casual inspection. Can you close the door and follow me down?"

Still carrying my shoes, I made my way down the creaking stairs, illuminated by a single hanging light. Long lengthwise cracks were clearly visible on many of the steps. "These stairs are original to the house," Sasha explained, her voice apologetic. "I would have them replaced, but as you might imagine, getting a carpenter in here to do the work is a bit problematic, under the circumstances."

I could hear voices speaking quietly from below as we descended. At the bottom of the stairs was a small wooden landing and below that, concrete floor. Looking over my new home, I couldn't help but feel a pang of disappointment. The basement, while large and clean, was sparsely-furnished and lit by lifeless florescent lights. A desk with a monitor and terminal client took up one corner of the room, and a man sat in front of it. Next to that was a large table and folding chairs with a flower arrangement at the center.

An old-style flat screen television hung on another wall, with a large rug and a sofa in front of it. A girl sat watching it with a black and white cat curled in her lap, and a women sat in the recliner, both oblivious to us as we entered. The sound on the TV was off, but subtitles flashed along the bottom. Other parts of the basement had been cordoned off with hanging cords and bed sheets. The toilet and shower, both surrounded by bed-sheets, had been obviously jury-rigged into the plumbing, and the sink was a large, plastic tub under a faucet that was spliced into the pipes. The room smelled faintly of stale sweat and antiseptic. The little touches of decoration meant to liven things up, in my mind, served only to highlight how dismal it was.

"Everyone," Sasha said loudly, "can I get your attention?" The man at the terminal stood and moved around the desk to come closer. I recognized the female in the chair as an elf at once. The high cheekbones, arched eyebrows, tall, lean frame, and prominent taper to her ears all matched the Tolkienesque ideal. Her red-gold hair fell nearly to her waist. Two others, a man and a woman, emerged from the partitioned area a moment later.

"This is the new addition I told you all about," Sasha said, putting a hand on my shoulder. "You may call him Norm. This is Nissi," she pointed to the elf woman. "That is Nock." The man who had been on the terminal nodded, and a pale green glinted from behind his pupils. "That is Wendy," she continued, pointing to the girl on the sofa. "Stan," she pointed to a young black man of athletic build and a ruggedly handsome face. "And Stansy." She had a similarly attractive, athletic figure, but with feminine features and fair skin.

"Hello," I said, more cheerfully than I felt. "It's great to meet you all." I had heard of most of their gene lines growing up, and my agency briefing filled in the rest. The proper term for my new roommates was "genetically modified humans", genemods for short. The term could also stand interchangeably for "genetic model", referring to the particular model of genetic modification made to the person's DNA. Some used the more general "genetically modifed organism" or geemo, but that was usually reserved for plants and animals and was deemed an insult when applied to a person.

Nissi came from the Tolkien word for female elves. Nock was short for Nocturnal. His gene line had been engineered with a minimal need for sleep, with eyes that contained slit pupils and a tapetum lucidum to increase vision in low-light conditions. Wendy and Peter mods were engineered to stop aging before reaching adult development. Stan and Stansy, short for standard upgrade, represented genetic engineering for human ideals of strength and beauty. Standard upgrade was one of the more popular genetic models, right up until designer babies had been outlawed in the 90s.

"Tilly, honey?" Sasha called. "Can you come out and meet Norm, please?"

Silence greeted her, and Stansy rolled her eyes. I searched my memory, but I was pretty sure I didn't know what model a Tilly was.

"Well, maybe she is sleeping," Sasha said, giving Stansy a slight shake of her head. "You'll find an empty bed with clean linen, and I'll bring dinner down within the hour. Go ahead and get comfortable. I will see you again in a bit."

She retreated back up the stairs, leaving me to chat with my new housemates. "So you're human normal, huh?" Stansy asked. "Must have done something pretty outrageious to get put here with us, huh?"

I ignored Stansy's uncomfortable question and set my bag against the wall where Sasha had left the suitcase. "Mind if I sit down? What are we watching?"

"National news," Wendy said. She made room for me on the sofa.

"I'm going to lie down and read for a while," Stansy said. She sounded irritated. I made a mental note to work on that. I didn't like having people dislike me, especially people I had to live with.

Stan sat on the arm of the sofa next to Wendy. Nock had returned to his seat by the terminal, but he watched me surreptitiously over the top of the monitor screen. On the television, smoke columns billowed up from a large sheet metal building. Subtitles flashed and disappeared, just a bit too fast to follow, so I asked Wendy to turn it up. ". . . thorities believe this latest attack to be the work of the terrorist group Vindicavit In Libertatem."

"Bullshit," Wendy and Nissi said, almost in unison.

The newscaster continued. "Five deaths and at least a dozen injuries resulted when the explosive device went off sometime early this morning. FBI Deputy Director Katherine Reynolds issued the following statement at a press conference just minutes ago..."

Wendy changed the channel just as a middle-aged woman appeared on the screen. "I don't know why I bother watching that crap," she said, ruffling the cat's fur behind its head. It cocked its head, yawned, and tucked tighter into a ball. "The media just reports what the government feeds them."

"It's getting worse out there, isn't it?" Stan said, looking at me.

I nodded, but did not elaborate. If they had television and internet, they already knew as much as I did. During the last few years, dozens of domestic terrorist groups had sprung up in response to McCain's declaration of martial law. Bombings, fires, and shootings were almost becoming a daily occurrence.

"Well, guess I'll go first," Stan said. "I've been here for two months. Before that, the agency placed me in a safe house in Phoenix, Arizona for about six years. I had to go into hiding once the audit started in '07. Moved around from one place to another before that to stay safe. Took odd jobs, paid in cash. I never stayed in one place more than six months. Before the Ban, I was a senior software engineer with IBM. Never married, no kids."

"Second-wave?" I asked. Standard Upgrade was one of the first widely-available designer genemods, emerging in the early 1970s.

"Yeah, you got me." Stan gestured with a thumb. "Wendy's older, though."

"Seriously?" I said, turning to Wendy. "You're first-gen?" It was odd, given the variety of mods that had appeared before the ban, that Peter and Wendy mods were some of the most difficult to put your mind around. The first generation of genemods, narrower in scope and and milder in effect than later mods, had emerged in the late 1960s. That put the apparent pre-teen on the sofa at somewhere in her mid 40s.

"Shh, you make me sound like an old lady," Wendy said. She pushed fine, wavy blonde hair out of her eyes. "Yeah, I'm first-gen mod, and I turned forty-six this year, not that anyone's counting. You could say my parents had more money than sense. They spent over a hundred grand so that their daughter could remain a darling ten-year-old forever. I've also been here the longest after Tilly, four months. Everyone who was here when I got in was smuggled out over time. Apparently the agency has a hard time placing stunties. Anyway, I was a biochemist before the Ban. I quit my job and managed to hide out at home with the parents for a few years, passing as their granddaughter. When the gene audit started, I had to go into hiding for real, which is how I ended up in Miss Gray's basement." She looked over at the elf. "You're up, Nissi."

Nissi shrugged and turned to meet my gaze. Her eyes were a startling shade of green with little gold flecks. "I have been here for just over a month now. Before that, I was in hiding with four others of my model in northern Arkansas. It wasn't an agency safe house, just very rural. We fled to the agency when we got warning that the FBI was searching our area for mods. I made it out, but I have no idea if the others are safe. I was third generation, so yeah, early eighties. My father was a Tolkien fanatic, and my mother agreed to my mod only on the condition that my two siblings were to be human normal. I was a musician before the band. Probably no one you ever heard of."

I looked over at Nock, but he had suddenly taken an interest in whatever was on the monitor in front of him. I sighed and began. "Okay, well. I was an assistant professor of anatomy at UCLA until just a few days ago. This was my first year in the position. Honestly, I don't know much of anything about this life. I was told that the agency is working on getting me out of the country, but I wasn't told when or how that might happen."

I caught the slight frown on Wendy's face at my omission, and I think I saw similar looks from the others. I knew they were all thinking the same thing. Why was I, a human normal, under agency protection? It happened sometimes, usually with the agency's own members who had been exposed, but the fact that I wasn't talking about it made them suspect that there was more to it.

"Well, you might be here anywhere from a few weeks to a few months," Nissi said. "It all depends on whether the agency can get sponsorship for you and when they can get passage on a ship going there."

"What happens if they can't get sponsorship?" I asked.

"Well, if they can't find an industrialized nation willing to risk taking you in, they'll put you off wherever they can. Africa, South America, parts of East Asia. And you really don't have a choice in the matter."

We settled into an uncomfortable silence as I let that sink in. The United States, working through the United Nations, put enormous political and economic pressure on the other nations of the world to capture and contain genemods, but many of the governments and citizens of those nations were sympathetic to their plight. While none were willing to openly defy the UN directives banning geemo research, many saw it as a violation of their human rights to revert genetic modification in humans, and worked covertly to help shelter them. The Genemod Relocation Agency had some international support from those nations, but mostly it ran off donations from those it had helped to get out of the US. From what I understood, the agency had managed to get tens of thousands of genemods to safety during its several years of operation, but well over a hundred thousand were still waiting in long-term safe houses and thousands more hid on their own.

"Your turn, Nock," Wendy said.

"Dinner first," he said, pointing to what looked like a cupboard next to the stairway. No, a dumbwaiter, I realized. He inhaled deeply through his nose. "Vegetable stew, again."

Stan opened the door to the shaft and pulled out a large tray containing a steaming pot and several bowls and silverware. It did, indeed, smell like some kind of vegetable soup, though I hadn't detected any scent at all just a moment ago. Stan carried the tray to the folding table and set it in the center.

"Nock likes to show off," Wendy said. She dropped the cat on the sofa's arm and stood up. "He got scent and aural upgrades along with the rest."

Nock smirked. "Hey, don't be jealous just because your super power is being a rug rat."

Wendy tapped the side of her face with her middle finger. "Never underestimate the power of cuteness, bat boy." She raised her voice. "Stansy, you having food?"

"Yeah, yeah, I'm coming," the other woman said, emerging a moment later from her curtained-off section of the room.

"Bat boy?" Nock said, shaking his head. "That hurts, baby doll."

"Vampire."

"Reverse jail bait."

"Alright, you two, knock it off," Nissi said, but smiled as she said it.

"What?" Wendy said, ignoring her. "Reverse jail bait? That doesn't even make sense."

"Think it over while we're eating," Nissi said. "I don't know about you, but I'm starving."

"This isn't over," Wendy said in a mock-menacing tone. She punched Nock on the arm.

I was glad to see that the others were already apparently adjusting to my arrival, acting more like themselves and less like they were trying to put up a good front for my sake. I took a seat on the end next to Wendy and was handed a bowl of stew from Stan. "That smells wonderful," I said, and it did.

"Miss Gray turned most of her backyard into a greenhouse," Nissi said. "She makes this stew about two or three times a week. Trust me, you'll start to get tired of it after a while."

I caught Nock's glance to my right. A woman, barefoot and dressed only in a threadbare nightgown, walked up to the table. She was shorter than the others, other than Wendy, of course, with tussled brown hair that reached to her shoulders. She kept her eyes down, but I could see that there were dark circles ringing them. She was thin, and not in a way that looked at all healthy. If I had encountered her on the street, I might have thought she were homeless.

"Hello, Tilly," Wendy said brightly. "I'm glad you could join us for dinner."

"Hi," the woman murmured. She pulled out a chair and sat. Stan set a bowl of stew in front of her and she began to eat, chewing and swallowing quickly and mechanically. Like most genemods, her symmetric and proportioned features gave her an attractive appearance, but the it was harder to see due to her lack of care and dullness of spirit. I realized that the others were studiously avoiding looking at her.

"So we were in the middle of introductions," Wendy said into the silence.

"Yeah, yeah," Nock said, setting his spoon down. I turned to give him my attention. "I was an entrepreneur and head of a small investment firm. When the Ban hit, I tried to get out of the country, but I found out that the feds had already set up border patrols and airport screenings. I've been bouncing from agency safe houses ever since. I have a girlfriend, but I haven't seen her in seven years. I hope she's still in hiding or out of the country by now, but, of course, the agency won't tell me. I've been here for about three months."

"I was an attorney," Stansy began, as soon as Nock finished. "I worked for corporate interests, did some criminal defense cases before that, but I didn't care much for trials. When I heard about the Ban, I thought there was no way it would stand, but I was wrong. I barely got out in time when the feds showed up at my firm to arrest me. My husband filed for divorce after I disappeared and got a private investigator to somehow track down a rep from the agency to give me my papers. The bastard didn't even wait a week, and he's got my son." She blinked several times and quickly reached for her water. "God, it still hurts, you know? I'm sorry if I came across as a jerk earlier, Norm. I'm just fed up with this shit."

"I'll drink to that," Stan said, reaching for his own water glass.

"Hey, do we still have that bottle of Cabernet?" Wendy asked. "This is a bit of a special occasion. New roomie and all."

Nock went in search for it, coming back a few moments later with a bottle of California wine.

"Sometimes Miss Gray brings us gifts," Wendy explained as Nock pried the cork. Wine wasn't rationed, but I knew that it was quite expensive.

"What about you, Tilly?" I asked. "What's your story?"

Tilly dropped her spoon into her bowl, splashing brownish liquid on the table. The rest of the table had gone suddenly quiet. Wendy placed the wine bottle carefully on the table. She stared at Tilly and chewed at her lip.