41 - Now that's an Interesting Thought

“I don’t think science would still classify them as homo sapiens, not with their modified DNA, RNA, amino acids, and proteins. I’m not sure what they are.”

“And here I thought that phoenix we faced last week was pretty crazy. And the Christmas lawn decorations come to life the month before that. And what about that giant green bull? You don’t get charged by one of those everyday.”

“We do seem to encounter more than our fair share of the weird and unexplained.”

“It’s his fault.” He points to Kyle. “If he’d just throw away that stupid compass of his instead of always going where it points, we’d save ourselves a lot of grief.”

“If not for that ‘stupid compass’, you’d still be stuck at The Power Company, and I’d be on the end of a Lab Assistant’s skewer.”

“Eww. That would be bad. I hated working at The Power Company.”

I look up at René and shake my head. I think he was only kidding, but with him you can never really be sure.

“So where does one go to get these enhancements? Maybe the same guys who made those Lab Assistants, because you know those weren’t your run-of-the-mill henchmen.”

“The Lab Assistants. Now there is an interesting thought.”

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40 - You Mean They Weren't People?

I recently became very familiar with DNA, RNA, and chromosomes thanks to a certain Red Plague that nearly wiped out half the population of Califia. But I don’t recognize these sequences. They aren’t even vaguely familiar. But Kyle does.

“You’re kidding?” I ask. He shakes his head and proceeds to describe how the anomalies are actually genetically engineered enhancements to improve strength, speed, agility, endurance, eyesight, hearing, and more. And I thought Olympic athletes who indulged in blood doping were extreme. This makes that look like taking a Flintstone vitamin. Who would have the knowledge, skill, and equipment to do this?

“What are you guys looking at? Modern art?”

I turn around to see René with an obscenely large bucket of popcorn in on arm and an obscenely large handful of popcorn in the other. How he manages to get it all in his mouth without dropping a single kernel I will never understand. You would think with his steady diet of snack foods he’d be the size of a hippo, but somehow he never manages to gain weight. I wish I were that lucky. I have to watch everything I eat and nearly kill myself every morning training with Kyle so I can still fit into my clothes.

“It’s the DNA of one of those … things that attacked Kyle.”

“Things? Someone’s become very pajoritive.”

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39 - Comparing DNA

I lean back tapping my chin and consider why they might have surgically altered their appearances. Are they criminals? Did they do it for this job specifically? Or did they just not like how they looked? That third one is very unlikely, but without more information, I can’t eliminate any possibilities. Not yet.

I scan thru the video footage for the umpteenth time. Several people managed to record the stranger in the grey suit, but no one got a shot of his face, not even a blurry one. With nearly an hour of footage from dozens of vantage points, that shouldn’t be possible. Someone was trying to hide his identity and knew exactly how to do it. How do we always manage to attract world-class adversaries? Can’t we go up against an ordinary criminal once in a while? Where is a shoplifter when you need one?

Kyle brings me his pants. At first I wonder if they were torn during the fight and he wants me to mend them. Then he points out a dark red spot on the knee and places it under one of the many scanners. I see a spiraling molecule appear on the screen.

“The police already ran the DNA but got no match.”

But the computer doesn’t stop at comparing the DNA. Oh, no. Like Kyle himself, the computer is an overachiever. It maps the chromosomes and analyses the sequences. That’s when I become very interested.

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38 - The Fight was Recorded

Chapter V - Wandering Koala’s LabTree

I sit behind the 20-foot screen of the supercomputer in the LabTree while René makes his nightly bowl of popcorn and Kyle tends to his wounds. I catch myself adjusting my glasses while looking over the search results and jerk my hand down. I’ve heard several people comment how I’m always playing with my glasses and how distracting it is, so I’ve been consciously trying to stop. It’s hard.

The three attackers were no ordinary thugs. They nearly took down Kyle, and he’s taken on a SWAT team before and won. They looked ordinary enough, which will make them that much harder to identify. They somehow managed to escape while Kyle was chasing the man in a grey suit. The police did recover samples of DNA, but so few people’s DNA is on file that it probably won’t lead anywhere. Fortunately, over two dozen people recorded the fight and posted it online, so I have excellent shots of all three attackers.

Facial recognition turned up nothing, but the program Kyle has (and where he gets his applications I wish I knew, because they are decades ahead of what anyone else has) was able to detect surgical alterations to both bone structure and facial features. I’m still trying to figure out how it could do that from a few fuzzy video frames.

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