I can’t help but smile. ‘I was trying to get a sample to sequence. This flock looks like a new strain. I think they might have the rest of the poem.’
The poem is a sonnet. I already have the three quatrains, and I’ve been waiting four months for the couplet to arrive.
‘Ah,’ he says, snatching up the rifle. ‘No time to waste, then. We have some birds to shoot.’
When the genehacked pigeons first appeared in our skies six months ago, it was my father who shot one down to take a look at their DNA. Their genes were expertly coded, except for one tiny section, a messy string of DNA that didn’t seem to fit. My father said it was junk, but it bugged me, so I took a sample to analyse on my own. I ran it through my genkit, my portable genetic sequencer, but none of the built-in search algorithms could find a pattern. Finally, on a whim, I translated the base pairs into binary, then ASCII and into a string of alphanumeric letters.
Then it all made sense. It wasn’t a gene – it was a message. That odd patch of G, T, C and A was hiding the words of a poem.
That’s the beautiful thing about gentech – the science of genetic coding. You can get lost in the minutiae, but then you step back sometimes, and patterns appear like sunlight bursting through clouds. Reading the genetic code behind a feather or a cell can make you feel like you’re reading poetry written by God.
Unfortunately, the poem in the pigeons was written by amateur genehackers, and it’s not the best thing I’ve ever read, but I still want to know how it ends.
‘One or two? Big or little?’ Dax squints through the rifle’s scope at the swirling flock of birds above us. His shoulder-length red hair is tied back in a low ponytail, a few loose strands hanging around his face. One streak is white blond, more a boast of his coding prowess than a fashion statement. A whole head of hair is easy to hack, but you have to be a coding wizard to zero in on just a few strands.
I cross my arms, looking up at the birds. ‘You really think you can just hit one?’
‘I know I can.’
I roll my eyes, but he’s probably right. Dax’s ocular tech is state-of-the-art, along with every other app running from the panel embedded in his arm. It stretches from his wrist to his elbow, a soft layer of nanocoded silicone glowing in a stripe of cobalt light beneath his skin. Inside it, tiny processors run gentech code, packaged up as individual apps to alter his DNA and change his body. Those apps govern everything from his implanted sensory upgrades to his metabolism, even the streak in his hair.
The computers that can handle manipulations on DNA were once the size of a room, but they eventually became small enough to bury inside your body. The gentech panel is a perfect combination of hardware, software and wetware, generating constant streams of algorithmically designed nanites. Those nanites move through a network of cables inside your body, then bleed through your cells, building and destroying coils of synthetic DNA. Gentech can grow wires and circuits the same way your body grows bone, or it can grow your hair in perfect ringlets even if you were born with it straight. Almost everyone has a panel, budded at birth to grow inside them, and most people carry hundreds, even thousands, of apps.
My wrist holds just six lonely dots. My hypergenesis, an allergy to the nanites that run most gentech, means the panel in my arm is little more than a glorified phone. I have standard healing and sensory tech, and a glitchy twelve-kilobyte comm that my father personally coded for me. But if I download anything else, even the simplest of apps, the nanites will shred through my cells and kill me within hours.
It’s ironic, really. I’m the daughter of the world’s greatest gentech coder, but I’ll never be able to experience most of his work.
Dax fires the rifle. A shot rings out, and feathers puff through the air. A single bird arcs up parabolically, then tumbles to the ground. He lowers the rifle, leaning it back against the wall, and arches an eyebrow. ‘What do you say, first one to the bird gets to finish the poem?’
My jaw drops. ‘No, this is my project. You can’t finish it. That’s not fair.’
He launches himself over the porch and lands in the grass with catlike grace, then tilts his head to smile up at me. ‘Life isn’t fair, Princess.’
‘Oh,’ I breathe, cracking my knuckles. ‘You are so in for it now.’
I bolt down the stairs and race through the grass, my long dark hair streaming out behind me, veering left as Dax tries to block my path. He’s stronger, but I’m faster, and I dart past him, skidding to a stop on the lake’s pebbled shore, snatching up the bird with one outstretched hand.
I’m fast, but not fast enough. Dax hurtles into me, knocking me to the ground, yanking the pigeon from my hand. I roll over on the grass and scramble up just in time to grab a fistful of his hair.
I yank it back, hard. He lets out a cry, dropping the pigeon, and spins to face me with a wild look in his eyes.
A few seconds ago we were two coders discussing DNA, but now we’re like wolves, circling each other, fighting over something neither of us need. The pigeon doesn’t matter. Any one of the feathers littering the ground could yield its DNA, but this isn’t really about the bird, or even about the poem. This is about Dax and me, and the tension that’s been building between us since he kissed me last week when my father was away. We haven’t talked about it since. I tried to pretend it didn’t happen, too frightened that my overprotective father would find out and fire Dax. We’ve spent the week trying to work together, to ignore the energy crackling between us, like two humming electrodes just waiting for a spark.
My eyes drop to the pigeon. I make the slightest move towards it, and Dax’s arm whips around my waist, lifting me clean off my feet. My heart pounds at the feeling of his chest against my back, but his feet slip, and for a heartbeat we sway together before tumbling into the lake.
‘Dax, no!’ I shriek, scrambling away, shoving my sopping hair away from my face.
He just laughs. He flicks his head back, sending up a glistening Mohawk of water. ‘I wasn’t going to take the damn bird.’
‘Then why did you start this? How are we going to explain this to my father?’
He grins. ‘That’s what I came to tell you. He knows, Princess. We had a chat, and he’s OK with it, but he kept telling me that some things are better when you wait for them.’
I almost choke. ‘Are you kidding me?’
‘Nope. I don’t know if it’s the whole apocalypse thing or not, but I got the Agatta stamp of approval. I hope you know that when we get married, I’m taking your name, and then we’re calling all our future children Lachlan, after your father. It might be hard on the girls, but I’m sure they’ll understand, and –’
‘Catarina!’
We both spin round as my father throws open the front door.