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I dreamed of who I used to be.
Of who, or what, I might become.

"Vast amounts of DNA, or plasmids, could be hidden on the pages of a normal book—dropped in microliter increments and left to dry on the pages, only to be rehydrated and used elsewhere. Even a short novel like The Stranger could hold a near-infinite amount of genetic information, with each page hiding the genome sequence for a different mammal, a terrifying disease, or a synthetic species, any of which could be activated in a well-equipped dark gene lab."

"Scythe was the revolutionary, biological DNA modifier system—now extremely illegal—discovered and patented by my mother, Miriam Ramsay. It had been a seismic leap forward that left the previous generations of technologies—ZFNs, TALENs, CRISPR-Cas9—gasping in the dust. Scythe had ushered in a new era of gene editing and delivery, one that brought about catastrophic results, which was why getting caught using or selling it for germline modification—the making of a new organism—came with a mandatory thirty-year prison sentence."

"We lived in a veritable surveillance state, engaged with screens more than with our loved ones, and the algorithms knew us better than we knew ourselves. Every passing year, more jobs were lost to automation and artificial intelligence.

"The ones that hurt were the raids on real scientists. Those who'd been doing groundbreaking work, for all humankind, when governments panicked and made it practically impossible to be a genetic engineer."

“Pain distorts time, so I had no idea how much of it had passed when I finally heard the thunder of footsteps descending the stairs into the basement.”

"They started me on a course of interferon-gamma and a set of new antivirals. I spiked one more fever the following night and then began a period of rapid improvement. My energy roared back. My appetite returned. I started sleeping through the night."

"It moved me that Ava would suit up to spend time with me inside my bubble. If you weren't used to them, a hazmat suit could be a claustrophobic experience. They were hot and bulky, and inevitably your face would begin to itch the moment you had entered the quarantine area. And, of course, looming over all of the inconvenience was the very real threat of a breach."

"Nothing's wrong per se. There's a metric called the z-score, which measures bone mineral density. Anything between −1 and 1 is within the range of normal. Your z-score is 2.75."

"Is that high?"

He chuckled. "In my entire career, I've never seen bones this dense. This could explain the deep body pain you've been experiencing if they were undergoing a cycle of densification."

"What would cause an uptick in bone density?"

“Bad things. Diffusely metastatic prostate cancer, Paget’s disease, pyknodysostosis, osteopetrosis.”

"I shouldn't have known, but as I considered the question, I remembered reading an article eight years ago in Scientific American, where PDE4B had been discussed in the context of gene therapies for mental illness. I said, "It's linked to low anxiety and high problem solving . Well, at least in mice." "Correct. It's been inhibited in you. What if I were to tell you that your entire IGF system had also been altered and your GRIN2B gene mutated?"

"I knew from my own experience in law enforcement that lie-detector tests don't actually detect lies. They detect guilty feelings, which most people experience when they lie, evidenced by dramatic swings in the metrics the tablet facing me was designed to track."

"What allows human beings to concentrate on things amid the maelstrom of infinite stimuli is a neurological process called sensory gating. It filters out low-relevance (redundant or unnecessary) stimuli in the brain from all possible environmental stimuli. If this didn't happen, we would experience an overload of irrelevant information in the higher cortical centers.

The absence of sensory gating is a key marker for schizophrenia and actually contributes to making people go insane. An existence without gating would be torture.”

"Prions are misfolded proteins that carry a horrifying ability to catalytically transmit their misfolded shape onto normal variants of the same protein. These mutations cause normal proteins in the brain to misfold. They literally shred brain matter and cause a handful of horror-show neurodegenerative diseases. Victims lose their ability to recognize people and places and to take care of themselves. In the final stages, they cease to think at all.

They cause But I watched in horror as the list of "50%—95% overlap" results scrolled by: scrapie, mad cow disease, camel spongiform encephalopathy (CSE), transmissible mink encephalopathy (TME), chronic wasting disease (CWD), feline spongiform encephalopathy (FSE), exotic ungulate encephalopathy (EUE), spongiform encephalopathy, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), Gerstmann-Sträussler-Scheinker disease (GSS), fatal familial insomnia (FFI), kuru, variably protease-sensitive prionopathy (VPSPr) and many other diseases."

That was a very big number. In virology, the R0 (R-naught) indicates the contagion level of a given illness. It's the number of cases expected to be caused by a single infected person. Measles, the most contagious virus known to humankind, has an R0 of 12 to 18, which means that each infected person would be expected to infect 12 to 18 others. By comparison, the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed fifty million, had a much lower R0 of between 1.4 to 2.8. COVID-19 had been around 5.7. "

“The greatest threat to our species lies within us.”

"Creatures who overlay story on everything, but especially their own lives, and in so doing, can imbue a cold, random, sometimes brutal existence, with fabricated meaning."

“But more than anything, I didn’t want to become someone’s lab rat.”