Mutant City Read Online Free Page A

that they defy scientific explanation.’ He paused to wet his dry, cracked lips.
    Zander was beginning to wonder if the old man’s ramblings might be simply a result of the pain-controlling medication he was on. He glanced back towards the door, weighing up whether he should call one of the nursing staff.
    The old man continued. ‘I’d heard rumours about mutants from the most extreme environments who had psychic powers and other weird abilities.’
    ‘They’re just old wives’ tales. Something that mothers tell their children to get them to sleep at night – “Behave or the mutant bogeymen will get you”.’
    The old man held up a finger. He reached out and retrieved the mask, holding it to his face and sucking in more oxygen before continuing. ‘I thought so too at first. But as scientists we owe it to ourselves to investigate such things, so I set about trying to find a mutant who showed signs of having a special gift. And I found one.’ He let out a harsh bark of a laugh which was quickly followed by another round of coughing. ‘Boy, did I find one.’ After a slight shake of his head he continued. ‘My men set out into the Blacklands, where the ravages of the Last War have created a landscape so inhospitable that for a while it was thought nothing could live there. But things do live there: horrible and grotesque things that you would hardly think of as human. One of these was brought back from that place. How they got it back with the things they experienced while it was in their custody is a miracle, but they managed somehow, although the cost was high in terms of the lives and minds lost. The freak was taken to the Farm to be picked apart, like a wristwatch, so I could see if I might be able to work out what made it tick. It didn’t survive, but I succeeded in isolating the mutated genes of interest.’
    ‘What did you hope to achieve?’
    His father stared at him for a few moments. ‘What do we do at Bio-Gen, son? Hmm?’
    ‘How do you mean?’
    ‘What do we offer to the citizens of the Six Cities?’ He paused, waiting for an answer that didn’t come. ‘Hope, that’s what. We offer them flawless, disease-free, intelligent, athletic human beings that are ordered up like food from a restaurant menu. You want a baby with green eyes and jet-black hair? No problem. You want him or her to be tall and strong so that they might fulfil your dreams of playing in the InterCity Games? Sure, why not? You want a child with musical abilities, with dextrous fingers and wide hands to easily span those octaves? A concert pianist? Hey, whatever you want, you’re paying! We can do all that.’ There was the maniacal glint in his eye that his son knew so well. ‘But what if we could offer more? What if we could make them more than human ?’
    ‘We are forbidden from mixing our DNA with that of the mutants.’
    ‘It was all the same DNA, before they became freaks!’
    ‘But it’s not any more . We made certain of that. We refined and reprogrammed our own genome to remove the defects and disease. We did that precisely so we might offer the hope you just described.’
    ‘Ha!’ Another bout of hacking coughs followed the old man’s exclamation, this one longer than the last. ‘You make it sound as if we were on a mission to save humanity! We did it for money. We did it because we could !’
    ‘Tainting our DNA with mutant genes? That’s the most illegal thing you could possibly do.’ Zander’s mind was a blur as he tried to take all this in. ‘Is that what you were doing at this Farm?’
    ‘We tried to create perfection: a superhuman being, if you like. We used artificial wombs and implanted single-cell fetuses with the DNA material I’d collected.’
    ‘Where did you get the fetuses?’ Zander couldn’t stop himself asking questions to which he really did not want to hear the answers; his father had already admitted to some of the most serious crimes imaginable. If anyone found out about this, the