Wild Type

Four thousand children share a piece of DNA that no human population has ever carried.Maya Restrepo maintains the machinery that tells nineteen million people who their cousins are. When a routine job runs five hours long, she finds a cluster of customers who all match each other at exactly one place in the genome, and nowhere else. Inheritance cannot do that.The sequence was not inherited. It was installed. It carries a laboratory promoter, a functional edit against the disease that kills more people than any other, and, in a stretch that codes for nothing, a serial number with a checksum on the end.Every one of them was conceived by IVF. Every one of them is under fifteen.And somebody has been quietly asking the world's genetic databases, once a month for nine years, whether anyone can see them yet.Maya has their names. So does the company she works for, which is eleven months from running out of cash and has just been offered nine times its valuation by a pharmaceutical company that would very much like to know who these children are.There is no way to tell the truth about them that does not hand somebody a list. The regulator needs a manufacturer. The court needs a plaintiff. The newspaper needs a face.So Maya stops looking for a way to tell the truth, and starts looking for a way to make the truth worthless.WILD TYPE is the first book of the Founder Trilogy.