Cloneseed 6

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Testimony of Prisoner REDACTED

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I am a convicted mass murderer but I still see myself as a gene thief; that’s what I did before I was a killer. I specialized in high school and university students as that is where the money was. Customers believed that the phenotype is largely realised in intellectual terms by the late teens so there was always good demand for nationally ranking students. In the early days I just offered the kids a designer bag or the latest slate for a swab but they soon wised up and started selling directly to the research labs. I was back to boiler rooms for a few years until the government saved me by making the sale of non-anonymised genetic material illegal. Privately the research labs were furious; a lot of them were closing in on viable, fully enhanced clones and they needed very specific DNA to work with; edge-cases, extreme ends of the bell curve are where the market wanted to go. Who wants to have a clone that’s average in every aspect?

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So now there was a niche for a middleman to fill, so that’s what I did. I was asked to approach high-achieving individuals in specific fields and steal the DNA; no one would sell, the penalties were too high and these were high flyers; money was not something they needed. Now understand that this was a much harder thing to do back then. A strand of hair was no good; a swab or blood sample was the only thing that paid out, so I had to resort to force. I did okay to begin with but the demand was huge and some of my peers got sloppy, a few targets were killed. Anyone that thought they might be a target got security and kept an eye out. The game was up.

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I spent the next few weeks sitting around in bars and drinking my savings. One day I got to chatting with this stunning girl in my favourite Burmese whisky bar. Turns out she’s a geneticist; a recent graduate, calls herself Lee. I figured I was out of the game for good at this stage, I was pretty drunk and I wanted to impress her, so I told her of my woes. Long story short, she said she could forge the DNA well enough that I’d get paid. She claimed the competition was intense and the race to be first to market was making everyone cut corners and take chances. I believed this to be horseshit of course, no graduate, probably no one in the world at that time, had that ability but I was drunk and infatuated so I played along. Three days later I was taking forged DNA to Cloneseed, my premier customer, and they paid no problems. I didn’t understand but I didn’t much care; I was back in business. Lee took a very reasonable cut and everyone was happy.

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Now fast forward another year, Cloneseed went from being a start up in an unmarked PO box building to the only topic of conversation. It was then for the first time I realised that this faked DNA would be skewing someone’s research. I panicked, I contacted Lee but she’d disappeared. I followed her lead and left town. I was set up financially; I didn’t need to work. I just sat around drinking, following the news like a paranoid schizophrenic looking for any hint of trouble. Six months after the first medical treatments I started to relax. The cloning hadn’t started but I didn’t care about them, I have no conscience when it comes to the rich. I was getting bored out on the coast so I headed back into the city. As fate would have it, that’s when the first stories about the plague surfaced. You know how it all ends of course, the plague was traced back to recipients of specific Cloneseed therapies, Cloneseed blamed faulty DNA samples used in their initial modelling, and a lot of people died. They created a story about me working for them and contaminating the DNA in the lab but that was just a means of covering up their illegal procurement of DNA and the authorities played along as it looked better for them than the existence of an illicit DNA trade. For me the result is much the same isn’t it? I’m not complaining; I deserve this but so does Lee, so do the suits over at Cloneseed for not being more careful. Of course they are too rich to touch now and Lee is gone like piss in the rain.

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Likelihood of significant falsehood: REDACTED%
Likelihood of minor falsehoods and embellishments: REDACTED%
Recorded and filed by 🆂🅸🅽 🆃🅷🅴 🅰🅸 on Tuesday 30th March CE215