Prophet Margin by Simon Spurrier Read Free Book Online Page A

me."
    "Harvey, I said I wanted as much information as you could find... for free ."
    "Now wait a minute-"
    "Harvey, we're broke. Every Dog in the agency's broke."
    The officer folded his arms. "Won't wash, mutie. You just came back from a hunt. I got the invoice right here." He flourished a piece of paper. "What happened there, anyways? Says here the body was somewhat lacking in the head department."
    "You tell me. Snecker's skull just upped and popped."
    "Yeah, well. Makes no odds to the contract. You're flush."
    "We had some... trouble." Johnny glanced at Kid Knee, struggling to keep his voice calm. The fat lug wasn't paying attention, staring off into space with a glazed expression. "Someone... someone crashed the rental. Bad takeoff. We lost our deposit."
    Harvey smirked, flashing an amused glance at the Kid. "No shit?"
    "No shit." Johnny tried not to grind his teeth. Balancing earnings with expenses was all very well, but clumsiness as a result of alcoholism wasn't conducive to a healthy profit.
    "Too bad." Harvey shrugged, dropping the disc into a pocket of his uniform.
    Alpha stared at him for a moment, thinking.
    "I'm sorry about this Harvey," he said, eyes beginning to glow. "I need to see that recording."
    White light filled Officer Harvey's vision, and everything went fuzzy.
     
    "What," the man said, "is a mutant?"
    His eyes twinkled behind thick omnispecs; transforming an apparently benevolent countenance into a monstrous facade that was eighty per cent eyeball. The audience rustled uncomfortably.
    "The answer," he said, "is that we are all mutants."
    At this the audience's composure shattered, eliciting a volley of startled hisses, breathless denials and one or two garrulous curses, artfully filtered by the sound-system AI.
    "Without mutation," the scientist persisted, "we'd never have crawled from the sea. We'd never have left the primordial puddle, as it were. Mutation is change , ladies and gentlemen.
    "Of course, once in a while, it creates a circumstance whereby a species is improved - making it... say, hardier, more efficient. Those are the specimens that proliferate and, by surviving and breeding, gradually effect evolutionary change." He shrugged. "Generally speaking, of course, mutation creates very little except a godawful mess."
    On cue the viewscreen behind him illuminated with the cluttered heraldry of the "Department of Genetic Abnormalities": crossed pipettes and test tubes beneath a rampant British Lion - albeit one with five legs and a scorpion's tale.
    "Latterly, mutation has had a helping hand. With the abundance of radioactive material in our environment abnormalities are no longer the remit of fate and time. Mutation - and therefore evolution - can be synthesised."
    The audience's discomfort was growing, muted anger filling the auditorium little by little.
    "My department was commissioned," the scientist continued, "to demonstrate the arbitrary effects of mutation in a simple manner. We selected as our model species Prionace glauca , as seen here." Behind him the heraldic crest dissolved, exchanged by a videfeed of a blue watery expanse. A torpedo body slunk across the screen, stippled by sunlight from above. The audience fell silent, transfixed by the beady-eyed grace of the creature, its missile-head underslung by a wedged mouth, striated by ranks of narrow teeth. It gyrated, ventral muscles propelling it from the image, leaving only a desolation of shadows and bubbles in its wake.
    "The blue shark." the scientist said, gratified by the audience's attention. "In its natural state it is programmed with just two imperatives: survival and reproduction. If we are to judge the relative success of a mutation we must do so in terms of a specimen's ability to pursue 'life goals'.
    "In conjunction with the department of Cloning Studies we produced a batch of ten thousand embryos and exposed them to Strontium-90. When fully formed, ten months later, we began to collate results. They were...