The aroma of white roses mixed with intrigue wafted through the air of the Manhattan funeral home.As Jared lowered his mother's urn into the grave, he heard a faint electronic humming coming from beneath the soil-a jammer he'd buried three days earlier to block all recording devices in a fifty-meter radius.
"Condolences." Lila's Chanel veil was lifted by the wind at one corner, revealing bruised eyes. The silver decanter she handed over was engraved with the Benson family crest, and the ice balls floating in the whiskey reflected an eerie blue light. As Jared tilts his head back and drinks, a distant drone captures the precise number of slips of the knot in his throat: three, at 2.3-second intervals, the biological code that initiates the suicide program.
The funeral march suddenly changes key to Chopin's Funeral March. Guests are shocked to see a holographic projection unfold: in the maternity ward twenty years ago, Jared's mother is sticking a syringe into her newborn's arm, and the Russian translation of the label reads "gene-editing serum". The urn suddenly explodes, spewing out not ashes but a sequence of Benson Sr.'s DNA, each chromosome labeled with a bid price.
"Are you crazy?!" Jared chokes Lila, only to be stabbed in the tiger's mouth by a micro-syringe in her earring. The final image before consciousness blurs is of Lila ripping off her human skin mask to reveal Violet's face, and the insulin pen spinning at her fingertips is the key piece of evidence in the yacht bombing three years ago.
The bulletproof glass dome of the Sotheby's auction room reflects the blood-colored evening sun; Ethan's sapphire cufflinks scan through the catalog and find a hidden message under the entry for "1945 Romanee Conti": Lot.77 - Twin Embryos Frozen for Twenty Years, with Genetic Editing Codes Containing a Key to the Benson Group's Seven Percent Ownership Interests.
"Seventy million dollars." As he raised his hand, the cloned cells on the back of his neck burst into flames, spelling out "stop" in Braille under his skin. As the bidding soars to one hundred and fifty million dollars, a holographic projection descends from the ceiling: a virtual image of Benson Sr. is signing a surrogacy agreement, with an embryo number identical to the item up for auction.
As the crowd stirs, Ethan catches the scent of bitter peach perfume, and Violet's red hair grazes his ear, "Do you know what it takes to grow these embryos?" She splashes red wine on the display case and the liquid corrodes old Benson's death certificate on the bulletproof glass, "Virgin's blood, 300 cc's a day for nine months."
As the alarm sounds, the auctioneer suddenly collapses in convulsions, and Ethan breaks open his tightly gripped gavel to discover a hidden micro-syringe-the insulin residue inside is identical to the one used at Jarryd's mother's funeral. When security breaks down the door, Violet is picking at the embryo storage canister with the tip of her high heel, and the Morse code reflected in the canister reads, You're next.
,
The UV lamps in the police morgue hum. Metal scrapes like fingernails across a chalkboard as the coroner lifts freezer number 13. Twin bodies emerged in the cold air, two pale bodies that looked like mirror images, except for the alpha and omega symbols tattooed on their necks.
"The time of death is seven years apart, but the cellular activity is identical." Before the intern could say anything, the fingers of the α corpse suddenly twitched. As the coroner turned to retrieve the tweezers, the eyelids of the Ω corpse snapped open, and the microchip embedded in the iris began to play encrypted video: five-year-old Jared was strangling his crying twin brother in the basement.
"The deceased is the true heir to the Benson family." Violet's voice suddenly comes over the PA system. The coroner is horrified to find fluorescent tattoos surfacing on the twins' chests, spelling out the combination to a Swiss bank safe deposit box. As he shakily enters the number, the account balance shows $300 million in the name of the pregnant woman's Bitcoin wallet that "crashed" on the air.
The freezers pop open en masse, and hundreds of corpses perform a grotesque ballet at the mercy of a robotic arm. In the midst of the chaos, the coroner catches a glimpse of Lila signing documents in the bail room with her bloody fingerprints, each contract accompanied by a photo of the twins' deaths.
At the container terminal under the Manhattan Bridge, where the salty river breeze wraps around the charred smell of yacht wreckage, Jared awakens in a coma to find an insulin pen keeping him alive intravenously. The countdown on the display has 23 minutes left, next to an equation written in blood: each drop of insulin corresponds to the deletion of a criminal memory.
"Like my immersive revenge game?" Violet's voice came through the rusty pipes. She maneuvered her robotic arm to raise the tablet, and the screen split to show: on the left, real-time bidding on the embryos at the auction, and on the right, surveillance of Lila being injected with the cloning serum at the mental hospital.
As Jared struggles to remove the needle, the container suddenly begins to sink. As the murky river water rushes in, the insulin pen's alarm lights up red, signaling the detection of excessive radiation levels from the wreckage of the yacht at the bottom of the river. The display switched screens: the time bomb he had personally installed in the engine compartment three years ago was currently underwater flashing a countdown red light.
"Do you know why old Benson chose the Hudson River to sink his body?" Violet's projection appears on the seeping bulkhead, "Because the radiation here keeps the cadaver cells eternally active-just like the serum your mother injected you with."
Lila squirms frantically in her straitjacket, watching the cloned serum snake through her veins in rose vines. When the paramedics lift her blindfold, the hospital room suddenly transforms into the deck of a yacht from three years ago.Amber's charred corpse is walking with a cake, each burning candle reflecting the twins' death scene.
"Happy birthday, Ms. Double." The charred corpse's vocal cords vibrate to Violet's frequency.Lila's screams are punctuated by the roar of propellers out the window. Three pesticide planes skimmed over New York, pouring rose seeds that mutated into blood red in the radioactive cloud, taking root as they landed, piercing concrete and blooming into knife-edge petals.
The watchman at the Central Park surveillance room realizes with horror that all the rose bushes are moving toward the mental hospital. As the vines pierce the glass of Lila's hospital room, old Benson's fingerprints emerge from each petal, and miniature cameras hidden in the stamens are transmitting real-time footage to the global dark web.
At the bottom of the Hudson River at this moment, Jared's insulin pen counts down to zero. A huge column of blood-colored rose water suddenly rises from the surface of the river, with an encrypted hard drive suspended in the center of the flower - containing the biometric codes of all the Benson family members over the past twenty years. As the salvage team approaches, the hard drive suddenly explodes on itself, staining the New York morning sun the color of a funeral black veil.
(End of chapter)
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When the frame of a Van Gogh forgery cracks open to reveal a miscarriage diagnosis, an auction's overpriced embryo suddenly goes fetal. Ethan's cloned cells are casting screens on Wall Street to spell out a crime map, and three hundred red-haired replicants are crawling out of the basement of a mental hospital ...