The Race Read Online Free PDF Page A

brother.
    I still feel guilty sometimes. I tell myself that if only I’d tried harder to find out what going on I could have talked to Del, persuaded him, opened his eyes to the risks. That’s all bollocks though, isn’t it? Apart from anything else, since when has my brother Yellow ever listened to anyone?
    He wouldn’t have heard a word I said. He’d have told me to fuck off and mind my own business.
    Knowing that should make me feel better, but it doesn’t.
    ~*~
    To understand how Sapphire works, you have to understand the smartdogs, and to understand the smartdogs you have to understand the panic that was first caused by them.
    The engineered greyhounds now known as smartdogs were the product of illegal experiments in stem cell research. The experiments originally took place at what was then a large governmental agricultural centre called Romney Heights. The nearest town of any real size was of course Sapphire, which was why most of the support workers – the lab staff and cleaning staff and technicians – came from here. The security was pretty tight – anyone found to be in breach of the lab’s confidentiality agreement was fired on the spot – but the pay was good, and once you have a job like that you do your best to hang on to it. For the most part people were more than happy to stick to the rules.
    There’s a lot of hard science stuff I don’t understand fully, but what it comes down to is that the government boffins at Romney Heights took eggs from a canine ovary and replaced some of the canine genetic material with human DNA. They fertilized those doctored eggs with dog sperm, and let them go on to become living dog embryos. Those embryos were then implanted back into the wombs of female greyhounds.
    The scientists used greyhounds for their experiments because they are docile and easy to train. They are also naturally hardy and highly intelligent.
    The process took a lot longer than I’m making out here, but the puppies born to those greyhound mothers were actually part human. I don’t mean they were deformed, or monsters or anything – they looked no different from any normal puppies. But they were part human nonetheless, and their intelligence – what the scientists call their cognitive ability – was more highly advanced and adaptable than in ordinary dogs.
    And of course those scientists were very excited, because nothing remotely like this had been achieved before. They hailed it as a radical breakthrough in biotechnical engineering.
    It was Del who told me what the Romney Heights project was really about.
    “They wanted to create a new kind of weapon,” he said. “An animal primed with explosives that could be trained to penetrate a military or industrial stronghold and blow it up.”
    “But wouldn’t the dogs be blown up as well?” I said. The idea horrified me.
    “Of course they would, numbskull, sky high. Blown to bloody smithereens and fragments of gut. But dogs aren’t the same as people, are they? Even dogs with human DNA aren’t the same as people. You can always breed more, blow those up too if you want to. None of your conscientious objections about blowing up dogs. That was the entire point.”
    I could see more or less at once what he was getting at. By using smartdogs you could get into places and take risks you couldn’t consider with a human strike force. And the smartdogs, like all dogs, would be happy to do exactly what they were told.
    They did more experiments, experiments that involved both a smartdog and a human trainer having a bio-computer chip implanted into their brain. The chip was programmed with code from the dog’s DNA, and facilitated a mental or empathic link between the dog and the human. Del says it’s impossible to describe in layman’s terms what it does, exactly, but basically it’s as if the smartdog and its human trainer can hear each other’s thoughts.
    The scientists believed that the implants would change everything, which they did, only