"Sean McMullen - The Blondefire Genome" - читать интересную книгу автора (McMullen Sean)

again. She loaded a blank cartridge into the starter's pistol.
"This is for you, Blondefire," she said as she squeezed the trigger.
A muffled thud rammed the tungsten and DNA mixture into the target cells. Megan broke the seal on
the pressure cooker and lifted out the dish of cells. The tissue culture process to make the enhanced cells
of ryegrass grow was a difficult one, and it would keep her mind off Blondefire for the evening.
When she went downstairs to microwave a pizza for dinner Alex was still watching Blondefire. Jackie
Cassall was all legs, lycra and billowing, bushy hair, singing "Saturday to Sunday" and looking
wholesome, winsome and dynamic. Her face was wonderfully clear and smooth, while Megan was
conscious that her own was ravaged by acne. She looked down at the pizza that she was carrying and
imagined her face in the disk.
"I'm fifteen, acne happens around fifteen," she muttered to herself.
"Sorry, what was that?" asked Alex.
"Ah, Jackie Cassall's skin. I just can't believe skin as good as that," she replied.
"Yeah, she's great. Hey, sorry about not recording Quantum last night. What was on, did you ring the
studio?"
"Just a live show, some kids with their science projects," Megan replied coldly.
She took the pizza to her bedroom and lay on her bed, eating the slices and examining her face in a
mirror. Her skin was seldom without a spot or two, but something had brought on a particularly bad case
of acne six weeks ago. What had caused the zits? Some new food? Her flu shots? Her diary might have
a clue.
She leafed through the pages, looking over her plant experiment notes and personal entries. She was
fanatically careful about experimental records, and she had documented her acne right down to an entry
for each pimple. She booted up her mother's PC and ran Statistica, then entered her acne count for each
day over three months.
"A base rate of two or three zits per week. Annoying, but not the end of the world," she told the
figures on the screen. The count had risen abruptly to fifteen per week, then peaked at twenty-one before
trailing down to the present seven.
The rise was sharp, so it had to be something new and obvious: food, perhaps, or makeup? Some
manufacturer might have changed an ingredient, added something that had caused an allergy. Laboratory
chemicals were another suspect. Her experiments involved some exotic compounds, and she had
documented those in the diary, too.
She typed in the figures on when she had begun using different chemicals, along with what she could
piece together on food and makeup. On the screen the lines of the graphs remained stubbornly smooth
and consistent near the date where her acne had suddenly erupted. There was nothing else in her diary
but a note about the pollination of ryegrass variety CG-47.
Megan sat back and closed her eyes. Pollen! Ryegrass pollen induced hay fever and allergies in some
people, but this ryegrass had been genetically hacked with wattle DNA. Could it unbalance oil levels in
her skin? Zitgrass. Ryegrass pollen that caused zits. But the makeshift greenhouse was in the sunroom, so
why weren't her mother and Alex affected? Perhaps it was related to teenage hormone levels. Alex was
twenty, her mother forty-five.
Almost as if he had been given a telepathic cue, Alex turned up the television's sound. "And now
Blondefire's first big hit, Blondefire, My Desire," cried the compere.
Something inside Megan slipped free from its chain. An image of creamy white skin spotted with angry
red eruptions appeared in her mind. Hardly aware of what she was doing, she opened her battered filing
cabinet full of seed envelopes. She retrieved the envelope marked RYE/WATTLE CG-47 and poured a
few seeds into her palm. Blondefire sang on from the living room. Megan stared at her genetic creations,
then went to the sunroom-greenhouse.
"Blondefire made me vanish. I might as well never have been on Quantum," she told the seeds as she
sprinkled them into a tray of seedling mix. "Now I'll make Blondefire vanish."
Under artificial lighting and heating, the seeds sprouted and the seedlings flourished. Megan collected