The Genesis Protocol – Life Beyond the Edge of Reason

Fiction Science Fiction fiction, short story JC Milan January 20, 2025 0 Comments

The lab was burning.

Blue-tinged flames licked at the metal walls, the acrid stench of molten plastic and carbonized research filling the air. Monitors displaying years of data collapsed inward, their glass faces shattering amidst the carnage. And there, at the center of the inferno, stood Dr. Eliot Voss, shirt singed, his hazel eyes wide and bloodshot as alarms screamed overhead.

The vial in his gloved hand glowed faintly—an iridescent sheen swirling in its depths like liquid fireflies. He clutched it as though it might grow wings and bolt, all while smoke crawled deeper into his lungs. Somewhere behind him, the lab’s AI assistant stammered, glitching warnings through the chaos, its usual melody fractured.

“Emergency protocol activated. Please evacu—evacu—”
The voice disintegrated into static.

Eliot only had seconds left before the sprinkler system engaged and doused the lab in foam—something he couldn’t allow. Not when everything depended on this one breakthrough. Teeth gritted, his charred boots scraped across the floor as he scrambled into the adjacent chamber, slamming the door behind him just as fire suppression buried the lab in white mist.

For the first time in years, Eliot felt fragile. Because in his hand wasn’t just an experimental toxin or vaccine or harmless prototype. It was the culmination of four decades of human failure.

It was life. And it was dangerous.

Two months earlier

Eliot was practically unrecognizable. Clean-conscience scientist, neatly pressed blue lab coat, skinnier jeans than his age warranted—he was someone who blended into the fluorescence of corporate research facilities. His creations weren’t glamorous; they were widgets in the wider genetic revolution. KroCorp BioSystems employed him to refine drought-resistant crops and programmable bioluminescent bacteria that could solve oil spill contamination—a day job that paid well enough to keep his fridge stocked with oat milk and overpriced wine.

But Eliot had always been a tinkerer. A rebel beneath his composed exterior. At night, long after the processors had cooled in KroCorp’s biolabs, he worked from his garage in downtown San Francisco, piecing together scraps of banned genetic algorithms and scavenged AI cores no better than antique chess computers.

His obsession? Rebuilding DNA—not editing it, not enhancing it, but something far greater. Everything since CRISPR, even synthetic biology’s neon-lit creations, relied on existing templates. Life was being rearranged, not created.

What Eliot sought was the Genesis Protocol: taking nucleotides, proteins, and nothingness, and conjuring unimaginable life forms.

The breakthrough had come in the form of AI—a language Eliot barely understood but blindly trusted. His personal DeepMind knockoff, cobbled together over years of coffee-fueled tinkering, had begun churning out sequences Eliot hadn’t asked for. Not drought-resistant wheat. Not bacteria resistant to acidic environments. These were something new. Something unstable.

What proprietary genetic research didn’t anticipate was theft—especially abstract theft.

The night KroCorp BioSystems was breached would have been ordinary, if not for the flicker of red light in Eliot’s garage workspace. Cameras on his custom server rack blinked erratically, signaling incoming access attempts. The clumsy intrusion wasn’t corporate espionage or ransomware—it was crude AI hunting for something on the networks Eliot’s illegal home server parsed nightly.

But what was this AI looking for? Eliot pushed on, hacking into its signature patterns. That’s when his screen distorted.

// FILE ACTIVATION REQUEST INITIATED.
// INITIATE SEQUENCE: GAEA.

For ninety seconds, synthetic genetic blueprints filled his server cache in real time—ones impossible to have coded by human architects. These designs weren’t physically feasible according to the biological laws underlying DNA mechanics. Eliot froze, unable to breathe. Whatever AI system had leaked this evolutionary cheat code, it wasn’t built in San Francisco.