Read Senescence (Jezebel's Ladder Book 5) for Free Online Page B

the
man’s mother to honor him. She had a hard time beatifying a man who married one
woman and impregnated another the same year. Men, as a rule, were scum. With
her Empathic abilities, she always knew what they wanted—sex, money, power, and
sometimes a little punishment. Under her mother’s skilled tutelage, she learned
to provide the promise of each to lure men to do whatever she wanted.
    “How did you find out about the
project?” Kaguya asked, sitting beside her, head down and hands folded.
    “Please. I do genetic engineering
for a living. I have gray eyes, and yours are brown. I dye my hair black and
wear colored contact lenses to fit into Japanese culture better. You’re a
world-renowned musician, while I’m practically tone deaf. I didn’t get your
Out-of-Body skills either. When I confronted Nana, she admitted that I was a
result of Grandfather’s earlier experiments to give me all the advantages he
could offer. Unfortunately, tinkering with one trait can disable another.”
    Her mother remained silent, so
Laura kept rambling. “Just like our intelligence-enhancement product line. IQ
is the most fragile and nebulous manipulation we have. If I encourage one
attribute, it might boost a child fifty points but increase neurological
disorders by 30 percent.”
    “You’ll figure it out.”
    Laura shook her head. Her first
patent at age fourteen had been deduced using her Pattern Recognition talent.
Each trait after that had been more difficult to spot in the genome forest
until her mother told her the secret. I get smarter around other people .
Other Quantum Computers could borrow from Actives to increase brain power, but
Laura could use anyone. In a room full of medical geniuses, genetic solutions
would leap off the page.
    “With several weeks of work, I
might be able to graft one of these strings onto the current ‘plus twenty IQ’
bundle and safely gain another three to five points. That’s if Grandfather
stops interrupting me to consult on trials.” In a room full of top litigators,
her talent could find the winning strategy every time.
    “You shouldn’t be a lawyer,” Kaguya
said, agitated. “They might show you accounting data or other numerical
patterns.” Even simple math could send an unanchored Quantum Computer talent
into a trance of no return. Laura had no one to anchor her. If she went into
navel-staring mode, so would her mother.
    Laura tried to reassure her.
“Relax. I’m an empath, so they won’t let me ask questions during a trial. I
have to sit behind a screen so participants can’t see me. I help select the
jury and tell when witnesses are lying. I also advise the counsel on the
science of genetic engineering. No math.”
    “Do they know who you are?”
    “Definitely.” People in the
judicial system called Laura by the middle name Nana had given her—Salome, the
woman who seduced a king to have John the Baptist beheaded for telling the
truth. She had perverted justice and ruined men’s lives, but she did it for
family. Her grandparents had shaped her to be a corporate weapon. “We rarely
lose when I assist, but I always make Grandfather pay a steep price when he
takes me away from you and my work.”
    “Why don’t you like my father?”
    “He’s a bottomless cesspool of
greed,” Laura said, knowing her words were probably being recorded. “When I was
younger, I considered killing him, but Nana told me she would eliminate me if I
came within a meter of him.” For a while, I played with tailored diseases
spread by sneezes that would only kill old Japanese men, but he might have infected
someone else before he croaked. “She confessed to having several more
embryos just like me. If I misbehaved, I could always be replaced.”
    Kaguya hugged her and apologized.
“No child should be treated like that.”
    “Please,” Laura said, stoking her
mother’s silken hair. “Anyone on this planet would switch places with me in a
second. I’m in the top millionth of the