Pandora's Sisters

'You want to know who gave you your immortal soul? You want a personal relationship with God? Well, we found God. We're all up in God. We've got God's private number. And so do you: imprinted a hundred trillion times – once in every living cell in your big dripping corpus.' So says a woman with a pole-axe pressed to her neck, and the solution to the entire mystery of human existence clutched between her palms. Two weeks earlier, she was just your average British expat with a PhD, working in Silicon Valley as an artificial intelligence designer for ultra-violent video games, spending the evenings hanging out with her pet chimp – and wondering how something as weird as human consciousness could have evolved through mere Darwinian selection. But when a mysterious and disconcertingly attractive behavioural geneticist, and a hotshot cryptologist with strange religious affiliations, stroll into her life, she begins looking for answers in the backwaters of the human genome – the 97% written off by scientists as ; junk DNA;. And soon after, when men in very strange hats come looking for her hard drive, shooting first and never really asking any questions, she finds herself on the run – pursued by multiple squads of heavily-armed religious zealots, the Feds, and worse. All seek to obtain, or to suppress forever, the key to the revelatory stretch of DNA known as The Pandora Sequence . The outcome of their race to control this explosive secret will forever alter how humanity regards itself - that is, if anyone lives long enough to tell the tale.