Chapter 24 - Chapter Twenty Four

The corpos had been running tests ever since the first reports of green shoots outside Night City started showing up on the feeds, and now with animals moving freely through the Badlands and plants sprouting in soil that had been dead for decades, the labs were busier than ever, their analysts tearing apart samples and running comparisons against Biotechnica's catalog, because if anyone had played a hand in it, that was the obvious suspect, yet the first thing their reports confirmed was that Biotechnica hadn't touched any of it, the genetic markers didn't match any of their archives, patents, or proprietary strains, leaving the question of who had done this wide open, and the longer they looked the less sense it made. The animals tested clean, nothing exotic in their sequencing, just baseline stock that hadn't existed in California for decades, rabbits, deer, squirrels, cats, dogs, fish, all exactly as the records said they should be, only healthier, more resilient, their immune systems robust and their overall biology tuned like they'd been bred from the strongest of the strong, the kind of stock that doesn't just appear on its own, and the plants were even stranger: stalks that sprouted in days rather than weeks, roots that required a fraction of the water normal species did, leaves that could metabolize light from even poor conditions, and fruits and vegetables that came in larger, juicier, and richer in nutrients than anything Corpo agriculture had managed to patent in the last half century, so when the testers wrote their summaries they all used the same phrase—"genetically optimized"—because there was no other explanation, but the trouble was none of them could prove who had done it, and without a Corpo tag the work might as well have been alien to the system they lived in. Meetings went long into the night in high-rise towers, executives staring at screens with data rolling in while managers asked the same questions again and again: who would pour the money and research into this, for what purpose, and how had they managed to deploy it so quickly and so broadly without a single Corpo surveillance satellite, drone, or spy catching the act, because that was impossible, nothing in the modern world happened without someone selling a record of it. Some executives suggested it might be a hidden Biotechnica black project that slipped under even their own internal checks, others blamed an international competitor, maybe Arasaka or Kang-Tao making a move to destabilize the American West, but nobody had proof, and while the Corpo debate kept circling the lab techs and street-level operatives kept feeding back the same truth: the people were eating it. Fresh fruit and vegetables, bigger and sweeter than anything sold in corporate stores, meat from rabbits and deer that cost nothing but a bullet or a trap, fish pulled from clean streams that tasted better than any protein paste, and no one was going to stop just because a Corpo claimed it was unsafe, because for the first time in living memory the poorest of Night City weren't hungry, and telling them to give it up would be laughed out of the room. Focus groups proved the point, corpo shills standing in market stalls trying to push the old food products against new wild-sourced meals, and the data was brutal: ninety percent of people preferred the "wild" option, even when told it might be dangerous, because taste, freshness, and the sheer fact it was free outweighed any corporate scare line. Executives knew the truth—any press release warning of "genetic modification dangers" would backfire, the people wouldn't believe it, not when their bellies were full and the change was visible in their own children looking healthier week after week, so instead the corpos turned their attention to finding the source, debating infiltration teams, satellite sweeps, and the possibility of sleeper agents, all while keeping the results under lock and key, because admitting the truth out loud—that someone had out-engineered Biotechnica and given the results away for free—was more dangerous to their power than any bullet or bomb could be.