A grainy satellite image loaded. It showed a small, ramshackle dock on the Paraguay River. Tied to the dock was a boat. And on the boat, unmistakable even in pixelated low-res, was a duck. A massive, unnervingly still wooden duck, its paint peeling, one eye a dark, empty socket.
The line went dead.
Aris leaned closer. The duck’s beak was slightly open. And inside the beak, barely visible, was a test tube wrapped in lead foil. quackprep.rg
Suddenly, the duck’s empty eye socket flickered. A red light bloomed from within. The image sharpened, and Aris felt his blood run cold. The duck wasn't just a marker—it was a collector . A rudimentary, low-tech drone built from scrap wood and stolen servos. Someone had programmed it to sit, motionless, for weeks at a time, sampling the river water every twelve hours.
The "RG" stood for "Redacted Group."
Somewhere in the dark, a very patient, very silent armada of decoys waited. And in a control room far from the river, a hand hovered over a single key labeled
And the last sample, taken at 2:00 AM that day, had flagged positive for a prion variant he’d only seen in theoretical models. A variant that could fold proteins in reverse—unfolding them into a state of pre-life, essentially erasing a cell’s biological memory. A grainy satellite image loaded
He clicked the file.