Three desperate teenagers in 2030 use their talents to run a black market operation for genetic alteration patches, only to discover an unexpected backlash of their product leading to the outbreak of mysterious symptoms

SYNOPSIS:

In the 2030s, genetic splicing becomes more commonplace, and there are large corporations that control the process. No such help has been mass produced or made available to the general public — only those who can afford hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth in medical bills can participate in the highly normalized privilege. But, the technology has made it a long way, with the use of CRISPR Cas9 protein synthesis to splice specific genes with masterful precision in each operation. In other words, people get what they pay for: changing eye color, genetic factors in bone structure, or even the rate at which cells generate is possible. Still, this entire branch of technology receives strong resistance both from the highly religious communities at large and significant regulation from many branches of government. Such is the price of progress.

The world also has significantly changed since the past decade's disease outbreaks and the resulting pandemonium in several nations, resulting in a militarized task force of the CDC in America, among other such agencies. When disease threatens the population, martial law begins again to implement a swift and skillful extraction of the cause to avoid decimation of the population. Thanks to the zoonotic spillover of synthetic mutagens, the ability for genetically altered life forms to change drastically — including that of microbes — is almost too well-adapted. It's clear that the creation of such genetic byproducts could have very dire consequences.

The world of Genome also has one more caveat: with the advent of stricter governments and more powerful technologies came also the rise of religious sects dedicated to the shunning of such developments. Some of the resulting sects have risen to live in neighboring towns in large

numbers, causing the balance between world advancement and cultish dark-age adherence to shift greatly over the decade. The truth is, there are organizations both big and small which control the thought leaders of the nation: some are for the advancement of humanity, and some think it has gone too far. Genome is set in Los Angeles, California, where the rise of both technology and cultish weirdness has risen significantly since the outbreak of 2020. The world is diverse, but the division of class is more evident here now than ever — with those who suffer at the lower classes dealing with mounting costs of medical care, while the wealthy simply taking care of all of their medical concerns on the fly. The anti-disease regime is not a pro-health regime, that much is made clear by the disparate conditions of the wealthy and the unfortunate.