Chapter Text
A naked man sits inside a giant, cylindrical chamber, clipping away his fingernails and toenails, brushing away excess hair, scrubbing away loose flakes of skin. He stares up at the cold fluorescent light and shivers in the semi-cold.
The man clambers out of the cylinder moments later, presses a button, and watches the flames rise up within the chamber, destroying all evidence of his presence. The ruddy glow of the fire flickers across his face, the flames dancing across his murky brown eyes, across his golden hair. They highlight two bright scars just below his knees, and caress his well-built body.
He gets dressed in a clean blue suit with a striped tie and combs his hair across his head before straightening up, trying his best not to squint at his reflection – it’s a bit blurry; he has myopia, after all. He crosses over to the sink and inserts his colour contacts; they tint his eyes dark cerulean.
Fingerprint pads are next, their satchels filled with blood from a nearby incubator. A pouch of urine sits gartered to the man’s legs, hidden beneath his trousers. More blood sit in phials tucked away inside the man’s suit, along with a handheld duster and several more phials of skin and hair.
When this man shows up at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, the scanners identify him as Sebastian Moran, a successful surgeon with an IQ off the charts, nerves of steel, and longevity predicted to extend well past his hundreds, possibly even forever. He waves hello to the doctor in charge of security screenings, a woman named Molly Hooper. She smiles at him as he vanishes into the lifts.
Little does she know that he is actually not Sebastian Moran.
The body is discovered in the same corridor as the consultation rooms. He is identified as William Murray, director of the hospital. Barely anyone mourns his passing, least of all the teachers. He won’t be missed.
Bill Murray has been killed by a blow to the back of the head by a keyboard from the computer lab on that level. The Yard hoovers the entire room and the adjacent corridor, and begins their investigations. With them is an exceptional man by the name of Sherlock Holmes, called into the investigation for only one purpose.
Sherlock is an Identifier.
This is a world where every human can be boiled down to a simple sequence of four letters. From their moment of birth, their future is set. If they possess traits only available to enhanced – genetically perfect – embryos, there will be no door closed to them. But if they are not so fortunate – if they are a faith birth, a child whose genes are left to chance, not science – they become second-class citizens. In-Valids, relegated to menial labour.
Only the most desperate of the in-Valids would commit the ultimate crime. Only they would steal, steal the genetic identity of another. Only they would refuse to play the hand dealt to them and become borrowed ladders.
Sherlock’s job is to find those borrowed ladders.
He has all of the genes for the job. His eyesight is keen, astute. His mind races faster than a rocket. He is capable of deducing the birth status and occupations of everyone he meets with a single sweep of his eyes. He could have gone on to become something far greater, but he chose to be an Identifier. So the Yard calls on him to come along to high-profile cases, to weed out any borrowed ladders within the suspects. After all, borrowed ladders have unaccounted-for genetic material, and thus pose security risks.
Or at least, that is the cover story. The belief underlying that is that the perpetrator is usually a borrowed ladder. Genoism may be illegal de jure, but in practice that is never the case. Genoism flourishes, and Sherlock Holmes is the sniffer dog of the genoists.
Sherlock Holmes examines Murray’s body with the rest of the Yard from his place next to Detective Inspector Lestrade. As the police begin to queue the hospital workers in the corridor, Sherlock gets to work. He paces up and down the ranks of doctors and nurses, scanning each and every one of them with his eyes.
He pauses when he gets to a man with golden hair and dark blue eyes.
This man is actually named John Watson, an in-Valid conceived by accident in the back of a Ford Anglia in Surrey. His older sister, Harry, is the one born naturally – born enhanced.
Well, the geneticists forgot to remove the alcoholism gene with her… but that’s of no import because right now, John is standing under the mask of Sebastian Moran, staring defiantly back at the keen eyes of Sherlock Holmes.
His heart – diagnosed at birth with cardiac arrhythmia – beats erratically in his chest, and he’s pretty sure Sherlock can hear it. As the Identifier’s eyes trail down his body, John feels the first palpitations of sweat. He’s pretty sure Sherlock can make out the outline of the urine pouch hidden beneath his trousers; pretty sure Sherlock has seen the shadows of the blood packets underneath his thumbs. He’s pretty sure the hospital light is making his contact-shielded eyes shine into Sherlock’s line of sight. He’s seen Sherlock at work before. Just the other week, he had observed on his nightly jog Sherlock accompanying DI Lestrade as he arrested a borrowed ladder in the government. The man, Andrew West, had actually been an in-Valid man named Joe Harrison.
John wants to close his eyes and resign himself to his fate, but suddenly Sherlock breaks eye contact and steps down the line. John exhales, long and slow. Hopefully disaster has been averted, however temporarily.
For almost as long as he remembered John has wanted to be a doctor, a surgeon. The human body interests him; he wants to take apart and fix this strange apparatus; he wants to discover the secrets of human life. It’s only fitting that an imperfect man like himself would want to understand his own imperfections. But unfortunately for him the doors are closed.
John trained in secret. No med school would accept him as an in-Valid, but he did manage to find a retired surgeon sympathetic enough to train him to become one as well. For the first few years of his life outside of home, then, John spent his workdays scrubbing toilets and performing manual labour at wherever his current job was, and his nights studying medicine and practicing his techniques.
But as skilled as he is, the instant any potential employers saw his genetic record it would be a lost cause. Even if he didn’t disclose, there would be other ways to illegally procure his genetic profile – through a drugs test, a fingerprint, a loose fleck of skin or hair. Who wants a surgeon with terrible eyesight, a surgeon with a nervous heart condition, a surgeon with a genetic profile inferior to those of his peers? All he can do as John Watson is scrub the toilets and wipe the glass, and for years he did just that at St. Bart’s. Through the glass windows looking into the operation room, John watched the surgeons at work and wished that he could do the same. After all, there is nothing more disheartening about an unattainable dream than standing right in front of it, separated only by glass and air.
And then John met James Moriarty, the Forger. He was, at that point, too desperate to question Moriarty’s motivations. It didn’t seem important, because with a single introduction Moriarty opened a closed door. The man whose identity John would assume was a man named Sebastian Moran, an Afghanistan war veteran who had been wounded in the shoulder and legs. The leg injury confined him to a wheelchair; the shoulder injury only pained him occasionally. Moran lends John his body, his identity, and under his mask John is thus able to become the best surgeon at Bart’s. After all, he’s already done the training in secret. All he needed was the blood test.
Now all of that is crashing around his ears with a single glance from Sherlock Holmes, and John feels resentment curl in his stomach. He watches Sherlock finish his circuit and stride back to the police, shaking his head.
John closes his eyes.