SPLICED

In 2066, fresh water is worth more than oil, and the dangerous work goes to the spliced.

A generation ago, seven years of drought broke the old world. Governments fell, coastlines flooded, and a handful of power blocs carved up what was left, fighting over water, energy and the labs that make both. Those labs also make people. The gene-forged are grown with an animal's DNA spliced into their own: a fennec's ears, a bear's shoulders, a caiman's jaw. Each one is built for a single kind of work, and their bodies are registered, licensed and, in some places, legally for sale. On the street, they're called splices.

These are twenty of their stories. A hyena-line sanitation worker in Flooded London has the length of a memorial speech to steal the secret table that decides who gets sent to live below the flood line. A fennec bounty hunter has three buyers bidding for the one engineer who can fix a desert city's water. A snow-leopard climber with nine days of coolant left in her back has to steal a brass die off a sea wall over the Bosphorus, in front of twenty thousand people.

There's a heist on the roof of a moving express train, a dive into the drowned streets of New Buenos Aires, a siege in a stone house high in the Zagros mountains, a title fight in a copper-mining town, and two comedies along the way.

Every job turns out to be something other than what the paperwork said, and every one of them costs something.

Every story first appeared, in an earlier form, as FIELD FICTION on terraconflictus.com, and was revised for this book.

How it was made. Generated with AI tools, under the creative direction of Jesse Alexander. How I work ▸