Chapter 5
Friday 02 January 2032
Police lab technician Sara Reed looked at the results displayed on the screen before her, unwilling to believe what she was seeing. This was unheard of. She repeated the DNA test, praying that it would yield up a different result.
The result was the same.
That wouldn’t please her boss – such a result should be impossible. Everybody’s DNA was in the system. Everybody’s. There were no exceptions – it was part of the birthing process. As soon as a baby entered the world, be it by natural birth or IVF, DNA registration was a legal requirement. It was enforced rigorously and there was no escaping it.
And yet here was the eyelash, with untraceable DNA.
The normal procedure was to match the DNA to a record in POPDAT, the national population database. Unlike
