Accidental Creatures runs on the razor's edge of scientific innovation with a harrowing story of survival in a future world not far removed from our own. Helix has always been...different. After a lifetime of isolation, she travels deep into Vattown, where the vat divers live...and die. The divers are a motley bunch, mutated by repeated exposure to the growth medium they swim through to harvest biopolymers for the biotech megacorporation GeneSys. But unlike the divers, who despise the company they blame for their mutations and who would do anything to escape their miserable, meaningless lives, Helix finds herself inexorably drawn to the noxious growth medium. She becomes a diver, and when she ventures into the sea of toxic chemicals, she feels an irresistible urge to remove her protective suit. Helix is about to discover the dark secrets that lie deep inside her DNA, secrets that may just bring GeneSys to its knees, secrets that Hector Martin, the brilliant GeneSys scientist who has been her protector, her foster parent, her lifeline to her heritage, would do anything to conceal. Hector, whose breakthrough research in biotechnology has brought million in profits to GeneSys, has risked his reputation and all of the company on a single experiment - a gamble so enormous that its failure would mean ruin for them all. But soon Helix and Hector will find themselves thrust into a disaster already in motion - for if the experiment succeeds, it may be the end not only of GeneSys but of everything they've ever known...
- ISBN10 0312875606
- ISBN13 9780312875602
- Publish Date 6 October 2000 (first published 15 May 1998)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 17 June 2021
- Publish Country US
- Imprint St Martin's Press
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 288
- Language English