The Spark: White Noise

It should have stopped.It didn't.Charlotte Bennett came to Cambridge wanting to understand why her sister lost a pregnancy. Barnaby Whitcombe wanted a problem difficult enough to fight with. Edward Hale trusted evidence because evidence, unlike people, could be checked.None of them expected an undergraduate research project to lead anywhere important.Then an old embryo record refuses to behave.Buried inside years of developmental data is a sequence marked Fourteen-B - a piece of research that appears to have been removed from the archive, copied, kept alive for months, and then hidden again.What remains is worse than an empty file.Forty-three seconds of damaged footage.A developmental process has failed. An intervention follows.And something begins to organise itself again.Professor Meera Anand knows enough to stop her students calling it recovery. She also knows enough to understand why somebody might have wanted the experiment forgotten.The records around Fourteen-B are a mess of missing consent, altered status, old signatures and explanations that no longer fit together. A researcher connected to the archive vanished eleven years earlier.Then somebody uses a dead university account to retrieve Fourteen-B before Charlotte, Barnaby and Edward even know it exists.After that, the questions stop being academic.Their rooms are searched. Edward's backup disappears. Barnaby's notes are taken.Someone enters his parents' house while they are asleep.Nothing obvious links the break-ins. Nothing valuable enough to explain them is stolen.Only the research.And for the first time, Charlotte begins to understand that the most frightening part of Fourteen-B may not be what happened in those forty-three seconds.It may be that someone understood what they were looking at years ago.WHITE NOISE is the first part of THE SPARK, a dark scientific thriller about three students who begin by asking why life fails - and stumble across evidence that biology may already know how to find another way.