DARK RECIPE

Prologue

Eighteen months before the outbreaks

The war began at 3:47 a.m. Shanghai time, though no one would recognize it as warfare for another year and a half. Liu Wei sat alone in the sterile glow of PLA Unit 61398, watching lines of code scroll past like strands of DNA. Around him, empty workstations hummed with the patient electronics of a machine that never slept.

On his monitor, FarmLake's architecture spread in meticulous detail: an agricultural automation platform deployed across hundreds of North American facilities. Greenhouses, hydroponic farms, cannabis grows—all trusting their crops to algorithms written by a brilliant engineer who had no idea his life's work was about to be weaponized.

Liu sipped jasmine tea from a porcelain cup his grandmother had given him, a small ritual anchoring the larger one. Once, he'd pretended cybersecurity was defensive. That was before Beijing showed him satellite imagery of American agricultural dominance, before Dr. Chen explained how food systems could be militarized without a soldier ever crossing a border.

He pulled up a file labeled Subject Analysis: Knox Ramsey. Video from three years earlier flickered across the screen—an engineer still convinced his technology would save, not destroy.

Detroit, Michigan — Three years earlier

Knox Ramsey stood before a conference room of investors, presentation remote steady in his hand. Slides behind him showed vertical farms rising like green skyscrapers, hydroponics feeding families in urban food deserts, and data streams promising to revolutionize how humanity fed itself.

"By 2050," Knox said, "we need seventy percent more food using less water, less energy, and fewer chemicals. Traditional agriculture can't scale."

He clicked to a cutaway of a controlled environment agriculture facility. "FarmLake can. Thirty thousand square feet indoors equals three hundred acres outside. No weather risk, no pesticides, ninety-five percent less water."

A skeptical voice: "Energy costs?"

Knox smiled. "LED arrays with spectrum optimization. Red for flowering, blue for vegetative growth, far-red for elongation. Plants don't need the whole sun—just the wavelengths that matter. We cut energy costs by more than half."

He played a time-lapse of lettuce from seed to harvest in eighteen days. "Our recipe management system learns from every plant. Nutrient uptake, growth rate, leaf color—it all feeds the algorithms. What one facility learns, the entire network gains. A breakthrough in Detroit is shared instantly with Denver, Dallas, Durham."

Margaret Chen, a venture capitalist, leaned forward. "Urban food deserts?"

Knox's expression sharpened. "Vacant warehouses can become farms. Detroit, Flint, Grand Rapids—neighborhoods that haven't seen fresh produce in decades. One facility feeds fifteen thousand families. Harvest to table in under twenty-four hours."

Tate, twenty-five in his first suit, sat in the back, watching his father command the room with technical mastery and moral conviction. This wasn't just engineering—it was mission.

An older investor asked, "What keeps agribusiness from copying you?"

Knox clicked to a slide showing an exponential curve. "Data. Every day our system runs, it gets smarter. A competitor starting now is years behind. Network effects are the moat. We're not just automating farms—we're building collective intelligence."

As the meeting wrapped, Tate asked quietly, "You really think this will work?"

Knox looked out at Detroit's skyline. "Son, this isn't about money. It's about changing how humanity feeds itself. We'll grow better food with less. Technology serving people at its finest."

Shanghai — Present

Liu Wei closed the archive. Knox Ramsey had built something beautiful, a system that could genuinely improve human nutrition and food security. Which made it perfect for weaponization.

"Asset insertion commencing," Dr. Chen's voice crackled through the intercom.

Liu's fingers moved with the precision of a pianist. No brute-force malware, no obvious signatures. Instead, they exploited a single assumption buried in Ramsey's architecture: that optimization was always beneficial.

Eight months of synthetic training data had prepared the ground—meticulous biological models hidden inside legitimate research. Now the corrupted algorithms propagated through FarmLake's network, carrying China's intent into American grow facilities where Knox's dreams would become biological nightmares.

The war had begun with a father's love for his son and a genuine desire to feed the world. It would end with that same technology turned against the people it was meant to protect.

Liu set his empty cup aside and watched dawn creep over the Huangpu River. Inside, the screens pulsed green as the infection took root.

They trusted the algorithm.

He would teach it to kill.

Chapter One

Shanghai '97: Operation Harvest Cloud

The operations floor of Unit 61398 hummed like a hidden power plant. Rows of racks glowed with GPU clusters, coolant fans whispering as they chewed through terabytes of stolen American code. A wall-sized dashboard mapped intrusion routes into Midwestern farm servers, each line a worm burrowing deeper into agricultural systems designed to grow lettuce, soy, and cannabis under glass.

Technicians hunched at their consoles, faces washed in screen-light, lines of code streaming like green rain. The intrusion had been months in the making—phased reconnaissance, backdoors seeded in third-party libraries, false credentials scraped from phishing campaigns. Tonight was the launch.

Liu Wei stood at the rail above the pit, arms folded, surveying his engineers with calm authority. To him, this wasn't risk. It was inevitability. The Americans believed they had built fortresses of code. What Liu knew—what tonight would prove—was that those fortresses had gates built by men like him, and gates could be opened.

He remembered Iowa winters from his graduate years—walking through knee-deep snow to reach the engineering labs at Iowa State, where Professor Randall had stayed late to help him debug photonics experiments. You've got the brains for this, Wei, the old man had said, eyes warm with genuine encouragement. But here you'll always have to work twice as hard to be taken half as seriously.

The kindness had stung worse than cruelty. Liu had learned what it meant to be brilliant but never belong—to sit in job interviews where his accent was dissected for political loyalties, where perfectly qualified positions went to candidates with "better cultural fit." The racism he expected; what hollowed him was the politeness, the way they smiled while they excluded him from the inner circles where real decisions were made.

But he had learned their systems from the inside. Every protocol, every trust relationship, every lazy assumption about American superiority. Now, fifteen years later, that knowledge was coming home to serve a different master.

Liu pulled up infiltration status on his tablet. Tonight's operation would demonstrate that American agricultural automation—the pride of feeding the world through technology—could be turned into a weapon against its own people. The irony was almost artistic.

At a side console, Dr. Chen could barely contain himself. His eyes darted as packet traces scrolled past, each confirmation of entry bringing him closer to the moment his toxic metabolic recipe would run live.

"We've tuned the stress-cycle algorithms for cannabinoid pathways," Chen said, voice vibrating with eagerness. "Once the profiles update, their own extraction labs will weaponize the compounds for us. This is more elegant than any traditional contaminant—it looks like nature did it."

Captain Zhang, older, more deliberate, didn't share his thrill. "Your eagerness is dangerous. Attribution is what matters. If the outbreak can be tied to us before the summit—"

Chen bristled. "Then history will still record who proved it possible. Do you think the Americans hesitate when they poison fields with sanctions?"

"Enough," Liu cut in, a small, sharp smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. "That is your department, Captain. My work ensures they will never see fingerprints. FarmLake will deliver the recipe, but it will look like the system taught itself the flaw."

Zhang's jaw tightened. He said nothing further, though the crease in his brow deepened.

The Technical Foundation

Liu Wei shifted to a secondary screen, where FarmLake's architecture unfolded in clean layers of code and diagrams. It wasn't complexity that made it dangerous—it was trust. Americans had designed the system to assume goodwill: every update signed, every profile validated, every algorithm treated as progress.

That naïveté was the opening.

"Show me the pathway corruption," Liu said.

Dr. Chen's workstation came alive with molecular diagrams, bright as stained glass in motion. Benzene rings spun, bonds stretched and reformed, pathways lit in pulses of red and green. "These aren't foreign compounds," Chen explained, fingers flicking across the keys. "Trace cannabinoids, trace terpenes. We're not adding. We're persuading. The plant already knows how to make poison—we're teaching it to prefer that outcome."

On the chromatography display, peaks rose like jagged mountains. "Tetrahydrocannabinolic acid synthesis up three-hundred-forty percent under stress cycling. Terpenes diverted toward analogs stable through extraction. Consumers will never taste the difference."

Liu leaned closer, studying the overlay. He remembered Iowa, the endless debates about ethics and optimization, professors lecturing about agriculture as the noblest of sciences. What Americans forgot was that nobility could be inverted. "And detection?"

"That's the beauty," Chen said, almost gleeful. "Cannabis labs don't screen for natural compounds in toxic concentrations. Regulation becomes camouflage."

Captain Zhang shifted at his post, the only one in the room who didn't share Chen's satisfaction. His voice cut low. "Elegant, yes. But fragile. If a single toxicology lab broadens its panels—"

"They won't," Chen snapped. "Even their compliance culture works in our favor. They cling to checklists."

Liu held up a hand, silencing them both. "No fingerprints. That is the mission." His tone left no room for debate.

For a moment the hum of servers filled the silence. Green lights blinked across dashboards, each one a grow facility across the American Midwest unknowingly preparing to become a test site.

Zhang exhaled through his nose, still unconvinced. "It is not just plants you corrupt," he said quietly. "It is responsibility. When their engineer sees this, he will blame himself."

Liu's mouth curved at the edge. That was the point.

The chapter continues with detailed technical descriptions of the neural network manipulation, the code injection architecture, Liu Wei's backstory at Iowa State, and the broader strategic implications of the cyber operation. The full chapter runs approximately 5,000 words, building the technical and psychological foundation for the agricultural warfare that will unfold throughout the novel.

Want to read more? The complete novel will be available in 2025. Sign up for updates at knoxramseythrillers@gmail.com.