When people hear the word "conspiracy," they picture robed figures in candlelit chambers. Secret handshakes. Hidden symbols carved into monuments. The stuff of thrillers and late-night television.
The real conspiracies are duller. And worse.
They happen in conference rooms. They're documented in internal memos. They involve people in suits making calculated decisions about how many deaths are acceptable before the cost of silence exceeds the cost of disclosure.
I know this because I researched them. And what I found became the backbone of GenVault—the corporation at the center of The Genesis Protocol.
Tobacco: Fifty Years of Knowing
In 1953, scientists at the Sloan-Kettering Institute painted cigarette tar on the backs of mice. The mice developed tumors.
The tobacco industry's response was not to reformulate their product, warn their customers, or fund treatment research. Their response was to hire a public relations firm.
Hill & Knowlton created the Tobacco Industry Research Committee—a body whose name suggested scientific inquiry and whose purpose was to manufacture doubt. For the next fifty years, the tobacco industry pursued a strategy that one internal document summarized with devastating clarity: "Doubt is our product."
They knew. Not suspected—knew. Their own scientists had confirmed the link between smoking and cancer. Internal documents from Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, and British American Tobacco show executives discussing lung cancer risks, addiction mechanisms, and mortality projections as early as the 1950s.
They buried it. Not by destroying the evidence—the memos survived, filed carefully in corporate archives—but by flooding the public sphere with manufactured uncertainty. Fund a counter-study. Quote a dissenting scientist. Demand impossible standards of proof while people died at rates their own actuaries had predicted.
The result: approximately 100 million deaths in the twentieth century. More than both World Wars combined. Not from ignorance. From strategy.
Leaded Gasoline: The Longest Coverup
In 1921, General Motors needed an anti-knock additive for gasoline. Their chemist, Thomas Midgley Jr., found one: tetraethyl lead.
They knew it was poison. Lead toxicity had been documented since the Roman Empire. Workers at the manufacturing plants were dying—hallucinating, convulsing, being carried out in straitjackets. The workers called the production facility "the House of Butterflies" because victims grabbed at invisible insects before they collapsed.
GM, Standard Oil, and DuPont formed a joint venture called the Ethyl Corporation and sold leaded gasoline for the next fifty years. When public health scientists raised concerns, the Ethyl Corporation hired their own researchers, controlled the narrative, and argued that the levels of lead in gasoline were safe.
They weren't safe. Lead exposure causes irreversible neurological damage, particularly in children. By the time leaded gasoline was finally banned in the United States in 1996, it had poisoned an estimated generation of Americans. Studies now suggest that childhood lead exposure from gasoline was responsible for a measurable decline in national IQ scores—and a corresponding rise in violent crime rates that peaked in the early 1990s and declined as the leaded-gasoline generation aged out.
The entire arc of American crime statistics in the twentieth century may have been shaped by a corporate decision made in 1921.
Climate: The Model That Was Right
In 1982, Exxon's own scientists produced internal climate models predicting that continued fossil fuel combustion would raise global temperatures by 1 to 2 degrees Celsius by 2020.
They were right. Almost exactly right. Their models tracked observed warming with remarkable precision—better, in some cases, than NASA's contemporary projections.
Exxon's response was to fund organizations that cast doubt on climate science. Between 1998 and 2014, ExxonMobil spent over $30 million funding climate denial think tanks and organizations. Their public statements contradicted their internal research. Their lobbyists argued against regulations their own scientists said were necessary.
This isn't speculation. It's documented. In 2015, investigative journalists at InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times independently obtained Exxon's internal documents. The gap between what the company knew and what it told the public wasn't a matter of interpretation. It was a matter of filing cabinets.
The Pattern
Tobacco. Lead. Climate. Opioids—where Purdue Pharma's internal documents showed they knew OxyContin was far more addictive than they told doctors. PFAS—where DuPont's own toxicologists documented health effects in workers and nearby communities for decades before public disclosure.
The pattern is always the same:
- Discovery: Internal scientists identify a serious risk.
- Suppression: Leadership decides the risk is less expensive than disclosure.
- Manufactured doubt: External PR campaigns create the appearance of scientific uncertainty.
- Delayed accountability: Decades pass. People die. Eventually the documents surface.
- Insufficient consequence: Fines are paid. Settlements reached. The corporation survives. The dead stay dead.
This pattern doesn't require evil people. That's the part that keeps me up at night. It requires ordinary people inside systems that reward short-term results and punish inconvenient truths. A scientist who flags a problem gets reassigned. A manager who raises costs gets replaced. An executive who tanks stock price gets fired.
The system selects for silence. And silence kills at scale.
Why This Matters for Fiction
When I created GenVault for The Genesis Protocol, I didn't need to invent a new kind of villain. I just needed to extend a pattern that already exists.
GenVault isn't a shadowy cabal of cartoon villains plotting world domination. It's a corporation. It has a board of directors, quarterly earnings reports, and an HR department. Its researchers believe they're doing important work—mapping human genetic diversity, studying disease resistance, advancing the frontier of genomic medicine.
Some of them are.
The question the book asks isn't "could a corporation develop something dangerous?" That's not fiction. That's history. The question is: what happens when the gap between what an institution knows and what it discloses becomes civilizational?
Tobacco killed a hundred million people over fifty years, and the evidence was in their filing cabinets the entire time. What happens when the stakes aren't lung cancer but targeted genetic deployment? When the internal memo doesn't say "acceptable mortality rate" but "population optimization through targeted genetic selection"?
The answer is GenVault. And the most frightening thing about GenVault is that it doesn't require a single element that hasn't already happened in the real world. It just requires scale.
The People Who Notice
There's a second pattern in these stories that interests me more than the cover-ups themselves.
In every case—tobacco, lead, climate, opioids—there were people inside who knew. Scientists who ran the studies. Researchers who wrote the memos. Employees who saw the data and understood what it meant.
Most of them stayed quiet. Not because they were bad people, but because the system made speaking up expensive and staying quiet easy.
But some of them didn't stay quiet.
Jeffrey Wigand blew the whistle on Brown & Williamson's manipulation of nicotine levels. Clair Patterson spent decades fighting the lead industry after his research on ocean sediments revealed the true scale of atmospheric lead contamination. Climate scientists at Exxon tried to publish their findings through official channels.
These people paid for it. They lost jobs, faced lawsuits, endured smear campaigns. The system punished them for noticing.
This is the dynamic at the heart of The Genesis Protocol. Sarah Chen, the protagonist, is a pattern recognition specialist. She's trained to notice things. And once she notices what GenVault is doing, she can't un-notice it. The rest of the book is about what it costs to act on what you see—and what it costs to pretend you didn't.
The corporations that knew chose pretending. The question the book asks is whether the people who work for them will make the same choice.