The third volume in F. Paul Wilson's seies of novellas about a time and place very much like our own except that the science of genetics is decades more advanced, wherein the fates of a set of humans and a race of recombinant chimpanzees "upgraded" with human genes are inextricably entwined.
Book Three -- Meerm, opens with a fire in a globulin farm. This is not a quaint old house in a bucolic setting, but a rundown Bronx tenement where sims are infected with various diseases; the survivors become "cows" and are milked of their immune globulins which are then sold to the highest bidders.
Someone wants this particular farm out of business. A masked raiding party adbucts the sims and the humans who run the place, then burns it to the ground.
But one sim escapes. Her name is Meerm and the hunt is on to find her. She doesn't know it, but she carries a secret that can change the world.
Francis Paul Wilson is an author, born in Jersey City, New Jersey. He writes novels and short stories primarily in the science fiction and horror genres. His debut novel was Healer (1976). Wilson is also a part-time practicing family physician. He made his first sales in 1970 to Analog and continued to write science fiction throughout the seventies. In 1981 he ventured into the horror genre with the international bestseller, The Keep, and helped define the field throughout the rest of the decade. In the 1990s he became a true genre hopper, moving from science fiction to horror to medical thrillers and branching into interactive scripting for Disney Interactive and other multimedia companies. He, along with Matthew J. Costello, created and scripted FTL Newsfeed which ran daily on the Sci-Fi Channel from 1992-1996.