Orfeo is a novel by American author Richard Powers. Orfeo tells the story of 70-year-old avant-garde composer Peter Els, whose home experiments in biohacking musical patterns into a bacterial human pathogen, Serratia marcescens, have attracted the worried hazmat-suit-level attention of Homeland Security. Els flees in panic, and becomes known as the "Bioterrorist Bach". The novel interleaves Els' attempt at a final redemption with a retrospective telling of his life.