Distress

I had no answer to that; it was exactly what would happen. I said, "You're the one who just declared that revival is obscene. You want to see it banned? This can only help your cause. It's as good a dose of frankenscience as any dumb luddite could ask for."

Gina looked stung; I couldn't tell if she was faking. She said, "I have a doctorate in materials science, you peasant, so don't call me—"

"I didn't. You know what I meant,"

"If anyone's a luddite, you are. This entire project is beginning to sound like Edenite propaganda, 'Junk DNA!' What's the subtitle? 'The biotechnology nightmare?'"

"Close."

"What I don't understand is why you couldn't include a single positive story—"

I said wearily, "We've been over this before. It's not up to me. The networks won't buy anything unless there's an angle. In this case, the downside of biotech. That's the choice of subject, that's what it's about. It isn't meant to be 'balanced.' Balance confuses the marketing people; you can't hype something which contains two contradictory messages. But at least it might counteract all the hymns of praise to genetic engineering everyone's been gagging on lately. And—taken along with everything else—it does show the whole picture. By adding what they've all left out."

Gina was unmoved. "That's disingenuous. 'Our sensationalism balances their sensationalism.' It doesn't. It just polarizes opinion. What's wrong with a calm, reasoned presentation of the facts—which might help to get revival and a few other blatant atrocities outlawed—without playing up all the old transgressions-against-nature bullshit? Showing the excesses, but putting them in context? You should be helping people make informed decisions about what they demand from the regulatory authorities. Junk DNA sounds more likely to inspire them to go out and bomb the nearest biotech lab."

I curled into the armchair and rested my head on my knees. "All right, I give up. Everything you say is true. I'm a manipulative, rabble-rousing, anti-science hack."

She frowned. "Anti-science? I wouldn't go that far. You're venal, lazy, and irresponsible—but you're not quite Ignorance Cult material yet."

"Your faith is touching."

She prodded me with a cushion, affectionately I think, then went back to the kitchen. I covered my face with my hands, and the room started tipping.

I should have been jubilant. It was over. The revival was the very last piece of filming for Junk DNA. No more paranoid billionaires mutating into self-contained walking ecologies. No more insurance firms designing personal actuarial implants to monitor diet, exercise, and exposure to pollutants—for the sake of endlessly recomputing the wearer's most probable date and cause of death. No more Voluntary Autists lobbying for the right to have their brains surgically mutilated so they could finally attain the condition nature hadn't quite granted them…

I went into my workroom and unreeled the fiber-optic umbilical from the side of the editing console. I lifted my shirt and cleared some unnamable debris from my navel, then extracted the skin-colored plug with my fingernails, exposing a short stainless-steel tube ending in an opalescent laser port.

Gina called out from the kitchen, "Are you performing unnatural acts with that machine again?"

I was too tired to think of an intelligent retort. I snapped the connectors together, and the console lit up.

The screen showed everything as it came through. Eight hours' worth in sixty seconds—most of it an incomprehensible blur, but I averted my gaze anyway. I didn't much feel like reliving any of the night's events, however briefly.

Gina wandered in with a plate of toast; I hit a button to conceal the image. She said, "I still want to know how you can have four thousand terabytes of RAM in your peritoneal cavity, and no visible scars."

I glanced down at the connector socket. "What do you call that? Invisible?"

"Too small. Eight-hundred-terabyte chips are thirty millimeters wide. I looked up the manufacturer's catalogue."

"Sherlock strikes again. Or should I say Shylock? Scars can be erased, can't they?"

"Yes. But… would you have obliterated the marks of your most important rite of passage?"

"Spare me the anthropological babble."

"I do have an alternative theory."

"I'm not confirming or denying anything."

She let her gaze slide over the blank console screen, up to the Repo Man poster on the wall behind it: a motorcycle cop standing behind a dilapidated car. She caught my eye, then gestured at the caption: DON'T LOOK IN THE TRUNK!

"Why not? What's in the trunk!"

I laughed. "You can't bear it anymore, can you? You're just going to have to watch the movie."

"Yeah, yeah."

The console beeped. I unhooked. Gina looked at me curiously; the expression on my face must have betrayed something. "So is it like sex, or more like defecation?"

"It's more like Confession."

"You've never been to Confession in your life."