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something called a “Show Me” button. The screen on the wall shows two enormous irises. Just irises. No whites, nothing else.
“Yuck!” Aislin exclaims. “What the hell are those?”
“Irises. I gave him hazel eyes.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never really known anyone with eyes that color. Maybe that’s why.”
It’s fascinating, the way they’ve designed this software. There are a bunch of genes that deal with the simple matter of eye color. You drop them into a sort of grid. The grid—which in this version has been designed to look like a very long string of beads—has a lot of the “beads” already filled in. That leaves plenty of blank spots for me to pick and choose.
I can increase or decrease the magnification. At life-size they’re invisibly small. Blown up, they’re six feet in diameter. Zoom in all the way and you get into the nano scale, where they don’t have color at all. They’re just bumpy gray cells.
Aislin puts her boots up on the desk and leans back, hands laced behind her head. “This is creeping me out. Do something un-gross.”
I add very white whites to the eyes. “Okay, now the capillaries,” I say, scanning my choice menu.
“Let’s do abs instead.”
“I told you: It won’t let me. Besides, this is the fun part. All the details.”
“Uh-huh.” Aislin is unconvinced.
I choose small capillaries and Aislin nods her approval. “Don’t want him getting bloodshot too easily.”
I stare at my creation. “I’m not sure about the iris color. It’s kind of muddy.”
“What’s your fantasy eye color?”
“I don’t have one,” I say, because I’m pretty sure I don’t.
Aislin scowls.
I change the irises to blue.
“More,” Aislin says.
Tap, tap. They’re an intense, mountain-lake-at-twilight blue.
“Bingo.”
“Next up,” I say, “visual acuity. Should I make him just a little near-sighted?”
“No,” Aislin says firmly. “No glasses. No contacts, even.”
I pause to consider. Everyone should have flaws. Isn’t that what makes us interesting? Isn’t that what keeps us from just being carbon copies of each other?
A slight adjustment in the shape of the eye and the lens, and he’s wearing Coke-bottle lenses the rest of his simulated life.
“Okay, you win.” I opt for perfect vision. I can always change my mind later.
“How old are these eyes, anyway?” Aislin asks.
“Part of the fun of the simulator is that I can choose the age of my person. I can make him a baby. Or I can age him all the way up until he’s as old as one of those sparkly vampires.” I grin. “But that would be creepy.”
Somehow making a baby seems way too close to reality. Who wants a baby? Later, okay, in ten years, or twenty. Or thirty. Not now. The safe answer—at least this is what I tell myself—is to make him about my age.
“Um, I don’t know how old he should be. Maybe seventeen?”
