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“Because she wants to keep you occupied, I assume.” He shrugs when I fail to take offense. “And, I suppose, because it might be informative to see what an ordinary person comes up with.”
“Ordinary.”
He stares at my work so far—eyeballs and hands. “Why would you start with hands and eyes?”
I take a deep breath. The truth is, I haven’t spent much time thinking about the “why.” But I don’t want to admit it. This guy is annoying me. Set aside the tattoos, and he’s like a lot of the other Spiker scientists I’ve been introduced to: arrogant and in love with his own IQ.
So I say, “Because gods want to be seen, and they want to be served.”
“Gods?”
I lift my shoulders in what I hope is a parody of his too cool for school attitude. “Don’t give me the job of creating a human unless you want me to have delusions of God-hood.”
“It’s just a sim,” he says, and his eyes narrow suspiciously.
“Okay, and I’m just a God sim.”
The conversation is not going his way. “If there were a God in this process, it would be the guy who created the RDSS-3 software and married it up to the CGMs.”
“The what?”
?
?The Rapid DNA Selection System and of course the Controlled…” He stops, glares, and actually thumps his chest. “Me. That’s who designed the RDSS and realized its potential.”
“So you’re God.”
He snorts. “Well, you’re not. I designed this system. You’re just using it.”
“Yeah. Like an artist uses paint. Right?” I ask it innocently. “I’ll bet the guy who sold Da Vinci paint thought he was the artist.”
“Mmm,” he says, his eyes hard. “It must be nice to be you, kid. Rich and privileged. Everything handed to you on a silver platter. Must be very nice.”
He turns on his heel and walks away.
What on earth is a CGM? I wonder. Controlled … That’s as far as he got, and then he stopped himself.
I Google it. CGM and the word “controlled.” Plenty of results, none of them very interesting.
“Dark hair,” I say to no one.
Dark hair it is. I tap the screen, I move the jelly beans. But the program informs me that I have made an error. We’re going to need a scalp and an entire head before we can grow hair.
I have no idea how to decide on a head shape. In my entire life I’ve never spent three seconds thinking about head shapes.
I get back on Google and start educating myself.
“Wait a minute,” I mutter aloud. “Is that what she’s up to?” Is my mother trying to entice me into majoring in genetics? Nah, that would be too motherly, not sufficiently subterranean.
Hmm.
It doesn’t matter, anyway. I’m enjoying this. And it’s a good way to take my mind off Aislin and Solo and The Leg.
For the next three hours I barely look up from the screen.
And when at last I do look up, there’s Adam, looking back at me.
He has a very handsome face. The nose is perfect. The cheekbones could belong to a male model. The black hair is lush and lustrous. The mouth … that’s the only thing I’m not entirely happy with. That mouth, those lips, are almost too perfect. There’s something unnerving about a perfectly shaped mouth.
