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Aislin thinks for a moment. “Can you make him kind?”
My phone chimes. My mother can see me in her office in an hour.
“An hour,” I report wearily, without explanation.
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It’s so weird. After days of longing for her company, now I want Aislin to go away.
If she senses it, she doesn’t let on. “Can I watch?” she asks, pointing to Adam.
I pull an extra chair over. She sits down. We’re both glum.
I show her. “See these gumdrops? What it’s saying is, basically, this is a set of genes that in some other guy made him very smart. But here’s a different set. And here’s another set. And each of these sets, they think, made this or that person smart.”
“How come they don’t know?” she asks.
“Because no one quite knows. There’s no single ‘smart’ button. It’s like smart in different flavors. Smart vanilla, smart chocolate, smart raspberry.”
Aislin stares intently. “You mean, they decoded some real person’s DNA and figured out what made them smart? Who were the people?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. The program doesn’t identify them.”
“So, like Einstein or Stephen Hawking?”
“Maybe.”
“Well … that’s not cool, is it? Making people who are like other people?”
“It’s just a simulation,” I say. “They couldn’t do it in reality.”
She looks at me. Her eyes are shrewd. I look away.
“Just because they did something to me…,” I say. I don’t know the second part of the sentence.
“Are you going to ask your mom?”
“About the nine thousand?”
“About being a—what did Solo call it?—a mod.”
I hold out The Limb Formerly Known As The Leg. “Let’s see. I’m walking. My bandages have disappeared. I’m guessing it will come up.”
We sit in silence for a while as I idly pick through brain configurations. Gradually, the tension between us bleeds away. I don’t want to be distant from Aislin.
I need her. She’s all I’ve got. And she needs me, even if she doesn’t always realize it.
“We could do muscles first, then brains,” Aislin suggests.
“It’s not all genetic, you know: He would have to work out.”
“Make him right and I’ll work him out,” she says with a trace of her confident leer.
“Without a brain?”
She sighs. “They’re better off without one.”
– 21 –
