Page 63 of CHOICE Lover
CONGRATULATIONS! YOU’VE WON MSP’S FAVORITE COSMETIC TREATMENT!
The preview shows a grinning man with a full face of freckles. There are no other messages. Her heart sinks.
It’s been five days since she posted the introduction, and crickets. She copies the text and posts it again, like she did yesterday, and theday before, and the day before. Maybe it just hasn’t found the right viewers yet. But not a single person has submitted a question or even liked her post. It’s that feeling again—the sting of every agent’sNothat made her question if she was even meant to be a writer. She should just give up. Take down her posts. Delete her account. Maybe she and her ideas don’t have a place in this world.
18 – Cool! A Dead Body!
Res6
November 7, 2390.
Res6 and Lextr watch as robotic articulated arms lower his most recent Jerme failure into the Biomass Recovery Vat. The benefit of Electra being a late sleeper is that he and Tommy can get the failed trials out of his bedroom without Electra noticing, like they did that morning.
Lextr insisted he watch the sixth trial using synthetic DNA get recycled to convince him to move onto the organic samples. Samples that are still safely stored in the BioBank. He almost wept when Lextr told him.
“How many more partially formed copies of your brother are we going to recycle before we start the real trials?” Lextr asks as the trial’s arm floats by along with deteriorating parts of several other units.
Seeing a mirrorimage of your own face—though not fully formed—liquefy as it hits the reabsorption coagulum really ups the stakes. He swallows, the lump in his throat painful. “You’ve made your point.”
Lextr follows him out of the viewing area past a group of schoolchildren on a field trip. Giving the kids a chance to see science in action is one of the many things that sets CHOICElover apart from the rest. As a lab tech guides them onto the viewing platform, a child squeals, “Cool! A dead body!”
He chuckles as they enter the elevator. Jerme would have probably hung around and pointed out all the gross things for the kids to observe. Lextr’s right. It’s time to get serious.
“Where are we going, sir?” Lextr asks, almost having to skip to keep up with Res6’s long strides.
All the emotions—the anticipation, the fear, the self-doubt—threaten to erupt out of him, but he needs to stay calm if he’s going to do this. There’s no room for emotional outbursts in science. If he isn’t performing at his peak, he could accidentally corrupt one of the ten available samples. He strides determinedly ahead. “The BioBank.”
Half an hour later, they have the samples and are in the designated Neuronic Gene Infusion lab, sterilized and suited up in their biohazard kits. Lextr watches over his shoulder as he meticulously psion-splices nucleic imprints using the robotic PSI-splicer to edit them into RNA collected from his brother’s first organic sample.
Splicing all the pieces back together is the tricky part. Thank Zorg for the containment suit; the sweat dripping off him in rivulets might contaminate the delicate sample. After several nerve-racking hours, he has a stable protein. With deceptively steady hands, he places it into the tissue replicator with Jerme’s original sample, a nuclease enzyme binder, and the raw organic building block material. It takesanother hour in the accelerated neural mesh incubator for the mixture to form a usable coagulum. Using synthesized DNA like they do for customer orders is so much more straightforward.
He siphons samples from different sections of the specimen, dropping them into the synth-gel oscillator. Once the bio-plates are ready, he runs the BioLume Gene Scanner over them to test their viability.
Lextr, who’s been tracking right alongside him, studies the readings on the screen. “Looks viable.”
He grins broadly. “It does.” The next step is to package the kit and take it home to begin the activation process. After nearly a hundred years, he can hardly wait the seven days it takes to grow and activate him. He glances at the time stamp on the scan: November 7, 2390. The anniversary of Jerme’s death is in one week. But if he’s successful, he’ll no longer associate it with his death. It will also be his rebirth.
19 – Floating in MSP
Electra
November 7, 2390.
As soon as Electra wakes up, she reaches for the tablet she’s developing a concerning attachment to. Please let there be messages today!
She taps the weird little frog icon, closing her eyes as the app opens. Nervously, she cracks one eye open, then the other. “Oh my God!” There are a dozen messages. She eagerly opens the first one:
Dear Electra,
I’m a 67-year-old man living in C Quadrant, and I feel like I’m living a double life. I go to work and my FRIENDS groups and act like I’m happy, but I never really feel alive until I’m in the simulation chamber, slipping into my spacesuit. As soon as they activate the antigravity field and I startfloating, I come alive. My question is how do I tell others I may not be meant for this world?
Sincerely,
Floating in MSP
Electra groans, deletes the message, and opens the next. She needs a reasonable question related to human connection that she can actually answer. Oh, this one is promising.
Dear Electra,
