Page 86 of As You Wake, Break the Shell

their genes, made charts, did

experiments. They made them

bigger, stronger. Able to carry

and pull.

Are there still wild rorquals

out there?

I don’t know. I hope so. But I

don’t know what they’d be like.

Keep telling me.

We give them hormone blockers

to keep them from reproducing.

They die after they have a calf,

but that’s not the only reason

we put a stop to it. We want to

keep them as we made them.

We don’t want them to change.

So we print them, like you do

with seeds, like the colony ships

did with our ancestors. We

print an embryo exactly as we

want it, then we let it grow to

a certain developmental point.

And then we tell it stop, so we

can keep using it.

So you already know about

genetic drift. You know that

even a thing that copies itself

will still change at some point,

for reasons beyond our ability

to grasp.