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 –
My mother’s office is kind of incredible. It’s not low-key. It’s Vegas, baby, but with a very cool, even cold, high-tech touch.
The massive room is dominated by a thirty-foot-tall waterfall. The water runs down a series of stone planes set at angles. Very slowly, so slowly you don’t notice it at first, the angles of the planes shift so that the water is always in a new configuration.
Her desk—if you can call it by so mundane a name—is a wedge of brushed stainless steel, flat where it needs to be flat, but then swooping up on the left in a way that suggests an airplane soaring into the sky, combined with a scalpel blade.
Hanging from the ceiling are sculptures my father made right before his death. He worked mostly in metal— some wood, some glass, too. These aren’t mobiles, exactly. They’re static sculptures suspended from cables. My father called them “airborne artifacts,” sculptures meant to echo natural forms: clouds, trees, birds. My favorite, done in steel and Plexiglas, is the rough shape of a thunderbolt. There’s a standing sculpture, too, one I’ve always loved. It’s sort of a free-form redwood tree that extends from floor to ceiling.
I don’t know why my mother, who hates art, and particularly hated my father’s art, has hung on to these pieces, let alone why she has them displayed. I asked her once, and she told me her interior designer needed something pretentiously ugly to fill the space.
It’s a completely intimidating room. A place that says
This is not an office where you’d expect to see a cluster of corny family photos, but there they are, completely out of place, a silver-framed gallery on the wall to the right of her desk. Most are of me, a few are of my dad. One is of the three of us, the classic happy-family-on-the-beach pose.
I remember that day, a good day. Windy, too cold to venture near the water. We flew a kite until it nose- dived into the surf.
I was four, maybe five, by then. I’d already been modified. The change had long since been made.
“Hello, Evening,” my mother says coolly.
“Hello.”
Her eyes go to my leg. There’s a flicker, but barely. “I see your leg is better.”
“It’s more than better. It’s perfect.”
She holds my gaze. I’m determined not to be the first to look away.
I look away.
“When were you going to tell me?” I ask.
“Tell you what?”
“That I’m one of your genetic experiments.”
There’s a long silence, during which I can hear the soft rushing of the water and the steel gears in my mother’s head. Well, the water, anyway.
“I’m curious as to how you arrived at that conclusion,” she says. She stands, arranging her suit, which is already perfectly arranged, and steps out from behind the Desk of Doom.
As has often been the case with my mother, I feel the urge to take a step back. But I resist.
“It’s obvious,” I say. “My mother runs a biotech company with a reputation for cutting corners.”
She steps closer. “Would you rather have the pain? Would you rather have the scars? The lifelong limp?”
“What else have you done to me?”
She’s close now. “Done to you? You mean, what other great gifts have I given you?”
“I—”
“How else have I made your life better than other people’s lives? How else have I protected you?”
I’m breathing hard. Her certainty and confidence is stifling. I start to answer but my throat is dry.
Do I really want the answer?
“What is it you came for? Sweetheart?”
“I need nine thousand dollars.”
“For your loser friend? I gather she found you last night? Do I have Solo to thank for that?”
I nearly panic. I can’t put it on Solo. He trusted me. “She found her way to me,” I say. “And she’s staying. As long as she wants to.”
I’m proud of the steadiness in my voice.
“Those are your demands.” It’s not a question. “Nine thousand dollars and a suite for your idiot BFF.”
I don’t see much point in quibbling about her description of Aislin. Not the time. “Yes.”
“You have to stay here another week, at least,” she says after a moment. “For appearances.”
“Fine.”
She takes a deep breath. She cocks her head, looking at me curiously, as if it’s the first time she’s met me. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay.”
“And?”
“And nothing.”
Oh, she’s clever. Oh, she is so very clever.
“Anything else?” she asks. Smug. She knows she’s outplayed me. She knows she just bought my silence and my acceptance. For pocket change.
So that’s how she got to be a billionaire.
– 22 –
