Rabbit was in love. His machine-gun turrets rotated involuntarily when he saw her, and his sights telescoped in to focus on the lovely fur that covered her breasts. She had the latest stealth modifications, he saw, so she was the latest line of scouts from CoreHead. His leg thumped involuntarily against the rack of the seat he was cuffed into, ( Read more... )

"*That's* a human?" he asked, staring with horror at the chittering piebald ball of flesh with male pattern baldness and a nasty case of acne. "Once all the DNA you share in common with other animals on your planet is stripped out, as requested, yes. We did have to use a base template, since that alone was not enough to sustain life, but I assure ( Read more... )

The black moth super-worker was born on a dark day in the gene labs. They'd been trying for a super-soldier, because that was where the money was at, but what they wound up with instead was a creature that had an unerring instinct for paperwork, a satisfaction in a job well done, low sleep requirements, an adequate but not-troublemaking imagination ( Read more... )

The chime into the gene pool was what worried her. A sound--a sound, an idea, a meme could carry beyond mitochondria, beyond simple gene spread. And now, when the gene pool was producing, was when it was most vulnerable. There had been--something--encoded in that simple chime, the simple sound that should never, ever have been able to reach so deep ( Read more... )

It was the fences that got people talking. Good fences make good neighbors and all that, but these fences were ten feet high and had barbed wire--pointed inside. Like prisons. Sure, the agricorp said that they had corporate patents and needed to protect their merchandise, but again--fences pointed inside? That was to keep something in. There were ( Read more... )

He had the music genome as ordered, but his lead soprano mother and his violinist father were frustrated by the path that it took. Even though they brought him the best vocal instructors, sent him to all the music camps he had time for, and frequently took field trips to music stores, he remained obstinately uninterested in the sound of music, ( Read more... )

They hadn't thought it out when they got their yet-unborn daughter into the trials for gene therapy to provide a short sleeper. Who wouldn't want to sleep only four hours a night? Once she was born, they rapidly figured out the answer was, "Us!" By then it was too late, though, and they did love their daughter, despite her annoying habit of being ( Read more... )