New Short

[dexfarkin]

You too can be sequenced.

It doesn't hurt much. You might have done it when you were young. Around the twenties, it was one of the things trendy parents did. Get your entire potential mapped out for them in a handy mini-disc
that cost five figures. There was a bunch of dark urban legends about parents finding out that their child was not going to turn out to be a proball player or barely had the likely intellect to make it past management training for the new McMeals corporation testing, and abandoning them on doorsteps and remotely maintained disposal bins. Even whispers of infanticide.

The flimsies did a story on it, between the newest SARS purge in west China and the tenth anniversary of the Diebold Presidency scandal. Just something to sell bandwidth in the morning
crush.

Back to my point. Imagine finding out that your genetics mean that you're going to suffer from allergies, poor eyesight, obesity. You can get ten years for serving food without the proper
disclaimers on your menu these days, but you could still get abnormally fat because that was what your whale of a great-grandmother gifted you with. No choice in the code handed down to you, especially since they killed the Abrams vs Abrams case in the Supreme Court. I guess suing your parents for loss of earning due to poor genetic traits passed on was a little much for the country to handle.

For example, you will not get any taller than five eight. Maybe an extra inch. You've got a slightly above average intelligence, but there are little time bombs in your code. I'd guess cancer before
you hit sixty. Hell of a thing, you know. You're what, seventeen, Jennifer? Based on just the most basic information we can see, you've got some bad news coming down the road. In these results,
all sorts of things could be hiding. Your parents aren't on file, so I can't even eliminate possibilities yet.

No, please. Take the whole box. I'll wait until you're ready to go on.

Now Jennifer, I want you to listen to me. You're an unexceptional young woman. It's not an insult. In the strictest genetic sense, you're a typical specimen of your background and physical
environment. This is the important part.

We can sequence you. We can find all those little timebombs, identify the problem areas, even know your physical future for you. It's like your own little Cassandra on disc.

She could see the future, Jennifer. You can look under Homer in the Gutenburg Project. You can see your future, and to be fair, a lot of what you read will not be things you will like.

That's why I wanted to talk to you today. If you're willing, I can take those problems away; defuse the timebombs. In the strictest genetic sense, I can make you exceptional.

No, I don't work for your government, Jennifer. They're equally typical and flawed.

It's your choice. What can I tell you? Cancer will never touch you. Nor allergies, or the flu. You will have more than forty years to live, and more than mundane tools to apply to them.

Very simple, my dear. You walk through the door behind me, and never walk back into your old life again. Dealing with the Devil? Not at all, Jennifer.

We don't have his sequence. Yet.