new job in the Indian Devolved Areas. He’s about to go off to Eden to start his diplomatic work. He looks so sweet in a penis sheath and a parrot’s feather through his nose. Standard diplomatic dress for a member of the Brazilian Consular Team.
I love him I love him I love him I love him.
I am so god damned lucky. They didn’t have embryo-screening on the Amazon. Hey! A fellow sodomite. We’re an endangered species everywhere else. Must eliminate those nasty alien genes.
Then I had to go and tell him about how my project was going. And he looked glum.
“I know you don’t like it,” I told him.
“It feels wrong. Like genocide.” He pronounces it jenoseed. “Soon they will be no more.”
“But it’s not genocide. The babies come out hetero, that’s all. No more samesex, no more screening, just happy babies. And the adults who are left can decide for themselves if they want to be cured or not. Anyway, the Neos say that we’re the genocide.”
“You don’t need to help them.”
“João. Baby. It won’t affect us. We’ll still have each other.”
“The Indians say it is unwise.”
“Do they? That’s interesting. How come?”
“They say it is good to have other ways. They think it is like what almost happened to them.”
That rang true. So me and João have this really great conversation about it, very neutral, very scientific. He’s just so smart.
Before the alien gene thing, they used to say that homos were a pool of altruistic non-reproducing labor. It’s like, we babysit for our siblings’ kids and that increases the survival potential of our family’s genes. Because genes that make it less likely that you’ll have kids should have died out. So why was it still here?
João tells his usual joke about all the singers in Brazil being samesex, which is just about true. So I say, wow, the human race couldn’t reproduce without Dança do Brasil, huh? Which was a joke. And he says, maybe so.
I say like I always do, “You know, don’t you, baby?”
His voice goes soft and warm. “I know. Do you know?”
Yes. Oh yes, I know.
That you love me. We love each other.
We’ve been saying that every day now for five years. It still gives me a buzz.
It was a big day at the lab, too. The lights finally went on inside Flat Man.
Flat Man is pretty horrible, to tell you the truth. He’s a culture, only the organs are differentiated and the bones are wafer-thin and spread out in a support structure. He looks like a cross between a spider’s web and somebody who’s been hit by a truck. And he covers an entire wall.
His brain works, but we know for a fact that it performs physical functions only. No consciousness, no narrative-of-the-self. He’s like a particularly useful bacterial culture. You get to map all his processes, test the drugs, maybe fool around with his endomorphins. They got this microscope that can trail over every part of his body. You can see life inside him, pumping away.
Soon as I saw him, I got this flash. I knew what to do with him. I went to my mentor, wrote it up, got it out, and the company gave me the funding.
People think of cells as these undifferentiated little bags. In fact, they’re more like a city with a good freeway system. The proteins get shipped in, they move into warehouses, they’re distributed when needed, used up and then shipped out.
We used to track proteins by fusing them with fluorescent jellyfish protein. They lit up. Which was just brilliant really since every single molecule of that protein was lit up all the time. You sure could see where all of it was, but you just couldn’t see where it was going to.
We got a different tag now, one that fluoresces only once it’s been hit by a blue laser. We can paint individual protein molecules and track them one by one.
Today we lit up the proteins produced by the samesex markers. I’m tracking them in different parts of the brain. Then I’ll track how genetic surgery affects the brain cells. How
I love him I love him I love him I love him.
I am so god damned lucky. They didn’t have embryo-screening on the Amazon. Hey! A fellow sodomite. We’re an endangered species everywhere else. Must eliminate those nasty alien genes.
Then I had to go and tell him about how my project was going. And he looked glum.
“I know you don’t like it,” I told him.
“It feels wrong. Like genocide.” He pronounces it jenoseed. “Soon they will be no more.”
“But it’s not genocide. The babies come out hetero, that’s all. No more samesex, no more screening, just happy babies. And the adults who are left can decide for themselves if they want to be cured or not. Anyway, the Neos say that we’re the genocide.”
“You don’t need to help them.”
“João. Baby. It won’t affect us. We’ll still have each other.”
“The Indians say it is unwise.”
“Do they? That’s interesting. How come?”
“They say it is good to have other ways. They think it is like what almost happened to them.”
That rang true. So me and João have this really great conversation about it, very neutral, very scientific. He’s just so smart.
Before the alien gene thing, they used to say that homos were a pool of altruistic non-reproducing labor. It’s like, we babysit for our siblings’ kids and that increases the survival potential of our family’s genes. Because genes that make it less likely that you’ll have kids should have died out. So why was it still here?
João tells his usual joke about all the singers in Brazil being samesex, which is just about true. So I say, wow, the human race couldn’t reproduce without Dança do Brasil, huh? Which was a joke. And he says, maybe so.
I say like I always do, “You know, don’t you, baby?”
His voice goes soft and warm. “I know. Do you know?”
Yes. Oh yes, I know.
That you love me. We love each other.
We’ve been saying that every day now for five years. It still gives me a buzz.
It was a big day at the lab, too. The lights finally went on inside Flat Man.
Flat Man is pretty horrible, to tell you the truth. He’s a culture, only the organs are differentiated and the bones are wafer-thin and spread out in a support structure. He looks like a cross between a spider’s web and somebody who’s been hit by a truck. And he covers an entire wall.
His brain works, but we know for a fact that it performs physical functions only. No consciousness, no narrative-of-the-self. He’s like a particularly useful bacterial culture. You get to map all his processes, test the drugs, maybe fool around with his endomorphins. They got this microscope that can trail over every part of his body. You can see life inside him, pumping away.
Soon as I saw him, I got this flash. I knew what to do with him. I went to my mentor, wrote it up, got it out, and the company gave me the funding.
People think of cells as these undifferentiated little bags. In fact, they’re more like a city with a good freeway system. The proteins get shipped in, they move into warehouses, they’re distributed when needed, used up and then shipped out.
We used to track proteins by fusing them with fluorescent jellyfish protein. They lit up. Which was just brilliant really since every single molecule of that protein was lit up all the time. You sure could see where all of it was, but you just couldn’t see where it was going to.
We got a different tag now, one that fluoresces only once it’s been hit by a blue laser. We can paint individual protein molecules and track them one by one.
Today we lit up the proteins produced by the samesex markers. I’m tracking them in different parts of the brain. Then I’ll track how genetic surgery affects the brain cells. How
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