It was too still to be anything but a corpse. Not even a hybrid could lie that still.

“Are you getting ready to kill me?”

“Hey, it’s throwing some text onto my screen,” Frank said.

“Nobody’s going to do anything bad to you,” Theo lilted. “You’re about the most valuable thing in the world, Mark. Man, you saved us all. You’d get a Congressional Medal of Honor, except that’s people stuff. You don’t want that crap anyway.”

Frank muttered, “The president’s an asshole.”

“That’s a corpse,” Mark said.

Frank threw back his head and laughed, rich and loud. “Mark, that’s you.”

Theo got up and went to the box. She dropped away the sides and pulled off the plastic, which made a sucking sound as it separated from the skin.

Lying there was a naked male body still coated in places with white cream. Using a large cloth, she wiped it off.

“I’d like to have skin like this,” she said. “Man, look at this, Frank. They did a really good job. The prof prevailed on her husband, and General Walker got this grown, thank God. The president wanted to—” She stopped.

“What?” Mark asked.

Frank said, “You’re very controversial. A lot of people think you shouldn’t—”

“Not now, Frank,” a voice that Mark recognized as Emma Walker’s said. Then she came into his field of view, and for the first time in all these many years, he felt an emotion toward her that had been removed from him when he’d first been sent into hiding.

“Mother.”

She smiled. “I know that sequence. And you’ll always be my son, Mark.”

Theo affixed straps to the body’s arms and legs. Doc Emma looked down at it. “How are its labs?”

Theo gave her a digital pad covered with text.

“This looks good.”

“So, are we ready?”

“Doctor, he’s—I mean, this is real unpredictable stuff we’re seeing. I think we want to get that six lines out of there. That code makes the whole thing unstable.”

No no no!

“You’re unstable, Frank, you get mad, feel desire, laugh. As do we all. Take out that code, and you deny him all those things.”

Thank you!