The shadow operators could scarcely believe their ears. They grew the cultivar in a tank much like her own, in an off-the-shelf proteome called Tailors’ Soup, customised with inorganic substrates, code neither human nor machine, pinches of alien DNA and live math. They dried it out and eyed it critically. “You’ll look very nice, dear,” they told it, “if you just wipe the sleep from your blue eyes now. Very nice indeed.” They brought it to the room in which she kept the Dr. Haends package.

“Here she is,” they said. “Isn’t she lovely? Isn’t she charming?”

“I could have done without the dress,” said Seria Mau.

“Oh but dear: she had to wear something.”

It was herself, twelve years old. They had decorated her pale hands with spirals of tiny seed pearls, and turned her out in a floor-length frock of icy white satin sprigged with muslin bows and draped in cream lace. Her train was supported at each corner by hovering, perfect, baby boys. She stared shyly up at the cameras in the corners, whispering:

“What was relinquished returns.”

“I can do without that, too,” said Seria Mau.

“But you must have a voice, dear—”

She didn’t have time to argue. Suddenly she wanted it all over with. “Bridge me in,” she said.

They bridged her in. Under the impact of this, the cultivar lost psychomotor control and fell back against a bulkhead. “Oh,” it whispered. It slid down onto the deck, staring puzzledly at its own hands. “Am I me?” it asked. “Don’t you want me to be me?” It kept glancing up and then down again, wiping compulsively at its face. “I’m not sure where I am,” it said, before it shivered once and got to its feet as Seria Mau Genlicher. “Aah,” whispered the shadow operators. “It’s all too beautiful.” Deco uplighters introduced to the room a gradual pearly illumination, wavering yet triumphant; while rediscovered choral works by Janácek and Philip Glass filled the air itself. Seria Mau stared around. She felt no more “alive” than she had in the tank. What had she been so frightened of? Bodies were not new to her, and besides, this one had never been her self.

“The air smells like nothing in here,” she said. “It smells like nothing.”

The Dr. Haends package lay on the floor in front of her, locked up in Uncle Zip’s red and green beribboned box—which, she saw now, was a kind of metaphor for the actual mechanisms of confinement the gene-tailor had used. She studied the box for a moment, as if it might look different viewed from real human eyes, then knelt down and threw back its lid. Instantly, a creamy white foam began to spill out into the room. The Photographer (revisioned from five surviving notes on a corrupted optical storage disc by the twenty-second-century composer Onotodo-Ra) faded to the Muzak it so resembled. Over it, a gentle chime rang, and a woman’s voice called: