The first, primitive models of the Total Phone were like old-fashioned phone booths you had to enter. These were prohibitively expensive. Later, a force field was created that the caller could enter with a few taps on the phone’s keypad. The phones were still very pricey, but there were plenty of people who could buy them. It is now agreed that it was the force fields that caused the chromosomal changes in the embryos.

Only the rich had been able to afford Total Phones; only the idle could afford the obsession the device engendered. To have a Total child was a strange sort of status symbol.

Children with Total Syndrome had triangular, arrow-shaped skulls. Their eyes were in the highest quadrant of their heads, near the corners. Their features were relatively flat. They had tiny mouths and developed tiny teeth. Postmortems revealed that there were no adult teeth waiting to come down behind the milk teeth in Total babies. Nature knew better than that. Their skin was very smooth. They had an expressionless affect. They blinked slowly. Although they were not able to learn language, Totals often seemed to be thinking, and could learn repetitive actions. They were easily toilet trained and seemed to be naturally neat. They often displayed evidence of apparently random emotion. Despite their difference in aspect from normal humans, Total children had a doll-like appeal.

There were entrepreneurs from New York to Shanghai who were swift to take advantage of the need to care for the Totals. Total hospitals. Total training schools. Total Management. Total Care. Total Waldorf. All of these systems were palliative, each distinctly emphasizing comfort and distraction, lacking in hope. They were warehouses in which to deposit these seemingly identical, docile children—places where they would be cared for as long as they lived. Total children had short life spans. A female in Iceland had lived to the age of twelve, but as a rule the children died by age eight or nine. The cause of death was never apparent. They simply ran down and expired like batteries.

The parents, already caved in with guilt about bringing on this illness through their own decadent fascination with an unnecessary object, often could not bring themselves to love a child doomed to die before its tenth birthday. Plus, the Totals were so prone to allergies and infection. They needed twenty-four-hour care.

There were support groups.

Total Phones were, of course, taken off the market once the connection was proven, but not before thousands of toxic conceptions and hundreds of lawsuits. For years after the babies started being born, the company denied the assertions of the parents as “bad science” and kept fabricating the phones. The demand was enormous despite the risks. Total Phones were more addictive than cigarettes.