I don’t want to do it. I shouldn’t do it. But if it helps save Aislin from Maddox—from herself …

“If I do this, if I help out this one time, will you get your act together? Find a guy who treats you better? Will you make this crap with Maddox stop?”

Aislin sniffles, nods slightly.

The truth is, it’s not much money. It’s a lot for most people, but it’s nothing to my mother. The only problem is, my mother doesn’t give money away: She buys things. If I ask her for help, she’ll own me.

But I can only be bought once. So I need to raise the price.

I pull out my phone and text my mother.

Aislin is looking at Adam. “You’re missing a few parts.”

“I’m working on the brain,” I say, distracted.

“Why?”

“It’s part of the simulation,” I say. “He needs a brain. I’m trying to decide whether I should make him really smart, or just smart.”

Aislin thinks for a moment. “Can you make him kind?”

My phone chimes. My mother can see me in her office in an hour.

“An hour,” I report wearily, without explanation.

It’s so weird. After days of longing for her company, now I want Aislin to go away.

If she senses it, she doesn’t let on. “Can I watch?” she asks, pointing to Adam.

I pull an extra chair over. She sits down. We’re both glum.

I show her. “See these gumdrops? What it’s saying is, basically, this is a set of genes that in some other guy made him very smart. But here’s a different set. And here’s another set. And each of these sets, they think, made this or that person smart.”

“How come they don’t know?” she asks.

“Because no one quite knows. There’s no single ‘smart’ button. It’s like smart in different flavors. Smart vanilla, smart chocolate, smart raspberry.”

Aislin stares intently. “You mean, they decoded some real person’s DNA and figured out what made them smart? Who were the people?”

I shrug. “I don’t know. The program doesn’t identify them.”

“So, like Einstein or Stephen Hawking?”

“Maybe.”

“Well … that’s not cool, is it? Making people who are like other people?”

“It’s just a simulation,” I say. “They couldn’t do it in reality.”

She looks at me. Her eyes are shrewd. I look away.

“Just because they did something to me…,” I say. I don’t know the second part of the sentence.

“Are you going to ask your mom?”

“About the nine thousand?”

“About being a—what did Solo call it?—a mod.”

I hold out The Limb Formerly Known As The Leg. “Let’s see. I’m walking. My bandages have disappeared. I’m guessing it will come up.”

We sit in silence for a while as I idly pick through brain configurations. Gradually, the tension between us bleeds away. I don’t want to be distant from Aislin.

I need her. She’s all I’ve got. And she needs me, even if she doesn’t always realize it.

“We could do muscles first, then brains,” Aislin suggests.

“It’s not all genetic, you know: He would have to work out.”

“Make him right and I’ll work him out,” she says with a trace of her confident leer.

“Without a brain?”

She sighs. “They’re better off without one.”

– 21 –

My mother’s office is kind of incredible. It’s not low-key. It’s Vegas, baby, but with a very cool, even cold, high-tech touch.

The massive room is dominated by a thirty-foot-tall waterfall. The water runs down a series of stone planes set at angles. Very slowly, so slowly you don’t notice it at first, the angles of the planes shift so that the water is always in a new configuration.

Her desk—if you can call it by so mundane a name—is a wedge of brushed stainless steel, flat where it needs to be flat, but then swooping up on the left in a way that suggests an airplane soaring into the sky, combined with a scalpel blade.

Hanging from the ceiling are sculptures my father made right before his death. He worked mostly in metal—some wood, some glass, too. These aren’t mobiles, exactly. They’re static sculptures suspended from cables. My father called them “airborne artifacts,” sculptures meant to echo natural forms: clouds, trees, birds. My favorite, done in steel and Plexiglas, is the rough shape of a thunderbolt. There’s a standing sculpture, too, one I’ve always loved. It’s sort of a free-form redwood tree that extends from floor to ceiling.

I don’t know why my mother, who hates art, and particularly hated my father’s art, has hung on to these pieces, let alone why she has them displayed. I asked her once, and she told me her interior designer needed something pretentiously ugly to fill the space.

It’s a completely intimidating room. A place that says you are nothing, and I am everything. Somehow in the midst of all this extraordinary largeness and grandiosity, my mother still dominates.

This is not an office where you’d expect to see a cluster of corny family photos, but there they are, completely out of place, a silver-framed gallery on the wall to the right of her desk. Most are of me, a few are of my dad. One is of the three of us, the classic happy-family-on-the-beach pose.

I remember that day, a good day. Windy, too cold to venture near the water. We flew a kite until it nose-dived into the surf.