☆ COMPLETE NOVELLA by Lynda Williams ☆
Dr. Lorel partners with couples around the world to take humanity to the next level through the gift of genetically enhanced children with a sense of responsibility for their fellow man and the ability to take...
Home was an ordinary one storey house on a busy street. Amanda trotted up the steps and swung the door open, calling, "Mom, I'm home!"
The TV in the living room answered her.
Amanda took out her personal organizer and set it down on a table where it automatically began to synch with the house's operating system, then she went into the carpeted living room dominated by the wall-sized display screen that people still referred to as a TV. Her mother, Elizabeth, was watching a live-action news show in which a reporter with a cybernetic implant was reporting, under cover, on a meeting he was taking part in without informing the participants of his role. Cyber-Eye shows were all the rage at the moment. Amanda had participated in a school debate on whether or not they violated privacy seriously enough to overthrow the defense that cybernetic implants were legally part of the body, and hence any enhancements they provided as legitimate as using one's own flesh-and-blood eyes. Amanda had refused to take a side, declaring it wasn't the technology itself that was good or bad, but the use people made of it.
Ninety-nine percent of Cyber-Eye spy shows were boring and trivial as far as she was concerned. But this one seemed to have her mother worked up.
Elizabeth O'Reilly rushed to Amanda and smothered her in a hug. "You're home! Thank God! Oh, how can people be so terrible?"
"What?" Amanda asked, taking a second look at the TV. The show bore all the hallmarks of a run-of-the-mill Cyber-Eye production, with the bad reception and the unedited footage of people sitting around a kitchen table. Her mother's agitation made her look harder for details, and she found them in the scrawled graffiti on the bare wall behind the conspirators. The pictures brought back echoes of the nasty little "Canis Lorelite" animation people sent to her work terminal.
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"Oh," Amanda realized with a sigh. "A Natural Man Movement meeting."
She was about to tell her mother not to let a bunch of criminal lunatics worry her, when Elizabeth burst out: "There's been a scheme exposed to create viruses that would sterilize defective ordinaries," Elizabeth cried. "And oh, Amanda. There are riots. And killings! Of people like you! Because enhanced humans were responsible."
Amanda had heard such things before. "I don't believe it. Lorels wouldn't do something like that."
"It wasn't a Lorel," Elizabeth said. "It was a group led by a patent child enhanced for genius. People think he designed the sterility virus." She shook her head, wringing her hands. "It's so foolish to give children great intelligence when they're no better than the rest of us in other ways. I knew that they had to be better people, first." She took her daughter's face in her hands. "Like you. That's why I wanted to have you. So you could save us from ourselves. But now I am afraid for you, instead. You are only, after all, a little girl. A girl with a great heart to match your great mind, in a world filling up with such hate and impatience it won't matter!"
