He had forced himself to tell this story many times, far more times than he had ever wanted to tell it to anyone. He had a prepared spiel of sorts, but he had never fully steeled himself to the dread it caused him to talk about it, the paralyzing stage fright. "Most of the product just didn’t make it. They’d really screwed with us trying to get us tank-worthy. I had a full genetic scan done in Copenhagen, and it turned out that they’d simply lopped off most of the introns from the zygote DNA. See, they somehow figured that if they could prune away some junk DNA from the human genome, then the product would be hardier in the tank and would run more efficiently.... Their lab guys were all med-school dropouts, or downsizees from bankrupt HMOs. Also, they spent a lot of time high on synthetic cocaine, which was always the standard collateral industry with South American genetic black-marketeering...."