Everyone In Silico | Page 4

in there. She waited unconsciously for the "That was delicious!" recording to play as she pushed the door open.
Instead she got, "Pee-yoo! Don't you wish you could have just said, Empty Garbage?" followed Nicky out on to the street. The "Go for Self!" tagline was cut off by the closing door.
She smelled her hands (fine) and glanced back at the green garbage can icon glowing in the half-light. As she headed home through the empty streets, she felt a little lonely. Since she had moved here, most of the kids her age who hadn't left Vancouver had moved to apartments around Commercial Drive. But Nicky felt that moving to the Drive, still busy with people, would be kind of living in denial. Plus, there was no way she could afford as much space there.
She heard squeaking when she got in and remembered she hadn't fed the flukes. Nicky walked into her living room and looked in the fluke cage. Two of them were sleeping, but the other one was doing his best to wake them up.
"How-are-you-my-little-meal-tickets?" Nicky said in her best imitation of Simone's baby-voice, reaching into the bag of Critter Kibble. She fed the one that was running around, panting with his big eyes glazed over, and the other two blinked awake. "Oh yeah, now you're awake. Where were you when I was taking in the groceries?" The flukes looked at her and started to whine.
She chucked the other two pellets in the cage and rolled up the food bag. Checking the time, she decided to get something done before JK arrived, so she headed up to the third floor.
She caught a glimpse of her new haircut in a mirror. Do I look like an idiot with this hair? she wondered. She had had a shoulder-length ragged cut for ages, and she needed a change - but she half suspected she'd done it to dramatically mark the end of her relationship. Kathy would have hated it, she thought giddily.
On the top floor stairwell, she stepped up on the wooden chair, pushed open the hatch and pulled down the well-oiled ladder that led up to her laboratory.
The lights came on gradually as she stamped down the hatch. She looked up with some regret at the covered skylight and window, even though it would have been pitch black outside by now. She remembered being excited by the skylight when she had first found the house, figuring it was perfect for a bedroom. But Kathy complained of having to climb down in the middle of the night to go to the washroom - it was a pain, but still, it would have been so cool to wake up to the sun - and so the lab ended up here instead. When Kathy ended up moving to Frisco, Nicky couldn't be bothered moving all the lab equipment out. What had started out as a small operation with an EasyBake and a shaky table had expanded into quite a bit of stuff.
Wedged against the slanted roof was a long silver counter with tons of beakers and vials and other antiques that Nicky had a soft spot for. Her computer setup was also outdated, but stable - like the rest of the equipment, she had scooped it up when the genetics department was phased out.
She called up her active in silico experiments - two had been birthed alive. One was a three-headed fluke she had called Cerberus, and the other had a single eye in the middle of its forehead. She focused in on the Cyclops fluke first, noting with satisfaction that it was blinking normally - the last version had been birthed with a messed-up eyelid. She called up the Cerberus fluke. It wasn't doing as well, only one of the three heads breathing normally.
She zoomed in on the organs and got the computer to diagnose. The heart glowed red, 125% the normal rate. The lungs were within normal parameters this time, although still a little off. Nicky sighed. Maybe three heads aren't better than one...
She went back to the Cyclops and introduced different stimuli. The model fluke barked happily when it was introduced to food pellets, sexual partners, and petting. It looked good to Nicky, so she decompiled the dog into its spawning ingredients. To free up some memory, she went back to the sick puppy and deleted it. The computer, as it always did when deleting, made a tinny scream. It was just a morbid thing the EasyCut programmer put in, but it always reminded Nicky of the first time she heard it.
It had been in the first week of classes, when they were all getting trained on the equipment. Her professor, a tiny outspoken Asian woman, was showing them how the in silico programs were used.
"Now when I was a little