Rood | Page 9

emptied the contents of both into his hand. Then he dropped them into the water. The fish swam faster, darting around, poking at the canisters. It nudged and pushed at them until the air clinging to their sides tore away and they settled onto the bottom.
"You put food in those?" asked Fed.
"Nope" said Tonx, smiling. Inside the tank the fish seemed to have lost interest and was swimming around aimlessly. "Here. Drop one of these in."
Tonx handed him two small black rocks and a penny. Fed shrugged and dropped the penny into the tank.
Without hesitating the fish swam to the penny and grabbed it, wedging it into its mouth before swimming over to one film canister and then the other. The goldfish nudged the canister upright and deposited the penny inside.
Then the fish swam over to the side of the tank and looked out at him.
"Put in a rock" whispered Tonx, clearly enjoying himself. Fed did. The fish caught the rock before it hit the bottom and put it in the other canister, then returned to watching them from inside the glass. Tonx keyed in a sequence on the canister next to the tank and a thin slick of grayish fluid seeped out of one of the spines. Inside the tank the fish began to bob up against the surface of the water, sucking at the slick.
"What the fuck was that?" whispered Fed. Tonx just laughed and turned off the light over the tank.
"That, my little man" he said, "is a mutagenetically altered goldfish. Your brother here found a way to conjoin endomorphic neurological tissue with shocked brain tissue using genetically modified carcinogens." He smiled proudly.
Fed slowly raised his eyebrows. Tonx rolled his eyes and sighed. He was clearly enjoying himself.
"I cut and pasted some brains, and used a GM cancer to make it stick" he explained.
Fed let his eyebrows stay raised, waited for the long explanation that was sure to follow. Tonx strolled over to the futon and fell back on its rumpled sheets.
"The coursework I worked on at MIT focused on mutagenics. The big breakthrough I came into there was the use of endomorphic tissues - you remember that?"
"Yeah" said Fed, squinting as he remembered the hazy past, back when Tonx had been clean-cut, carefully clad, ready for his break into the corporate graduate schools. Ready to make it, big time. "Yeah, endomorphic tissue is from squids and stuff, yeah?"
"And a lot of other critters, yes. It's tissue that can readily change. Stuff like color, shape, firmness... that kind of stuff. Turns out that endomorphic tissue readily accepts mutagenesis."
"That is..." asked Fed.
"Meaning it's easy to hack its genetic code. Endomorphic tissue readily accepts changes to its base DNA sequences. It led to a bunch of patents Johnson & Johnson licensed off MIT for those T-cell multiplier Band-Aids. The ones they recalled because they gave a bunch of people a nasty rash?"
Fed remembered. "Yeah. Funny shit. Why was that?"
"Not everyone's body gets rid of mutagenic cells the same way - a lot of folks' skin freaked out and tried to isolate the cells thinking it was foreign tissue. Made lots of little bitty scars under the skin. Anyway, J&J got bit because they didn't test it well enough. They only used refugees from Serbia as a test base. They happened to have readily mutagenic-prone cell bases."
"So they didn't get the rash?"
"Exactly. But J&J imported the stuff here and slapped it on a bunch of people and all of a sudden the entire population of Irish Americans in New York started getting nasty zits. Biogenetics are like that, man. Got to take into account the entire variance of the human genome, you know?"
"So what about the goldfish?"
"Right. Lots of people had discovered that using endomorphic tissue as a base provided you with a ready chunk of material you could mutagenetically alter directly. But as a conversion vector it's got a lot of problems - mainly, the body thinks it's a virus.
"Just about the time I bailed from school some of my peers figured out that they could use cancer cells to create recombinants - cells that combine DNA sequences. The ability to hack cancer cells has been around a long time; you just set it up to create the cells of your choice and off you go. But the body readily identifies those cells as foreign, typically, and kills them. Cancer in the wild propagates because it finds a variety that's particularly virulent - whatever you end up mixing together at home is pretty easily taken care of by the immune system. So what we figured out was a marriage of the two - a genetically unstable cancer that sought endomorphic cells and was vulnerable to conjoining."
Tonx looked proudly up at Fed, his hands laced behind his head. Fed folded