PseudoPod 731: The Genetic Alchemist’s DaughterAuthor:
Elaine CuyegkengNarrator:
Rebecca Wei HsiehHost:
Alasdair StuartAudio Producer:
Chelsea DavisThis story was originally published in
Black Cranes edited by Lee Murray and Geneve Flynn. (2020)
Show NotesReviews at the end by Associate Editor M.M. Schill, read by Assistant Editor Karen Bovenmyer.
Black Cranes is an anthology edited by Lee Murray and Geneve Flynn.
Halloween Season is a collection by Lucy A. Snyder.
She dreams of death and rebirth on her mother’s table.
The smell of antiseptic: chemicals, artificial cherries and other-fruit. The specimen on the table. Herself, slipping a needle under the specimen’s skin to obtain samples for reconstruction. Finally, the disposal of the body while the new one grows inside her crimson egg, kicking her little amphibian feet. Later, a telepathic matrix imparts an library of the Prodigal’s memories. This reinforces the desired traits, knitted carefully into the genome.
In twelve days and twelve nights, there will be a single, perfected being: waking in the specimen’s old room with only a vague, uneasy sense of displaced time. There will be no official record, no trace of the original .
Everyone dreams those strange, mundane dreams of themselves performing their daily rites. The genetic alchemist’s daughter is no different; why should she be? But still, Leto Alicia Chua Mercado wakes as if she were a child waking from a nightmare. Leto thinks: there are fragments of bone and marrow in her pyjamas, in her blankets, her bed. For a moment, her hands are viscous with ruby red.
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I'd like to hear my options, so I could weigh them, what do you say?
Five pounds? Six pounds? Seven pounds?
