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ice pack pressed to his nose. No. His parents wouldn’t understand. “Normal day. Y’know. I’m going to get started on my work. Let me know when it’s time for dinner.” Fisher headed up the stairs as his parents resumed their discussion of the rogue crustaceans.
    Fisher headed straight for his room and, for the first time all day, allowed himself to relax. Fiber-optic cabling and hydraulic tubes snaked along every wall, connecting banks of computers, massive microscopes, and chemical apparatus that would shame most universities.
    Here, Fisher truly felt he had a place in the world. He wished more than anything that he felt even half as comfortable in a crowd of other twelve-year-olds as he did when surrounded by test tubes and bubbling solutions. If telling a joke or talking to a girl were as effortless as splicing bacterial DNA, Fisher would be the most popular boy in school.
    He turned to his closet door and waved a hand in the air. The door got brighter as its metal surface slowly resolved itself into a mirror. Fisher looked himself up and down. He raised his arms up above his head so his sleeves fell to his elbows, wishing he had big muscles instead of scarecrow arms. Then he tried to pat down his light brown hair, which never could decide on a single direction to go in. The three oblong freckles on his nose completed the picture.
    Pathetic. He was doomed forever to be a geek. He waved his arms rapidly in the air, causing the motion-detecting closet door to shift into a crazy carnival mirror. Fisher’s image was distorted and warped, bending in all directions. Fisher walked toward it, striking funny poses and making faces. At least he didn’t have a forehead as large as an eggplant … or a body stretched out like taffy … or squashed up like a bowling ball… .
    Too late, he felt a cool object under his foot. A moment later he was crashing to the ground as a steel test tube rolled away from him. “Oof,” he grunted. He had landed among a pile of dirty socks, and his flailing legs had made the mirror fade away.
    As Fisher stood up, he heard a soft, snuffling sound and light footsteps approaching him. A few seconds later, a pinkish, lightly fuzzy object glided into the room and came to an unsteady landing at Fisher’s feet.
    â€œHiya, boy.” Fisher reached down to scratch his pet pig, FP, under the chin. FP was an unusual pig. In fact, he was a Flying Pig. His parents had once gotten into a debate about adding on additional lab space to their house. Fisher’s father had told his mother that he’d agree to expand the property “when pigs fly.” His mother had taken this as a challenge and won her new lab expansion by biologically engineering little FP.
    FP looked like any other pig, except he had light bones and weblike tissue stretching between his front hooves and the middle of his back. This allowed him to glide as gracefully as his pig body permitted—in other words, not gracefully at all. But he was adorable nonetheless.
    â€œMiss me?” Fisher asked, patting FP on the head.
    FP squealed enthusiastically. Fisher sighed. At least someone cared about him, even if the Vikings were intent on making sure that he graduated from the school system without a single human friend.
    Fisher walked over to a tightly sealed, clear plastic cube in which dozens of tiny mosquitoes swarmed, bouncing off the walls like compressed gas molecules. He had been working for months on mosquitoes, trying to modify their genes so that they would bite only certain chosen people. Certain meathead bullies, to be precise. If it worked, Fisher would be able to walk straight through a swarm of them and emerge on the other side without a single mosquito bite. The Vikings, on the other hand … Fisher smiled, picturing them covered in murderously itchy red spots.
    â€œLet’s see how this batch came out, FP,” he said. “If I can get these to work, I bet