Revolution World Read Online Free

consuming passion and they'd never listened to hers. But they were family, so what can you do? Part of the reason Terpsi was the only married one was the tightness of their family unit. It was hard for others to break into such a close-knit family and even harder to find someone willing to try.
    "The Peruvian monkeys were almost completely wiped out. They live in the cloud forests of Peru and those are pretty thin these days," Clio explained patiently to her sister. "We could barely capture enough to get a full genomic work-up. That is, a complete library of their DNA. We had a terrible time cloning the eggs to test in the lab and totally failed to splice up a variant that would breed in captivity."
    Kalliope looked at her blankly. Harmony quickly interjected, "P-modding, short for phenotype modification, is what we call it when we introduce a change in the genes of an adult. Imagine your genes are like a book of recipes for your life. Your body reads the various recipes when it wants to make something. So to make changes to the book of their life, we first need to know what it says. That's a complete genomic work up. You remember? We talked about that before?" She paused and looked at Kalliope, who nodded.
    So Harmony continued, "Usually splicers have to work with eggs or seeds and cultivate modified species from there. In other words, we change the story in their book of life before it's printed. P-modding is trying to change the story of an individual who has already been born. That is, whose genetic book has already been printed. It's technically difficult, but not totally impossible. You see what I'm saying?"
    Kalliope nodded slowly. "So your DNA is the recipe book for your life. It's easy to edit the book before it's printed, but really hard after it's been printed. Got it. Why is that? Because it will damage the book? Or just come out as nonsense?"
    Clio gave her sister a big grin. After only a quarter of a century, some of it was finally sinking in. "Exactly. If it damages the book, who knows what happens? Usually something bad like cancer or heart attack. If it comes out as nonsense, your body will just ignore those pages. That's what usually happens. Nothing, in other words."
    She gave her sister a minute to think about that as her mind wandered to the pollution fish in the Aquatics lab that she was developing for the Great Lakes. Clio just loved her job. She remembered how frustrated she'd been with the monkeys.
    "So how did you do the p-mod in the monkeys then? What did you change?" asked Kalliope.
    "I ended up modifying the genes of a fruit that wild monkeys loved to eat. The fruit produced chemicals and proteins that caused the desired changed in the adult monkeys. Plus, let's just say their libido got juiced up. Which made for a population explosion. They were able to survive at lower altitudes and eat a wider variety of foods." Clio thought it was funny that she had produced the primate equivalent of a goat. The spliced monkeys could and would eat almost anything.
    The result was wild adult monkeys that reached maturity faster and produced more babies. Usually any changes you could manage to make to an adult were not likely to be passed on to their babies, but Clio had some techniques that ensured the babies possessed the same ability to grow up quickly and make lots of babies. The resulting population explosion brought the monkeys back from the brink of extinction.
    Clio was now working on a subspecies that could be more easily raised in captivity. Those were the monkeys that the intruders took. Clio had added a few changes to the fruit that resulted in a greater proliferation of the Peruvian cloud forests as well.
    Clio had slightly changed a few of the proteins in the fruit to break down as they passed through the monkey's digestive tract. The digested proteins enriched the local soil dramatically. Now monkey manure, by the pound, was worth more than gold in Peru. All in all, she was pretty proud of that