Axiomatic

by Greg Egan

three young dolphins whose DNA contained human gene grafts. (“We ate the failures,” he had confided, with a sigh of gustatory bliss.)

They wasted too much time using ineffectual chemicals before steeling themselves to nuke the site. By then, the winds had already made any human action – short of melting half a dozen states, not an option in an election year – irrelevant.

It was more a matter of nostalgia than miserliness; this minuscule bit of hacking was a token gesture, proof that in spite of impending middle age, I wasn’t yet terminally law-abiding, conservative and dull.

“How can you say that? Ten-year-old boys do not own twenty-thousand-dollar video synthesizers—” “No? Some might. But I’m sure there are plenty of forty-year-old men with the same sophisticated sense of humor.”

apparently, few countries could afford to forego the advantages of being plugged into the quasi-legal Orbital economy.