Back before I was born, Dad paid a doctor lots of money to make my sister and me more perfect than perfect: athletic and dazzling and smart, smart, smart. It didn’t matter that gene engineering was illegal in the Technocracy — my father went to an independent world where the laws were different… or where the police were cheaper to buy off.

The gene-splicing worked real well for Samantha, but with me it only did part of the job. I can do hundreds of push-ups without stopping, and Sam always called me devilishly handsome, but my brain chemistry didn’t come out so good. Too much of some things, too little of others. So Dad kept me at home for fear his "retarded idiot son" would embarrass him in public.

I didn’t mind so much. He kept Samantha at home too, with all kinds of private tutors. Sam became my private tutor, so it worked out pretty well. She taught me to be polite and brave and honest, and to think really hard about being good to people. Later, when we were teenagers, she’d take me on pretend-dates so I wouldn’t feel left out: to the gazebo on the south lawn near the reflecting pool, where we’d dance and dance and dance.

Sometimes I wished I had someone else to dance with — someone who liked me, who wasn’t my twin sister. But I never said that to Sam; I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

On our way to the party, the perfumey admiral woman explained that "crossing the line" meant leaving the Troyen star system for interstellar space. It was a big moment in any starship flight, the point where you cross out of your starting system… because the League of Peoples has a law, if you’ve been a bad person, you aren’t allowed to go from one star system to another.