Contents

One: La Causa

Two: The Portero Method

Three: Meerm

Four: Zero

Five: Thy Brother’s Keeper

Acknowledgments

I owe a debt of thanks to the following:

Daniel F. Murphy Jr., Esq., for his generous assistance and advice regarding the labor relations issues and legal procedures so vital to the plot in Parts One and Two; Coates Bateman, editor-at-large; J. R. Peter Wilson, brother and defense attorney; Mitchell Galin for early encouragement; David Auerbach, genetics maven and fellow Jill Sobule fan; Barry Rosenbush for being a believer; David Hartwell, Elizabeth Monteleone, Steven Spruill, and Al Zuckerman for the usual editorial help.

Author’s Note

Sims takes place just around the corner, timewise, in your town, your country, your world. It may seem like science fiction, but it isn’t. For right now, as you read these words, someone somewhere is altering a chimpanzee’s genome to make it more human. Right now . So it won’t be too long before we all come face-to-face with the same issues challenging the characters in Sims…

1

WESTCHESTER COUNTY, NY

SEPTEMBER 20

A good walk spoiled, Patrick Sullivan thought as he trudged toward the rough where his slicing golf ball had disappeared. Somebody had got that right.

Patrick didn’t actually hate golf, but he suffered from a condition he’d come to call GADD—Golf Attention Deficit Disorder. Nine holes and he’d had it. Maybe that was because during his first nine holes he racked up more strokes than most golfers did in eighteen. But today he was playing with Ben Armstrong, CFO of the Jarman department store chain and a valued client, who, although even less skillful than Patrick on the links, seemed immune to GADD.