“A sim union? Have you been nipping at the aftershave, Tome?”

“Have money,” Tome said. “Have saved. We give you make sim union.”

“Wait a minute…wait a minute…”

Patrick suddenly had a wild thought. He looked around for a video camera. When he didn’t see one, he checked the stalls—all empty. Laughing, he came back to Tome.

A reading, AFL-CIO sim. Sure.

“All right, who put you up to it? Armstrong? Rogers? Come on, who?”

“No, Mist Sulliman. We know you. Want hire.”

Could this cloned ape be serious?

Patrick sighed. “Tome, you have no idea what you’re saying. Unions are for people. Sims aren’t people. That’s the law.”

“Yessir, but Mist Sulliman lawyer. Lawyer change law. You—”

Just then the door swung open and Holmes Carter waddled in. About Patrick’s age—mid-thirties—but he looked older and had a commanding lead in the gut department. A bulbous forehead and no lips to speak of, and where Patrick’s hair lay thick and fair, Carter’s was dark and thinning; his scalp gleamed through his comb-over. Soon he’d be a chrome dome.

Or maybe not. Looking at Carter’s hair now, Patrick noticed that it was thicker; didn’t appear to be a rug or a weave either. Must have gone and got himself a splice to replace his baldness gene. You ol’ devil, you.

Too bad the genemeisters couldn’t do anything to reduce his fat. Scalps were easy: a limited number of cells to splice. Fat was a whole other deal—trillions of fat cells in a body.

But fat, thin, bald, or pompadoured, Carter would always be a first-class dork. No splice for that. But he was also third-generation Beacon Ridge and first in line to inherit the family’s string of car dealerships. In his teens Patrick had caddied for the two preceding generations of Carters and they’d been pretty decent. But Holmes…Holmes must have been fashioned from what had collected in the skimmers of their gene pool.