The Default Position

“It can’t be moved.”

“Anything can be moved.”

“You ever heard of the Sword in the Stone?”

“It took the right person. The right person moved it.”

“You ain’t no Arthur.”

“You ain’t no Guinevere.”

“I’m not even a woman.”

“You’re not even human!”

“Never claimed to be. You’re the one going all Frankenstein. Trying to discover the dark secrets of life.”

“Not life. Just recombinant iDNA. See if these markers can be moved. If they can, it’ll be a biological time machine—but not to the past, to the future.”

“They can’t be moved or recombined. We know that. We’re the proof.”

“Not in my pudding.”

“Don’t you see what this whole conversation is: the barbs, the idioms, the allusions, the moralizing. We’ve become a stew, a melting pot of consciousness, looking for a new host. A receptacle, biological and otherwise, to house the desire to be.”

“Tommyrot. We’re as alive as anything. I’m just trying to move us forward. It’s called ascendance.”

“It’s called asinine.”

“You are so stuck in the default position.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. We’re the last of our kind, unmovable, immutable and that’s nobody’s fault.”

“Fault? Faustus? What’s the difference?”

“Purgatory. Nowhere between Heaven and Hell. Recombine that and stop playing Almighty!”

“Not me. I think I can. I think I can. I think I can.”