It takes longer every morning to recognize yourself in the mirror. The court-mandated therapist says it's all in your imagination.

It is. It's in your imagination and in your blood and muscles and bones. You're sure it's also in your brain even if the law prohibits genetic modifications of neural tissue "to preserve the inviolable integrity of sentience." The same law that put blockers on your extended self — hardware in your brain, subliminals in your content, who knows what on the infrastructural software that everybody lives on and in and through — to make it impossible for you to ever consider killing someone else again no matter how deep your desire.

These days it's very deep. The murder you're being punished for was by comparison a lighthearted affair over sex and social capital portfolios. Reason enough at the moment. The guy's religion had been no factor at all; you had no particular opinion about shell company churches in general and hadn't even suspected the weird copyright and insurance custom-laws of the one he was senior partner of.

Looking at him you wouldn't have thought any of his genes were particularly valuable. You certainly haven't felt any wealthier since the retroviral delivery system was injected into you. What sort of freaks kept their genetic data not in computers but in people? And who chose failover storage this way?

Freaks indeed. Rich freaks. Influential freaks. And you have to give them credit for foresight of a sort. You removed from the pool one copy of their "exclusive genes" but your behavioral blocks prevent you from ever doing it again. You spend the nights thinking of nothing else but the gun on your bedside table is as unreachable as whoever is on the other side of your flesh.