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rejection as any other mutagenic recombinant. The worst part is that it's become a data-crunching problem. In a fish lumping on another gob of brain tissue isn't so big a deal. The genome's been mapped a bazillion times over, so finding combinations that are within a working range isn't so impossible. But even there it's taken forever to find something that will last two weeks. It's much harder to find something that'll pass as native to the goldfish's immune system - although I believe it's possible."
    "Does that mean I can't become a genius here?" asked Fed.
    "That's exactly what it means" said Tonx. "Trying to discover a working recombinant for three-way DNA mutagenesis in a more complex creature is orders of magnitude more complicated. It's just impossible."
    Tonx leaned back on his elbows. "Each conjoined state needs to account for the entire genome's sequencing before and after that state's conversion, and the end recombinant needs to stay stable as usable tissue. The goldfish is about as dead simple as it gets - and it took me two years of processor time on every machine I could beg, borrow, or steal access to just to get this far."
    "But isn't it just a matter of combination matching?" asked Fed. He realized his hands were shaking. It sounded impossible - but it wasn't. It was just very, very hard.
    "Sure it's just a matter of combination matching" shouted Tonx. "But the combinations range in the millions of billions - and they all have to be cross-compatible. And any satisfactory result set needs to be cross-checked across the entire data set."
    He screwed the lid roughly onto the jar and tossed it under the bed. "I wrote a short compiler to process the data I've got so far, but I don't have enough processing power. Nobody does. I know my code is crap but it just doesn't matter at this scale. To prove my work, to make it worthwhile, I need to figure out how to keep the cells from eating themselves, locate a reasonably intelligent endomorphic creature that has had its DNA fully mapped, and then co-opt all the computing power in China to run the comparisons." He rubbed his hands over his eyes.
    A faint thumping noise began, Fed's leg jumping nervously against the bottom rung of the stool.
    "Okay." said Fed, quietly. His voice trembled slightly. He stared wide-eyed into space, his hands fastened tightly to his knees, fingers rubbing the junction where his sockets turned to flesh.
    "Okay" he said again, louder. He looked at Tonx, a smile playing across his face. "You find me a data set for a real smart endomorph and I'll get you the computational power to design a match."
    Tonx opened his mouth, closed it again. He frowned, and opened his mouth again.
    "From all the computers in China." Fede said, and pulled out his chording keyboard.

Chapter 7
     
    Poulpe tapped all ten fingers roughly onto the desk and pulled off the headset. The lights in the room slowly brightened as the panel set into the desk dimmed, an aesthetic touch by the Japanese designers who had implemented the system. As the room brightened Poulpe's log notes slowly faded from view on the walls around him, cast by projectors hidden in the molding. He watched as three charts he kept placed near the doorframe slowly disappeared. They showed a steady upward march of tic marks, and were listed against a timeline of three years.
    The black plastic housing on the top of the tank next to him hummed gently, filtering the blood and loose bits of skin and muscle out of the water. He squinted at the display he'd stuck neatly to the outside of the tank, watched the pixels flash and dance there. Reaching out a finger he traced the fat grey cable running out of the display and into the water, connecting neatly to the beige plastic lid of the baby-food jar just under the surface next to the glass. He paused a moment, watching the red and yellow LEDs softly blinking on the top of the jar. A pair of glass pipettes had been pushed through the lid next to the cable,