“Come on in and sit down, you two,” Priya said to the young couple as they entered through the front door of Genomaly. They were abducted by the Omanji along with Priya. “Hi Irina and Leonid, how is little Anna doing?”

“She’s growing slowly,” Irina said.

“Yes, she is below average in all categories of physical baby development for a 10-month-old,” Leonid said. “Do you think it’s because of our modified genes?”

“She looks like a normal six-month-old,” Sophie said. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with her. We’re all maturing slowly, right Pree?”

“Yeah, we’re 19 and we appear to be 16 and feel 13. We were abducted when we were 16. You guys are older than us, but don’t you two think you’re maturing slowly?”

“Yes, I’ve noticed my friends are maturing faster than me,” Leonid said. “I don’t notice anything unusual until I visit my friends.”

“Well, little Anna is maturing slowly too,” Priya said. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with her. Let’s give her the rouge test. It’s not officially valid anymore but it’s a good place to start.”

Priya dabbed a dot of red rouge on her little nose and held a mirror up to her. At first, she stared at herself and identified a playmate, as any 10-month-old baby would do.

“Hey look,” Priya said. “She sees the dot on her nose. She’s wiping it off her nose. She’s exhibiting advanced mental development. Only half of all unmodified 18-month-old babies self-recognize. Anna is not intellectually behind other babies her age; she’s far ahead of them. She’s just slow to physically age, which makes her appear slow to develop to a casual observer.”

They spoke for a while. They walked into the lobby and towards the front door.

“Thanks, Priya,” Leonid said. “We’re nervous since we’re the first mod parents of a full-term new species baby.”

“Yes, but you’re now in the company of 20 other mod couples who have had babies in the past few months. You guys were abducted when you were 18 and now, you’re almost 21. We need to stay in touch so we can keep track of the developmental cycle.”

They set up future appointments and walked out of Priya’s office.

As they turned the corner to walk out the front door. Two FBI agents stood there, blocking the doorway.

“Are you Leonid and Irina Akulov?” the first agent said.

“Yes,” Leonid said.

“You must come with us.”

“What law have they broken?” Priya said.

The first agent stared at Leonid and Irina sternly.

“You’re being charged with the procreation of offspring using artificial Omanji-modified DNA.”

Sophie walked into the lobby. Priya stared at the agents in disbelief.

“You can’t do this. That law is about creating babies with our modified DNA using artificial means.”

The second agent said, “Under this law, it doesn’t matter how the baby is created. A new interpretation of this law by the Supreme Court forbids the creation of any baby using artificially manipulated DNA.”

“I’ve never heard of this interpretation,” Priya said. “When did this happen?”

“About five minutes ago,” the first agent said as he checked his eyepiece. “We can’t charge them for something that happened before 5 minutes ago, but we can confiscate the baby after a hearing.

Priya’s eyes opened wide.

“Why you no good—”

“Pree, stop.” Sophie said and she grabbed her arm to hold her back.

“We’re only following orders, now come with us please,” the first agent said as he led them out the front door.

Priya and Sophie followed them down the stairs. Irina handed Anna to Priya.

“Take care of her,” she told Priya.

“I promise. I’ll have my parents take care of her. We’ll get Pablo’s legal team to defend you,” Priya said, as they were put into the police car.

Leonid and Irina gazed at them through the rear window as the police car drove away.

“Pree,” Sophie said. “Do you hear what I’m hearing on our telepathic network?”

“Hold on. They’re taking all of them right now.” Priya said. “All 20 couples with babies are in custody now. This is disgusting. I’ve seen these tactics used to rapidly catch entire mafia families or people in drug rings.”

“Pablo knows what’s happening,” Sophie said. “Warren does too. He’s at Pablo’s office.

“Good. Let’s go now,” Priya said.

“They ran to Pablo’s office.

“Are you telling me the moment they passed the new interpretation, they swooped right in to take them away?” Priya said.

“Yes,” Pablo said. “I can recall the exact timeline from our network. The arrests started three minutes after they voted in the law. Within eight minutes, all 20 couples were in custody.”

“How should we react?” Sophie said.

“I know how I want to react,” Priya said. “They’re taking away our right to procreate.”

“That appears to be the case,” Pablo said. “They carefully crafted the interpretation to leave room for amendments in the existing genetics and national security laws. They added this in with a bunch of other amendments on unrelated issues. They hoped we wouldn’t notice.”

“They intentionally snuck this through, those no good—”

“Pree, you need to meditate,” Sophie said.

“What do we do?” Priya said. “Do we just sit here and take this? You know they’re going to try to sterilize us.”

“We’ll fight,” Pablo said. “We have the right to live normal lives. We’re working on some ideas right now.”

Priya turned to Warren.

“We need to do something to keep an eye on what the government is doing. Somewhere right at this moment, people are planning to legally do to us what that guy did to me with the bottle.”

“Yeah, I’m going to get our best programmers to monitor this. We had no idea they were amending that law or planning those arrests.”

“I think the world is against us,” Priya said.

“I don’t think the entire world is against us,” Warren said. “But there’s a lot of fear out there. Fear can short-circuit the logical mind.”

“Yeah, that’s for sure,” Priya said. “We need to share more information on our telepathic network. It’s our only secure place. The Omanji technology can’t be hacked, at least not yet.”

“That’s true,” Warren said. “Armies of hackers are trying to get into our social network which has 4096-bit encryption. Even if they get in, they won’t know what they’re seeing. Up to this point, nobody has broken in. Sophie, you’ve been unusually quiet.”

“Leonid and Irina Akulov are talking to me telepathically. They’re telling me the police are trying to get them to log into their accounts on our social network.”

Warren fell silent for a moment.

“Okay, I just told the information technology guys to disable the accounts of those who were arrested.”

“I’m sure glad we can communicate silently,” Priya said. “We need to perfect our techniques in case they physically pull the plug on our online social network.”

“Oyuun is providing a lot of the world’s power already,” Warren said.

“Yeah, but they can always take a hammer to our servers no matter how well we hide them,” Priya replied. “Let’s stop putting vital current information there.”

“Good idea Pree,” Warren said. “I’m having the IT people warn everyone now.”

“I’m going down to the police station,” Pablo said. “They need lawyers.”

“Okay, good luck,” Priya said. “I knew we’d need good lawyers.”

Priya and Sophie walked back to work.

“What does the protester’s sign mean?” Priya said. “Secret society = World domination.”

“Let me search,” Sophie said.

She blinked her eyepiece to life.

“Ah, I understand. They think we’re creating a closed society to take over the world. They think once we own the world, we’ll create a master race which will dominate and own ‘real’ humans.”

“Ugh, just what we need, more conspiracy stories,” Priya said. “Check out that sign, ‘Unfair: I lost my job to a mutant.’ That’s untrue. We’re creating jobs.”

“We may be creating jobs on balance,” Sophie said. “But that protester lost his job to one of us. All you need for a good conspiracy story to go viral is a small element of truth.”

“In other words, our private social network is a secret society?” Priya said.

“Yes.”

“And because Warren and Oyuun are two of the wealthiest people on Earth, we’re questing for world domination?”

“Yes,” Sophie said.

Priya laughed.

“Take this seriously Pree. This type of fear can get out of hand.”

“Yeah, you’re right. It’s hard to take insanity seriously. However, I suppose if a crazy person pointed a gun at me, I’d take it seriously. Okay, let’s get back to work.”

“Okay, but first let’s go say hi to Ian. Today’s the big day.”

They walked into his lab.

“Congratulations Ian,” Priya said. “Over 1,000 people are cancer free because of your little flesh-eating friends.”

She smiled and continued.

“Yes, I know they don’t eat flesh. I remember when we walked into your room, and you told me you had flesh eating bacteria in those Petri dishes. Gross.”

“Yeah, now over a million orders are lined up,” Sophie said. “This is a big day. I used to worry that someday I’d get cancer, but not anymore.”

“Thanks guys. I used to joke around about finding a cure for cancer,” Ian said. “I still need to create strains for the stealthier cancers, but I’m getting there. I couldn’t have accomplished this without Warren’s initial investment.”

“You could have done this with me or without me,” Warren replied. “I helped things go a little faster. The IPO will give you the time to work on the other strains. The stock market is screaming higher, so now’s the time. It’s tripled from where it was before the Omanji came.”

“Why is the market going up so quickly?” Priya said.

“The biggest gainers are the companies where we work. Levitation Sciences, C5-AI, RoeBots, Bioneer Scientific, and other high-tech companies are up over 1,000%. It’s driving the rest of the market higher.”

“If times are so good, why are they protesting against us out on the street?” Priya said.

“They fear us, so they want to stop us and make us go away,” Warren replied. “They imagine us becoming wealthy and they think we’re taking money from them. However, we’re creating wealth. Ian is not taking anything from anyone by curing cancer. Well, he is putting the chemotherapy makers and cancer cure fraudsters out of business. I guess they’ll be picketing against us. Overall, society is benefiting from what we produce and discover. They also fear us for those ignorant old school reasons. We’re aliens, we can read minds, we spread disease, etc.”

“You’re right,” Priya said. “Oyuun is making those fusion power plants and energy prices are dropping. Then he made those small graphene, fusion power plants to desalinate water in drought-stricken places. His most ambitious goal is to use antimatter from his plants to send a probe to the closest habitable planet outside our solar system, at Proxima Centauri b. It’s about 4 light years away, which is close. The Omanji had backup planets, we should too.”

“We’re coming up with a clever way to improve the cognitive function for mentally challenged people,” Sophie said. “We’re doing a lot of good in the world. Most of us are under 20 years old.”

“Yeah, but they’re still protesting and throwing things at us,” Priya said. “Now they’re arresting us if we have babies. Among the 25,000 of us, a baby will be born every week or so.”

Silence.

“I’m sorry,” Priya said. “For now, let’s celebrate Ian’s cure for many types of cancer.”

Everyone cheered.