hell of a party

[middlingalong]

Ivan must be drunker than he thought he was. He could have sworn he knew his way around Vivienne's parents' house, since she wanted to introduce him last week and showed him the place, but maybe they have a... secret... upstairs... bar? where Vivienne's room is supposed to be? And most certainly was last time he checked? He's never going to find the sweater she sent him up looking for here, anyway. Why is there a secret upstairs bar in Vivienne's parents' house?

Comments

[isthisart]

"I do not plan to clone you. It wouldn't even help - here's a live you, as immortal or close to it as you are, cloning you wouldn't add new information. I would be somewhat inclined to trust a promise from the haut Empress Lisbet that she would not allow any cloning of you to happen but less inclined to believe that she could guarantee that no one would do it without her catching them. The scenario I envisioned was figuring out as much as I can on my own, removing everything about your genome that definitely isn't making you immortal because it's busy making your eyes brown or what have you, and sending that along - but I'll probably just hire my own geneticists; I can afford it."

[thisvorlunatic]

Miles is now spinning nightmare scenarios about someone with Lalita's genes and his personality being raised haut.

[dream_me_up]

"And whoever you hire could figure it out?"

[isthisart]

"One hopes. If I do my own office cryptography and don't keep any wetware equipment around I can be sure none of them run away with enough of the sample to clone, and we could hope to figure out how you manage to be immortal, if the biology cooperates enough - if your world doesn't have humans who are just slightly too different to be useful to us, or something. And in that case I suppose I could live in hope that I'd find the bar again and at least get my results back to you, although you'll have a harder time doing anything with them if genetic engineering is illegal and most people are non-humans."

[dream_me_up]

"Yeah, those are not good conditions to use something like this."

[isthisart]

"Well, maybe we can give you useful things to at least partially compensate. Let's start with medicine, I know some medicine." She has some medicine on her pen, even. She calls up her textbook list and skims it. "If you have a doctor handy and neither of you is one that might be useful for figuring out what I know that's novel."

[dream_me_up]

"It shouldn't be too hard to track down Dr. Hall."

[warpfairy]

"I'll hold the door so no one sees me suspiciously ambulatory, you go fetch him?"

[isthisart]

"Why is it suspicious that you're ambulatory?"

[warpfairy]

"Lalita gave me a blood transfusion. It's got some pretty extreme healing properties."

[dream_me_up]

"It can't fix death. Short of that—" he shrugs.

[thisvorlunatic]

[isthisart]

"I changed my mind. I do want to clone you. It is possible to do single-organ cloning, including just blood. I can wrap it up in every intellectual property law that exists, and if it retains these miraculous properties afterwards I can shred the DNA in the product before it ships, and I can dye it purple so nobody suspects it's blood unless I can't find a dye that cooperates with the effects, will that do?"

[dream_me_up]

"...yeah," he says, "okay."

[isthisart]

She beams.

[warpfairy]

"It's lucky you have a hope of being able to use a thing like this. I'm planning to shift more of my activism attention to the issue after I'm done being shot at for advocating Federation admission for warp-incapable species, but I don't have a realistic hope of getting much of anywhere."

[dream_me_up]

"Anyway. Are we sending me out to find Dr. Hall?"

[warpfairy]

"Yes, I think so." Isabella goes to hold the door. She sneaks a kiss before he goes out into the hall.

[dream_me_up]

Kiss!

Off he goes.

[thisvorlunatic]

"I wonder how much that blood of his can cure."

[warpfairy]

"I took a phaser hit directly to the chest, and it was not set to stun. Dr. Hall did a lot of amazing reconstructive work, but this was a few days ago and now I'm not even on painkillers."

[isthisart]

"There is something called a 'phaser' which has a 'stun' setting and can also take out large portions of your chest?"

[warpfairy]

"Uh, yes. Do we want to exchange weapons technology...?"

[isthisart]

"Maybe. We have stunners, but they don't have a 'hospitalize' setting."

[thisvorlunatic]

"We want to exchange weapons technology," Miles says firmly. "You don't have to use ours if you don't want to, but damn, a stunner with more intimidating settings available—? Best of both worlds as far as I'm concerned."