Credit: Jamie Tufrey/COSMOS
The first thing I noticed about the new girl was that she wasn't wearing the school colours on her face. I had never seen a pupil of McAllister Girls' Academy without the school badge on her skin. Then I noticed that her hair was kind of frizzy and that it looked real.
"She must be an anti-synth," said Alicia incredulously. "Wow. I've read about them, but I never thought I'd meet one. What a freak."
"Why would anybody be anti-synth?" asked Jeddy. "They'd have to deal with all kinds of killer diseases. I just can't imagine anybody being so dumb. It's retro and not in a good way. She must be a freak."
I remembered that there was an anti-synth community somewhere in the Midlands, maybe in Nottingham. They were called Charlies. They live without any synthetic gene technologies.
"It's a religious thing," I said, staring at the new girl. She looked so strange walking through the school without the school colours. She looked naked, somehow.
I realised that, for the first time, I was looking at a person without any synthetic mods. She looked pretty good to me, attractive, even. I turned back to the canteen table, and I saw that Alicia and Jeddy were staring at me. Alicia and Jeddy were my best friends.
"What do you think, Marjory?" asked Alicia.
"She must be a freak," I said.
Turned out that Ella wasn't a Charlie. Mrs McAllister, the school's headmistress, explained it all to us, when she bought Ella into class.
Ella was disabled. She has an anomalous genome that won't allow any click-DNA insertions. She has some kind of crazy, ultra-efficient immune system that just eats up any foreign DNA that tries to enter her body.
"I've got Metchnikoff Syndrome. It's my macrophage assembly. It's incredibly effective - a hint of foreign DNA and ... zap."
Mrs McAllister had assigned me as Ella's buddy, and I was showing her around the school. She didn't seem to mind talking about her disability. I thought that was pretty cool.
"Can't they mod your phages, and make them less effective or something?" I asked.
