"2277."

"We're in 2998 standard, but humans have been working alone, and it definitely sounds like we have things to share both ways."

"Even if warp doesn't work for you? Yeah. What's the most efficient way to do this...?"

"If we get information about your world's technology in electronic format from Bar, we can take it home and have somebody convert it. I'm sure Simon would be thrilled. I don't know how well the reverse holds."

"We have some experience in getting disparate systems to play nicely with each other," says Lalita.

"You know, I wonder if Dr. Hall would want anything to do with this conversation," says Lalita.

"Do you suppose he'd give Linyabel a sample, too?"

"Incidentally, the door will only continue to lead here as long as somebody from your room is in the bar or holding the door, and unless the door is open to your world no time will pass there," Linya mentions. "Dr. Hall is, I take it, another engineered person?"

"Yes. More species-mixed and more in hiding about it than me," says Lalita.

"With some psi - more like very dilute Betazoid than Vulcan, although he said he had both; he gets emotions from a bit of range."

"Speaking of which, Isabella, I already have a sequencer and would like a sample of you too if you don't mind."

"I... suppose? What are you going to do with it exactly? I'm not immortal."

"I'm going to compare it against mine."

"Oh. Sure. ...Are you going to do all this work yourself?"

"I'm slightly tempted to seek help from the other haut, on the immortality project if not my personal curiosity about alts project, but there are some drawbacks to that plan. Maybe if I manage to rule out enough factors and anonymize the sequence enough that I can be sure there's no way they could outright clone Lalita - usually haut don't go in for clones, but this would easily tempt an exception. Doing it myself would probably take long enough to make it impractical to get even a plausible prototype into our children. I might just acquire geneticists the way I acquired a neurologist."

"I would prefer that nobody cloned me," says Lalita.

"If you clone me you get half a Lalita, apparently; if you clone Lalita do you get half a me?" wonders Miles. "I am not suggesting that anyone make the experiment, mind. Particularly not the haut."

"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."

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

"And whoever you hire could figure it out?"

"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."

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

"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."

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