"Non-anomalous. And we're here to network, eh? Business-like."

"You're here to buy regular chemicals and meet people?" she says slowly.

"Nah, I'm here to run the booth. You're here to buy regular chemicals and meet people. Here's the shopping list."

Morgan stares at it blankly.

There's an explosion in her, waiting to come out. She is this close to decompensating like Krakatoa; the only thing holding her back is the crowd of strangers. Berating a coworker in public is simply not on – and yet, she still feels as though a strongly-worded interoffice memo won't cut it.

She takes the shopping list, closes her eyes, and counts to ten while imagining waves rolling in on the beach. Lets it all go.

"Okay."

"Next one's in fifteen. Some munter with a bucket on his head, can't miss it."

Morgan is perfectly calm.

"If I find out you had anything to do with this, I will nail your tongue to your desk," she says, perfectly calmly.

Is Morgan going to check out anything else at the trade show in the next fifteen minutes?

That depends on whether there's anything particularly eye-catching.

There's a demo of a massive, multi-limbed machine performing abdominal surgery in the next aisle.

…on a person?

No, it's a mannequin.

The interior of the mannequin is quite lifelike, though. The robot has peeled back the layers of the synthetic belly to expose a rubber gastrointestinal tract, four of its arms holding the skin and fascia still while two more repair a hernia with flawless precision. There are two staff members at the booth, both talking to other members of the audience – supposedly this thing is fully autonomous, although one of the salesmen claims it was built to complement human surgeons. Before their very eyes, the robot picks its stitches apart and closes the incision.

An emoticon of a smiley face briefly appears on the monitor facing the audience before it repeats the cycle.

That doesn't seem evil at all. Who made this?

According to the placard bolted to the chassis it's a Hummingbird Surgical System, designed by Anderson Robotics!

Nevermind! Morgan is instead going to leave, before the Anderson staff and the endotracheal tube guy and Kelsey and the engineers who think that creating cyborgs is a great idea instead of a nightmare realize they're all in the same room and start giving each other ideas.

Giving each other ideas? That's the whole point!

Fifteen minutes and one stiff Irish coffee later, Morgan makes her way to a seminar room near the back of the building. "Introduction to Genomic Engineering," according to the map – a field germane to her own interests, although as a virologist she prefers to study organisms with a single-digit number of genes in their genome.

She goes inside. It reminds her of a university classroom, with rows of chairs arranged facing a projector that currently shows a faux-crayon drawing of a DNA strand under a magnifying glass. It's nearly full. She takes a seat at the back, next to an unusually tall woman with charcoal-black skin.

A few seconds later, the man running the seminar enters the room. He wears cerise-accented power armor that makes almost no noise as he crosses the floor, complete with a helmet that admittedly does look sort of like an upside-down bucket. He adjusts the microphone towards his face and speaks in a deep, computer-modulated voice.

"Hello. At some point in your journey you may wish to create life. This is a moderately complicated process. I cannot devote time to every edge case in the period we are allotted, nor even to some more common pitfalls – this is an introductory lecture, not an entire course – but by the end you will hopefully know which questions to ask next. I will presume that you are familiar with the central dogma and the basics of trait inheritance; please save questions on those topics for the end."

Moderately complicated?

"I will cover the why first, before moving on to the what and the how. Custom organisms are well-suited for work that baseline humans cannot accomplish."

He clicks to the next slide, showing a cartoon of Albert Einstein performing an overhead press.

"The ultimate limits of human strength and intelligence are relatively low. Whichever metric one hews to, it's clear that the products of natural selection fall shy of what is theoretically possible. No matter how much weight a large man can bear up, he will never compare to the African elephant; in a similar fashion, while there are many ways to estimate intelligence, humans are limited by cranial hardware. The algorithm that produced us did not attempt to maximize anything beyond the capacity to continue one's lineage indefinitely. This reasoning can therefore be extended to other desirable traits, such as magical potential."

A woman in the front row raises her hand and speaks immediately.

"What about performance-enhancing drugs?"

"Useful for reaching peak performance – not for exceeding it. The maximum contractile force a human can exert with any muscle group is partially dictated by their skeletal geometry, which is generally unaffected by synthetic androgen use. The strongest man known to me cannot deadlift more than 2,500 lbs, even with extensive chemical assistance. As for nootropics, they are indicative of a problem in molecular biology to which I shall return shortly."

"All right."

"Once you have come to this conclusion, the natural next question: why new life and not machines? The world's strongest man is famously associated with an inventor and user of power armor, one who can lift 2,500 lbs over his head with no particular difficulty. Such devices are useful," he says, waving a hand at himself, "but must be designed to specification. They lack adaptability, and must be continuously re-engineered as your needs evolve.

"Of course, one might wish to combine the flexibility of conscious life with the calculating power of silicon and the strength of titanium. Accomplishing this in a satisfactory manner remains an unsolved problem in the field."

Next slide: a photograph of an asteroid approaching Earth.

"You are encouraged to experiment with artificial intelligence only in worlds that will not be missed when destroyed utterly."

"With that warning out of the way…"

He brings up another slide, this one a single photograph:

"The growth factor responsible for arresting muscle development is called myostatin. Unlike most genes, its English-language name is a reliable clue to its function. There are several naturally-occurring point mutations that silence myostatin expression, leading to mammals and birds with a gross surplus of muscle tissue. They are, as you might expect, significantly stronger than the wild type. Myostatin is an excellent starting point for your journey into creating transgenic life – it has a more dramatic positive impact than nearly any other individual gene.

"However, myostatin is highly conserved – many species have it, and it rarely changes. If you will forgive some anthropomorphism, natural selection likes myostatin. Can anyone tell me why?"