"How's he doing?" He seems like he's almost suicidal," Nerdly said. "He's living in a one room apartment in Hollywood and pays the rent by lubing cars...for minimum wage. He picks up a hundred dollars or so a month with the studio sessions they throw him and he's just waiting for their contract to expire so he can be a real musician again." How sad for him," Crow said, rolling his eyes. "But you have to remember..." You know why the studio likes to use him?" Nerdly asked, interrupting Crow."Why?". I touched the screen onelast time. It was too late to stop the process now. My father's firstmodification was underway. 3Reconfigurations of high complexity often take up to four hours. I leftthe machine flashing and whirring to make a salad in the laboratorykitchen.I had loved salads even in my unmodified past, but my reshuffledmorphology adored them. In my masculine form, a "salad" consisted oflettuce, tomato, and onion. I now couldn't imagine a salad. I was wrong. As I came into the kitchen she was making breakfast and looking like she had just won the lottery. She smiled at me and pointed to the calendar we had on the wall. I couldn’t help but notice that today was circled with a bold black line, the date, June the 6th. I sat at the table and thought of the irony of that date, in 1944 thousands of soldiers and sailors had sought to free Europe from a tyrant. Today, I lost my wife to another oppressor. Kathy was almost giddy as she brought. Wilson was the teacher in charge that night. I signed in at her desk and she gave me the rules. "You're to sit quietly for the next hour. No cell phones. No getting up without permission. You're allowed to read or do homework, but no other activities are permitted. If you run out of work to do, you are to sit and think about why you got in detention until the time is up." I pulled out my English textbook and started to read the short story we were assigned to do a report on. After about fifteen.