MANHATTAN

"Perrier?" Judy said. "Are my ears playing tricks or did I just hear you order water?"

Ellis had been taking in Tavern On The Green's sunny, glass-walled Terrace Room with its hand-carved plaster ceiling and panoramic view of Central Park. The park was more impressive when in bloom, but even here in the fall he found a certain stark, Wyethesque beauty in the denuded trees. The Terrace Room's seating capacity was 150. Today it seated only four: Ellis, Judy, his daughter, Julie, and son, Robbie, the birthday boy. He'd rented out the entire space for a family luncheon.

Ellis turned to his ex-wife. Judy was looking better than ever. With her perfectly coiffed blond hair, her diamond bracelets, and her high-collared, long-sleeved, clinging pink dress made out of some sort of jersey material - Versace, he guessed, because she'd always loved Versace - she fit perfectly in this ornate setting. Judy was only two years his junior, but Ellis thought he must look like her father. She was enjoying her wealth from the divorce settlement. Far more than Ellis was enjoying his own.

"Yes," Ellis told her. "I've decided to take a vacation from alcohol."

"That's wonderful, Ellis." He knew she meant it. The divorce had been amicable: Ellis had told her she could have anything she wanted. That said, she'd taken a lot less then she could have - more than the GNP of a number of small nations, to be sure, but still, she could have grabbed for so much more. "How long has this been going on?"

"Since the summer."

"What made you...?"

"Lots of developments, lots of things happening. Things I want to keep an eye on."

"And Mercer? How's he?"

"The same. Eats, sleeps, and drinks the business. Still obsessed with SimGen's profits and its image. Someday he'll look around and wonder where his life has gone." He leaned closer and lowered his voice. "Did you hold on to all that SimGen stock from the settlement?"

Her brows knitted. "Yes. Why?"

"Wait till after the earnings report at the December stockholders' meeting, take advantage of the bounce, then dump it."

"Is something wrong?"

"Things might become...unsettled. I want you and the kids protected. But mum's the word. Just sell quietly and stick it all in T-notes, okay?"

She set her lips and nodded.

"Good." He straightened, put on a happy face, and looked around the table. "But enough about me and Mercer and business. This is a celebration." He turned to Robbie. "How's the birthday going so far?"

His son shrugged, a typical fifteen-year-old's studied nonchalance mixing with embarrassment at being out on the town with his folks and his younger sister on his birthday. He was underdressed in denims for the occasion, but that was to be expected of a boy his age; his buzz-cut hair revealed a bumpy skull. Hardly attractive, Ellis thought, but it was the style. So was the turquoise stud in Robbie's left eyebrow. At least he showed no signs of a splice, and Ellis prayed he never would. He realized it was a teenager's duty to irk his parents, but he hoped Robbie would find his own ways rather than galloping after the herd.

"Okay, I guess."

Ellis smiled. He wasn't making any appreciable progress developing the new sim line he so desperately wanted, but he was feeling good about himself nonetheless, better than he had in years, and he wanted to share it. Only on rare state occasions did they get together as a family, but he'd used Robbie's fifteenth birthday as a reason, and it was as good an excuse as any.

"Just okay?" Ellis said. "This is your favorite restaurant, right?"

He had a big day planned. After lunch they'd head for Broadway where he had four precious front-row seats forWordplay! , the hot new musical comedy everyone said was a must-see. Then dinner at Le Cirque, followed by a Knicks game in the SimGen skybox.

As Robbie shrugged, Julie chimed in. "I can't wait to see the play!"

She was thirteen and the light of Ellis's life. Judy had dressed her in a plaid wool skirt and a white blouse. Julie's pod backpack was suede, sporting the Dooney & Bourke logo. Robbie was an intelligent kid, but Julie was brilliant. She had a wonderful future ahead of her.

A memory surfaced...of the day SIRG had threatened Julie to assure his silence, to keep him in line. And it had worked...for a while...until he'd found another way to make things right. But God help Julie and Robbie if SIRG ever found out.

He shoved the memory back into the depths. Nothing was going to ruin today.

"You just want to see Joey Dozier," Robbie sneered.

"Who's he?" Ellis said, fully aware he was a teen heartthrob who'd moved from a hit TV sitcom to lead in a Broadway play. "Never heard of him."

Julie got a dreamy look in her eyes. "He'sgorgeous! " she said, as if that explained it all.

Ellis started to laugh but it died in his throat as he saw the small crowd of sign-carrying protesters appear at the Terrace Room windows. Their chant of "Free the sims! Free the sims!" began to echo through the glass.

The tuxedoed maitre d' hurried to Ellis's side.

"I'm so sorry, Mr. Sinclair. I've called the police. They will be here in a few minutes."

Ellis looked around the table. Judy was ignoring them, Julie was watching, fascinated, and Robbie, the birthday boy, looked ready to crawl under the table.

"How did they know I'd be here?" Ellis asked, furious. He'd booked the whole room just to avoid an incident, even used a pseudonym.

"Someone must have recognized you."

Pretty fast work, considering he left all the public appearances to Mercer. Probably someone on the Tavern staff. However it had happened, he wasn't going to let them ruin the day he had planned.

He pushed back his chair and rose. "I'll handle this."

"Ellis, no!" Judy said, placing a hand on his arm.

"Mr. Sinclair, the police - "

"Could take a while to get here. In the meantime I want to talk to these people."

He crossed to a door leading out to the lawn and stepped through. The shouting grew louder as the crowd - a three-to-one ratio of women to men - recognized him. He stood impassively for a moment or two, then raised his hands.

When they quieted enough for him to be heard he said, "Please. I'm trying to have lunch with my family."

Cries of "Aaaaaw!" and "Pity the poor man!" rose, and one woman stepped forward to snarl, "Yeah! Eating lunch grown and harvested by slave labor!"

Ellis stepped forward. He'd noticed something interesting about a number of the protesters.

"If this is supposed to accomplish something," he told them, "I assure you it won't. Perhaps a more sincere group might make a point, but not a bunch of hypocrites."

Ellis kept moving into the gasps of "What!" and "You bastard!" and "What right?" and pointed to the snarling woman's handbag.

"Balducci, right?"

Her only reply was a stunned look.

"Sim made!" Ellis pivoted and jabbed a finger at the insignia on a man's windbreaker. "Tammy Montain - sim made!" As he slipped deeper into the throng, pointing out all the popular labels that used sim labor, crying "Sim made!" over and over, he knew he should be careful. But these people angered him, and not simply because they'd interrupted his lunch.

Finally he was back where he'd started and could see by their expressions and averted eyes that he'd taken the steam out of them.

"How can you be part of the solution when you're part the problem?" he said, knowing it was a cliche but knowing too that it would hit home. "You really want to 'free the sims'? The fastest way is to boycott any company that uses them as labor. Companies understand one thing: the bottom line. If that's falling off because they use sim labor, then they're going tostop using sim labor. It's as simple as that. But you can't show up here wearing sim-made clothes and shoes and accessories and expect anyone with a brain to take you seriously. If you're sincere about this you're going to have to make some sacrifices, you're going to have to let the Joneses have the more prestigious sim-made car, the more fashionable sim-made sweater. Otherwise, you're just blowing smoke."

Ellis stepped back inside and closed the door behind him. He had no idea what the protesters would do next, but the question was made moot by the arrival of half a dozen cops who began herding them off.

He returned to the table to find his family staring at him.

"Dad," Robbie said, wide-eyed. "You were great!"

"Ellis?" Judy said. Ellis noticed a tremor in her voice, and were those...?

Yes, she had tears in her eyes. "For a moment there you were like...like you used to be."

He looked into her moist blue eyes. God, he wanted her back, more than anything in the world.

"I don't know if I can ever be like I used to be, Judy," he said, knowing his soul was scarred beyond repair. "But if things go right, if a few things happen the way I hope they will, I should be able to present a reasonable facsimile."

"But Dad," Robbie was saying, "you were, like, telling them how to, like, so screw your own company."

Ellis put on a pensive expression. "You know, Robbie, now that you mention it, I believe I was. I'll have to be more careful in the future."

"Will sims ever evolve into humans?" Julie said, looking up at him with her mother's huge blue eyes.

Ellis stared at her, momentarily dumb.

"She's studying evolution in school," Judy offered.

Ellis cleared his throat and controlled the sudden urge to run from the room. He'd rather be off the subject of sims - this was Robbie's birthday after all - and especially off their evolutionary genetics, but how could he not answer the jewel of his life?

"Doyou think they will?"

"Well," she said slowly, "we humans evolved from chimps, and sims are a mix of chimps and humans, so won't sims evolve into humans someday?"

"No," Ellis said, choosing his words carefully. "You see, humans didn't evolve from chimps; chimps and humans are primates and both evolved from a common primate ancestor, an ape that had evolved from the monkeys."

"A gorilla?"

"No. Gorillas branched off earlier. Let's just call our common ancestor the mystery primate."

Julie grinned. "Why call him 'mysteryprimate'?"

"Because we haven't found his bones yet. But we don't need to. Genetics tells the story. So even though we may never identify the mystery primate's remains, we know he existed and we know that at some point millions of years ago, whether because of a flood or a continental upheaval or climactic changes in Africa, a segment of the mystery primate population became separated from the larger main body. This smaller group wound up stranded in a hotter, drier environment, probably in northeast Africa; some theories say it was an island, but whatever the specifics, the important point is they were cut off from all the other jungle-dwelling primates. And there, under pressure to adapt to their new environment, they began to evolve in their own direction."

"But didn't the mystery primates in the jungle evolve too?"

"Of course, but because they were in an environment they were used to, they had little need for change, so they evolved more slowly, and in a different direction: toward what we now call chimpanzees. Meanwhile the primates in the separated group, in a drier, savanna-like environment, were changing: They were growing taller, their skin was losing its hair and learning to sweat in the hotter temperatures; and because they were no longer in a lush jungle where food was hanging from every other tree, they had to learn to hunt to keep from starving. This added extra protein to their diet which meant they could afford to enlarge a very important organ that needs lots of protein to grow. Do you know what that organ is?"

"The brain," Julie said.

"You aresmart ," he told her. "Absolutely right. The sum of all these changes meant that they were evolving into hominids."

"Humans, right?"

"Humans are hominids, true, but it took millions of years for the first hominids to evolve intoHomo sapiens ."

"But once they got back to the jungle, couldn't the hominids get back together with the mystery primates?"

Bright as Julie was, Ellis wondered how far he could delve into the intricacies of evolutionary drift with a thirteen-year-old. He paused, looking for an analogy. He knew she played the cello in her school orchestra...maybe she could understand if he related evolution to music.

"Think of DNA as a magnificent symphony, amazingly complex even though it is composed with only four notes. Every gene is a movement, and every base pair is a musical note within that movement. So if one of those base pairs is out of sequence, the melody can go wrong, become discordant. If enough are out of place, it can ruin the entire symphony. But sometimes changes can work to the benefit of the symphony.

"Imagine the sheet music for a concert arriving in a city far from where it was composed. The local musicians look at it and say, 'No one around here is going to like this section, nor that movement; we'd better change them.' And they do. And then that version is shipped off to another city even farther away, and those local musicians find they must make further changes to satisfy their audience. And on it goes, until the music is radically different from what was on the original sheets.

"This is what happened to the sheet music of the hominid's DNA. It was progressively changed by different environments; but the chimp DNA never left its hometown, so it changed relatively little. And because they'd been separated, with the genes of one group never having a chance to mix with the genes of the other, each group kept evolving in its own direction, causing their genomes to drift further and further apart.

"At some point millions of years ago both groups reached the stage where neither was a mystery primate anymore. By the time the hominids started spreading into different areas of Africa, it was too late for a reunion. The hominids were playing Bach, while the chimps sounded like heavy metal. They couldn't play together. Too many changes. One of the most obvious was the fusion of two primate chromosomes in the hominids, leaving them with twenty-three pairs instead of the twenty-four their jungle cousins still carried."

"But sims have only twenty-two pairs, right?" Julie said. "What happened - ?"

"That's way too long a story for now," Ellis said quickly. "Suffice it to say that the two groups had evolved so far apart that they could no longer have children together. Once that happened, their evolutionary courses were separated forever. So you see, a chimpanzee cannot evolve into a human any more than a human..."

His voice dried up.

Julie said, "But that doesn't mean a sim won't evolve into a human."

"Sims are different, Julie. Theycan't evolve. Ever. To evolve you must be able to have children, and sims can't. Each sim is cloned from a stock of identical cell cultures. They are all genetically equal. Evolution involves genetic changes occurring over many generations, but sims have no generations, therefore no evolution."

"This is pretty heavy luncheon chatter, don't you think?" Judy said.

Ellis was grateful for the interruption.

"Your mother's right." He chucked Julie gently under the chin. "We can continue this another time. But did I answer your question?"

"Sure," Julie said with a smile. "Sims will always be stuck being sims."

Not if I can help it, Ellis thought.

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