ABSTRACT
Tracy was facing the moment every parent finds difficult. Sharon had started asking The Question: Where did I come from, Mummy? As she patted her daughter’s blonde hair (catalogue number: HC 205) and looked into her perfect cornflower-blue eyes (catalogue number: EC 317), Tracy decided that, in the year 2095, there was nothing to be squeamish about. Sharon had heard disturbing rumours about how in the olden days, when a man and a woman wanted to have a baby, they went to bed with each other and left the outcome to passion and chance. Well, this was certainly not the way that Trevor and Tracy had set about bringing their daughter into the world. The very idea that any responsible parent could possibly permit a child to be born whose genes had been left to the chance shuffling of natural processes-it was quite obscene. No parent would allow a foetus to go through nine months of development without knowing the colour of its eyes, or whether it had straight hair or wavy. Good grief, no one would ever conceive a child without ensuring that it met the minimum genetically specified intelligence quotient.
