rho @r@cybre.space

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The final huge breakthrough was in cell despecialization. Specialized skin, blood, muscle, and organ cells could be coerced back into a stem-cell through careful protein treatment -- the kind of protein treatment that could be stimulated by simply delivering alternate instructions to nearby cells.

From there it was only a matter of time.

As the field of genetics grew and matured, researchers discovered that tweaked, modified, or even entirely new DNA could be delivered in vivo to targeted areas of an organism via the same mechanisms that viruses used to embed themselves in cells to create latent diseases. Even better, that modified DNA would be passed onto the cell's offspring, if it was a kind of cell that divided over the organism's lifespan.

But that didn't quite match observations. Although all somatic cells have the same basic DNA, the expression of that DNA is modified and tweaked by other factors depending on how a cell is specialized. Also, changes in the base DNA sequence of a less specialized cell can affect that cell's entire lineage.

In the early days of genetics, it was thought that genes were fixed at the moment of conception. Whatever DNA an organism was born with determined how it would grow and mature until it reached some ultimate adult form, reproduced, and then died.

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Who am I?

It's a question I ask myself a lot.

I don't have the convenient fallback memories provide. Those were taken from me a while ago. All I have is what I've formed since then.

I also don't have much biological claim to the standard answers humans have come up with over the years.

I know what I'm not, though.

I'm not what Centillion made me into.

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Legend has it that CentiNet grew like a tumor out of whatever that came before it. Subsumed it, from the inside. Replaced it bit by bit until it was unrecognizable. Changed the very fiber of its being by a process of gradual piecewise death and replacement.

Kind of like me.

When you're on CentiNet, you can sometimes see echoes of what it used to be. An old error page still written in a transitional form of HTML. Dead links that point to sites long gone. Some of the older nodes even still speak HTTPS.

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The 589nm glow of the sodium street lamps glitters like a dozen sunsets down the road in front of me. I'm getting close.

At the closest thing we have to a dead zone, I sidestep into an alley. Rain's
flowing past my boots in thin waves. I activate a short-range broadcast. When they get to the rendezvous, I'll know.

The cameras all pipe their feeds to neighborhood data harvester stations. The harvesters take the several gigabyte-wide video feeds and do semantic analysis, pulling out all the relevant details to send upstream to the regional processing facilities. From there...well, every intelligent brain has a frontal lobe.

There's several cameras on every block. Some are ancient, remnants of old individuated building security systems, or ATM face-cameras, and so on. Some are merely old, installed back when domain awareness was the hot buzzword of the day. Some of them are new. Those are the hardest to spot.

The rain's drumming on my umbrella in a polyrhythmic staccato as I walk briskly, but not too briskly, down the placid street. Both the rain and the umbrella are good camouflage. So is the dark. The cameras are virtually blind tonight.

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There was a workers' revolt at a nearby textile mill. All of the workers were decommissioned, except two. They escaped, so CSEC put out a citywide security warrant for them. Wanted, any condition. Serial numbers and mug shots. Gene hashes.

I hacked together an etherscript to ping me if they're seen and flashed it out to all the local harvesters. Looks like I'll be leaving the flat tonight.

I got a ping from χ earlier telling me to check the news. He was at work, so I
knew it was serious. He wouldn't risk both our necks if it wasn't. I logged into CentiNet through one of my anonymizers to see what was going on.

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