But despite all this, you still get a few hesomagari, the ''twisted navels," those full-blooded humans contrary or perverse enough to seek a fulfillment not socially sanctioned.

Such as Bert Mayr.

We had his files downloaded before we left Ixsys. And this was what we learned.

Mayr was the son of NU citizens Rowen a a nd Boris Mayr, ex-settlers who had retreated in failure from the hard life on board Aquarius, the floating arcology and OTEC power plant off the coast of Madagascar. Their Lotto-won berths had gone to others when they fled back to Boston.

Boris had died here shortly after Bert's birth. Caught in the middle of a turf war between the Morgue Boys and the Thai Guys out in Charlestown, where the mother still lived. She had never rebonded on a permanent basis.

Mayr had grown up to be your archetypical loner. No friends, no resident erotofiscal partner, no transient lovers. Apparently, he had followed this solitary lifestyle ever since becoming fully enfranchised.

My cop's intuition drew me a picture of a mama's boy, the only token of his lost father, a coddled and fussed-over introvert.

In his final year of schooling, Mayr had shown aptitude as a chromosartor. Given the standard Scios Nova cooker-splicer setup for twelve-year-olds, he had soon modified it with add-ons purchased with his pocket money to produce standalone entities up to the level of annelids. He loved to hack nucleotides and amino acids, perhaps too much so. Legal and moral boundaries appeared to mean little to him. He had almost gotten expelled for the prank of infesting the school's showers with nonreproductive hookworms. He had programmed them with only a thirty-day lifespan-but in that time they also secreted low levels of psilocybin-analogues directly into the victim's gut.

When he had graduated, he found that his juvenile record of misdemeanors worked against him. No respectable peltsie would hire him as a chromosartor (at least without Mayr consenting to a course of corrective tropes, a measure he apparently rejected), for fear of his dangerously irresponsible attitude. The best job he could get was field-testing at Ixsys, a position he had held unremarkably for the past decade.

"And then along came the Blankie," K-mart said, back at the office when we had finished viewing the file.

"It must have triggered something latent in him. Or touched some active kink."

"Because he was the first to have access to the Blankie, he came to regard it as his personal property. He takes it home-Tara! You don't think Ixsys insisted he use it, do you?"

I shrugged. "That's what field-testing's all about."

"Shit! Thank Ishtar I work in the adminisphere! Anyway, he gets hooked on the Blankie, uses his skills to alter it

for sex. Then when Ixsys finds out and fires him, he goes suborbital, absconding with the product. Finally, he comes to resent anybody else who owns one."

Nodding agreement, I said, "I think we need to pay a little visit to Peej Mayr."

"Should I sign out the Viper again?"

"No. A Bulldog."

A cocktail of canine, wolverine, hyena, and-of course-smattering of human, the Bulldog was what we favored for a one-perp pickup with low to medium violence potential. (And Mayr's MO, with its kind of remote-control aggro, led me to suspect he wouldn't resist arrest.) Massing only three-quarters of a basal human, the Bulldog was capable of taking down half a dozen nonmoddies faster than you could say "Kreb's cycle."

In the car on the way to Mayr's last address, we got a bulletin.

Almost as if our psychic attention on Mayr had drawn him out, there had been another Blankie incident. This time the vector for the assault was a family splice, a Dumbunni. Returning from an errand, it had seemed disoriented. Sent to its manger, it had wandered instead to the human nursery, where it was found gnawing at the Blankie with its blunt, newly venomous teeth. Luckily, the prodge was rescued before the Blankie began fibrillating.

"We've got to put this guy away," K-mart said, "or our personal asses-not to mention the department's-will be so much feedstock. You've read the profile of the average Blankie owner. He or she is a hardnosed, string-pulling plute who's not going to sit quietly for this."

"Agreed. But I'm actually more interested in the details of the perp's kink."

"Great. You can write it up later for the UPCM Journal. But we've got to catch him first."

Mayr's last-known residence turned out to be one of those old asymmetrical rhizomatic structures out in Cambridge. The bawab was a doddering kibe whose split casing seams were patched with Radio Shack Silly Cement. The unit directed us to Mayr's flat, where our idents secured immediate entrance.

A stale smell and a layer of dust (the lowrent place didn't even have self cleaning capabilities) told us no one had occupied the rooms for at least a month.

"Shit! Cold trail," K-mart said.

"Patience, patience. No telling what a search will turn up."

So while the Bulldog stood guard at the door, we began to go through the rooms.

I found Mayr's porn stash in one of the more clever hideaways I had ever encountered. One portion of the bumpy, seemingly dead wall was in reality an embedded modified marine polyp With very good mimicry features. It had taps into the residential structure's water veins, but apparently hadn't been fed in a while. As I was running my fingers over the wall, the polyp dropped its disguise, flexed open, extruded tentacles, and weakly attempted to ingest my hand.

I yelped, K-mart came running, flashlight in hand. He lasered the creature dead. Inside its still quivering husk were several datapins.

We dried them and popped them into K-mart's poqetpal. Images cohered. Right away I noticed something missing: the usual WTO official imprimatur: ALL MODELS ARE ENFRANCHISED CITIZENS OVER AGE TWELVE. Then I focused on the pictures.

Back in that reedpair time I had been recently speculating on, there had been a flourishing porn trade-conducted mostly in the old nation-state of Japan-known as bura-sera. Images of young schoolgirls hoisting their skirts to reveal their simple, functional underwear. Sometimes this speciality extended to the sale of the underwear itself. Preferably soiled.

With the gradual lowering of the franchise to its current level, this trade had disappeared-merged, rather, into the mainstream. But what K-mart and I now viewed reminded me of it and was plainly an offshoot or descendent of the burasera.

It was pix after pix of diaper-clad individuals, ages ranging from newborn to elderly. There was no actual sex going on that would have made the pins contraband. But there was a lot of peeing and crapping.

K– mart was disgusted. "This stuff isn't even illegal! It's just stupid! Why would anyone murder over it?"

I shut off the display. "You got me, Kaz. But if this accurately represents Mayr's hardwiring, then you can see how the Blankie was like a match to tinder for him. When Ixsys took it away from him, all he could think of was revenge."

Just then a bulletin came in. Another Blankie taken out, this time by a swarm of sweatbees. Luckily, no loss of human life.

"What next?" asked K-mart. "Maybe a talk with Rowena Mayr?"

"Sounds good. I think I'd like to ask her where she got her parenting license."

Rowena Mayr lived in an insensate building in a dismal neighborhood right below the Seraphim tracks. The super-fast train suspended from its overhead monorail was relatively quiet. But the Boston-Montreal Express went by once an hour, and somehow you could feel its passage in your gut as it split the air.

The crumbling stoop outside Mayr's building was occupied with dole-proles and their nonschema prodges. The adults were drinking cheer-beers while the kids were playing with those cheap trilobite pets so popular that summer. We garnered dirty looks as we went in, but no one tried to stop us. We left the Bulldog by the entrance to forestall anyone sending up a warning.