Chapter 164 Talking It Out

• "Why are you looking at me that way?"
• "Do you remember when we first met," I asked Jakob one night as I lay next to him, stroking his dark hair idly. For my part, I was still marveling over the changes the `thals new nano-bots had made in our bodies. It was like we were twenty again...only we had our appreciation of life our long-time bond had given us. So much had changed over the decades and centuries those same bots had gifted us with, but our feelings for one another were undiminished. On Earth, the number of people who could claim more than two centuries was small, due to the Genetic Authority's ban on any use of nanos in humans other than for the curing of terminal illnesses. On Mars and Luna the numbers were larger, since the GA had no way to impose its sanctions on those two worlds.
• Damn them...the bastards had killed my mother! Anna-Marie Hallbach developed an inoperable brain tumor which the early nanos could treat, but it was a painful process, and one she refused after the second recurrence. There was a new treatment which could have prevented it from coming back, but the GA had forbidden it when it would have altered her genome. There had been a lot of potential disasters from the early researches into genetic manipulation, but the Authority really gained impetus when the Neanderthals became a visible reminder of homo sapiens' shortcomings. It didn't help when investigations showed that the only `tampering' had been with their resistance to the common cold and flu viruses.