Doctor Michelle led me through the halls. Her heels went clop clop, like when the school admin ladies would lead me away from class for causing a ruckus. "It would be silly for us to ignore the medical advances we've had since Sliceday."

"Is that what it's called? Officially?"

"It's a political thing. If you're opposed, you call it the End Time. If you're for it, you say the Day of Rebirth or something like that, lots of variations. If you don't care but want to be clear, you call it Sliceday and everyone knows what you mean."

"But you're opposed. You lost your house and family."

"Sure, but let's be realistic. Most people weren't rich doctors with swimming pools and vacations. Things had gotten bad."

"Why are you helping Todd?"

She made a face. "Human nature is something I've studied. I'm a surgeon, but I also have a doctorate in psychology. I was obsessed with what made people tick, in their guts and in the brainpan."

"Okay, so you learn more with him?"

"Not at all, he's dumb as hell in a lot of ways. But I respect an aspect of what he's doing. Humans need hierarchies. They need to have someone in charge. Morality shouldn't be horizontal."

I frowned. I didn't know what she meant, and I knew she was much smarter than I was, but she was also wrong.

She went on in a voice that told me she was used to disagreement, and that it didn't matter to her. "Humans need a leader, and that person needs to be led. You need a coach. The coach obeys the league."

"Not into sports. What if the people at the top, the leaders of everyone, are idiots? Or evil, or both?"

She shrugged. "Structure's the important thing. Bad leaders get bad endings."

My list of failed history classes told me she was wildly incorrect. "What did you want me to see?"

"It would have been better if you'd waited a little to ask, so I can do a dramatic reveal when we enter the big room. I need to show you the tanks. You might remember Todd hollering about nonhumans, right?"

"Sure, unclean this, evil that. But I was on a train with a bunch of them, and they seemed pretty cool."

"That can be true, individuals are individuals, after all. Societies are what need looking after. Those are what makes or breaks. The failures of Human society are why Sliceday happened. Someone got mad and took action. Another society overwrote our own."

"There's a big door coming up. Hey, Dr. Michelle, what did you want to show me?"

She gave a thin smile, pressed a big round button on the wall. The door opened slowly. "The tanks." She gestured dramatically.

It wasn't a big chamber made for mad science. Everything looked like it had been crammed in, squeezed in. Two human-sized tanks, spherical with fogged-up glass. Plenty of hoses and wires leading into them. Glowing symbols hovering in the air.

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"Runes, right?" I rubbed my arm where my tattoo had been so generously given by Rune Guy Rick. "They help with this?"

"Runes. I don't know what a lot of them do, to be honest. I don't have a doctorate in Magic, and don't know of any accredited schools. No Hogwarts out there just yet. But the tanks work. It all works."

Nobody was in the tanks. Just clear liquid, the occasional sluggish bubble. I don't know what I'd expected; a smiling naked girl, I suppose, but I have a bias.

Doctor Michelle had been talking. "--not only with axonal cells but with nonphysical structures."

"What? I didn't understand all of it. Are you saying this thing heals not just bodies, but souls?"

She raised her eyebrows. "You got a lot further than Todd, I'll give you that. This is a Maker version of a Medelae restructuring tank. And since it's a Maker thing, it's better than the original. People abuse it."

"Is there a drug thing happening?"

"Absolutely. People make bodies and inhabit them."

I thought about how that might shake things up. I remembered a fuss when I was on Earth before Sliceday, one about people changing genders. It had seemed confusing to me at the time, but most things had.

I inspected Dr. Michelle. A middle-aged white lady, not always the paragons of open-mindedness with regards to culture. She would have disapproved of changing genders, I suspected. And that was fifty years ago. "What do people do with these now?"

My question had clearly been what she wanted. "There are laws older than man. Laws given by God. Imagine one of the unclean growing a Human body in here. Running around, pretending."

Ah.

"You don't like that," I said helpfully. "Would those people infect Humans with some kind of Maker disease?"

She frowned. "It's not a matter of contagion, Mateo. Not physical, anyway. Spiritual. Societal. Imagine a Maker pretending to be Human. Walking among us, reproducing with us. Imagine if a programmer made an AI, then gave it a Human body. What would that do to society if you didn't even know if a Human person was born Human?"

"I don't know. You've got all the doctorates, fill me in."

"Suspicion, fear, instability. Violence. It seems to me that if one of the unclean wants to feel what it's like as one of us, they should learn about the good as well as the bad."

She was staring at me with a sweaty intensity, though the room was quite cool. I wasn't picking up what she was laying down. She could tell, and was getting frustrated.

"What if," she said, stammering a little with her excitement, "what if a charismatic politician gained a following, and he was never Human to begin with? He wouldn't be one of us. One of our own leaders, secretly unclean."

"Do you know anyone like that? Is Todd that way?"

She stepped back, nonplussed. She'd clearly never considered it. "No. Absolutely not."

"Then pardon the impertinence of my question, but what's the big deal? It sounds pretty cool to me. Want to put me in the body of one of those little dinosaur guys right now?"

"Jokes," she spat. She was livid, I was startled to see. "Jokes, about the most important crisis facing Humanity. About all of us. We're on the ropes here, Mateo, in case you didn't know it." And she shoved me, a bullying gesture that took me by surprise.

I hadn't been joking, but okay. "Why did you want me to see these things, then?"

Her eyes narrowed. "The good as well as the bad, understand?" She was all grimace, her lower teeth jutting forward. "As well as the bad."

She reached into the pocket of her labcoat and produced my phone, of all things. The one that had been confiscated. "I'm done with your damn phone. Go away. You know how, leave."

She didn't turn her back on me. She glared until I backed out of the room, those lower teeth pugnacious and inarguable. The big doors slammed shut, seemingly without her intervention.

Mister Charm, that's me.

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