“Jeez, what’s eatin’ him?” muttered Lynt.

“How the hell a guy like that keeps a woman like Glenda,” Yrtl mused. “I’ve had better conversations with the zombies.” He indicated the noncons, mechanically doling out portions of in-vitro lamb.

“Better watch you don’t wind up as one,” Lynt grinned. “S’what happens when they reckon you’re too bad to fix.”

“Bullshit.”

“Correct,” interjected Doc Akin. “Noncons are born, not made.”

“I heard they take little kids away,” said another, “and fry their brains. They go in normal, then come out – like that.”

Akin continued patiently, “Infants are screened, yes, and the phenomenologically null among them processed to remove parody behaviour. But those ones were never, in any sense, normal.”

Phenomy-what? thought Yrtl.

The Doc was smart – real smart. But not so much as to avoid 10 years in JDC for embezzlement and then a dead end on the Atomworks production line. Still, he did seem to know an awful lot about the Synod.

Yrtl wondered how far he could trust him.