>>5379107"It's alright, just these are enough for me. It's already a hundred times better than the nutrient paste i was eating back on Treg's ship..."
"Hey, i'm just fuckin' with you, man. You know i got you some breakfast over here."
In addition to the hashbrowns, you pull a little covered bowl out of the fridge and unwrap it for him."
"Here, it's fruit salad. Technically."
"...What do you mean technically, captain?"
"I don't consider this shit real fruit, and it's definitely not nutritious. So it's drizzled with sugar, nut oil and some fruit extracts. Y'know, so it tastes like something."
"Calorie dense as usual. ...Thanks, Captain."
"Don't worry about it, man. Hey, how are those pills doin' ya?"
"My sodium and cholesterol are fine, but i still get the runs if i eat anything fried in dodo fat. I think eggs will be fine if i can just... get used to the gas."
"There's probably a pill for that too. We'll get you boys fixed up one of these days, don't worry about it."
"David, you can't just gene mod everyone for the sake of cuisine." Kyla grumbles.
"The hell he can't!" Sanig shoots back. "That's what gene modding is for! To fix god's mistakes, damn it! Why do you think we greys invented it, to cure diseases?! Hell no! Our ancestors wanted our piss to glow in the dark, and by god we made it happen!"
"That's so stupid that i could almost believe it." She snorts.
Sanig just stares at her with his arms crossed.
"Wait, you're serious?"
"I've heard dumber things. We wouldn't be the first to gene-mod our way into better eats, though. This one guy on earth, he experimented on himself to cure his lactose intolerance. Made a gene-modding retrovirus basically in his fuckin' garage..."
(
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3FcbFqSoQY)
"Now you're the one being ridiculous, kid. You're banging rocks together out there, ain't ya? Now that might get you a decent nuke, but gene modding? I bet you don't even have proper nanomachines yet."
"Yeah you're right, we don't. Best we've done is moving around little bits of metal with magnets."
"Well, that's half the way there, technically. But finally, you admit you're spouting bullshit for once!"
"Oh, no. He really did that. And it worked, too."
"What."
"Yeah. Like i said, he made a retrovirus in his garage. Out of trash and some basic equipment, actually."
"What do you mean by retrovirus? You said you didn't have any nanomachines!"
"Oh, well... it's literally a virus. Hostile organisms that get you sick, take over your cells and re-write their genetic code to produce more of themselves. Basically we just tack our own instructions onto the virus, and then it rewrites our genes more or less how we wanted."
"What."
"Kind of clumsy, yeah. It's like copying and pasting chunks of computer code and just hoping shit works, but it kinda just does. Life finds a way, huh?"
You stuff most of a whole sausage in your mouth while thinking about just how tenacious life can be.
