Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse by Stephen King, George R. R. Martin, Cory Doctorow Page A

it?" He held up a vial of blood. "We have the DNA. A live one is hardly worth keeping around. Very expensive to maintain, you know. Manufacturing a basic organism's food is quite complex. Clean rooms, air filters, special lights. Re-creating the web of life isn't easy. Far more simple to release oneself from it completely than to attempt to re-create it." He glanced at the dog. "Unfortunately, our furry friend over there would never survive weeviltech. The worms would eat him as quickly as they eat everything else. No, you would have to manufacture the animal from scratch. And really, what would be the point of that? A bio-job without hands?" He laughed and headed for his HEV.
    We all looked at each other. I jogged after the doctor and caught up with him at the hatch to the tarmac. He had paused on the verge of opening it. "Your centaurs know me now?" he asked.
    "Yeah, you're fine."
    "Good." He dilated the hatch and strode out into the cold.
    I trailed after him. "Wait! What are we supposed to do with it?"
    "The dog?" The doctor climbed into the HEV and began strapping in. Wind whipped around us, carrying stinging grit from the tailings piles. "Turn it back to your pits. Or you could eat it, I suppose. I understand that it was a real delicacy. There are recipes for cooking animals. They take time, but they can give quite extraordinary results."
    Musharraf's pilot started cycling up his turbofans.
    "Are you kidding?"
    Musharraf shrugged, and shouted over the increasing scream of the engines. "You should try it! Just another part of our heritage that's atrophied since wee-viltech!"
    He yanked down the flight cocoon's door, sealing himself inside. The turbofans cycled higher and the pilot motioned me back from their wash as the HEV slowly lifted into the air.

    Lisa and Jaak couldn't agree on what we should do with the dog. We had protocols for working out conflict. As a tribe of killers, we needed them. Normally, consensus worked for us, but every once in a while, we just got tangled up and stuck to our positions, and after that, not much could get done without someone getting slaughtered. Lisa and Jaak dug in, and after a couple days of wrangling, with Lisa threatening to cook the thing in the middle of the night while Jaak wasn't watching, and Jaak threatening to cook her if she did, we finally went with a majority vote. I got to be the tie-breaker.
    "I say we eat it," Lisa said.
    We were sitting in the monitoring room, watching satellite shots of the tailings mountains and the infrared blobs of the mining bots while they ripped around in the earth. In one corner, the object of our discussion lay in its cage, dragged there by Jaak in an attempt to sway the result. He spun his observation chair, turning his attention away from the theatre maps. "I think we should keep it. It's cool. Old-timey, you know? I mean, who the hell do you know who has a real dog?"
    "Who the hell wants the hassle?" Lisa responded. "I say we try real meat." She cut a line in her forearm with her razors. She ran her finger along the resulting blood beads and tasted them as the wound sealed.
    They both looked at me. I looked at the ceiling. "Are you sure you can't decide this without me?"
    Lisa grinned. "Come on, Chen, you decide. It was a group find. Jaak won't pout, will you?"
    Jaak gave her a dirty look.
    I looked at Jaak. "I don't want its food costs to come out of group bonuses. We agreed we'd use part of it for the new Immersive Response. I'm sick of the old one.
    Jaak shrugged. "Fine with me. I can pay for it out of my own. I just won't get any more tats."
    I leaned back in my chair, surprised, then looked at Lisa. "Well, if Jaak wants to pay for it, I think we should keep it."
    Lisa stared at me, incredulous. "But we could cook it!"
    I glanced at the dog where it lay panting in its cage. "It's like having a zoo of our own. I kind of like it."

    Musharraf and the Pau Foundation hooked us up with a supply of food pellets for the dog and Jaak looked