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| born:�� his first thoughts on seeing his child were peculiar, not proud or joyful, but an apprehension at having begun something now inevitable, spoken the first number of an interminable sequence.� not that he felt that the little round pink thing would wreak any particular kind of havoc on the world--he wasn't afraid of having spawned a Mary Antoinette, or that something specifically terrible would happen, what drove him near panic was that something, whatever it was would happen, the thing would grow, and almost certainly at one point succumb to the same imperative of biology that he had unintentionally fallen into, would reproduce, and the future then was bound to spit out exponential hordes of increasing offspring.� the thing that scared him was that now there was nothing he could do.� even if he could have brought himself to murder the infant in her soft breathing sleep, the law now prohibited him from doing so, just as it would prohibit him from trying to keep her from marrying, from having children, grandchildren.� whatever freak of genetic code that existed in him, that produced somehow what he always considered his irreconcilable strangeness, bizarre helixed thoughts, haywired loops of consciousness, was now beyond his control.� it could be reproduced, modified, enlarged, passed on, loosed upon the world, reflected in the eyes of a daughter or granddaughter, inflicted on hundreds of unsuspecting inheritors of this, this thing, that occupied him now, that he couldn't stop even in his own skull, and now that soft one of the child.�� | ||