Your DNA will be determined by whatever morphs were used for reproduction. So two rusters will produce another ruster. Furthermore, I guess that all rusters of the same production line share the same DNA (with a few tweaks, like sex) and are clones of each other. DNA testing would still be possible, if every morph gets a unique marker sequence. Also, like you've said, corporate produced morphs are copy protected. These morphs are therefore unfertile without further modification. Two more questions: Are different morph types genetically compatible at all? And is the classical way of reproducing even that common anymore? I guess artificial and external wombs would be quite widespread.

Yes, the reproduction threads are the perennial feature of this forum. From a biotech standpoint, the designers of morphs could have decided that (1) all morphs should be able to reproduce naturally with at least flat humans, (2) should not be able to reproduce, (3) will reproduce but insert extra morph-specific chromosomes, (4) reproduce with compatible morphs if some arbitrarily complex set of conditions apply. Which of 1-4 to choose would have depended on stage of technology, local laws, public opinion, marketing strategy, and the company's theory of what the future would be like. That is, they could be all over the place. Take 1 for example. Splicers are probably often in this category, since they are just flats with bad alleles removed. They would be able to breed with each other (producing splicers) and with flats (producing a mixture). But you could have a morph with extra chromosomes with the specific morph genes that are not expressed in the gonads, allowing the morph to have children with other morphs with this feature, splicers and flats. The offspring would likely be like splicer offspring, completely lacking the enhancements on the extra chromosomes. Option 2 sounds extreme, but in societies where enhancement is the norm you might even view having a random child a form of prospective child endangerment. This way all children will be born wanted and with somebody checking that they do not get any nasty bugs. Option 3 is a real mess. The sperm or ova of the morph will have extra chromosomes that might not have any counterpart in their partner: this either leads to non-viable offspring, offspring with partial chromosome sets (which might be everything from perfectly fine to sterile and genetically impaired) or - when mating with another morph with the same system - some mixture. Which may or may not make sense. I suspect that unless the designers were sloppy they would try to reduce the amount of random genetic weirdness and block the more stupid outcomes - maybe Skinthetic morphs can breed with each other, but the chromosomes self-destruct if you breed with a Cognite morph (even if it has a compatible chromosome number). This shades over to Option 4. In principle we are talking software here: the genes that control what happen are able to do an arbitrary number of "if ... then ..." operations, error checks and sense the presence of chemicals. You could have morphs that can reproduce with other morphs if they inject an artificial hormone, specific for the morph type. You could have morphs that produce cancerous tumors as offspring if they breed with a competitor morph ("Read the fine print: we are *not* liable for damage due to violations of our intellectual property, especially not when done using a product of another company.") Imagine all the strangeness of backwards and forwards compatibility, localization, copy protection and software patches, and apply it to the genome. Finally back to the original question: in the old days, morphs were not so elaborate and were essentially just boosted flats. So they should have been genetically compatible. I suspect the first ruster morphs were like this, while later forms (the ones with planned obsolescence) would be more like option 2 or later. Breaking reproductory copy protection is probably not too hard. Cells in the body needs to divide, so there will be mitosis all over the place, including stem cells. In order to get a child you need meiosis to get a sperm or egg, and this is where one can block things. The obvious thing is to prevent genes needed for developing the right types of cells or tissues from expressing, but the hacker might break that or just take cells into the lab and start adding the right enzymes "by hand". A deeper block would be to have hidden genes that make products that mess up key steps like recombination. But a dedicated hacker might just sequence the whole genome of the partners, recombine them "by hand", and then synthetise the DNA and put it into an empty egg. Way beyond 2013 tech, but pretty simple in a few decades.

OneTrikPony wrote:

My personal feeling is, when it gets to that point, it no longer maters who the original genetic stock was sourced from, you may as well order your baby from the catalog of a reputable dealer. You've pretty much killed all of the cutsie; "she gets that from her father's/mother's side of the family" comments because in reality you've completely avoided the genetic crapshoot that contemporary people love to romanticize.

Well, you would still recombine the baby from the parents (although you could include any number of them, as well as some "must have" new genes from dealers). So you could have all the parents sit together and generate the random number seed in a little ceremony. "Dad, why am I named 'The Royal Sampler'?"