"Nah, it's cool. I don't mind talking about it." She takes a swig of water (not too big, considering that she'll need to make the bottle last for a while). "But yeah, you're right, it's the choice thing that really grates. They built my sisters and I ... for a lot of reasons, but one was to be a baseline for experiments. Didn't want modifications they made to the gene line getting out in the general population, especially since almost none of us knew our origins. Kind of hard to be like hey, can you make sure you never have a baby without explaining the whole context, I guess. So ... infertility. A failsafe."

She smiles, ruefully. "Worked for most of us. One set of identical twins it didn't, and they're the only ones as far as I know. But the whole thing was like, the greatest hits of unethical scientific practice." She glances at Ellie. "You know what's really fucked? There's an intellectual property warning encoded in my DNA. Like, I have no idea how they thought that would hold up in court, maybe it was a leftover from experiments that were just cell cultures, but it's a lot to know that there's like ... a piracy warning in my fucking cells, you know?"