Julia Ryan

Under Warranty

Excerpt

As soon as my dad read my report card, I knew he was going to return me. He scanned my teachers’ comments, the corner of his upper lip curling, and by the time he got to the end, he was making his wolf face, his nostrils flared.

“Did you do this on purpose?” he asked.

“What?”

“Get the worst grades in math and science?” He shoved his tablet in my direction. “Look at what your physics teacher wrote about you.” 

Unfortunately, Newton’s law of inertia applies to Nadia: her performance at rest will remain at rest, unless acted upon by an external force. 

My dad was clearly going to be that force.

“I didn’t do that badly,” I said from my stool at the kitchen island. Yes, the last few tests hadn’t gone well, but that was only because I had to finish my jazz composition for Ms. Smith. She encouraged me to improvise on the piano: braiding strange harmonies together, twisting a melody into a messy bun. In Calc and Physics, all we’d do was “plug and chug,” finding limits. 

“You’re gene-edited to excel in STEM. You should be getting straight As.” He closed out of the report card and glared at me. 

My palms began to sweat. That’s what all parents said before they returned or exchanged their kids. He got up to make dinner, chopping tomatoes with a big knife and grating their flesh into a bowl.

I started breathing faster. Designer teens in my class were already disappearing. Sam O’Connor got low SAT scores and never came back from fall break. And just last week, Alexandra Knight’s parents decided they wanted a less rebellious daughter. 

I grabbed my dad’s tablet while his back was turned. Dr. Chen probably had something nice to say about me. I was pretty good at solving computer science puzzles, which meant I wasn’t a complete failure at STEM. When I glanced at the screen, I saw my birth certificate was open. The Genome Labs logo, an elliptical green G, glowed at the top, followed by my name and product information: 

Nadia Eve Brown

Second-Generation Designer Baby ®

Analyst Genetic Package, 17-Year Warranty

If only it were six months from now. Then I wouldn’t be under warranty anymore. But before I could scroll any further, my dad snatched the tablet away.

“You have to stop messing up at school, Nadia. You’re competing with all the other second gens with analyst packages. They’re not wasting their time banging on the piano! They’re actually preparing for jobs in finance.”    

“But I don’t want to go into finance!” He was convinced I should become an investment banker, a Rumpelstiltskin spinning money into more money. I’d rather be a cat embalmer.

“It’s the safest career for you. Sometimes, you just have to suck it up.”

“I don’t want to spend my entire life sucking!” I replied. “How come you get to do what you love, and I have to suffer?” 

He was the environmental science teacher at my high school, and when he wasn’t yelling at me, he was having his students build solar panels or run around the building measuring air quality. He also used to take them on camping trips to document invasive species, but now there were too many heat waves and storms to stay outside for that long.

“I don’t want you to end up like me,” he said. “I was stupid and went into teaching even though I knew it wasn’t a middle-class profession anymore.” 

“So what?” I replied. “You’re happy.”

“But I’m completely financially dependent on your stepmother. Who do you think paid to fix your broken tooth last month? I don’t want you to rely on anyone but yourself.”

My tongue slid over my new front tooth. I thought falling on that treadmill had been the least of my problems. Thank god Cynthia had a lawyer’s salary. And, as though on cue, she came into the room, wearing a black blazer and pencil skirt.

“Are you two fighting again?” she asked, giving my dad a quick kiss and heading straight for the coffee pot. Her auburn hair was styled in its usual smooth bob.

“How’s the case going?” he asked.

“Not great.” There were dark circles under her eyes. She’d been working nonstop on a natural born discrimination lawsuit. Apparently, it was really hard to win when being natural born wasn’t a protected class like gender or age. In fact, there was only one gene editing law: no designing for sex or race. Genome Labs and all the other corporations had Congress in their pockets. But that didn’t stop her from trying to help her undesigned clients. She began measuring coffee beans on the kitchen scale.

“Did you get Nadia’s birth certificate for her permit test?” she asked. 

I eyed my dad, and he nodded vaguely. I still didn’t understand why I had to get a permit to operate a self-driving car. The car should get the permit. It was the one driving, not me. Was that the reason why I found my birth certificate open on his tablet? Because he was gathering documents for the DMV? 

My dad turned the burner on the stove to high heat and poured the tomato pulp into a pan. 

“Take a look at her report card,” he said to Cynthia. “She’s underperforming in her classes again.”

He smashed a glove of garlic with the flat side of the knife, and my heart beat faster and faster. Cynthia’s blue eyes zipped back and forth as she read my report card on her phone.

“Did you see Dr. Chen’s comment?” she asked after a moment. “He’s recommending that Nadia take a college class on cybersecurity research.”

“Really?” I said, sitting up. “Why?”

“Something to do with you intuiting a ‘script injection’ attack?” Cynthia said, her brows furrowed. 

Right. He must have meant last week, when I hacked my classmates’ mock business websites. I’d finished building mine early and decided it would be fun to change the prices on all their products. Like making diamonds cost ten cents a carat. It was great. Real people even tried buying engagement rings off my best friend Harper’s jewelry site. 

“But I was breaking into my classmates’ systems,” I said to Cynthia. “Not protecting them. So what does that have to do with cybersecurity?” 

“You were what?” my dad said, nearly dropping a pot of water on the stove.  

“Supposedly, that’s what cybersecurity experts do,” Cynthia said, glancing at Dr. Chen’s notes. “They try to find vulnerabilities, so they can fix them.” She set her phone down. “I think this is a wonderful opportunity for you, Nadia. Cybersecurity could be something you become passionate about and want to work hard at. And you’d be doing good in the world.”

I smiled. The research class didn’t sound so bad. And I bet it wouldn’t have busywork like my current CS class. I hated memorizing syntax and hand-writing algorithms. What kind of computer scientist didn’t use a computer?  

“No!” my dad said, his brown eyes widening. “There’s no way you’re going into research. You’re going into finance and that’s that. No distractions.”

“But why?” I said. “It’s still a STEM class. I thought you’d be happy.”

The tomato sauce bubbled and sputtered. A glob landed on my dad’s flannel shirt. He looked down at the red stain and then glowered at me like it was a wound I’d personally inflicted. It didn’t make any sense. Most parents gave their kids a little leeway in their careers, as long as their choices were related to their designs. It wasn’t as though I said I wanted to be a jazz musician—which I did—or a ballerina. I wanted to take one class. Cynthia approved. Why couldn’t he?

About the Author

Julia Ryan is an MFA candidate in Fiction and University Writing Instructor at Columbia. She has a BA from Swarthmore, an MA from Bread Loaf, and an MS Ed from UPenn. She taught high school English at Hotchkiss, King School, and UNIS. Under Warranty is an excerpt from her novel-in-progress.