One ugly roadblock was finally removed when the Genomics Control Board came through with their blessing. The Pumptis were deemed harmless, placed in the same schedule-category as home gene-testing kits. Magic Pumpkin was free to ship throughout the nation!
But now that their production lines were stabilized, now that their catalogs were finally proofed and printed, now that their ad campaign was finally in gear, their fifteen minutes of ballroom glamour expired. The pumpkin clock struck midnight. The public revealed its single most predictable trait: fickleness.
Instantly, without a whimper of warning, Magic Pumpkin was deader than pet rocks. They never shipped to the Midwest or the East Coast, for the folks in those distant markets were sick of hearing about the Pumptis before they ever saw one on a shelf.
Janna and Veruschka couldn't make payroll. Their lease was expiring. They were cringing for cash.
A desperate Janna took the show on the road to potential investors in Hong Kong, the toy capital of the world. She emphasized that Magic Pumpkin had just cracked the biggest single technical problem: the fact that Pumptis looked like slimy blobs. Engineering-wise, it all came down to the pumptose-based Universal Ribosome. By inserting a properly tweaked look-up string, you could get it to express the junk DNA sequences in customizable forms. Programming this gnarly cruft was, from an abstract computer-science perspective, "unfeasible," meaning that, logically speaking, such a program could never be created within the lifetime of the universe.
But Janna's dad, fretful about his investment, had done it anyway. In two weeks of inspired round-the-clock hacking, Ruben had implemented the full OpenAnimator graphics library, using a palette of previously unused rhodopsin-style proteins. A whiff of the right long-chain molecule could give your