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.The defensive line were even larger, specifically bred to secrete noxious chemicals whenever the ball was in play.Genetic Alternative Sports were a huge hit, and the technological advancements spilled into other avenues of human life.Cars were suddenly coming off the production line made from human mutations.Bone on the outside, soft supple flesh in the interior, and engines made from mutated internal organs - living cars, that drove themselves, parked themselves and never crashed.More importantly than that, they didn’t rely on fossil fuels to run.All they required was carfood - a special mulch made from pig offal.Cars in the twenty-third century ran on sausages.The trend spread.GELFs, Genetically Engineered Life Forms, were everywhere, and soon virtually every consumer product was made of living tissue.Gelf armchairs, which could sense your mood, and massage your shoulders when you were feeling tense, became a part of everyday life.Gelf vacuum cleaners, which were half kitchen appliance, half family pet, waddled around on their squat little legs, doing the household chores and amusing the children.Finally, the bubble burst.The Gelfs rebelled, just as the Mechanoids had rebelled before them.The unrest had been festering for half a century.The dichotomy was that, although Gelfs were created from human chromosomes, and therefore technically qualified as human, they had no rights whatsoever.Quite simply, they wanted to vote.And normal humans were damned if they were going to file into polling stations alongside walking furniture and twenty-feet tall athletic freaks.The rebellion started in the Austrian town of Salzburg, when a vacuum cleaner and Gelf Volkswagen Beetle robbed a high street bank.They took the manager and a security guard hostage, agreeing to release them only if Valter Holman was brought to justice for murder.Valter Holman had killed his armchair, and the whole of the Gelf community was up in arms, those that had arms, because the law courts refused to accept that a crime had been committed.The facts in the case were undisputed.It was a crime of passion.Holman had returned home from work unexpectedly one afternoon to discover his armchair sitting on his naked wife.He immediately leapt to the right conclusion, and shot the chair as it hurriedly tried to wriggle back into its upholstery.Finally the establishment capitulated, and Holman was brought to trial.After the two-day hearing the court ruled that since Holman would have to live out the rest of his life being known as the man who was cuckolded by his own furniture, he had suffered enough, and was given a six-month suspended sentence.And so the Gelf War started.And for a short time, humankind indulged in its favourite pastime.Humans versus man-made humans.Armchairs and vacuum cleaners fought side by side with bizarrely shaped genetically engineered sports stars and living, breathing motor cars.The Gelfs didn’t stand a chance, and most of them were wiped out or captured.The few remaining went to ground, becoming experts in urban guerrilla warfare.For a short time, Gelf-hunters proliferated, and a rebel vacuum cleaner waddling frantically down a crowded street, pursued by a Gelf runner, became a common sight.But it wasn’t the Gelf resistance fighters who caused the problem.The problem was what to do with those who’d surrendered.Legally, killing them constituted murder, but equally, the authorities could hardly send them back into docile human service.Fortunately the problem coincided with the nomination of Earth as Garbage World.All the captured Gelfs were dumped like refuse on the island of Zanzibar and left to die.Most of them did.But not all.Some survived.Not the brightest, not even the biggest, just those best equipped to cope with the harsh rigours of living on a planet swamped in toxic waste and choking poisons.The ones who could endure the endless winter as Earth soared through the universe looking for its new sun.And gradually, a new strain of Gelf evolved.A creature who could live anywhere.Even in the revolting conditions on Earth.A creature with a sixth sense - telepathy.A creature who was able to read its prey’s mind, even through hundreds of feet of compacted ice.A creature with no shape of its own: whose form was dictated by the requirements of survival.These were the polymorphs.The shape-changers.They didn’t need food for survival.They fed on other creatures’ emotions.Their diet was fear, jealousy, anger …And when no other creatures were left on the island of Zanzibar, they began to feed off each other.Until finally, there were only a handful left.TENThe polymorph who’d assumed Lister’s shape lay on the bunk, waiting for its energy to return after its metamorphosis, while Kryten and the Toaster stared at the suddenly blank screen [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]