Chapter One - Penelope

Young transgender woman Penelope Bishop and her mother Rosemary are advised that their estranged father and husband was killed in the line of duty as a Police Sargent in the small city of Balwyn Texas. Much to her mother's chagrin, Penelope decides to joing the Balwyn Police Department and follow in her father's footsteps and possibly solve his murder. Penelope attends the funeral and finds out her kind aren't welcome in Balwyn

Raven drags herself through the front door. She was soaked to the bone from the rain. The day had started off nice and sunny. It was just a little chilly when she left to go to work early this morning.

She hadn’t noticed the storm clouds, till after lunch. The garage was doing good, so Jordan cooked food for everyone. He cooked on a homemade grill he kept behind the garage. It was a simple lunch of hot dogs, bratwurst and hamburgers. There was a chef salad that Jerry made, there was potato salad and macaroni salad as well. Of course, there was beer and soda.

Doctor William Heath turns the lights on inside his private medical lab. He glances over towards the glass prison cell he kept his son in. The estrogen rich blood transfusion he gave his son last week was doing its job to his body. He was starting to look more and more like his daughter.

He loved his daughter very much and was devastated when she died in a car accident. His son, on the other hand, was a major disappointment. The boy got into trouble all the time and had been caught stealing.

He didn't like anything he was looking at. The gauges didn't show any signs of life when he flipped the switches. Everything was dead. This wasn't good. There was no noise from below to tell him the little diesel was even trying to start when he turned the switches on.

He dropped down into the galley where Karen was pumping water into the sink. "I don't have any batteries this morning. I think I forgot to turn off the radios last night and the mooring lights drained everything."

He opened the hatch leading into the engine room. Karen could hear him complaining about boats in general, as he tried to crank the diesel over by hand.

David reached across the seat and played with her hair. "Can we kiss and make up?"

"No! I’m still mad at you for doubting me." She folded her arms across her chest.

"It wasn't you I doubted and him I don't trust."

"Same thing. I designed him and he’s a part of me."

There wasn't one single company capable of matching the quality of work Karen and Henry were doing. Most of them tried to duplicate her work by ordering a model and disassembling it to find out how she accomplished it. Piece by piece, their lab technicians would dissect her models. At the end they experienced the same results as the medical research laboratories. Except for being polymer instead of skin and bone, it was an exact duplicate of the entire human anatomy. The programming she was running to complete one model had to be horrendous and yet she never made two models alike. The bytes of data Karen was using was incomprehensible to most model makers. They weren't programmers though, most of them were chemical engineers designing the plastics used in their manufacturing. Karen was a computer engineer who worked on the design of the models from a graphics equation perspective. Henry helped research the plastics used to build the models. Same problem to all the companies competing in the model market. Different approach by the engineers.

CHAPTER V

The days and weeks settled into some resemblance of order for David and Karen. By the end of the month, David had over two hundred mice with fuzzy feet. Karen laughed at him as she told him it would take very tiny clippers to shear them. She certainly didn't think the sheep industry should be worried yet. It would take a lot more mice than what David had to make one pair of mittens.