The White Room
Tracy dropped her gum into the trash can on the bus as she got off, making the driver smile as he said good bye. She shrugged him off and ignored his wave as she turned her back and went into her house. He carefully took it out of the trash before he closed up the “barn” for the night. When he got home, he carefully extracted the gum from the baggie he’d carried it in, then swabbed it to get a clean sample of her DNA from the residual saliva. He then grew the sample in a small petrie dish, which took about an hour. The petrie dish went into his DNA analyzer, and he loaded it into his computer. Fifteen minutes after that, he smiled when he saw the digital representation of her on …