検索キーワード： "Michael Scott" 歴史改変

London might as well be a world away from Sandsend, a tiny village on the Yorkshire coast. Gideon Smith dreams of the adventure promised him by the lurid tales of Captain Lucian Trigger, the Hero of the Empire, told in Gideon’s favorite “penny dreadful.” When Gideon’s father is lost at sea in highly mysterious circumstances Gideon is convinced that supernatural forces are at work. Deciding only Captain Lucian Trigger himself can aid him, Gideon sets off for London. On the way he rescues the mysterious mechanical girl Maria from a tumbledown house of shadows and iniquities.

The great gene mapping project of the late 20th and early 21st centuries had located every trait on the double helix. Splicing, and then cloning, had made it possible to determine the inclusion of any desired characteristics or the exclusion of any fault. Humans could be designed like an automobile, created for specific purposes, and then reproduced exactly and endlessly by cloning. And they had, by the thousands, when trust in ordinary biology had become too risky. And to ensure that biology would mind its own business, genes for sexual preference had been controlled.