Why Live? — Kathy DiSanto

To be, or not to be, the woman I was engineered to be?" is the question third-generation clone Kai-Lee Fox can't help asking herself. For more than 400 years, the star cruiser Janus has been a virtual Utopia. Life goes on ... and on and on ... for the Quingenti, five hundred souls who fled Earth when the Global Assembly refused to legalize human cloning as a means to obtaining mortality. No one could have guessed six words as apparently harmless as, "There was only one Ella Fitzgerald," would trigger a rebellion. But those words no sooner leave Kai's mouth when the truth breaks over her, and the trouble begins. Before long the same truth that rocks her world makes itself known to a handful of others. And one of them doesn't intend to keep quiet. When Dr. Ke-Ling Yan, the Colony's lead geneticist and a member of the ruling Council, announces his intention to move for the abolition of cloning, the mild-mannered Quingenti reveal an unsuspected dark side. How far will the faithful go to contain the rebellion? As far as activating the Alpha Genesis Option, using a microchip implanted in every colonist's brain at birth to erase defective thinking and prepare the brain for reprogramming. But before the mind police can apprehend him, Ke-Ling does the unthinkable--he commits suicide--leaving a farewell, ship-wide broadcast that transforms the Janus into a seething cauldron of paranoia, intrigue, and danger. Will Kai-Lee and her friends survive the interstellar witch hunt? Where do you run when you're on a space ship millions of miles from nowhere, and the hounds are closing in?