**** HERE BE SPOILERS.  YARRRR! **** (Sorry – been watching far too many pirate movies recently.  That is, movies about pirates, not…  Oh, never mind.)

We know that Dr. Narbon is capable of cloning herself – as will shortly be revealed.

In D.D’ we learn that clones can be ‘speed grown’ – even if Helen had started to grow her Dave clone the day he joined the lab, she’d only had about five years to grow him and he is clearly a fully grown adult.  Well, at least as adult as Dave can be.  So, she must have speed grown him.

Also in D.D’, we learn that it is possible to take a backup copy of a person’s mind and then re-imprint it onto a clone.

So, all Dr. Narbon has to do is speed grow a clone of herself and then keep it on ice, hooked up to an imprinting device with a relatively recent backup copy of herself and access to the news archives to fill in the gaps.  Then , when she dies, the backup is activated – this can either be via an implant which sends out an ‘I’m dead’ signal on cessation of vital signs or by setting up a computer to scan the news for certain keywords.

Ta-dah!

Now, the only question remaining is whether Shaenon will acknowledge my brilliance in working this out or will she do the truly evil thing and try to claim that she had it all worked out in the character’s backstories all along?  Not exactly a hard question to answer, is it 😉

And as to why Helen went through a normal childhood rather than beiong speed grown?  Well, Dr. Narbon wanted a subject to study from ‘birth’ for her seminal work on mad geniuses – genius’?  Genii?  Whatever, you know what I mean  🙂

Today’s Doomed Gerbil obviously has very strong tail muscles that go rigid in moments of sudden fear.

And the owl is obviously deliberately choosing to fly in the opposite direction that the reader’s eye is traveling.  What kind of hunter would he be if he could be easily tracked?  Damn crafty owls.

Still, you have an owl flying backwards. All it needs to do now is deliver a letter to someone and it becomes an homage. 

Things That Never Happen Again Because Now Helen Knows Better: ur-gerbils, employee brain scans, superintelligent sane gerbils. Had Helen decided to revisit any of these maleficient technologies, things might have been much easier later on. Fortunately, several forthcoming storylines will introduce Narbonics Labs technologies that are functional and stable enough to recur in subsequent storylines.