It was

Rick's hands were actually shaking when he yanked the glued-on tablets from the story-board design he'd created. There had been problems with the alpha version of the bio-DNA product. He'd spent countless hours on the phone dealing with physicians, hospital administrators, and sick patients. Still, these five pills were the basis for a revolution in human development. Yeah, the final product had the fancy interface, lots of stomach buffering, and more fully developed features but he didn't have the million dollars a pill the final product would cost.

For a fleeting moment, Rick wondered if it wouldn't be smarter to take the pills to another bio-tech company and sell them but that was craziness. First, all of the bio-techs were incestuous, with cross-board representation, shared venture capital funding and aggressive legal teams. Second, nobody would pay much for an early design product when they could just blow a few million and buy the final version.

He studied the oversized black pills and took a deep breath. If he took a pill, he was committed. He would become something different, something his own marketing literature insisted was transhuman and its critics said was demonic.

On the other hand, if he did nothing, he was just another homeless has-been on the streets of Dallas singing of his former success while busking for a few bucks to buy a bottle of cheap wine.

He choked down the first pill.