Juice

"What kind of juice do you want?" Kasumi asked Megumi.

After a chaotic and honestly quite boring day at school, the Lemons decided to invite Megumi to the park, but the park wasn't that interesting either. Risa was using the sandbox, and Yuri was somewhere. Kasumi and Megumi found a vending machine. There were all kinds of juices. Lemon juice, tomato juice, mango juice, mystery juice, cow juice, beetle juice, and water juice, which was just water. It didn't have any sodas. This must've been due to the recent legislation that tried to pull back from sodas in the public. Juice was considered to be a healthier alternative, but juice sometimes has as much sugar as sodas do, but I guess it would be healthier for the public. Probably.

"Why is juice considered to be healthier than sodas?" Megumi asked.

"Um. I don't know. I thought you were the trivia expert," Kasumi responded.

"Well, you could say that that is me, but I don't know about sodas and juices. Do you think that it's because soda is more acidic than juice and it rots your teeth faster? Or is it that the natural sugars in juice are healthy than the added sugars in sodas? Maybe it's that people think that the natural stuff will always be healthier than the artificial stuff."

"I would be damned if I told you that I knew the answer honestly. I don't know much about juice or anything like it. I know less about health and what's potentially the best thing to eat or consume. I don't know about exercise and how important it is. I don't know how important is health and if happiness has better places to be found. Should I sacrifice my favorite foods for a healthier life or are those foods helpful for my well-being? I don't know these things. So, I can't tell you if sodas are less healthy than juices. Even though I would assume so. Sodas are just lquid candy. That makes sense to me. I would think that orange juice is healthier than the super sugar soda with compressed sugar so that there can be more sugar."

"It's all about sugar at the end of the day isn't it?"

"I guess so. Anyway, you didn't say what juice you wanted?"

"Well, I'll have the orange juice."

"Okay, then." Kasumi pressed some buttons and inserted some bills and the orange juice came falling out of the machine. Kasumi also got some cow juice for herself. Don't worry cow juice is good for you and humans have been drinking it for thousands of years. Probably. The history of cow juice isn't my forte.

"Hey, Megumi. Do brown cows make chocolate milk?" Kasumi asked.

"No, brown cows make normal white milk, and why are you talking to me like I'm your personal digital assistant?"

"No reason. It's just something that I wanted to know. When did that rumor start?"

"Honestly, I wish I knew. It might be a simple web search away, but I don't have my phone with me right now. May it rest in peace."

"What happened to your phone?"

"It died."

"Okay."

"Back to the brown cows, it's unknown as far I know, but I imagine that once chocolate milk was popularized, people just started looking at brown cows and saying 'Hey, that makes chocolate milk.' I doubt it's anything deeper than that. It's kinda obvious that brown cows don't make chocolate milk. Chocolate is completely unrelated to cows, and that wouldn't naturally happen. But I think I heard of experiments to make cows who make milk that taste like chocolate, but the idea was scrapped quickly. Breeding cows and editing DNA to make a chocolate cow was too much work. No matter how funny it was."

"Would you like to make a chocolate cow?"

"A chocolate cow probably wouldn't fit in my room, and I don't have enough space for it anywhere in my house. Maybe I could fit a couple of mice in there. I've seen kits that allow you to make glow-in-the-dark mice, but I also heard that the usual result is that they glow very lightly, like a glow stick that is running out of juice."

"Maybe you have to shake them around so that they start glowing again," Kasumi said, gently shaking her can of cow juice.

"Haha. That probably goes against animal cruelty laws. Either way, I think DNA splicing and editing is an expensive hobby. If you even want anything beyond premade kits, you'll need a license from the government. Then you have to buy a DNA modifier, mice that can breed with each other, and the proper habitats for the mice. Then you'll have to understand what each gene does to the mice. I believe there's an online resource where you can see all about the mice's DNA. Thousands of experiments around the world. I heard some people are trying to make a simulation that creates the mouse-based completely on the DNA you made up, but many people said that that was impossible to make that, but who knows? They could crack the code."

"I hope they don't figure out the secrets of DNA because then music labels will DNA edit their way to the perfect J-Pop star."

"I don't think we are that far. People can't even handle mouse DNA. Human DNA would be a completely different beast, but scientists have changed a little bit of human DNA, but that was for genetic diseases and stuff like that. We are far from creating custom babies like we are playing some life simulator. That would require a lot of stuff. I don't even think that we could control for something like height and eye color. No, we could probably change eye color. Or can we? Eye color seems simple but it's very complicated if you look closely at it. DNA is too complicated for us. Theoretically, it would be like computer code, but DNA turns on and off."

"It turns on and off."

"Well, it kinda just twists in a weird way that makes that part of the DNA not function anymore. But it isn't a thing that happens randomly. Think about it. You have the same set of DNA in every cell in your body. But there are different kinds of cells. There are skin cells, brain cells, eye cells, bone cells, etc. But if all of the cells have the same DNA, then what causes a cell to be different. Well, it turns on some parts of the DNA in some cells and turns off the same parts in other cells. Therefore, this is how brain cells differ from skin cells, by turning on and off the parts of the DNA they need and don't need."

"That's interesting. How do you know this?"

"I watched, like, two videos online. If I'm wrong, I apologize."

"Do you know what causes the cell to choose what turns on and what to turn off?"

"Frankly, no. I think we know what causes it, but I personally don't know. DNA is complicated."

"That's fine we don't have to know everything."

Kasumi and Megumi walked around the park. There was a bunch of stuff to do in this park if you were creative enough. There were trees to climb, grass to lay on, benches to sit on, and a ladder made of sand?

"Hey," Megumi said. "How in the goddamn does that work?" She pointed at the sand ladder that Risa made about a week ago.

Once Kasumi looked at it, the ladder immediately collapsed. It was just a pile of sand now, laying on the ground next to the tree. It'll never stand again