WETWARE is set in a near future where there are tough and tedious jobs no one wants to do - and people down on their luck who volunteer for genetic modifications to make them right for this work -- in slaughterhouses, infectious disease wards, landfill and other hard jobs. With business booming, programmers at Galapagos Wetware up the stakes by producing high-end prototypes, Jack and Kay, for more sensitive jobs like space travel, deep cover espionage or boots on the ground for climate or resource conflicts. Galapagos genetic programmer Hal Briggs improvises as he goes on what qualities to include or delete in his gene splicing for Jack and, especially, Kay, to whom he develops a dangerous attachment. Then word gets out that Jack and Kay have escaped, before Briggs has completed his work. As Briggs scrambles to track his fugitive prototypes, he makes a provocative discovery that changes everything.