DMZ show-and-tell (pp. 213–214)

A quiet mark of maternal inheritance, dropped mid-scene. Hal insists that someone "actually hop in the truck and actually go to a real med-library" to verify the DMZ rather than trust online monographs — because "Hal's his mother Avril's child when it comes to databases, software Spell-Checks, etc." The one trait explicitly handed down from Avril is her rigor, her distrust of the unverified, the prescriptive-grammarian's insistence on the authoritative source. Of everything the mother could transmit, what surfaces in Hal is her method — the same exacting standard that built E.T.A.'s curriculum now applied to sourcing a hallucinogen. The family's maternal line runs in Hal as a habit of verification, love-of-the-database as heredity.