Started with Errors (Relative Industries Series Book 2)

by Joanna Beaumont

  “What are you doing in RI?” Lana asked. “Virtual reality gaming? God knows, they need an escape out there, and those without a job need a constant supply of games to keep them occupied.”

  “The company I worked for started out in dementia research, but after the war they saw a new market opportunity in gaming and branched out. They took me on to work on an evolution of virtual reality. It was a more immersive experience. Scenes were planted inside the mind, and the user interacted with them like a dream. It was a complete escape from reality, but the project was axed.”

  “Axed, why? It sounds great. Who doesn’t want to escape reality and live in a dream?”

  Beth looked uncomfortable. Her expression turned serious. Lana got the feeling there was more to it.

  “We had a technical problem. It wasn’t working, and I was having doubts about it, anyway. I was relieved when Meda cancelled it.”

  “So, other than bringing in new recruits, what are you doing now?”

  “I’m working on climate change with Meda; she suggested it. She’s angrier than ever about the lack of climate action around the world, but I agree with what she’s trying to achieve and nobody wants to go back home, do they?”

  “No, they don’t. What area of climate change?” Lana asked.

  “You’ll laugh.”

  Lana shook her head to convince her she wouldn’t.

  “Cattle farts and burps. Before my project was cancelled I’d become familiar with the area.”

  “Good, I don’t want to feel guilty about drinking milk for the rest of my life.”

  “I want to work the twenty years, and then I can retire to the neighbouring island and never go home. What will you be doing?” Beth asked.

  “The infertility crisis. Human-embryo development outside the womb. I’m here because Paige managed to get the changes made to the HFEA Act.” Lana scrutinised the faces in the bar. “Do you think anyone else might know me in here?”

  “No, I don’t think so. We’re late starters. I think most of the students who graduated when we did have completed their placements here and are enjoying retirement on the next island. They stagger the new entrants, and I worked in the UK for a few years before I came offshore. I arrived April 13th. No one works through the night, so I’ve been here for about five years. I just had a couple days vacation outside, touring the island, and now I’m catching up again. I’m officially five years older than you now, I think. Maybe it’s more, I don’t even want to think about it.”

  Lana’s eyes flitted around the bar before they landed back on Beth. Lana examined her face. “You don’t look it.”

  “Thanks. I only recognised you because we were good friends. Your hair is different. And your eyes…Are you wearing blue contacts?”

  Lana nodded and breathed out, allowing the knots in her stomach to slacken off a little. “I think I’ll keep my head down, just in case.” She rested an elbow on the table and hid her face with her splayed palm. “What happened with you?”

  “I went back to uni after the Easter holidays. I looked for you. I asked around. Nobody knew where you’d gone. While I was taking my exams—” Beth’s voice cracked. “They got my dad. The apprentice he was training pushed him off scaffolding, chanting, ‘YAG’. He put him in hospital. He’s in a wheelchair now.”

  Lana straightened.

  “We knew the lad that did it too. He’d come to the house, and Dad would take him to work in the mornings. While they were building the New Cities, Dad had plenty of work erecting scaffolding.

  “For years he treated him like a son, but Dad was never one to keep quiet about his opinions, especially not about the YAG, and Dad was organising vigilante security for our street to give the YAG a good kicking if they came close. He was a pain in the YAG’s arse.” Beth’s face drained of colour. “If he ever found out I was involved in the YAG, he’d never forgive me. The boy was a spy. When Dad found out it was him he made excuses for him at first, said he’d been brainwashed. But you couldn’t trust anybody. Opinions couldn’t be spoken, not even in private.

  “When Dad told me the YAG had marked our door, I knew he was involved. When I came back home during the Easter holidays—” She shook her head. “The way he would look at Dad when he wasn’t watching. I saw hate in his eyes. He had a grudge, and Dad was oblivious. Dad probably made fun of the way he held a spanner once or something trivial like that. They painted over the red cross on their door, but they said it kept coming back each night. They were lucky their house wasn’t torched like yours. After being marked, you didn’t have long before some bastard did something. You’ll never guess what they wrote on our door.”

  “What?” Lana asked.

  “Research not social care.”

  “Research not social care? No!”

  “I know. They turned our own chant back on us. Our family was outside the range of socially acceptable. Two kids, three kids, yeah, but five. We were an unfair burden on the state: five kids needing school places, five kids needing doctors’ appointments, five kids generating rubbish for the landfill. And Jessie, the youngest, she has learning difficulties, so she received social care. But they didn’t think it through. We were more of a burden after because Dad couldn’t work anymore. But those people didn’t think anything through the ignorance of youth, as Dad would say.”

  “Were we ignorant? Do you regret any of it?” Lana asked.

  “I regret how it turned out, but not what we found out.”

  “Where do they live now?”

  “They moved them into Area 252.”

  “What a mess! I’m sorry about your dad.”

  Beth sighed. “I’m sorry about your grandparents.”

  After more silence and long, transfixed gazes, Beth asked, “Did you get any sleep on the night-flight?”

  “No. I’ll still have to take a sleeping tablet tonight, though.”

  “You get some sleep. I’ll see you in a few days to find out how you’re settling in, and I’ll introduce you to my husband.”

  “You’re married; congratulations! I’ll look forward to it, and I’ll bring Callum. He knows nothing about me and the Lucy Green former terrorist thing. We’re not together together.”

  “You’re too hard on yourself. We weren’t the terrorists.” Beth half smiled. “But you want to be together with Callum?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  Lana knew she should keep their lives separate. What if Beth accidentally told Callum? But to ignore her could make it worse. She hoped Beth was a good liar, like the liar she had become.

  “Yeah, it must be,” Beth said. “It will be fantastic if we can grow babies outside the womb. It would change things at home. Things might go back to how they used to be.”

  “I know. We’re really excited about it. About time, eh?”

  Chapter Eleven

  The alarm clock blared near Lana’s ear. She’d resisted taking the sleeping tablet for as long as she could, but after hours awake and her brain showing no sign of shut down she had to.

  She was groggy. Her mouth was dry. She rolled onto her side and shut the clock off. After sipping water from the glass on her bedside table she looked at her reflection in the mirror she’d drawn on.

  Her dream was still awake in her mind. Her own baby had grown in front of her eyes like a pumpkin in her grandfather’s old greenhouse. Every moment of the day she’d obsessively monitored its progress and hardly spent any time away from it. But even then, outside her window, she could hear the angry taunts of masked gangs swinging their buckets of red paint and trailing red drops behind them.

  Crazy ideas raced through her mind. At first, the babies would grow inside pods in hospitals or clinics, but when the technology was cheap enough and there was a return to normality with jobs that paid real money, it would be possible to buy your own pod.

  Birthing pods would become a part of everyday life. It might be difficult for people to imagine now, but in the future pods would be normal. The lines between black and wh
ite frequently blur with time.

  In the old cities, drug and alcohol dependent mothers had babies. That need never happen again.

  And if an anti-viral was found, it might not work for everyone. The virus could mutate. Women might still need to use the pods. They could be a family heirloom. An eighteenth birthday present. Assuming the embryos will grow outside the womb, but why wouldn’t they?

  She flung off her quilt then rushed to the shower. She had to get started. She didn’t know how long she had before Beth, or she, cracked.

  Beth would likely tell her husband. She didn’t want to ask her not to; she wouldn’t want Beth to live a lie. There were too many lies already.

  Ready for work, she glanced at her Zone 12 phone and a text message from Callum received hours earlier.

  Get here asap. Stay in the waiting room. I want to see your face when you come in!

  He was keen—in the lab already.

  She took a lidded mug with her and on the way to her lab filled it with free coffee from the coffee station then selected a pastry from the breakfast-to-go dispenser.

  Strolling along the Zone 12 walkway, both hands full, she found the lab and pushed the door open with her backside. She sat down on a bench in the waiting room, thought-texted Callum and tore a piece from the pastry.

  Before she finished eating, Callum arrived with a wide-eyed fantastical expression.

  He sat down next to her, his knee bounced while he watched her intensely.

  She licked her fingers and picked the flakes of pastry from her jeans and ate them. He didn’t tell her to hurry up, but she knew he wanted to, and she was kind of enjoying him waiting for her.

  He groaned.

  She looked at him. “What?”

  He reached for her coffee. “Give me that. I don’t want you to drop it when you see inside.”

  She gave him the mug. He stood, and at the internal doors he pushed a code onto the pin-pad. The doors swung open onto a vast, open plan room.

  “Here it is,” Callum said, sweeping his arm across the lab.

  She gasped. The walls were painted blood red. Four rows of freestanding pods stretched in neat lines, way into the distance, and inside each one something pink and fleshy grew—surely not human embryos. She strode to the nearest pod. Diffuse red lighting cast a faint glow inside. She frowned, trying to make out the contents.

  “It’s a gigantic womb,” she whispered.

  “See what’s growing?”

  “Are they pigs?”

  She resisted the urge to heave and rushed to the next pod and then the next. Pig foetuses were suspended inside transparent, egg-shaped sacs of clear fluid, each at a different life stage.

  Open mouthed, she watched a fully developed pig squirm and stretch. On the control panel 110 out of 114 days gestation.

  An umbilical cord stretched from the pig foetus and reached through clear-fluid into an outer sac filled with a thicker, yellower, jelly-like suspension. She assumed the jelly-layer served as the placenta and fixed the inner sac into position.

  She scanned down the list of statistics on the control panel: temperature, mineral/vitamin composition, embryo life stage, oxygen, hormone levels. Until the final row they were self-explanatory: g=0.9.

  “Awesome!” Lana said.

  “The umbilical cord attaches to the membrane between the two fluid sacs, and the nutrients from the placenta leach through the cord. The outer and inner fluids are monitored for the correct level of nutrients.”

  She tapped the panel. “What’s g=0.9?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “I wasn’t expecting it to be this advanced.”

  Lana checked the control panel and examined the squirming piglet inside the pod again. She’d seen nothing on this scale before, not even in China.

  “What will happen to these pigs?” she asked.

  “What do you think? This is a self-sustaining facility.”

  “I hate pork.”

  “You don’t like baby back ribs smothered in barbecue sauce.”

  “That’s sick!”

  He laughed. “Look in here.”

  Lana followed him through a set of doors that led into a smaller room.

  Directly in front of them, a wide viewing-window served as a partition to another room containing five man-sized transparent pods.

  “That’s the growing room,” Callum said.

  Lana gripped a chair positioned at the long control panel. She would have a ringside seat to the show, and she wouldn’t be watching pumpkins or pigs grow.

  “The human embryos are in the cold storage safe.” Callum pointed at the heavy metal door, like a bank safe, fixed flush to the right-hand wall inside the room they stood in. A pin-pad was next to it.

  “Do you have the code to the safe?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  Lana walked along the length of the control panel, pulling off the transparent film-coating still protecting it from scratches.

  “How long have you been here?” she asked, wondering how he knew so much already.

  “Two hours. One of the team members showed me around. They’re on a coffee break now. There’s five of them. I’ll introduce you later.”

  “Why didn’t you wake me earlier?”

  “I thought you needed the sleep. You said you had—” he shuddered “—period pain.”

  “It’s 9:30 a.m. A coffee-break already?” She screwed the film up and dropped it in the bin near the door.

  “They start work at six and work twelve-hour work days.”

  Twelve hour work days?

  “Do you want to see inside the growing room?”

  Lana nodded. Twelve hour work days? She didn’t want to moan already.

  Inside the growing room Callum said, “Each pod is an enhanced time acceleration zone. Whatever we grow inside them can be grown in minutes if we want them to.”

  “In minutes?” Lana approached a pod. She peered inside at the empty void waiting to be filled with human life. Her stomach lurched, from fear or from doubt? She wasn’t sure.

  Every good and perfect gift comes from above.

  She pushed the spitting woman’s face from her mind. God worked in mysterious ways.

  Callum tapped a control panel fixed to the side of a pod, and a soft red glow illuminated the inside. “Light and sounds are controlled individually. There are sounds from the home, birds, bees, a mother’s heartbeat. Only the best for the human embryos,” he said.

  “What’s the difference between pig and human embryos?” she asked.

  “You know it’s not that simple. A human pregnancy is different to a pig’s in many ways.”

  “Have the team tried with human embryos yet?”

  “I assume not. They were waiting for the changes to the HFEA Act.”

  Lana was unconvinced. This place was so advanced. Why hadn’t they tried growing the human embryos already? Inside Zone 12, years had passed since Parliament had passed the HFEA Act.

  They moved back inside the control room. Callum opened a tall cupboard stacked with tubs of powder and reels upon reels of filament.

  “These are the ingredients we’ll use to print the womb sacs,” he said. “Do you want to make a baby, Lana?”

  He smiled. He was too good at double-entendres. And if he hadn’t just used the words womb and sac in the same sentence, she could’ve imagined him asking that question in very different circumstances.

  Trying to be serious, she examined him for a moment, but she couldn’t stop her smile. “Do you want to make a baby, Callum?”

  “After we’ve assembled the sacs, eh?”

  “Yeah, it’s good of them to give us a job to do.”

  He didn’t notice her cynicism.

  A young woman with thickly glazed glasses and curly brown shoulder-length hair darted inside the control room. “Alex is here. He must have come in with you yesterday. He’s coming to see you two.” She shot back out again.

  “That was Rosie, by the way,” Callum said. />
  A minute later, Alex burst into the control room. “Callum and Lana!” he said with the charisma of a game show host. “I see you’ve seen our human embryo facility already. I’m excited to meet you two. Your presence represents the culmination of a very long process.”

  Yesterday he seemed bored, but now he brimmed with enthusiasm. Was this the side of him Paige saw?

  After Paige had first mentioned Alex, Lana researched him on the internet. He described himself as an experience hunter, always looking out for something interesting to do.

  After you’ve bought an English premiership football team, the New York Giants and the Chicago Bulls, when you own companies in most sectors and still have more money than you can ever spend, what else is there left to do? Where does the next hit come from?

  She could see what Paige saw in him. He was arrogant, but there was something deeply sexy about him too. Similar height and build to Callum but with thick brown hair and green eyes and those prominent eyebrows. He gave the impression he had untold secrets, and anyone who followed him would be touched by his greatness. He was a leader. People would follow him, maybe over a cliff.

  He put his hand out and shook Callum’s and then Lana’s.

  “You have two thousand pre-thirty-five embryos in cold storage in here. The rest are inside the Deceleration Zone. When ice sheets covered the northern hemisphere the number of humans dropped to two thousand. Can you imagine? The human species so highly inbred and still recovering to the numbers we have today. You must use the embryos wisely and prove the technique.”

  “Yes, we’re excited to get going. We’ve been waiting a long time for the changes to the HFEA Act, haven’t we, Lana?” Callum prodded Lana’s arm.

  “Yes.” She cleared her throat. “About the embryos…before we use them may I see parental consent?”

  Alex’s expression didn’t change, but his green eyes took aim on hers. Lana blinked a few times. Her eyes suddenly feeling dry from the air-conditioning.

  Callum nudged her again. She turned to look at him. He raised his eyebrows as if to say, ‘Do you know who you’re talking to?’