Ghost Species

by James Bradley

  And then, just when it looks as if it will never work, a healthy embryo is produced. Kate suggests the team celebrate but Jay refuses, afraid they will jinx it. She laughs at him, and is surprised when he glares at her.

  That night she expects him to be distant, but in the darkness he reaches for her, and they fuck wordlessly, his body no more than a shape in the gloom. Closing her eyes she imagines the embryos in the lab freezer, the surrogate’s body, and for a moment it is not Jay above her but Marija, or somebody else she does not know.

  A fortnight later they implant, Kate watching the operation on a screen. For a week they wait, and when the news comes that the embryo has taken they all cheer, until Jay motions to them to calm down, assuring them there is much more that needs to be done.

  As summer bleeds into autumn they monitor Marija’s pregnancy closely. There are hiccups, but for the most part it proceeds normally. One day, at the gym, Kate encounters Marija. She is swimming, her stroke clean and strong, her angular body barely altered from the back. As she wheels up the lane Kate watches her, wondering at what they have done here, at the notion the child in her womb is not human. How much does Marija guess, Kate wonders. Some? All? None?

  In her bag her phone buzzes, and pulling it out she reads an email from Jay and fires back a quick answer. As she puts her phone away again she is startled to realise Marija has climbed out of the pool while she was distracted and now stands a short distance away.

  Out of the water the younger woman’s body is long and lean, the only sign she is seven months’ pregnant the gravid weight of her belly, which protrudes at an improbable angle from her body, her heavy breasts. She does not acknowledge Kate’s presence. Eventually Kate turns towards her, speaks.

  ‘You swim beautifully.’

  Marija doesn’t look at her. Instead she looks at the pool.

  ‘I did squad when I was younger.’ She has the slightly blurred accent of the young, that indeterminacy that makes it sound like it is straining eastward, across the Pacific.

  ‘It shows,’ Kate says.

  Marija continues to dry herself, as if the conversation is over.

  Not for the first time Kate is struck by the way Marija repels all attempts to engage with her. It is difficult to tell whether it is lack of interest or a peculiarly obstinate stupidity. Were there always so many people who were so unengaged by those around them? Or is it a new thing? An evolutionary response to technology or social conditions? She has heard Marija on the phone to people who must be her friends, her words flowing out of her, as if she were describing a video that just happens to be her life in which anybody not in her field of vision is irrelevant.

  ‘I saw some of the results. You seem to be doing well.’

  Marija glances at her, her flat incuriosity deflected for a moment by the fact they are talking about her.

  ‘They said.’

  ‘And you feel well?’

  She nods, grappling the wet mass of her hair into a thick rope as she wraps it in a towel. Kate watches her thoughtfully.

  ‘I’m curious,’ she says. ‘What made you sign up for this project?’

  Marija looks at her. ‘I wanted to help.’

  Kate hesitates. She feels as if she is on the edge of something. ‘Help with what?’

  ‘Help Davis.’

  ‘Why would you want to do that?’

  ‘Because I believe in what he’s doing. Because he’s trying to make the world a better place.’

  ‘But this is a baby you’re making,’ Kate persists.

  Marija smiles. ‘It’s my body,’ she says. ‘If I can make somebody else happy that’s a good thing, isn’t it?’

  In the last weeks of the pregnancy, there are a series of meetings to review the question of whether a vaginal delivery or a caesarean would be safer. Although the decision is ultimately one for the medical team, Jay and Kate and several other of their senior colleagues are included in the discussions. Although the baby seems to be developing as anticipated, her weight is lower than expected. It is unclear if this is normal or due to some unexpected developmental delay, but in the end the medical team decides to operate, thereby eliminating one vector of risk. The decision is communicated to Marija by Jay and the head doctor in a conversation that is livestreamed to Davis, Kate and other members of the team. The camera is on the ceiling of the conference room, its angle queasily reminiscent of footage from some kind of exposé.

  Although Kate had assumed Marija would be upset, or at least concerned about the possibility of post-operative damage, she seems entirely unmoved by the news, receiving it impassively.

  More troubling to Kate is the decision Marija will not be allowed to see the child. To achieve this it has been decided she will be sedated during the procedure and then removed to a recovery suite immediately after the incision has been closed.

  ‘She deserves to hold her, to see her,’ Kate says, but Davis refuses.

  ‘We’re worried the shock might lead to her breaching her confidentiality agreement,’ he says, his voice oddly hollow through the speakers.

  On the day appointed Marija is prepped and moved to the delivery suite. Although they are not part of the medical team Kate and Jay have been given permission to attend the procedure; together with Davis and a videographer they stand to the side of the room as Marija is wheeled in, her body swathed in a surgical gown, her long blonde hair falling on either side of her face.

  The operation is quick, unproblematic, but as the scalpel pierces Marija’s skin and the flesh parts to reveal the blue-grey form of the child, Kate begins to shake, the memory of her own time in surgery coming back to her. Reaching down, she grips the chair and wraps an arm around her middle. Nothing is ever truly over. She turns to Jay, but above his mask his attention is fixed on the obstetrician, so she closes her eyes and focuses on breathing.

  And then, sooner than seems possible, there is a gasp. Kate opens her eyes to find the obstetrician holding a blood and vernix-smeared form in his white-gloved hands. She is so still, her tiny shape so immobile that Kate’s breath catches. But as the nurse lays the tiny form out on the resus trolley, it coughs, then with a rasping wheeze begins to cry, and all at once the moment rushes in, filling her, filling all of them. Above his mask Jay’s eyes are creased with delight; on the far side of the suite the obstetrician leans back in relief. Pushing closer, Kate stares down at the child, her tiny face contorted as she cries out in shock and fear at being torn from the world within and thrust into the light, a sound not heard for forty thousand years spilling out into the air, filling the space around them, Kate’s only thought that she is so small, so beautiful. So human.

  The hours after the child is born pass in a daze, the world around them only half-real. Jay and the other team members are elated, suspended in a mixture of relief the procedure has been a success and wonder at the less easily parsed miracle of her being. Still clad in a gown, Jay is interviewed by the videographer, his words coming in a rush as he attempts to describe his feelings, glancing around every sentence or two to look at the child – Eve, as Davis has demanded they call her – nestled in the arms of the nurse. When he is done the videographer approaches Kate, but she lifts a hand and backs away, uncomfortable committing her emotions to words at this moment.

  There is much to be done, of course – not just medical tests but records of size and weight, heartbeat and blood chemistry, reflex responses and more, as well as photographs and video. But even before they begin it is apparent to all present that she is healthy and strong, no different, in many ways, from a normal baby.

  But even a superficial glance is enough to reveal she is not normal. Beneath the thick red-brown hair plastered against her scalp her head is larger, the face more simian, the rounded cheeks and jaw reminiscent of those of a chimpanzee, her subtly shorter forehead emphasising the unusual largeness of her eyes.

  Yet it is not these differences that strike Kate most forcefully, but her fragility, the wonder of her. She is them but not them, h
uman but not human, extinct yet somehow here, in the world. But most of all she seems to embody a kind of possibility, something both dizzying and terrifying to contemplate, her presence in the world changing everything. And nothing.

  The scientist in Kate is dispassionate enough to want to probe these responses. Are they simply relief and excitement? A natural reaction to a newborn child, or perhaps some kind of delayed response to her own trauma? Or is there something deeper going on, some hardwired response to the sight of a different species? We are, after all, programmed to recognise our own kind, and, conversely, to know when somebody or something is not one of us.

  They have produced a formula with which to feed her, engineered to provide minerals and proteins they anticipate she will need. It is a decision Kate resisted, arguing they should allow her to breastfeed, an argument that was overruled by Davis and Jay. Technically it is the responsibility of the nurse to whose care Eve has been entrusted to feed her, but when Kate asks her if she can hold the child, the nurse smiles and places her in Kate’s arms. And as Eve takes the bottle Kate realises it does not matter, that in the end the world narrows down to this one thing. The way that bond connects both, one to the past, one to the future, or in this case, folds back in on itself, disturbing time, abstracting meaning.

  It is only when she looks up that she sees Davis standing to one side, watching her. During the procedure he had stood on the other side of Jay, barely speaking, his eyes above his surgical mask focused on Marija and the doctors. Once or twice Jay had said something to him, but Davis had seemed to hardly notice, not even glancing around as he replied. In the moments after the birth he had been interviewed by the videographer; clad in his scrubs he had spoken of the Foundation’s goals, the fact their achievements had propelled them into the future. ‘We are at a moment of historical decoupling,’ he said, his manner shifting from something almost messianic to a performance of humility so disingenuous Kate was surprised he couldn’t hear it himself. In recent weeks there have been a string of negative stories about Gather sharing information with the Russian and Chinese intelligence services; watching Davis’s performance Kate found herself wondering whether his oddly unsettled demeanour is connected to them.

  Still lost in the wonder of the child, she smiles.

  ‘Would you like to hold her?’ she asks.

  Davis doesn’t move. ‘She looks happy where she is.’

  Kate smiles again. ‘Are you pleased? Is this what you expected?’

  Once again she sees the sheen of mania she glimpsed when he spoke to the videographer in the fixity of his gaze. ‘The whole point was to move us past expectation. Into somewhere new.’

  Kate hesitates, unsure how to respond. But before she can recover herself Madison appears at Davis’s elbow and whispers something to him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I have to go.’

  It is only after he has left it occurs to Kate that at no point did Davis hold or touch the child.

  Kate does not see Marija again, although later she is told she was discharged and returned to the mainland the day after the birth. Davis disappears as well, supposedly back to Oakland to discuss the buyout of another company, although that same day Kate sees photos of him at a music festival in Costa Rica and a meeting with Saudi sheikhs. With them gone it is as if some crucial link with the wider world has been severed. Isolated not just from the other staff at the facility, but even those in their own team who are not privy to the true nature of the project, Kate finds herself struck by the sense the rest of the world has fallen away, leaving only her and Jay and the others involved in Eve’s care.

  At least at the outset this proves easier than anybody had anticipated. Eve is strong, alert, surprisingly untroubled. Although there is no way of knowing for certain what constitutes normal development in a non-sapient child, she seems healthy and happy.

  In principle Eve’s day-to-day care is the responsibility of a team of nurses. Although all have been carefully vetted Kate sometimes wonders what they think of the project, and of those involved in it: more than once one in particular asks pointed questions about when they plan to move Eve into a more normal environment, and on several occasions Kate interrupts conversations none of the nursing staff seem in a hurry to resume. Yet still, as the weeks pass, she finds herself in the suite more and more. Sometimes she has an excuse – data to review or samples to collect – but more often she is there simply to be close to Eve, her hours passed watching the child sleep or cradling her tiny body, undone by her presence. One evening, when Eve will not settle, Kate offers to take over from the nurse, holding the bottle as Eve’s restlessness gives way to calm. As Eve slips into sleep Kate becomes aware of somebody behind her, and looks up to find Jay standing there. He smiles solicitously, and she smiles back, suddenly aware of the way they recapitulate the iconography of the family: infant, loving mother, attentive father.

  Jay places a hand on her shoulder. ‘You mustn’t bond with her,’ he says gently. ‘She isn’t ours.’

  She starts, struck by his use of the word ‘ours’.

  ‘But that’s the point, isn’t it? She should be somebody’s. All children should be.’

  ‘And she will be. You’ve seen the plans. Davis has arranged for carers and educators.’

  Kate’s stomach twists. ‘You know that’s not the same. She deserves parents.’

  Jay nods. ‘You’re right. But we understood when we signed up that it would be like this. That she would be part of an experiment.’

  ‘Are you sure that was the right choice? We could find another way, surely?’

  ‘Please, Kate,’ Jay says. ‘Don’t do this.’

  That night, back in their room, they argue.

  ‘So, what?’ Jay demands. ‘You think they should hand her over to us? Let us play happy families? You know that’s a fantasy. It’s never going to happen.’

  Kate stares at him. ‘I don’t think you understand what it’s like to grow up without people who care about you,’ she says, willing her voice not to waver.

  ‘If I don’t, it’s because you’ve never talked to me about it,’ he replies. For a brief moment Kate wonders if he will say more, but he does not. Finally he relents. ‘I’ll talk to Davis. Perhaps there are ways the plan can be finessed.’

  But two days later Kate is startled when Jay stands up in a team meeting and says he thinks the time has come to begin developing new candidates.

  ‘If we can make one child we can make more,’ he says, his voice clear, confident.

  There is a murmur of voices. Kate grips the arms of her chair. She wants to stand up, walk out the door, but she cannot move. Opposite her, Mylin catches her eye. Several times in recent months she has sought Kate out and sat with her in the cafe, seemingly eager to establish a bond between the two of them. Mylin holds her gaze for a few seconds, then Kate looks away.

  Twenty-four hours earlier Davis had been in the facility, staring at Eve in her crib, his expression unreadable. Only when the nurse prompted him by asking if he wanted to hold her did he seem to remember he was not alone and look up, regarding her and Kate with his pale eyes.

  ‘Kate,’ he said. ‘I didn’t see you there. I hear you’ve been spending a lot of time with her.’ His voice was pleasant, conversational, but not for the first time she was reminded he was not like her, not like any of them, that he inhabits a world in which his whims have the force of reality.

  Afterwards, before he met with Jay, she had caught Jay in his office and reminded him of his promise. He smiled and told her he hadn’t forgotten.

  That evening Kate watches him sitting in their living room, working on something on his notebook, and realises she no longer knows him. Looking down she sees her hand is shaking.

  The next day she wakes before dawn. Outside, the first murmuring of light. Slipping out of bed, she pulls on a jumper and steps out into the morning air. She hears birds in the distance, their cries echoing across the valley. The grass is wet as she crosses towards the fore
st and sets off up the hill. On the slope the trees are speckled with grey where the lichen is taking hold. Looking out over the landscape, she understands with the force of a blow something she should have understood long before. This project is wrong, not because it is an exercise in vanity, because it places humans at the centre of things or pretends to godhood, or for any of the other arguments they have rehearsed at various stages in the process. Instead it is wrong because it fails to see their solution is part of the problem, a misplaced belief that this is another problem they can manage, engineer, control.

  Eve is not an experiment, she is a conscious being, she deserves the right to find her own path, to be her own person. She deserves love, not just people hired to care for her. But more than that, she deserves to grow up on her own terms, unburdened by other people’s expectations to discover what she is for herself.

  The day rushes by. Ordinarily she could rely on her work to anchor her, on her ability to push everything else aside and lose herself in it, but today she cannot. She feels she has passed beyond some kind of boundary, that there is no going back, nor, without knowing what to do next, any going forward. It is only when she returns home late in the evening that she suddenly understands what it is she must do. For a moment she just stands, drinking in the simplicity, the almost mathematical purity of it, then she turns, and heads back towards the house.

  Inside Jay is seated on the couch, headphones on, absorbed in something on his screen. They have barely spoken all evening. For a long moment she stands, staring at him. What will this do to him, she wonders, and her chest contracts. Her heart beating fast she hurries into the bedroom, and taking out a bag, stuffs clothes into it, money, documents, anything she can lay her hands on. Although she is working fast she does not feel panicky or afraid, instead she feels curiously calm, the edges of the world around her delineated with a strange and unfamiliar clarity. Once she is done she opens the drawer beside the bed and drops her phone in, and heads out to the car.