“You’re welcome,” I said, giving him a hug.
“You look great, Cassie.” His eyes made a typical, guy-type scan of my body. He tried to be nonchalant, but it was way too noticeable and made me blush.
“Oh, and by the way,” he added, “you can call me James B. Dean if you like, but just for tonight.” He settled back into the chair next to me.
Before I could respond, a waitress took our drink order and returned minutes later with a Ninja cocktail for Ella, a soda for me, and another beer for Magnum.
“So, um, what were you saying earlier? You said I could call you what?”
“James B. Dean.”
“What made you say that name?”
“You did.”
“Me?” I asked, half choking on a sip of my soda. Ella sucked her Ninja cocktail through a neon-pink straw.
“Yeah, after I left your room the other day, I started to think about my DNA donor, how he was my only true relative, so I looked him up. The only information in the archive was the name on my ancestor’s tombstone, and that name was James B. Dean.”
“What else did you find out about him?” I asked.
“Just his name. That’s all I know.”
“What about a year? Did it have a birthdate and date of death?” James B. Dean. I knew that name. He was a famous actor during the 1950s. Oh my God! Could it be him?
“Yeah, I think he was born in 1930-something and died in 1950-something. He wasn’t very old. I figured it out. He was only twenty-four. It makes me wonder what he died from. I hope it wasn’t a genetic medical issue.” He frowned.
“I can’t believe this,” I said, taking three deep breaths and placing a hand on each side of his face. His skin was warm and stubble-free. “Why didn’t I realize this before? No wonder why you seemed so familiar to me. Don’t worry, your donor didn’t die from a medical issue.”
“Did you know him?” whispered Ella across the table, her eyes wide.
“No, I didn’t, not personally.” My grandfather introduced me to him one stormy night when we sat together on the couch and watched the movie Giant. I complained about the movie being in black and white but stopped the minute Dean appeared on the screen. He was so cute!
When the movie was over, my grandfather continued our marathon with a second Dean film, Rebel Without a Cause, and I watched it, completely mesmerized by the hot, young actor. It wasn’t until after the movie ended that my grandfather told me Dean died in a car crash at the age of twenty-four.
I spoke, my words slow and controlled. “I didn’t know him, but I knew of him. He grew up in Indiana, but he moved to Los Angeles. He was—”
“No, Cassie, don’t.” Magnum wrapped his fingers around my wrists. “That’s all I want to know. His name is enough. He died so young, and oddly enough, it makes me kinda sad. I really don’t want the details.”
“Okay.” I said, bringing my arms around his body until we were snuggling shoulder to shoulder. I could feel his chest expand with each deep breath. I imagined him in Levi’s, a white T-shirt, and a black leather jacket, a rebel without a cause, his hair slicked back with gel. Out of context, uniformed, his hair free of grease, and in the thirty-first century, I couldn’t place the resemblance until now.
He rested his head against mine. “Are you okay?”
“Yes. I’m sorry. I just needed to do that,” I answered, pulling away.
“Remember, I’m not him. I’m a different person with my own soul. It wasn’t me who died at twenty-four. I’ll be twenty-six next month. I already have him beat.” Magnum laughed and brought his hand around to stroke my hair.
“I know.” He was a different person, but with the exception of a different hairstyle, I could see James Dean in a way that no one else who was born after 1955 ever could.
“Well, I’m never going to look up my donor. No way,” said Ella with a pouty smile. “I don’t care who she was.”
She tilted her head back and inched forward. Her eyes closed slightly, but her mouth remained opened and smiling before she took another long sip of her cocktail and released her straw, leaving it crunched and indented with tooth marks.
“Even though I don’t like knowing my donor died so young, I’m still glad I did it. It made me think about how vulnerable we really are. How dependent we are upon the dead, robbing their bones of DNA.” Magnum took a long gulp of beer. “The whole thing is pretty pathetic when you think about it. Maybe the human race wasn’t meant to survive the plague in the first place.”
“What are you talking about? Life is way too precious to think that way,” Ella interrupted, stirring the ice in her glass with her straw. “And now that Cassie’s here?”
“Yeah, now that she’s here, the pilfering is going to continue.” He looked to his left and right and dropped his voice to a whisper. “This time stealing eggs from young girls—beginning with her.” Ella crossed her arms and glared. “And don’t forget, they’re also going to force them to give birth—again and again.”
Touche! Magnum was definitely on my side. I couldn’t say the same for Ella, who was making this awkward moment even more uncomfortable by staring at the ceiling. “Thank you for understanding,” was all I could say.
“Cassie, honey, now don’t take this the wrong way,” Ella finally said, after crunching on a piece of ice, “but as much as I don’t like the idea of anyone being forced to do something he or she does not want to do, there are times when it’s necessary to give someone a little nudge when it comes to having that person decide to do the right thing.”
“A nudge?” he asked, shaking his head through a sarcastic laugh. “How about a push?”
“It’s just hard for me to understand why you don’t want to have a baby.” She played with the egg necklace. “I mean, if I ever had the chance to give birth, I’d take it in a heartbeat, no matter the circumstances and no questions asked, especially if it meant saving the human race. I’d do anything to be in your shoes.”
I believed her, and I couldn’t blame her. Every female soap opera character had an inner longing to procreate naturally, clutching their flat bellies, their eyes brimming with tears as the newborn clone of their choice was plucked from a plastic uterus and handed to them by a MED.
“Please don’t be mad at me for feeling that way,” Ella begged just before the waitress arrived with a tray of food.
“I’m not mad at you.” But was she secretly mad at me because of the way I felt?
She leaned toward me for a long hug and whispered, “Thank you,” in my ear before she let go and eyed the plate of food in the center of the table.
“I’m seventeen. I have a long life ahead of me,” I added, “and I should be the one who decides what to do with it.”
We ate our appetizers, oddly shaped mushrooms smothered in a savory orange sauce, and downed small glasses of smooth, cold soup referred to as soup shooters. Magnum tapped his foot, Ella became giddy, continuing to laugh for no apparent reason, unless it was a failed attempt to lighten the mood, and I sat in silence with a movie star to my left and a woman to my right who wanted to be me.
“Hey, you two go out and dance.” She giggled as the restaurant lights dimmed and the volume of the background music increased.
“No, no, you two go out there,” I said.
He groaned. “I don’t dance.” He tilted back in his chair, and I pictured him with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.
“Yeah, right. Mr. Cool is too cool to dance? Go on,” I urged.
He lowered his chair to the floor and stood with hunched shoulders. “Okay, I’ll dance, but you have to dance with me, Cassie.”
“Yeah, go on. It can be part of your physical therapy,” said Ella. She gave his lower leg a push with the tip of her pointed-toe shoe.
“But I’ve never danced with a guy before,” I shouted above the music as he took my hand and led me to a small clearing on the dance floor.
What could I do other than resort to imitating the moves of the other women around me?
There was more upper-body movement and less grinding than I remembered. Apparently “dirty dancing” was dead, and I was glad.
Magnum kept to the beat, but his movements were not fully extended. He was only half dancing, trying to appear nonchalant and detached from the other men who, probably in his mind, looked like buffoons.
“So do you really think I’m cool, whatever that means?” he said when the music slowed.
“Absolutely.”
“No one has ever called me that before.”
“That’s because no one uses that word anymore—at least I haven’t heard anyone use it here, not even the people on the entertainment channels. How do woman usually describe you?”
He smiled, embarrassed. “Oh, I don’t know. Usually I’m told that I’m cute.”
“Well, you’re more than that. You’re cute, and you’re cool,” I teased as he gave me a twirl.
Here I was dancing with James Dean. Magnum was charming and charismatic, fun and fascinating. The thought gave me a good set of chills and made me forget about being a mother in the near future.
“So, um, how are you handling things anyway? Are you doing okay?”
The music slowed. He pulled me against his body, and like the other couples, I brought my arms around his neck as he drew his arms about my waist.
“No, not really. I know I don’t have a choice, and I know I can’t change things,” I whispered in his ear. “But at the same time, I can’t accept my fate. I don’t want to be a mother, especially under these circumstances, even if it means no more dead fetuses and no more tortured chimps.”
“Whoa, you know about that?”
“Yup, I saw it for myself. It broke my heart,” I said, letting out a soft sigh.
“I do what I can to avoid both rooms. If there’s ever a technical issue I send one of my techs, but Dr. Bennett, he goes in the chimp room all the time.”
I stiffened. “Why? Is he the one who has to harvest…?”
“No, that’s a bot’s job. Dr. Bennett feels sorry for them, but instead of ignoring their existence like many of us try to do, he brings them special treats, things they don’t get in their regular meals.”
“Aw, that’s so sweet.” I wished Michael was here now, his arms tight around my waist, his hands pressing my back, his lips light against my neck.
“So were you telling Ella the truth when you told her you weren’t mad at her? I’d be a little mad if I was you.”
“No, I’m not mad.” Not at her. How could I be?
“You know, she’s not the only one who’d jump at the chance at being you. I think any woman would.”
“At least you understand how I feel.”
“That’s because I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about your situation. If I got married today and my wife and I decided to have a child, we’d show up at the GenH1 maternity ward, and twenty minutes later leave with a baby in our arms. Even though that baby wouldn’t be tied to either one of us genetically, at least I’d have a choice as to whether I wanted a baby in the first place, and if so, who the mother of my child would be.” His forehead touched mine. “That’s not going to happen for you.”
He was right, but it was something I didn’t want to think about. I rested my chin on his shoulder and pressed my cheek against his neck. If I could pick the father of my child, would adjusting to my role here be easier, or would it make things more complicated? My stomach knotted.
Colored spotlights from above bounced between two mirrored walls, one on each side of the dance floor, pulsing in time with the music. From over Magnum’s shoulder, I watched the clones’ mirror images dance, turning in small, slow circles as they held one another. Like their reflections, they were copies of another human, distant echoes from the past, something that was still so hard for me to believe.
“I’m sorry this is happening to you. If I could stop it, I would,” he said, his soft breath on my neck.
“Knowing that means a lot to me. Thank you.”
When the song ended, he gave me an extra-long embrace before we cut across the dance floor toward Ella.
“Cassie,” said Ella as we sat down. “Dr. Little called. He wants you to report to his office when you’re done eating.”
“Why?”
“He said the celebration wasn’t going to end here. Apparently it’s going to continue in his office.”
“What’s he talking about?”
“I’m not sure,” she said, shaking her head.
Magnum snatched a straw from an empty glass, chewed the end like a toothpick, and chucked it across the dance floor.
Chapter Eleven
Two security guards were waiting for me outside the restaurant, and as we turned into a corridor leading to an A.G.-lift, the three of us were joined by a SEC. A rush of panic filled my core, tempting me to rip my arm from the security guard’s grip and sprint away from them down the hall.
“Welcome, Miss Dannacher,” said Dr. Little when I entered his office. “Thank you for agreeing to see me tonight.”
Did I have a choice? He motioned to one of the chairs on the other side of his desk, and I sat down, my nerves on fire. “So, what are we celebrating?” I asked as blasé as I could and looked over his shoulder at Claus rather than making direct eye contact with him.
“Something special, something very, very special. Something that should make you very, very happy. Making you happy and keeping you that way are very important to me.” The fervor in his eyes made me cringe.
Yeah, right. Then let me go. “Really, you could have fooled me. Don’t forget that I spent three weeks in solitary confinement.”
“That was for your own good. We couldn’t have you trying to run away or consider hurting yourself again, now could we?” He smiled. “I can only hope it gave you time to think about how well you’ve been treated since your awakening. We gave you back your life—something that was impossible in your century—and in doing so, healed all of your injuries. We’ve provided you with food, clothing, a warm bed, and medical care.”
All of which were true, yet hard to appreciate considering why they brought me back to life in the first place. I didn’t get my old life back, but they did give me life.
“You can never give me what I really want.”
“That may be true, but we have given you something.”
“What?”
“Let me show you rather than tell you,” he said, setting his Liaison in front of me and giving it a tap. The black screen flickered and an image appeared, something alien-looking, something pink with an enlarged head and tiny limbs bent at their knees and elbows.
“Why are you showing me this?”
“Congratulations, Miss Dannacher. You’ve just completed your first trimester.” He grinned. I held my breath as I studied the image again, a fetus about the size of a domino floating in a fluid-filled sac of flesh. “It’s a girl, of course, due to our gender selection method.”
“There’s no way. I don’t understand.”
“What is there to understand? This image was taken last night by a MED while you slept. As of today, you’re twelve weeks into your pregnancy. In approximately twenty-six weeks, you’ll be giving birth to a healthy baby girl. This is your baby,” he said, pushing his Liaison closer to me.
“I don’t believe you,” I gasped, pushing it back, and remembering the soft ding I thought I heard in the middle of the night. “I haven’t been throwing up every morning for the last three months.” I’d been nauseous from time to time, but I was sure that was due to anxiety and being dead for one thousand and three years.
“Only 75 percent of pregnant women suffer from morning sickness during the first trimester, and of that 75, 25 percent experience occasional nausea without vomiting. Think about the symptoms: fatigue, nausea, dizziness, an increase in appetite.”
I’d experienced all of those things, but weren’t they signs of my recovery, symptoms born from my mental struggle to get a grip on this world?
“You could’ve gotten
this picture from anywhere. There’s no proof that it’s from me,” I shouted, folding my arms hard across my chest and giving the desk leg a kick.
He pointed to the picture on the screen. “It is your baby, Miss Dannacher, and if you don’t believe me, I’ll call in a MED right now for another scan, so you can see the image being taken for yourself.”
This is what Michael was talking about—a truth being told.
My head grew light, and for a moment I thought I was going to faint. The pink, thumb-sized fetus blurred as my eyes welled, but I sucked in my trembling lower lip, determined not to let a tear fall.
“You’ve made these last three months rather difficult for all of us. Eighty percent of all miscarriages occur in the first trimester. After the stunt you pulled three weeks ago, we had to do everything we could to keep you and your baby from harm, which included moving you to the isolation ward and checking your hormone levels regularly.”
It all made sense, but I didn’t want to believe it. I couldn’t believe it. Three months? I’d only been awake for one.
“When? When did you do this to me?”
“Two months before you were awakened.”
“Y-you had no right to-to violate me like that,” I stammered. “I was unconscious. I couldn’t give you my permission.”
“What rights? You were a ward of the region. The president made the decision for you.”
“But why? Why do it before I was awakened? And why didn’t you just—”
“Just what? Take one of your eggs, fertilize it in the lab, and pop it into an artificial uterus or a waiting surrogate?”
That was my question, although that wouldn’t have made what they did to me any better. Touching my body without my consent, invading my private places, and impregnating me using who-knew-what from someone I didn’t know. The words curdled in my throat as I tried to answer yes, and my hands shook as I balled my hands into fists.
“Like we explained to you before—the artificial uterus has not been perfected. Whether the donor of the egg is a human or a primate, the odds are against its survival. We can’t afford losing, or should I say, wasting any of your precious eggs.”
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