by H. A. Swain
From the neat stacks of blue scrubs, I grab a shirt and pants then whip off my dress. The bottle of Synthamil falls out of my pocket and rolls toward the door, where it makes a dull thonk. “Oh crap, oh crap,” I whisper and skitter after it. As I crouch, half dressed, trying not to breathe, a muffled argument breaks out in the hallway.
“I won’t…” I hear someone say followed by deep angry voices, then a scuffle and the sound of people running. I close my eyes and duck my head, waiting for the door to fly open. But it doesn’t. Instead, I hear the back door thud and Gaia yell, “Let him go. I’ll deal with him later.”
It takes a moment for my heart to stop pounding in my ears, and I feel sorry for whoever just bolted, because he’s going to get it after the harvest is over. I finish dressing and stuff my pockets with the Synthamil bottle and knife then tuck my hair under a cap. As quietly as I entered the dressing room, I leave.
Keeping my head down but my eyes up, I inch along the hall toward the front of the building. I see Leeda handing out small plastic cups to the line of men slithering through the open door of a lab. My heart pounds in my ears as I search the line for Basil, trying to find the one thing that distinguishes him from all the other bearded men in identical brown uniforms. Surely, I think, I will know him, but like the other times, I can’t distinguish him from the crowd. With Leeda so close, I can’t linger and gawk so I pass by, cutting my eyes to the right to look inside the room where I see Gaia, reclining on a bed, her blue robe wrapped tight around her body with one bare leg sticking out. She eyes the men hungrily as they line up in front of her, tiny cups in hand.
“Hey,” someone says, and I jump. A girl I’ve never seen before shoves a tray of syringes at me. “Take these in. He’s waiting.” My hands shake as I take the tray, making the syringes rattle. “What’s wrong with you?” she hisses. “Be careful!”
“Sorry,” I mutter, panicking because I can’t go in that room with Dr. Demeter.
“And where’s your surgical mask?” she asks.
“I … I … I…”
She shakes her head, annoyed. “Take this one.” She pulls a strip of blue fabric from her pocket and hands it to me. “I’ll get another.”
I hook the straps of the mask behind my ears and find the lab with Dr. Demeter. He’s changed into scrubs and a mask, too, so only his eyes show. He glances at the tray in my hands and says, “Thank you, dear. You can put those right over there.” I pass by the twelve women, including Tia and Ester, who were chosen by Gaia outside. They lay on gurneys, their flat bellies exposed to the bright lights overhead. Their arms are attached by thin tubes to IV bags marked meperidine and diazepam hanging on poles behind them. Bex and Ella are on the far side of the room labeling petri dishes with numbers.
“Now then,” Dr. Demeter says as he snaps on a pair of sterile gloves. “If you could kindly swab the girls, we can begin.”
I mimic another girl in scrubs and a mask who starts at one end of the row while I go to the other. We pull on gloves then rip open antiseptic wipes and work our way down the line. When I rub the area around Ester’s belly button, she sucks in air. “Sorry,” I whisper. “Is it cold?” She looks at me with bleary eyes then seems to drift away.
“Don’t worry,” Dr. Demeter says cheerily. “They won’t feel a thing, especially when we top them off with a local anesthetic.”
Bex follows him down the line with the tray of syringes that I brought in. I move away from her and pretend to busy myself cleaning up so that she won’t see me. Dr. Demeter quickly pokes each girl in the belly, saying, “That should numb you up in no time.” Then he goes back to the beginning of the row. “And now we’ll begin the extraction.”
The other girl pushes a cart of equipment over to him. He attaches a light to his forehead and puts on strong magnifying glasses then takes some small instruments from a tray. “First we’ll just clip this off.” He attaches two small clamps to either side of the Tia’s belly button. “Raise those up ever so slightly then insert the laparoscope.” He lifts the clips with one hand as he slides a long thin needle into her navel.
I have to look away because I feel faint. I lean against a stainless steel table, breathing deeply as snippets of his quiet narration float by. “When I reach the ovary, which has become enlarged … we being to aspirate … this one looks quite full … now I can extract the oocytes.” I hear a sucking noise and think that I might vomit.
I excuse myself and run across the hall into an empty lab, panting for air, trying to wrap my mind around the truth of the situation. Haza was not insane. Dr. Demeter is harvesting human eggs! When I understand this, I think I know what could be happening to poor Basil and the other men in the room with Gaia. But I can’t understand why there are so many children running around already. I know the people on my squad were having sex in the woods and since they’re ingesting Arousatral in their Synthamil, they would be fertile. Surely all the girls who are pregnant got that way naturally. So why would he need the lab?
I pull the mask and cap off and wipe my clammy face as I swallow the sour taste in my mouth. Then I realize that I’m inside the one room that’s been locked all week. The hum of electric generators and the eerie glow of soft light come from long tables holding rows and rows of small shallow glass dishes. Inside each dish is a thin pinkish film growing in a clear solution, which looks vaguely familiar. I try to remember where I’ve seen this before. Was it something online I was reading? Or in the Relics? Maybe in my mother’s lab? Then it hits me. At the rehab center on the second floor. I took a picture of it with my Gizmo. I can’t figure it out though. These aren’t babies being grown. It looks more like human tissue. Similar to Just-Like-Skin, only not synthetic.
As I’m pondering what these lunatics could possibly be doing, the door opens. “Yes, I’ll be just a moment,” Dr. Demeter says. “I think I have a spare laparoscope in here.” He walks into the lab muttering, “Everything breaks in this godforsaken place.…” Then he sees me, pressed against the back wall. “What is it?” he asks. “What are you doing in here?”
I’m too stunned to think of a quick response or to run away. Part of my brain is screaming at me to get out, but some other part of me takes over and says, “Dr. Demeter, what are you growing?”
I catch him off guard. I don’t think anyone has ever asked him before because he actually smiles. “I love a good curious mind,” he says. “I’ve been telling Gaia for years that we should groom some lab technicians who could help me.” He opens a closet near me and rummages around, chatting easily. “It’s not hard you know. Just follow the recipe really. And I could use help tending to these crops while I’m away.” He takes a long flexible tube from the closet.
“Crops?” I ask.
“Some food can be grown in a lab, you know,” he says with a wink.
“This isn’t Synthamil,” I say, feeling for the bottle in my pocket.
“No, no, this is the next step.” When he turns to look at me fully, his face shifts into a confused stare. “I know you,” he says. “You look a bit different, but I always recognize my former patients. Remind me of your name.”
“I … I … I…” I can’t think quickly enough, but before I can run, he grabs my arm.
“Thalia?” he asks. “Thalia Apple?” I recoil, trying to get away, but he pulls me closer. “I should have known you’d make your way here!” I realize then that he’s hugging me. “Of course! Of course! Had I known that you were in the resistance, I would have brought you here myself.” He releases me and beams. “I tried to drop hints when we were talking at my facility to see how far along you’d come in your thinking, but I wasn’t quite sure you were ready. I’ve watched with great interest what you’ve accomplished in the Loops. And now I find you here! Does Gaia know who you are? She hasn’t mentioned a thing.”
I don’t know what to do. I stand, staring at him, completely befuddled by what he’s saying to me.
“Well, this is excellent!” he cries. “You can be our spokesperson!
If Lily Nguyen’s daughter, the One World–resistance leader tells the world that Synthamil didn’t work for her, but my food supply did, we’ll be able to reach a far bigger market more quickly!”
“Food supply?” I ask, still trying to make my brain understand. From the corner of my eye, I see one of the girls in scrubs step into the lab with a tray of petri dishes. When she sees us, she steps out quickly again.
Now Dr. Demeter becomes so excited that he paces in front of the tables. “Yes, you see, as I told you at my rehab center, I believe humans need to eat. It’s hardwired into us. People like your mother have been able to overcome that, but not for long. The human instinct for survival is strong. The DNA is responding. You, like nearly everyone here, are one of the chosen ones.”
“Chosen for what?” I ask, horrified.
“The mutation on chromosome sixteen,” he says.
“Mutation? Chosen?” I clutch at my throat. “Who did this to me?”
He cocks his head to the side as if trying to understand my question, then he says, “Mother Nature. It’s natural selection at play. First, we saw it mostly in second borns, but then it spread. I’m sure we’ll see more and more people unable to cope with synthetic nutrition as the mutation takes root. I thought it would be years before things would shift, but now with the revolution under way and One World ready to crumble, we will be poised to offer the masses food. Real food, again. Real plants, real milk, real meat!” He motions to the table. “We will dominate the market and become the sole supplier of nutrition in the new world order.”
There’s so much to wrap my head around that I don’t know where to begin. So I ask, “What do you mean milk and meat. There are no animals.”
“Ah,” he says with a smile. “There’s still one.”
My stomach rolls over as the pieces come together. “Human milk?” I whisper, and he nods. I remember the topless women in the pump house. The buckets of strange whitish water. The sweet tea. The talk of cheese. “And this?” I ask. “This is the meat?” I point to the dishes on the table.
“Don’t you see? No one is harmed. I grow the embryonic stem cell lines from what we harvest here and create sheets of muscle fiber, which we can stack into a hearty protein source. I think your mother will be very interested in this.”
“My mother?”
“And now that One World has severed ties with her, you can help me bring her on board.”
“Darius?” Gaia’s voice comes from the hall.
“Coming!” he calls. “Just had a bit of an equipment malfunction.” He turns to me again. “After the harvest, let’s sit down and have a good long talk,” he tells me cheerily. “I’ll explain everything more thoroughly.”
As he walks to the door where Gaia’s tying her belt around her jumpsuit, he points over his shoulder and says, “Did you know—”
But Gaia cuts him off. “Hurry up,” she tells him testily. “The men are done. They’re heading out to the fields, and I’m hungry.”
“Yes, yes,” he says impatiently. “Give me twenty minutes to finish up, and I’ll meet you at your house for lunch.”
* * *
As soon as Dr. Demeter and Gaia are gone, I bolt for the door and come face-to-face with Ella, who grabs me and whispers fiercely, “What are you doing here? Why did you come back?”
“For Basil,” I say and latch onto her arm. “And for you. Come with me and Mr. Clemens. We’ll all leave together.”
Ella shrinks from me. “I can’t,” she says. “My son. And Noam.”
“Noam?”
She nods. “I won’t leave them behind.”
“Okay, fine,” I whisper. “We’ll take them all. We’ll figure it out. Just come with us.”
“How?” she asks with a shred of hope sparkling in her eyes.
“I don’t know,” I admit.
“What about your family? In the Loops. Would they help us?”
“Yes but…”
“I know how you can contact them.” She pulls me down the hall toward the rear door as she explains, “Gaia has a screen. If we hurry, you can call them before she gets home.”
We run silently through the tangled vines. What’s happening between us is so huge that neither of us dares to speak until we reach Gaia’s back door.
“She’s checking on the harvest out in the fields while the doctor finishes,” Ella says as she leads me through a dark hallway. “You have less than twenty minutes before they’ll return to have lunch here.” She pulls a set of keys from the folds of her dress. My mouth falls open when she opens the door to a room as sleek and modern as any back home in the Loops. A huge screen takes up an entire wall. “Can you do it?” Ella asks. “Can you reach your family?”
“If you can get me on the system.”
Ella shrinks back and shakes her head. “I don’t know how,” she says. “I just slip in and pretend to clean whenever Gaia’s in here. That’s how I figured out who you are.”
“But then, she must know…”
Ella rolls her eyes. “You’d think she would have put it all together by now, but she seems clueless. Honestly, I think she just searches for news about herself and ignores everything else. So? Will it work?” she asks me hopefully.
I swallow hard, wondering the same thing myself, but then I take a breath. “Yes,” I tell her. “I can do it.”
She nods and without a word, she leaves, closing the door behind her.
I assume the main screen Eye won’t let me blink on, and if Gaia uses voice recognition, I’ll trigger a lockdown if I speak commands, so I have to find a way to hack into the system manually. I jiggle the touch pad on the desk to wake the screen and see that she’s smart enough to have encrypted her password, but I know lots of back-door tricks, including the fancy command line work AnonyGal taught me during a Dynasaur chat. I key in codes to get the system to cough up its most common keystrokes and work to decode the password, which is surprisingly simple. Username: Gaia. Password: TheFarm. Sheesh, I could’ve guessed it without breaking a sweat.
When Gaia’s personal feed comes up, I almost fall off my chair because the first thing I see is Yaz standing in front of an EA where the portico has become a tent city. I turn the volume as low as it will go and lean close to the speaker. “Workers and privies alike have overtaken this EA demanding talks with the government and One World about the legality of the so-called Universal Nutrition Protection Act,” Yaz explains as she directs her HoverCam around the area.
Below the feed, I see links to more vids by Yaz where she’s visited malls that have been looted by protesters, marches that have shut down the highways, and many feeds from PlugIn 42, which has become a command center for the Dynasaurs who are orchestrating everything online. As much as I want to know everything that’s happening, I must connect with my parents soon because there may not be another chance, so I leave Yaz’s PRC and open Gaia’s video feed.
I see myself in the small subscreen. The pink in my hair is fading, and my eyes are nearly back to hazel so my former self peeks through. I ping our house, hoping like hell that someone in my family is near a screen. “Mom, Dad, Grandma! It’s Thalia. Please pick up. Hurry!” I whisper.
When my mother’s face fills the screen, I nearly cry, but I hold myself together. “Thalia, is that you? Is that really you?” I nod and fight tears. “Oh thank god.” She looks gaunt and tired with deep lines across her forehead. “We were so worried when we lost contact with your Gizmo.”
“I don’t have much time to talk,” I tell her. “But I’m in a terrifying place and I need your help.”
My dad jostles into the picture. His skin is ashen and his jaw is tight. “We’ll come right now. Tell us where you are.”
“I don’t know exactly. On some crazy farm in the Hinterlands. Can you pick up a locator signal from this network?’
“I’m already trying,” Dad says as he jabs at his tablet.
“Oh, Mom!” I cry. “Dr. Demeter is here, and you will never believe what he’s doing!”
“You’re sure the inocs and Synthamil cause it?” I ask. “Dr. Demeter thinks the mutation is caused by natural selection.”
“My research is showing a direct link to the synthetics.” Her voice breaks. “It’s my fault. My fault you were ever hungry.”
“I don’t care,” I say. “Just please get me out of here.”
“It’s not going to be easy,” Mom says. “Things have gone from bad to worse in the Loops.”
“I heard you were fired.”
Her face hardens. “We’ve had a falling out with Ahimsa. She doesn’t want to acknowledge what I’ve discovered.”
“One World is against you, too?”
She nods then turns to my father. “Have you located her?”
“The signal’s blocked, but I think we can hack it. Thalia, use RabbitHole to go into the system and reveal the IPN to me.”
“How do you know about RabbitHole?” I ask, confused because it’s a program AnonyGal wrote and released to the Dynasaurs years ago.
My dad looks up at me with a weak smile on his face. “I’ve always had your back, HP.”
“Are you…?” I start to ask but then I hear Gaia’s voice in the hall.
“Ella, we’re back!” she calls.
I freeze as a wave of nausea rolls over me. I hit the mute button on the screen and quickly IM my parents that I can no longer talk.
Dad types back, Reveal the IPN then keep the connection open even if you have to go, kill the screen. We will find you!
Footsteps echo through the house. “Where is that lazy girl?” Gaia mutters almost directly outside the door. I hold my breath, not daring to even type until she passes by.
Once she’s gone, I quickly key in the RabbitHole code and search frantically for the IPN, then the screen begins to fade. “Dad,” I whisper and IM, WHERE R U? Blackness fills the wall. I wonder if I’ve lost the connection until a fuzzy image takes over. My stomach drops as Ahimsa’s face fills the screen. I see her mouth moving angrily but no sound comes out.