“So what’s the latest on the little ones?” I said, attempting to cut through the friction. “Are you seeing any limbs poking through yet?”
“There’s some buds, yeah.” Muscles strained in her forearm where a patch of synthetic skin had worn away. I had more than a few of those kinds of injuries myself, hidden under my garments.
“Happy with progress, then?”
“Cautiously optimistic, I guess. I’m trying not to get ahead of myself.”
“So you haven’t thought of names, then,” I joked.
She allowed herself a smile. “Well, I didn’t say that.”
“Have you?”
“No,” she said, and I was relieved to hear the lightness in her voice. “That’s a decision at the bottom of a very long list of other decisions.”
“How are things over at Cider?”
“It’s not too bad. I’m on top of it for the most part.”
I decided to push my luck a little further. “Why don’t you come back over to Somerset for the night after you’ve dropped off the water?” I offered. “We can go through a plan for the next couple of weeks and figure out how we’re going to manage the workload.”
She thought about it for a moment, then said, “Yeah, okay. I’ll do that.”
We reached the crest of the hill and I guided the wheelbarrow up onto the driveway of the house.
“I noticed you took care of the wheat,” she said, standing there without placing the buckets on the ground.
“Yeah, it was a decent harvest.”
She gazed along the road toward Cider, appearing on the verge of saying something else, but then the sky to the north lit up like a bolt of lightning. It flickered twice, three times, and then a tall needle of light glowed brilliantly in the twilight.
“The Grid spire again,” I said. Arsha ignored me, but her lips moved slightly. I realised she was counting softly to herself, her eyes locked on the spire. I heard her reach eleven before the light winked out again.
“Eleven seconds,” she said. “That’s the longest I’ve seen the Marauders keep it active.”
“Maybe I should head out there and blow that thing up.”
“We can’t risk that yet. They’ll have it guarded for sure.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, then.”
“Yeah.” She turned up the street. “Let’s talk about it when I get back.”
“I’ll put a beer on ice for you.”
She smiled genuinely. “You do that.”
As she turned her back and walked away, a kind of determination came over me. A resoluteness. I would not let her down again. She was right – there could be no more mistakes. I had to work harder, think more clearly, and eliminate my errors. I had to try to be more like her, aspire to the standards that she had set. Be stronger. The way that Arsha conducted herself left no room for doubt or for weakness. There was only that unflinching self-belief, a quality that infused itself in everything she did. She set the example that I had to follow.
I would reach the benchmark she had set. I would do better. There was no doubt about it in my mind.
I looked back at the lengthening shadows of the city, found the curved spire of M-Corp rising above the others. Tomorrow I would return to the lab.
There was business there that I had left unfinished.
9
Arsha stood behind me as I fussed over the a-wombs, her arms folded in what was becoming a familiar pose for her.
“You’re wasting them,” she said wistfully. She stood there a moment longer before moving away, repeating it under her breath. “You’re wasting them.”
I ignored her, sorting through the last of the touch panels and verifying the configuration. The transfer was complete. They were on their way.
Three more unengineered blastocysts. I’d wavered several times about using so many but, considering I’d been unsuccessful with the first couple, decided to play the numbers game to increase my chances of success. Here were three more opportunities for me to add my own chapter to our future, to prove that I wasn’t a redundant cog in this machine. I still wanted so much to see these natural embryos grow into children, to come into the world in the image of those who had gone before – not altered, not enhanced, but pure and unadulterated. If nothing else, I wanted this to be my legacy: that I’d brought people back into the world just as they’d left it.
“You checked the amniotic fluid, right?” I said.
“Yeah, I checked it.” Arsha had returned to her own embryos and seemed only vaguely interested in what I was doing.
“And you’re happy with it?”
“Yeah. Looks okay.”
It was evident that she did not approve of this new turn of events, having tried first to dissuade me from thawing the embryos, then stalking about sullenly as I proceeded on regardless. It seemed that we couldn’t agree on anything of late. I was loath to introduce more antagonism into our relationship, and I wouldn’t have dared stirred the pot had this not been so important to me, but I felt driven by it. I knew that I had to succeed, that there was more riding on it than my own gratification or some selfish sense of pride. This was a vital piece of the jigsaw that would one day coalesce into our future.
“Well, that should be it, then,” I said, satisfied. I’d selected a-wombs eight, nine and ten for the implantations, the last three in the row. With the flurry of tasks completed, I stood foolishly for a moment, not knowing what to do, before sliding a stool along the vinyl to where I could sit and watch over them.
“You know you won’t get another shot at this for a while,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“The embryos. If you leave it any later, they’re going to come to term outside the harvest season. That’s too big a risk to take for newborns.”
“But what about the deterioration in the embryos? I thought we had to fast-track this process now.”
“It’s a balancing act. We have to get things moving, that’s true, but we also have to pay attention to the other factors that we’re dealing with. What’s the point of bringing a baby to term when there’s no soy milk to feed it?”
It made sense. “Yeah, okay.”
“So if those die, don’t rush in and start thawing out another batch, all right? For now, this is it.”
Quite a role reversal, I thought. You advocating we slow things down. But I didn’t say it.
“Take a look at this,” she said. She beckoned with one hand, her eyes locked onto the touch panel before her. As I neared she tilted it for me to see.
“Wow,” I said wondrously. “Look at that.”
The touch panel displayed an image formed by ultrasonics operating within a-womb number two, in which one of Arsha’s embryos was growing. Represented in bright, unnatural shades of blue and green, the embryo was not as yet human in appearance, instead more like a lumpy kidney bean. Activating a toggle, Arsha brought up a rendered interpretation of how the embryo might look with more natural colouring. It was pale and pink, with a tiny black dot forming an eye, a slit for a mouth, and stubby little hands and feet protruding at its front. Arsha tapped again, and an amplified sound began to emanate from a speaker on the side of the panel.
Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump.
The beat was rapid, loud and firm, like the metronomic chugging of a steam train.
“Holy shit,” I breathed. “A heartbeat. A human heartbeat.”
“It sure is,” Arsha beamed.
“It’s been a while since the world heard one of those.”
The sound resonated throughout the lab, a noise that I would normally have regarded as loud and grating, but at that moment it seemed more like sweet music, like a tribal drumbeat to set the pulse racing. Neither of us made any move to shut it off. We just stood there in awe of it for minutes on end. Eventually Arsha reached out and swiped the display, causing both the image and the sound to abruptly vanish.
“That was… amazing,” I said.
“It’s all starting
to feel real, isn’t it? Like we might actually pull this off.”
“I don’t want us to get ahead of ourselves, but, yeah. After all the hard work, we may be getting somewhere.”
“It’s going to take a lot more work to bring our plans to fruition, but this is a start. A hell of a start.”
I rubbed at my chin. “We’re never going to see a moment’s rest again, are we?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean from now until the day our cores give out and we fall into the dust, you and I are going to be dedicated to this cause. To this mission.”
“No rest for the wicked,” she said lightly, then her face darkened. “Why? You getting cold feet or something?”
“No, not at all,” I said, raising my palms. “I wouldn’t want it any other way. I guess I was just wondering – if you had time to yourself, if you had a single day to spend doing your own thing – what would you do?”
She seemed surprised by the question, unprepared, like she’d never even considered the possibility.
“Uh, I don’t know. Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“No, I didn’t mean that.” She ran a hand through her hair and scratched her head. “I, uh… I haven’t told you all of this, but there were some pretty rough times here while you were away. I’d stand out there at the edge of the workshop, looking out through the broken windows at that dead city, and it was always there, day after day, year after year, and nothing ever changed. Sometimes I wondered if you would ever return. I wondered how I would cope by myself if you didn’t.
“I kept track of the calendar for a while. I thought that might help, ticking off the first of January every year. Another year down. One less to wait before life returns. But it didn’t help. I think it might have even made it worse. I figured with every year that went past, the only thing that was coming closer was the day the Marauders would find me.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I can understand that.”
“So I stopped looking out that window. I stopped waiting. I just shut myself in here and worked. And worked. I didn’t concern myself with things I couldn’t change, with things I couldn’t control. I concentrated on the future, on my vision of the future, on how I was going to shape it. But even so, I couldn’t help but wonder sometimes if another first of January had ticked by, and if I’d ever see a living plant or animal again.”
She stood straight and looked at me earnestly. “So, I guess if I had a day where I could do whatever I wanted, I wouldn’t spend it alone. I’ve lived too many days like that already. I’d just want a day in the sun, and someone to share it with. To belong.”
She blinked and looked away, returning her attention to the touch panel, seemingly embarrassed by her own candidness.
“Uh, how about you? What would you do with your hypothetical day?” she said.
“Well, I always wanted to learn to surf,” I said flippantly.
“Come on, you don’t get out of it that easily. What really?”
I paced over to the lab enclosure and picked up the recently used tongs, scrubbing with a cloth to clean away any residue that might have fallen on them during the transfers.
“I think I’d create something,” I mused.
“Really? Like what?”
“I don’t know. Something meaningful.”
“Okay.” She seemed nonplussed. “I’m not sure where you’re going with this.”
“It’s more that… I don’t know.” I struggled to convey my feelings. “I want to leave something behind.”
“Like a sculpture or something?”
“Something to say I was here, something that these children could look at and remember me by. I don’t want to be forgotten the moment I’m gone, y’know?”
“You won’t be forgotten,” she reassured me.
“There’s no way to be sure of that, though.”
“Sure there is. Be involved in their lives, make a difference. They’ll remember you.”
“I hope so. I hope that when there’s dozens, or hundreds of people walking around, that they’re still going to care about a couple of old machines. Us old relics.”
“What are you talking about, Brant? Of course they will.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said. “Remember the days before the Winter? Synthetics were disposable. Sooner or later we became redundant, and then… what? Shut down, chopped up then recycled.”
“We’re in a different world now, though, right? None of the synthetic factories are left. They were all blown sky high in the Summer. We’re not replaceable anymore, no more than any human. We’re unique. That makes us special.”
I shrugged. “I guess you’re right.”
She stepped close to me. “Brant, there’s more ways to make people remember you, to pass on a part of yourself, than just by building something.”
“I know. I’m being stupid. I shouldn’t be worrying about this.”
“It’s okay. I understand what you’re saying.”
“It’s not like I want to have statues erected in my name, or a… I don’t know, a public holiday named after me or something. If there was even one person to miss me, to remember who I was, that would be enough. I don’t want to fade into nothingness like I never existed.”
I could see sympathy creeping into her eyes. It was a nice change from the impassiveness I’d glimpsed in them all too often of late.
“Don’t let that eat you up, okay? That’s something we don’t get to choose. We do what we can in the time we have, right?
“Yeah.”
“We all fade into nothingness eventually, Brant,” she said softly. “Even the greatest of us. One day, we just do. It’s inevitable.”
10
I initiated the abort procedure on a-womb number nine. Number eight was already draining, fluid slopping out and gurgling down the cavity below. I pressed my hand to my mouth, then slid it up to cover my eyes where I began to massage my eyebrows wearily. Over the last two weeks I’d watched and waited over these a-wombs for more hours than I cared to count. Now the time felt wasted.
“Are you going to do number ten?” Arsha said.
I glanced over at the touch panel for ten, where the readout shimmered in the gloom.
hCG: 4 mIU/ml.
I lifted my hand and it wavered over the panel. This was the last of the three unengineered embryos left, the last survivor, but judging by the data it too seemed doomed. I could feel my hopes and dreams crashing down around me in that moment, the determination that had earlier driven me onward evaporating into nothing. Arsha had been right all along. I was wasting my time with this endeavour. Wasting embryos. Jeopardising our future.
The abort key was right there within reach. It would be so easy now to just end this and move on. Accept that I’d been defeated, and try to forget that it had ever happened.
But my finger wouldn’t move. I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
“No,” I said, withdrawing my hand. “I’m going to wait.”
“Wasn’t the reading ‘six’ yesterday? It’s on its way down.”
“I’m waiting.”
“Okay.” She went back to verifying parameters on her own a-wombs. The embryos within had grown into foetuses, now around two centimetres long and visible to the naked eye as dark blotches on the walls of the glowing red sacs. The sacs, too, were enlarging, appearing more inflated every day as they grew to accommodate the lifeforms within.
I headed to the door, unzipping the suit, agitated.
“Where are you going?” she called after me, but I ignored her, shouldering out into the workshop and scooping up my backpack on my way down the stairs.
Out in the street a blustery wind gusted through, cold and fresh, and overhead dark clouds roiled. The rain had finally arrived. I stooped my head and started along the street, feeling the first drops pelt down on my skin. I decided I needed to find something to do that didn’t involve embryos, a-wombs, Arsha or the lab. And I knew what that was.
My c
oncern had been steadily growing about the amount of time I was spending trekking from M-Corp to Somerset and back again. If I had a more efficient mode of transport I could save myself an hour or two a day of walking, and that was going to become more vital in the coming months. The answer might well be found in the shape of something I’d seen a few weeks back whilst out looking for solar cells, sitting in a forgotten corner a couple of blocks from M-Corp.
The rain was really coming in now, sheeting down across the streets and buffeting buildings in great rippling torrents. I turned down the alleyway I sought, stepping away from a thick curtain of water where a gutter was overflowing above. The water was pooling in the ruts and potholes where years of rain had gnawed away at the asphalt, and rivulets streaked across the alley and into rusted grates that led to the sewers. The day was preternaturally dark under the storm clouds and every footstep sent a splash of water around me in a wide arc, soaking the hems of my already damp jeans.
Finding the busted metal door I’d previously entered, I pushed through the broken lock and into the dark interior of the building. This had evidently been some kind of storage area for vehicles. They were lined up four and five deep, many of them antique. Back in the day they’d have been worth a lot of cash, but in the meantime someone had come through and taken a crowbar to the entire assembly. Whether it was in order to search the contents or just a case of wanton destruction I couldn’t be sure, but the end result was a whole host of ruined cars and motorcycles.
There was one they’d knocked about but hadn’t beaten up too badly. It lay in the corner of the room on its side, a two-wheeled cycle called a Helios. It showed the scars of one or two swipes from the crowbar, but otherwise it was in good condition. More importantly, the wheels had been covered in opaque, tightly fitted plastic. I pulled a knife from the backpack and sliced through it, revealing the rubber beneath, then ran my fingers across it. There was no sign of dry rot, but a moist, oily substance came off on my fingers, most likely some kind of preservative. All in all the tyres looked in excellent condition given their age, and they were still inflated, which meant they must have used those pricey auto-inflation tubes.
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