Upside Down

by Jaym Gates

  “No way,” said Jai. “He’s my oldest buddy, way back from college. We can trust him.”

  “Trust me?” I said. “Sure. But you’ll be found out anyway.” I pointed to her. “She’s gone missing from wherever she’s supposed to be. People will be looking for her — people with guns and listeners. Maybe they’re listening to us right now, working out how to extract her and dispose of the two of us with the minimum mess.”

  “I was very careful,” said Devyani. “I made sure I wasn’t followed. They don’t guard us every minute, you know. They think the stories of rape and murder are enough to keep us in the facility. It works for most of the women.”

  “Obviously didn’t work for you,” I said, “or you wouldn’t be here, endangering the life of my friend.”

  Jai stood up. “Now Shyam, don’t take that tone. She didn’t want to come here. But she needed a place to hide and I offered my apartment.”

  “Could be a government agent,” I said. “They use women as bait sometimes to trace fools like you.”

  “Are you a government agent?” Jai asked Devyani.

  “Of course not,” she said.

  “There you are,” said Jai. “Satisfied?” He dropped a possessive hand on her shoulder. “Devyani ran away because she didn’t want to become an industrial womb, like her sisters.”

  She covered her face with her hands. “I’m sorry if I land you in trouble,” she said in a muffled voice, “but I didn’t know where else to go.”

  Jai squeezed her shoulder. “Stay with us as long as you wish,” he said. “Right, Shyam?”

  “Right,” I said. “What’s this about an industrial womb?”

  She raised a tear-stained face and I felt like a heel for doubting her. “You should know they haven’t been able to replicate womb-like conditions for growing fetuses.”

  I made myself stay expressionless as I nodded. Of course, it was a major issue. The population had literally halved in one month and there was no way to sustain it. Cultured cell lines could be used to grow an endometrium; the problem lay in the interface and the composition of embryonic growth factors.

  “They use us to reproduce,” said Devyani. “The women who survived. Some of us are carriers but others are naturally resistant, and they hope to produce enough resistant females to one day bring the population growth rate back to zero. We’re fertilized at the age of eighteen and it doesn’t stop for years, not until we’re fifty-five. Can you imagine what it’s like, making babies year after year after year? What it does to your body, despite the best care?” She shuddered.

  No, of course I couldn’t. “Is the plan working?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “I suppose. There were about one hundred and fifty girls and women in Delhi in 2028. Now there are over two thousand of us.”

  “Two thousand!” I stood up and began to pace. “Jai, you’re in deeper shit than I thought. You’ve seen this place, haven’t you? Where the women are being kept?”

  He nodded. “I followed Devyani there a couple of times, although I didn’t try to enter. It’s just an ordinary-looking building in Gurgaon. We didn’t even talk in the electronics store, just exchanged notes.”

  “Good,” I said, my brain working overtime. “There’s a small chance they actually don’t know where she is. Unless they scan the security feeds from the store and detect the note-passing. Maybe we should try and scramble the feeds, just to be on the safe side.”

  “I already did,” said Jai. “See, I’m a step ahead of you.”

  “Anyone for more tea?” said Devyani.

  I declined the tea and left a little later, promising to stay in touch. I suppose I felt a bit jealous of the way she looked at him, the way he touched her. Over four hundred thousand males in Delhi, and she’d chosen him.

  Not that I wanted her, of course. She was Jai’s problem. But that night, after I had done a complete physical in the hygiene cabinet and slipped into bed with my vag-sim, it was Devyani’s dusky face that floated in front of my sleepless eyes.

  #

  I kept myself busy the next week. I got a free check-up at e-health, just in case Devyani was a carrier. Then I hacked into Jai’s company account and uploaded a forged medical certificate for him. Cost three weeks’ pay — Jai’s, not mine.

  For the rest of it, I threw myself into my work. I felt like I was close, on the verge of a breakthrough in my project. But something fundamental about the stability of my model continued to elude me.

  I tried not to think too much about the two of them — what they were doing, whether they had been traced, what Jai was planning. He was the closest I had to a friend, but Devyani’s arrival had changed things. I guess I was hoping she’d just go away, back to the facility, and things could go back to the way they’d been. Or maybe I hoped for something else and just didn’t want to admit it.

  One night, about a week later, Devyani showed up at my place. I knew it was her because the building bot — not recognizing her retinal scan — sent me a picture of her face. I buzzed her in, trying to compose myself.

  “What happened?” I said as soon as she was inside. “Is Jai okay?”

  Instead of answering, she shrugged off her raincoat and flopped down on the sofa. “I’m so tired,” she said. “I walked all the way here because I didn’t want to risk the train. It must be over four kilometers.”

  “Have they taken Jai?” I demanded. “Where is he?”

  She gave a mocking smile. “Very concerned about your friend, aren’t you? Well, you don’t have to worry. He’s safe and sound in his apartment.”

  I didn’t understand. “Then why are you here?”

  “Don’t have anywhere else to go. I found your address in his phone when he was sleeping.”

  I reached for my cell. “He’ll be really worried about you. I’d better tell him you’re here.”

  She leaned forward and grabbed my sleeve. “No. He kicked me out. We had a fight and he told me he never wanted to see my face again.” She must have noticed my disbelieving expression because she snapped, “If you don’t believe me, then go ahead and call him.”

  I sat down next to her and exhaled. Jai was okay. They’d had a fight, that was all. It must have been pretty serious for him to kick her out. That wasn’t like him. I’d have to talk to him about it.

  “Can I get you anything to eat or drink?” I asked.

  She gave a grateful smile. “Please. I’ve had nothing since last night.”

  I hurried to the food-maker, glad of something to do. Her presence made me nervous, even though I’d established she wasn’t a carrier.

  Later, over cheese sandwiches and masala chai, she told me more about herself. Women at the facility were trained to be more than just wombs. Devyani was a teacher and philosophy was her passion. She talked of Fitch, Kant, and Aurobindo as if they were old friends.

  “My version of the paradox of knowability,” she said, draining the last of her tea. “Not everything that is true can be known, and not everything that is known is true. We are separate egos locked in bags of skin, thrown into a world we cannot understand, imprisoned by our history, enigmas even to ourselves.”

  “So what is the solution?” I asked, fascinated.

  “What is the question?” She got up and smiled. “Thanks for the tea and sandwiches. I’m going to use your hygiene cabinet, if that’s all right.”

  “Sure.” I rose and cleared the table, and folded it back against the wall. When I’d finished, I saw that the screen to my sleep pod was open. I walked over, hoping Devyani hadn’t found my vag-sim.

  She had. She was standing next to my bed holding it, turning it over in her hand. “What’s this?” She sounded genuinely puzzled.

  I swallowed my embarrassment. “A toy. Some version of which just about every straight male uses.”

  She inspected it with interest. “Cool. So you put your thing here and … what’re the wires for?”

  “Fantasy overlay,” I said, hoping the shortness of my answer would give her
the hint to stop talking.

  She tossed my vag-sim on the floor. “We can do better than that, can’t we?” And she pulled her shirt off over her head.

  I don’t know what I expected. I’d never slept with a woman before, so I didn’t have anything to compare it with. It was nothing like the vag-sim, nothing like my limited experience of Chandini market. It was both wonderful and terrifying. When it was over, I felt drained and exhilarated, as if I’d won a marathon. Had Jai felt like this, too?

  Devyani slept, her face slack and open. I watched her for a while, then rose from the bed, carefully so as not to wake her. I padded to my closet and pulled on a pair of fresh shorts and a shirt. There was something I needed to do.

  I opened a drawer stuffed with odds and ends and managed to find a blank sheet of paper, even an old charcoal pencil. Twenty years since I’d drawn anything. My fingers barely remembered how to hold the pencil.

  I sat on the end of the bed and tried to sketch Devyani’s sleeping face. But my skills were too rusty and after a while I gave up. And she was fundamentally unknowable to me; I couldn’t capture her. I stuffed the paper back in the drawer and went to the living room. Perhaps seeing my old sketches would remind me how to draw. Remind me what I’d been.

  I flipped open my work table and the computer screen sprang to life. I tapped in a password to gain entry into a restricted folder that I hadn’t accessed in years.

  A collage of sketches and photos popped onto the screen. A wheat field. A mother holding a baby. The pretty teacher I’d had a crush on in fourth grade. A farmer. A class picnic. My older sister, getting married to the man who would jump off the thirty-fifth floor of a building when Femonza hit. The pictures flew by too fast and I wanted to slow them down. No, I wanted them to stop, to go into reverse and take me with them. Back into time. Back when things were normal and I was a dreamy-eyed kid with a camera and a sketchbook.

  A shadow fell over the screen and I snapped it closed. Devyani stood behind me. She put her hand on my shoulder. “Was that your family?”

  I swung around to face her. She was wearing my shirt. She could have been my wife, my sister, my mother. But she wasn’t.

  “You’re not really from the facility, are you?” I said.

  Devyani only smiled.

  My throat felt dry. “You’re not a real woman.”

  Devyani removed her hand from my shoulder. “I’m virtually indistinguishable from one. Isn’t that enough?”

  “How did Jai figure it out?” I said.

  “He caught me in the hygiene cabinet, voiding the samosas he’d made me eat. How did you figure it out?”

  “Logic,” I said. “They’d never let an actual female out of sight. They’d have tracers, neural bugs.” I paused. “What did Jai do?”

  “I told you,” said Devyani. “He kicked me out. It’s too bad. Now he’ll get a mindwipe.”

  I got up. I suppose I said something, pushed her away.

  “You don’t get it, do you?” said Devyani. “A mindwipe will give him a chance to start afresh. Would you rather he was euthanized?” She shook her head. “As it is, he is too full of bitterness to be happy, or do anything useful.”

  “Why did you come here?” I said. “Why pick us?”

  “Jai was selected for the Delhi pilot program,” said Devyani. “With his illegal sensors, he came to the attention of my boss years ago. So passionate, so determined. He was a prime candidate for the program, which seeks to reintroduce women into society.”

  “Not real women,” I said.

  “Real women are dangerous,” said Devyani. “Isn’t that what you said?”

  “They planted listeners on us?” The bile rose in my throat. “I suppose your boss is listening to us right now.”

  “What does it matter?” said Devyani. “You and I, we can be a team. I’m not an Ayesha; I’m as close to an actual woman as you’re ever likely to get. Jai couldn’t accept me. But you’re different from him.” She stepped forward and grasped my hand, gazing intensely into my eyes.

  I shivered. Her touch so warm, so right. “I can’t,” I said.

  Her grip tightened. “Did I not meet your expectations of what a woman should do?”

  I thought of Devyani bending down to serve me tea, of pulling the shirt off her head, and I cringed. “I’m sorry, I …”

  “You are as much a program as I am,” said Devyani, “a set of responses tainted by your history. Why then this difference between us? Why deny my right to be?”

  “You have as much right to be as I do. But it would always feel like a lie to me.”

  “And what you felt last night,” she said softly. “Was that a lie? Am I just a vag-sim to you?”

  “Of course not,” I said, and stopped. I didn’t know how to express myself without hurting her feelings. But I wasn’t sure she even had them. Was there really such little difference between us?

  “You should take what you can get,” she said. “Life is only so long.”

  “That’s exactly why you shouldn’t take what you get,” I said. “You only have so many years to make sense of it. You can’t substitute what you have with what you need.”

  “But you can substitute what you need with what you have,” she said.

  It was at that moment, when she said those words, that the answer that had been eluding me for so long hit me.

  Devyani continued to speak for a while, but I didn’t hear her words. I was looking at the solution that would solve the dilemma that had stumped me for the last three years, and it was so beautiful, so amazing in its simplicity, that I felt like laughing and clapping my hands.

  Devyani finally stopped speaking and asked me why I was grinning like a fool.

  I bent down and kissed her bewildered face. “Tell you later,” I said. “Got to do something in the lab first.”

  I rushed out of the apartment and down the elevator. I caught a late bus to the office district, almost tearing my hair off when the bus broke down mid-way. I finally got to the research lab at midnight, and then I worked uninterrupted until morning. When I had finished my notes, I emailed them to six different universities that I had been in touch with over the years. As I hit ‘send’, my phone buzzed.

  It was Devyani. “Where’ve you been?” she complained. “Leaving me alone like that. I had a hard time convincing my boss you would be fine.”

  “I’m fine,” I said, “and you can tell your boss to go screw himself.”

  There was a snort at the other end. “That will be a bit hard, seeing as my boss is a software program.”

  “What?” I digested this. “Okay. You can tell that piece of shitty software that soon there will be no need for it and its ilk, because I, Dr Shyam Arora, have discovered how to build a stable artificial uterine system for the growth of healthy embryos.” Drumroll please, I thought.

  Instead there was silence for so long that I thought Devyani had gone catatonic. Finally she said, “Congratulations, Dr Shyam. My mission is a success.”

  “What?” I said, confused. “What mission?”

  But Devyani only laughed and put the phone down.

  When I went back to my apartment that evening, it was clean and empty, as if she had never been there. The next few weeks were busy and I put Devyani out of my mind. Jai came back to work a month later, a bit subdued after a high-grade Complete Clean, but with more of his memories intact than I’d hoped. At least he remembered me. They’d only done a partial wipe.

  News of my project spread quickly. I had been able to build a placenta ‘naturally’ on a layer of endometrial tissue, quite early in my research. But the problem had been making the placenta do what was needed — regulate nutrient delivery and hormones to mimic what nature does so well. Additionally, the fetus had to be stimulated — sung to, touched, walked, exposed to a 24-hour cycle of day and night, just like a human mother does.

  My solution? Grow the uterus inside a specially designed robotic ‘parent.’ Substitute what you need with what you have.
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br />   All over the world, research labs got to work building prototypes and testing my results. Eggs frozen from the pre-Femonza years were fertilized, and the embryos’ genomes edited for resistance to Femonza. A new generation would be brought into being, using my methods.

  I got a promotion and a salary hike big enough to enjoy the services of an Ayesha whenever I wanted. I also got multiple job offers, all of which I turned down. There didn’t seem to be any point; I’d already done the most important thing I would ever do — the rest of it was just a talk-show, a media merry-go-round that I longed to get off.

  I put out anonymous advertisements in different outlets every week. To the only real person in my life: please come back. We could be a team, you and I. Months went by and no one responded. I was disheartened, but I didn’t give up.

  A year-and-a-half later, the media frenzy shifted from me to the first products of the artificial uterine systems, crawling on nursery floors, wetting diapers, and gurgling into cameras. The sex of the babies was withheld — it was assumed that half would be girls and half boys — but the intent was to allow them to grow in a gender-neutral environment for as long as possible. Perhaps, unlike us, they would be free of the taint of history.

  One hot summer evening, I pushed open the door of my apartment and there she was, sitting on the sofa and smiling like she’d never left.

  I crossed the room in two bounds and knelt before her. Devyani took my face in her hands and I tried not to shake, tried not to cry. This is happiness, I thought. Remember it.

  “Shyam,” she began, “I’m not really …”

  “Shh,” I said. “I don’t care what you are and what you are not. All that matters is that you’re here.”

  That night, when Devyani had fallen asleep, I got up and switched on the lamp so its light fell on her face. I dug out the paper I had shoved into the drawer months ago. It wasn’t easy completing the sketch I had begun. My hands trembled and I was consumed by fear that it was no good, that there was no way I could portray her as she actually was.

  But I did it. Because we are all fundamentally unknowable to each other, separate worlds that spin and dance on their own axes. But if you try hard enough, you can sometimes make a bridge from your own truth to another’s.