The Miracle Baby Box Set: Volume One: Books 1 - 4

by Hamel, B. B.

  “So let me ask you something, Emma,” he says after the bartender returns with his drink. It’s a double whisky, neat. “If you had to change one thing about the Envoy, what would it be?”

  I blink at him. “Really?”

  “Really,” he says. “Please, be brutally honest.” He nods his head back toward his table. “The people over there are brilliant, but there’s a lot of ass kissing when you get to a certain level of success. Sometimes I think nobody will give me a straight, honest answer.”

  I can’t help but laugh a little bit. “You really want my brutal, honest opinion?”

  “Please,” he says. “I honestly do. I was just trying to pry something out of them but so far all I’ve gotten is ‘more cup holders,’ which isn’t super useful.”

  I snort a little bit at that and turn red again. I have a tendency to snort instead of laughing, which isn’t the most delicate and feminine thing in the world.

  “Well, uh,” I say, “battery storage is still an issue. Acceleration is decent, but not great. Those are all tech problems and will eventually get solved. I think the real problem is ethical.”

  He smiles a little bit brighter. “Really now?”

  “You talked about it in your lecture. When given a choice of saving a person outside of the car, or saving the person inside of the car, how does the vehicle decide? Does it swerve off the road and kill a baby to save the driver? Is there a way to program fluid human ethics into a machine?”

  His eyes are bright when I finish, and although I know I’ve just parroted his talk back to him, it’s honestly something I’ve thought a lot about. It’s the whole reason I want to get into autonomous vehicles in the first place, and he’s at the forefront of this. Our smart cars and devices have to be ethical if they’re going to be making choices that have serious ramifications.

  “Tell me more,” he says, watching me seriously.

  “Who’s making the choice?” I ask him, sipping my drink and getting into my topic. “You brought up most of the questions, but you didn’t talk about the most important one. Who are the people that are going to program these cars to think ethically?”

  “Programmers, I’d imagine,” he says, head cocked.

  “And why do they get to make those decisions? Why don’t we all get to decide how our vehicles choose to behave in situations that affect our lives?”

  “I never thought about it like that,” he says softly, thinking. “But you’re right. We want our programmers to think ethically, but why do we even give them that power to begin with?”

  “Exactly,” I say. “We need serious limits and regulations and deep, deep thought. More thought than went into the Envoy Mark 1, I bet.”

  I shut my mouth, shocked that I just said that. He stares at me for a long moment, and I’m suddenly afraid that he’s upset. I feel like I just crossed a line by suggesting that there wasn’t enough thought put into his flagship vehicle, the most advanced self-driving car in the world and the first to be approved for mass sale. I’m just some random girl at the bar, I shouldn’t get to be critical of David Carlson right to his face.

  “Emma May,” he says softly. “Would you like to get out of here with me?”

  Now it’s my turn to stare. I wasn’t expecting him to say that, not even a little bit. I glance over at the table of people that are waiting for him. “What about your friends?” I ask him.

  He shrugs. “They’ll survive without me.”

  “Okay,” I say, standing up. “Let’s go.”

  “Don’t you want to know where you’re going?” he asks me as he puts money down on the bartop, clearly enough for both our drinks and then some.

  “No,” I say. “I don’t really care.”

  “Didn’t your mother teach you not to go home with strange boys?”

  “You’re not a stranger. We just introduced ourselves.”

  He smirks at me. “But Emma, I’m trouble.”

  I grin at him, not sure where this confidence is coming from. “So am I.”

  His smile is so genuine, and I follow him from the bar back to the hotel where the conference is at. He has the topmost penthouse, a huge, gorgeous space with multiple rooms and beds.

  We order room service and stay up half the night talking. I never in a million years expected this to actually happen, but here we are, completely by chance. If I hadn’t gone to the bar and sat in that seat, I doubt I would have ever spoken to him at all, let alone ended up back in his room.

  We eat, we have a few more drinks, and when he asks me to take off my clothes, I listen. He watches me, and when I finish, it’s his turn. He takes me into one of the bedrooms and kisses me, and somewhere deep in the back of my mind, I know I’m making some kind of mistake. I don’t know what kind, probably a stupid one, but in the moment it feels so fucking good.

  He’s as beautiful in bed as he is in normal life. He’s muscular and lean and his hands find me wet and already aching for him. David knows what he’s doing as his fingers tease me, pressing deep inside, rubbing my clit before he slides down to the edge of the bed to taste my dripping pussy.

  I moan under him as he fucks me. I completely forget who he is and I lose myself in the pleasure of the night, sweating with him, writhing as he makes me feel things I’ve never experienced before. I don’t make him wear a condom, because I know I can’t get pregnant. I had cysts on my ovaries when I was younger, and my doctor said they caused some scarring that would last the rest of my life. He fucks me raw and deep and I find myself panting his name, begging for more, experiencing a deep, lasting pleasure that I didn’t know was possible.

  We fall asleep just before the sun comes up, and we’re barely out for an hour before someone calls his phone to wake him up.

  “I’m sorry I can’t stay longer,” he says to me. “Last night was fun.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Weird that it just ended an hour or two ago.”

  He grins at me and tips my chin toward him. He kisses me softly. “The room’s paid for, stay as long as you want.”

  “Okay.”

  He stands and stretches. “I’ll call you, Emma May.”

  “You better. You’d be missing out if you don’t.”

  He grins at me. “I think you’re right.”

  He doesn’t say anything else before leaving the room. I hear a shower running briefly before I end up falling asleep again. A few hours later, I wake up to the afternoon sunlight streaming in through the window, and the penthouse is empty. David’s gone, and I feel like the night before was a dream.

  He doesn’t call. I hold out hope for a couple of weeks, but he never does. I’m upset, but I shouldn’t be. I was just another one-night stand for a rich and important billionaire, and I’m a total nobody. I thought I impressed him, but clearly I didn’t.

  It’s okay. I still have that night. And it all feels like a dream, at least until a month after everything happened and I don’t get my period.

  I go another two weeks, in total denial, before I finally take the pregnancy test that changes my whole life.

  They say miracles really do happen, and apparently that’s true. It’s a one-in-a-million chance that I got pregnant, and my doctor has no clue how it even happened. Sometimes, miracles don’t look like how you think they will, at least not right away.

  2

  David

  Two Years Later

  “Sales projects are looking strong,” Olivia says, her dark hair pulled back into a bun. Her skin’s lightly tanned with severe features, resting bitch-face, and the best mind in the business.

  “What’s the problem?” I ask her.

  “Mark 2 is delayed again, that’s the problem.” She sighs, looking impatient. I grin at her, which only makes her more annoyed. “It’s not a joke, David.”

  “I know it isn’t,” I say to her. “I promise, we’re working on it, okay? It’ll be done soon. There are just…”

  I don’t get to finish my sentence. “Just some bugs, yeah, I know. You keep telling me.�
�� Her mouth is a tight line.

  I sigh. “Come on, Olivia. Cut me some slack. Envoy is going great.”

  “So far,” she concedes. “But there are lawsuits and some accidents we can’t really explain.”

  “All well within projection,” I say, waving it away. “The Envoy is by far the safest car on the road, by a huge freaking margin. We’ve had eight fatal crashes in its entire existence. That’s thousands of cars and hundreds of thousands of road hours, and only eight deaths.”

  “A miracle, I know,” Olivia says, her voice neutral. “But it’s still eight deaths. That’s eight people, dead because of the Envoy.”

  I grunt at her, looking away. “I know,” I say softly. “Like I said, we’re working on it.”

  She softens a little bit at that. We have this argument almost every day now at this point, and I think she’s just trying to snap me out of my funk.

  Truth is, those eight deaths hang heavy over me. I don’t want any deaths, any injuries, nothing at all. The Envoy was supposed to be the perfect car, the machine that would take the human element out of driving and make everything safer. It has done that, well beyond my team’s projections, but it’s not enough. I need more, always more.

  That’s why the Mark 2 is still delayed. I’m afraid it’ll never be good enough, and I’m constantly tweaking the algorithms, trying to make it even safer.

  Olivia slides a file across my desk toward me. “We’ve had a few new hires, if you want to take a look.”

  “Sure,” I say, opening the folder. I like to always glance at the new people, at the very least. It’s a big company, but I try to at least stay current with it. “Anything of note?”

  “Not really,” she says as I leaf through the pages. “A few junior developers, a few senior. Some new staff in the dining hall, a new janitor for the third floor, and a new yoga instructor.”

  I grin a little bit. Our campus is becoming a freaking zoo. “What about this?” I ask, pausing as I come to the last page.

  “Ah,” Olivia says, raising an eyebrow. “Her. I almost forgot about her.”

  I read it over briefly. “Emma May,” I murmur. “Undergrad at MIT in engineering, of course, but a year of postgrad in Philosophy with a specialization in contemporary ethics.” I look up at Olivia, an eyebrow raised. “Who hired her?”

  “You did,” she says, and then corrects herself. “Sven did, under your order.”

  “What order was that?” I ask.

  She doesn’t seem surprised that I don’t remember. “Apparently the two of you went out and, ah, had a few drinks.”

  “Oh shit,” I say, grinning. “I remember that.”

  “You told him you needed an ethicist on staff. Someone with training in philosophy. He compromised and found Miss May here.”

  I bite my lip and look back down at her file. The name sounds so familiar, so incredibly familiar…

  And then that night comes back to me. That woman at the conference two years ago. The one that told me we weren’t thinking deeply enough.

  Holy shit. I feel like my heart’s going to stop. I’ve been thinking about her for years. I wanted to call her, but we never exchanged numbers. I tried to look her up but it turns out there are a ton of Emma Mays, and she never told me where she’s from. And then the Envoy launched officially, and I got too busy to keep searching for her, and life got in the way.

  But shit. Emma May. This has to be her.

  “Is she here today?” I ask.

  “Yes, she is,” Olivia says with a wry smile. “Started two days ago.”

  “Let’s go say hello to our new hire.”

  Olivia arches her eyebrow. “Do you really have time to do that? We need to start launching the Mark 2—”

  “Yes, I know we do,” I say, coming around the desk. I stop in front of Olivia and put my hands on her shoulders. “But love trumps all other things.”

  Her look of utter bewilderment makes me smile as I leave the office. She trails behind me, clearly annoyed, but not arguing anymore. I know where Sven’s people sit, so I head over to his little pen, two floors down and a few feet away from the elevator bank.

  Olivia follows me the whole way, probably just to find out what the hell I meant by that weird comment. I can’t blame her, although she should be used to it by now. We’ve been together for years now. She was the first person I hired back in the day, and now she’s my most trusted employee and my closest friend. If she weren’t gay, I probably would have tried to fuck her by now and ruined everything, but fortunately we don’t have that whole sex thing standing in between us.

  It’s not like I’m running around sleeping with anything with a pulse, but I have the tendency to fuck women I get close with. I don’t have many female friends at all, mostly because I’ve alienated all of them by sleeping with them at totally inopportune moments. Emma May is no different, and I bet she hates my guts for never calling her, even though it’s not entirely my fault. I really wanted to, and really wanted to bring her onto my team. Fortunately, though, she managed to find her way onto it all on her own, which is even more impressive and proof that I was right about her back then.

  Sven intercepts me before I can start to harass his people. “What are you doing here?” he asks me in his inscrutable Russian accent, even though I know he’s not fucking Russian.

  “Where’s your new girl?” I ask him.

  “Oh, the ethical one, yes?” He rolls his eyes and gestures at the pen. “In there, somewhere.”

  “Thanks. You’re so helpful as always.”

  He turns to Olivia. “Nice to see you, lovely Olivia.”

  She glares at him. “Dress more appropriately.”

  “Oh, you don’t like?” He gestures at himself. He’s wearing an absurd red and black track suit with stripes down the sides. “I think very handsome, yes?”

  Olivia shakes her head. “Can we make this fast, David?”

  I grin at Sven and head off into his little pen of workers. Sven’s team is officially the debugging group, but that’s not really their role. Sven runs more of an experiment hive of programmers, artists, and designers all tasked with working on… something. I’m not sure what. But it’s supposed to be cutting edge and experimental. He never tells me what they’re doing, and I don’t bother asking.

  I find Emma sitting in the very last cube. I slow down and stop when I finally see her, and that night comes rushing back. Sure enough, it’s her, almost unchanged. Her hair’s longer, still blonde and full. Her desk is covered in personal things, including a photograph of a cute little girl, a little over one year old. I stare at it for a second, and the girl looks so familiar it’s actually scary, but I don’t have time to think too hard about that, because Emma turns around and gapes at me.

  I grin at her. “Hey, Emma,” I say.

  “David.” She quickly stands. “I didn’t… I didn’t know you’d be coming here today.”

  “I just saw that you were hired,” I say. We shake hands, all very formal. Olivia hovers nearby, trying to pretend like she’s not listening intently. I step a little closer to Emma so that we’re not easily overheard. “You know, I meant to call you.”

  She blinks and blushes right away. There’s a flash of something else though, and she drops my hand. “Of course you did.”

  “Really, I did. You just never gave me your numbers, and then the Envoy launched, so…”

  “It’s okay, really,” she says, waving it away, all smiles again. I’d forgotten how truly attractive she is, cute and bubbly and beautiful. “Seems I found my way back to you anyway.”

  “Yes, you did,” I say softly. “I’m glad you did.” I glance back at the picture over her shoulder and back at her face. The girl looks remarkably like Emma…

  “What was that?” I ask. I realize that Emma said something.

  “I said, are you finally taking my advice?”

  “Oh, apparently,” I answer, coming back to the conversation. “We hired you, so we must be going in the right direction.�
�

  She smiles and blushes again, which makes me grin. I love making her blush and apparently it’s easy.

  “Well, uh, it’s nice to see you again.”

  “Same to you. We’ll have to get together. Maybe remember the old days.”

  Her blush grows deeper. “Maybe,” she says. “There’s not much to catch up on, though.”

  “Oh, I disagree. I think we have a lot of work to do, you and I.” I put my hand on her arm, and although I know it’s going too far, I can’t help myself. I meet her gaze and she knows exactly what I’m saying.

  I want to push her buttons more, but Olivia steps up. “David, call from Karen,” she says. “Something that needs your attention.”

  I sigh. “Never ends. Welcome to the team, Emma. See you later.”

  “Thanks,” she says, and I turn away. Olivia and I walk away from Sven’s little pen, and I cock my head at Olivia.

  “Karen’s on the phone.” I ask her. “I thought she was in Kuwait.”

  “Nope. Just wanted to get you out of there before you made more of an ass of yourself.”

  I grin at her. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. When was the last time you flirted with a guy?”

  “Never,” she says. “But I’ve flirted with women plenty, and you’re awful at it.”

  She gives me a rare smile and I can’t help but laugh at myself.

  We get back to work, but I can’t stop thinking about Emma for the rest of the day. It’s not exactly Emma that I’m drawn to, although she’s gorgeous and I really do want to see her again. No, it’s that picture of that little girl on her desk. It’s bugging the hell out of me, but she looks so damn familiar.

  It takes me all day and three more cups of coffee before I finally figure it out. It’s so fucking obvious, and so fucking horrifying, that I don’t even admit the truth until I’m back at home with a whisky in my hand.

  I had no clue. Of course I had no clue, she never got in touch with me to tell me. How could I have known? I feel like an asshole, like a piece of shit.