Caeli Widger - Mother of Invention

Tessa cut over to the footpath that traced the edge of the bluff and sat on a green bench, facing the ocean. It was a rare clear afternoon, the clouds a light smear in the sky, the breeze a soft rustle. At the base of the cliffs, the Pacific bucked and churned. Behind her, the domes of the Center gleamed in the sun.

She wished Peter hadn’t brought up the baby issue. It was in the past, a healed wound. Their life was rich and full. She wished he’d just congratulated her. Said he was proud and left it at that.

A few hours later, he sent a text:

Eric & Dalton hiking the PCT. Invited me to join for part of it. Probably a couple weeks. Might be good timing, since you’re busy. Could bring Python along. Thoughts?

The message startled Tessa. Eric and Dalton were old buddies from Peter’s Polar Bear Club days; he hadn’t mentioned them in years. Hiking the Pacific Crest Trail had been something he’d dreamed of when he was younger, Tessa knew, but he’d stopped seriously hiking after ZSY went under, claiming it gave him too much time to think.

That he would now suddenly want to embark on such an adventure with distant acquaintances struck Tessa as strange.

Could he be trying to punish her?

That wasn’t Peter’s way.

Still, she was vaguely hurt by his request.

But how could she possibly say no?

2021

Back in his office, after the debriefings on the procedures, Luke settled into his desk chair and tapped his phone to lower the taupe shades over the broad windows facing the ocean, obscuring his panoramic view. Often, he found the natural world distracting. People spent far too much time in pursuit of beautiful settings. In Luke’s circles of entrepreneurs and innovators, it was practically a sport. The splendor of the California coast was not enough for them. Nor were traditional places of grandeur, like Europe or Hawaii. No, Luke’s peers insisted on Antarctica, on Easter Island and the Amazon. Then flaunted their conquests in real time on social media, grinning smugly at the camera.

Luke had been almost nowhere. This was on purpose. He’d had a VR room built in his house and owned all the most state-of-the-art accompanying equipment, and it was enough. In that room, he’d taken a safari to Kenya and stood atop the summit of K2, without risking his life or taking interminable plane flights or getting a single insect bite. More importantly, he hadn’t eaten up weeks and weeks of his valuable time. Travel, in Luke’s opinion, was an inefficient endeavor, on its way to eventual obsolescence. It pleased him to be ahead of the curve on this, even if it meant incredulity from his friends and mockery from the media.

He propped his feet on his desk and twirled his fidget, fixing his eyes on the round bearing at its center, trying to focus on breathing deeply. Meditation, like travel, also seemed a waste of time, but a knot of anxiety had settled in his chest after the Cohort’s procedures were completed a few hours ago. It had yet to dissipate, despite the jog he’d taken around the periphery of the campus, and the two cans he’d swigged of ClearCalm, a drink containing the root of a South American plant that purported to “soothe the central nervous system while simultaneously promoting mental acuity.”

Currently, Luke felt neither calm nor clear. A few hours ago, at the postprocedure debrief, when the doctors declared the Cohort’s transfer procedures successful—inasmuch as success could be determined so early—he’d experienced a wave of elation. The whole staff had exchanged jovial hugs, even Roger Milford, who reminded Luke of some upright crustacean. Luke hugged Tessa last, and as they embraced, she’d whispered in his ear, Two days until it all begins, Zim, and held on to him for a few extra beats.

Of course, she’d only meant that the day after tomorrow, the doctors would know whether the women of Cohort One were pregnant. Her comment was merely one of excitement, of camaraderie, an iteration of obvious fact, but to Luke, it also carried vague menace. Yes, the day after tomorrow was the beginning of everything. But it could, theoretically, be the beginning of the end. He needed the Trial to run smoothly. His stakes were high, higher than anyone else’s. He’d known this from day one, from the first moment he’d learned of accelerated gestation, years ago, back at Configuration Labs.

He had total confidence in the Seahorse team and the work they’d done to bring TEAT to the world, to improve every iteration, working from mice to rabbits, then from rabbits to rhesus macaques and chimpanzees, and finally to the Cohort. He believed in Milford and Gupta, in Kenzo Akabe. He believed in Tessa.

It was not the risk of the Trial, exactly, that was making him edgy. It was the surrounding circumstances. He reminded himself of the most basic principle of science, taught in grade school: correlation does not imply causation. That he’d noticed, several weeks ago, the presence of some anonymous visitor to the CleftKids group—a ghost troll whose account and IP address he could not trace, nor could his go-to hacker friend in India—meant nothing. That Tessa was soon leaving on a short trip to Boston to speak at her alma mater, Weldon College, where Vivian Bourne was currently a senior, slated to graduate in just eight weeks—also meaningless.

But yet, combined with the momentousness of the Trial, Luke could not help feeling unsettled by these events. Even though Tessa had informed him months ago of her obligation to speak at Weldon, as part of a series the college ran called Influencers. Even though LikeMe “ghosts” were not uncommon—hackers were getting more intrepid by the day—and it was only a matter of time before the company’s cybersecurity division would nail whoever was lurking among the CleftKids. Still, both developments left Luke unsettled. He could not afford mistakes, especially not now, when his reputation and the entire course of his future was at stake.

Once the Cohort settled into their pregnancies, he’d feel calmer. Once TEAT was fully under way, and he could view the babies and know with certainty that he’d made all the right decisions. Once Gwen Harris, the questionable member of the Cohort, had improved her attitude. Which was inevitable, Luke thought, from a hormonal perspective. Once the oxytocin began swirling in her brain, she would surely lose her sourness, which had felt vaguely threatening to Luke from the moment he’d met her.

He closed his palm over the fidget and jutted his head to the right, then the left, hoping to elicit some cracks that might relieve the tension at the base of his neck, but nothing happened. His office with its blotted windows felt suddenly stifling. Perhaps he’d have to resort to a view of nature after all. He tapped his phone to open the window shades, and they peeled up to reveal the sky and sea before him, so bright he could hardly look.

1999

Before the baby, when Irene Brenner was just a regular college student, she’d loved the white winters of Connecticut, the exuberant springs. How the air on campus teemed with possibility, with any number of amazing things ahead, endless permutations of greatness. Nothing like the languid Texas Hill Country where she’d grown up, in a big house in the suburbs outside Austin, where it was green and warm most of the year. Yale was a revelation. The seasons, the sense of exclusivity. She was happy there, happier than she’d ever been. She went out for crew on a whim, because it seemed a quintessential college experience, and fell in love with the sport. It ignited an ambition in her she hadn’t known existed, a competitiveness, a superiority. Rowers got up earlier than anyone else and trained harder. The rigor was part of the reward. There was no individual glory; the nine teammates were part of a single organism, bereft without one another, worthless.