Caeli Widger - Mother of Invention

It was subtle, but Viv was noticing, of course, and she was writing about it. Not just on LikeMe, but now in an essay that Artery , the most popular long-form site on the web, with two million daily visitors, was set to publish in a few weeks.

Once the Artery piece came out, Wayne knew, there would be no re-canning the worms. All the painstaking efforts the ISA had taken to eradicate speculation about accelerated gestation would be undone, and the conversation would metastasize all over again, like a returned cancer. Just when they’d almost put the Juva debacle to bed once and for all. They could not allow Viv to undo all their work now. Especially since Tessa Callahan and her crew of luminaries in California were ready to assume ownership of the whole thing, to package accelerated gestation as something they’d invented. As an elective option for women. They were calling it Seahorse —how clever!—and were running a human trial of their synthetic version of AG right now. Soon they’d be celebrating it publicly, demanding media attention, pushing their new “solution” onto consumers, and in the process, letting the U.S. government off the hook. Callahan and her rich-kid sidekick, Luke Zimmerman, were inadvertently ensuring that the public would now associate accelerated gestation with her swanky biotech startup. As a result, the original AG phenomenon would become even further disconnected from a certain major fuckup on the part of a U.S. federal agency, followed by a mandate by President Falk to erase the fuckup. The Seahorse buzz would divert whatever vestiges were left of the old AG skepticism—and there wasn’t much, thanks to the ISA—straight to Silicon Valley. Away from Washington. Anyone who wanted to dig into the original cases would now likely break ground in the wrong place.

Thus, the Feds were delighted with Seahorse and let Callahan and Zimmerman run with their Trial. The government disliked meddling in Silicon Valley, anyway; the area was too critical to the national economy.

Wayne, on the other hand, was disturbed by the concept: deliberately turning pregnancy into a highly controlled, manipulated scenario, like traveling into space. Especially meddling with gestation speed. Why the hell would a woman as smart as Tessa Callahan endorse it? What was wrong with a regular nine-month pregnancy?

He hoped they were smart enough to make it work, the Californians with their crazy technology and Mensa IQs and outsize egos. They probably were. After all, the original AG, on paper, had not been a statistical disaster, and that one did not have a bunch of “geniuses” behind it. Most of the thousands of women who took Juva never suffered the side effects, and most of their children were showing no symptoms now.

Only a few dozen, like Irene, were unlucky.

Like Viv.

Wayne’s body hummed at the thought of her, and his mind blanked with the singular desire to hear her voice, to feel his skin against hers.

A pit of nausea opened in his stomach as the reality returned of what he was about to do: recommend Viv’s importation to the Inner Panel. As sick as it made him, as much as he wanted to grab her hand and run far, far away, flight was not an option. They’d only get caught. Viv had already caused too much noise about AG online, and though the ISA was pulling her posts as fast as she put them up, the administration was frowning on them. Or frowning on Wayne specifically, according to Borlav.

If he failed now, before Seahorse alleviated the situation and the administration declared it under control, Wayne could kiss his retirement goodbye.

He rolled his neck, then dropped to the cold floor of the Blue Room and did push-ups, desperate for distraction. He tried to count them in his head, but her name replaced the numbers. Viv, Viv, Viv.

A sharp rap came at the door of the Blue Room, and it simultaneously opened. A full hour had passed since Wayne had finished his presentation and the IPs disappeared. Now, Borlav, Winger, and Hurst reentered. They didn’t thank him for waiting or for his patience, or ask if he’d like some water. Borlav simply began to speak in his mob-boss baritone.

“Theroux. Thanks for your presentation on PIT #1999-42. Excellent work. We’re tasking you with fast-track importation. Thirty days, max.”

He presented Wayne with various screens to sign, committing to the import terms. Standard procedure. Wayne had signed dozens of times, for other PITs, but this was the first time he felt a fissure open in his chest as he initialed the screen with his fingers. The thought of bringing Viv here was sickening. And yet, so was not retiring. He could not do this for much longer: enter a person’s life as a friend, and leave it as a captor. He’d rather be dead. In fact, next to the prospect of more presentations in the Blue Room, death sounded like comfort.

He finished signing, and then, without saying goodbye to the IPs, he left the subterranean den of the Blue Room and caught the elevator up to the surface of the earth. The sun was blinding, despite his dark glasses.

He didn’t even consider catching the shuttle to visit Irene in her neighborhood behind the Great Wall. He had more than enough pent-up energy to walk the three miles from Base to the Colony. Of all the Imports he’d worked with over the course of his career, Irene Brenner, formerly PIT #1979-33, was the only one, until Viv, that he’d cared for at all.

By the time Wayne completed the third mile, his throat was so dry he could hardly swallow. He’d bolted from the Blue Room so quickly he’d forgotten to bring water for the walk. The route between Base and the Colony was intentionally roadless, and the all-terrain vehicles that traversed it routinely took different routes, so as not to wear traces of passage into the landscape.

If you didn’t know the way between the two settlements, you’d be unlikely to find the Colony. To the untrained eye, the “path” was merely inhospitable desert studded with ragweed and rock, disappearing from view after a few miles, when it met a rise in elevation.

But if you knew what you were doing, as Wayne did, you’d walk for forty minutes or so, gauging your route with the compass on your phone, or, if you had done it enough times, by the particular view of the Sandia Mountains in the distance, certain trees and rocks along the way. Every landscape, eventually, could be memorized.

He approached the Great Wall, which bordered the Colony. Constructed of steel-cored adobe, it rose up from the desert floor like a giant earthen crown. To pass through it, you had to learn where the invisible seams were, like the secret door to a speakeasy. You had to know where to find the keypads, several of which were buried under the desert floor. Your markers were nothing more than a certain plant or a group of rocks, indicated with a tiny X in white paint. And finally, you had to recall the cumbersome code for entry, a jumble of numbers and letters and symbols that changed regularly, and which you had to enter with your hand shoved eight inches into the ground.

Wayne could basically do all this in his sleep. Ten yards from the Great Wall, he squatted next to a spiny knot of rabbitbrush, felt for the metal nub on the ground, found it, and peeled the desert floor away from itself. He beamed his phone’s flashlight into the hole to check for snakes. There was nothing inside the socket of earth but a small square console that lit up as the sunlight hit it. The screen produced a weak greenish glow. Wayne dipped his hand into the hole to trace the entry code across the reinforced glass with his index finger.