Caeli Widger - Mother of Invention

“Quite the opposite,” said Milford. “They’re striving for symbiosis. They share a circulatory system. Each needs the right level of blood flow.”

“And? Are they getting it?”

“It appears so, yes. We’re monitoring carefully for signs of imbalance.”

“And otherwise? Do they look viable?”

“Plausibly. But this is a high-risk pregnancy, especially given the mother’s age. Complications could still arise. We should inform Ms. Harris of the situation.”

“Not yet,” said Luke. “You just said complications are still possible.”

“Complications will remain possible up until she successfully delivers,” said Milford. “We need to tell her.”

“Give me survival odds.”

“Better than fifty percent.”

“A week ago you said thirty. So we’re moving in the right direction. Let’s get to seventy-five before we move to full disclosure.”

“Need I bring up the ethical considerations?” Milford said in a tight voice. He stabbed an index finger to his tablet and the monitor on Luke’s desk went dark.

“You need not,” said Luke. “Because, as clearly stated in the consent and release documents signed by each member of Cohort One, including Gwendolyn Harris, our primary objective is to preserve the global health of mother and child. Global encompasses physical and psychological.”

“I’m aware of the definition.”

“So we wait and see for another few days.”

“I don’t follow your logic. The longer we wait, the longer the mother’s perceived window of deception.”

“ Omission. Window of omission.”

“Call it what you will.” The doctor stood from his seat. “Either way, I’m not comfortable with it.”

“You don’t need to be,” said Luke easily. “Comfort is not a priority. Bringing these babies into the world as safely as possible is my priority. It needs to be yours, too.”

“You have an interesting definition of safety, Dr. Zimmerman.”

“Get some sleep, Roger,” said Luke. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Milford exited without saying good night. Luke dimmed the lights in his office as soon as the door clicked shut behind the doctor, leaving only a single soft glow over his desk, and opened a ClearCalm. He put on his headphones, selected Fauré’s Requiem on his phone, and turned up the volume. He settled in front of his monitors as the river of voices and string instruments began in his ears and logged on to the CleftKids LikeMe page.

No new posts from Viv or the others, but the ghost had been there just twenty minutes before.

Plus five other times that day.

Goddammit.

He closed LikeMe and put his monitor to sleep, settling back in his chair to absorb the music. People often lazily assumed Requiem was simply another piece about death, but Fauré himself had said it was about aspiring to the sublime, about leaving the ordinary world behind for something grander. Luke related to this theme. It was the reason he’d invented TEAT. Sometimes when he listened to Requiem , he felt that Fauré had written the piece for him.

Thirty minutes later the piece was reaching its crescendo, the choir swelling and soaring— Libera me, Domine —and the music layered and broke and layered again, until its last measure. He pulled off his headphones and tossed them onto the desk. The room refocused around him, eerily silent.

VivversOC: Hey everybody, I have an announcement

LindsEE!: VIV! Where’e u been???

VivversOC: Studying my ass off for finals. Haven’t you guys?

Xavey: Affirmative.

Stoph1: Spare us the chitchat, I’m on the edge of my seat here. What’s you’re announcement dude?

VivversOC: So u know how I met Tessa Callahan last month?

LindsEE!: Yes so cool

VivversOC: Well she invited me out to visit her company in CA!

Xavey: WHOA

VivversOC: I know! They’re paying for it and everything. Tessa says since I’m AG and their tech is based on it, she thinks me and her team would “benefit from some informal facetime.”

LindsEE!: R U going?

VivversOC: Yes. But before I do, I wanted to check with all of u guys to see if it’s OK if I share your stories with her. Like everything you’ve told me about your AG. I think she might be able to help us.

Stoph1: Help how???

VivversOC: Get to the bottom of why it happened.

Xavey: Fine by me. Tell her whatever.

LindsEE!: Same here.

Stoph1: Run with it, detective

2021

Wayne bolted awake at 2:00 a.m., not from a dream but more disconcertingly, from a heavy charcoal slumber. His heart rate was high, as if he’d just run a sprint. Beside him, Viv was sound asleep, her breathing so slow it was barely perceptible. Part of his work at the ISA involved surveillance—focusing on the physical world, verified intelligence, hard data—but the other part, the more advanced one, required him to translate his intuition. To extrapolate action and facts from his gut feelings. In the past, he would have fought an abrupt awakening in the middle of the night, doing anything it took to get back to sleep: counting to ten thousand, a shot of whiskey, a sleeping pill. Now he understood that he did not tear awake from a dreamless sleep for no reason. That he needed to stay awake and wait for the reason to present itself. He believed in the transfer of energy, not in a dippy new age way but in a Newtonian way—a disturbance somewhere necessarily yielded a counterdisturbance elsewhere.

Waking up, as he just had, was a counterdisturbance.

He checked his various devices: nothing.

He studied Viv in the darkness, her curls like dark Spanish moss all over the pillow. She was an exceptionally heavy sleeper, he’d learned from these nights awake beside her. He could see a whole childhood in the way a person slept; Viv preferred to be on her back with two pillows, unguarded, without vigilance. Offering herself to the night. Elise and Larry Bourne—although shallow, as Viv often complained—had taken good care of her, protecting her not only from harm but the prospect of it. Wayne had studied Viv’s childhood in depth, scouring her and her parents’ digital histories: the long mornings at the beach, the tennis and soccer and surfing, the vacations to Yosemite and Big Sur and Joshua Tree.

And yet, he knew Viv felt disappointed by her parents, in that way that well-cared-for children could afford to be. It was not enough that they’d loved her to the best of their ability and provided her a life of comfort and stimulation. Like many kids of her generation, Viv craved understanding from her parents. Connectivity. A sense that they “got” her. She could not yet appreciate the fact that they’d shaped her perception of the world in such a way that allowed her to reach her early twenties and still sleep on her back. Wayne always slept on his side and often woke curled into a tight ball, like a late-stage infant in the womb. Self-protection.

And yet, he did not resent Viv and the gentle cushion of her history. Someone else, he might have resented. In his younger days, he could easily hate anyone with a history of softness.

He had never hated Viv, not for a second. Perhaps he’d granted her leniency from the beginning, from before they’d even met, from when he’d reviewed her file and learned what had happened to her before she’d been born, how much Elise and Larry had risked for her. They might be dolts—they were afraid to tell Viv they’d adopted her, for fear of her reaction, instead letting her believe Elise had birthed her after nine weeks—but they were generally loving parents. That big house in Newport Beach with the wrought iron and topiary in the backyard suggested only bad taste to Viv, but to Wayne it was evidence of how hard her parents had tried, within the confines of their own limitations, to keep her safe.