Caeli Widger - Mother of Invention

Evidence that the life he was hiding was emptier than the one he’d presented to Viv.

Viv. He tried not to picture her, cloistered in the Quarry, getting dinner delivered on a cart by Johanna or some other nurse. Instead, he tried to think of her as he’d known her until just days ago, in her life as a college student in Boston. He tried to think of them together in their ordinary places: breakfast at the Piehole, walking by the river, lying in his bed until fifteen minutes before he had to “teach his class at MIT.” All the phrases that had come so effortlessly, all the little inventions, not because Viv was easy to lie to but because he’d let himself believe that they wouldn’t matter. That together they would somehow transcend the phony history he’d spun to her, that the inner truth of him was bigger than the surface of his lies.

What an idiot he’d been, he thought now, lying on the thin mattress of his bunk. Inner truth. As if he could do one thing and hope for another, expecting the hoped-for thing to prevail, powered by the Force. He and Bethany had loved Star Wars when they were little, had used brooms and rakes as lightsabers and battled each other in the dirt yard of the trailer. Neither ever wanted to be from the dark side, so they settled for Good versus Good: Luke versus Leia, Obi-Wan versus Hans, R2 versus C3PO.

That’s how his work with Viv had felt. He was technically in opposition to her, technically baiting her so that he could make her disappear, but he always felt they were on the same side. Good versus Good.

If he complied, he’d be free in three months. Pending paperwork, passage of his final polygraph, et cetera. He’d always thought he’d go back to Montana, build a cabin deep in the northern Rockies—somewhere up near Whitefish—and live out his days beside a frigid river in the mountains. Since he’d been with Viv, though, a wintry climate no longer appealed to him. Too much of his life had been spent in the cold. He was picturing a beach now, palm trees and cake-flour sand, no seasons. He didn’t want to wear layers. He wished to hide beneath nothing.

Tracy’s phone bleated an alert. He sat up to silence it, but when he looked at the screen, it read 10:52. Time to go to work. It was going to be a long night.

2021

Luke sipped a club soda and stared out the window as his plane angled toward the clouds. Outside, night was claiming the sky, but the dregs of the sunset were still ferocious, bleeding wild colors. Luke could see the burning eye of the sun, fading, and he stared right at it. His whole life he’d done that, and his eyes had never suffered for it. His father had chastised him for it, which, of course, only encouraged him. He thought of Reed now, of how deep his disappointment would be if he knew Luke had failed him. That he’d lost Seahorse before it had managed to transcend a single imperfection in humanity. All because of Luke’s slovenly, idiotic mistakes.

Over the loudspeaker came his pilot’s voice. “Flight time: two hours, forty-seven minutes.”

Luke sipped his water.

They were headed to Tremble City, the closest airstrip his pilot, Trey, could find, twenty miles from the coordinates Luke had gotten from Tessa’s phone. From there, they’d have to take a chopper. It was going to be a long night.

But he had no choice. Tessa knew too much.

Some time later, a message pinged in, waking Luke from a light sleep. He yawned and pulled out his device.

The message was from Rita Gupta.

Gwendolyn Harris was in early labor. Contractions four to five minutes apart. They would move forward with a C-section as planned. Gupta and Milford were already preparing for surgery. The anesthesiologist had arrived.

No one seems to know where you are, Gupta had written. But everything is under control. We’ll keep you updated.

Luke pulled on his headset to communicate with the cabin.

“Trey,” he said, “how long have we been up?’

“One hour, forty-eight minutes.”

Almost two hours.

It would take him at least three, including traffic, to get back to Seahorse. It was best if he stayed away. There was nothing he could contribute to Gwen’s situation; for that, he’d hired the best doctors in the world, spent millions. His presence might only make his staff feel pressure they did not need.

He replied to Gupta: I’m OOO until tomorrow. Unexpected necessity. Gwen is in the greatest of hands.

Then he turned off his device.

Perhaps everything would be okay.

He believed in Milford and Gupta and the rest of the team, in all the work they had done. Perhaps they’d pushed TEAT to trial a bit prematurely, perhaps they’d sourced material too aggressively, tweaked the data a bit; but then, as Tessa had written in her book, waiting for a clear green light is the cowardice of a wasting life.

Luke believed this with all his heart. Even if they’d waited to launch the Trial, risks would still have been involved. The Cohort knew this. They embraced it. People had been taking voluntary risks with their bodies for generations: gender reassignment surgeries, transplants of every kind, breast implants. Face-lifts and vaginal tightening, Botox. They’d undergone lobotomies, they’d had bacteria purposely introduced into their brains to eat away cancer.

Some had taken a little-known drug called Juva, in hopes of stretching their fertility into their forties, their fifties, even beyond.

Human pioneers would always be necessary for progress. Without them, the world would not continue to flourish. It would stagnate and wither and die.

It was all one unified system, Luke thought, one organic pattern: risk and consequence, setback and progress. They were all working together, generations of humans, pushing through the darkness toward the light, sacrificing now so that others could have a better future.

There was no shortcut around sacrifice.

Still, Luke hoped very much that things would turn out well for Gwen and her babies. As it was, he had enough troubled women to worry about.

Outside the window of his plane, the night sky turned to black velvet, pocked with hard white stars.

2021

Tracy knocked lightly on Viv’s door in the Quarry. She opened it with the tap of a button, still lying in bed, assuming he was Johanna. Her breath staggered inward when she saw him. He held a finger to his lips. Moved across the room to her. She sat straight up in bed and then cowered, shielding her face with her forearms. As if fending him off.

“Please,” he whispered at her bedside. There was little time before they would find him. Perhaps just minutes before the rest of Third Shift Surveillance noticed that their squad captain was MIA. Before the alerts beamed to screens and alarms shrieked.

Viv lowered her arms from her face. In the dim light, he could see she’d advanced maybe to forty. Still fully herself. Maybe even more so. Her face was her own, just deeper settled, her cheekbones more prominent. She wore a nightgown, something loose and white. Her hair spilled over her shoulders. It had salted and peppered in places, ash-colored. He’d never seen her more beautiful.

“No,” she said to him. A single syllable, stark and cruel. “And why are you dressed like a soldier?”

His heart boggled in his chest. He lifted his hand to her cheek, on instinct, needing to feel her skin. She batted him away.

“It’s too late,” she said. “It’s over. Go away.”

“It’s not. I found a way.”

“A way?”

“I can get you home. To your parents, or to Weldon, or wherever you want to go. But you’ll have to promise me you’ll never tell anyone what you’ve seen and heard here. Not ever, to anyone. Do you understand?”