Carola Dibbell - The Only Ones

“But!” Rauden’s gasping, when files start coming on the screen. “You’re nineteen years old! You were boread>

THERE WAS THIS HORROR SHOW CALLED THEM that came up a few years later. I used to watch it even though it was really stupid. Well, guess who Them is supposed to be? Clones. No one but Rauden and us ever said SCNT or Transfer or any of that. In this stupid Horror show, how you make a clone, you drop product in a dish and bingo, it’s a clone. Well, it doesn’t work like that. It usually doesn’t work period. Let alone, first try. So try again. Still doesn’t work. You just got to keep trying and trying. Sometimes it never works.

And that’s true even the regular way. The regular way got all kind of problems. That’s why Bernie does such good business. He sells product that doesn’t work good any more — male, female, pre-pandemic like the dickhead clients insist on. Plus for an extra fee, he will hook you up with a virgin Host. Though it is pretty hard to find one who wants the work.

What Rauden got to do here is harder than that. It’s very fussy, like Bernie said, and that’s just when cows are the Subjects. Imagine how hard it will be with Rini and me. And we are talking about after they got the parts. Even the regular way, you need the parts. You could mix them in a dish or person, but either way you need the parts.

Rini is egg Donor, and hers worked very good — nobody even knew why. Maybe vaccine Syndrome was not so bad where she came from. Some OBGYN beefed her up in Toronto, and Bernie timed his circuit around that, so he’s in Buffalo when she’s ready to cross the border, and he did the Harvest there. He pulled fourteen! He had a friend in Buffalo glider-drop them to the Farm for an extra fee.

I’m soma Donor, and Rauden have been getting that from me while this was going on. How you get the soma is, you scrape mostly from the breast, but also ear or butt. Freeze it till you need it.

When Rini’s eggs arrive, he took five of them and some of my soma to a place in the basement where no one was allowed but him, and he came back saying it didn’t work. Tried again. Tried again. Did not work.

So Rini had to start again.

Me too. He wants to keep on running Harvests from me. I don’t know why he bothers, with Rini’s eggs working as good as they did. But it’s ok with me. I am in no rush to get back to Queens. The food is great, the weather warmed up. Everyone’s in a good mood.

A lot of new things is hatching in nearby farms, like remember what Larraine had in the cage that went, Peep! Peep! Now it’s, Chee, chee! Hoo, hoo! Once Rauden took me with him on an errand, and I could hear some of them through the truck window. Wee! Wee! Ba! Ba!

looks me up and downisis a lot of pamphletRauden calls them Endangereds. He says all of them are, even the heifers. Flus killed half, and the stupid antiPatho spray messed so bad with male factor, SCNT is all that works. It worked very good on pigs. Henry brought one baby pig around, called Delmore. Delmore had a bro named Marcus who had died. They didn’t even eat him. The ones that didn’t work, they ate them sometimes, and they are pretty tasty. Marcus, no. Mad with grief.

It looks like Mumbai was not going to spread as fast as they thought. It pretty much wiped out Sydney, Australia, though.

Janet really wants me to go home. I’m in her basement again, and she’s nervous I will attract attention and there will be a raid, but my next Harvest is a bust, and Rauden says I got to stay another month and try again. “Come on, Janet,” he tells her. “Once this girl is out of here, we’re never seeing her again. We have to pull what we can from her while she’s here!” So I get to stay another month.

There is flowers in Janet’s garden and corn starting up in Rauden’s up the hill behind the Farm. Henry says he should make ethanol but Rauden will use it for booze. He will make it in a tub.

Because my Harvest been so subpar, Bernie talks Rauden into trying a megadose. Rauden beefed me up so hard he got drunk and punched a wall. It’s a whole week till he could use the hand.

Rini got some problems too. After Sydney, everyone thinks Mumbai is winding down, and for sure nobody heard of cases in America, North or South, but there is still a lot of panic and the border guards are so tough, Rini is worried, if she crosses from Canada for her next Harvest, they will never let her back. She has her Toronto OBGYN do the Harvest and glider-drop them over the border from there? But the drop got stopped and boy, she was on the phone to every contact she had, “This is not your mitochondria! This is my mitochondria!” but by the time the cryoPaks get to the Farm, well, the SCNT might not of worked anyhow, how things been going. Who knows why it didn’t work? But it didn’t. So then they got to start again.

Bernie is missing. No one knows why.

In July, a different shady OBGYN ran my Harvest, in Cahoonzie. That megadose really worked! They get twenty. Twenty! Rauden’s so excited, he wants to do another round, but Janet said not a chance.

So that’s it.

“You have your Bonus?” We’re in Lab 3, where Rauden is going to take one last bit of soma before I leave. “And don’t forget that bag Janet fixed up for your ride home.”

I said, “Dude! I know.”

He is going to scrape the soma from my breast, the left.

“How good are the Zone North public Boards?” he asked, while he wipes my breast down, for Hygiene.

I said, “Ok, if they don’t crash.”

“Well, check your messages when you can.” He gave the topical and we wait for it to take.

It is very early and always cool inside Lab 3 though it’s going to be a hot day. It’s very quiet because we’re the only ones around. I don’t know where Janet went. Rauden looks like he is having a hard time thinking of things to say, if you can believe it.

“What will you do when you get back to Queens?”

I said, apply to be an Opener. The pay is good and you are off the Mound but first must pass an Interview and purchase starter equipment. I could use the Bonus Rauden’s giving me for th%ft“ at.

He’s getting the scalpel ready. “You open suspicious packages from drops?”

I agreed. “In case some bioterrorist put a pathogen in. You could also do deCon cleanups, in houses where somebody died, or sometimes you clean up after antiPatho spray.”

“What sort of pathogens?” he asks.

But his scalpel hand is shaking so hard that I tell him, “Come on. What am I, going to get Anthrax? I already been exposed.” And I gave him a little poke.

That got a smile. His hand is steady enough now to do the scraping. He did this so many times by now it’s not even invasive. He put the scraping in a dish and I just waited on the lab stool with my breast out.

What happened now, Rauden did something that really surprised me. After he put a cover on the dish and started to wipe the blood off my breast with a cloth, he said, “Well, watch yourself. We’re still not absolutely sure how this Sylvain hardy business works.”

So I’m like, whoa. Why would he tell me that? He’s never seeing me again. Why would he even care?

And I guess it is because I was surprised, or maybe just I will never see him again either, I start to think if I got something to ask, better ask it now. “What will you do with those eggs?”

“The Cahoonzie Harvest?” he goes, like he’s surprised too. Like, Cahoonzie? That’s the last thing in the world I would wonder about. “Well!” He finished wiping off my breast with an antiPatho wipe. “I suppose I’ll try another stab at conventional IVF — you know what that is — test tube babies, even though we do it in a goddamn dish — I’ll mix your eggs with frozen sperm from Dewey’s old collection — just to see what happens. I have fresh male product too.” He put a bandage on. “That should hold you.” He put the scalpel and things where they went. I pulled on my shirt. He headed for the freezers with the soma dish in his hand.