Chapter 22
Everyone a seed
The Girl found herself on the point of giggling when the idea was first presented to her, not because it was funny, but because of the way the scientist put it; he asked her to consider it for the greater good, to look beyond her own biology, so limited to the narrow confines and ageing processes of her own body, and to allow them to take her ovaries and womb for safekeeping – keeping them alive for her, but outside her.
He had a neat scientific name for the process: ectogenesis.
It was an old name, he admitted, but a new and experimental procedure that had never been attempted and was relying on an equally novel and unproven device.
“Yes, sure, it’s a kind of a Last Chance Dance,” he said, his mid-Atlantic accent grating a little as he looked her with the kind of willed eye contact that immediately made her feel he was trying just a bit too hard not to look shifty about this.
“But if I can be honest, this late in the party, a Last Chance Dance may be all we have…”
This was not the bit she giggled at. This was the bit where she in her turn willed herself to look reasonable and interested in the marvel of cutting-edge medical technology, the “Exowomb” that he was showing her on his iPad.
He called it the “Host Apparatus”. It looked innocent enough, as if a discreet centrifuge had had a baby with an equally unassuming desktop refrigerator, but was, he assured her, a truly remarkable host among hosts, a place where her precious womb could be rehoused, and her almost miraculous ovaries could be nourished.
More than nourished, hopefully even rejuvenated and kept young beyond their years by the use of “novel hormone enhancement” techniques which, if applied in situ, might also possibly work, but only at a certainly fatal cost to her, the current host.
“Machines,” he said, “don’t get cancer.”
And it wasn’t being described as her own womb and ovaries’ “host” that made her giggle, either.
That was triggered by the accompanying government lawyer leaning forward and suggesting in a low, confiding voice, that it might make it “conceptually more palatable” if she “flipped the script” and looked at their proposal not from the personal perspective, but the planetary one.
“Taking your ovaries, using this revolutionary technique to make sure that every last one of the remaining eggs is, well, as ‘fresh’ as those of the young, well, younger, woman you once were… that’s pretty amazing…”
It wasn’t the insensitivity of “fresh eggs” that triggered the giggle either, even though the lawyer was herself an inoffensive looking woman who might in simpler times have been expected to catch the phrase and re-tool it before it completed its journey from her brain to her mouth.
But these weren’t simpler times. If they were, the Girl thought, someone might have at least had the grace to call the fridge/centrifuge crossbreed something other than a “Host”.
Maybe a “Hostess”. No, it was what the scientist then said, as if cleverly tag-teaming with the lawyer.
“Yes,” he said. “Don’t think of it as a personal loss: think of it like a harvest for the world.”
“A Harvest for the World”. Title of the R&B playlist she used to run to when Spotify was still up.
The song had been one of her mother’s favourites, the dead mother who gave her her own love of R&B and disco, who insisted “We are Family” be played at every family gathering, even if it was just her and her brother dancing round the kitchen table in those long lost and still lamented “simpler times”.
She was pretty sure the scientist hadn’t consciously been referencing The Isley Brothers, but the incongruity of his words made her snort.
The other thing that made her giggle was contrary and much darker.
She was terrified. Because this was the moment she’d been fearing, the one where her bodily autonomy was taken away.
The one a seemingly stern nurse had quietly warned her about, softening as she made it clear that she, the nurse, would likely be imprisoned if it got out that they’d had the conversation.
It was the first time the Girl realised that everything about the facility was covered by the Official Secrets Act.
And that had been chilling enough. The stern nurse – who turned out to actually be a kind nurse made stern-looking by the pressure of working ever more closely to the wrong side of the Hippocratic Oath – told her that things were consensual at the facility, until they weren’t.
And that some of those other subjects who had been “moved” had in fact done so under duress, and several of them had not survived the “experimental augmentations” they had been subjected to in anything close to good health.
The nurse had advised her not to give anyone the idea she was anything other than still fully compliant, because there was a regime of closer surveillance that the less amenable patients were subjected to.
“Keep smiling,” she said. “And if you decide to run, run without giving them a clue you’re unhappy.”
“Why would I run?” said the Girl. “I can just tell them I want to go.”
“You can tell them,” said the nurse. “But they won’t let you.”
“How do you know?” said the Girl, feeling the catch of fear in her throat.
“Because I’ve seen it happen,” said the nurse. “And I couldn’t do anything about it. I can do something about you though, and I’m doing it. Be clever. Be smiling. Talk about it with your bloke. But do it in person, and do it outside, away from any trees.”
“Trees?” the Girl said. Her world was beginning to spin a little too fast and she felt a kind of rising vertigo.
“Come on,” said the nurse. “It’s not just the walls have ears.”
That’s when the terror began to build in her.
That’s the moment the unsaid and the suspected became real, like shadows in the dark solidifying into a monster.
Everything that had felt bad about the place, everything she had suppressed and chided herself for being paranoid about in order to survive the treatments and the endless waiting and the disappointment crystallised into a crushing concrete reality.
They came for her at dawn, just as she’d feared they would. Not just the doctors and the scientists but two government lawyers with matching policewomen, walking behind the still friendly but apologetic male nurses, who were pushing a gurney fitted with hand and feet restraints. Just in case.
It was something of a parade, but then the business was one of national, even international, significance.
The security team had confirmed she was on the premises, which was as expected, it being the Friday, the day when she went for her swim later than normal, after getting the weekly hormone injection.
They’d watched the CCTV as GJ went off to the beach on her own, which was unsurprising as – being pregnant now – she no longer needed the injections, her own smile of bruises being complete.
There’s one thing about having an escape plan – the having of it can be its own problem.
It can lull the potential escapee into a kind of complacency.
Knowing you can leave makes you less claustrophobic as the Girl had said, but that can also make you less aware of the urgency.
It can mess up your timing. It can deaden you to the signals you should have been alert to.
They weren’t normally stupid or overly naive, neither the Boy nor the Girl.
They had a signal of their own. Of course they had a signal.
The signal was a word they’d never normally use, and though the nurse had warned her that the emails were likely monitored she figured it was safe enough to write an anodyne update on the last few days since they’d communicated.
So the email saying she was feeling more “chipper” at the prospect of his return from Saudi in a couple of weeks winged its way through the increasingly hiccuppy internet.
En route, in a cruel twist of digital timing, it must have passed his last email coming in the other direction, because no sooner had she hit send than he pinged into her inbox with an update too extensive to have been written in response to her message.
Hey. Missing you a lot like always. It’s worse when I’m closer to coming home.
Why is that? Anyway, are you OK? I hope (think) you are this time.
A strange (Spooky? Good) thing happened.
Had a dream about you last night, a good one, like the old, old days, and we were running up a hill and I kept laughing and trying to make you slow down but you wouldn’t and when I asked you why not, what was all the hurry about you pointed to the top of the hill and said “Because we have to get there before he goes”.
And at the top of the hill was Arch, just standing there in the sunlight, tail wagging and as excited to see us as we were to see him, and then there was a rustling noise in the heather behind him, like a rabbit breaking cover, and he turned and ran barking over the lip of the hill, and when we got to the top he was gone, just gone, no Arch, no rabbit, just hill and more hill and no dog at all, even though we could see for miles and I was sad and you laughed and said it was all right, because we’d seen him.