Unnaturals (11 page)

"So, girl." Jerome pointed at the rows of tables lining the room's floor and at the glass cubes on the tables. There was liquid inside the cubes, as well as something moving. "Do you know what these are?"

Mel shook her head.

"Do you know where babies come from?"

"From cells," Mel said. "Non-embryonic stem cells from the parents." She felt stupid saying it. Even Mom knew as much. Everyone, or at least everyone wanting or having a child, did. When the time came, both mates went to the office of BabiesAsYouDream, Inc., where a special medstat cut a lock of hair from each and gently scraped cells from their tongues. Months later, the mates were messaged to go to BabiesAsYouDream, Inc. to receive their new baby and a special medstat to care for it in its first two years.

Or, that was the process for most people. Mel's dad had done work that the corporation usually did for you.

"The parents can choose which genes from the cells to use," Mel said, "though most people don't. I am sorry, Doctor. Doctor Eryn wouldn't tell me more than that. She said it was no business of a Doctor of Computers. She said I only needed to know how to care for existing people, if there ever was a need for my inadequate services."

"Heh, yes." He screeched with laughter again. "We wouldn't want to fill the heads of our Computer doctors with additional stuff that would only take space needed for their programs, would we? Worry not, even Doctors of People don't learn much of this. They don't need it, either."

"I am not worrying,"
Mel almost said. Why would she want the Doctors of People to know less?

She didn't say it. She
was
worrying. Why keep people, doctors or not, ignorant?

"Of course, girl, all that information is out there in the interweb."

"Is it? I didn't know that. What I do know"—Mel met his eyes, suddenly angry—"is that the information on the interweb is much, way too much, and always contradictory! I've read about pre-implantation genetic diagnosis and selection, about pluripotent stem cells, extrauterine fetus incubation. I've even read that the
giving birth
wonderful experience in the mall was once upon a time a real thing! But you asked me what I
know,
Doctor, not what I can find on the interweb! The interweb is words, words,
words
—so many that, as some of those very articles on the interweb say, you can drown in them. But what exactly is
drown,
doctor? Do you even know? They say that it is water killing you, but water does not harm people, it quenches thirst and gives health..."

One of the old man's feet shot in her direction. It kicked her in the knee and she fell, suddenly in great pain. A medstat was wheeling towards her, but the doctor shouted "No!" He gripped Mel by the collar and forced her head back, then grabbed a bottle from his pocket and poured water hard into her nose.

It was just like a wonderful experience in the mall—but much, much stronger.

It lasted no longer than a few moments. Then the medstat caught her with its metal hands, turned her on her belly, hit her back, made her cough despite the pain in her chest, lifted her head, and then hit her again, and again, until all the water had gone out through her mouth and nose. Mel coughed again. It hurt. She was weak and dizzy, and she could not get up.

"Say again that water can't harm people. No? You won't say any such stupidity? Good. Fix her up, medstat."

She got up. Then she had to sit again, on the floor, because there were no chairs in this large room full of tables and bright white glass boxes.

"Enough, medstat," Doctor Jerome said. "The hurt is in your mind now, Meliora" he added gently. "I am not denying you needed medical care. I am just not letting it give you relaxation pills. I am sorry, but you need your mind with you. No relaxation pills while you're my student."

"In Lucasta, water does not harm people," Mel whispered, "only because of these machines. Is it so, Doc? Otherwise..."

"Otherwise more fools would be drowning than now, true. It happens very rarely now; people are rarely out of the range of a medstat. But, Meliora, now you seem to think that, if not for the medstats, we would all be dead. Not exactly so. But we depend on our machines, true. We depend on them a lot. And this is
a good thing.
Without them, life would be a theater of wonderful experiences."

He took her to the next room. It was much smaller, but its walls were covered by screens. The screens showed a room with vials—small glass containers, perhaps no bigger than Mel's fists. Medstats walked among them, sometimes touching them, inserting tiny, precise metal fingers into the liquid inside.

Doctor Eryn's eyes sometimes looked like the bare, cold stone of an intercity underground. Doctor Jerome's, on the other hand, glowed like brightlights while he watched those screens.

"This, Meliora, is the creation of life."

Life started with cells from both parents, the doctor said, combined inside the vials. A child could have just one parent, or more than two, but time and experience had shown that two parents gave the optimal results most often.

"Unless, girl, a minor correction is needed for a minor genetic defect, or if two women want to have a boy. Then, we reach into the bank of stored genes—of perfect genes that we've gathered and keep gathering. There are no
major
defects any more, and even minor defects are very, very rare—because, of course, after every correction the new person doesn't carry the defect and can't propagate it further."

"I thought everyone had two parents."

"Almost everyone, as I said. Indeed, once upon a time, before Lucasta even existed, two parents was
the only way
and besides, one of them had to be female and the other one male."

"Why?" Mel asked.

"Because people didn't yet know how to make life, and had to rely on the only method, a clumsy and fallible one, that nature had provided for them," Jerome replied.

"Nature?" She could guess about nature. It had something to do with sheep, farms, and grass. Perhaps it also had to do with famine, sickness, and war. But she could only guess. She didn't
know.

"You'll be a Doctor of Nature in addition to your other titles."

"No one told me such a Doctor existed!"

He shrugged. "Few people are Doctors of Nature, and all are doctors of something else first. But the pressure of being a Doctor of People or Computers is enough for most."

"So will I learn to select genes for people?"

"Among other things. It's the baby corporation's job. Some of our doctors work there, though these days the breeding medstats are mostly good enough to do this by themselves. The corporation is obliged to tell the parents that they can make their own choices, too, within certain limits. Propagating a disease that has somehow sneaked into the parents themselves, or sociopathy, greed or another such detrimental divergence, is not to be tolerated—but who wants their child to carry anything like this, anyway? Of course, these days what we call
disease
is so minor that a person can live a whole life and never notice, but still, disease must be eradicated."

"I thought it was eradicated, more than eighty years ago."

He inclined his head, watching her. "Mostly. Not entirely. Not yet. But no one dies from disease any more."

"No, only from the cure." She intuitively cringed, but the doctor didn't hit her, didn't tell her that she was due her hours in a dark room with a hard floor.

"Of course they die from the cure!" he said. "This is how it should be—and that, too, is people's own choice."

Own choice?

"Doctor Jerome, who programs the medstats that work the vials and do gene selection?" Meliora asked. "Theodore doesn't even know about them, does he?"

"He doesn't. He doesn't need to—he could have been shown that they exist, but he hasn't demonstrated a desire for it. Lucasta's needs, and teaching our new recruits, occupy Doctor Theodore enough. Those medstats are programmed by Doctors of Nature who are also Doctors of Computers, like you will be. Like I am."

"So, are we going to program them today?"

"Not today. Today, we are on a tour. You'll get your turn to work on immaculate conception, don't you worry about that."

He wouldn't even let her into the room with the vials.

"And I won't let you in there later, either. Or anyone. We program the medstats, girl.
They
touch the cells. We are too clumsy and too dirty for that—and for tens, hundreds, thousands of years, humans, just like animals, have consistently been making a mess out of having babies. Immaculate conception, I said."

She watched the screens and the medstats' work for some time more. She saw vials and liquid and color—but no semblance of babies.

Later, when Doctor Jerome took her to see the sheep, and the process of a male sheep climbing over a female sheep to make a baby sheep in the old way, she saw no semblance of a baby sheep in this, either.

"But that's similar to what people do with their mates! This doesn't make
babies
when people do it, Doctor, does it?"

"Of course not. Of course not. Imagine what world we would live in if it did."

He brought her back to the room with the glass boxes—extrauterine fetus incubation units, also called artificial wombs. Each box apparently held a baby in that liquid.

"This is where they come when they are about to outgrow the vial."

She walked closer to them. Some looked more like babies than others. None looked like babies entirely. Some were just...vague shapes of what might be a baby one day, attached to a feeding tube—monsters, Mel thought, creatures from fairytales. Others had limbs but not full limbs. She suddenly thought of a misshapen baby from the wonderful experiences.

"No," the doctor said as if reading her mind. "They will all be proper in the end. This is the process they must all go through, they are just at different stages of it. A baby spends nine months here."

Meliora took a deep breath. She'd spend hours at a time in Eryn's prison, in darkness and disconnection from everything else—hours. It had been too much. The babies spent months here. The babies had light, at least, and the food that Jerome explained they were getting through that tube that extended from their bellies. Yet...

Without thinking about it, Mel stepped towards the closest box, which held a baby that looked almost real, and put her hand on the box.

"No use." Jerome shook his head. "This box is a computerized life support system, you can't touch inside without opening it, and you
can't
open it..."

Eyes narrowed, she pressed her hand harder. The computer felt warm. Then, for just a moment, the baby reached out, too, and touched its tiny, almost formed hand to the glass.

Mel felt warm, too. Doctor Jerome inclined his head at her and started wheezing with laughter.

***

Next he showed her what he called the birthing chamber. He didn't take her inside; he said it was no place for humans.

"Remember what I told you of humans being clumsy and dirty? Throughout the years, countless babies and mothers have died at that very moment of the baby coming to the world. Animals—a kind we call mammals—are similar to what humans once were in terms of making children. However, regarding birth, humans were even worse than animals. Animals in the wild could at least do it by themselves. Humans needed
assistance.
And what assistance would they get? Other humans. Those would touch mothers and babies without even washing their hands, after touching death. Well, death, it turns out, is contagious."

"May I see the sheep give birth?" She already knew she could not see humans do it.

"Sheep—well, yes, you can see them. They are similar to humans in this, though. These are not wild animals. They are something that humans kept close to themselves, and so it started resembling them—in bad ways. Sheep need assistance, too. You'll see it when one of them comes to term."

She watched an immaculate human birth on the screen, instead. When the time came, the boxes with babies were taken to this birthing chamber, where special medstats took the baby out of its box. It cried. Then the medstat carefully, precisely, cut the feeding tube and inserted another feeder into the baby's mouth. The baby stopped crying and soon slept.

"They had to wash them in the old days because they were covered with blood and other human goo," Doctor Jerome said. "I'll plug you into a wonderful experience, maybe. I'll have you be the mother—or one of those assistant fools. They could better see what was going on, in all its glory. Some of them were even called
doctors.
But we've been here long enough."

They walked away from the room with the birthing chamber screens, and then into a familiar place. It was one of the baby rooms for babies who no longer lived in glass and could smile, kick, squeeze and pull a girl's hair with impressive strength. There were hundreds of babies, each with its own caretaking medstat hovering close. Doctors were walking among the rows of little beds or the playpens of older babies, too. At this stage, babies got human contact to prepare them for the contact with their parents. Mel reached out to pick up a baby that was just starting to cry.

"Oh, leave it be, Meliora! You've done this already! We are off to another new place now."

It was another small room with screens.

"No, you can't go in. There is no way you can get in there. You can only watch the screens. I have shown you the beginning of life's journey. This now, Meliora, is the end. You'll see the middle later. But the end, like the beginning, must be immaculate. No humans. Not even you."

The screens showed, from different angles, a small room with a nice, big bed that looked very soft and had the latest Lucastan advertisements imprinted on the bed covers. There was a soft red chair by a table laden with chocolate and fruit. The walls had the latest, prettiest advertisements, and there was a new computer on the table.

A woman entered the room, a medstat wheeling by her. She looked young and beautiful—just like everyone. She was smiling. She looked at the chocolate and fruit and smiled some more, then walked to the bed and lay on it.