GenYsiX - Part 2
The doctor slides banks of sensors
over her bare, slicked tummy. The whole room click and hums. I bend around banks of green
machines aimed at Cathy.
Surely you don't need all this stuff
for a routine check-up…what on Mars do they all do?
Cathy glares at me. She likes this doctor; a sweet and wrinkly octogenarian.
Cathy glares at me. She likes this doctor; a sweet and wrinkly octogenarian.
The doctor says, “Nothing can grow here.”
“Except new life,” I mumble.
“What’s that?” the sweet doctor cranes his head
around some contraption. I look at him. What I see is a stick in a
grey robe gripping a blinking green device. But also very wrinkly. A wrinkled
stick. On this point, at least, we
fully agree.
To be fair, though, he is almost
exactly how Cathy described him. The kind of man who takes the Book of Standard
Practices as gospel, who can recite it word by word even after shooting an
entire syringe of Red Dust. Except that he’d never touch the stuff because that
would be a deviation from the expected protocol as stipulated in section something, line whatever.
I smirk.
Actually I know exactly which line in
which section he’d quote because I can quote it too. Anyway. That’s beside the
point. Little stab of self-consciousness.
The doctor is swivelling still more gear through the bright cubic space. The room and all its
modular Medi Facicility fixtures are in standard crisp white. But here in this
one room there’s this very particular shade of green which is all artfully
infused into every single machine the doctor handles. All of them proudly
display the same logo and branding and the same perfect green name.
Deity, I’m nervous.
Deity, I’m nervous.
“So, all we have to do is select the
GenYsiX box and then follow the prompts. It’s really that easy?” Cathy’s voice
is reverent. It is the perfect tone. It captures the requisite awe for Science.
She continues in a whisper, “We just select boy or girl.”
“Yes.”
The doctor halts his frenzied fiddling
with the machinations of reason. His wrinkled face splits in a wide grin and for
just a moment he steps off his pedestal and he’s somewhat like the rest of us.
“When Joan and I had our first one,” he
says, “there were still so many variables in the system. So much natural selection. But now – how
fortunate for you! Soon there will be no more room for chance.”
Cathy shudders beside me. “Good
riddance! Oh Doctor what you and the Company have achieved, what you’ve
given…it’s just—”
I succumb to a petty and impulsive jibe.
“Miraculous?”
The doctor tenses and he frowns and his
eyes are swallowed up in it.
Cathy’s eyes go wide. She giggles. She
cuts it short, gasps, “Oh, Max!”
“Forgive me, doctor,” I say.
Silly. Shouldn’t have. Not the time or the
place. Felt good though.
Cathy says, “What he means is it’s like a miracle. Of Science.
Figuratively speaking.”
“Yes. Quite. Genesis is everything.”
His gaze moves from the green machines
onto us. Intense. Frank. Hint of green reflection.
“You will see. You will be parents,
soon, and then you will know. Genesis is all that matters. One day you will be
old too and then you will look back on everything you thought you knew and you
will understand the only thing that matters.”
Cathy squeezes my hand. “Of course, if
it was up to Max, we'd go all natural!”
I love her. She is my wife. The doctor
chokes. He might be the man manipulating the green machines, but it is always Cathy
who pushes the buttons.
“All natural? Mr and Mrs Min, you—oh in deity’s name—do you have any idea how many variables there are? Do
you have any comprehension of what that word even means?”
The doctor’s wrinkles are so very flushed
and I interject before he suffers an attack of some kind.
“Not all the way. Just a few small
things,” I say.
“Like,” says my wife, who I feel strong
chemical bonding for, “whether Norm might be a boy or a girl.”
Cathy's strangely playful today. Maybe
she's getting off on it, on being so totally justified in her innocuous tease. Being so totally right in the eyes of this quivering old priest of reason.
Judging by the doctor’s face, we’ve
averted the possibility of him having a heart attack. But he’s far from calm. He
might just attack me if I don’t stop
poking fun at Science.
“Mr Min, the choice is yours. Of
course. I am not disputing your right to free choice. But as a medical professional
I must impress upon you how...how irresponsible any such a choice would be.”
He smooths his grey robe which is
utterly without wrinkles. He is searching for the perfect words. The most reasonable
words.
“Please, Mr Min, please remember your
Schooling. Remember the Science, for starry vault’s sake! You—and your wife—have
already decided on a boy. You have assigned the name Norm to the zygote. You
have prepared a room and painted it blue. Cerulean, I recall.”
“The doctor is such a good listener!” Cathy’s
delighted. Her new pet.
“Indeed. Paint's not even dry yet,” I
say.
“Blue is for boys, Mr Min. Norm Min is
a good, strong name. A Scientific name. If you…if you change your mind, forgive
me, you’d only confuse, bias, the
baby. And you’d have to repaint the wall pink. How inefficient.”
By deity he’s serious.
He means it, he has absolutely no idea.
I stare at Cathy all smug as a sand drake.
“Your wife,” continues the doctor in perfect
oblivion, “who is carrying your baby, your baby who is to be a boy—has made up
her mind. Do not cloud your joint intention. It is your choice, still, of course,
it is always your choice – but do not choose differently. Do not choose the
dangers of the past when the future is so bright. You know the Science, Mr Min.
You know what conflicting intentions can do to a developing child. You don't
want to cause any complications, do you? This choice—which is yours and yours
alone to make—don't let your personal feelings cloud your clear mind. Don't let a fantasy, if I may be frank, cloud the clear perspective afforded to you by
your Schooling, by the firm convictions of all Our Science. Your wife may
tolerate these fantasies, may poke fun at you because she experiences strong
chemical bonding for you, but I am a medical professional and I cannot let this
go unchallenged. Please continue to make the right choice—freely, of your own
will—as your wife has already done.”
I am silent.
Cathy beams at me. Innocent as a hyena.
I say, “It's Dr Min, actually.”
“What?” coughs the doctor.
“It's not Mr Min. It's Dr Min.”
“I...that's hardly relevant, man! Did
you hear me?”
“Every word. And I forgive you. We have
never met, you have dealt with Cathy directly. Your head must be full of her stories
about cribs and bibs and blue paint.”
If I had a choice, none of us would even be here. If I had a choice there would be no child. I wouldn't be married, wouldn't
be settled, wouldn't be doctor of anything. If I had a choice, which I did,
because you always have a choice.
I remember mom saying you can be anything you want. Do you want to be a doctor or a
lawyer or a teacher? What I want is to travel, to adventure; to explore the
edge of imagination and maybe fall off. Somewhere there is a line between
fantasy and what might be. I want to test this line. I want to hang in the rift
between the possible and the manmade. I remember being offered peas or carrots. But I don't like
vegetables at all. I was trained on false choices. But aren’t we all? Cathy my wife. The trap of what’s normal. Maybe it goes all the way back to that little boy sitting in the high
chair in the kitchen forcing himself to do what he hates so he doesn't make Mommy
sad. So he doesn't make Father mad. Heart still thuds at the image of the hand
holding the wooden spoon, the big red hand with the big knuckles and the veins
like wriggly mountains.
“Of course, doctor,” I say.
I am perfectly calm.
“Of course! I am free to choose and will make the only choice—the right choice. Forgive me, I've been very emotional since Cathy got tested. Thank you for reminding me of Reason, and the infallibility of Pure Applied Science. How could I choose anything else—who would? Who would make a choice that left the life of their child up to chance when by injecting a chemical cocktail into Cathy's uterus we can make the boy into whatever we want. Our very own little baby toy! Boy. Excuse me. I’m all excited. Our very own baby boy. Of course! I'm so glad I learned in Schooling how sticking needles into the zygote—into our Norm—it doesn't affect change him, all it does is reconfigure him how we want him to be. How perplexing the choice must've been before Schooling made us make our minds up!”
I am perfectly calm.
“Of course! I am free to choose and will make the only choice—the right choice. Forgive me, I've been very emotional since Cathy got tested. Thank you for reminding me of Reason, and the infallibility of Pure Applied Science. How could I choose anything else—who would? Who would make a choice that left the life of their child up to chance when by injecting a chemical cocktail into Cathy's uterus we can make the boy into whatever we want. Our very own little baby toy! Boy. Excuse me. I’m all excited. Our very own baby boy. Of course! I'm so glad I learned in Schooling how sticking needles into the zygote—into our Norm—it doesn't affect change him, all it does is reconfigure him how we want him to be. How perplexing the choice must've been before Schooling made us make our minds up!”
The doctor's smile grows broader and
broader until his every feature vanishes under some wrinkle. Like desiccated brain-flesh
stretched over his head.
Cathy is ecstatic.
I understand everything in a moment of
violent truth. I see it, the game she’s been playing these last few months, I
see every move laid out in a glorious, twisted chain. What a woman. What an ability.
I’m so inspired by my insight that I
extend it even further back, to when I walked into the jaws of the snare
willingly—Do you take this…? I do—to
when I made the choice, but further back still and far deeper to the peas and
carrots and the P’s and Q’s and the rap on the knuckles when I didn’t dot my
i’s and standing on my chair in front of the class and writing in the Piggy
Book, and I stare the great big grinning System right in the lifeless eyes.
It’s not real of course except it also totally is real and in this moment when my son is still in the belly of his mother I see his whole existence pre-set before me. Every up and down. A standard three act structure: his Schooling, job, and gay marriage. I see it because it is predictable but also because Cathy has maneuvered me—us—into the GenYsiX process and the next step is to with money and needles make her belly full of Science so that our clever little Norm can be c-sectioned out.
It’s not real of course except it also totally is real and in this moment when my son is still in the belly of his mother I see his whole existence pre-set before me. Every up and down. A standard three act structure: his Schooling, job, and gay marriage. I see it because it is predictable but also because Cathy has maneuvered me—us—into the GenYsiX process and the next step is to with money and needles make her belly full of Science so that our clever little Norm can be c-sectioned out.
Because it’s really backwards to give
live birth—who would make that choice, the pain, all the variables! And of
course to preserve her full package so that when Cathy and I one day split up
like we’ve discussed she’ll still have all her honey for the other drones.
My wife is so lovely, glowing there on
the table next to the wrinkled old coat.
.:.
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