Marlow didn’t want to keep something from her that Bridget—not to mention anyone who had been watching Marlow’s or Ellis’s channels when they came to the decision—already knew.
“I hope so.” Bridget set her silverware over her barely touched meal in an X. “Otherwise, things will get ugly,” she said in a warning singsong.
Things would be ugly no matter what, Marlow thought, watching Floss push through the narrow space between the tables. The quivering mass of her backside brushed diners on both sides. Her baby would never have an ass like that, Marlow thought. Her baby would never share anything with her mother. They had arranged, after not much discussion, to ask the designers to ignore Floss’s genes as they assembled the baby’s DNA. To toss them out altogether. Marlow wished it had been Ellis’s idea, something she could claim she had been talked into. But it hadn’t been. It had been hers.
* * *
At 3:05 in the morning, Ellis’s alarm went off. He shook Marlow awake. “Off-camera time,” he whispered to her. He settled onto his side and punched his pillow into a ball beneath his face so he could see her. Briefly, she was worried that he wanted to have sex. She tried to calm her resistance to the idea. She could ask her device to call up photos of Constellation’s firefighter talent.
But it wasn’t sex Ellis wanted. “We’ve got to decide about the baby,” he said. “The sowing’s next week. This is getting ridiculous.”
Marlow hugged the comforter to her neck. “I said we could do acne,” she murmured. They had pored over the forms for days, reading the questions in their head and trading answers out loud. They drew up extensive family histories, reporting birthplaces, death locations, diseases, distinctions. This was how the baby would be built: the inputters would map a genome based on all the contributors’ traits. Marlow and Ellis would choose everything they wanted their child to be from the DNA they had to work with. It was tempting to make the baby perfect, but studies, and Jacqueline, claimed that children who were programmed without any potential flaws ended up “psychologically disadvantaged,” as the studies put it—“petri-dish weirdos,” in Jacqueline’s words. “You’ve got to mess them up a little,” she had told Marlow, with a surreptitious nod at a mole on her daughter’s neck. But even mild weaknesses seemed cruel. Marlow couldn’t think of a glitch she could live with. Finally, Ellis suggested acne. “No one ever died from a couple zits,” he said.
“Not the flaws,” he said now. “The gender.”
Marlow knew that Ellis wanted a boy. She knew he was already thinking of passing on the family fortune he had yet to inherit, and that despite the fact that he had a mother revered as a business legend and a vintage T-shirt that said WILD FEMINIST in frequent rotation, he had trouble imagining anything better than what he saw in the mirror.
It wasn’t that Marlow didn’t want a boy. It wasn’t that she wanted a girl. It was that choosing the gender would finalize the child that had, so far, existed only in lab hypotheticals and overwrought party plans. There was a reason the fertility center needed to know their baby’s sex before her sowing: at the event, a mock-up of the child would be projected on a giant canvas backdrop. Marlow was dreading the sight of it. She sensed that, more than the moment she got the pregnancy arc assignment, even more than the eventual implantation of the embryo, seeing that baby-to-be gurgling at her from a screen would feel like the moment of no return. What could she do, how could she contemplate wriggling out of things, once she had seen her child?
“Let’s talk about it tomorrow,” she said, and rolled over. She fell back asleep almost instantly. Sleep, off Hysteryl, was a wholly new sensation, at first blunt and black and deep, then followed by vivid dreams. The old ones were back, and jarring as ever: Grace pleading, Honey mugging for the dashboard camera, the water climbing over the car. But tonight, she dreamed of her sowing. She saw herself in the yellow dress and Ellis at her side. The two of them stood, as planned, in front of a smiling crowd in her mother’s backyard. Everyone had their faces trained on a screen hung above the altar. On the screen was Marlow’s baby, with chubby feet and dimpled hands, wispy curls springing up from its scalp. But where it should