Go figure. Guess they didn’t think of that wrinkle when they revised a couple kids’ contracts.” Grace picked up a doctor’s tablet, with its lightless, fog-safe gray screen, from the long shelf against the wall. She smoothed its smudged surface. “I need to show you something,” she said.
Marlow watched Grace summon a diagram, a honeycomb of yellow twigs connected by blue and green and red dots. The heading at the top of the graphic said BABY #1217, TRIESTE. “I kept waiting to send in your mock-up,” Grace said. “I didn’t believe what I found, when I went looking through your genes. I thought maybe the network was up to something—a big reveal, or whatever. But here we are—your sowing’s today, right? And they still haven’t told you.”
“Told me what?” Marlow said. A perverted hope, the size of a tender shoot, sprang up—what if the designers had discovered that she and Ellis were distant cousins? They’d have to break them up then.
“It’s about your dad,” Grace said. She leaned in and explained.
Grace, as she worked to turn Marlow and Ellis’s preferences into a person, had come across something curious. The physical traits belonging to Marlow’s father, the ones they had selected for their baby—brown eyes with an epicanthic fold to the lids, black hair with a thick shaft—did not match the DNA in Marlow’s own genome. In all the places her father should have been, there were the genes of someone else. Someone whose hair and nails and spit Marlow and Ellis had not brought to Liberty.
“I’m so sorry to tell you this,” she said, “but I can’t find Aston anywhere. He’s not your biological father.”
“No, he’s my father,” Marlow said dumbly. “Did you look—could you look again?” She felt her breath quickening. This was a mistake. People made them all the time.
The first warning from the network sounded in her mind. I should return to an on-camera space. Grace got it, too, Marlow could tell. She started to talk faster.
“I tried to do some research, before I got you all upset,” Grace said. “And this was weird, too: I can’t find your birth certificate on file anywhere. I know you hardly need them for anything these days, but still.” She frowned down at her nails, shy in her accusation. “I mean, that could be unrelated, if you don’t have one,” she added. “It wouldn’t be the weirdest thing, considering your birthdate.”
Floss was always bragging about when Marlow was born. “The whole world’s divided into born before or born after,” she said sometimes. “Not too many people can say ‘during.’”
Grace slid a scrap of paper across the desk to Marlow. Marlow startled at the sight of it, and picked it up quickly, automatically, as if to hide it from the cameras. But when she remembered that no one could see them, she looked at it closely. The paper was thick and plum-colored. A golden pattern was laced across it—the swirls rose off the paper, catching under her nails.
“It’s wallpaper,” Grace said. “Left over from my dining room. I didn’t have anything else to write on.” She reached out and turned the paper over.
There, on its yellowish-white side, was an address, scrawled in Grace’s hand.
Mount Sinai West. 1000 Tenth Avenue, New York, New York.
“The hospital where I was born,” Marlow said.
“Yeah,” Grace replied. “I pulled the address from your file. Maybe someone there can tell you something. Maybe they have a record of your real—” She couldn’t finish the sentence. She never did, Marlow thought, have a mean bone.
The pads of Marlow’s fingers pawed awkwardly at the scrap. “Could you just message me this info?” she said.
Grace looked at her a long time before she answered. “I think it’s better if I don’t,” she said. “I’m just worried that...” She looked down, shook her head at her lap. “The network runs all our storylines by the Department of Info, you know,” she said. “And the network clearly didn’t mean for you to find out about this. If I message you, and the Department of Info flags it, I’m worried they’ll...” Grace raised her eyebrows wearily. “Well, it’s a discrepancy. We’re going off-script here, Marlow.”
An eerie jangle ran through Marlow. She had never had a secret from the network before. She had never really had a secret, period. She couldn’t find a place in her mind to put it. It wasn’t a comfortable fit.
I should return to an on-camera space immediately, the voice reiterated firmly.
“And I would pump your mom for information,” Grace