Genesis: A science-fiction short story. (2 page)

“I was after my second, yes,” says Sylvia. “That was already—”

“And your parents have passed, both of them?” asks Mrs. Woodrow. She swipes quickly at a small pad on her desk, entering in data too quickly for Sylvia to follow.

“Yes, my father passed this year,” says Sylvia, caught off guard. She hadn’t realized that it would be part of the consideration process. She doesn’t remember the question being asked before.

“No attempts at all at natural children?” asks Mrs. Woodrow, and now her voice is expectant. Sylvia can tell that now Mrs. Woodrow wants the answer as much for herself as for the paperwork.

“I’ve really… I did try,” says Sylvia, and leaves it at that.

“Income has
n’t changed?” asks Mrs. Woodrow, her eyes now studying Sylvia. Sylvia cannot tell if the look in her eyes is compassion or irritation.

Sylvia wonders
, to herself, why they ask them to fill out the paperwork only to verify everything later, in person.

“Yes,”
says Sylvia, reluctantly. She wants to explain, but she knows the explanation will fall on deaf ears. “I mean no. I mean… it hasn’t changed.”

“And debt hasn’t changed?” asks Mrs. Woodrow.

“Well—actually,” says Sylvia, hesitantly. “It has, actually—“

“Yes, I see,” says Mrs. Woodrow, nodding to herself. She again enters something into the computer. “And have there been any other major life changes?”

“No,” says Sylvia, automatically. She then thinks through the past couple of years; she really doesn’t know what constitutes a major life change.

“But I see one of your children has been diagnosed with a mental deficiency, earlier this year,” says Mrs. Woo
drow, her eyes raising upwards as though catching Sylvia in a lie.

“
No, that’s not what it was,” says Sylvia, leaning over the table. “They said that she’s developmentally abnormal, yes, but the abnormality was positive. She’s falling outside of the spectrum on the positive end; she’s advanced for her age. They were very clear about it not being a deficiency.”

“I see,” says Mrs. Woodrow
, entering something else into the computer. She finally turns to Sylvia.

“Upon completion of your audit, which of course you can appeal, we have decided that your third child will need to be sterilized,” says Mrs. Woodrow.

Sylvia nods; she had expected this. It was common enough; her second child had been sterilized as well.

Mrs. Woodrow continues,
“Further, we are afraid that we can only certify her until 31 years of age.”

Sylvia’s heart drops; her mouth immediately dries.
She wonders if she heard that properly, but a look into the woman’s eyes tells her that yes, she undoubtedly did.

“What?” she asks, and the voice comes out as a whisper. “I’ve never heard of—“

“It’s new this quarter,” says Mrs. Woodrow. “We reduced the minimum certification from 35 to 30. It was not a decision the bureau took lightly, but it was necessary given the current global economic situation.”

“I—that, you can’t
do that,” says Sylvia, but she can already see that Mrs. Woodrow has shut down; she has leaned back in her chair and is staring again at her screen. Sylvia opens and closes her mouths before finding her voice again. “How do I appeal?”

“You want to appeal?” asks Mrs. Woodrow, looking at her out of the corner of her eye. “I can tell you right now, the appeal process isn’t easy. Unless you’ve failed to tell me something major, you won’t win. You’ll just spend your entire pregnancy tied up in paperwork.”

“I want to appeal,” says Sylvia, with conviction. Mrs. Woodrow reluctantly sighs.

“What is your official email address?” asks Mrs. Woodrow. “It must be a government email address.”

Sylvia gives the woman the information and the woman, with a few hard taps, sends along the requested forms.

Mrs. Woodrow
shakes her head, her tone changing immediately from casual to stiff; she doesn’t like it when people try to appeal, she feels that it is a personal slight.

Sylvia leaves the office; she barely even sees the others she walks past. She is lost within her own mind.

Kathleen
Cardoff’s pregnancy would have gone entirely unnoticed if she had simply been quiet about it. Certainly, the child looked very similar to her—but children are supposed to look similar to their mothers. Certainly, she had maintained that she could not possibly be pregnant—but many women did exactly that.

Like a terrier with its prey, however, Kathleen just couldn’t let it go. It wasn’t just about her; it was about her little girl. She couldn’t get past the fact that the girl looked just like her. She took out pictures, showing whoever asked; she told everyone she knew her story.

Eventually, Kathleen received a message from Dr. Neal Rivera. Dr. Rivera had been tracking similar cases all across the globe, but Kathleen’s was the first known occurrence. Once she had connected with Dr. Rivera and his team, everything moved, to her, like a blur; he was able to immediately confirm what she had always known. That she and her child were genetically identical.

Dr. Rivera had initially called it spontaneous genesis, but it would later be coined
Cardoff’s Syndrome. It was not a disease that could be transmitted through human vectors, and thus any search for a “patient zero” failed. For the rest of human history, Kathleen Cardoff would remain the first known case.

Within the decade it had to be accepted; virtually every woman had developed
Cardoff’s Syndrome. It occurred slowly, at first, and then more often. If they did not become pregnant through natural means, they began naturally and spontaneously generating a clone of themselves.

There was no way around this but for sterilization; ordinary means of birth control, even chemical means, did not work because the woman’s eggs no longer needed to become fertilized to be viable.

Was it the hormones in the water? Was it somehow the electrical frequencies being jettisoned through the air? Was it some mysterious change in the chemical nature of the earth itself? What had caused this?

No one knew. What they did know was that it was an emergency. What they did know was that there would have to be protocols put into place to preserve the future of humanity.

Sylvia Rider returns home, where her best friend Caroline Young has been watching her two
young daughters. Her children, Maggie and Kate, are now aged two and four. She loves them, more than anything in the world.

Sylvia’s husband, Dorian, had never been able to accept the children nor the fact that Sylvia had managed to become pr
egnant by herself before him. It was a difficulty that many men now faced; a race against their own partner’s biology.

At the time, the fact that Sylvia had refused to request termination of her firstborn child had hung like a shadow over their relationship. Now Sylvia wonders if she would have had her termination request accepted at all. She wonders if she could have kept the peace by going through the motions; if she could have kept their relationship together.

Dorian had always commented that he was lucky, marrying a woman who had not been sterilized. Now, sometimes in her dark moments, she wonders if that was the only reason he had married her.

Not every woman wa
s allowed to remain reproductively intact any longer; only the women who were considered to be positive influences on the genetic pool. They were expected to avoid Genesis as much as they could, but it wasn’t always possible; not when reality intervened.

“How did it go?” asks Caroline, tugging on her jet black hair. The children are playing in the living room, still in sight, and Caroline has picked up on Sylvia’s mood.

“They wouldn’t let me terminate,” says Sylvia.

Termination needed to be petitioned for, but it was yet another procedure almost entirely controlled by invisible and inconceivable algorithms, calculated for the betterment of society and the genetic pool.

“Well, we knew it was a longshot, requesting it that late,” says Caroline, attempting to comfort her. “They almost never approve terminations after the first two weeks, it’s all that scheduling madness. We’ll get through it together. What’s the final verdict?”

“31,” says Sylvia
quietly, breaking open the seal on a coffee pod and slipping it into her mouth. She almost immediately feels her jittering falling away, though she knows that it’s just a placebo. In the living room, Kate is playing a virtual reality game.

“What?” asks Caroline sharply,
as she takes the canister from Sylvia’s hand. “31? That isn’t even possible. Did you say 31? Three and one?”

“It’s new,” says Sylvia,
numbly, as she turns and leans against the kitchen counter. She looks into the room at her children.

“
What… What are you going to do?” asks Caroline. “Can you appeal? I’ve never heard of… 31?”

“I can appeal,” says Sylvia
, shaking her head. “But it doesn’t look good. I don’t think… I’m not sure what to do, Caroline.”

“
Those appeals never go through,” says Caroline, leaning against the counter. She looks to the two girls in the living room and lowered her voice. “There are… I mean, I’ve heard there are options.”

Sylvia has heard that, too. Underground drugs. Illegal operations. She knows that it is an option; a very real option. But she also knows that it’s not an option for her.

“I’m not 19, Caroline,” says Sylvia. “If I’m caught, who will take care of the girls? What if I get sick? The last thing I need is more medical bills, or jail time, or to die.”

“Why would they even approve the
Genesis if they’re only going to certify it till 31?” asks Caroline, her voice displaying the frustration that Sylvia felt.

“I don’t know. Who knows how they calculate these things,” says Sylvia. “Lord knows I tried enough to figure it out before I even went. Why did Maggie get 73 and Kate only 68? Why
did I get 79? Why did you get 64? It’s all just a mess.”

“Well, we have time,” says Caroline, putting her hand on Sylvia’s shoulder. “We’ll figure it out, in time. And you know what? Maybe they won’t even have the same certification process in 30 years. Who knows? Anything could happen.”

Sylvia nods, to herself, but she’s no longer listening. It was everything that she had been telling herself on the way home through the metro, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was terribly, awfully wrong.

Kathleen Cardoff was forgotten quite quickly once the epidemic reached a global scale. She was abandoned to her modest home and her child and she was quite happy about it, all things considered. She now had her answers: there wasn’t anything wrong with her or, if there was something wrong with her, it was wrong with everyone.

Her beautiful—if she could say that without being conceited—daughter was healthy and happy and, in fact, through her daughter Kathleen learned to love herself a little bit more, too.

Eventually, Kathleen married one of the young researchers that worked on Dr. Rivera’s team, and she created a normal life for herself; sometimes happy, sometimes sad, but overall content.

The story was no longer about Kathleen
Cardoff.

But that didn’t mean that the story was now over.

Genesis meant that reproduction could no longer be controlled by the individual, and thus, it was said, it needed to be controlled by society itself. Given the technology of the time, the only thing that could be done to avoid it was sterilization.

S
cientists cautioned against abusing the process; ultimately, it could lead to the extinction of the human race. They painted dramatic and cautionary end-of-the-world scenarios that the scientific and political community debated at length.

The majority of the world quickly fell into chaos. At first, the sudden shift between genders in developing areas led to social and political issues
, but that wasn’t the largest problem. As the population increased dramatically, the issues became primarily biological and logistical; disease and hunger cut through the globe at a record speed, laying waste to entire nations.

In the developed world,
rigid protocols were enforced to monitor and control reproduction, to avoid what had happened to the rest of mankind.

It was not possible to qu
estion these standards; all anyone had to do was point to the pandemonium that had been unleashed upon those who had lost control.

Sylvia Rider settles herself down into the cushioned bottom of her bathtub, lilac scented oil wafting around her and the steam rising up in her vision.

Caroline has agreed to stay the evening to watch the children; she can hear them whispering, talking and giggling just outside her door. She feels strangely now, as though she has just floated out of a dream.
She can imagine that none of this is happening; that it’s just another day. But that does not last very long.

After a while, s
he imagines the child that she will have, in another seven months of time. Her child will be just as her others; she will come out with blonde hair and blue eyes, which will slowly turn darker. She will be intelligent, but there any expectations diverge.