Zara wanted to get ahead in school. She wanted the cute guy. She wanted to win the game. Trouble was, everybody else had expensive brain implants, augmented muscles, and those pretty tailored bodies. She had none of those things. Of course, she work...
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Zara and Finn huddled at a small table in a far corner of the Makan. They sipped on their energy drinks and stared at each other. A gust of cold wind blew through the cafe, making her shiver.
"I'm not going there," she said. "It's wrong. I'm not going to do that."
The Makan featured elegantly polished black aerographite tables set on a supernatant platform of polished dark parauri floors. Small plasma thrusters underneath kept it stabilized and hovering in place far above Atraville. They worked smoothly most of the time. But once in a while, she could feel the jostling of her drink. Or was that her hand shaking from anger?
The waiter brought them their food and topped off their drinks. His was deep-blue huckleberry. Hers was bright-red cranberry hibiscus.
Normally, she liked the high-altitude experience. The landscape stretched out beneath her in every direction—so beautiful; so serene. Problems disappeared when she looked down at the world from such a lofty place. At least they had before today. Now the height made her feel small; the frigid breeze made her feel cold.
"Why not? Why wouldn't you?" He leaned into the table, glaring, his eyes lit up. "I was raised in a public incubator. It's not bad. I liked it."
She backed away from him. Her body tensed up. Her stomach felt heavy and her heart pounded in her ears.
"The public incubators monitor them," he said. "They watch them every moment of every day—how the heart is developing, how the brain is progressing, the stomach, the liver, the kidneys, the works. Nothing can go wrong. There are no diseases, no birth defects, no deformities. Everything is controlled by Axion.
"Sign up for the incubators. It's a simple operation, completely painless. That's all you have to do. Just takes an hour. Our baby will have a perfect birth. The kid will be raised in a childhood nirvana. Don't you want that? I know I do."
It was Friday after school. She and Finn had ridden their boards as they usually did. They pushed off from the classroom and soared through the air as if this were a typical Friday. But this Friday was different—she told him she was pregnant.
After she told him, he leered at her as it if were her fault. "Let's go to the Makan. We can talk there."
She agreed, thinking it would be okay once they reached the cafe. They didn't race. They didn't take any side trips. They didn't fly around the spires of downtown Atraville or walk the boardwalk through the market or play in any experience dens.
They rode straight to the cafe, banking their boards at steep upward angles, gripping with their feet, and pushing with their legs. Of course, the energy made it easy. But once they had reached the restaurant, nothing seemed easy anymore.
"I don't like the public incubators," Zara said. "It's not nirvana. It's nothing like that. I didn't like being raised in one of those places. I don't like having a robot for a teacher and I didn't like having one for a mom either. I don't want my child there."
His death stare made her feel unwanted. This was far worse than fighting with Xavier, Samara, and Kabibe. She would rather be battling the goons than this horrible ripping apart.
"Zara." He said her real name. He had never said her real name before. It hurt more than she imagined.
"Are you really going to give birth to a live baby from your own body? Think of how bad that's going to feel, the excruciating pain, much less having to carry the thing around for nine months.
"Giving birth is so messy. It's a terrible shock to your body. It will hurt real bad afterward too. It's in all the holos. You should go through them. There's lots of things that can go wrong—diseases, defects, and problems. Imagine the depression and the suicide that used to happen before the incubators.
"You have to be careful about what you eat and drink. You have to see a doctor like once a week or something. It's terrible. It's the worst.
"And then, how are you going to hide the baby from Axion? How are you going to give birth? Who's going to help you? You're an outlaw. If you go to a doctor, they'll discover you've been doing dark energy. Do you think they won't tell Axion? Its particles are everywhere and they know everything. Where are you going to go? How are you going to hide? You might have the bracelet for yourself, but you can't hide a child from them.
"Why wouldn't you give the fetus to the incubators? Then you can live your own life the way you want to. That's what all of us were meant to do."
She spoke in a hoarse whisper as she pointed to the burn on her left cheek. "See this mark on my face?" She recalled it as a mottled reddish-purple mark about the size and shape of a baby's handprint. "I got this from the incubators. They said a sensor went bad. Robots make mistakes too. Axion is not so perfect. Nobody fixed my burn. The bots didn't think it was important. I'm not going to the public incubators. I'm not giving my baby to Axion."
She once thought the sharp and defined angles of his face to be so beautiful, taking her breath away. But now she couldn't breathe for a different reason, because she was so upset, because the beautiful lines of his face had twisted into a beast, harsh and ugly.
"So what, you're going to get pregnant?" He spat the words out at her. "You're going to have a baby?"
She turned her eyes down at the polished dark floor beneath her feet. She couldn't look at him anymore.
"Yeah, that's what I want to do." She could hardly hear her own voice, staring down at the floor.
He slammed his hand on the table. When she dared a glance up again, he was gone.
