Child Z

CHAPTER 12 - MAI

Ideally, First Emanation would have happened three weeks ago, but the delay was the result of logistics. Blaze had needed to find a way to get his grandmother out of the house, and the surgeon Viraj had set them up with needed time to secure all the equipment. Now everything was finally ready, and the procedure was scheduled to take place tonight inside the shed.

They'd debated moving Akna to a separate location but knew moving her would only spike the chimp's anxiety. Akna had grown more restless lately. Nothing, including treats, seemed to calm her down anymore, and the sedatives were losing their potency. Instead of knocking the chimp out cold, the drugs now sent her into a weary, wobbly, often violent stupor, as if she were doing all in her power to resist.

Akna now despised visits from her caretakers. Whenever the kids entered the shed, the chimp greeted them by shaking the wire mesh barrier, stomping her feet, and banging the wall with her fists and head. A week ago, during one of her tantrums, Akna started flinging feces. When the viscous brown liquid splattered against Mai's chin and jacket, she was too shocked to be disgusted. TJ, on the other hand, yelped like a toddler after getting hit square on the forehead. The impact sent her running from the shed in search of a shower.

For Mai, the chimp's newfound angst felt like a betrayal after all she'd done to care for this animal. But she knew from Akna's point of view there was no way to tell the difference between those who'd held her captive at Simia and those holding her captive in a shed. Either way, human beings were to blame.

On top of her outbursts, Akna had taken up a strange new habit. The chimp was making "p" sounds, like she was trying to say please but could only mouth the first part of the word. The sound of the quiet puff of air escaping the chimp's lips without any voice to accompany it was confusing and heartbreaking. Mai felt like it had to mean something.

Or maybe it meant nothing. At this point, Akna was well past stir crazy. The pregnant chimp, unable to act on natural impulses, was rapidly losing her mind. Whenever Mai got caught in the crosshairs of Akna's piercing glare, she could see that the chimp's quiet resentment, once simmering, had risen to a rolling boil—and for good reason. Akna's pregnancy had surpassed the scheduled First Emanation date by three weeks. There wasn't supposed to be a human fetus growing inside her, not even by Simia's warped standards—hence why the surgeon was being called in.

The night of the procedure, Mai went to meet the surgeon at a café in Pine Grove while Elsie, TJ, and Blaze made preparations back at the shed.

The woman, an ex-Simia employee with personal ties to Viraj, had a steady voice and fierce, no-nonsense eyes. She and Mai sat at a corner table holding the beverages they'd ordered.

"Surrogates can miscarry between twelve and sixteen weeks," the surgeon explained. "Happens more than you'd think, and sometimes it kills the chimps. Simia does all it can to avoid discussing what, internally, it calls gestational collateral. At least that's what they used to call it back when I still worked there."

Keeping her voice low, Mai asked, "What was your job?"

The woman sipped her coffee, unemotional, dark hair and light skin. "I performed autopsies to determine cause of death."

Like Viraj, the surgeon said her time at Simia eventually drove her to hate the company, quit, and join the resistance. She and Viraj had met through CLM but had since broken away to join the Gorillas—those rioters Mai often saw on the news.

The surgeon said, "The Gorillas are doing what CLM is too afraid to do. We're making a stand—a real difference."

From what Mai knew of the Gorillas, she didn't like them. Across the country, protesters wearing gorilla masks were showing up to crash Sim Pride rallies, and this loose network of anarchist-style resisters all wore the same angry-faced Halloween gorilla masks, which Mai found goofy and creepy. The group targeted not only Simia and Sim Pride but also biobag companies like Gest8 and X-pecting in an effort to tear down the whole industry. Their most recent destruction had occurred in downtown Denver—the day Governor Alvarado answered the longstanding question of what was to be done with sim kids who failed their mandated health screenings. The governor was transferring them to what she was calling "Temporary Relocation Centers," often without parents' consent. The decision set off a flurry of Sim Pride protests, followed by hundreds of people in gorilla masks attacking those protesters and setting fire to buildings and cars.