ExoWomb

"I hate it when you do that." Fatima sighed, shoving her hamburger into her mouth. "It creeps me out." She hadn't even turned around.

It creeps out a lot of people. I turned the volume down on the exowomb and covered the glass with the black out box. "It's a natural part of development."

"It's only natural when it's inside of the body, in a real womb." Tima hated the real life application of her work but she coded the dialysis machines, along with ECMO, and designed each of the seven main computer interfaces. I just created the non-AI subject and tried to not kill it.

So far, I had grown two cats and rabbit to term.

"When's that one going to be done cooking?" She didn't resent being in the research lab for her post-doctorate work but she would have much rather been working on artificial pancreas'.

"We're not cooking this one." I hated when she used those terms; they were animals and we gave them homes. We didn't send them to slaughter. The two cats lived with me and the rabbit lived with my sister.

This little lamb would go to the university's farm for socialization and to see how a traditionally birthed mammal would react, if there would be a difference in behaviors.

I would love to follow the full process but I knew my limitations.

"She'll be ready in another two weeks." I logged today's observations in the shared database. Besides the two of us, there were six other teams working on the same project but with different animals.

We were in a race to perfect the process but Tima and I were the only ones who had three surviving specimens. The other teams had just taken their second out of incubation. We didn't count deaths within the first 24 hours after incubation termination.

"Brook!" She squealed. "Tiny and Strong are live streaming their fox's incubation termination." She moved out of the way of her screen and I watched as Tiny, real name William, and Strong, real name Sandra, disconnect and bring the fox into their clean room.

We had been in the same bio-med classes through our graduate work and they both got their nicknames in the usual ironic manner. I had finished second to Strong and Tiny finished third. My jealousy mixed with awe as I watched them clean the fox and as the fox began to move.

Neither of them would sleep for the next 24 hours and Tiny assured the viewers of their live stream that they would keep the feed on unless there was a medical emergency. It was public and anyone could be watching. One of our other teams had already been reprimanded for allowing a two-step injection death process to be broadcast.

With all of our progress, people were prejudiced against our advancements. We couldn't say we could use this to help infertile couples or same-sex partners achieve their lifelong dreams of creating a family together using their DNA.

Those protestors showed up after we began publishing the papers and findings on viable lives after incubation.

Tima switched to another work station and left Tiny's stream without audio on her workspace.

I typed in today's observations and read over the inputs from the last eighteen weeks. If this incubation goes to term and our little lamb lives, we will move onto a pig and we will be required to operate in exo-utero. That excited me more than a little bit.

Our constant fiddling with codes and doses, monitoring the pumps and heaters, may one day save a child and make fetal viability accessible at an even earlier point in development.

Looking towards the future made the long hours and redundant work worth it. Those protestors out there when we came into the lab every morning and left every night didn't understand that one day, we could have the technology to save their descendants.

Fatima's ingenuity when it came to rethinking code and reprogramming tasks could not be rivaled. I thanked the digital gods she had been assigned to me. I hope she felt the same way when the grant money came in that I applied for this year. I need her to outpace our colleagues.

A foreign curse escaped Fatima's lips. Before I could look up, she was at the door, initiating lock down procedure. The windows sealed themselves with steel curtains and the door to the hallway, a steel door, engaged the four locks.

Alarms blared outside our safe room as we fastened filters to the vents and turned off the water supply.

"One of those groups broke into Vera and Angel's lab." She rushed back to her workspace.

Tiny and Strong kept the livestream, calmly explaining to their viewers what was happening. Strong assured her mom that she was safe, it was probably just a drill.

I pulled the security feeds up on my workspace. Vera's lab was blacked out and the hallway outside their door was filled with smoke. The hallway outside of our lab was clear but there was smoke crawling on the floor outside of Tiny's.

"Tima, how did you know?"

"I was talking to Vera about dinner when I saw someone come in behind her. I heard Angel scream and our connection cut. I didn't think about it. I just hit panic." She didn't turn around but I know she was fighting back tears as she stared at the blank screen.

"It's ok. You did the right thing." I kept looking at the security feeds. Security would show up soon. During drills, it only took five minutes. It had been less than that and there was smoke.

I connected to the labs in Caen, Zurich, and Brasilia. WebEx automatically translated for us. There had been no attacks at their sites.

"Do you have enough supplies?" Yesenia, at Brasilia, inquired.

I assured her that we did and help was coming in. They would have to move slowly. But, we were safe.