It was one of those decisions that, even though we’d mulled over it for months, we knew we would never really be comfortable with. We’d studied copiously about it—about the technology, the politics, the ethics; we’d had hundreds, maybe thousands of different conversations on it together, and with dozens of others, and not just casually, but real consultation with doctors and teachers and even the local priest. We meditated on it, convinced ourselves that we’d weighed every outcome, done every calculation. Typed up pro-con lists and shared them with the internet, watched hours of footage on the process itself. There’s no real one thing that convinced us to do it, but looking back, there were a few easy ones.
I was thirty-eight, she was thirty-six, and everyone else had kids. She wasn’t making a lot, I wasn’t making anything at the time, and really, that’s what it all came down to, and for most in our position, I feel, that was enough. I remember asking myself one day in the middle of it all, 'who am I going to need to answer to?' Just him or her, really (him, as it turned out), and by then, who knows how we’d all feel? The way it was drawn up was simple—suspiciously simple, though everything seemed that way when talking about A.I back then. You sign up for the study, and you’re sorted into one of two groups. Both groups get implanted with the egg, classic in vitro. The procedure is the same for everyone. All medical expenses paid, plus a good deal of money afterward—something a little over the minimum wage for the following year, for each parent. One group got the human egg, the other group, the android egg. You don’t know which one you got, the doctors doing the surgery don’t know either—hell, I don’t know if I ever even met anyone who actually would know. And then, once every six months, you brought your kid to this dingy lab in this grey building that people walk by every day, to play with some toys and answer questions or what have you. Couldn’t have been any easier, on paper. And really, it wasn’t that difficult to live it either. At the time—and still, actually, on a good day—it didn’t feel that different from adoption. When you adopt a child, you don’t know what you’re going to get, what their background is, what they will and won’t have. And we’d been saying for years, before the tech came out, that we would be okay with adoption. Along those lines, we didn’t think there’d be anything different in how we had to think about it. When you adopt, you have to make the decision on if, or when, really, you’ll tell the child about where they came from, how they came to be, et cetera. Sure, our situation was going to be a little different no matter what, but that was one of those million things we’d talked about it, and we decided that that was our cross to bear, and that was it. What we didn’t realize though, or at least what I didn’t, was how much the thought of it was going to creep in to the simple things, and how powerless it made you feel. I remember throwing the ball around with him once, he was five or six maybe, and at one point he chucked it so hard it stung my hand a bit, and I spent weeks up at night thinking about it, wondering if that meant something, if that was a slip-up of some kind. Those kinds of things accumulated over time, and sometimes, I know it affected how I treated him. Not poorly mind you, just differently. It was things like that that made me just want to grab him at night and pick him to pieces sometimes, not to hurt him, just to know what was in him, but then, wouldn’t that have just been me betraying all the thoughts I’d had before, about how it didn’t matter? I wondered for a while there if maybe that was the big deception too. What I’d really signed up for. Maybe I was the test subject, and all the babies were fine, and they were just checking to see if we treated them any differently, if they turned out a different way because of the mental games we played with ourselves. That’s unlikely, of course, because at that time there was a big media storm about the project, but those lab coats have done worse things to better people. And then there were the even crazier ideas, like him knowing, having been programmed to know, right from birth, and that he’d just been evaluating us all along, to see if we would tell him. I imagined some countdown in his head-slash-operating system just ticking off the moments until it was officially determined that we were poor parents, and then just kicking the door open and blasting us to pieces with lasers. But it was hard to reconcile that with the fact that he was just like any other kid, maybe just a kid with a hell of an arm, and someone needs to fill that quota, right? And the real truth of it was that we had so much love for him that, well, he was our boy and that was the end of it. But still, that’s the matrix I had in my head for some three decades or so. There was a fifty-fifty shot he was human, but was there? Cause there was a fifty-fifty shot they were lying and there’s no such thing as robot babies, isn’t there? And we were never told how many in each group got which either, plus we don’t know how many people were involved. So every night before bed I’m doing calculations with numbers that don’t really exist, assumptions on top of theories on top of ludicrous ideas. It went deep too. That was the scariest thing, was that even if we tried probing, there was no real way of knowing. I remember one time he was complaining about bad headaches, so we took him to the hospital, and I was so excited—I’m awful--so excited that they might scan his head, and that maybe I could catch a peek and might see something, some chip in his brain. But then it dawned on me that if I saw it, great, I would know, but if I didn’t, that it didn’t mean anything, because I don’t know how good technology is, or how real something could look, and that meant I could never know because there’s no way to prove anyone isn’t an android, is there? And no one was going to tell us either, as we found out that day. The doctor took one look at his chart and said that for reasons we all understood they weren’t ‘legally permitted to provide us with certain health information one way or the other’ and that’s when we knew we’d gotten ourselves into something sticky, hadn’t thought it out quite as well as we thought we had. So they took a scan, said nothing was wrong, kid probably hadn’t done his homework and needed an easy out, and that was that. Took him home that night and ran more numbers off in my head. That was the first time it really sank in, that the scope of it all was well beyond us, but the second time hurt much worse because, well, it had to do with him directly. It was one thing reconciling for ourselves that we could never know, because that’s what we’d signed up for. But years down the line from then, it hit me like a pang one day, a bolt of lightning in my kitchen. I was making coffee, and I don't think I was thinking about it any more than I usually did, but I realized something I'd never went so far as to consider before--realized that we’d signed away his knowledge too. He was an adult by then, early 20’s, living half out his old bedroom and half with his first girlfriend in some off-campus shanty. It hit me so hard I just dropped my mug and it shattered, because it was like all the calculations had stopped after two decades or so, and the only numbers churned out were “zero”— which was the amount of say he’d had in the whole thing—and “fifty”, roughly the amount of years he’d have left to dwell on it, should he ever find out, which, of course, he did. I don’t know if it was fate or one of those self-fulfilling things, but probably less than a month after that coffee spilled, he was digging through junk in the old corner bedroom, which had once been a study, and found some slips of paper with his name on it, some check-in form from when he’d had to go to the “toy room” as a kid, only now he was seeing it as an adult, suddenly wondering what the hell that place was and why he’d randomly stopped going a few years back. I told him almost immediately. I remember it clear as I see this room now, him standing one foot on the floor and the other on the bottom step, me spun around in a computer chair, some talk-show playing on the T.V. in the corner. I panicked. The wife was sick, bed-ridden, had been for a few months (she’d pass about a year later—we never told her that he knew), and I was utterly incapable of lying to him anymore, and really, I wanted to tell him, just to have someone else weigh in on it, 'cause as much as I loved my boy, he was also an adult male that I’d cracked a beer open with just a few weeks prior. I told him, he didn’t believe me for all of one unholy second before he started cursing me out, and I took it, all of it, for a good twenty minutes, and that was the last real time we spoke about it. I can’t say for sure how he handled himself after that—I recall that the next time we saw each other he was a bit stiff with me—but I don’t even recall the time we met after that, so I imagine he handled it in his own way. It’s funny how the world works, in terms of what you have out there at your disposal for something like this. The study itself had been all over the news and in schools at the time, and anyone that had heard it probably knew that from then on there was a chance anyone they met born within that span wasn’t human (assuming they believed it), but there wasn’t much of a big deal made about the after-the-fact. Maybe it was everything else going on in the world, or maybe it was that people had come to accept that it wasn’t worth talking about if you could never identify one of them anyway, but by this time, you could do all the research you wanted online and learn just about everything there was to know about it. It’d be like learning that you have a certain disease or something and then looking it up and seeing that it’s a big deal, but it’s not that big that you can be blamed for not having heard of it before. The only thing you really couldn’t look up was who was and wasn’t one of the “real” ones, and, like I said, that’s just because it went so deep and so high up you didn’t even know who you could ask. Whatever the case though, I like to imagine that he’d done his own research on it, came to accept the reality of it on his own terms, and realized, just like I had way back when we’d made that decision, that I was his father by any definition that mattered. Only twice in the next twenty years would we even acknowledge it. The first time was an off-hand joke; he was telling me that he and his wife had been talking about trying for a baby, and we got into a talk about the old squares you used to draw up in science class, what with the brown and blue eyes and the blood types, and we both knew where it was heading the whole time, but kept going with it anyway, and he dropped the big ‘25% chance they’re born with a plug’ line, and we laughed together, but it was a nervous laugh, and we both kept our eyes on the road, and I changed the topic quickly. The second time wasn’t nearly as funny. It was about a year later, we were at a cousin’s wedding, just talking, the two of us, and he let me know that he and his wife had been trying for months and had finally been told by the doctor that they should consider adopting, because something was wrong, but obviously they weren’t allowed to say what it was. And that’s the third, big time, it hit me, how far this all went. Because if they couldn’t rule out that he was the issue due to that damn piece of paper I signed, then his wife couldn’t rule out that she was the problem, and so now she's up at night multiplying and dividing, and so on, and where did that end? It’s strange how reversed it all was by that point. By that time, all of the crazy thoughts about him being this sentient killer robot were gone, leaving only really the fears that I’d initially had going in, only more intense, more complex. I’d feared that I would treat him differently because I wouldn’t know for sure that he was really mine, but it wasn’t until much later, after that talk at the wedding, that I realized I hadn’t shared my burden with him all those years ago—I’d created a new one for him. He now knew there was a chance I wasn’t really his. And so the game got larger, the matrix expanded. We’d started growing distant over the years, as any parent and child do, but now, there was a question of who was responsible for that? Was I doing it without realizing, because deep down, by some instinct, I couldn’t be sure he was worth my time? Or was it on his end, had he realized the same, that I wasn’t worth the investment? He’s the only son I ever had, I don’t even know how I’d treat one that I was sure was like me, how I’d feel about them, and I have to assume that he’s been in the same spot ever since I told him. I thought for sure that would be the last question I had to ask myself, what with me on my way out now. Not anymore though. The last question, I know, is going to be about today, also the last day I’m sure I’ll ever see him. Because he left five minutes ago, slamming the door behind him, and even if I could get out of this hospital bed and go after him, I wouldn’t. I forfeited that right not a minute earlier. He’d come in to visit, holding this sealed envelope in his hand. He’s a big business guy now, which I’m damn proud of him for, and he’s got big friends that are high up, I know. He came in as he was knocking, then pulled up a chair to my bed, not letting me say so much as a hello before he’d held the envelope up and told me what it was. He said he knew a guy who’d managed to track down the exact study we were part of, had pulled the records. Said that inside the envelope was the answer to which group he’d been part of, the human eggs, or the android ones. It’s been seventeen years since we last spoke about it at that wedding. He asked me if he should open it, and I said it was up to him, and without missing a beat, he did. I watched his face as he read, not knowing how to feel about it all; I hadn’t even been expecting him to come by today, let alone for this, and part of me was wishing the nurse would just barge in at that moment and give me a breather to collect my thoughts. But there were no interruptions, just about ten seconds of silence before he lowered the paper and looked up at me. “Do you want to know?” he asked. I stared at his nose for around two seconds before I answered. “Yeah,” I said. He pursed his lips, nodded, then stood up so fast the chair went flying. Then he crumpled the paper up into a little ball, then smoothed it out, and then tore it to a thousand pieces. Then he just walked away, not even looking at me, dropping the scraps into the trash on his way out before that big door-slam, all without a word. And now I’m just staring at the trash bin, part of me wondering what it said, and part of me wondering if it had just been some old cable bill he’d never opened.
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About MeVekin87 is the author of the Albus Potter Series, a 7-book continuation of the J.K Rowling's Harry Potter books. The Things I Write While You're Asleep |
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