TW: Extreme Gore. Sexual References. Violence Mentioning Children.

A baby is set to be born. The Mother is cared for by a collection of nurses. Their faces are plastic, and their movements are as stiff as their skin. Their bodies move jointly, carrying along tools made to heal, but create a memory made to cut and poke. The Father sweats, sitting in the room as they cut into his wife to extract what is underneath. She lays there, motionless, her eyes full of artificial light darting back and forth as her stomach is numb, her womb still full. The nurses shuffle back and forth to extract what is beneath the surface of the skin, only to pull out the most feared treasure– a bundle of flesh that had been entangled in a mess of wires that is not meant to exist within the nest of creation. It does not move.

The Mother stares into it, but does not cry. The Father shudders, but does not speak.

“It is gone. But rest is still a necessity,” one of the husks bellow.

Its voice rings in her ears, especially. It rattles in her pale head, but she remains hollow as the nurses start to zip the chamber back up, reaching inside of her body to continue taking out and attaching cables that had been misplaced during the pregnancy. One of the nurses scrape a spot that isn’t numbed. The Mother gasps and arches her back, a wheezing coming out from her mouth. She smiles through it– it is the only pleasure that she will experience in this moment, and it won’t be a pleasure that she will remember.

A few days after the incident, the two return to their home nestled between many other messily-constructed apartment buildings, made to house an ever-growing population in the city of Charlotte. They catch a glimpse of the young woman next door, feeding a man, wide-eyed and outstretched on a throne of metal and cables. They pay them no mind.

They pass by a room more akin to a storage closet than a child’s room, tiny clothes and mittens and hats hanging from hangers and sat on shelves. The Mother looks at them briefly, blinks, and moves to the living room.

After eating leftover slop from yesterday’s lunch, the two retreat to their bedroom. The act is loveless but desperate, not out of some emotional attachment, but instead to search for the only pleasure that either of them can feel ever since they had both changed. The two grin and huff throughout still, caught up in the momentary ecstasy despite the return to absolute neutrality afterwards. The bright lights in her eyes shine brightest. His cold skin only becomes slightly more warm when he merges with her. And every time it is over, they resume their muted expressions, blinking at each other before moving to redress and pretend nothing had occurred in the first place.

They have been living for a little over 20 years on this Earth, and they have already succumbed to their fates.

They try and try and try the following days, but what is organic in his body is very weak. It has been ever since he threw some of his humanity to the wind and replaced it with devices similar to hers. Perhaps not as much, but just enough that producing an heir was difficult.

Eventually, they succumb to this too.

They approach a man that they call Darwin at the hospital, one with multiple eyes where one once was, and with a body more like an arachnid than that of a Human. He hears their request, his smile wide and gnarled, each tooth yellowed if it wasn’t already full of stained metal.

Darwin takes them to a room with large, gridded tablets around its epicenter. Above it was a cephalopod of a machine, its many intertwining tentacles moving to form shapes and figures on white palettes. There were other soon-to-be parents tapping vigorously at their keyboards in front of gurneys, ome with more metal in their heads than The Mother. Some of their eyes twitch. Some of them have many more visual orifices that dart back and forth. Some have mandibles that tap the screen ever since the feelings in their arms had been lost long ago, perhaps in an accident, or another procedure that had been run on them in the past.

The Mother taps on the tablet. Her attention moves between so many possibilities. She settles on a few that lay within her mind:

Platinum.

Brown.

173.

Fair.

Joyful. Humble. Easygoing.

Confrontational.

No tears.

And so, it has been set in the grid.

Once the initial selection finishes, The Mother lays back. From the cephalopod, one of its tendrils detaches, filling the tip of its syringe with the formula. The gurney closes on her after she removes what is necessary, and from between the loins, it injects and stays inside until she tests positive. It’s cold and discomforting, and it makes her more gracious to the warmer embrace of her husband. It’s the only thing she thinks to appreciate. It has been rare for many years for anyone married for true love anymore. Now they were more akin to animals, moving their bloodline along because it was simply in their DNA to do so, whether they were worthy or not of parenthood.

The other mothers follow in her footsteps on their own gurneys, having their own experiences. Some good. Some poor. Regardless of which, they are wheeled off in a collective room, sure to be told the amount they owe for this operation. And each one gives a similar lackluster response. They are much too excited for their creations to be brought to them in a few days’ time.

In that short span, the mothers are given food and water in bundles as their wombs grow quickly, taking what should be a progressive multi-month cycle in only a few days. The rapid growth makes them bedridden and unable to move, lest they use up too much energy and peter out too quickly. Some don’t make it through. Some lay dormant for days just for sitting up for too long. As for The Mother, who is lucky enough to have a husband on standby, waits hand-in-foot for her, feeding her and tilting her glasses for her to drink. The Mother and The Father exchange glances every now and then, a light in The Mother’s eye when she looks at him now. Generosity like this only came in a blue moon.

Then, suddenly, deep within the night, there is a scream.

And then another.

And then all in unison, all of the poor women are left with these shrill shrieks that fill the entirety of the hospital.

And as sirens blare around them, those same husks that had announced the miscarriage of her unborn shuffle in, attending to each woman. And as the chorus of bloody screeches sing like a murder of crows dawning upon a corpse, The Father’s helpless as he watches them cut into his wife’s stomach. Anesthesia is not produced in time, so each lifeless nurse moves to recover those within the mothers, as they would otherwise grow past their limit and burst. The chaos that follows is plentiful. Some are ripped asunder as they panic, spasming and rocking in their beds like women possessed until they stop moving altogether, as well as the bundle within them. Others hold on as long as they can before they lay back from the excruciating pain. And as for The Mother, she looks as though she will join the others that had moved in the way of the nurse’s work. But before she could, The Father grabs her hand, squeezing it tightly. In his panic, he grabs her chin and points it to him.

“Look at me. Only me.”

The first words he had spoken to her in months.

She obliges like his word is that of a God, long abandoned but having suddenly dawned from the heavens.

Through the drilling and slicing and slimy, sticky noises, suddenly-

All grows quiet.

Those that scream either perish, faint, or lay back breathing heavily.

The Nurse brings to The Father… The Daughter… dug deep from the nest amidst hell around them.

And even as sirens blare around them, loud and obscene as the smell and moisture created by the blood and bits of warm flesh…

The child laughs.

With flecks of platinum blonde hair.

Large brown eyes.

A narrow body.

Fair yet almost synthetic skin.

A wide smile.

And no tears in sight. And will never be in sight for the rest of her life.

Just as generated.

“... She’s perfect.”