The bottle on the table seemed so innocuous. Barely four inches high. Small white label.
The set of sterile-wrapped, medium-gauge hypodermic needles nearby lent it a greater gravity, though.
As did Theresa’s slightly rounded belly.
The “bump” that was her baby.
Their baby.
Will moved the bottle and needles away from the edge of the table, closer to the centerpiece, and paused silently.
“Not tonight,” he said. “We won’t begin tonight. We should sleep on it.”
They’d been through it so many times that she couldn’t imagine what was left to sleep on, but she nodded, and they headed upstairs sluggishly, as if the bottle itself was a super-dense star trying to hold them in orbit around it.
That metaphorical gravity weighed heavily. It even seemed hard to breathe, much less relax, that night.
When they finally did drift off to sleep, it was deep into the dark hours of early morning, and only a couple hours before dawn.
The day that they would begin.
* * *
“What?!” her mother had said, voice dripping with indignant surprise. “What did you say?”
“I hope our baby is born a transhuman, Mom,” Theresa had said, just a few days after announcing to the family that she was pregnant. She knew the statement wouldn’t go over well, but she had felt the need to say it anyway.
“Why ever would you want something like that? You’re both white, so the chances are awfully slim, and thank God for that,” he mother had said, with a tone of finality.
But Theresa hadn’t heeded that tone much since the age of 16, which explained the strained relationship between them; it was a wonder that they spoke regularly at all. Perhaps if a grandchild hadn’t been on the way, Theresa considered, she might have just let the parent-child relationship drift farther apart instead as she entered middle age.
“The world is changing, Mom. It has been for decades. Not being transhuman puts a person behind. Sure, most people still aren’t trans, but what will things be like in another few decades? And when you get down to it, it’s kind of a handicap being white now since we’re less likely to become transhuman. Everyone else is moving ahead, and we’re not keeping up.”
“Moving ahead? Moving toward freakishness, you mean? Count it a blessing that you’re white and your husband is too. Just another bit of proof that it’s the best place to be racially,” her mother said. “Just more proof that we’re what God intended, because we’re not as subject to those perversions. We remain as God created us to be. We shall overcome.”
“No, Mom—what it means is that whites may not be keeping up with evolution,” Theresa countered.
“You need to watch Ben Glick more often, dear. And listen to Rush Limbaugh on the radio,” her mother retorted. “You need to come to church with me more often and listen to less NPR. I hope William isn’t sharing these delusions. Evolution indeed! It doesn’t exist anyway, so it’s a poor argument. Transhumans are just a sickness. If not from Satan, then from lives filled with too many drugs, deviant behaviors and what-all else.”
* * *
The bottle sat there as if in stern contemplation of them the next morning, instead of the other way around. The tiniest judge. Impersonal and imperious.
“This is such a big step,” Theresa said.
“If you’re not…” Will began.
“No! The sooner the better. Otherwise our child will be born into a world it might not survive.”
“She, not it.”
“It’s too soon to know, and why would you want to anyway? The more we know about the baby, the harder it will be to take this step. How can you be so sure that you know it’s a girl anyway?”
“I just do,” Will said. “I just do.”
* * *
Despite having been surrounded mostly by white people growing up in the suburbs; despite being mostly around white people in elementary, middle and high school; and despite 80% of his graduating class in medical school being white, William Bastion pretty much stuck to the notion that the world had moved beyond race sometime in the 1970s.
He didn’t like it when pundits on TV or radio told him otherwise. He didn’t like the screeching notes of people still talking about slavery when that was a product of the 1800s, long before his parents were born, much less himself. Being told he was responsible indirectly—and his entire race directly—for crack in the inner city, high incarceration rates of blacks and Hispanics, and income inequities between the races, among other social ills, made his blood pressure rise. It was nonsense, and anyone with two hands and two feet could choose to grab onto some bootstraps and pull themselves up.
One of his colleagues, Dr. Sylvia Rudolph, was certainly proof of that. She had been a black girl raised by a single mother. She’d had two brothers, one of whom ended up in prison and the other of whom worked as a janitor. Her own father had abandoned the family when she was three and ended up dead in a bar brawl a few years after that. But she had made it through high school in one of the worst neighborhoods in New York City with high marks. She had gotten scholarships to college. She had excelled. She had become a neurosurgeon. She was proof of what minorities could become if they were motivated.
Then she’d had to ruin his image of her at that Christmas party two years ago.
“You think like that because you have white privilege,” she’d told him, sipping at her eggnog. “Plain and simple.”
“I can’t believe you of all people would say that, Sylvia. You’re proof…”
“I’m an exception.”
“You’re proof that people don’t have to let race define them.”
“Great, Will. That works fine if you don’t define yourself by race and let that limit you, and no one should do that. But it’s not enough to get through life. When the rest of the nation defines who you are by the color of your skin, that’s a whole different story.”
“Really, Sylvia? Seen many of your friends lynched? Had police sic attack dogs on you when you go to a demonstration? Your mind is still stuck in the early 20th century and a few centuries before it. Too many people use race as an excuse. If they don’t get something handed to them, they say whites are keeping it from them. If they screw up, they blame racial oppression. It’s an easy out.”
Her eyes somehow darkened and glittered at the same time as a play of emotions ran across her face.
“Easy?” she sputtered. “Do you have the slightest idea what slavery did to black family structures and the ripple effects that continue today? Do you have any idea what social programs that you think blacks use to milk the system have done to break up families, too? Do you have any idea how routinely the police profile people based on color and not reasonable suspicion? Do you know how many black and Latinos get harsher sentences than white people do for the same crimes?”
“And all of those people could remove themselves from situations and environments that put them at risk. They can be careful what they do and where they go.”
“See? They have to think about how they interact with white-dominated society all the time, Will,” Sylvia snapped. “They have to follow rules of ‘whiteness’ that society created and they can’t just be themselves. They have to assimilate or else. They have to think about their color all the time, because they get judged on it. Do you know now many great apartments I lost out on when people saw I was black, and suddenly, they were no longer available? Do you know how many rich white women go to department stores in sweat clothes and get doted on, but I have to dress up like I’m going to the opera or security follows me around like a shoplifter?”
“Now, wait…” he started.
“No, you wait. You go out the door and don’t have to think of all the privilege you have simply by being white, because it’s a given in this society. It’s the default for you. It’s as easy as breathing. Even with medical degrees or whatever else, we people of color have to think about what we do and what we can’t get or what we have to work twice as hard to get because of race—all things that you take for granted on a daily basis!”
The conversation had only gone downward from there. Will dug in and refused to budge, feeling more and more under attack and getting more stubborn as he became defensive. He wasn’t a racist, and it felt like he was being called one. In the end, he realized, he had used many of the same arguments as racists, but he had felt justified at the time because it had become an argument. He wasn’t so certain in the following days that he actually had been justified, but that wasn’t something he was going to admit out loud.
It was months before he and Sylvia spoke again, and he made sure race never came up again.
But then his wife had become pregnant, and Sylvia’s words came back to him often. To haunt him, in fact. He thought about racial tensions and racial divisions and how whites were the largest single racial group in the United States—more than 70% of the population when you factored in white Hispanics—but whites only accounted for only about 25% of all transhumans in the nation. And among the transhumans with the most advanced powers, whites accounted for less than 20% of that group.
His child would be born white in a world where suddenly non-whites were gaining an edge in the next step of evolution.
Sylvia had been right about one thing, at least: He had never been forced to think about white privilege.
But now that it was clear that it came with an expiration date for him and his unborn child, he could think of nothing else.
* * *
“I have to admit, those needles seem kind of big, Will. They make this whole thing a bit scary.”
“I need to deliver the compound to the amniotic fluid and into the umbilical cord,” he told her. “You know that as well as I do, honey. You’re not a physician, but you’re a molecular biologist, and you know the risks if I inject that into you directly.”
“There’s enough to do it that way, Will. if you inject it into my bloodstream, we can do it more often, use a higher concentration, and we’ll have more chance of success.”
“We’re taking enough risks with you getting pregnant for the first time in your mid-30s instead of having done it when we were younger,” he answered, “and now we’re adding this wrinkle. If I give the compound to you directly, it might trigger a shift for you. Becoming a transhuman at your age is risky. The chances that you might suffer psychological damage are too high for my tastes, and do you want to be a transhuman anyway, even if nothing bad happens? It’s one thing for our child to grow up naturally that way, but is it a change you want at middle age? No, this is the safest way. It will mean I need to be more careful and more slow, but it’s a better plan.”
“It means less chance that our child will be a transhuman, Will. More chance that it…she’ll…be left behind. I don’t want our child being a candidate for extinction, Will. Would she even be able to get ahead in a world led by transhumans? Would she be able to take care of us when we’re old, and even more dinosaur-like?”
“I’m already tossing my Hippocratic Oath aside to do this—to do what we need to do, hon,” William answered. “I’m already going places I shouldn’t be. I don’t want to treat this like a game of craps or roulette and bet everything on a risky move.”
Theresa nodded, but not in agreement. He wasn’t going to budge; she would have to accept that. A frontal attack never worked with Will.
* * *
While dealing with patients and hospital administrative matters took up plenty of his time, William loved research as well, and had kept his hands in various clinical trials of experimental drugs and in research studies. It made him happy, though Theresa didn’t like having even more time taken away from their relationship.
On the other hand, she certainly worked plenty of late hours, too.
One of the most exciting studies he had been on was also the one that ended the fastest. The drug that had seemed so promising in mouse, rat and chimpanzee models unleashed a host of side effects once it reached human trials. There were a few deaths due to cardiac effects and liver damage, but mostly the problems were neurological effects of varying degrees, some of them permanent, in nearly one out of every seven patients. It was one of the biggest pharmaceutical research and development failures ever in human clinical trials, and that failure and the resulting lawsuits had nearly bankrupted the company that had been hoping to make a fortune off the drug.
The FDA had swept in with unusual aggressiveness to secure unused samples of the compound, which had always struck Will as odd. The company wasn’t going to risk itself legally by releasing the drug, so why would the Food and Drug Administration confiscate it all?
Through the grapevine, he’d learned quickly enough that there were suspicions that the drug’s biggest “risk” might be that it triggered latent transhuman potential that would otherwise not emerge organically.
The FDA—or whatever agency had been using the FDA as its cover—hadn’t gotten all of the samples in Will’s possession, thanks to a storage and paperwork error. Will hadn’t even realized he still had some of the drug in his lab until several months after the brouhaha. He thought about mentioning it to someone, but then decided to just hold on to it.
All he thought of it at the time was: You never know, right?
Then, more than a year later, there was a child on the way, making him happy and terrified. Making him think about the fall of white privilege—a construct he still wasn’t sure he believed in—and the rise of transhuman privilege—which he was certain would be a reality soon enough, no matter how many people looked with fright toward transhumans.
Sure, they get some oppression now, but how well did it work for Cro-Magnon man or Homo Erectus to fight against evolution? William considered. Some things you can’t hold back no matter how much you try.
And the frustrating part was that his very race—which Sylvia had claimed gave him an automatic advantage—was now what could hold him back.
As well as his child.
Then he did some tests, and discovered that Theresa had some biomarkers that suggested she might have deeply buried transhuman potential. Will found that he did to, but to a much lesser extent. That meant their child would, too, but she would probably never realize that latent potential without help. It would likely always be a boxed up prize she could never open.
It probably wasn’t her destiny to be a transhuman.
So Will decided to force destiny’s hand—and pull his daughter up by her genetic bootstraps.
Sylvia could rise above the challenges of being black, he thought, so I’ll rise above the limits of being white.
Convincing Theresa was a long process, but she came around. Nothing like the idea of one’s child being held behind in life to spur a mother to action.
* * *
Theresa winced, as usual, as the needle went into her belly. It was the fourth week of treatments, conducted so secretly in their own home, once every six days.
It would be too slow, though, she feared. It wouldn’t be enough.
So when Will was asleep, she went to her small office in the house, and pulled out her own set of needles; her own bottle.
Will had brought his entire supply of the compound home to be on the safe side—in case someone tripped across it at the university hospital. Most of that supply in his office was a nice, safe, sterile, neutral solution now. Theresa had seen to that. All of his extra bottles were nothing but placebo.
Theresa always injected herself in a discreet place Will wouldn’t see the needle marks, as she had been doing almost daily since they had begun this process—as she would continue to do until she ran out of the compound.
Will worried too much about what the side effects might be to her. None of that mattered, though. She had to have faith he’d still love her no matter what might happen—and there was no guarantee anything would change for her, good or bad. But her unborn daughter was a blank slate, her genes open to the promise of this compound. Wide open, and with so much less risk.
Her husband had put Hippocrates aside, but in the end, that wasn’t enough. They had to be bolder than that, and Theresa had decided to be the bold one. It might be a roll of the dice, but it was a bet she had to make.
Nothing was more important than giving their child the right start in life, she considered as the tip of the needle hovered at the surface of her skin, not even her sanity or humanity.
The needle broke the flesh, and Theresa pressed the plunger of the hypo down.
She rolled the dice again, and would do it again tomorrow. And every day thereafter that she could.
The chemical harbinger of genetic progress rode through her veins to bring word of mankind’s future to a tiny life ignorant of issues like evolution, race and privilege.
At least for now.