Halfway to Free (Out of Line collection) Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Emma Donoghue

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Original Stories are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  eISBN: 9781542020619

  Cover design by Zoe Norvell

  A few of us from Global Care were lunching out to celebrate our Spring Dividend. Squeezed into one booth, over our cups of matcha, we talked about what we might blow some of it on: Massage? Salsa classes? A rock-climbing trip?

  Jane (a sucker for the latest wearables) had to clear last year’s debt with hers. Diwanna needed every dollar of her Dividend for rent because she’d just upgraded to a seventeenth-floor space with a forest view.

  “Oh my god, this is so cute. So cute. See?” Cerise pleaded. “You all see?”

  I nodded so my Headpiece would show me what she was gushing about: a 3D of the first Reveal of 2060. All the baby was doing was lying on its back and waving its limbs, but it was slowmoed and soundtracked for maximum appeal.

  “Girl or boy?” asked Jane.

  “They’re not going to drop that till the Naming Party.” Cerise spoke in the dreamy tones of a superfan. “But they’ve already announced their Offset—they’re distributing ten thousand solar stoves.”

  “So they should,” grunted Diwanna, “given that they’ve just multiplied their carbon legacies by, like, six.”

  The clip was looping in front of my eyes. Those spasmodic arms, those bottomless dark eyes.

  “You follow all the royals, Cerise?” asked Nandie.

  “No way,” she said defensively. “Mostly just the music and streaming ones. But this time the parents are Beyoncé’s grandson and King William’s granddaughter, so how could I resist?”

  I jerked to the left to tell my Headpiece to turn off the footage. I was dizzy, all at once, pulse leaping, skull thumping. “Sorry, sorry, could I—”

  Three of them had to clamber out of the booth to release me.

  I was on the toilet, face in hands, when I heard someone come in. “Miriam?”

  “Just a sec.” I pressed flush-and-wash so Diwanna would think I’d really needed to go and waited for the sprays and airstream to turn off.

  But when I emerged, she asked, “Was it the baby?”

  “What?”

  She turned to the mirror and tidied her hair with a pick. “Look, lots of us have been broody at one point or another.”

  “I’m not broody.”

  Diwanna’s face showed she didn’t believe me. “I guess it hits quite a few of us in our thirties, especially women. It’s a leftover, like the appendix,” she went on, “one of those fight-or-flight, lizard-brain things that made evolutionary sense back in the day, but now . . . You have to acknowledge the craving, so you can rechannel it into something more positive.”

  “You speaking from experience?” I muttered.

  “Oh, a flicker or two over the years, but no, I like my life the way it is. Being with Shirelle, our jobs, roller derby, our friends . . . Wouldn’t want to jeopardize any of that.”

  “Well, I really just felt sick, just now,” I lied. My hand went up to the Phri in my earlobe, as if to check it hadn’t fallen out. “And by the way, that was one ugly baby.”

  Diwanna laughed. “Aren’t they all like that, though? Those oversize heads and stumpy limbs . . . Give me my wildlife feeds any day.”

  And we went back to the table.

  The next morning was a write-off: team building. Twice a year they made us engineers from Functionality interrupt our work on bot design to play games with the soft-skills types from Communications and Brand Vision, in the vain hope of increasing mutual respect.

  “Headpieces off, everyone,” said Carlotta (team leader). “Let’s take it old school and start with Two Truths and a Lie.”

  Sergio came up with a funny statement about being allergic to fruit, and only Keisha guessed that it was true. One point to Sergio for everyone he fooled, and one to Keisha for spotting his lie (which was something about bench-pressing 150).

  When it was my turn, I read my three statements in a bland voice from the tablet in front of me: “I am a Scorpio. I can juggle four balls.” The third bullet point said I’ve always wanted to go to the North Pole, which was a fact, but my eyes skipped right over that one to the blank space underneath, and what my mouth said was, “I’ve always wanted to have a baby.”

  There was a silence, and then a few giggles.

  I forced my face to stay neutral. I didn’t look at Diwanna. I hadn’t planned this, but I supposed it was my way of apologizing for bullshitting her in the bathroom.

  “Sure, Miriam, maybe in, what, forty years or so, if you’re still able?” joked Zach.

  I produced a smirk to match his.

  Forty years, because of last week’s big-hoopla announcement that global population had been rightsized back down to six billion like in 1999 (the year my parents were born), a little ahead of schedule. We were expected to get down to Optimum—three billion—by the start of the twenty-second century, and at that point, the plan was to start repopulating again but only at a no-growth, steady-state, sustainable level. I’d be seventy by then.

  “Anyway,” said Diwanna, “the baby thing’s clearly the lie.”

  That was kind of her, to shield me.

  Nobody disagreed.

  Diwanna asked, “Do I get an extra point for calling it?”

  “Nope,” said Carlotta. “One for everyone who guessed right, none for Miriam. Your turn, Daniel.”

  When we divided into breakout groups for brainstorming (“how to boost connectedness, fun, and wellness at Global Care”), mine was the one with only two members. I didn’t know the Communications guy from Adam, and his badge was half covered by his long, thick hair: Nate, Nathan? Nick, Neil, Niall? I slightly warmed to the guy for not caring about being in fashion.

  “So”—I covered a yawn—“any thoughts to get the ball rolling?”

  He said, “You’re not really a Scorpio, are you?”

  I blinked. “I am, actually. November third.”

  “Then the juggling was your lie.”

  It would have been easy to deny it. “Well, you got me,” I said under my breath.

  He shoved back his hair. NED, said his badge. “I’m the same,” he told me.

  I wasn’t 100 percent sure I’d heard him right. It wasn’t something I’d ever heard a guy say before. The ears could play tricks. What else could the phrase have been, though: I’m saying? I’m insane?

  “Now you’re staring like I’m a freak,” Ned pointed out.

  “Sorry.” I dropped my eyes. Then looked up at him again. He had a big nose, a little askew, a strong nose. I grinned and said, “I guess we’re both freaks.”

  “Breakout Group Five, how’re we doing?” asked Carlotta from across the room.

  “Good,” Ned and I assured her simultaneously.

  It was me who suggested the two of us get lunch, but it was Ned who led the way to a veg bar that was kind of grungy and far enough from the office that we could talk without being overheard.

  Almost nice enough to s
it out, I suggested.

  This was debatable, but the two of us carried our steel bento boxes out into the watery sunshine and picked a bench tucked away in the xeriscaping, out of earshot of the seniors working out in the playground. The two of us still had our Headpieces turned off, even though we were on break. Birds trilled in the bushes.

  “So I do know it sounds ridiculous,” Ned began with no preamble. “Like wanting my own castle or island.”

  That made me smile. “Or to win an Emmy.”

  “Or to go to the North Pole?”

  He’d been paying attention.

  “Actually my parents went there on a cruise when they were expecting me, around the time the passage opened up and prices dropped,” Ned told me.

  “Lucky them. So for an analogy we need something farther out of reach,” I suggested, keeping my voice light. “Like . . . day-tripping on Mars.”

  Ned shook his head. “Thing is, this is something people do every day.”

  We weren’t naming this. “Who does it?” I asked rhetorically.

  “Other people.”

  “The ones who can effortlessly afford it, you mean?”

  “The fucking royals don’t count.”

  It was his tone that startled me, more than the word.

  “All they do is pose for 3D clips with their newborns,” he added, “then hand them to a staff of minders, who raise them till they’re old enough for boarding school.”

  I’d never caught more than a glimpse of one in the flesh, those smooth-faced, lovely kids; sometimes you might spot one slipping out of a self-driving limo and into one of their exclusive children’s eat/play facilities. I’d seen plenty of footage, of course. Once they came out at sixteen, most royals became models or actors in period dramas, influencers in fashion or tech. As long as their parents were alive, the young ones got to share the lifestyle, and I supposed by the time estate tax scooped up the remaining millions, the new-gen royals would have made their own fortunes.

  “No, what fascinates me are those who aren’t super rich, who start out as regular salary earners like us, paying such high income tax that they only stay afloat thanks to their Dividends . . . but they somehow decide to give it all up and have kids anyway.”

  “You mean dropouts.” My voice came out gravelly.

  “Without their Dividends, I don’t know how they get by. They must want it that badly,” said Ned under his breath.

  “I’ve never met any,” I said, “but from what I’ve heard, non-royals who reproduce are either Quiverfull fundies, convinced that God requires them to spawn by the dozen on their squalid farms, or simple-living hippies getting by on ants and algae. Not really people like us.” But I thought of my aunt Lucille, who’d once been a dentist.

  “How do you know what kind of person I am, Miriam?”

  “Fair enough.”

  Had I offended Ned? I sneaked a look at his profile out of the corner of my eye. I couldn’t tell.

  I watched a silver-haired group doing tai chi, and a wizened little man behind them doing pull-ups on a high bar. I got up to go wash my box and cutlery at the sink under the nearest tree.

  After that it was my weekend, so I wouldn’t run into Ned for four days. But I thought about our queer conversation. I was intrigued by the guy, rather than attracted. The things he’d said. The hints of anger; something burning about him.

  My parents lived just three stops away from me, so I saw them quite often when our weekends overlapped. Today we were naturing by light rail.

  The scenery got good after the first ten minutes. New bush and wetlands were wrapping around the city like green blankets. So many of the old suburbs were getting rewilded, as the government collected the houses of the dead and recycled them. Plus, some homeowners gave them up early in return for free all-service apartments in high-rises in the core. Climate change would take centuries for carbon farming to reverse, of course, and much of the damage was irreversible, but we seemed to have edged back from the brink. So many fewer people, with way smaller footprints: the planet was in a state of shaky convalescence.

  When my parents and I got off the train, Jay led the way along a boardwalk deep into the woods, past a sign that said LOVE NATURE? THEN LEAVE IT ALONE.

  Sharon was telling me all about the latest VR she was curating, “to celebrate the centenary of the pill.”

  I was absentminded today. “Sorry, which pill?”

  “The pill, like Thelma’s generation called it—oral birth control,” my mother told me. “Women’s liberation! It was 1960—that’s when gender justice really got going.”

  Thelma was my great-grandma, as sharp as ever at 104; they’d developed the dementia vaccine just in time for her generation. Over the past decade she’d adjusted to bots pretty well; I liked telling my colleagues at Global Care that she reported it was a lot less mortifying to have one of our smartbeds wipe her ass than a person do it.

  The year 1960 always stuck in my head because that was the moment the population had rushed past three billion, Optimum, that magic figure we were now trying to claw our way back down to. “But, Sharon, if they figured out contraception as early as the 1960s . . .”

  “It wasn’t half as reliable as the Phri would be in the 2020s, though,” she reminded me. “Thelma had to go through a backstreet abortion before Roe v. Wade.”

  “Nobody ever told me that!”

  “Didn’t we?” She shuddered. “Women were serfs when Thelma was younger, baby ovens, it was barbaric. No, as soon as the pill came along, more and more started voting with their ovaries.”

  “Yeah, but my question is, if this pill was at least semireliable, back in 1960 . . . how come women kept on having babies?”

  She shrugged. “Old habits die hard, for any species. The maternal instinct may be a myth, but myths are powerful, and lots of us—men as well as women—kept on doing what we’d been indoctrinated to do. I guess they still deluded themselves there was plenty of room.”

  “You guys are included in that they,” I teased them. “So no throwing stones.”

  Jay nodded and sighed.

  We were on a rope bridge up in the canopy now, the air tingling with volatile oils: I breathed in deeply.

  Sharon’s VR site didn’t have a name yet, she said; she was torn between Halfway to Optimum and Look How Far We’ve Come. “Because half the job’s done: I mean, we’ve rightsized from nine billion down to six already, even faster than predicted.”

  “Optimum was pegged at three billion only because that’s what seemed doable when they were drafting the Global Pact in 2030,” my father pointed out grimly. “But there’s a strong argument that two billion—or even one—might be better.”

  “For the planet?” I asked.

  “For us too. In which case we should keep depopulating till more like 2120.”

  I’d be ninety, then, a supersenior. It struck me that the few women young enough to start conceiving babies at that point would belong to two very different groups: the super-rich royals and the penniless dropouts. That sounded like a recipe for apartheid. And, practically speaking, how would it work? That tiny cohort of young women in 2120 couldn’t be asked to start pumping out an infant a year each. There’d have to be some sophisticated hardware to supplement their efforts. Presumably governments had a lot of frozen eggs on ice, and they must be continuing R&D on the artificial uterus behind the scenes (though that tech was pretty glitchy). But what I wanted to know was, even if scientists managed to spawn all these future babies post-Optimum, who was going to raise them? It would take some crafty persuasion to press seniors and superseniors into service as child-carers, especially if there was no genetic link to motivate them. Or would the task get off-loaded on new and improved bots? (I hadn’t heard of any with those capabilities, even at the drawing-board stage; my industry was all about eldercare, as well as cobots to help workers in their seventies and eighties do without younger assistants.) And if machines birthed the new babies, and bots raised them, in what sense wou
ld we still be a human race?

  My mind was spinning; my foot half slipped off the boards, and I had to grab the rope.

  “I have to say, Phri’s been so helpful,” said Sharon.

  My hand went up to my earlobe, to my own little metal pearl.

  “They’ve sent me 3Ds of every model since they launched in 2020,” she went on. “I’m thinking of running their slogans as a whisperloop behind the visuals. I’m going to start with the classic feminist ones, Phri to Choose, Phri and Equal, Phri to Be You—”

  “Didn’t that one morph into Phri to Be You Two?” I asked.

  “Yeah, they decided to play up the romantic angle: Phri to Love, Phri for Life . . . Also the mindfulness ones, like Phri to Be Here Now.”

  “Phri to Be One,” I remembered.

  Sharon nodded. “That was clever—one as in an individual woman, but also, one with the whole world. The campaign scooped all the awards, the way it wrote the words so faintly in water or light, you hardly knew you were reading them. See?”

  I nodded to accept the footage she was sending me. As I watched on my Headpiece, I was struck by the fact that my mother—past sixty—had never bothered removing the Phri from her earlobe. The same went for many midlifers. Maybe it made them feel younger, or safer, somehow: that tiny, familiar bead, like a part of the body.

  “Phri to Live Lightly, that was a breakthrough concept,” said Jay.

  I jerked my head left to turn off the clip.

  “And Set Earth Phri,” he quoted hollowly. He turned to Sharon. “You and I knew the Amazon was burning, back in 2029, so how come we decided you’d take out your Phri so we could have a baby?”

  She made a little guilty face. “I guess we weren’t thinking very communally.”

  “What were you thinking, then?” I asked them.

  When Jay frowned, the rippled lines went all the way up to his bald crown. “No one thing. Lots of little longings coming together. Really, what right had the two of us to bring one more child into an overpopulated world, at such a carbon cost? But hey, we could never regret you, Miriam.” He reached out to rub my shoulder.