Halfway to Free (Out of Line collection) Read online

I knew my cohort of babies had been the last gush from the faucet before it had been pretty much shut off by the Global Pact. When so many governments came on board with financial incentives for the child-free, uptake of the Phri had spread like wildfire from the West across the developing world, and birth rates had plummeted everywhere. Another few years, and likely I would never have happened, which was an odd thought.

  “It was a different world,” said Sharon.

  Jay spoke in a weary, marveling voice: “Back then, imagine, we still kept animals captive in our apartments and spent money on food and toys and clothes for them, instead of repairing entire ecosystems.”

  “Remember that massive row we had with your sister the night we told her I was pregnant?” asked Sharon.

  My parents shared a wry grin.

  “Lucille was such a zealot,” Sharon told me. “She’d been one of the first Pledgers.”

  “Pledgers?”

  “They started a birth strike as soon as the climate crisis became really obvious.”

  “But hang on, that doesn’t make sense. Didn’t you tell me Lucille went off and joined one of those breeder communes?” The phrase was too harsh; I supposed I didn’t want to sound too interested in my aunt.

  “That’s the joke of it,” said my mother. “People change.”

  “She never had any babies herself, though, right? Was that about the Pledge?”

  Jay shrugged. “My sister’s always been a mystery to me.”

  I thought about siblings: the strangeness of two people having the same parents. Was a sister more like a friend or a rival?

  “I don’t regret you either, honey,” Sharon told me belatedly. “I’m just sometimes amazed I managed it. Birth’s like shitting a pumpkin—”

  “Sharon!”

  “Shush, you,” she told Jay. “And as for child-rearing, it was all pretty exhausting, Miriam. Even though it was so much easier then than it is for the dropouts now, because there were still daycares and schools and playgrounds, cafés you were allowed to breastfeed in. You could bring a kid pretty much anywhere . . .”

  “If it was so hard, but you two had this yen to do it anyway”—my eyes were on the sun diamonding down through the canopy—“does that suggest it might be a deep-down instinct after all?”

  Jay shook his head. “Just an old script.” He tapped his temple. “That religio-colonialist, be fruitful and multiply BS. No, we were acting like a toxic species, and we had to rein ourselves in before we brought on Armageddon.”

  The paradox was, there was no way to tell my parents what I was thinking right now, I realized. No, not thinking, exactly: wondering, asking, probing at some lower and murkier level than thought. Jay and Sharon had had mixed feelings too, thirty years ago. So they would probably understand mine, but I couldn’t bear to worry them, especially if it was all for nothing; just a predictable mid-youth crisis.

  When Ned and I talked over matcha or lunch during the weeks that followed, it wasn’t as if that—our secret—was what we always talked about.

  It was a running joke between us, for instance, that he was so fuzzy on what we did over in Functionality—what I called the actual work of the company.

  I tried again. “See, the nurse bot’s currently got a hundred and forty-eight degrees of freedom.”

  “As in . . .”

  “Ways it can move, Ned.”

  “Right.”

  “Pitch”—I bobbed my finger up and down—“yaw”—left and right—“and roll, that’s three possibilities for rotation, got it? Then there’s translation—the same movements but going somewhere in space, that’s three more degrees of freedom. Six multiplied by twenty-four end effectors, which each—”

  He interrupted. “And they are?”

  “What do you guys do all day?”

  “Translate your gibberish,” he said, deadpan.

  I made a face at him. “End effectors are like arms but customizable. Anti-collision sensors, temperature and pulse readers, brushes, disinfectors, magnets, grippers, lifters, needle-inserters, eye-in-hands, that kind of thing.”

  “Like Captain Hook?”

  It took me a minute to get the old reference. “Well, a pirate is more like a prototype cyborg than a bot, but yeah. Here’s a 3D that makes it—”

  But Ned shook his head, so I turned the footage off.

  His voice went right down, which was the only warning that he was about to bring up the subject. “How old were you when you first wanted it, Miriam?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” I tried to remember. Hard to date the feeling, given that I’d always written it off as a fantasy, an idle curiosity. Lots of little longings, as my father had put it. “The day I got my period—” Urgh, once had been more than enough. My hand automatically went up to my earlobe now, fingered the hard bead. “I was excited about my first Phri, and the party after. Silly games, and dancing, and the special cake . . .”

  “Did they ask you?”

  “Ask me what?”

  “Whether you agreed to having a Phri fitted?”

  I couldn’t remember the question arising. “I guess my parents authorized it, as I was a minor.”

  I tried to imagine taking it out, right now. It would be done in a second. Phris weren’t locked on like prisoners’ ankle bracelets or medieval chastity belts. It occurred to me that nothing had actually been preventing me from removing mine, ever since I’d become an adult at sixteen—only a sense of taboo that made my fingers tingle.

  “Do girls talk about this stuff with each other?” Ned wanted to know.

  “We joked about it—about being, you know, pregnable. The others were always, like, Nightmare! But over the years I did find myself thinking, what if? As in, if we were still like any other animal . . . might it be kind of thrilling to grow a tiny person inside myself?”

  Ned spoke flatly. “I don’t remember a time I didn’t want a baby to hold.”

  I tried to picture it: a tiny, soft-skinned version of him, tucked into the crook of his elbow. “Did guys call you a weirdo?”

  “I’m sure they would have if I’d ever told them. A psychopath, actually, for wanting to put a woman through that. Quite apart from poisoning the planet.”

  These conversations with Ned felt oddly dirty. Laying ourselves bare like this. Ours was an underground desire, an itch we were never going to get a chance to scratch. Wanting a child in the year 2060 made no sense; it had only dream logic.

  I told myself that Ned was my pressure-relief valve. No better looking than some men I’d been partnered with, less good looking than most, in fact. It was only the words coming out of his mouth that stirred me, the secret picture in my head of him with a child riding on his thick shoulders. Mine. Ours. The smell of danger, like singeing hair.

  I deliberately hadn’t looked up anything about this so far. When I cracked and did it, sitting at my kitchen counter, asking how long Phri effects—

  —my Headpiece responded, “Can I help you, Miriam?”

  I cleared my throat. “I’m just theoretically curious about, ah, taking out my Phri.”

  “Is the device bothering you in some way?”

  “No.”

  “It works by sending a message to your anterior pituitary gland not to trigger a surge in your luteinizing hormone.” A 3D played in front of my eyes, showing the signals pulsing through the skull, from the ear to behind the bridge of the nose. “Without your Phri, within weeks or months, you’d be at a ninety-five percent risk of one of your ovaries releasing an egg, which in the presence of sperm would lead to a high danger of conception, and unless you prevented implantation of that fertilized egg, you’d become pregnant.”

  “Got it.” (Dry-mouthed.)

  “This would likely lead to a cascade of physical, emotional, and mental changes over the next approximately forty weeks. Normal symptoms of pregnancy include fatigue, breast tenderness, nausea, excess saliva, increased urination, bloating, mood swings, cramping, hunger, constipation, food aversions and cravings, indi
gestion, heartburn, flatulence, lines on skin—”

  The list was filling me with rising panic.

  “—nasal congestion, extreme weight gain, swelling of hands and feet, vaginal discharge, faintness, energy fluctuations, varicose veins, cysts, urinary blockage, alterations in sex drive, back pain, shortness of breath, and trouble sleeping.”

  “Jesus!” How had any woman ever gone through this? But I reminded myself that it was like the list of possible side effects on every medication package; they wouldn’t all happen every time.

  The Headpiece rolled on: “Then there are complications, which can include anemia, nutritional deficiency, urinary tract infections, depression, blood clots, preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, stroke, and death in labor.”

  That left me speechless.

  “After birth, you might continue to suffer long-term or permanent pelvic widening, flattened and enlarged feet, skin striations and scarring, labial deformation, stress incontinence, increased risk of heart failure, and changes to brain structure.”

  “Brain structure?” I repeated, incredulous.

  She answered: “Shrinkage of gray matter associated with social activities such as conversation. These phenomena may be caused or worsened by the stresses of caring for an infant, which include sleep deprivation, social isolation, loss of partner intimacy, and logistical and financial burdens.”

  “So, yeah, what would it all cost?” I asked, just to get her off the medical-horror track.

  “Increased expenses would begin with private medical care—”

  “Hang on.”

  The voice anticipated my question. “Pregnancy is one of the Elective Risk Factors that invalidates membership in your local free clinic.”

  “Oh. And . . . the actual, ah, the birth itself?”

  “Hospitals’ risk-assessment policies mean that you’d have to hire a freelance doctor to oversee your labor off-site,” she pointed out. “After birth, there’d be new costs such as performance-enhancing infant formula, diapers, clothing, safety equipment, furniture, rental of a new living space with additional room for an infant . . .”

  That one hit me. “You’re saying I’d have to move out?”

  “Your building has an over-sixteens policy clause.”

  Had I known that? I’d never needed to. My mind roamed now, seeing terrors everywhere. “Would I be able to take medical leave from my job?”

  “Not for a Voluntary Disablement.”

  “What the—”

  “Voluntary Disablement means that if an employee makes a decision that effectively incapacitates them by rendering them unable to work their previous schedule with their previous degree of energy and concentration, they’re deemed to have chosen to surrender employment.”

  How could any of this be legal?

  “Also, financially,” the Headpiece said, “you’d no longer be entitled to government incentives for keeping your emissions down: the Spring and Autumn Dividends, as well as free eldercare as needed.”

  I thought I was going to puke. I rested my cheek on the kitchen counter.

  “Just to summarize, Miriam, by removing your Phri, you’d be choosing to risk your health and life in order to create a person—initially immobile, nonverbal, and incontinent—who’d remain helplessly dependent on you as well as nonearning for at least sixteen years. At the same time you’d be making yourself homeless, unemployed, impoverished, and isolated.”

  I jerked my head to the left to turn her off.

  Ned and I walked through the streets a few nights later. He pointed at his switched-off Headpiece: “Mine said exactly the same things about what-if-I-impregnated-someone, because, guess what, it’s the same chatbot. Are we really going to take life advice from an algorithm?”

  “Fuck that shit,” I told him.

  “Fuck that shit, Miriam.”

  The surge of shared defiance warmed me. “If I ever actually did such a crazy thing,” I said—without looking at him, in case I lost my nerve, “I think, I’m pretty sure, I’d want it to be with you.”

  Ned stopped so suddenly I almost tripped. “You mean . . . conceiving it?”

  “And raising it. The whole kit and caboodle.” Where had that ludicrous old phrase floated up from?

  He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. He looked lit up like a lamp.

  We walked on, past a Thank God It’s Thursday bar. Then allotments, a sports center, a vertical farm, a tea dance salon, a meat lab. (Jay said it was tastier than the dead-animal stuff they ate in the old days, but he still found the texture too squishy.) People glided by on e-scooters, trikes, self-driving carts. My old high school was being retrofitted as a Lifelong Learning and Leisure Center. The head of the work crew spun around in her wheelchair and adjusted her hard hat; she looked nearly ninety to me.

  I remembered the daycares getting shuttered when I was in that school, once there were almost no small children left; then the elementary schools, when I was in college. Some politicians had spoken up and warned that it was all happening too fast, but the tide was against them: that exhilarating sense that we were solving the puzzle at last, cleaning up our mess, zooming toward Optimum.

  My courage was leaking away. “Really, they’ve made it impossible. Between the financial penalties, losing jobs and medical care, and becoming pariahs . . . it might as well be illegal.”

  “Well, that’s putting it strongly. It’s not like anybody would actually lock us up or shoot us.”

  “It comes to the same thing, Ned! Voluntary, my Headpiece kept saying, elective, as if we have any real choice.”

  “But don’t we?”

  “Oh come off it. Are you getting all existential on me now?”

  “Not quite impossible, is all I’m saying.” Ned spoke very low in his throat, almost growling. “Some people do do it, even these days. Yeah, there’d be sacrifices. You said dropouts aren’t our kind of people, but who knows what we could be if we let ourselves?”

  That shook me.

  “You know, even if our buildings weren’t for over-sixteens,” he added, “we’d have to move out of the core, because the kid would be barred from most of it.”

  The kid: I tried to picture the big eyes in the small face. Ned was talking as if this was at least a rough plan. Like the two of us weren’t just talking but seriously about to yoke ourselves together in this appallingly irrevocable way.

  “I looked it up. Turns out transit doesn’t allow them—it’s a safety hazard,” he said scathingly. “With their weak immune systems, they’re considered vectors of contagion. Same goes for restaurants, libraries, entertainment plazas, malls, playgrounds—the policies all claim children would inconvenience users by behaving inappropriately or unpredictably and creating odor, mess, noise, and nuisance.”

  “But playgrounds were built for kids in the first place!”

  “That was then. What’s really bothering me,” he said, “is how could we earn enough to manage without our Dividends?”

  “We’d have to learn to get by on a whole lot less, I suppose,” I said glumly. Homeless, unemployed, impoverished, and isolated, the bot had said.

  “While teaching the kid ourselves, of course,” he added, “because we couldn’t afford tutors.”

  “Just brainstorming . . . but what if I were to stay home with her or him—if we found somewhere outside the core where we were allowed to live—and you were to keep your job and commute?” I was already wincing at the retrograde sound of it. Some couples did that, I’d read, but . . . wasn’t this what my grandparents and parents had fought to free me from?

  Ned laughed under his breath. “I wouldn’t be willing to miss out on the actual hands-on of being a dad. Especially if I’d thrown my old life away for it.”

  “It is impossible, you know,” I told him. It was probably time to get this unhealthy fantasy out of our systems. “We need to find a way to live with the way things are. As my great-grandma says, ‘You get what you get and you don’t get upset.’”

 
Ned’s lips twisted. “You know who we should go talk to—your aunt.”

  The next time my weekend overlapped with Ned’s, we tracked down Lucille. (It took me hours online, but I managed to find her deets without having to ask my parents.)

  The piece of land she lived on was far away; we had to cycle almost an hour from the nearest stop.

  “Look!” I tugged on Ned’s sleeve as we approached the farm. “That guy, I think he’s got a baby under his coat. Strapped to him.”

  “Wouldn’t the kid suffocate?”

  “I guess not or they wouldn’t do it.”

  By the time we reached the house, I’d seen more children of various sizes than in my whole life to that point. I tried not to stare. I managed to smile at a tiny walking one in a blue coat; I gave another (lying on its back, playing with a balloon) a shy wave, but it didn’t seem to notice me.

  Inside the farmhouse was shabby but comfortable enough, not exactly what I’d been dreading.

  Lucille looked quite a bit younger than my father, maybe because she still had her hair. “Yeah, we do a lot of babywearing here,” she said over her shoulder as she brewed a big pot of some herb I didn’t recognize.

  “Because the ground’s too rough for—what do you call the thing with wheels?” asked Ned.

  “A stroller. Yeah, but also because being carried keeps infants happier, so you can get on with the other things you have to do,” Lucille explained.

  “Weeding and picking and stuff?” I asked.

  She smiled at me just a little mockingly. “We’re not as off-grid as you imagine. Some of us telework, for instance.”

  Ned asked in a surprised voice, “You have Wi-Fi?”

  “Not enough for streaming, and we pay for it, but yeah. Some cycle and transit to part-time jobs in the core or make things to sell online. A few couples your age jobshare while their kid is young.”

  “So, the kids—how do you . . .” I didn’t even know enough to know what I was asking.

  “We all pitch in,” Lucille said with a shrug. “There’s a few former doctors among us, and quite a few teachers—we couldn’t get by without their skills.”