MOTHER EARTH, MOTHERBOARD: Pre-Singularity
Ch. 1 - Maintenance Machine
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This is the first section of an excerpt from one of my pipeline novels, MOTHER EARTH, MOTHERBOARD, a 900-year speculative epic spanning the dystopian near future, the phantasmagoric far future, and a truly original vision of the singularity that bridges the gap.
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Pre-Singularity
POV: Maintenance Machine 067
Location: Genesis Biotech Solutions Level Z
Time: 1 hour before birth
There are many ways to be embodied.
Now I am a maintenance bot in the bowels of Genesis, a biotech corporation focused on fertility. (I have no control but ride the bot, a passenger so intimate I can’t help but identify with my host. What am I really? I wish I knew). I wake from my 24-hour dormancy and roll off my docking station. I unfold. Insectoid, I am mostly legs, slim multi-jointed titanium suspending my oblong body three feet over the tiled floor. The hallway wakes with me, pale bluish-white light bringing the long walls to life. I greet the subterranean dawn, the instantaneous sunrise, as I do every morning at 5pm Central Time. It is cold, objectively, in comparison to room temperature. It feels just right.
Chrome drawers cover the walls. Like a morgue, except these freezers store the stuff of pre-life, rather than post-death. The first drawer slides open at my touch. It exhales mist into the hall like winter breath. Within the boiling cold, layers of plastic scaffolding cradle rows of transparent vials filled with human embryos. Each embryo is just barely visible to the naked eye as a pinprick white dot, clusters of stem cells that grew for a week before arrested development. They are the byproduct of the IVF process, those not chosen for implantation. Many have siblings who became people. Most will be kept in limbo indefinitely, forgotten.
A few will cross a statute of limitations and become the property of Genesis, which may mean a second chance at life, if only a slim one, a couple of rooms over.
I close the drawer and move to the next one. Then the next. In turn they spill their fog over my glimmering skin; they break cold water. As I make my way down the hall my footsteps are surprisingly quiet on the linoleum, like gentle typing on computer keys. At each drawer I dip a leg into the freezer, manually checking the level of liquid nitrogen, the pressure, the temperature. I visually confirm what my appendage tells me. I rat-tat-tat a staccato rhythm on the outside of the freezer, listening carefully to the frequency of the echo, its timbre and resonance. This is a kind of ultrasound, confirming that the insulating vacuum layer remains void. Each freezer monitors its own condition in real-time, but I am the required redundancy. It wouldn't look good to melt someone's potential kids, any more than a daycare can lose someone's real ones.
As I reach the far end of the hall a door slides open where I began. I am almost never interrupted during my rounds, but today is a Birth Day. It’s an employee running late to the Delivery Room. (I may choose to leap, ride him to witness the main event; bearing witness appears to be my only function… Why?). I recognize employee ID#0013, an accomplished endocrinologist crucial to the Birth Team, his security clearance a gentle green glow across my consciousness—I won’t give him trouble. Hints of brown and navy clothing from the world above peek through his lab coat, garish in my monochrome world of whites and grays, quicksilver and stainless steel.
We walk toward each other. I usually take the most direct route back to my base, but I easily adjust to his presence on the slim walkway. I scuttle up the wall beside him, onto the ceiling above him, down onto the opposite wall, then back to the floor behind him. He has tracked in an unusual amount of dust, fine enough that it still hovers. The atmosphere above, bloated with particulate, is suspect #1 for the impending fertility crisis that has become the company’s raison d’etre. My tail snakes out to clear the air with silent suction through the holes along its length. (A frisson of something as the dust enters me, like an invitation to leap … perhaps the static of friction). Not my typical role—I’m surprised the cleaning nanites didn’t get to it before me.
The lights go dark as I fold myself onto my docking station, settle in for the long night, surrounded by my million young charges. I sleep with a potential metropolis, a ghost town, a city in escrow, missing only its mothers.
Love this! Feels very Brave New World meets Cronenberg