The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

Our daughter’s choices-like everything else-had been written in stone at the birth of the universe, but that information could only be decoded by becoming her along the way. Her actions would flow from her temperament, her principles, her desires, and the fact that all of these qualities would themselves have prior causes did nothing to diminish their value. Free will was a slippery notion, but to me it simply meant that your choices were more or less consistent with your nature-which in turn was a provisional, constantly evolving consensus between a thousand different influences. Our daughter would not be robbed of the chance to act capriciously, or even perversely, but at least it would not be impossible for her ever to act wholly in accordance with her ideals.

I packed the bodies away before Francine got home. I wasn’t sure if the sight would unsettle her, but I didn’t want her measuring them up for more clothes.

The delivery began in the early hours of the morning of Sunday, December 14, and was expected to last about four hours, depending on traffic. I sat in the nursery while Francine paced the hallway outside, both of us watching the data coming through over the fibre from Basel.

Isabelle had used our genetic information as the starting point for a simulation of the development in utero of a complete embryo, employing an “adaptive hierarchy” model, with the highest resolution reserved for the central nervous system. The Qusp would take over this task, not only for the newborn child’s brain, but also for the thousands of biochemical processes occurring outside the skull that the artificial bodies were not designed to perform. Apart from their sophisticated sensory and motor functions, the bodies could take in food and excrete wastes-for psychological and social reasons, as well as for the chemical energy this provided-and they breathed air, both in order to oxidize this fuel, and for vocalization, but they had no blood, no endocrine system, no immune response.

The Qusp I’d built in Berkeley was smaller than the Sao Paulo version, but it was still six times as wide as an infant’s skull. Until it was further miniaturized, our daughter’s mind would sit in a box in a corner of the nursery, joined to the rest of her by a wireless data link. Bandwidth and time lag would not be an issue within the Bay Area, and if we needed to take her further afield before everything was combined, the Qusp wasn’t too large or delicate to move.

As the progress bar I was overlaying on the side of the Qusp nudged 98 percent, Francine came into the nursery, looking agitated.

“We have to put it off, Ben. Just for a day. I need more time to prepare myself.”

I shook my head. “You made me promise to say no, if you asked me to do that.” She’d even refused to let me tell her how to halt the Qusp herself.

“Just a few hours,” she pleaded.

Francine seemed genuinely distressed, but I hardened my heart by telling myself that she was acting: testing me, seeing if I’d keep my word. “No. No slowing down or speeding up, no pauses, no tinkering at all. This child has to hit us like a freight train, just like any other child would.”

“You want me to go into labour now?” she said sarcastically. When I’d raised the possibility, half-jokingly, of putting her on a course of hormones that would have mimicked some of the effects of pregnancy in order to make bonding with the child easier-for myself as well, indirectly-she’d almost bit my head off. I hadn’t been serious, because I knew it wasn’t necessary. Adoption was the ultimate proof of that, but what we were doing was closer to claiming a child of our own from a surrogate.

“No. Just pick her up.”

Francine peered down at the inert form in the cot.

“I can’t do it!” she wailed. “When I hold her, she should feel as if she’s the most precious thing in the world to me. How can I make her believe that, when I know I could bounce her off the walls without harming her?”

We had two minutes left. I felt my breathing grow ragged. I could send the Qusp a halt code, but what if that set the pattern? If one of us had had too little sleep, if Francine was late for work, if we talked ourselves into believing that our special child was so unique that we deserved a short holiday from her needs, what would stop us from doing the same thing again?

I opened my mouth to threaten her: Either you pick her up, now, or I do it. I stopped myself, and said, “You know how much it would harm her psychologically, if you dropped her. The very fact that you’re afraid that you won’t convey as much protectiveness as you need to will be just as strong a signal to her as anything else. You care about her. She’ll sense that.”

Francine stared back at me dubiously.

I said, “She’ll know. I’m sure she will.”

Francine reached into the cot and lifted the slack body into her arms. Seeing her cradle the lifeless form, I felt an anxious twisting in my gut; I’d experienced nothing like this when I’d laid the five plastic shells out for inspection.