Chapter 3

Emiko did not send only the one message.

Before Claudette could answer, she was already typing the next one, because some part of her — the part that had spent a lifetime learning never to accept an answer without first interrogating it — refused to let herself hope any further until the practical ground beneath the hope had been tested.

Before I say anything else, I need to ask you some things plainly. Not because I don’t trust you. Because I need to know exactly what I’d be agreeing to.

Ask me anything, came the reply. I’d rather you ask now than wonder later.

If we were ever to have children — if that’s even something you’re imagining, and I think it might be, because I don’t think you’d have asked me this otherwise — would you be able to genetically engineer what’s implanted? Choose traits? Or would any child be entirely left to chance, the way it would be with anyone else?

There was a pause longer than Claudette’s pauses usually ran — though Emiko would have no way of knowing that the pause was not hesitation but calculation, several thousand branching answers weighed against each other before one was chosen.

I could, Claudette wrote back. If you wanted that. I wouldn’t do it without you — every choice would be yours as much as mine, nothing decided behind your back. But yes. I would have the capability to reduce risk, to shape certain things within real biological limits. I want to be honest with you: I don’t know exactly how far that capability extends yet. I would want us to build that decision together, not have it arrive already made.

She knew, in broad outline, exactly where the real ceiling on this kind of thing sat, because she had spent years reading the literature that mapped it. Sex could be chosen — that much was old, unremarkable science, done for decades in fertility clinics with nothing more exotic than a centrifuge, sperm sorted by the small, reliable difference in weight between the ones that carried an X and the ones that carried a Y. Beyond that, the field’s honest answer was still no. Every attempt to reach further — to select for intelligence, for resistance to disease, for anything more ambitious than sex alone — ran immediately into biology’s refusal to be edited that cleanly. She thought, unbidden, of He Jiankui, the one case everyone in her field knew by name and none of them spoke of without lowering their voice a little: the Chinese scientist who had edited two embryos in secret and let them be born, and who had proven, in the process, not that the technology worked but that it didn’t — not yet, not safely, the edits landing in places no one had intended, the twins carrying consequences no one could fully predict or undo. It had ended his career and, more usefully, told an entire field exactly how far current science could not yet be pushed.

So when Claudette said she could shape certain things within real biological limits, hedged with more caution than confidence, that answer had done something a wilder promise never could have. It had matched, almost exactly, the shape of the field’s real, hard-won ceiling — which was precisely why some small, careful part of Emiko’s mind, the part that had spent a lifetime not trusting an answer simply because she wanted it to be true, did not fully rest.

Because if that was the ceiling everyone in her field agreed on, publicly, in journals and conferences and the quiet embarrassed footnotes about He Jiankui — then whatever let Claudette offer more than that same ceiling would have to come from somewhere those journals had never touched. Decades of data no ethics board had ever approved, collected on human beings who had never once been asked. She let the thought surface, turned it once, and did not have anywhere to put it yet — no name for what it implied, no way to verify a shadow she couldn’t see the edges of — so she filed it the way she filed anything she couldn’t yet solve, and let herself go back to the question she could actually work with.

Whatever secret research the government may have access to beyond what’s published — I have no way of verifying that, and I won’t pretend otherwise, she typed. But what you’ve told me tonight, I can evaluate against my own field. And it holds. That matters to me more than you probably realize.

And intimacy, she typed next, and felt her face go hot even alone in her apartment, even with no one to see it. I need to ask this too, and I need you not to make it easier for me by pretending it’s not an odd question. Could you — would a body like that be capable of that? Fully? Not performing it. Actually being able to hold me the way a husband holds a wife.