Billy couldn’t breathe for a moment as he stared in stunned horror at the contraption before him.
She wore a pair of black-framed glasses, her chestnut hair swept up into a neat bun. The collar of a silky red blouse peeked out from beneath her pristine lab coat, and pinned to it, just over her chest, was a researcher’s ID badge. Billy had always known her as a born actress, but he had never suspected that their entire marriage was nothing but a performance, her love for him just another act in an elaborate theater. He’d seen her in countless disguises over the years and couldn’t help but wonder—was this her true self at last, or just another role she was playing?
"Hello, Billy, my darling," she said, her voice adopting that familiar, sugary Vivian tone.
He shook his head in disdain, locking eyes with her as she gracefully brushed past him. "Darling? Spare me," he retorted coldly.
"I understand how you must feel, but—"
"You understand nothing!" he snapped, cutting her off. "You lied to me for a decade. Used me. You’re in bed with the Brotherhood of the Knowing. Everything you ever said to me was a lie."
"No, Billy, it wasn’t. Not everything. Not even when I call you darling. You are my darling. You always will be," she said with maddening calmness, not even turning to face him as she walked across the polished floor toward the imposing figure of Henry Thandros in his life-preserving machine. "In time, you’ll see the bigger picture. You’ll forgive me because you’ll realize we were right. Everything we’ve done is... justified."
She stopped in front of the towering contraption and stepped up to the terminal connected to it, her fingers gliding over the sleek touch screen. A pneumatic hiss echoed through the room as a side panel on the enormous machine creaked open, and a dense cloud of frosty mist billowed out, obscuring her momentarily as she stepped inside.
"Vivian?" Billy called, unease thick in his voice.
No answer.
Where had she gone? Was she... inside the machine?
Suddenly, she emerged from the swirling mist, pulling a heavy, box-like apparatus on wheels. It was connected to the main structure by an array of tubes and cables. The device resembled an oversized breadbox, albeit one outfitted with complex controls, gauges, and pipes. Its curved front bore a fogged-over window, milky and opaque.
"Just as an embryo is tethered to its mother by the umbilical cord, so too is this machine tethered to the professor’s body. Both rely on the cold to survive." Vivian chuckled softly at her metaphor. "It’s a fitting comparison," she added. "But don’t worry—the incubator inside is always kept at a toasty 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit." She glanced at the temperature display and corrected herself with a smirk. "Well, 98.8 now."
Did she just say incubator?
Billy swallowed hard, his expression darkening. "Vivian, what in God’s name is that thing?"
"It doesn’t matter what it is. What matters is... what’s inside," she replied, her smile calm and unflinching. "It holds the most valuable thing humanity has ever conceived. Inside lies its future."
Her manicured finger hovered over a gray touchpad, and the window’s opacity faded away. The contents of the incubator became horrifyingly clear.
Billy forgot to breathe as he stared, transfixed and appalled, at what floated in the viscous liquid inside.
"Is that seriously..." He struggled to swallow his unease, his voice breaking. "...some kind of steel womb?"
Vivian’s smile remained fixed as she licked her lips, savoring the moment. "I’m surprised by your question, Billy. I thought you’d be more interested in knowing what the boy inside has to do with you."
Billy looked from Vivian back to the incubator.
"Is that... our son?" he asked, his mind racing. He tried to calculate when he and Vivian had last been intimate. He couldn’t even remember. Vivian hadn’t let him near her in years, and she’d always made it clear she didn’t want children. So what could this mean?
"It’s not our son," she said, her voice like silk, cutting through his confusion. "It’s your son. The one you conceived with Tabitha."
"What?!"
Billy’s heart thundered in his chest. He stopped breathing altogether.
Even the typically stone-faced members of the board furrowed their brows. For once, even the world’s most ruthless individuals were caught completely off guard.
Billy felt his chest tighten as he tried to process what he was hearing.
"Vivian, say that again. What are you talking about?"
The fetus floated peacefully in the viscous liquid, curled into itself with tiny arms and legs. Its head appeared unusually large, and its translucent skin revealed the network of veins and internal organs beneath. The umbilical cord tethered its small body to the machine, delivering the nutrients it needed to grow—just as the massive life-support system sustained Henry Thandros. The monitors displayed stable vitals, though the machine’s temperature was inching toward a critical threshold.
It looked so horribly wrong, so unnatural, to see a human life growing inside that contraption.
"You’ve always wanted a child, haven’t you, Billy?" Vivian’s voice was light, almost teasing. "Well, it’s not truly ours. It belongs to the Professor. But it does carry your genes. And it’s the first perfect human."
Billy bared his teeth in a grimace, his face twisting in confusion and despair. None of this made sense. How could he possibly have anything to do with the creation of that embryo?
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In the silence, the labored breathing of Henry Thandros filled the air, amplified through the speakers. It took him a moment—another strained breath or two—before his voice followed, adding yet another piece to the puzzle.
"It was the mission of the android you knew as X-3-19 to seduce you and bring your genetic material to our lab. There, we combined your sperm with an egg cell from our donor, Tabitha, to perform an ex vivo fertilization. If your body had survived the metamorphosis, you would have been the first perfect human. But now, that honor and responsibility pass to your son. He will achieve what you, due to your illness, could not. He will be the first human with only good traits, and a life expectancy worthy of humanity."
Without a word, Billy took slow, cautious steps toward the incubator. He glanced at Vivian, silently asking if he could touch the glass.
She nodded eagerly.
Placing his hand against the cool surface, Billy stared at the fragile human form within, the being they claimed was his son.
My son. My boy. I’m... I’m going to be a father?
His voice was hesitant as he lifted his gaze. "What are you going to do with him?"
"He will grow up in the Garden of Eden," Henry Thandros said. "As you did. He will lead humanity into a new era. Isn’t that wonderful?"
Was it?
Billy said nothing.
"Will you experiment on him the way you did with the rest of us?" he asked.
"No experiments that will cause him pain. He's perfect already."
Suddenly, the fetus disappeared from view as the glass turned opaque again. Vivian had pressed her finger to the control pad, closing off the window. She gestured toward the machine’s temperature display. "I need to return him to the cooling chamber before the artificial womb overheats."
Billy fought the urge to object, to keep the helpless creature near him, to hold it and never let go. But he said nothing as his wife—his ex-wife—his never-really-wife rolled the incubator back to the base of Henry Thandros’s massive life-support system and locked it into the dark, frosty chamber that served as the Professor’s mechanical underbelly. The imagery wasn’t lost on Billy; it was almost as if the Professor were a hen brooding over her egg.
It was all so absurd, so unfathomably bizarre.
Billy’s mind drifted to his simpler life as a factory worker, where problems felt so overwhelming then but seemed laughably trivial now.
"Let me ask you again: why do you think you’re here?" Henry Thandros’s voice cut through his thoughts. The Professor hung motionless in the intricate network of wires and cables, his frail upper body suspended like a glacier’s relic thawing from ancient ice. His paper-thin eyelids flickered open and closed as he awaited Billy’s answer.
Billy Jones drew a deep breath, expanding his chest as if bracing for a storm. He wanted to speak with conviction, but when the words came, they were fractured, trembling with fear and doubt.
"I’m here to kill you. Now more than ever."
He stepped into Vivian’s place at the terminal, meeting her gaze. He was so close that, in another time, he might have reached out to embrace her. But now, the thought repelled him, as if she were a stranger—and perhaps she was. Billy gripped the edges of the terminal with white-knuckled hands.
"Darling," Vivian said softly, her voice laced with a dangerous sweetness. "If you turn off that machine, the fetus in the incubator will die. And with it, you’ll destroy humanity’s only hope for a brighter future. Is that what you want?"
Billy pressed his lips together, refusing to answer. He no longer knew what to think. Frost swirled like ghostly mist around the emaciated upper body of Henry Thandros as the old man leaned as far forward as his frail form allowed, his bony hands braced against the massive machine that sustained him.
"We are all afraid of dying," Thandros croaked weakly, for the first time speaking in his own voice. "You fear losing everything you’ve built in your life. You fear the day your light will fade, leaving nothing of you behind—not even a memory. That’s why you believe in a god. Not out of love for a creator, but out of selfishness, because you hope for life beyond death in paradise. Your fear of death is simply a longing for immortality."
The voice amplifier affixed to his throat did its best to make the words intelligible, yet every sentence seemed to drain what little strength remained in him.
"But after a certain age—after amassing a certain amount of experience—that fear begins to dissipate. What’s left is a curiosity for the void, for how peaceful it might feel." A weighty silence hung between them until Thandros spoke again, his voice like a spectral whisper. "Fear of death is nothing more than fear of loss. But one day, you’ll stop fearing the loss of things that were never truly yours to begin with. You, my child, are just a tiny fragment of a much larger whole, something beyond your, my, or anyone’s control."
Billy bit his lip, waiting to see if the ancient man had more to say, something that might make sense of his cryptic words.
"I no longer fear death," Henry Thandros continued. "My life’s work is complete with the boy in my care. You’re the only unanswered question left in my life. Are you truly who I think you are?"
Billy swallowed hard, lowering his gaze as he scanned the three monitors before him, each displaying incomprehensible graphics. A bewildering array of controls and buttons stretched out before him, offering an overwhelming number of choices.
"Professor," Vivian interjected, her voice tense. "At least allow me to move the unborn child to safety first. This is too dangerous. If Billy shuts the machine down, then—"
"Then the boy in my care will be no different from his father," Thandros interrupted, his lips unmoving as his words emerged through the artificial voice system. "And he, too, will one day seek revenge."
It took Billy a while to navigate the labyrinthine system menu and locate the option to disable the machine’s life support. As he worked, the silence in the room grew taut, charged with suspense. Everyone present seemed to wonder if Thandros was truly willing to take such a risk. What the scientist was doing was the equivalent of a magician sticking his head into a tiger’s mouth. And Billy was the tiger. Would he bite, or wouldn’t he?
Disabling the machine required an eight-digit security code, which Thandros recited without hesitation. His faith in Billy’s morality seemed greater than Billy’s own.
Billy keyed in the numbers, realizing only then how badly his hands were trembling. His face hardened into a mask of doubt as he tried to conceal the inner turmoil sparked by Thandros’s words.
If I turn off the machine, I become a murderer.
I won’t just kill Thandros—I’ll also kill my unborn son.
But it’s the only way to end the human experiments.
How much truth lies in his claims?
Do we need to change who we are to secure a future?
His finger hovered over the button to confirm the shutdown.
If I let Thandros live, I’ll spend my final days in his paradise.
But more people will suffer. More people will lose their loved ones, just as Isaac lost his wife.
Billy parked his tongue in the corner of his mouth. Sweat trickled down his temples. Time seemed to stretch endlessly as he stared at the monitor, his fingertip mere millimeters from making a decision that would change everything.
"Shut down the machine that keeps me alive if that is truly what you wish," said the eerie figure above, dangling like a ghastly marionette from the web of fiber-optic cables. "No one will stop you. No one will stand in your way. And no one will punish you if you do."
Billy’s face contorted with indecision. He licked his lips, steeling himself. Lifting his head, he glanced at Vivian. She stared back at him with wide, anxious eyes, pressing a trembling fist to her mouth as she slowly shook her head.
"Don’t do it," she whispered. "Think of your boy. Think of the future of humanity."
His gaze shifted to the android, the one bearing his father’s face, who had remained utterly silent until now. The android met Billy’s eyes, its expression devoid of emotion. Then, suddenly, it gave a subtle nod. So faint, it felt more like a whisper carried on the wind than a physical gesture. Do it, the artificial eyes seemed to say. Think of all the lives you can save, of the enslaved androids you can set free.
Billy’s sweat dripped freely, his heart pounding like a war drum.
The time had come to make a decision.