Page 26 of The Echo Wife
We were finished.
There was so much to do, and so little time to do it in.
Nathan’s tissue needed to be prepared, and then the tank needed to be prepared, and 4896-T needed to be neutralized and examined and disposed of. Normally, the entire process would take two days—one day for the old specimen, one day for the new.
For this work, we had a matter of hours, and no room for error.
It was two o’clock in the morning by the time we began working in earnest. Two thirty, really, because Seyed insisted I take Martine out of the lab while he drained and euthanized 4896-T. Sentimental of him, but I understood. Watching the neutralization of a specimen isn’t easy, especially if they wake up.
Still, it felt like a waste of time. Martine could have turned her back, if she didn’t want to watch.
By the time we returned to the lab, the failed specimen was on the autopsy table. Seyed had erected a cloth drape between the dissection setup and the rest of the lab. It was a screen wetypically used to hide works-in-progress from view during rare visits from company executives who wanted to see where their money was going—they wanted to see our progress, but they were always squeamish about our process.
The drape seemed like overkill to me at first, but the moment Seyed made his first incision, I understood his reasoning. The sound of flesh parting echoed in the near-silent lab, and Martine flinched violently at the clang of Seyed dropping his scalpel onto a lab tray.
Perhaps turning her back wouldn’t have been sufficient after all.
“Martine,” I said, noticing the way her hands twitched nervously at her skirt, “would you like to help me get started?”
“All right,” she whispered.
I could pretend that I let her help out of kindness, in order to distract her from the wet sounds that came from behind the screen. Or maybe I could pretend that I was exploiting her need to help—cruel and mercenary, taking advantage of her accommodating nature to make my work move along faster.
I could pretend either of those. I could even pretend that I knew which one it really was.
It doesn’t matter. What matters is that Martine was the one who prepared the tissue sample for sequencing.
I loaned her a lab coat to protect her dress, anticipating that she would spill something on herself. I showed her how to double-layer her gloves so it would be easier to change them again and again, even if her palms started to sweat. I gave her careful, step-by-step instructions. I used a soft voice and small words.
When I thought she understood what I was asking her to do, I left her behind with a set of shears, a scalpel, and an emulsifier. I was already dreading the way I’d need to coddle her through the next few hours of work. I’d always resented having to cosset my assistants, but I was prepared to hold Martine’s hand through the entire process.
Much to my surprise, Martine turned out not to need coddlingat all. She was quick and efficient, and she asked for the right amount of guidance. I checked her work at every step of the process; every time, she’d done precisely what I’d asked.
We traded places at a few critical junctures—her taking over a menial part of the tank preparation while I handled a tricky bit of tissue separation or fluid sampling—but ultimately, it was her work.
I trusted her with a job that I should really have given to Seyed. He knew how to prepare samples, and he would have done it without any management from me. I could have let Martine deal with the tank preparation, and I could have done the autopsy, and Seyed could have prepared the tissue, and everything would probably have been fine. If I were going to do the experiment again, I’m sure that’s how I would do it.
But it didn’t occur to me at the time. Sample preparation is more concrete than tank preparation, smaller in scale. It’s a more complex job, but it’s simpler to explain, and the steps are easy to break down. And, all that justification aside—it felt better, somehow, giving Martine that job. Challenging her.
She sank into the task, enough that she didn’t seem disturbed by the whine of Seyed’s bonesaw. I occasionally caught her giving her work a satisfied smile.
For all that I’d feared she’d be incompetent, it was startlingly easy to guide her through the process. She was a natural. I hadn’t expected to be proud of her, but there it was.
By dawn, we were ready.
Specimen 4896-T was bagged and ready for incineration. The yolk that would grow Nathan was prepared—machine-printed stem cells, a half-dozen growth factors, stabilizers, stripped-down free-floating cell frames, all suspended in a low volume of synthetic amnio. My hands shook with fatigue as I double-checked the levels on the emulsion. This was the compound that we were going to use to grow a new version of the man I’d married.
We didn’t have extra growth materials to spare, not ones I could justify within my operating budget, especially now that Iwas going to have to reconcile my budget with Seyed’s little side business. And we didn’t have extra Nathan.
It needed to be perfect.
“Okay,” I said. “I think we’re ready.”
There was nothing climactic about the work that followed. There was no charge in the air, no tension, no triumph. We were all exhausted. Seyed and I were trying to maintain our usual routine, while stepping around the betrayal that lingered between us. Martine stayed out of the way, watching quietly, her eyes lingering on the equipment.
Filling the tank went according to plan, exactly the way it always did. Seyed depressed the plunger that pushed Nathan’s emulsion into the base of the tank. At the same time, I started the flow of substrate—a combination of synthetic amnio and perfluorocarbon. The two liquids entered the tank at the same rate, mixing together as they equalized. The process was exactly like tempering eggs; the amnio that was already in the tissue slurry made it easier to combine with the substrate. It kept the tissue from crystallizing too rapidly, from congealing into a sloppy archipelago of useless flesh.
Nothing went wrong. The tank filled steadily, blood-pink fluid rising to the top of the tempered glass. Bubbles moved slowly through the thick liquid, rising to break at the surface. By the time all of those bubbles were gone, the liquid would set like cooled gelatin.
