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The Garden
Antonio Pena, a small claims court attorney with a quiet but successful practice in Lebanon, New Hampshire, was enjoying a hot shower after a long set of tennis with his law partner when the contact lens in his left eye began to glow.
He blinked hard, twice, to dismiss it. “Siri, do not disturb, please.”
“Do Not Disturb set,” a soft, synthetic voice replied. For several seconds, the gentle hot patter of water on his shoulders was the only sensation that mattered in the world.
His contact lens flashed again.
“Siri.” He let a little heat into his voice, though of course Siri didn’t care what tone he used with her. “I said, set Do Not–”
“Emergency message from Lori,” Siri interrupted. That was a first. Siri had never interrupted him.
A cold shock flashed through his veins, momentarily defeating the heat of the shower. Three blinks, deliberately spaced, accepted the message, and the little green dot in his peripheral vision expanded into a line of text.
LP: ACCIDENT CHECK NEWS NOW
The hell? Did she think he was an ambulance chaser? Sure, the office had been a bit slow the past few months, but he hardly need to go scraping for clients. A bit annoyed, he opened his personalized newsfeed and began scanning through the items.
He found it immediately. The same article headlined the national, international and local sections: NEW HAMPSHIRE MAGLEV DERAILS, DOZENS FEARED DEAD.
Fuck. He fumbled for the shower nozzle, shutting it off and stumbling out of the shower while scanning the article. Images from drone cameras filled half his vision, showing the tangled mess of metal and trees that had once been a high-speed train. Dozens of emergency vehicles surrounded it or floated in the air overhead. Rescue workers in bright, reflective clothes climbed over the wreckage like ants. At one point, the drone camera panned out and up, and he saw Lebanon’s rolling, modest skyline on the horizon, defined by the county courthouse and the steeple atop the Methodist church he sometimes rode past on his bike.
More news articles appeared. The accident was already the top story in the nation and rapidly becoming a top story around the world. Maglev accidents, much less mass-casualty events, were almost unheard of in the late 21st century. Messages of condolence from the United Nations began rolling in.
He could barely see, his vision was so cluttered with text and drone footage and social platforms erupting with comments by turns excited, horrified, grieving and detached. Friends from decades ago, barely remembered friends who felt like characters from a different life, began pinging him with private messages. Closer friends, real friends he actually knew and met and liked, began updating their statuses to let everyone know they were alive. After a moment of clumsy confusion, he figured out how to do the same.
He stubbed his toe on the edge of the shower door. He cursed loudly and stumbled out of the bathroom, naked and dripping wet, leaving a trail of water into the bedroom. Still he scrolled through the articles, searching for the only important piece of information that mattered.
There. Just four minutes ago, the county medical director released the list. No names yet, just towns, followed by a number.
LEBANON: 22
CONCORD: 15
MANCHESTER: 12
NEWPORT: 7
DARTMOUTH, UNINCORPORATED: 4
MERRIMACK VALLEY, UNINCORPORATED: 2
OTHER, OUT OF STATE: 16
Twenty-two. Twenty-two confirmed dead in their town. He dismissed every open window in his augmented vision and began pulling open drawers on Lori’s half of the bureau. He tossed aside lacy underthings, socks, bras and everything else a woman kept in her drawers until he found it: a small, off-white plastic container about the size of a family bible. He pressed his thumbs into the lock, and the container opened like a flower, the lid parting into dozens of petals that peeled away. Cold air wafted out from within, followed by wisps of fog.
A message appeared in his vision. LP: ON THE WAY NOW, FIVE MINUTES. IS IT READY?
The molded interior of the capsule was filled with dozens of color-coded syringes, each not much larger than a pencil. “Uh, yeah. G-got it. What color?”
LP: RED FOR ME, BLUE FOR YOU.
Okay. Blue first. He carefully pried the syringe out of its cradle and removed the colored tip. The syringe came alive, and less than a second later his vision flashed with notice of a successful pairing. Simple, diagrammatic instructions appeared in his eyes, and he followed them, placing the business end of the syringe against the crux of his elbow.
He felt it squirm. Dozens of tiny, hair-thin filaments intruded into his skin, finding the vein and maneuvering it into position. A bright red DO NOT MOVE appeared in the center of his sight, and the syringe sprang its hypodermic needle into the vein. He jerked at the sudden pain and the cold rush as the syringe’s contents began flowing toward his heart.
It was done in seconds. The needle withdrew, and the syringe closed the wound with a dab of biofix. He set it down and began to shake.
Nerves, not the medicine. It would be several minutes before those special molecules went to work.
He heard the front door open and slam shut, followed by feet on the stairs leading up to the bedroom. Lori burst in. Her hair was matted with sweat and clung to her forehead, compressed into odd geometric shapes by her bicycle helmet. She dropped her coat on the floor, blouse already half-unbuttoned, when she saw him and froze in surprise, a question already forming on her face.
“Shower,” he said. “Sorry, I was in the shower.”
She snorted, amused. “Whatever. Did you use yours yet?” She walked over, peeling the rest of her blouse away and tossing it on the floor, revealing muscular, tanned shoulders and a small bust that barely needed the modest bra that concealed it.
“Yeah. Careful, they’re cold.” He handed her the red syringe.
“That’s fine. Supposed to be.” She gave the device a little shake, then popped the red cap off and held it against her shoulder without any hesitation. After a moment she pulled it away. A tiny dot of blood welled up behind it.
He brushed it away with his finger, then stepped back. The edge of the bed hit behind his knees, and he sat down hard. The shakes were rougher now, almost convulsive, and he felt his heart hammering in his chest. Each breath seemed to draw in five lungfuls of air. A wash of dizziness turned the room upside down. Definitely the medicine. The room swung as Lori carefully leaned him back on the mattress.
He closed his eyes until the dizzy spell passed. “I think it’s working.”
She laughed, and he felt her fingers wrap around a delicate part of his anatomy. Christ, he hadn’t felt this hard since his twenties. Modern medicine might have given him the body of a young man as he neared the century mark, but certain appetites still slowed over the decades.
But damn, that drug was something. He opened his eyes and grabbed Lori’s wrist hard. “How long will yours take?”
She twisted out of his grasp and pressed her palms against his chest. She was strong, his Lori. Part of what he loved about her. She lowered her head for a long, hungry kiss.
“A day or so,” she mumbled. “Hormones are slower than drugs. But we can get started now.”
He was already naked, of course. He peeled off the rest of her clothes, tearing them in his impatience. She giggled as the fabric bit into her skin, leaving thin bruised lines. But eventually they came together, driven by lust and drugs and hope, more than anything else hope. It was desperate, boundless hope that whipped them on with frenzied speed, caring nothing for pleasure or love, only for climax and and the ancient, ageless communion of egg and seed.
They raced against the thousands of other couples in Lebanon to conceive a child.
Three more victims died of their wounds overnight. Twenty-five citizen slots were now open for residents of Lebanon.
One slot was claimed immediately. A bookbinder’s apprentice with a shop in one of the craft studios lining the old main street revealed on her social portal that she was already six weeks pregnant. Antonio read her announcement post and studied the vid alongside it over a breakfast of English muffins and sliced cantaloupe. The woman smile as she went down a zipline in some humid rainforest crowded with bright, tropical flowers. It looked like fun.
“Fucking cheating, if you ask me,” Lori said. Her own breakfast plate was larger than his, filled with carbs and proteins: toasted wheat bread, whole apples, a bowl of oatmeal drizzled with honey and blueberries, and a small tourene of yogurt. A few pills lay in a pile beside the plate, ready for her to swallow at the end of the meal.
“It’s legal,” he said, though part of him agreed with his partner. Getting pregnant like that, before anyone in your jurisdiction had died, was an audacious gamble. Death wasn’t exactly defeated, but since the Booster Project released the first, primitive version of mass genetic reediting viruses in the 2040s, death was no longer inevitable. Aging was something that happened to wine and cheese. In the era of the Garden most diseases were only found in medical textbooks.
Yet this bookbinder had taken a chance, conceiving a child just a few weeks ago, with no guarantee a spot would open up for it. She was either exceptionally optimistic or heedlessly cruel.
Maybe just irresponsible. That was a good compromise. She was irresponsible. He looked across the table at Lori, who wore the distracted expression of a person reading something on her contacts.
Irresponsible. And yet, her gamble had paid off. He spent the rest of the morning wishing they’d taken the same wager. Then they wouldn’t be locked in this merciless race with their neighbors.
The county sheriff’s office confirmed what everyone was hoping the next day. In a simple, short, somber post on the state’s social portal, she announced that a preliminary investigation into the maglev accident pointed to an undetected failure in a capacitor bottle. All of the deaths were caused by a tragic accident rather than deliberate human action.
Hundreds of celebrations broke out across town at the news. Families gathered for spontaneous barbeques and pool parties. Women toasted each other with non-alcoholic champagne and wished each other well, then withdrew to stare at their potential rivals. Decades-old friendships evaporated like mist. In the Garden’s post-scarcity world, competition was fierce for the greatest treasure of all.
Children. Antonio remembered them, vaguely, in foggy recollections of his own youth. The cure for aging and death hadn’t granted humans more perfect memories, and he struggled to remember the last time he’d seen a real child. Not an auto-doll or an avatar, but an actual, flesh-and-blood human child.
Years, at least. Hadn’t there been that parade in Concorde, the one his sister dragged him along to because she’d helped decorate the floats, and the state’s elementary school was marching to celebrate Earth Day or somesuch? Dozens of them had been in the street between floats, twirling batons or holding banners or just running around with the crazed, boundless energy he distantly recalled once possessing himself. It was like watching something out of a documentary.
His contacts flashed. He accepted the message immediately.
LP: COME SAVE ME?
He turned away from his own conversation and scanned the backyard. Lori was near the veranda, a polite smile pasted on her face. Three other women had her surrounded and appeared to be making small-talk. Antonio recognized them from Lori’s job at the clinic. It would explain their surgically perfect faces and millimeter tight bodies.
Fuck. Okay, he could do this. He took a long swallow from his O’Doul’s and wished again that alcoholic drinks were allowed at these gatherings.
“Ladies,” he said, breaking into their little hen circle. He edged around to stand next to Lori. “Enjoying the party?”
“Oh yeah, totally. Thanks for the invite.” Chrissy wrapped her arm around his and leaned against his shoulder. She spoke with a valley girl accent that seemed out-of-place on her Indian features. Of the three he’d known her the longest, and still hadn’t figured out if the accent was a deliberate affection on her part or some sort of sly joke.
She could also afford to be affectionate. The entire town had seen her naked in a series of explicit leaked portal vids. Supposedly an accident, but Chrissy hadn’t seemed too upset by it. She flaunted her body like she flaunted her accent. She hadn’t even pretended they were fake.
“We were talking about the accident,” Lori edged in. She tangled her fingers around his and gave him a gentle tug toward her. “There’s going to be a memorial service at the Methodist chapel tomorrow, and we were thinking of going.”
“It’s supposed to be good luck,” Matoko said. “You know, like the spirits of the deceased are there to bless all the women trying to replace them? It’ll be pretty crowded I bet.”
“That’s…” Ghoulish? He struggled. “Really nice. What about, like, the families?”
Chrissy shrugged. Lori tugged at the sleeve of her blouse, worrying the fabric.
Finally, the third of Lori’s coworkers spoke. Roselita was short, dark-skinned and dark-haired, and she kept her temper bottled up well. But on the rare occasions it erupted Antonio was careful to keep his distance. Given that her husband was in Europe on a book-signing tour, and thus unavailable to help her participate in the pregnancy frenzy that was sweeping Lebanon, he doubted she’d be in a good mood.
Her tone was even, though, and her words thoughtful. “The families can come or not. They have private services – the public service is for the town.”
“Yeah, like, you can view this as a tragedy or an opportunity,” Chrissy said. “But, like, scientific studies have shown that people who have a positive outlook on things live longer and healthier lives. So you might as well look at the bright side, right?”
Antonio was fairly sure those studies were from the pre-Garden era, when health and lifespan were meaningful concepts. People could be as dour as they wanted nowadays and still live forever. Unless they were on the wrong maglev train, anyway. He took a sip from his beer to hide his grimace.
They made smalltalk for a few more minutes, until Lori made some excuse or other to escape. She dragged him away, and he held in the living room with the blinds drawn until her shakes stopped.
She was strong, his Lori. But nothing in modern life prepared women for the kind of pressure she was under. And nothing she could do would make the incipient life inside her grow any faster.
The first round of results came out 10 days after the maglev accident. As a courtesy to the rest of the women in town, most of those trying for pregnancy announced on their portal pages when their tests came back positive.
It was a form of psychological warfare, too. For every positive result that was announced, more women would abandon the effort. With over a thousand couples trying for a baby, only those who got started on the first day or two really stood a chance.
By the end of the second week, 94 women had announced their pregnancies. Only one, the bookbinders apprentice, felt any sort of certainty or comfort in the fact. With only 25 citizen slots available, the town was preparing for a heartless but essential culling.
When Antonio came home from his practice that night, Lori was waiting for him. She had a tablet out and was scanning through the news. There was a bowl of iron-fortified wasabi peas on the counter beside her, and they slowly vanished as she read.
She finished chewing down the last few before speaking. “It says I’m supposed to get an appointment.”
“What?” He sat beside her and refilled the peas. “Already?”
“We have to prove it was naturally conceived. Blood tests, ultrasounds. They’ll do a credit check to look for any unusual purchases. You’ll need to provide a statement.”
“Like, a deposition? I, Antonio Pena, do solemnly swear that I had sex with my wife after the maglev accident?”
“I think that’ll work.” Lori swiped through something on the tablet. “I don’t want to mess this up, you know?”
“We’ll be fine.” He stole a few peas for himself. “Those hormones are okay, though, right?”
“Everything I’ve read says yes. They’re just counterfactors for my birth control. As long as we didn’t use any, uh, artificial interventions, we should be fine.”
Great. Another thing to worry about. He squeezed Lori’s hand in his and began searching for obstetricians with open appointments in New Hampshire.
There were none. The closest he could find was in New York. Obstetrics had gone out of style in the new era.
By the end of the first trimester, women had started dropping out of the race.
That was the euphemism polite society used. The maglev accident was unusual enough that papers across the country covered the replacement race, providing updates much in the way they covered sports. As the three-month anniversary of the crash passed, it was clear that some women (or their partners) had been a bit too slow.
A total of 107 were officially certified by the state as potential mothers, indicating they had successfully conceived in a two-week period after the accident. Some women had done the math, realized they were slow, and quietly ended their pregnancies. It was a kindness to do it as soon as possible during gestation. At least, that was the common wisdom posted on millions of portal pages across the nation. End it now, end it early. You cannot miss what you never had.
Antonio scrolled through the morning news. A total of 47 women in Lebanon were still pregnant. All had reasonable claims on the 25 citizen slots. In a half-a-year, just over half of them would become mothers.
He sipped his coffee. It was hotter than he expected and stung his tongue. He set it down to cool and gazed across the table at Lori.
She didn’t look pregnant. Of course, at the three-month point no woman looked pregnant. She certainly felt pregnant, though, and frequently told him so. The bouts of morning sickness had passed already, and she wore special compression socks to keep her ankles from swelling, but otherwise she was the same Lori he remembered marrying all those decades ago.
But there were other changes. Thin lines in the skin around her eyes. A slight tremor in her hands. Panic attacks. For the first time in her life, she was presented with a problem completely and totally out of her control. A life was on the line and she could do nothing but hope.
“Hey,” he said. “You okay?”
She nodded. “Yeah. Yeah. You?”
He smiled for her. “Fine. Any plans for the day?”
“Biking with the team,” she said. “Down the old 89 trail toward Concord, stopping for lunch in Freemount, then back. About sixty kilometers. Wanna come?”
Christ, sixty kilometres? Sometimes it was like he barely even knew her. “Maybe next weekend?”
She nodded. Any hope that it might have been a passing fancy, an offer made out of politeness, vanished when his calendar pinged with an invite for next weekend’s ride. He made a mental note to check his tires.
Riding cross-country sucked. But it was good if it kept Lori’s mind off other things.
Four hours later, he was at his desk at the downtown practice, reviewing a draft adjudication between two neighbors whose property was defined by a stream. The stream had, over the decades, slowly silted up and overflowed its banks, which not only damaged the southern neighbor’s tomatoes but also redefined the stream’s path, essentially changing the property boundary, which was one reason modern property law required mensurated satellite coordinates rather than local landmarks. Fortunately the neighbors were friendly with each other, friends for decades. They played football on the same highschool team about a century ago. No need for a judge – just a lawyer to make sure everything looked right.
That’s how most law was practiced in the Garden. Paralegals no longer existed, having been replaced by AIs some decades back. Even as a lawyer, his job most consisted of reading text drafted by a computer. It had nearly destroyed the profession before the Maintenance Laws were passed, mandating a human-in-the-loop for a broad range of jobs. The robot revolution was safely deterred, once people realized that white-collar jobs might be on the chopping block.
His left contact flashed. He blinked hard, twice, to dismiss it. “Siri, set do not disturb, please.”
Wait. His mind flashed back three months to the shower. He blinked three times in the space of a second to accept the message.
It came through via audio. “Mister Pena? This is Constable Brantley. There’s been an accident. Your wife is being taken to Concord Municipal. Are you able to meet us there?”
The folder and its pages slid out of his fingers. An overwhelming dread crashed over him, chilling him like an ice water bath. He stood, knocking the chair away, and tried to respond.
He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t breath. He tried to inhale but the dread crushed his chest, squeezing the air out of him. He bent over, double, and gasped for air.
“Mister Pena? Are you there, sir?”
“Yes,” he croaked. “I’m here. I’m here. Is… is she okay?”
“She’s awake and alert, sir. That’s a good sign. I’ll leave the rest to the doctors. Can you make it here? I can have a squad car pick you up if you need.”
Okay. Okay. The pressure on his chest eased. He drew in a deep breath and held it for all of a second before he had to exhale. “Yeah. Uh, yes, I mean. I’m in downtown Lebanon, Pena and Associates Law Practice, across from the courthouse. Can someone pick me up?”
There was a pause of a few seconds before Brantley responded. “There’s a car on the way. And, hang on… Your wife says she’s fine and not to worry.”
That was great to hear. Impossible to obey, though – Antonio worried all the way to Concord, and not all the patrolman’s platitudes as they drove could assure him that his wife would be fine.
There were more police at the hospital. Two officers stood outside the emergency room entrance. A drone hovered over the parking lot. Cruisers with lights flashing parked on the grass beside the ambulance bay. They let him pass without trouble, escorted by the patrolman.
In the end, finding Lori was a relief and an anti-climax. She was sitting on a gurney, talking to a plainclothes officer in a private room. The officer had a badge on a lanyard around her neck and took notes with the help of a tiny recording drone clinging to her shoulders. They paused as he walked in, and Lori stood to wrap him in a hug.
He squeezed her tight. “Jesus, Lori, you scared me. Are you okay? Shouldn’t you be lying down?”
“I’m fine. Just a few scrapes and a sprain. Fell off my bike.” She sat back on the bed, and he noticed the angry red weals on her face and neck. Her right arm was bound in a soft cast. A small transdermal patch on her neck delivered some sort of medication into her bloodstream.
“Why, uh…” He sat beside her, holding her free hand in his lap. “If you don’t mind, officers, why is the law concerned with this?”
“We don’t believe it was an accident, Mister Pena,” the officer said. She extended her hand. “Detective Albright, Concord Police Department. Footage from other bikes in the race clearly shows that she was deliberately struck by another cyclist.”
“That…” He took a breath. Lori leaned closer, and he wrapped his arm around her shoulder, pulling her close. “Who would do that? Why?”
“We have a good description of the alleged offender,” Albright said. “He fled immediately after the accident and we don’t have any footage of his face, but there’s a limited pool of suspects. We’ll narrow them down based on credible alibis and start questioning the remainder.”
He looked at Lori. She stared down at the linoleum. Her wounded hand cradled her belly, still too early to show any outward sign of her condition.
“What suspects?” Even as he spoke, he knew the answer.
“Husbands and partners of the other women attempting to claim citizen slots for their children,” Albright said. Her tone was even, matter-of-fact, as though explaining the basics of traffic law to someone she’d pulled over for speeding. “We’ll be stepping up patrols around the city. If you’d like, we can detail an officer to your street. Keep people from getting ideas.”
“I can’t believe someone would do that,” Lori said. She sounded almost thoughtful, philosophic about the possibility someone had just tried to murder her unborn child. “That’s not supposed to happen anymore.”
“It’s human nature,” Albright said. She reached up to her shoulder and pulled the the little recorder drone off her shoulder. It folded its legs up and compressed into a marble-sized ball, which she slipped into her pocket. “Most crime is driven by necessity and by unmet needs. That used to be drugs or money or whatever, back before the Garden. Now? You’ve got something very precious, and that makes people regress. But don’t worry, we’ll find the idiot who did this and put him somewhere he can’t hurt you.”
Antonio swallowed. “You’re sure you’ll find him?”
“Oh yeah.” The detective waved her hand absently. “People don’t know how to commit crimes anymore. We’ll have this guy by the end of the day. So, you still want that patrol car?”
He looked at Lori. She nodded.
“Yeah. We’ll take it.”
Over the next three months, Antonio became an expert on the minutia of the Citizenship Laws. Aside from a brief course decades ago in law school, it wasn’t an area he’d had much experience with. Fewer than one percent of his clients over the years had been parents of minor children.
The law had a lot to say about Lori and the child she was carrying. In a very real sense, the very concept of the Garden was based on women’s wombs.
Unborn children were considered citizens as soon as they reached the point of viability outside the womb. Court decisions over the years had narrowed that concept further, eliminating artificial wombs and cryogenics and every type of surrogacy. Once a baby could breathe using its own lungs, it was considered a person. With modern NICUs and ventilation technology, that point was around the 20th week of gestation.
Assuming, of course, an open citizen slot was available. If a slot was not open, the child couldn’t be born. Other interventions, cloaked in the guise of modernity and medicine but really neither of those things, prevented the birth of children for whom no slot was available. It was the great compromise the Garden era was founded on. Eternal, ageless life and health could not come without some cost. Just as ancient man had given up the right to inflict violence upon his neighbors, modern humans gave up the right to procreate. It was for the best. Who could trust flawed, imperfect humans with that sort of power?
It had been 19 weeks since the maglev accident. Thirty-six pregnant women hid in their houses across Lebanon, police cruisers parked on the streets outside, scanning the news and their portals.
Some news still came in the mail. The most important types of news. He sat across from Lori at the table in their spotless, sterile kitchen. She held a sealed envelope in her hands.
“It’s thin,” she mumbled. “Is that good or bad?”
College rejection letters were thin. They were bad news. Was it the same for letters from obstetricians? Were there enough obstetricians left in the world to survey for an answer? He just shook his head.
With shaking fingers, Lori tore the end off the envelope and tapped the contents out. A single page folded in three. She opened it and read in silence.
He waited. He watched her face, not the letter.
Her lips tightened. She swallowed once, twice, then turned and exhaled hard. She folded the letter back up and passed it across the table to him.
He didn’t open it. He grabbed her hand instead, held it, and waited.
“It’s too soon still,” she said. It burst of her. “Her lungs haven’t developed enough yet.”
“We have a week still before any deliveries start. That’s time. We can get a hotel down in Concord and check every day until—”
“Ten days.” Lori said. She tapped the letter. “Doctor Bertrand won’t induce delivery for ten more days. She said it would be—” her voice caught, and she froze for a moment, the words stuck in her throat like a bone. “—unethical to try before that.”
Ten days. Ten days was three days too long. For all that they’d rushed into conceiving, they were still three days slow. How many other women would deliver in those three days? How many citizen slots would still be available for their daughter?
They couldn’t exactly ask. Health information was one of the last abodes of privacy in the Garden, though most citizens were in perfect shape and diseases long banished. Funny how that had survived as one of their last taboos.
“It’s only three days difference,” he said. “There are 25 slots for 36 women. You only have to beat 11 of them.”
“Beat.” Lori barked out a quick, humorless laugh. She dabbed at her eyes with her fingers. “I can’t exactly make it go faster, you know.”
“Yeah.” He gave her hand another squeeze. “I know.”
He wanted to tell her to relax, to say that stress wasn’t good for the baby. But he was smart enough to keep that bit of wisdom to himself.
“Hi Lori. Sorry to keep you waiting.” The disembodied voice of Doctor Bertrand floated in the air above their living room coffee table. Charts and high-frequency ultrasounds and test results of every kind lay spread out on the cypress. “I have the pulmonary capacity imaging results from the lab. Your daughter’s lungs are still small but within the range we consider normal. Compared with her peer group, she’s at about the 10th percentile.”
Was that it? Were those words his daughter’s death sentence, or had they already received it a week ago, when Bertrand’s envelope arrived? Or was there some test awaiting them still that would seal her fate? Antonio tumbled over those thoughts, stuck on them, until his wife’s angry voice broke through his daze.
“What do you mean, normal?” Lori pushed the pages around, searching for the appropriate bell curve. “Tenth percentile?! That’s too small!”
“It means, out of one-hundred babies, ten will have lungs less developed than hers at this stage of gestation,” Bertrand said. His voice was calm, with a stern edge, like he was lecturing a wayward student. “That is still well-within normal bounds.”
“No!” Lori shrieked at the air. “You don’t understand! She has to be born now! Today! There are only 14 slots left open. We can’t wait!”
“If I induce delivery now I can’t guarantee she’ll be able to survive,” the empty voice offered. “In fact, I can almost guarantee she won’t. She needs at least another week just to have a chance.”
Silence followed. From him, from Lori, from the doctor. Lori stared at the space above the table, her mouth agape.
Oh, he thought, when finally he could think again. So that’s a death sentence.
Angel Valez Martinez was born at 11:47 p.m. on a Tuesday. He was seven pounds, six ounces, had a full head of dark hair, and claimed the final open citizen slot in Lebanon, New Hampshire. Antonio read the news when he woke up Wednesday morning.
Lori was still asleep. She had curled up on her side, fingers clawing at the sheets. He could feel her breath on his shoulder.
The sun was starting to creep through the blinds on their east-facing window. In a few minutes it would be bright enough to wake her. At that moment, Antonio wished for nothing more than the power to close the blinds tighter, to keep her from waking for a little bit longer. She should not have to bear this.
He settled for holding her closer. It was all he could do.
Later, after a somber, silent breakfast, they sat at the kitchen table. Their portal pages were quiet – most of their friends and family were smart enough not to ask for updates at such a critical time. Everyone knew how many citizen slots remained, who was celebrating the arrival of a new family member, and which families were conspicuously silent. He began mentally composing a thoughtful message with the right amount of grief and gratitude.
It should’ve been easier. He was a lawyer. But all he could do was stare out the window at the pear tree in their backyard. Robins had built a nest in it, and he could see them sometimes flying in and out of the canopy.
He licked his lips. “I can call Bertrand. Schedule the procedure.”
Lori didn’t answer. She stared out the window at the tree. The broad, dark leaves danced in the wind.
“We should do it as soon as possible,” he continued. “It’s, uh, safer and healthier that way. The earlier the better.”
“Did you read that somewhere?”
“It’s just…” He stopped and emptied his mind. Deep breaths. “It’s just how it is. Do you really want it growing inside you, still? Knowing what’s coming?”
“It?” Lori turned to stare at him.
Fine. They were arguing. “Her. You know what I mean.”
“I don’t believe you!” Her voice was quiet but seethed with rage. As if he was responsible for the law or their perfect society. “You’re ready to give up on her, just like that!”
“I’m not giving up. It’s better this way. Do you really want to wait? Until she’s almost ready to be born? Do you know what they’ll do to you?”
“They’ll…” She shook her head. Her lips had turned gray, her face ashen. She balled her hands into fists on the table and leaned forward, resting her forehead on them. He could hear her ragged breaths. “It could still happen. Maybe someone else will die? We have four months.”
Someone else might die. It was possible. But over the past decade, not counting the maglev accident, only three residents of Lebanon had died in accidents. All the old scourges of the past – disease, age, war, car accidents, cigarettes, 9-to-5 jobs – had vanished. Their society had defeated them all and replaced every horseman of the apocalypse. They had the Garden, but like that first garden, the mythical Eden, mankind could only remain within its walls if he obeyed its rules. And no rule was more iron than the citizen law.
There was only so much space in the Garden.
He closed his eyes. “We’ll talk later, okay?”
She snorted. “Fine.”
But it wasn’t fine, and they didn’t talk.
The months passed with terrible speed.
Society turned away from them. To walk the streets, to visit shops, to eat in restaurants as a pregnant woman was rare. To be visibly, hugely, obviously pregnant, with no open citizen slot, was anathema. She carried a slowly growing corpse in her belly.
The weeks passed in a blur. Antonio remembered bits of them. Choosing Helena’s name. Ordering a crib. It was all he could do to convince Lori to wait before setting up a registry for baby gifts. She was determined to try. To gamble everything.
His thoughts turned dark. He contemplated, in the quiet hours of the night, opening a citizen slot by ending his own life. What nobler sacrifice could there be, but a father giving his life for his daughter? Was Lori thinking those same thoughts, when she lay awake beside him? Was that the escape from this trap?
Had he still been mortal, had the Garden not banished age and infirmity and death, he might have done it. But the years stretched out before him, an endless life. Other opportunities might come along in those long centuries. The laws might change. New lands might open. More disasters might happen. Why close that door now, for a daughter he would never know, a daughter not yet even born?
As the ninth month of Lori’s pregnancy arrived, he found himself walking the streets of downtown Lebanon. Boutique shops lined the old brick road, restored just a few years back. More bikes than cars filled it these days. When you lived forever, there was less need to rush everywhere. Most people just walked.
It wasn’t until he arrived at his destination that he realized what he’d been searching for. A small memorial of perpetual flowers and colorful cards, replaced every few days, decorated the steps of the Methodist church. The names of the maglev victims were written in those scraps, forgotten by almost all in the frenzied rush to replace them. He reached down, idly, and plucked one card from the mass. It was lavender, folded in half, and when he opened it a small picture tumbled out. He caught it with the tips of his fingers.
A young man and woman, dressed in colorful floral shirts, posed for the camera. The man held up a bottle of Corona and smiled at the drone. Something had caught the woman’s attention, and she looked off-frame, her mouth open in a silent call.
Which of them had died, he wondered. The man, the woman, or both? He put the picture back in the card and set it down.
There were dozens of such messages at his feet. No one read them; the only people who cared for these souls were the ones who’d left the messages in the first place. Letters to no one. He stared at them for a while, then walked into the church.
The layout hadn’t changed since the memorial service. He walked up the aisle between the pews, and took a seat near the front. A few other worshipers sat reading or praying. He stared at the austere gold crucifix on the wall above the altar.
In time, he realized he wasn’t alone. A middle-aged man sat beside him, dressed in ecclesiastical robes. It was rare to see someone with obvious signs of aging – a deliberate choice, one that even the extremely religious rarely took. Nothing in the bible explicitly prohibited eternal life on Earth.
“Reverend,” he mumbled.
“You look troubled, my son,” the reverend said. “Here for guidance?”
Antonio swallowed. “No, just to pray, I think.”
“Ah.” The reverend clasped him on the shoulder. “You’ve come to a good place, then. Was there something you wanted to pray about?”
The cross blurred. He blinked rapidly. “I don’t know.”
The reverend nodded slowly. “I see. You know, when I find myself troubled, I sometimes find it’s easier to think of those who are less fortunate than I. It makes me grateful for my own blessings.”
“Grateful.” Antonio choked on the word. “Yeah?”
“Yes. I know it can be hard to be grateful for our blessings, sometimes. I won’t pretend to know what troubles you today, but remember that there are those who are worse.” The reverend stood and straightened his robes. “If you aren’t sure what to pray for, perhaps ask God to give his blessings to the poor Westings boy.”
Antonio blinked. “Who?”
“The boy in the news? Who had the tractor accident?” The reverend shook his head. “Terrible thing. So young.”
“Oh, right.” Antonio mumble. “Sorry, just… uh, forgot his name.”
The reverend said something else, but Antonio was beyond paying attention. For the first time in days, he pulled up his news feed.
Eric Westings. A 14-year old Lebanon boy, injured when the tractor he was joyriding around his parents’ wooded property overturned. Trapped beneath it for hours. Brain damage. Coma. Images of traumatized parents holding each other outside the hospital in Concord. He recognized the doors of the emergency room behind them.
Think of those who are less fortunate. The reverend’s words bounced around his mind.
“I am,” he mumbled. For the first time in almost a century, he fell to his knees in the pews.
Antonio Pena, the blessed, ageless, immortal citizen of the perfect society, of the Garden, closed his eyes and prayed for a child to die.
He blinked hard, twice, to dismiss it. “Siri, do not disturb, please.”
“Do Not Disturb set,” a soft, synthetic voice replied. For several seconds, the gentle hot patter of water on his shoulders was the only sensation that mattered in the world.
His contact lens flashed again.
“Siri.” He let a little heat into his voice, though of course Siri didn’t care what tone he used with her. “I said, set Do Not–”
“Emergency message from Lori,” Siri interrupted. That was a first. Siri had never interrupted him.
A cold shock flashed through his veins, momentarily defeating the heat of the shower. Three blinks, deliberately spaced, accepted the message, and the little green dot in his peripheral vision expanded into a line of text.
LP: ACCIDENT CHECK NEWS NOW
The hell? Did she think he was an ambulance chaser? Sure, the office had been a bit slow the past few months, but he hardly need to go scraping for clients. A bit annoyed, he opened his personalized newsfeed and began scanning through the items.
He found it immediately. The same article headlined the national, international and local sections: NEW HAMPSHIRE MAGLEV DERAILS, DOZENS FEARED DEAD.
Fuck. He fumbled for the shower nozzle, shutting it off and stumbling out of the shower while scanning the article. Images from drone cameras filled half his vision, showing the tangled mess of metal and trees that had once been a high-speed train. Dozens of emergency vehicles surrounded it or floated in the air overhead. Rescue workers in bright, reflective clothes climbed over the wreckage like ants. At one point, the drone camera panned out and up, and he saw Lebanon’s rolling, modest skyline on the horizon, defined by the county courthouse and the steeple atop the Methodist church he sometimes rode past on his bike.
More news articles appeared. The accident was already the top story in the nation and rapidly becoming a top story around the world. Maglev accidents, much less mass-casualty events, were almost unheard of in the late 21st century. Messages of condolence from the United Nations began rolling in.
He could barely see, his vision was so cluttered with text and drone footage and social platforms erupting with comments by turns excited, horrified, grieving and detached. Friends from decades ago, barely remembered friends who felt like characters from a different life, began pinging him with private messages. Closer friends, real friends he actually knew and met and liked, began updating their statuses to let everyone know they were alive. After a moment of clumsy confusion, he figured out how to do the same.
He stubbed his toe on the edge of the shower door. He cursed loudly and stumbled out of the bathroom, naked and dripping wet, leaving a trail of water into the bedroom. Still he scrolled through the articles, searching for the only important piece of information that mattered.
There. Just four minutes ago, the county medical director released the list. No names yet, just towns, followed by a number.
LEBANON: 22
CONCORD: 15
MANCHESTER: 12
NEWPORT: 7
DARTMOUTH, UNINCORPORATED: 4
MERRIMACK VALLEY, UNINCORPORATED: 2
OTHER, OUT OF STATE: 16
Twenty-two. Twenty-two confirmed dead in their town. He dismissed every open window in his augmented vision and began pulling open drawers on Lori’s half of the bureau. He tossed aside lacy underthings, socks, bras and everything else a woman kept in her drawers until he found it: a small, off-white plastic container about the size of a family bible. He pressed his thumbs into the lock, and the container opened like a flower, the lid parting into dozens of petals that peeled away. Cold air wafted out from within, followed by wisps of fog.
A message appeared in his vision. LP: ON THE WAY NOW, FIVE MINUTES. IS IT READY?
The molded interior of the capsule was filled with dozens of color-coded syringes, each not much larger than a pencil. “Uh, yeah. G-got it. What color?”
LP: RED FOR ME, BLUE FOR YOU.
Okay. Blue first. He carefully pried the syringe out of its cradle and removed the colored tip. The syringe came alive, and less than a second later his vision flashed with notice of a successful pairing. Simple, diagrammatic instructions appeared in his eyes, and he followed them, placing the business end of the syringe against the crux of his elbow.
He felt it squirm. Dozens of tiny, hair-thin filaments intruded into his skin, finding the vein and maneuvering it into position. A bright red DO NOT MOVE appeared in the center of his sight, and the syringe sprang its hypodermic needle into the vein. He jerked at the sudden pain and the cold rush as the syringe’s contents began flowing toward his heart.
It was done in seconds. The needle withdrew, and the syringe closed the wound with a dab of biofix. He set it down and began to shake.
Nerves, not the medicine. It would be several minutes before those special molecules went to work.
He heard the front door open and slam shut, followed by feet on the stairs leading up to the bedroom. Lori burst in. Her hair was matted with sweat and clung to her forehead, compressed into odd geometric shapes by her bicycle helmet. She dropped her coat on the floor, blouse already half-unbuttoned, when she saw him and froze in surprise, a question already forming on her face.
“Shower,” he said. “Sorry, I was in the shower.”
She snorted, amused. “Whatever. Did you use yours yet?” She walked over, peeling the rest of her blouse away and tossing it on the floor, revealing muscular, tanned shoulders and a small bust that barely needed the modest bra that concealed it.
“Yeah. Careful, they’re cold.” He handed her the red syringe.
“That’s fine. Supposed to be.” She gave the device a little shake, then popped the red cap off and held it against her shoulder without any hesitation. After a moment she pulled it away. A tiny dot of blood welled up behind it.
He brushed it away with his finger, then stepped back. The edge of the bed hit behind his knees, and he sat down hard. The shakes were rougher now, almost convulsive, and he felt his heart hammering in his chest. Each breath seemed to draw in five lungfuls of air. A wash of dizziness turned the room upside down. Definitely the medicine. The room swung as Lori carefully leaned him back on the mattress.
He closed his eyes until the dizzy spell passed. “I think it’s working.”
She laughed, and he felt her fingers wrap around a delicate part of his anatomy. Christ, he hadn’t felt this hard since his twenties. Modern medicine might have given him the body of a young man as he neared the century mark, but certain appetites still slowed over the decades.
But damn, that drug was something. He opened his eyes and grabbed Lori’s wrist hard. “How long will yours take?”
She twisted out of his grasp and pressed her palms against his chest. She was strong, his Lori. Part of what he loved about her. She lowered her head for a long, hungry kiss.
“A day or so,” she mumbled. “Hormones are slower than drugs. But we can get started now.”
He was already naked, of course. He peeled off the rest of her clothes, tearing them in his impatience. She giggled as the fabric bit into her skin, leaving thin bruised lines. But eventually they came together, driven by lust and drugs and hope, more than anything else hope. It was desperate, boundless hope that whipped them on with frenzied speed, caring nothing for pleasure or love, only for climax and and the ancient, ageless communion of egg and seed.
They raced against the thousands of other couples in Lebanon to conceive a child.
Three more victims died of their wounds overnight. Twenty-five citizen slots were now open for residents of Lebanon.
One slot was claimed immediately. A bookbinder’s apprentice with a shop in one of the craft studios lining the old main street revealed on her social portal that she was already six weeks pregnant. Antonio read her announcement post and studied the vid alongside it over a breakfast of English muffins and sliced cantaloupe. The woman smile as she went down a zipline in some humid rainforest crowded with bright, tropical flowers. It looked like fun.
“Fucking cheating, if you ask me,” Lori said. Her own breakfast plate was larger than his, filled with carbs and proteins: toasted wheat bread, whole apples, a bowl of oatmeal drizzled with honey and blueberries, and a small tourene of yogurt. A few pills lay in a pile beside the plate, ready for her to swallow at the end of the meal.
“It’s legal,” he said, though part of him agreed with his partner. Getting pregnant like that, before anyone in your jurisdiction had died, was an audacious gamble. Death wasn’t exactly defeated, but since the Booster Project released the first, primitive version of mass genetic reediting viruses in the 2040s, death was no longer inevitable. Aging was something that happened to wine and cheese. In the era of the Garden most diseases were only found in medical textbooks.
Yet this bookbinder had taken a chance, conceiving a child just a few weeks ago, with no guarantee a spot would open up for it. She was either exceptionally optimistic or heedlessly cruel.
Maybe just irresponsible. That was a good compromise. She was irresponsible. He looked across the table at Lori, who wore the distracted expression of a person reading something on her contacts.
Irresponsible. And yet, her gamble had paid off. He spent the rest of the morning wishing they’d taken the same wager. Then they wouldn’t be locked in this merciless race with their neighbors.
The county sheriff’s office confirmed what everyone was hoping the next day. In a simple, short, somber post on the state’s social portal, she announced that a preliminary investigation into the maglev accident pointed to an undetected failure in a capacitor bottle. All of the deaths were caused by a tragic accident rather than deliberate human action.
Hundreds of celebrations broke out across town at the news. Families gathered for spontaneous barbeques and pool parties. Women toasted each other with non-alcoholic champagne and wished each other well, then withdrew to stare at their potential rivals. Decades-old friendships evaporated like mist. In the Garden’s post-scarcity world, competition was fierce for the greatest treasure of all.
Children. Antonio remembered them, vaguely, in foggy recollections of his own youth. The cure for aging and death hadn’t granted humans more perfect memories, and he struggled to remember the last time he’d seen a real child. Not an auto-doll or an avatar, but an actual, flesh-and-blood human child.
Years, at least. Hadn’t there been that parade in Concorde, the one his sister dragged him along to because she’d helped decorate the floats, and the state’s elementary school was marching to celebrate Earth Day or somesuch? Dozens of them had been in the street between floats, twirling batons or holding banners or just running around with the crazed, boundless energy he distantly recalled once possessing himself. It was like watching something out of a documentary.
His contacts flashed. He accepted the message immediately.
LP: COME SAVE ME?
He turned away from his own conversation and scanned the backyard. Lori was near the veranda, a polite smile pasted on her face. Three other women had her surrounded and appeared to be making small-talk. Antonio recognized them from Lori’s job at the clinic. It would explain their surgically perfect faces and millimeter tight bodies.
Fuck. Okay, he could do this. He took a long swallow from his O’Doul’s and wished again that alcoholic drinks were allowed at these gatherings.
“Ladies,” he said, breaking into their little hen circle. He edged around to stand next to Lori. “Enjoying the party?”
“Oh yeah, totally. Thanks for the invite.” Chrissy wrapped her arm around his and leaned against his shoulder. She spoke with a valley girl accent that seemed out-of-place on her Indian features. Of the three he’d known her the longest, and still hadn’t figured out if the accent was a deliberate affection on her part or some sort of sly joke.
She could also afford to be affectionate. The entire town had seen her naked in a series of explicit leaked portal vids. Supposedly an accident, but Chrissy hadn’t seemed too upset by it. She flaunted her body like she flaunted her accent. She hadn’t even pretended they were fake.
“We were talking about the accident,” Lori edged in. She tangled her fingers around his and gave him a gentle tug toward her. “There’s going to be a memorial service at the Methodist chapel tomorrow, and we were thinking of going.”
“It’s supposed to be good luck,” Matoko said. “You know, like the spirits of the deceased are there to bless all the women trying to replace them? It’ll be pretty crowded I bet.”
“That’s…” Ghoulish? He struggled. “Really nice. What about, like, the families?”
Chrissy shrugged. Lori tugged at the sleeve of her blouse, worrying the fabric.
Finally, the third of Lori’s coworkers spoke. Roselita was short, dark-skinned and dark-haired, and she kept her temper bottled up well. But on the rare occasions it erupted Antonio was careful to keep his distance. Given that her husband was in Europe on a book-signing tour, and thus unavailable to help her participate in the pregnancy frenzy that was sweeping Lebanon, he doubted she’d be in a good mood.
Her tone was even, though, and her words thoughtful. “The families can come or not. They have private services – the public service is for the town.”
“Yeah, like, you can view this as a tragedy or an opportunity,” Chrissy said. “But, like, scientific studies have shown that people who have a positive outlook on things live longer and healthier lives. So you might as well look at the bright side, right?”
Antonio was fairly sure those studies were from the pre-Garden era, when health and lifespan were meaningful concepts. People could be as dour as they wanted nowadays and still live forever. Unless they were on the wrong maglev train, anyway. He took a sip from his beer to hide his grimace.
They made smalltalk for a few more minutes, until Lori made some excuse or other to escape. She dragged him away, and he held in the living room with the blinds drawn until her shakes stopped.
She was strong, his Lori. But nothing in modern life prepared women for the kind of pressure she was under. And nothing she could do would make the incipient life inside her grow any faster.
The first round of results came out 10 days after the maglev accident. As a courtesy to the rest of the women in town, most of those trying for pregnancy announced on their portal pages when their tests came back positive.
It was a form of psychological warfare, too. For every positive result that was announced, more women would abandon the effort. With over a thousand couples trying for a baby, only those who got started on the first day or two really stood a chance.
By the end of the second week, 94 women had announced their pregnancies. Only one, the bookbinders apprentice, felt any sort of certainty or comfort in the fact. With only 25 citizen slots available, the town was preparing for a heartless but essential culling.
When Antonio came home from his practice that night, Lori was waiting for him. She had a tablet out and was scanning through the news. There was a bowl of iron-fortified wasabi peas on the counter beside her, and they slowly vanished as she read.
She finished chewing down the last few before speaking. “It says I’m supposed to get an appointment.”
“What?” He sat beside her and refilled the peas. “Already?”
“We have to prove it was naturally conceived. Blood tests, ultrasounds. They’ll do a credit check to look for any unusual purchases. You’ll need to provide a statement.”
“Like, a deposition? I, Antonio Pena, do solemnly swear that I had sex with my wife after the maglev accident?”
“I think that’ll work.” Lori swiped through something on the tablet. “I don’t want to mess this up, you know?”
“We’ll be fine.” He stole a few peas for himself. “Those hormones are okay, though, right?”
“Everything I’ve read says yes. They’re just counterfactors for my birth control. As long as we didn’t use any, uh, artificial interventions, we should be fine.”
Great. Another thing to worry about. He squeezed Lori’s hand in his and began searching for obstetricians with open appointments in New Hampshire.
There were none. The closest he could find was in New York. Obstetrics had gone out of style in the new era.
By the end of the first trimester, women had started dropping out of the race.
That was the euphemism polite society used. The maglev accident was unusual enough that papers across the country covered the replacement race, providing updates much in the way they covered sports. As the three-month anniversary of the crash passed, it was clear that some women (or their partners) had been a bit too slow.
A total of 107 were officially certified by the state as potential mothers, indicating they had successfully conceived in a two-week period after the accident. Some women had done the math, realized they were slow, and quietly ended their pregnancies. It was a kindness to do it as soon as possible during gestation. At least, that was the common wisdom posted on millions of portal pages across the nation. End it now, end it early. You cannot miss what you never had.
Antonio scrolled through the morning news. A total of 47 women in Lebanon were still pregnant. All had reasonable claims on the 25 citizen slots. In a half-a-year, just over half of them would become mothers.
He sipped his coffee. It was hotter than he expected and stung his tongue. He set it down to cool and gazed across the table at Lori.
She didn’t look pregnant. Of course, at the three-month point no woman looked pregnant. She certainly felt pregnant, though, and frequently told him so. The bouts of morning sickness had passed already, and she wore special compression socks to keep her ankles from swelling, but otherwise she was the same Lori he remembered marrying all those decades ago.
But there were other changes. Thin lines in the skin around her eyes. A slight tremor in her hands. Panic attacks. For the first time in her life, she was presented with a problem completely and totally out of her control. A life was on the line and she could do nothing but hope.
“Hey,” he said. “You okay?”
She nodded. “Yeah. Yeah. You?”
He smiled for her. “Fine. Any plans for the day?”
“Biking with the team,” she said. “Down the old 89 trail toward Concord, stopping for lunch in Freemount, then back. About sixty kilometers. Wanna come?”
Christ, sixty kilometres? Sometimes it was like he barely even knew her. “Maybe next weekend?”
She nodded. Any hope that it might have been a passing fancy, an offer made out of politeness, vanished when his calendar pinged with an invite for next weekend’s ride. He made a mental note to check his tires.
Riding cross-country sucked. But it was good if it kept Lori’s mind off other things.
Four hours later, he was at his desk at the downtown practice, reviewing a draft adjudication between two neighbors whose property was defined by a stream. The stream had, over the decades, slowly silted up and overflowed its banks, which not only damaged the southern neighbor’s tomatoes but also redefined the stream’s path, essentially changing the property boundary, which was one reason modern property law required mensurated satellite coordinates rather than local landmarks. Fortunately the neighbors were friendly with each other, friends for decades. They played football on the same highschool team about a century ago. No need for a judge – just a lawyer to make sure everything looked right.
That’s how most law was practiced in the Garden. Paralegals no longer existed, having been replaced by AIs some decades back. Even as a lawyer, his job most consisted of reading text drafted by a computer. It had nearly destroyed the profession before the Maintenance Laws were passed, mandating a human-in-the-loop for a broad range of jobs. The robot revolution was safely deterred, once people realized that white-collar jobs might be on the chopping block.
His left contact flashed. He blinked hard, twice, to dismiss it. “Siri, set do not disturb, please.”
Wait. His mind flashed back three months to the shower. He blinked three times in the space of a second to accept the message.
It came through via audio. “Mister Pena? This is Constable Brantley. There’s been an accident. Your wife is being taken to Concord Municipal. Are you able to meet us there?”
The folder and its pages slid out of his fingers. An overwhelming dread crashed over him, chilling him like an ice water bath. He stood, knocking the chair away, and tried to respond.
He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t breath. He tried to inhale but the dread crushed his chest, squeezing the air out of him. He bent over, double, and gasped for air.
“Mister Pena? Are you there, sir?”
“Yes,” he croaked. “I’m here. I’m here. Is… is she okay?”
“She’s awake and alert, sir. That’s a good sign. I’ll leave the rest to the doctors. Can you make it here? I can have a squad car pick you up if you need.”
Okay. Okay. The pressure on his chest eased. He drew in a deep breath and held it for all of a second before he had to exhale. “Yeah. Uh, yes, I mean. I’m in downtown Lebanon, Pena and Associates Law Practice, across from the courthouse. Can someone pick me up?”
There was a pause of a few seconds before Brantley responded. “There’s a car on the way. And, hang on… Your wife says she’s fine and not to worry.”
That was great to hear. Impossible to obey, though – Antonio worried all the way to Concord, and not all the patrolman’s platitudes as they drove could assure him that his wife would be fine.
There were more police at the hospital. Two officers stood outside the emergency room entrance. A drone hovered over the parking lot. Cruisers with lights flashing parked on the grass beside the ambulance bay. They let him pass without trouble, escorted by the patrolman.
In the end, finding Lori was a relief and an anti-climax. She was sitting on a gurney, talking to a plainclothes officer in a private room. The officer had a badge on a lanyard around her neck and took notes with the help of a tiny recording drone clinging to her shoulders. They paused as he walked in, and Lori stood to wrap him in a hug.
He squeezed her tight. “Jesus, Lori, you scared me. Are you okay? Shouldn’t you be lying down?”
“I’m fine. Just a few scrapes and a sprain. Fell off my bike.” She sat back on the bed, and he noticed the angry red weals on her face and neck. Her right arm was bound in a soft cast. A small transdermal patch on her neck delivered some sort of medication into her bloodstream.
“Why, uh…” He sat beside her, holding her free hand in his lap. “If you don’t mind, officers, why is the law concerned with this?”
“We don’t believe it was an accident, Mister Pena,” the officer said. She extended her hand. “Detective Albright, Concord Police Department. Footage from other bikes in the race clearly shows that she was deliberately struck by another cyclist.”
“That…” He took a breath. Lori leaned closer, and he wrapped his arm around her shoulder, pulling her close. “Who would do that? Why?”
“We have a good description of the alleged offender,” Albright said. “He fled immediately after the accident and we don’t have any footage of his face, but there’s a limited pool of suspects. We’ll narrow them down based on credible alibis and start questioning the remainder.”
He looked at Lori. She stared down at the linoleum. Her wounded hand cradled her belly, still too early to show any outward sign of her condition.
“What suspects?” Even as he spoke, he knew the answer.
“Husbands and partners of the other women attempting to claim citizen slots for their children,” Albright said. Her tone was even, matter-of-fact, as though explaining the basics of traffic law to someone she’d pulled over for speeding. “We’ll be stepping up patrols around the city. If you’d like, we can detail an officer to your street. Keep people from getting ideas.”
“I can’t believe someone would do that,” Lori said. She sounded almost thoughtful, philosophic about the possibility someone had just tried to murder her unborn child. “That’s not supposed to happen anymore.”
“It’s human nature,” Albright said. She reached up to her shoulder and pulled the the little recorder drone off her shoulder. It folded its legs up and compressed into a marble-sized ball, which she slipped into her pocket. “Most crime is driven by necessity and by unmet needs. That used to be drugs or money or whatever, back before the Garden. Now? You’ve got something very precious, and that makes people regress. But don’t worry, we’ll find the idiot who did this and put him somewhere he can’t hurt you.”
Antonio swallowed. “You’re sure you’ll find him?”
“Oh yeah.” The detective waved her hand absently. “People don’t know how to commit crimes anymore. We’ll have this guy by the end of the day. So, you still want that patrol car?”
He looked at Lori. She nodded.
“Yeah. We’ll take it.”
Over the next three months, Antonio became an expert on the minutia of the Citizenship Laws. Aside from a brief course decades ago in law school, it wasn’t an area he’d had much experience with. Fewer than one percent of his clients over the years had been parents of minor children.
The law had a lot to say about Lori and the child she was carrying. In a very real sense, the very concept of the Garden was based on women’s wombs.
Unborn children were considered citizens as soon as they reached the point of viability outside the womb. Court decisions over the years had narrowed that concept further, eliminating artificial wombs and cryogenics and every type of surrogacy. Once a baby could breathe using its own lungs, it was considered a person. With modern NICUs and ventilation technology, that point was around the 20th week of gestation.
Assuming, of course, an open citizen slot was available. If a slot was not open, the child couldn’t be born. Other interventions, cloaked in the guise of modernity and medicine but really neither of those things, prevented the birth of children for whom no slot was available. It was the great compromise the Garden era was founded on. Eternal, ageless life and health could not come without some cost. Just as ancient man had given up the right to inflict violence upon his neighbors, modern humans gave up the right to procreate. It was for the best. Who could trust flawed, imperfect humans with that sort of power?
It had been 19 weeks since the maglev accident. Thirty-six pregnant women hid in their houses across Lebanon, police cruisers parked on the streets outside, scanning the news and their portals.
Some news still came in the mail. The most important types of news. He sat across from Lori at the table in their spotless, sterile kitchen. She held a sealed envelope in her hands.
“It’s thin,” she mumbled. “Is that good or bad?”
College rejection letters were thin. They were bad news. Was it the same for letters from obstetricians? Were there enough obstetricians left in the world to survey for an answer? He just shook his head.
With shaking fingers, Lori tore the end off the envelope and tapped the contents out. A single page folded in three. She opened it and read in silence.
He waited. He watched her face, not the letter.
Her lips tightened. She swallowed once, twice, then turned and exhaled hard. She folded the letter back up and passed it across the table to him.
He didn’t open it. He grabbed her hand instead, held it, and waited.
“It’s too soon still,” she said. It burst of her. “Her lungs haven’t developed enough yet.”
“We have a week still before any deliveries start. That’s time. We can get a hotel down in Concord and check every day until—”
“Ten days.” Lori said. She tapped the letter. “Doctor Bertrand won’t induce delivery for ten more days. She said it would be—” her voice caught, and she froze for a moment, the words stuck in her throat like a bone. “—unethical to try before that.”
Ten days. Ten days was three days too long. For all that they’d rushed into conceiving, they were still three days slow. How many other women would deliver in those three days? How many citizen slots would still be available for their daughter?
They couldn’t exactly ask. Health information was one of the last abodes of privacy in the Garden, though most citizens were in perfect shape and diseases long banished. Funny how that had survived as one of their last taboos.
“It’s only three days difference,” he said. “There are 25 slots for 36 women. You only have to beat 11 of them.”
“Beat.” Lori barked out a quick, humorless laugh. She dabbed at her eyes with her fingers. “I can’t exactly make it go faster, you know.”
“Yeah.” He gave her hand another squeeze. “I know.”
He wanted to tell her to relax, to say that stress wasn’t good for the baby. But he was smart enough to keep that bit of wisdom to himself.
“Hi Lori. Sorry to keep you waiting.” The disembodied voice of Doctor Bertrand floated in the air above their living room coffee table. Charts and high-frequency ultrasounds and test results of every kind lay spread out on the cypress. “I have the pulmonary capacity imaging results from the lab. Your daughter’s lungs are still small but within the range we consider normal. Compared with her peer group, she’s at about the 10th percentile.”
Was that it? Were those words his daughter’s death sentence, or had they already received it a week ago, when Bertrand’s envelope arrived? Or was there some test awaiting them still that would seal her fate? Antonio tumbled over those thoughts, stuck on them, until his wife’s angry voice broke through his daze.
“What do you mean, normal?” Lori pushed the pages around, searching for the appropriate bell curve. “Tenth percentile?! That’s too small!”
“It means, out of one-hundred babies, ten will have lungs less developed than hers at this stage of gestation,” Bertrand said. His voice was calm, with a stern edge, like he was lecturing a wayward student. “That is still well-within normal bounds.”
“No!” Lori shrieked at the air. “You don’t understand! She has to be born now! Today! There are only 14 slots left open. We can’t wait!”
“If I induce delivery now I can’t guarantee she’ll be able to survive,” the empty voice offered. “In fact, I can almost guarantee she won’t. She needs at least another week just to have a chance.”
Silence followed. From him, from Lori, from the doctor. Lori stared at the space above the table, her mouth agape.
Oh, he thought, when finally he could think again. So that’s a death sentence.
Angel Valez Martinez was born at 11:47 p.m. on a Tuesday. He was seven pounds, six ounces, had a full head of dark hair, and claimed the final open citizen slot in Lebanon, New Hampshire. Antonio read the news when he woke up Wednesday morning.
Lori was still asleep. She had curled up on her side, fingers clawing at the sheets. He could feel her breath on his shoulder.
The sun was starting to creep through the blinds on their east-facing window. In a few minutes it would be bright enough to wake her. At that moment, Antonio wished for nothing more than the power to close the blinds tighter, to keep her from waking for a little bit longer. She should not have to bear this.
He settled for holding her closer. It was all he could do.
Later, after a somber, silent breakfast, they sat at the kitchen table. Their portal pages were quiet – most of their friends and family were smart enough not to ask for updates at such a critical time. Everyone knew how many citizen slots remained, who was celebrating the arrival of a new family member, and which families were conspicuously silent. He began mentally composing a thoughtful message with the right amount of grief and gratitude.
It should’ve been easier. He was a lawyer. But all he could do was stare out the window at the pear tree in their backyard. Robins had built a nest in it, and he could see them sometimes flying in and out of the canopy.
He licked his lips. “I can call Bertrand. Schedule the procedure.”
Lori didn’t answer. She stared out the window at the tree. The broad, dark leaves danced in the wind.
“We should do it as soon as possible,” he continued. “It’s, uh, safer and healthier that way. The earlier the better.”
“Did you read that somewhere?”
“It’s just…” He stopped and emptied his mind. Deep breaths. “It’s just how it is. Do you really want it growing inside you, still? Knowing what’s coming?”
“It?” Lori turned to stare at him.
Fine. They were arguing. “Her. You know what I mean.”
“I don’t believe you!” Her voice was quiet but seethed with rage. As if he was responsible for the law or their perfect society. “You’re ready to give up on her, just like that!”
“I’m not giving up. It’s better this way. Do you really want to wait? Until she’s almost ready to be born? Do you know what they’ll do to you?”
“They’ll…” She shook her head. Her lips had turned gray, her face ashen. She balled her hands into fists on the table and leaned forward, resting her forehead on them. He could hear her ragged breaths. “It could still happen. Maybe someone else will die? We have four months.”
Someone else might die. It was possible. But over the past decade, not counting the maglev accident, only three residents of Lebanon had died in accidents. All the old scourges of the past – disease, age, war, car accidents, cigarettes, 9-to-5 jobs – had vanished. Their society had defeated them all and replaced every horseman of the apocalypse. They had the Garden, but like that first garden, the mythical Eden, mankind could only remain within its walls if he obeyed its rules. And no rule was more iron than the citizen law.
There was only so much space in the Garden.
He closed his eyes. “We’ll talk later, okay?”
She snorted. “Fine.”
But it wasn’t fine, and they didn’t talk.
The months passed with terrible speed.
Society turned away from them. To walk the streets, to visit shops, to eat in restaurants as a pregnant woman was rare. To be visibly, hugely, obviously pregnant, with no open citizen slot, was anathema. She carried a slowly growing corpse in her belly.
The weeks passed in a blur. Antonio remembered bits of them. Choosing Helena’s name. Ordering a crib. It was all he could do to convince Lori to wait before setting up a registry for baby gifts. She was determined to try. To gamble everything.
His thoughts turned dark. He contemplated, in the quiet hours of the night, opening a citizen slot by ending his own life. What nobler sacrifice could there be, but a father giving his life for his daughter? Was Lori thinking those same thoughts, when she lay awake beside him? Was that the escape from this trap?
Had he still been mortal, had the Garden not banished age and infirmity and death, he might have done it. But the years stretched out before him, an endless life. Other opportunities might come along in those long centuries. The laws might change. New lands might open. More disasters might happen. Why close that door now, for a daughter he would never know, a daughter not yet even born?
As the ninth month of Lori’s pregnancy arrived, he found himself walking the streets of downtown Lebanon. Boutique shops lined the old brick road, restored just a few years back. More bikes than cars filled it these days. When you lived forever, there was less need to rush everywhere. Most people just walked.
It wasn’t until he arrived at his destination that he realized what he’d been searching for. A small memorial of perpetual flowers and colorful cards, replaced every few days, decorated the steps of the Methodist church. The names of the maglev victims were written in those scraps, forgotten by almost all in the frenzied rush to replace them. He reached down, idly, and plucked one card from the mass. It was lavender, folded in half, and when he opened it a small picture tumbled out. He caught it with the tips of his fingers.
A young man and woman, dressed in colorful floral shirts, posed for the camera. The man held up a bottle of Corona and smiled at the drone. Something had caught the woman’s attention, and she looked off-frame, her mouth open in a silent call.
Which of them had died, he wondered. The man, the woman, or both? He put the picture back in the card and set it down.
There were dozens of such messages at his feet. No one read them; the only people who cared for these souls were the ones who’d left the messages in the first place. Letters to no one. He stared at them for a while, then walked into the church.
The layout hadn’t changed since the memorial service. He walked up the aisle between the pews, and took a seat near the front. A few other worshipers sat reading or praying. He stared at the austere gold crucifix on the wall above the altar.
In time, he realized he wasn’t alone. A middle-aged man sat beside him, dressed in ecclesiastical robes. It was rare to see someone with obvious signs of aging – a deliberate choice, one that even the extremely religious rarely took. Nothing in the bible explicitly prohibited eternal life on Earth.
“Reverend,” he mumbled.
“You look troubled, my son,” the reverend said. “Here for guidance?”
Antonio swallowed. “No, just to pray, I think.”
“Ah.” The reverend clasped him on the shoulder. “You’ve come to a good place, then. Was there something you wanted to pray about?”
The cross blurred. He blinked rapidly. “I don’t know.”
The reverend nodded slowly. “I see. You know, when I find myself troubled, I sometimes find it’s easier to think of those who are less fortunate than I. It makes me grateful for my own blessings.”
“Grateful.” Antonio choked on the word. “Yeah?”
“Yes. I know it can be hard to be grateful for our blessings, sometimes. I won’t pretend to know what troubles you today, but remember that there are those who are worse.” The reverend stood and straightened his robes. “If you aren’t sure what to pray for, perhaps ask God to give his blessings to the poor Westings boy.”
Antonio blinked. “Who?”
“The boy in the news? Who had the tractor accident?” The reverend shook his head. “Terrible thing. So young.”
“Oh, right.” Antonio mumble. “Sorry, just… uh, forgot his name.”
The reverend said something else, but Antonio was beyond paying attention. For the first time in days, he pulled up his news feed.
Eric Westings. A 14-year old Lebanon boy, injured when the tractor he was joyriding around his parents’ wooded property overturned. Trapped beneath it for hours. Brain damage. Coma. Images of traumatized parents holding each other outside the hospital in Concord. He recognized the doors of the emergency room behind them.
Think of those who are less fortunate. The reverend’s words bounced around his mind.
“I am,” he mumbled. For the first time in almost a century, he fell to his knees in the pews.
Antonio Pena, the blessed, ageless, immortal citizen of the perfect society, of the Garden, closed his eyes and prayed for a child to die.
The lesson to take away here is: Always listen to your wife. Probably.
Anyway. We start off a little, not rocky, but not exactly clear, either. At first I thought Antonio and Lori might be a pair of super heroes or something who need injections to juice up for hero work. That is quickly struck out as the truth of the matter. The rest works well exploring the sci-fi nature of the setting and the quirky rules that keep it floating. I particularly liked the comment about the robot revolution being staved off once the white-color jobs started going.
Lori's attacker is almost a darker reflection of Antonio at the end. Both wanting to grant their wife's deepest wish, one being a little more proactive than the other. It's a neat note to end on.
Anyway. We start off a little, not rocky, but not exactly clear, either. At first I thought Antonio and Lori might be a pair of super heroes or something who need injections to juice up for hero work. That is quickly struck out as the truth of the matter. The rest works well exploring the sci-fi nature of the setting and the quirky rules that keep it floating. I particularly liked the comment about the robot revolution being staved off once the white-color jobs started going.
Lori's attacker is almost a darker reflection of Antonio at the end. Both wanting to grant their wife's deepest wish, one being a little more proactive than the other. It's a neat note to end on.
This is excellent. Everything from prose to progression is solid. The misdirection of the first scene worked a charm. And I'm a sucker for this sense of sordid one-upsmanship that tramples empathy and corrupts friendships.
Conceptually, your treading some well-worn ground – overpopulation as a scifi theme was hackneyed decades ago – and the ay it's portrayed here doesn't strike me as terribly realistic. But you know what? That doesn't matter. Because you know it's just a backdrop, and it has a place. The real story is in the drama made possible by these conditions. (This is quite high-level stuff, and one of the biggest issues I find with writers here.)
My big issue is with the ending. After the subtle and creeping horror suffusing most of the story, the final line comes off as bombastic. You've gone from describing nastiness in a low-key tone to describing something comparatively banal in an overdramatic tone. It's almost as if the final line wants to be written bolded, underlined, with a chain of exclamation points at the end.
To look at it another way: By the time we're halfway through the story, the stakes are obvious. One life must be traded for another. That's fantastic and creepy. But you don't capitalise on it. Your tension flatlines. I was reading this in a state of tension, my mind conjuring up all manner of grotesqueries. Will we get a murder? Will they accidentally kill the baby by going underground to induce birth too soon? No. All that happens isa dude prays for something he was already hoping for and expecting.
But the plus side is that all you need to do to fix that ending is do what you were doing for the rest of the story. Keep your mettle and just keep turning the screw.
Conceptually, your treading some well-worn ground – overpopulation as a scifi theme was hackneyed decades ago – and the ay it's portrayed here doesn't strike me as terribly realistic. But you know what? That doesn't matter. Because you know it's just a backdrop, and it has a place. The real story is in the drama made possible by these conditions. (This is quite high-level stuff, and one of the biggest issues I find with writers here.)
My big issue is with the ending. After the subtle and creeping horror suffusing most of the story, the final line comes off as bombastic. You've gone from describing nastiness in a low-key tone to describing something comparatively banal in an overdramatic tone. It's almost as if the final line wants to be written bolded, underlined, with a chain of exclamation points at the end.
To look at it another way: By the time we're halfway through the story, the stakes are obvious. One life must be traded for another. That's fantastic and creepy. But you don't capitalise on it. Your tension flatlines. I was reading this in a state of tension, my mind conjuring up all manner of grotesqueries. Will we get a murder? Will they accidentally kill the baby by going underground to induce birth too soon? No. All that happens isa dude prays for something he was already hoping for and expecting.
But the plus side is that all you need to do to fix that ending is do what you were doing for the rest of the story. Keep your mettle and just keep turning the screw.
Okay. Take what follow with a big grain, I'd say a boulder, of salt. This piece is lightyears ahead of my own skill.
First of all, <nitpick>there are some small things to tidy up, like I saw a double the, or, especially at the beginning, one or two verbs lacking their final -d</nitpick>
<nitpick2>One of your underlying assumption is wrong. Women do not cease to ovulate because they grow old, rather because they run out of ova. Ova are not created each month. They are drawn out of a stock, which is full at birth, and starts depleting from puberty on. So, even in your society, women over 50 would be unable to be pregnant</nitpick2>
That being said, I found the first half much more punchy than the other. Until the (deliberate) accident the pacing is strong and I read on with bated breath. But then the plot somewhat subsides, and the last twist comes a bit out of the blue, and feels somewhat artificial (I concur with my brilliant neighbor right above, that the tension maxes out at the ⅔ of the story). I’m wondering about the last line signification. Does it mean the guy has become as wicked as the one who made his wife fall off her bike?
TBH, I’d like to see this concept mixed with another idea Philip K. Dick was very fond of: precogs. A precog able to foresee accidents and deaths in such a setup would be immensely coveted by all couples. Maybe that could be a good idea for a future short story (which, promised, I will not write !)
First of all, <nitpick>there are some small things to tidy up, like I saw a double the, or, especially at the beginning, one or two verbs lacking their final -d</nitpick>
<nitpick2>One of your underlying assumption is wrong. Women do not cease to ovulate because they grow old, rather because they run out of ova. Ova are not created each month. They are drawn out of a stock, which is full at birth, and starts depleting from puberty on. So, even in your society, women over 50 would be unable to be pregnant</nitpick2>
That being said, I found the first half much more punchy than the other. Until the (deliberate) accident the pacing is strong and I read on with bated breath. But then the plot somewhat subsides, and the last twist comes a bit out of the blue, and feels somewhat artificial (I concur with my brilliant neighbor right above, that the tension maxes out at the ⅔ of the story). I’m wondering about the last line signification. Does it mean the guy has become as wicked as the one who made his wife fall off her bike?
TBH, I’d like to see this concept mixed with another idea Philip K. Dick was very fond of: precogs. A precog able to foresee accidents and deaths in such a setup would be immensely coveted by all couples. Maybe that could be a good idea for a future short story (which, promised, I will not write !)
The only comment I would make is that these types of stories are often pushed forward by both the characters being challenged as well as the society itself. This story only challenges the characters. It's a short story, of course, so it would have been tough to do both, and you do well with what you chose, but it just left me feeling a little bit like the people running the show here get off scot-free for what's happening, or at least they fly under the radar. Brave New World had the Savage, which it had a hard time figuring it out. And 1984 had Winston's rebellion, which was handled like it was nothing. If this story would be continued, challenging the society itself would be a cool direction to go.
But it's an excellent story on its own, and as it's been pointed out that last line is a killer, because it's the final punchline to what the author was trying to say. And I love how the society was built, especially the fact that everyone rides bikes now instead of cars. I would imagine that maglev ticket sales would absolutely tank after this little mishap!
But it's an excellent story on its own, and as it's been pointed out that last line is a killer, because it's the final punchline to what the author was trying to say. And I love how the society was built, especially the fact that everyone rides bikes now instead of cars. I would imagine that maglev ticket sales would absolutely tank after this little mishap!
Like the others, I found the first half to have more tension. I honestly expected the bookmaker's apprentice to have sabotaged the train. And I expected Antonio to take more action than a prayer.
But my overarching, one thought is this:
I'd start a sports league.
Yes. It would be called simply War.
I'd buy a city or three. Absolutely fill it with cameras. Outfit participants with weapons, clothing, equipment, training. Team leagues, individual leagues. There would be a division for Flintlocks and Tomahawks. High Noon. The Great War. WWII.
Some would fight for glory. Some because they are tired of life. But most of them are fighting to open up citizen slots. Every tenth slot you open is reserved for you.
Happy hunting.
But my overarching, one thought is this:
I'd start a sports league.
Yes. It would be called simply War.
I'd buy a city or three. Absolutely fill it with cameras. Outfit participants with weapons, clothing, equipment, training. Team leagues, individual leagues. There would be a division for Flintlocks and Tomahawks. High Noon. The Great War. WWII.
Some would fight for glory. Some because they are tired of life. But most of them are fighting to open up citizen slots. Every tenth slot you open is reserved for you.
Happy hunting.
Most of what I have to say about this story has already been said: it was very well written, the opening grabbed me at once, it flowed naturally and was easy to read, and the first half had more tension than the second. It could benefit from polish, but that's mostly just nitpicking.
That said, there is one thing about the premise that bugged me, and I think it's what stands between The Garden being a good story and being a great story.
Letting us know why the protagonists care.
In real life, I'm getting toward thirty and I don't have children. While I would like to have children at some point, it's not an overwhelming desire. I'm not a woman, but there are certainly plenty of women who choose not to have children, and the desire not to have children tends to correlate with affluence and stability. So in a highly affluent, highly stable future society with strong restrictions against having children, I'd expect most couples would be okay with the idea that they can never have kids. Never having kids is normal.
But the people in this story? The women and couples competing for the available slots and watching the news for deaths? They aren't normal. They're the crazy 0.1% of people who really truly want to have children more than anything else. The dangerous fanatics of this future age.
Perhaps, instead of all the women in town gathering, it's a group of women spread out over the country. Perhaps there are online message boards dedicated to how to game the system, colored by the fact that everyone on them is competing against each other. Perhaps, after someone blows up a church to make room for more children, the normal people start to be suspicious of these dedicated breeders.
After all, none of them would have derailed that train just for the right to raise a little human. But until the police are sure it's an accident, best not to get too close to the Penas.
Details may vary, but I think a little more detail on why the protagonists feel they way they do would do a lot to make this story come to life.
That said, there is one thing about the premise that bugged me, and I think it's what stands between The Garden being a good story and being a great story.
Letting us know why the protagonists care.
In real life, I'm getting toward thirty and I don't have children. While I would like to have children at some point, it's not an overwhelming desire. I'm not a woman, but there are certainly plenty of women who choose not to have children, and the desire not to have children tends to correlate with affluence and stability. So in a highly affluent, highly stable future society with strong restrictions against having children, I'd expect most couples would be okay with the idea that they can never have kids. Never having kids is normal.
But the people in this story? The women and couples competing for the available slots and watching the news for deaths? They aren't normal. They're the crazy 0.1% of people who really truly want to have children more than anything else. The dangerous fanatics of this future age.
Perhaps, instead of all the women in town gathering, it's a group of women spread out over the country. Perhaps there are online message boards dedicated to how to game the system, colored by the fact that everyone on them is competing against each other. Perhaps, after someone blows up a church to make room for more children, the normal people start to be suspicious of these dedicated breeders.
After all, none of them would have derailed that train just for the right to raise a little human. But until the police are sure it's an accident, best not to get too close to the Penas.
Details may vary, but I think a little more detail on why the protagonists feel they way they do would do a lot to make this story come to life.