STORY: ‘In the Making’

Our next example comes from the twenty-first century, when this technology was still in its infancy. The story has been pieced together from data recovered from an electronic device preserved in a fortuitous rockfall.

Maria was a young woman living in a part of the world then known as Australia. Viewed at the time as a kind of ‘lucky country’, this land is now largely forgotten. When she was in her mid-thirties Maria received her first child, an event that evidently brought her much joy. She writes, for example, about the pleasure of ‘creating a unique and beautiful being’ and of the rewards of ‘shaping a life’.

We must remember that organic conception was still the norm back then. People had a deep belief in their own agency, and in what they saw as their innate ability to influence events, other beings, and the wider world. This conviction perhaps accounts for much of what Maria was experiencing.

For several years, it seems, she was happy. The child, named Clancy for apparently arbitrary reasons, was outwardly normal. But then the trouble began. Clancy developed a ‘chronic disease’, prompting Maria to set out on a long and angst-ridden investigation into its ‘causes’, leading her to the conclusion that the originating hospital was somehow at fault.

Although this may look like a curious leap of logic on Maria’s part – at the outset, remember, she claimed responsibility for little Clancy’s life – it is entirely in keeping with the tenor of the times. Indeed, unusual children were sometimes said to have been ‘dropped on their heads at birth’.

The truth behind Clancy’s illness, though, was to prove far more disturbing for her mother. Unbeknownst to Maria – or to many others at the time – her hospital had started trialing the reproductive technique we now know as inorganic cultivation. Which brings us to the crux of the story.

Medical records show that Maria had no organic child; hers, it seems, was a ‘phantom pregnancy’, a rare psychosomatic phenomenon. Doctors, however, took the opportunity – with the best of intentions, we can only assume – to meet Maria’s needs. You can probably see where this is going.

Maria got her baby.

The technology, though, had its teething problems, and Maria gleaned from the hospital that her child had a ‘known fault’. And here her last words are revealing. Maria writes with raw honesty about her deep-seated need to ‘make’, as she puts it, and about the shock she feels when a ‘callous’ doctor tries to explain to her the (mal)functioning of a child of Clancy’s make. The juxtaposition of the two words is telling.

What followed, we presume, was the fall among the rocks.

The child was reclaimed by the hospital and yielded much useful information. I think we can safely say that, thanks to Clancy and her kind, the technology we’ve been discussing – and our world, for that matter – has become what it is today.

And on that uplifting note we’ll end.