Page 78 of Folds
“No way,” I said, voice brittle as the fracture lines in station gravity plating. “That’s not possible. The genes don’t… cross.” According to fourth-grade xenoschool and every boredom-wiki I ever mainlined as a kid, anyway. “Maybe the test is off?”
She shook her head. “These panels aren’t even coded for Bozad biology. The hormone spike is purely human.” She pointed, not unkindly, to the readout. “You’re not just pregnant, you’re… robustly so. If you want, we can run a molecular assay—” Her voice trailed off, no version of the next sentence that didn’t short-circuit both our brains at once. I let it hang, the silence louder than any klaxon.
So I nodded, with the professional calm I’d learned in ten years’ worth of disaster drills and lockout-tagouts. “Yeah, please. Run the panel.”
She did. She tapped her pad. I read the angle of her neck, the way her eyes flicked over the results. Her lips made a pout, then a flat line.
She looked at me. “Have you had… Are you aware of any interspecies conception attempts succeeding?”
I just laughed, for real this time, and shrugged so hard my whole body wobbled. “No. The odds are supposed to be zero. Not low, not one in a million. Just zero.”
She swept the pad toward me and, for a moment, I half-expected to see a pop-up: “Achievement Unlocked: Impossible Pregnancy.” But the numbers were real. All my numbers, but one of the columns in the hormone readout was off the scale. There was even a Bozad marker, flagged in a color she probably hadn’t known the system could display.
“Spontaneous genetic recombination,” she whispered, almost reverent.
I made a sound that, if I’d let it, could have twisted into a panic laugh. I told the tech thanks as I slipped out of the med bay and into the corridor, completely forgetting about the painkillers. The lights in the service tunnel were brighter than I remembered, humming so hard it felt like my teeth were vibrating. By the time I palmed the lock open and slid inside, my hands were shaking with a fine, delicious tremor. Pregnant.Pregnant. It wasn’t a joke. I locked the hatch behind me and spun a slow circle in my closet-sized quarters, letting the weight of it all settle somewhere between my collarbones and pelvis. The impulse was to freak out, a what-the-fuck primal scream into the foam insulation. But it was like a different panel of my brain had taken over. I’d spent my entire life hunting every anomaly, every weird bug in the system,every demo day meltdown and field repair. I was built for crisis and anomaly, to ride out the storm and see what secret signal pulsed out of the static.
I pressed my palm to my belly, not expecting a damn thing, but there was—something. Not a flutter, not even a heat, but the ghost of a tickle under my skin, a new vibration in the silent zero of my body.
I should have felt panic. Instead, I felt a surge of excitement, that made my heart beat so loud I worried it might trip the local security sensors. I—a human—was pregnant. And not just with anyone’s kid, but with a hybrid, a cross, a first in history. My brain atomized the logistics: would it be blue? Would it have his eyes? Would it need to molt? But under the avalanche of questions was a vein of pride so bright I almost laughed.
There would be consequences. Social, bodily, maybe existential. I didn’t care. I wanted to be the first, to chart new territory, to watch the world blink in shock and then clamber after me to figure out what I’d done. It was so thoroughly, catastrophically me to end up here.
I sat down on the edge of my tiny bunk, pressed both hands to my cheeks, and let myself grin for the first time in months. And then I laughed, and then I cried exactly three times, but the last one was from the kind of joy that comes when you realize what you are about to do is going to fuck with the entire system and maybe, god help you, even improve it.
The next step was obvious. I had to tell Izu. I couldn’t send a message—too easily intercepted, and Izu was one of those security types that didn’t check messages unless it was life or death or maybe a grand romantic gesture involving a wormhole. He was due to return in a week, maybe less, but the days felt like syrup, stretching out into infinity. Every moment was some new twinge or worry. Would the kid be viable? Would it burn out my body from the inside, grow too fast, be so alien it set off alarms? There wasn’t a single line in any manual on this scenario, even the unlicensed ones.
I didn’t know what I’d say.Congratulations, you’re a statistical aberration?Hey, Karel, hope you crossbred for emotional bandwidth, because you’re about to be a dad?
It’s not that I thought he’d freak. More like I worried it would fry whatever fragile connection we’d built. Maybe he’d see a hybrid as a flaw in his perfect engineering. Maybe he’d be too rational, try to brute-force a solution with logic and tradition and completely miss the point that this—us, the genetic bug in the system—was better than anything we could’ve planned.
I needed to tell him in a way that would bypass all his defenses, that would ignite the same wild curiosity in him as it had in me. I needed to make it impossible to ignore. But how did you tell an alien who spoke in triple redundancy and encryption that you were both about to be parents?
Easy. You turn it into a puzzle.
I pulled my dataglove from the charger, flexed my thumb to access the synthpad, and started to draft. A text would be intercepted, a voice memo could be spoofed. But a puzzle—nobody on this station solved puzzles except me and, on his best day, Izu.
I set the message header to “Emergent System Fault,” flagged it as low priority, and then in the body, set the syntax to mimic a diagnostic report. He loved diagnostic reports. He once told me he read them to relax. Then I laced the content with every clue I could wedge into the three-paragraph limit: sporadic power surges originating from a previously inactive maintenance relay. Rogue energy readings, intermittent at first, but increasing. A “secondary anomaly” detected—something in the genetic screening array, a subroutine that flagged parentage markers as bothunknownandhighly probable cross-species origin.
Embedded in the final line of the report, where the summary always appeared, I wrote, “Recommend you see for yourself. Condition persistent. Await further instructions.” Then, as the cherry on top, I signed it with a string of numbers, the timestamp for when I expected him to dock. I paused with my thumb hovering, then hit SEND.
Now it was just me and the long, slow spiral of the station’s artificial night. I couldn’t sleep, not the real sleep but that fuzzy, half-conscious drift you do when the air recycler is a stutter and your body’s rebooting on the cellular level.
I didn’t tell Mara, not yet. There was no point in breaking the news until Izu was here, until there were more variables in play than just my own biology and the panopticon of station rumor. I didn’t check my inbox because if you stared at a kettle on this station, it only got colder. I just did my job, same as always—patched lines, rebooted subroutines, and hung upside down in access.
chapter eight
IZU
The incoming data packet triggered my personal comm at 0400. The low-priority designation almost fooled me, but the pattern of the header was unmistakable. Sadie. She had encoded it in one of our shared cyphers—hardly secure, but elegant enough to evade superficial filters. The subject line, Emergent System Fault, hinted at either disaster or a joke.
I parsed the body in a single sweep, attention faltering only at the diagnostic readout labeled secondary anomaly. The numbers, the parentage marker, the suggestion of cross-species origin. At first, I thought it was a riddle aimed at my boredom. Then I saw the timestamp—she had embedded my own return ETA in the closing line, down to the minute. I reviewed the message twice, then three times, searching for the error. There was none. It was a factual report, her way of telling me what could not be told.
Pregnancy.
My hands shook, not from alarm but from a pulse in my core that spread outward, refracting every thought into seven. Pregnancy was not a thing that happened.
I dropped everything. Not metaphorically. I physically abandoned my shift. The encrypted transmission from Sadie obliterated my capacity for protocol or sequence. Every priority on myqueue was routed to null. I touched the soft-ink glyph she’d encoded in the diagnostic header, letting my fingers caress the screen’s glowing pulse. I read the words again, slower, this time not as an analyst but as the animal I suddenly realized I was. Every Bozad cell in my body thrummed at the revelation.
