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1
OLIVIA
Olivia Sinclair reached a pivotal scene in the holo-book she was spooling and stopped for a moment to sigh contentedly and look out the window, imagining her own happily-ever-after.
Her flat was tiny, but it was kept on cool-climate all year long, which was important for her computer equipment. And the view from her only window was incredible.
Hover-cabs slid through the air night and day, their colorful lights twinkling like stars as they flitted over the city park and among the graceful spires of Terra-58’s oldest urban center.
It would make the perfect setting for a romance novel, if only Olivia enjoyed writing as much as she did reading. She was much more interested in creating her own, real-life romance, and a baby…
Terra-58 was a matriarchal society with a lower divorce rate, higher happiness quotient, and better intergalactic relations than any other Terran planet. Butthe rules of society required a woman to have a child to ensure her line before she could marry.
Most women went to a fertility clinic to easily conceive their primary heir. Once a child was born, the women were free to choose a husband.
Wealthy families might pay the clinic extra for the primary heir to have genetic enhancements, and for the procedures to be completed in relative luxury. But even a poor family could typically scrape together enough for their daughter to receive a session in a public clinic.
The only real trouble with the system was for women like Olivia, who couldn’t easily conceive.
She was running out of credits, and some days it felt like she was running out of time, if she wanted to have the family she had always dreamed of.
Time…
Biting her lip, she glanced at the time display on her reader and hissed in a breath.
It was after midnight.
And that meant that the result of the early pregnancy test from her most recent round of treatment was available.
Her heart began to pound and she clenched her hands into fists, trying to convince herself not to do what she knew she was about to do anyway.
Olivia had an in-person appointment at the clinic scheduled in the morning. She was used to the routine at this point. A sweet-natured member of the fertility center’s staff would meet with her to talk about her results. They would either celebrate together or commiserateand plan another round of treatments. But in either case, she wouldn’t find out her results alone.
“They do it that way for a reason,” she reminded herself out loud, even as her fingers danced on the virtual keyboard of her hybrid Stealth-84.
It wasn’t a brand-new machine, but she’d bought high quality used parts and put the thing together herself, so it was more powerful than the Stealth models you could buy in the store, and much, much faster than a standard 84 computing system.
With a capable processor and a bit of her own skill, she broke effortlessly through the fertility center’s security protocols on the first try.
Olivia’s knack for technology assured that she had fairly high-paying work, even if it was all temporary gigs. Which meant that she could take her treatments between jobs without begging a boss for time off like other young women had to do.
And that was a good thing, because she had already failed to conceive after three full rounds of treatment. She assumed her first failure was a fluke, or maybe the result of going to an inexpensive public clinic.
When she failed the second time at a costly private center, she burst into tears in front of everyone and probably traumatized the poor nurse who had to break the news.
And when she received bad news for the third time…
Well, she was just lucky they opted to keep treating her after she flung herself out of her chair in a fury and accidentally knocked over that awful statue they kept in the waiting room. The weird stone sculpture of an emaciated-looking pregnant woman had shattered instantly on the marble floor, filling the waiting room with startled shrieks from all the other patients.
And Olivia’s rage had immediately melted into uncontrolled sobbing. Again.
She was pretty sure she could hold her emotions in check this time. But wouldn’t it be better to just check the result herself ahead of time, so she didn’t embarrass herself or damage any property if she didn’t get the answer she was hoping for?
And what were the chances of more bad news, really?
I’m pregnant. I just know it…
She had just entered the back end of the clinic’s portal and was sliding easily past security walls on sensitive patient data to get to lab results with the right date.
