Breeder

by Honni van Rijswijk

  Ma was here, once—Ma was in the Incubator, birthing children for the Corporation. She had twenty-one Corporation children for them in twenty-one years. And then my mother was here. She had only one child—me. My mother in a cell just like this. My mother being pumped full of drugs. My mother being forced into pregnancy, forced to have the baby who became me.

  •

  My chest hurts. There’s a lot of soft flesh around the nipples where there used to be flat skin.

  I can’t stop crying. I press my index finger into my stomach. Soft. Nauseating.

  My body feels sick with not moving. I can’t tell whether it’s day or night, but I think it’s been many weeks that I’ve been lying here like this. Whenever I open my eyes, I see the concrete watchtower and the floodlights that shine from it, which are always bright, all the time—all the time.

  The click and the voice says, “We are willing to try this again. You’re the one in charge here. It’s your choice.”

  “Okay,” I say, my eyes full of water. I get up out of the bed, shaky because I’m not used to moving. I put on the green tracksuit that’s folded on the chair next to the bed. I sit down on the plastic chair, in front of the plastic table. I eat the orange mush and leave the brown and the yellow squares untouched. The orange mush is sweet. The texture is viscous and has bits in it—it’s like eating crunchy snot.

  The intercom clicks. “Now the pills.”

  It’s the same voice. It’s always the same voice. I pick up the first pill and put it in my mouth and take a sip of water and swallow. I pick up the next pill and put it in my mouth and swallow.

  I need to behave myself. I show all the ways I’m a good Breeder.

  •

  I wake up and there’s breakfast on a tray next to me. Not cubes of mush but real food.

  There’s a click. “If you keep making the right choices, you’ll receive exercise privileges.”

  “Can I go speak to someone in person, please?”

  Silence.

  There’s a lump of pain in my throat. “Why can’t I speak to someone? How many times do I have to tell you? I’m not a Breeder!”

  I get the sprinkler.

  Click of the intercom. “We will teach you to make better choices.”

  Fuck better choices.

  Click. “You’re an important resource for the Corporation.

  Fuck that.

  “I’M NOT A BREEDER!”

  •

  I’m being punished with mush again. The tray of food is twice the size of the last one. I eat the orange mush. Then I eat the yellow mush as well. The yellow mush is harder than the orange, and silky because it’s full of fat. It’s an abomination. The brown mush is the softest—I scoop it up with a spoon and let it dribble back onto the tray.

  I’m sleepy, so I get on the bed and curl up under the sheets. When I woke up this morning, they’d changed the sheets during the night while I slept.

  “My name’s Will,” I whisper to myself, very low, so as not to set off the sprinkler. I whisper it again and again.

  “My name is Will. I’m a Westie. I live in Zone F. My Corporation account is in credit.”

  “My name is Will. I’m a Westie. I live in Zone F. My Corporation account is in credit.”

  “My name is Will. I’m a Westie. I live in Zone F. My Corporation account is in credit.”

  •

  I wake up feeling hot and sticky and throw the sheets aside. There’s blood between my legs and in a circle underneath me and all over the sheets and I scream.

  There’s a click and the gas comes and then the orange suits come. I am bleeding between my legs. I am going to die.

  •

  I wake up and there’s a box on the table. I feel happy, thinking stupidly of the presents that Ma used to get me when I was little—because I’m groggy from the drugs. I look at the box: Tampons, it says. Inside, lined up like soldiers, are cotton cylinders covered in plastic. There’s a folded informational brochure and I open it. The brochure explains the menstrual cycle and has six drawings describing how to insert a tampon into the vagina.

  I tear the plastic off a cylinder, and see that there’s a length of string at the end. I use the string to hang the first tampon from the sprinkler. The camera starts to move and I know I’m going to be punished but I don’t care. I look up into the eye of the security camera in defiance as it clicks into focus on me as I hang the second tampon. Then the sprinklers start. The water soaks me and the tampons as I tie up two more, and they bloat and swing with the force of the spray. I lie on the bed and watch them. I feel the blood dripping between my legs, seeping into my underpants, as I wait for the orange suits to come through the sliding door.

  “I’m not a fucking Breeder!” I scream.

  Here they come! I hear their stamping feet. Then, the usual routine: I fight them, they inject me, then all goes dark.

  •

  I hear the click and the voice says, “We’re going to have to start again.”

  There’s a dry feeling between my legs. I put my hand there and there’s string sticking out of me. My ankle is tied to the bed and there’s an IV in my wrist.

  •

  There’s the click and the voice says, “Eat your food.”

  I do it. I can’t be bothered not doing it.

  There’s the click and the voice says, “Take your pills.”

  I do it.

  The voice says, “Stand up,” and I pull myself up and teeter there, and I wait until the voice says, “You can rest,” before I sink back into the chair, exhausted.

  The voice says, “Walk up and down the cell, back and forth, until I say stop. This is for your muscle tone.”

  I get up and walk. I do what they tell me to do.

  This goes on for days.

  Soon, they return full privileges to me—no more leg ties, no random insertion of IVs. I’m allowed full movement around the cell. My body hurts all over, but that’s a welcome distraction compared to what I’m feeling inside.

  •

  I stand in front of the mirror, looking at the brand down the left side of my face: an embryo, curled into itself like a leaf. They etched it there during one of my chemical sleeps. There are bruises all over my face, purple and yellow, and my nose is off center and my right eye squints.

  I have a pale, pudgy face, surrounded by brown curls that come down to the shoulders, and I have a bloated body dressed in a green tracksuit. There are . . . there are breasts. They stick out. There are hips. There’s so much fat on this body. Everything is padded and lumpy.

  It’s my body. But it’s not my fucking body.

  •

  My days are so tedious, I could kill myself. I’ve been here a long, long, long time. Months.

  I’m so obedient that they’ve stopped tying me to the bed, even at night. I eat the mush they give me. I swallow the pills. The orange suits don’t come with their injections anymore.

  I watch the sliding door.

  An orange suit crosses, holding a leash. He holds out a baton with his other hand, the Taser and semiautomatic fixed to his belt.

  A Breeder follows him, the leash tied to her wrist, her large belly leading, taut like a balloon shoved up her tracksuit top. I can’t see her face. She’s followed by another orange suit.

  Then I hear noises and realize that they’re putting her in the cell next to me. But the weird thing is that I can hear their voices, and I can hear her voice, as they settle her in. Usually, I don’t hear anything outside my cell—usually, my cell is soundproof. There must be some kind of connection between my cell and the cell next door.

  •

  I can hear the Breeder in the next cell, weeping. Then the voice over her intercom chides her and there’s silence.

  Now that I can move around the cell freely, I take every chance I get to be close to the wall that conn
ects our two cells. I want to understand why I can hear the Breeder.

  I go up to the wall and press my hands against it—for the thousandth time—and I move my legs slowly back and forth, one at a time, pretending to be doing some healthy stretches, and for the thousandth time I see nothing: just a sealed concrete wall.

  I curl up onto the bed, lying on my side, and then I see it. Behind the bottom of the bed, someone has dug into the concrete wall to make a tiny tunnel the diameter of a half dollar, reaching into the next cell. It must have taken them months. Did they dig either side until they met in the middle? Were they friends? Is it possible to have a friend in here?

  A couple of hours later, the Breeder next door starts sobbing again, then she’s screaming. I run up to the sliding door but can’t see anything. I go back and curl up on the bed, my back to the camera, so the camera can’t see me talking.

  “Hey!” I whisper, and the howling stops. “Are you alright?”

  “Of course I’m not fucking alright!” comes the voice—a spitting, harsh voice, as though her throat has been torn.

  “Shhh,” I say. “They’ll just come and drug you.”

  She wails. The sound is awful. I hear the door of her cell opening and the stomping of the orange suits.

  •

  I wake up to a sniffing sound. I drape myself over the bed and lower my head. Fuck it. “Hello?” I whisper.

  “Hello,” she says. Her voice is still ragged.

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  “No,” she says. “No.”

  “My name is Will,” I say. It feels so good to say my name. I want to keep talking. “What’s your name?”

  “Mary,” she says. She starts to weep.

  “Shhh,” I say, my heart smashing in my chest. “They’ll come for you.”

  “The baby died,” she says. “It’s the fifth one I’ve had, and they’ve all died. I’m going to the Rator for sure.”

  Fuck.

  “How many months are you?” she asks me.

  “I’m not a Breeder,” I tell her. “They made a mistake.”

  “Yeah, right. How long have you been in here? Nine months? Ten?”

  “Right. But I’m not a Breeder.”

  “They inseminate you when you’re sedated,” she says. “You don’t even know it’s happened.”

  “Yeah but I’m not . . .”

  “You are, or you wouldn’t still be in this unit.”

  “I’M NOT!” I yell. I jump off the bed, away from her. Behind me, I can hear Mary laughing.

  I look down at my protruding stomach and feel the heat of shame rush to my face. All the ways I’ve been pretending won’t work anymore.

  I kick over the chair, tear the sheets and blankets off my bed, and throw my toothbrush across the room. Everything else in the cell is either concrete or bolted down and I need to destroy. So I go about destroying myself: I smash my whole body against the concrete wall, and then run to the other side of the cell and drive myself into the wall again and again and again.

  I curl up on the floor, around my giant belly, my hands to my ears.

  I want to die. I want to die.

  There’s no comfort coming. I keep thinking it’s coming but it isn’t.

  All the young Breeders outside the wall thought comfort was coming too. And instead they saw me—me dragging them beyond the Gray Zone, loading them into Rob’s car, sending them to the Incubator.

  I recite their names to myself.

  The girls I smuggled in, to this fate.

  To remember.

  Kylie, age fifteen, with her angry fists.

  Darcy, age thirteen.

  Clarice, age fifteen, and Mai, age fourteen.

  Kim, age twelve, and Sophie, age thirteen.

  Daniella, age twelve, clutching her pink rabbit.

  There are hundreds more.

  There are so many.

  They’re all in here with me—in the Incubator somewhere. I did that to them in order to keep myself safe.

  There is no safe place.

  I grab the bottom sheet from my bed, get up on the plastic chair, tie the bed sheet around the sprinkler head, hoist my neck through the loop. I hesitate, then see my pregnant stomach again, and then I kick back that fucking chair as hard as I can.

  Shudder up my spine, above my heart, down my legs. Lungs compress, my limbs jerk. Fear. Then nothing.

  •

  There’s movement beneath me. A sharp light in my eyes.

  “No. Put her over there.”

  A rolling motion, a shooting pain in my neck.

  “Dammit, be gentle with her spine!”

  Another bright light in my eyes.

  Then there’s a face in front of mine. Bright green eyes above a surgical mask. “We’ve had to operate. You stupid little Breeder. But you should be able to walk.”

  A cold stinging in my arm, then darkness.

  I drift in and out of consciousness. I’m so, so tired. When I’m awake, I sense pieces of sound and light, like in dreams. And then I’m out again.

  I wake to real music. Not an entertainment plug. It hurts my heart, it’s so beautiful.

  And there’s a light, a different kind of light. It’s warm. Right above me are angels: the tumbling, laughing, happy, beautiful angels, just like the Book Shadow had in her shop, but ten times larger, and so bright. Are they real? Ma used to tell me about what she called “Heaven”—a place, she said, where she believed we go when we die. A place filled with angels, one for each of us. It’s where everything lost is returned; where everyone sought is found; where the answer to every sorrow is love. I’ve never believed in Heaven, to be honest. Even if there is life after death, I bet it would be like here anyway—a place that calculates your units earned and your units owed, and if you’re in deficit, makes you pay.

  It all goes dark again.

  When I wake, the voice is warm.

  “You’re awake, are you?” I’m wrapped in something soft.

  I try to focus my eyes on something. I see a wall. There are angels: the angels aren’t real but painted on the wall. The music stops. I’m in a bed wrapped in a thick, heavy blanket.

  I look at the huge, tight belly that is part of my own body. I failed—I’m still here. I’m still attached to that Thing. I try to sit up but am shackled again.

  “Don’t move.” The voice is to the right and I try to turn my head but can’t. “No, don’t turn your head. Let your muscles go slack.”

  The voice sounds musical, rich, older. “You’re doing really well. You’re safe.”

  Yeah, right. A face comes into view: those bright green eyes again. I try to talk, but there’s too much pain.

  “Take it easy.” The mask comes off. “Just relax. Really.”

  She’s female, but she has no scar or tattoo. She looks male and female, old and young, all at the same time—she has a beautiful face, like from one of the Book Shadow’s old-timey painting books, but her expression is as calm and untraumatized as a man’s.

  “Where am I?”

  “In my home. In Zone A.” It’s one of the biggest rooms I’ve ever seen. There are paintings on the walls and the doors at the end open up into bright sunlight.

  “Are you a magistrate?” I ask. My voice is hoarse and it hurts to talk.

  She laughs at me.

  “Are you a . . . Shadow?”

  There’s another laugh. “Only Westies are Shadows. I’m Professor Keeling, the surgeon of the Incubator. I’ve had to make a small adjustment to your spine as a result of your—suicide attempt. And I’m also your obstetrician.”

  My face goes hot. “You operated on me? Here?”

  She nods and points to a hallway behind us. “I have a full surgery room out there, and private recuperation rooms.”

  She’s looking at me c
arefully. Do all Breeders get lifted into Zone A when they try to destroy themselves? She wants something. She’s waiting.

  “Will, I can’t emphasize enough what a valuable resource you’re carrying. As you know. And we’re very interested in a live birth.”

  I don’t say anything. Ma always taught me not to give anything away for free: to find the angle with a person, to find out what they want, and then to use that as leverage. But the Corp already has everything they want from me—there’s nothing I can hold back.

  “What do you want?” I ask.

  “I love Westie directness,” she says, and smiles. “I’ve brought you here to monitor you myself. Is there anything I can bring you to make you more comfortable?”

  “I need some information about my family,” I tell the surgeon.

  She shakes her head. “I can’t give you anything like that,” she says, still smiling.

  I’m angry at how disappointed I feel, it’s like another kick in the guts. “Then why bother asking?”

  She stops smiling and looks completely deadpan. Her expression chills me.

  “It would be good for you if we could get along, Will, until we get that live birth. It won’t be long now, but I’m going to keep you here until that happens. So just be a good Breeder, okay?” I hear the crackle of plastic and then there’s a sharp, cold pain in my arm. “I’m just going to give you this to calm you down. It’s very important that we protect your spine.”

  I start to fade out as the music resumes. It’s definitely not on an entertainment plug. Somebody is playing a real instrument.