Living Proof

by Kira Peikoff

  “I guess they could make me open my books. I’m going to go check right now. You didn’t tell Jed anything right?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Where is the story going to run tomorrow?”

  “The Daily News. He couldn’t write it tonight, so he passed it along to his friend there.”

  “God, if it weren’t for him calling you … I owe him big. But of course, he’ll never know it.”

  “No, he won’t.” And now, Trent thought, I’ll have to make sure you never talk to him again.

  “But do you know what this could mean still?” Her voice quivered. “If the DEP fucks this up—”

  “No,” he said firmly, “you’ll—”

  Her voice cut through his. “Gotta go. Can’t waste time.”

  Trent heard a click and the line went dead.

  A box on the computer flashed in red on his screen: twenty minutes left.

  He closed his eyes and pressed his forehead against his palm. Sweat smeared onto his hand and dribbled down his wrist, but he didn’t bother to wipe it away. The clicking of keyboards around him faded as anguish set in. To know he could help her only to a degree; to watch her struggle alone, in her condition, against the relentless procession of his own department—it was no less than horrifying. Could it be that the force of the DEP was unstoppable, that despite the scientists’ progress, there was no other realistic conclusion but the one he feared most? His stomach cramped. It was the first time he allowed the possibility to be real: She could actually die in jail.

  Trent looked up, knowing he was losing time. Dopp’s e-mail still filled the screen. Hastily, he created an anonymous e-mail address on quickmail.com, then copied and pasted Dopp’s e-mail into a new message. The only section he still needed to fill in was the destination address. His briefcase lay at his feet. He pulled out the newspaper and looked inside for a number. By the time he had downloaded Trype, the free—and untraceable—Internet phone service, the computer screen was flashing again: ten minutes left.

  The line rang only once before a man answered.

  “Daily News, city desk.”

  “Hi,” Trent murmured, his head bent close to the computer’s speakers. “I work for the Department of Embryo Preservation, and I have a huge exclusive for you.…”

  “Oh yeah?” The voice sounded perkier.

  “A major change in policy is starting tomorrow: random, surprise inspections at any clinic, and more. The whole thing is in a confidential e-mail that the chief sent to the department just an hour ago. Give me your e-mail address, and I’ll send you a copy of it right now.”

  * * *

  Arianna stood inside the lab, leaning against its steel door for support. Her knees felt shaky, but whether it was from anxiety or her depleting nerve fibers, she did not know.

  Sam and Patrick were both gaping at her.

  “Are you sure?” Patrick asked. “It sounds pretty extreme. Couldn’t there have been something lost in translation?”

  Arianna shook her head, ignoring the twisting of her gut. Don’t fall apart, she told herself. This is not the time to cry. She spoke steadily.

  “Trent told me everything his reporter friend told him, which he got straight from the source. It’s going to be in the paper tomorrow, so there’s no sense in second-guessing it.” Before the men could respond, a cold sense of pragmatism overtook her. She stepped away from the door and pushed against her cane, standing erect.

  “We need to stop standing around and figure out what to do. I checked the records—to be current, we need twelve embryos in the freezer by tomorrow morning. How many clones do we have ready right now?”

  Sam looked at Patrick, whose wide eyes betrayed his alarm.

  “You took care of the cloning,” Sam snapped. “Answer the question.”

  “We—well, I,” Patrick stammered, “I only made ten clones.”

  “But we’re twelve short!” Arianna heard herself shout.

  “I wasn’t rushing to make them—we weren’t supposed to need them for weeks!”

  “Why did you only make ten?” Sam demanded. “Why didn’t you just make as many as possible?”

  “I didn’t want to spend all my time on it before I had to,” Patrick choked out. “Maybe if you would have helped…”

  “How dare you.” Sam’s lip curled up in a sneer. “I was doing both of our jobs.”

  “At least one of us was avoiding the backlog,” Patrick shot back. “You know how we always spend so much time the week before an inspection on cloning!” He glanced wildly between Arianna and Sam. “You can’t be mad—I had no idea we would need them this instant!”

  “None of us did.” Arianna shook her head, cursing under her breath. “But we’re two short. What are we going to do?”

  As soon as she asked the question, she felt, rather than thought, an idea so painful that a barbed rod seemed to twist inside her throat.

  “Sam, what about the embryos I brought you a few days ago? Are there any you haven’t used yet that I could—take back?”

  He shook his head. “No. We’ve used them all. I thought you were bringing us a new batch today.…”

  “I was going to,” she whispered. “I have some ready at the clinic.…”

  “We need them right now!” Patrick cried. “Now more than ever!”

  “I’m sure she realizes that,” Sam snapped. “Now, Arianna, what if you just changed a few numbers in the records? It’s not as if you already filed the count. You’re not even supposed to know about the new policy!”

  As Arianna winced he continued, “If we were short a lot of embryos and you drastically manipulated the records, the numbers might jump out, but it’s matter of two, Arianna. Two!”

  She looked at Patrick. He did not appear to agree or disagree, but stood by silently, arms crossed over his chest.

  “But it’s still risky,” she protested. “If they found out I underreported, they could immediately arrest me on felony charges. In fact, it’s less of a crime to misplace two embryos. So we’d get a ten-thousand-dollar fine and probation, but I wouldn’t have to worry about jail.”

  “How do you know?” Sam retorted. “You give them too much credit, Arianna. The whole department is running amok with power. Who’s to say they’ll just give you a ticket and walk away? How can you be so sure that the second they find fault with the clinic, they won’t shut it down under the new policy?”

  Sam’s face pinched into taut lines—a dark rage that befitted his firsthand understanding of the government’s transgressions against its citizens. “They’re gangsters,” he spat. “All of them.”

  “They are unpredictable now,” she admitted. “I guess we can’t give them an inch.”

  “So you have to change the numbers,” Sam said. “It’s the only way.”

  “I’ll have to be very careful about it. Patrick, do you agree?”

  Arianna turned to look at him and wondered if he might faint: the whiteness of his face was eerily similar to the color of his lab coat. He did not answer right away, and when he did, Arianna had to strain to hear the three words:

  “I guess so.”

  * * *

  Arianna sat in her office early the next morning holding a copy of the Daily News. The pages felt smooth in her hands, but the words on the cover may as well have been spikes: FERTILITY CLINICS IN FOR A SURPRISE—INSPECTION!

  And on the line beneath: “DEP Cracks Down.” Stamped at the bottom of the page was a rectangular box: “Exclusive! See Pages 4–5”.

  Barely breathing, Arianna flipped to the pages. A copy of the chief’s infamous e-mail was blown up on the left page, with the accompanying article on the right page. She skimmed the e-mail, and then the article:

  A confidential memo sent from the chief supervisor of the Department of Embryo Preservation to his staff—and obtained exclusively by the Daily News—indicates an abrupt, sweeping change in policy that will affect all of the city’s 112 fertility clinics, starting today.

  Under
the new policy, surprise inspections may take place at any clinic that chief supervisor Gideon Dopp designates on a weekly list. Clinics will also need to comply with new reporting guidelines; instead of filing their leftover embryo count with the department at the end of each month, they will now need to do so every day. According to the memo, such frequent filings will allow the department to “more closely monitor [the clinics].”

  When reached at his home in Long Island, Dopp initially demanded who had leaked the memo to the News. After a reporter refused to disclose the source, who had acted on condition of anonymity, Dopp said, “God has given me the sacred task of protecting the many EUEs in fertility clinics from abuse and neglect. I believe this change in policy will better accommodate that goal.”

  Just then, a high-pitched alarm sounded and the flat-panel screen on the wall lit up in red bursts. Shielding her eyes, Arianna found the remote in her drawer and clicked it off. It was barely 9 A.M. Someone had either just broken in, or held up a certain badge to the front door.

  Her heart plummeted. She set down the newspaper and stared at the screen. It took about four seconds for the picture to sharpen. A stout, blurry figure appeared, and then focused into round edges, a dark suit with a glint of gold, a familiar solemn face. The snapshot captured the man walking through the door with one knee raised, as if on a death march. Arianna’s breath caught in her throat. Even though she was prepared, she wondered if she could summon the politeness and calm she had always managed to show before.

  The clinic’s first appointment was not scheduled for another hour. Dr. Ericson was already in his office, prepping for the day’s patients, including a few of her old ones, as well as a donor’s egg retrieval surgery in the afternoon. Emily, the embryologist, was in the clinic’s lab, checking on the growth of fresh embryos. Arianna swiveled in her chair to face the intercom on her wall and pressed a button: laboratory.

  “Em, are you there?”

  “Yeah, what’s up?”

  Arianna lowered her voice. “He’s here. We’ll be in soon.”

  “Already? Christ, those jerks are fast.”

  “Are you surprised?”

  “Not one bit. Don’t worry, I’ll get out of your way.”

  “Why do you think I called?”

  During a routine inspection a few months prior, Emily had rolled her eyes at the back of an inspector who demanded three recounts. Although the man did not see the gesture, Arianna did. Both women realized then that Emily’s contempt was too blatant, and her self-control too scant, for her to be trusted around anyone from the DEP.

  On the flat screen, the inspector’s picture still gleamed, his unsmiling face out of keeping with the pictures of sleepy newborns covering the wall. Arianna hit a button to clear the screen, and then rose gradually, willing her legs to carry her to the waiting room. By now, she was accustomed to the tingly, half-asleep feeling in her legs that bordered on total numbness. Instead she concentrated on where each foot was in space, and where it needed to go: out the door, to the left, into the hallway, forward.

  But whenever she put pressure on her feet, the tingling sensation exploded into a furious, inside-out itch, and she willed her legs not to thrash. Soon, the sensation became too intense to ignore. There in the empty hallway she stomped and squirmed, feeling completely dissociated from her awkward body. She imagined watching herself from a bystander’s perspective. I must look totally crazy, she thought as she wiggled her legs like a dancer without rhythm or sanity. She chuckled in spite of herself, and the sound skidded off the white walls and faded away.

  Then she stopped short, grinding her cane into the linoleum floor. Her own laughter, she realized, had become a foreign sound. In the corners of her eyes, tears pooled.

  No, she thought simply. No.

  Left foot forward, plant. Right foot forward, eye on the prize … The waiting room door was within reach. She yanked it open.

  Inspector Banks rose from the sofa and smiled coldly. She could not bring herself to smile back, or to show any emotion at all.

  “Good morning, Dr. Drake,” he said. “I take it you are not surprised to see me?”

  “No. I read the paper this morning.”

  His lips tightened. “I see.”

  “It must be hard to have a traitor in the department.”

  He narrowed his eyes, as if trying to spot a smirk on her lips. But she remained blank. “Shall we?” she asked.

  “I need to see your most current record count,” he demanded.

  “Of course. Follow me.”

  They walked to her office. He did not ask about her cane, or why she was walking so woodenly, as if on the sea floor. When they reached her office, she motioned for him to sit down across from her desk.

  “I’ll stand.”

  She shrugged and turned to her filing cabinet. After rifling through it, she pulled out a stack of records and dropped them onto the desk.

  “There’s all the patients’ records in the days since your last visit.”

  He looked over the pages, signed by both doctor and patient.

  “What’s the total EUE count?”

  “I will have the computer add it up. One moment.”

  She turned to her monitor, which faced away from him, and pressed her thumb on the upper right-hand corner of the screen. After a second, a box popped up that read UNLOCKED, which enabled her to navigate to patients’ records. She opened a program that automatically studied the records from a specific date forward and then calculated the total number of embryos that ought to be in the clinic’s lab. But before she hit the CALCULATE button, she checked the one record she had changed last night. It was of the most recent donor, not an actual patient. The woman—who was the daughter of a family friend—had given up nineteen of her eggs last week, but Arianna had changed the number to seventeen in order to compensate for the two they were short. Last night, Arianna had also called the donor and explained the change, so that in case the DEP ever contacted her to corroborate the record, her answer would be consistent. On screen now, the woman’s record still showed seventeen, so Arianna hit CALCULATE and then printed out the total.

  “Here it is,” she said, handing Banks the paper. “Seventy-eight leftover embryos.”

  Banks flinched at her condescending term—leftover—but Arianna didn’t care. It wasn’t illegal to call them what they were, she thought. Let him go to hell.

  Anyway, she knew the number was correct; late last night, she had counted the embryos twice herself and checked each one under the microscope.

  “Let me just check that number against your paper records here,” Banks said.

  “Go ahead.”

  He leafed through every page of records in the stack, scanning the numbers with a pen-sized device that added them on an internal calculator. Arianna held her breath when he came to the altered record she had replaced in the file. He passed it without incident. Finally, he announced the sum.

  “Yes, seventy-eight is correct.”

  Arianna nodded and led him to the lab. Inside, the freezer and incubator purred quietly, sustaining a veritable farm of embryos between them. Banks opened the freezer door, waited for the billow of icy mist to evaporate and then counted the embryos labeled JANUARY, including the ten undetectable clones. Then he turned to the incubator and counted the fresh ones growing there, including the donated ones that should have been in Sam and Patrick’s able hands. The embryos languished in the incubator in the sad-face section as the cells continued to divide—and Arianna realized that they would soon grow past the early window that accommodated the extraction of stem cells. The precious donation—and the careful effort that went into recruiting the woman, preparing her body with hormones, and extracting her eggs—would end up in the freezer, a waste. Arianna looked away from the inspector’s bent neck, gripping her cane. She tried not to think of it as a weapon.

  After the bureaucratic exercise of viewing random embryos in the electron microscopes to check that they were being properly preserve
d, Banks turned to her, barely concealing a sigh. “They’re all there, and they’re being properly preserved.”

  She signed the form he handed to her.

  Wordlessly, they left the lab and she led him back to the waiting room. It was still empty. He turned to her again, and she thought he was going to shake her hand. He did not.

  “I suppose,” he said, “since you’re so caught up, you already know you have to start filing daily counts with us, starting by the end of today.”

  She nodded.

  “An official notice will be sent to you this afternoon. See you soon, then,” he said, flashing her a sinister smile.

  Something about his words unsettled her, and as he walked to the door, she realized why: She had assumed that since the clinic passed the inspection, he would not be returning for another several weeks, per the regular schedule.

  “Wait,” she called out.

  He turned around.

  “What do you mean, soon? How often are these surprise inspections to take place?”

  Banks shrugged maddeningly. “I really am not authorized to say. Hence, ‘surprise,’ Dr. Drake.”

  “But we passed it. This clinic has passed every inspection and audit. I’m sure we have one of the cleanest records in the city. Doesn’t that count for something?”

  He shrugged again. “Things have changed.”

  “So you’re saying you could come back again next week?” She hoped her tone did not sound indignant.

  “Or even tomorrow. Good-bye, Dr. Drake.”

  He turned and walked out without waiting for her to reply.

  Stunned, she stood in the doorway of the waiting room, staring at the spot he had vacated. It was as if his words had stripped her of her ability to function. Things have changed. She knew she needed to call Sam, and her hand reacted appropriately, reaching into her pocket and pulling out her cell phone. He answered right away.

  “Don’t tell me the bastard already showed up.”

  “Yeah. We passed.”

  “Good!”

  “Not really. He could show up any day—I didn’t realize it was going to be a constant—”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. We need to have an emergency meeting tonight. I’ll come to the lab with the Ericsons as soon as the day is over. But you and Patrick need to start cloning new embryos as soon as possible, because until we have replacements ready, I can’t take any embryos out of here. He could show up again tomorrow.”