Free The Only Ones by Carola Dibbell

excited, he wants to do another round, but Janet said not a chance.
    So that’s it.
    “You have your Bonus?” We’re in Lab 3, where Rauden is going to take one last bit of soma before I leave. “And don’t forget that bag Janet fixed up for your ride home.”
    I said, “Dude! I know.”
    He is going to scrape the soma from my breast, the left.
    “How good are the Zone North public Boards?” he asked, while he wipes my breast down, for Hygiene.
    I said, “Ok, if they don’t crash.”
    “Well, check your messages when you can.” He gave the topical and we wait for it to take.
    It is very early and always cool inside Lab 3 though it’s going to be a hot day. It’s very quiet because we’re the only ones around. I don’t know where Janet went. Rauden looks like he is having a hard time thinking of things to say, if you can believe it.
    “What will you do when you get back to Queens?”
    I said, apply to be an Opener. The pay is good and you are off the Mound but first must pass an Interview and purchase starter equipment. I could use the Bonus Rauden’s giving me for that.
    He’s getting the scalpel ready. “You open suspicious packages from drops?”
    I agreed. “In case some bioterrorist put a pathogen in. You could also do deCon cleanups, in houses where somebody died, or sometimes you clean up after antiPatho spray.”
    “What sort of pathogens?” he asks.
    But his scalpel hand is shaking so hard that I tell him, “Come on. What am I, going to get Anthrax? I already been exposed.” And I gave him a little poke.
    That got a smile. His hand is steady enough now to do the scraping. He did this so many times by now it’s not even invasive. He put the scraping in a dish and I just waited on the lab stool with my breast out.
    What happened now, Rauden did something that really surprised me. After he put a cover on the dish and started to wipe the blood off my breast with a cloth, he said, “Well, watch yourself. We’re still not absolutely sure how this Sylvain hardy business works.”
    So I’m like, whoa. Why would he tell me that? He’s never seeing me again. Why would he even care?
    And I guess it is because I was surprised, or maybe just I will never see him again either, I start to think if I got something to ask, better ask it now. “What will you do with those eggs?”
    “The Cahoonzie Harvest?” he goes, like he’s surprised too. Like, Cahoonzie? That’s the last thing in the world I would wonder about. “Well!” He finished wiping off my breast with an antiPatho wipe. “I suppose I’ll try another stab at conventional IVF—you know what that is—test tube babies, even though we do it in a goddamn dish—I’ll mix your eggs with frozen sperm from Dewey’s old collection—just to see what happens. I have fresh male product too.” He put a bandage on. “That should hold you.” He put the scalpel and things where they went. I pulled on my shirt. He headed for the freezers with the soma dish in his hand.
    But now I got started with the questions, I keep asking and asking, while I follow him to the freezers. “And if the, what you said, IVF doesn’t work?”
    He is opening drawers. I think he’s looking for empty cryo-Paks. “Well! I might try a bit of cloning. Enucleate a few of your eggs and transfer some nuclei from your soma.”
    Man! I really got used to how Rauden talks. “With nobody’s product but mine?”
    He finds a cryoPak, puts the covered dish with my breast soma inside, writes on the outside with a pen, and puts it in a freezer drawer. “Yes, it would be a,” he coughed, “single Donor SCNT. It’s done sometimes.” He shuts the freezer drawer and heads to the Box Room.
    Well, I just kept on with the questions. It’s like a chasing game I used to play with Cissy Fardo, so long ago. I followed him to the Box Room where he sat at his gizmo and punched keys, and I sat on a box, like the first time I was ever in this room. “And if that works?”
    He doesn’t