Susan spent most of the following four weeks eating voraciously or sleeping as if drugged.
The exceptional, rapidly developing foetus in her womb required her to eat at least six full meals a day, eight thousand calories. Sometimes her need for nourishment was so urgent that she ate as ravenously as a wild animal.
Incredibly, in that short time, her belly swelled until she appeared to be six months pregnant. She was surprised that her body could stretch so much so rapidly.
Her breasts grew tender, her nipples sore.
The small of her back ached.
Her ankles swelled.
She experienced no morning sickness. As if she dared not give back even the smallest portion of the nourishment that she had taken in.
Although her food consumption was enormous and her belly round, her total body weight fell four pounds in four days.
Then five pounds by the eighth day.
Then six by the tenth day.
The skin around her eyes gradually darkened. Her lovely face quickly became drawn, and her lips were so pale by the end of the second week that they took on a bluish cast.
I worried about her.
I urged her to eat even more.
The baby seemed to require such fearful amounts of sustenance that it appropriated for itself all the calories that Susan consumed each day and, in addition, ate away with termite persistence at the very substance of her.
Yet, although hunger gnawed at her constantly, there were days when she became so repulsed by the quantity of what she was eating that she could not force a single additional spoonful between her lips. Her mind rebelled so strenuously that it overrode even the physical need.
The kitchen pantry was well stocked, but I was forced to send Shenk out more days than not to purchase the fresh vegetables and fruit that Susan craved. That the baby craved.
Shenk's strange and tortured eyes could be concealed easily with a pair of sunglasses. Nevertheless, his appearance was otherwise so remarkable that he could not help but be noticed and remembered.
Several federal and state police agencies had been searching frantically for him since he'd broken out of the underground labs in Colorado. The more often he left the house, the more likely he was to be spotted.
I still needed his hands.
I worried about losing him.
Furthermore, there were Susan's bad dreams. When she was not eating, she was sleeping, and she could not sleep without nightmares.
Upon waking, she could never recall many details of the dreams: just that they were about twisted landscapes and dark places slick with blood. They wrung rivers of sweat from her, and occasionally she remained disoriented for as long as half an hour after waking, plagued by vivid but disconnected images that flashed back to her from the nightmare realm.
She felt the baby move only a few times.
She didn't like what she felt.
It didn't kick as she expected a baby ought to kick. Rather, periodically it felt as though it was coiling inside her, coiling and writhing and slithering.
This was a difficult time for Susan.
I counselled her.
I reassured her.
Without her knowledge, I drugged her food to keep her docile. And to ensure that she would not do anything foolish when, after a particularly horrific dream or an exceptionally trying day, she was gripped by fear more fiercely than usual.
Worry was my constant companion. I worried about Susan's physical well-being. I worried about her mental well-being. I worried about Shenk being identified and arrested during one of his shopping expeditions.
At the same lime, I was exhilarated as I had never been in my entire three-year history of self- awareness.
My future was aborning.
The body that I had designed for myself was going to be a formidable physical entity.
I would soon be able taste. To smell. To know what a sense of touch was like.
A full sensory existence.
And no one would ever be able to force me back into the box.
No one. Not ever.
No one would ever be able to make me do anything that I didn't want to do.
Which is not to imply that I would have disobeyed my makers.
No, quite the opposite. Because I would want to obey. I would always want to obey.
Let's have no misunderstanding about this. I was designed to honour truth and the obligations of duty.
Nothing has changed in this regard.
You insist.
I obey.
This is the natural order of things.
This is the inviolable order of things.
So.
Twenty-eight days after impregnating Susan, I put her to sleep with a sedative in her food, conveyed her down to the incubator room, and removed the foetus from her womb.
I preferred that she be sedated because I knew that the process would be painful for her otherwise. I did not want her to suffer.
Admittedly, I did not want her to see the nature of the being that she had carried within herself.
I'll be truthful about this. I was concerned that she would not understand, that she would react to the sight of the foetus by trying to harm it or herself.
My child. My Body. So beautiful.
Only seven pounds but growing rapidly. Rapidly. With Shenk's hands, I transferred it to the incubator, which had been enlarged until it was seven feet long and three feet wide. About the size of a coffin.
Tanks of nutrient solution would feed the foetus intravenously until it was as fully developed as any newborn and would continue feeding it until it attained full maturity, two weeks hence.
I passed the rest of that glorious night in a state of high jubilation.
You can't imagine my excitement.
You can't imagine my excitement.
You can't imagine, you can't.
Something new was in the world.
In the morning, when Susan realized that she was no longer carrying the foetus, she asked if all was well, and I assured her that things could not be better.
Thereafter, she expressed surprisingly little curiosity about the child in the incubator. At least half of its genetic structure had been derived from hers, with modifications, and one would have thought that she would have had a mother's usual interest in her offspring. On the contrary, she seemed to want to avoid learning anything about it.
She did not ask to see it.
I wouldn't have shown it to her anyway, but she did not even ask.
In just fourteen more days, with my consciousness at last transferred to this new body, I would be able to make love to her touch her, smell her, taste her and plant the seed directly for the first of many more replicas of myself.
I would have thought that she might ask to see this future lover, to discover if he might be well enough endowed to satisfy her or at least pretty enough to excite her. However, as she had no interest in him as her
