Genesis: A science-fiction short story. Read Free

but a look into the woman’s eyes tells her that yes, she undoubtedly did.
    “What?” she asks, and the voice comes out as a whisper. “I’ve never heard of—“
    “It’s new this quarter,” says Mrs. Woodrow. “We reduced the minimum certification from 35 to 30. It was not a decision the bureau took lightly, but it was necessary given the current global economic situation.”
    “I—that, you can’t do that,” says Sylvia, but she can already see that Mrs. Woodrow has shut down; she has leaned back in her chair and is staring again at her screen. Sylvia opens and closes her mouths before finding her voice again. “How do I appeal?”
    “You want to appeal?” asks Mrs. Woodrow, looking at her out of the corner of her eye. “I can tell you right now, the appeal process isn’t easy. Unless you’ve failed to tell me something major, you won’t win. You’ll just spend your entire pregnancy tied up in paperwork.”
    “I want to appeal,” says Sylvia, with conviction. Mrs. Woodrow reluctantly sighs.
    “What is your official email address?” asks Mrs. Woodrow. “It must be a government email address.”
    Sylvia gives the woman the information and the woman, with a few hard taps, sends along the requested forms.
    Mrs. Woodrow shakes her head, her tone changing immediately from casual to stiff; she doesn’t like it when people try to appeal, she feels that it is a personal slight.
    Sylvia leaves the office; she barely even sees the others she walks past. She is lost within her own mind.
     
    Kathleen Cardoff’s pregnancy would have gone entirely unnoticed if she had simply been quiet about it. Certainly, the child looked very similar to her—but children are supposed to look similar to their mothers. Certainly, she had maintained that she could not possibly be pregnant—but many women did exactly that.
    Like a terrier with its prey, however, Kathleen just couldn’t let it go. It wasn’t just about her; it was about her little girl. She couldn’t get past the fact that the girl looked just like her. She took out pictures, showing whoever asked; she told everyone she knew her story.
    Eventually, Kathleen received a message from Dr. Neal Rivera. Dr. Rivera had been tracking similar cases all across the globe, but Kathleen’s was the first known occurrence. Once she had connected with Dr. Rivera and his team, everything moved, to her, like a blur; he was able to immediately confirm what she had always known. That she and her child were genetically identical.
    Dr. Rivera had initially called it spontaneous genesis, but it would later be coined Cardoff’s Syndrome. It was not a disease that could be transmitted through human vectors, and thus any search for a “patient zero” failed. For the rest of human history, Kathleen Cardoff would remain the first known case.
    Within the decade it had to be accepted; virtually every woman had developed Cardoff’s Syndrome. It occurred slowly, at first, and then more often. If they did not become pregnant through natural means, they began naturally and spontaneously generating a clone of themselves.
    There was no way around this but for sterilization; ordinary means of birth control, even chemical means, did not work because the woman’s eggs no longer needed to become fertilized to be viable.
    Was it the hormones in the water? Was it somehow the electrical frequencies being jettisoned through the air? Was it some mysterious change in the chemical nature of the earth itself? What had caused this?
    No one knew. What they did know was that it was an emergency. What they did know was that there would have to be protocols put into place to preserve the future of humanity.
     
    Sylvia Rider returns home, where her best friend Caroline Young has been watching her two young daughters. Her children, Maggie and Kate, are now aged two and four. She loves them, more than anything in the world.
    Sylvia’s husband, Dorian, had never been able to accept the children nor the