UnDivided Read Free Page B

husband’s life. “And what if you sold the patent to the nation’s largest medical manufacturer . . . and what if they took all of that work . . . and buried it? And took the plans and burned them? And took everyprinter and smashed it, and prevented anyone from ever knowing that the technology existed?”
    Sonia trembled with such powerful fury as she spoke, she seemed much larger than her diminutive size—much more powerful than any of them.
    â€œWhat if,” Sonia said, “they made the solution to unwinding disappear because too many people have too much invested in keeping things exactly . . . the way . . . they are?”
    It was Grace—“low-cortical” Grace—who figured out where this was leading.
    â€œAnd what if there’s still one organ printer left,” she said, “hiding in the corner of an antique shop?”
    The idea seemed to suck all the air out of the room. Connor actually gasped, and Risa gripped his hand, as if she needed to hold on to him to stave off her own mental vertigo.
    Finally Sonia pulls forth a cardboard box that is about exactly the size of what Connor imagines a bread box would be. He makes room on a little round cherrywood table, and she sets the box down gently.
    â€œYou can take it out,” Sonia says to him, a bit out of breath from her efforts.
    Connor reaches in, gets his fingers around the dark object, then lifts it out of the box and sets it on the table.
    â€œThat’s it?” says Grace, clearly disappointed. “It’s just a printer.”
    â€œExactly,” says Sonia, with a smug sort of pride. “Earthshaking technology doesn’t arrive with bells and whistles. Those get added later.”
    The organ printer is small but deceptively heavy, packed with electronics tweaked for its peculiar purpose. To the eye, it is gunmetal gray and, as Grace already noted, entirely unremarkable. It looks like an ordinary printer that might have been manufactured before Connor was born, and thecasing itself probably came from a standard printer.
    â€œLike so many things in this world,” Sonia tells them, “what matters is what’s inside.”
    â€œMake it work,” asks Grace, practically bouncing in her chair. “Make it print me out an eye, or something.”
    â€œCan’t. The cartridge needs to be filled with pluripotent stem cells,” Sonia explains. “Beyond that, I couldn’t tell you much more. I’ll be damned if I know how the thing does what it does; my forte was neurobiology, not electronics. Janson built it.”
    â€œWe’ll have to reverse engineer it,” Risa says. “So it can be reproduced.”
    The small prototype has an output dish large enough to deliver the eye Grace requested—but clearly the technology could be applied to larger machines. The very idea sets Connor’s mind reeling. “If every hospital could print organs and tissues for its patients, the whole system of unwinding collapses!”
    Sonia leans back slowly shaking her head. “It won’t happen that way,” Sonia says. “It never does.” She makes sure she looks at each of them as she talks, to make sure she drives the point home.
    â€œThere isn’t one single thing that will end unwinding,” she tells them. “It will take a hodgepodge of random events that come together in just the right way and at just the right time to remind society it’s got a conscience.” Then she gently pats the organ printer. “All these years I was afraid of putting it out there because if they were to destroy this one, there’s no recourse. The technology dies with the machine. But now I think the time is right. Getting it out there won’t solve everything, but it could be the lynchpin that holds together all those other events.”
    Then she smacks Connor so hard with her cane it could raise a welt.