BABYBOTS AND BOTBABIES
The times are strange. It’s winter in Portland, Oregon, and as people are bustling around the city doing their holiday shopping, decorating their trees, and listening to endless Christmas song playlists, Sam Turpin is sitting in his cubicle in an empty office, contemplating how he will write code that will lead to the perishing of numerous embryos located on the other side of the globe. Meanwhile, Lyla Turpin, Sam’s wife, is cozied up on the couch at home, reading “The M.E.I.P.S 101: The Ultimate Guide to The Mechanical Embryo Incubator and Pregnancy Simulator.”
Sam and Lyla had started discussing children recently, as they were both approaching 35, and like most people in the mid-21st century, they had already stored their embryos when they were both in their early twenties. “Store em’ while you’re young, and your embryos will be fresh!” had been the motto. Now it was decision time: should they use the natural pregnancy process, or use the babybots, which was the name that the MEIPS had quickly been dubbed, since it looked somewhat like a robot and “produced” babies. For Lyla, it was a non-decision. She had just been promoted to vice president at Bank Bitcoin United, the biggest global electronic currency bank, and was not about to let a nine-month pregnancy devastate her career trajectory. Sam, on the other hand, was not enthused about having a “botbaby,” which children born from the babybots were often referred to unofficially. Just like his food, which only came from farmers markets, he wanted his children to be “all-natural.” To make matters worse, his parents were devout Catholics, and thought that the babybots was a tool developed by the Anti-Christ to allow humans to “play God.” Sam also had other reasons for not wanting to use the babybots, reasons he could not share with Lyla.
Unbeknownst to Lyla, Sam had just been put on a top-secret mission at the NSA and was tasked with creating malware that would shut down Russian-built babybots that were currently sitting in the Ukraine. Sam’s level of anxiety had been skyrocketing recently, since he was aware that the embryos in the babybots would perish if he was successful. His NSA clearance level meant that he was only privy to certain information, and all he knew was that a Ukrainian terrorist organization had stolen embryos from America’s biggest embryo storage company, Embryo Emporium, and that they were planning something malicious. Sam felt extremely conflicted about being involved in a mission that would hurt living beings, yet he trusted that the government wouldn’t needlessly pursue such an ethically questionable plan of action.
It was during this time of high-intensity career situations for both Sam and Lyla that tragedy struck! Lyla had decided to take a break from her M.E.I.P.S reading to go for an e-coffee run when her car was struck by a malfunctioning autonomous vehicle.
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The angry sound of metal crunching on metal fills the air...
