Worlds Apart Pt. 02

"I guess it's just one of those things," she replied, the tip of her furry tail twitching indecisively on the cushions beside her. "Being in a relationship is like a balancing act, we have to consider our own wants and needs, weigh them against those of our partner. I'd never try to twist your arm, I'd never hold our relationship hostage to get what I want. I'm not your Alpha, we're not a pack, I can't just order you around. But I'd hope that you'd realize how important this is to me, how much I want this."

"It's really that important to you?" he asked.

"I feel incomplete without it," she admitted, her green eyes turning back to him.

"Then, I'll put some serious thought into it," he added. "We both knew going into this that it wouldn't always be easy, that there would be hurdles. We've overcome them all so far, and we'll overcome this one, too."

"Alright," she said, giving him a reassuring smile.

***

"She wants kids?" Mike asked, dealing a deck of cards as he sat across the table from Jamie. It was a Friday evening, just after closing, so he was playing his weekly poker game with his colleagues at the supermarket. The five friends were sitting around a circular table in the breakroom, a cramped space with a few plastic chairs scattered about, a couple of vending machines standing up against the wall. There was a kitchen area with a fridge and cupboards that would have looked far more at home in an apartment, a solitary coffee machine sitting atop the counter.

"That's what she says," Jamie replied, picking up his cards to examine his hand.

"Don't think that this will just go away if you ignore it," Abby said. She was sitting to his right, still wearing an apron with the store's logo emblazoned on the front. Her dark hair was pulled back in a tight bun, and she had a cigarette between her lips, a lazy wisp of smoke rising towards the spinning blades of the ceiling fan above. "When women get all maternal, it's not something that's going to wear off. If she says she wants a baby, she'll get one. Her whole body chemistry is gearing up for it."

"Maybe aliens are different," Jamie replied with a shrug, but Abby shook her head.

"I wouldn't count on it."

"She's got the baby-rabies," another of his colleagues added, eliciting laughter from everyone besides Jamie.

"I don't know what to do," he continued, pausing to take a drink from a can of soda. "She laid out all of our options, and they're all bad. I don't want to raise another guy's kid, and I certainly don't want Liz to have someone else's baby. Does that make me selfish?"

"Love is selfish," Abby insisted, waving her cigarette at him before taking another puff. "We have exclusive relationships because we're possessive, and let's not pretend otherwise. We get married because we want exclusive access to a person, we want it in writing, like we're signing a lease on a car."

"You're the only one of us who's had kids," Mike added, Abby glancing across the table at him. "What's it like?"

"It's a huge pain in the ass," she replied, taking another long drag. "Their constant screaming at all hours of the night will make you want to smother them if it means getting a couple of hours of uninterrupted sleep. Every piece of clothing you own will be covered in vomit stains before long, and you'll be spending most of your day handling human feces. That said, I'll be damned if our brains aren't wired to make us love the little bastards more than life itself. You won't get it until you hold a baby you helped make in your own hands, but you look down at the little dreg, and it's like...I would literally kill a lion with my bare hands to keep you safe."

"I am both horrified and inspired," Mike mused.

"There must be another option," Jamie continued, leaning back in his chair as he stared blankly at his cards. "Every time we encountered some unsolvable problem, we found a way. I don't want to choose the lesser evil, and I don't want to disappoint Liz. There has to be something that nobody has thought of, something so out-there that I'm the first one to consider it."

"I think you may be screwed on this one, Jamie," Mike replied. "You can't beat biology."

"We live in a time when most forms of cancer can be cured with gene therapy," Jamie replied, "where birth defects can be detected and edited out in the womb while a baby is still a clump of cells. We wiped out HIV with targeted viruses, we cured sickle cell, so why can't we find a way for two different species to reproduce? Why is that so impossible?"

"Sounds like you've been doing some research," Abby muttered, tapping her cigarette against the edge of her ashtray. "If human and Borealan DNA is as different as your girlfriend says, then they're not even in the same ballpark. The fact that you look kind of similar is a coincidence. You might as well try to splice a dog's genome with a sea sponge."

"What if it went wrong?" Mike said, Jamie glancing across the table at him. "What if the kid ended up like a Chinese soldier and started fucking melting or something? You read about the kind of shit that happened to the PLA guys in the Sino-American war, right? They tried to turn them into super-soldiers with shoddy gene-editing tech, and it went about as well as you'd expect."

"There are gene therapy clinics," Abby added with a shrug. "Maybe go ask the experts, see what they say."

"Maybe I'll do that," Jamie said, nodding his head. He examined his cards again, then pushed a stack of colorful, plastic chips towards the center of the table. "Raise."

***

"It's a nice thought, Jamie," Liz said as she lounged beside him on the bed. She was nude, the sheets discarded somewhere on the carpet, the silver moonlight that bled in through the window reflecting off the sweat that misted her dark skin. She rolled over onto her side, her ample breasts spilling onto the mattress beside him, gravity squashing them together. "I think your friends are right, though. I'm not sure that any gene-editing tech could make it work."

"Why not?" he asked, sitting up on the bed beside her. He was still a little hazy from their most recent bout of lovemaking. "I'm no geneticist, but if they can go in and edit a baby's genes to cure its cleft lip before it develops, why can't they do this?"

"There are a couple of big issues," Liz began, Jamie trying to keep his eyes off her chest as she explained. "DNA is made up of two chains that are formed into a double helix, spiraling around each other, and those helixes are bundled up into chromosomes. A chromosome is basically a big package of DNA all wound up like a ball of yarn, makes the DNA easier to manage."

The bed creaked as she shifted her weight, the motion making her bosom wobble.

"When we reproduce, the chromosomes from each parent are combined to make a new genome, which is a hybrid of both. Genes that are recessive or defective in the chromosomes from one parent will be overridden by the other's. The problem is, each of those genes has to match up with a counterpart. If your genes are imparting different instructions, or if you have a different number of genes, the resulting code is nonsense. It doesn't work. The same issues arise if you have a different number of chromosomes."

"So, you have to be almost identical to begin with," Jamie mused. "At least as far as species go."

"Pretty much," Liz replied. "If there's even a small mismatch, you're out of luck."

"I still want to look into it," Jamie added. "I might take a sick day tomorrow, find out where the nearest clinic is and go pay them a visit."

"If you want to," she replied. "I don't think it will do any good, but...thanks for taking this whole thing seriously. I appreciate that you're actually thinking about it like you promised."

"I always keep my word," he replied. "You're really smart, you know that? I feel like I don't tell you that enough."

"Oh?" Liz cooed, giving him a wry smile.

"You know all about biology, linguistics, your job at the embassy would boil my brain if I tried to fill in for you."

"Flattery will get you everywhere," she purred, rolling over on top of him. She let her breasts settle around his head, burying him in an avalanche of wobbling flesh. Her damp skin was silky smooth against his cheeks, the wonderful blend of her exertion and body wash filling his lungs. "You ready for another round?"

CHAPTER 2: GENETIC DETERMINISM

The mag-lev train zipped along its rail noiselessly, Jamie peering out of a nearby window as he watched the landscape fly past. The track was elevated high off the ground, the streets below little more than a blur, the towering spires of the city gradually giving way to sparser buildings as they reached the outskirts. Ahead of him, he could see the complex that housed the clinic, a cluster of hospital and university buildings that formed their own little settlement amongst the surrounding greenery. They were all whitewashed blocks of concrete and steel, the main structures forming a broken ring around a park area in the center of the campus, the green lawns framed by neat rows of trees.

The train slid to a stop in a nearby station, Jamie stepping out through the automatic doors. It was a short walk to the campus, and after checking a nearby information kiosk, he located the gene therapy clinic. The waiting room was much like any upscale hospital lobby, rows of padded benches lining the walls, a few potted plants adding a touch of greenery to the whitewashed surroundings. Jamie announced himself to a secretary who was sitting behind a desk, then took a seat, waiting for his turn to be seen. There were a few patients occupying the benches, each one being sent through before him, until his name was finally called.

The secretary directed him down a short corridor, Jamie pausing to glance through a long window to his left. He could see through into some kind of lab or cleanroom. Everything in there was white, from the walls and ceiling to the lab coats that the occupants were wearing. Large, expensive-looking machinery with white housings occupied most of the surfaces, many of the employees hunched over them, tapping at touch screens and holographic displays. Jamie watched one of them raise a vial of fluid, holding it up to the bright halogen light strips for a moment before inserting it into some kind of centrifuge.

Another man in a lab coat emerged from a door ahead of him, raising a hand in greeting. This must be the doctor. He was an older fellow with a clean-shaven face, his brown hair just starting to turn gray in places. They introduced themselves, the man waving Jamie into an unremarkable office, the two of them taking a seat to either side of a wooden desk.

"I'm told that you're interested in pursuing fertility treatments with our clinic," the doctor began, pulling up Jamie's information on a holographic display that was being projected from a console mounted atop his desk. "When we get clients in your age bracket, it's usually because they've been diagnosed with a condition that makes conception difficult, or they're in a same-sex relationship. I took the liberty of looking through the medical records that you forwarded, and I couldn't see anything that stood out to me as unusual in your history. Might I inquire as to what kind of treatment you're looking for, exactly?"

"I have what may be an...unusual request," Jamie began, the doctor peeling his eyes away from the display to peer across the table at him.

"I should warn you that our clinic operates in full compliance with UN law," he began. "We offer cosmetic gene modification, but no enhancements or other procedures that aren't deemed medically necessary."

"Oh, it's nothing like that," Jamie insisted. "My partner and I are having problems conceiving because, well, we're different species."

"Different species?" the doctor asked, giving Jamie his full attention. He didn't seem shocked, more intrigued than anything.

"My partner is a Borealan, and we've recently started looking into ways to have kids. Adoption, surrogates, and artificial insemination are on the menu, but I wanted to know if there was any hope of us conceiving a child together?"

"This is a first," the doctor mused, scratching his chin as he considered. "I suppose this kind of thing was bound to come up eventually. With more and more alien species joining the Coalition and interstellar travel becoming more frequent, humans and aliens are ending up in closer and closer proximity. I happen to know that the Borealan genome has been sequenced," he continued, Jamie's heart skipping a beat.

"R-really? Does that mean..."

"Unfortunately, just because the DNA has been sequenced doesn't mean that we know what each individual gene does and how they interact with one another. That will take years of research. I can tell you that humans and Borealans have different numbers of chromosomes, meaning that sexual reproduction is quite impossible. Reproduction in eukaryotes relies on a process called meiosis, where chromosomes from the two parents fuse during fertilization to create a new genome. If the number of chromosomes is abnormal, it results in a condition known as aneuploidy, which in the majority of cases will cause a miscarriage. The baby just wouldn't develop properly, or at all, because the instructions being given to its cells would be gibberish. Not that fertilization would occur to begin with in this case," he added, "as the genetic codes of the two parents would be completely incompatible."

"Why is that?" Jamie asked. "We're so similar, we both breathe oxygen, we both have skin and hair. If we took the gene that tells Borealan cells to develop into hair follicles, why would it be so different from that of a human?"

"Take a look at this," the doctor continued, waving a hand through his holographic display. He brought up an animated graphic of a DNA strand, a double-helix that slowly rotated in the air. "This is DNA. As you can see, it's made up of two chains, which are joined by structures that look like the rungs of a ladder. These are called your base pairs. Think of them like the binary code in a computer, a set of instructions. A gene is a larger segment of that chain, which works kind of like a program, giving the cells their orders. It tells them how to form, how to behave, even when to die."

He zoomed the image in, the strand unraveling, a long section highlighted in red.

"Humans have around twenty-five thousand genes, though not all of them are active, and some will be superseded by more dominant genes during meiosis. In other species, the order in which they're arranged, the number of genes, and what those genes do are all totally different. Splicing two completely unrelated genomes together would require perfect knowledge of each gene's functions, and its interactions with other genes, which can change its function entirely."

"Then, it's not impossible in theory," Jamie said as he examined the floating graphic. "It's just so complex as to be infeasible."

"Sequencing a genome is no more difficult than running the data through a sufficiently powerful computer," the doctor continued, shutting off the display. "The difficult part is figuring out what those genes do, and there's no method that we know of other than experimentation. If we have a genome that we know is healthy, and one that we know is damaged, we can compare them to find out where the errors are. We can activate genes in a lab environment, deactivate others, then observe the results. There's no way to fast-track that process, I'm afraid."

"I see," Jamie said, his hope fading.

"Sorry we couldn't be of more help," the doctor said, Jamie giving him an appreciative nod. "If you're still looking for artificial insemination or surrogate services, that's something that we can definitely arrange for you."

Jamie tried to perk up, reminding himself that he was here for Liz. Even if his dreams of conceiving a child with her had been dashed, there were still other avenues open to them.

"Tell me about artificial insemination," he began. "My partner says that if we can secure a Borealan donor, the process should be pretty straightforward."

***

Jamie arrived back at his apartment to find Liz lounging on the couch, a tablet computer clutched in her furry hands. She was in her usual state of undress, wearing only a pair of tight shorts and a loose-fitting tank top that barely served to preserve her modesty. She didn't even look up as he entered the room, she was too engrossed in whatever she was reading.

"Hey, Liz," he called as he tossed his jacket onto the coat rack by the door. "I'm back from the clinic. They basically told me the same thing you did, I don't know why I got my hopes up like that. Guess it was a pretty stupid suggestion."

He walked over and sat down on the edge of the cushions, Liz looking up from her work, blinking her green eyes at him as he brandished a handful of colorful pamphlets.

"I made some progress, though. The doctors over there provide both artificial insemination and surrogate services. They can arrange the whole thing, we just have to decide which one we want to go with. They gave me all these leaflets."

"It wasn't a stupid suggestion," Liz shot back, Jamie cocking his head at her. "It was too smart. That was the problem."

"Huh?" Jamie asked, lowering his pamphlets.

"We can't splice two unrelated species together because our understanding of genetics and our level of medical technology doesn't allow it," she added, waving her tablet as she spoke. She was going a mile a minute, just like she had when they were kids, and she was explaining some lofty concept about xenolinguistics or exobiology to him. He hadn't seen her so enthusiastic in a long time.

"And?" he asked, wondering where she was going.

"And, there are two species that we know of that are more advanced than humanity, at least in that area. The first are the Brokers, and good luck getting them to share any of their technology without a hefty price tag. I've been researching all day, and there's so little information on them that I can't even work out what they actually look like."

"What's the second?" Jamie asked.

"The Betelgeusians," she replied, her emerald eyes glinting.

"The Bugs?" Jamie repeated, raising an eyebrow incredulously. "You mean the species of murderous insects we've been at war with for our entire lifetimes? The species that raze whole colonies without a shred of remorse?"

"That's the one," she replied, turning her attention back to her tablet. She scrolled through an article, the tip of one of her hooked claws covered by a rubber cap to prevent her from scratching up the glass. "Betelgeusian tech is all organic. Even their guns and ships have genetically-engineered components, each one a purpose-built lifeform designed to carry out a specific role. They have an understanding of DNA that transcends even Earth's most celebrated geneticists. The problem is, capturing their technology for study is extremely difficult. Their equipment literally dies in captivity, and since they tend to fight to the death, obtaining undamaged samples is rare."

"I'm listening," Jamie replied, "but I'm having a hard time seeing how that helps us."

"When we were talking about genetics last night, it got me thinking," she continued. "Back on Borealis, I'd hang out with Coalition auxiliaries whenever I could, Borealans who had served alongside UNN troops. They were a little more mellow than the other natives, and they knew what it was like to live around humans during their deployments. Anyway," she added with a dismissive wave of her hand. "Borealans like to share war stories, the bloodier the better, and they'd often get to talking about their experiences in the Navy." She set down her tablet now, giving him her full attention. "This one time, not long before I made it off-world, I was at a banquet hall where a lot of the auxiliaries liked to hang out. There was a pack there that had just shipped home after finishing a tour, and they were talking about something so unusual that it stuck with me."