“So,” Corbin said, bewildered. His brain could not accept the image of his father as a lovesick young man willing to contaminate his lab. “You married her.”
Marcus chuckled. “Not right away. I begged and scraped and pleaded until I found somebody willing to hire me at the gene library. Awful job, but I was lucky to get anything at that point. The head lab tech there had done a year down on Overlook, too. I think he sympathized. Sita got a job with a cargo company based on Titan that didn’t ask too many questions, either about who she was or what cargo they took on. Shady work, but… well, we thought it was a good thing at the time. Since I was back on the orbiter, we could see each other more often. And after a time, I married her. We had five wonderful years together.” Marcus’s face grew tight, and for a moment, Corbin thought that he could see all the years of his father’s life press down upon him. “One morning, she told me she’d have to leave her job in a few months. I asked why. She told me she was pregnant. I was ecstatic. By that time, I’d crawled my way up to a better position in the library, and we had enough credits saved up to start thinking about living elsewhere. It was the perfect time to begin a family. I’d never even thought that a family was something that I’d be able to have. I mean, who’d love me?” His pixelated eyes found Corbin’s. Corbin said nothing. Marcus continued. “Two tendays later, Sita was making a run from Titan to Earth. Ambi cells. She normally didn’t make runs that long, but they were paying her double because of the valuable cargo. It wasn’t the sort of job she could say no to. Thing was, the bastards at the shuttleyard didn’t check to make sure that the containment seals were properly installed. This is before the GC really started cracking down on unsafe ambi. Bureaucrats don’t give a damn about anything unless it starts to affect a significant number of their constituents.” Marcus took a breath. “I’m sure you can guess what happened next.”
“The seals broke,” Corbin said. Marcus nodded. “I’m sorry.” He meant it, for Sita’s sake. At least an ambi accident was a quick way to go. The woman probably hadn’t had time to realize that anything had gone wrong. Still, unfortunate as the story was, it didn’t address the important question. “This doesn’t explain why you felt the need to clone yourself.”
“Doesn’t it?” Marcus said. “Sita was gone, and with her went the only chance at family I thought I’d ever get. I buried all thoughts of her, and focused instead on the child I could have had.”
“You could’ve adopted.”
“I wanted my own flesh and blood. Proof that someone had loved me enough to create a new life with me.”
Corbin scoffed. “You could’ve found a surrogate. You could’ve met someone else.”
“Yes, I’m sure you’d think that clearly if you were in the midst of grieving your dead wife,” Marcus snapped. There. That was the father that Corbin knew. At least he was on familiar ground now.
“So where did you do it?” Corbin asked. “Where was the vat that you grew me in?”
“Stitch. I took everything Sita and I had saved, and went to Stitch.”
“Stitch. Lovely.” Stitch was a fringe colony that served as a haven for the darker side of the modding community. Even visiting Stitch was liable to get you interrogated and slapped with jail time if someone back in the GC found out about your little trip. There weren’t many legal reasons for visiting such a place.
“After you were… well, after you came to be, I stayed a few more months, then brought you home.”
“How did you explain the infant?”
“I said that I’d met a woman on Port Coriol. We shared a night together, and next thing I knew, I had a son. I said that your mother couldn’t take care of you, so I took you home instead. I chose a non-augmented gestation process, so it did actually take nine months for you to fully form, and you aged at a normal rate. There was no reason for anyone to question it. My family chalked it up to me still grieving, but you know I didn’t talk to them much anyway. As for Sita’s family… they didn’t want anything to do with me after that. They’d never liked me to start, and I suppose they didn’t like the idea of me sharing someone else’s bed so soon after their daughter’s death.”
Corbin held up his hand. Old family drama was the least of his concerns. “You said non-augmented gestation process. Is there anything about me that was augmented?” Dr. Chef had told him there was nothing out-of-the-ordinary about his body, but he wanted to be damn sure.
Marcus shook his head. “No. The tech who made… the tech I hired kept trying to convince me to add a few tweaks, but I put my foot down. You’re the same as me. Flaws and all.”
Corbin leaned forward. “That’s why, isn’t it?”
“That’s why, what?”
“Mistakes were never okay by you. A broken sample dish, a dirty sock on the floor, a spilled cup of juice. It didn’t matter how well-behaved I was at school, or how good my grades were. I’d come home with a score card full of ‘excellents,’ but all you’d focus on was the one ‘average’ mark.”
“I just wanted you to be the best that you could be.”
“What you wanted,” Corbin said slowly, “was for me to improve upon all the mistakes that you had made yourself. You didn’t want me to be my own person. You wanted me to be a better version of you.”
“I thought—”
“I was a kid! Kids make mistakes! And it didn’t stop when I grew up, either, you never once stopped to tell me that you were proud of me or that I’d done all right. I was an experiment to you. You were never satisfied with positive results, you just kept looking for the flaw causing faulty data.”
Marcus was silent for a long time. “I am proud of you, Artis,” he said. “Though I’m sure that’s too little, too late. There’s no way for me to go back and be a better father.” He looked back to Corbin. “There’s one thing, though, that I’m very glad of.”
“What’s that?”
His father gave a sad smile and looked around the sterile prison room. “That it’s me in here and not you.” He sighed. “They told me that you have to reapply for citizenship.”
“Yes. I’m leashed to one of my crewmates for the next standard.”
“You’re lucky,” Marcus said. “Aside from Sita, I never had any friends good enough to do that for me.”
Corbin shifted in his chair. “She’s not a friend,” he said. “She despises me, in fact. Just not enough to let me die in a Quelin prison.”
“Don’t sell yourself short, Artis. Even unpleasant bastards like us deserve company.” He smirked. “That’s a quote from my wife, by the way.”
Corbin exhaled something like a laugh. “I’d have liked to have met her,” he said. Something occurred to him. “Though if she had lived, I wouldn’t exist.”
“No,” said Marcus. “But I’m glad that you do.”
Really? Would you have traded her for me, if you’d known? “How long is your sentence?”
“Twelve standards,” Marcus said. “I’ll be an old man once I get out. But I’ll be fine. I’ve been treated well here so far. And I’ve got a cell all to myself. I can finally catch up on my reading.”
Corbin noticed a spot of dried algae gunk on his desk. It was a good thing to focus on. “One more thing,” he said, scratching the gunk away.
“Yes?”
“My birthday. Is my birthday my real birthday? Or my pulled-from-vat day, I suppose?”
“Yes. Why?”
“I don’t know. It’s been bothering me.” He looked around his lab. “I have to get back to work now.”