You are Neil Oliver, assistant laboratory technician working for the Leeds Teaching Hospital Trust. It is a mundane job. From 9 to 5 you prepare human tissue samples into slides to be studied under a microscope by your superiors. It is a three-step process, four if you're generous. First the tissue sample is frozen in liquid nitrogen before being placed within a microtome, whereupon you press the button to make the machine slice it into thin wafers. These are then carefully laid out onto a glass slide. The slide is then placed underneath a resinator machine. The big lever on the side of the resinator is pulled, releasing a squirt of golden ambrite gel onto the slide with a blorp. The ambrite solidifies around the tissue sample in seconds, preserves it perfectly and indefinitely.
You do this 100-150 times a day. You're not sure what is worse - that you spent four years and £25,000 studying at University for this monkey work, or that in two months the entire process is being automated, rendering you obsolete and out of a job.
On this particular day, you approach the resinator and pull the lever, only instead the customary blorp there is a wheezing blu-pl-plu-pluh and a brief splutter of ambrite.You give the machine a good kicking, then go knock on the supervisor's door. "Cath. The machine's out of goop."
Catherine shrugs. "You know where it's stored. Go get a new batch."
"Any chance I can get a little help?"
"Brian's on his break. Amy, Steph and myself... well we're hardly in any shape to be doing heavy lifting," she smiles serenely, stroking her pregnant belly.
"But those things are heavy!"
She tuts. "You're a big strong man; I'm sure you can deal with it."
The ambrite is kept stored in the hospital basement. You slip out of the lab and head to the lift. Outside of the histopathology labs, the hospital resembles warzone. One floor down, you are forced to vacate the lift for a screaming woman on a stretcher in the middle of labour, a child already poking out from between her legs. Forced to take the stairwell, you step carefully around the pregnant women that fill the hospital corridors. The beds are all full. The hospital had to start turning people away weeks ago - 'women and children first' and all that. This isn't even the worst of it. You're not scheduled to reach peak baby for another three weeks, at which point this baby boom becomes a baby big bang.
The parthenogenesis pill, otherwise known as the morning before pill, costs £19.99 and is available over-the-counter at your local pharmacy. It was released 35 weeks and 2 days ago to the general public and can be taken by any woman. Two days after swallowing the pill, the woman becomes pregnant. Nine months later, give or take a few weeks, she gives birth to a healthy baby girl, a child born not of a man and a woman but of the mother alone, a perfect clone. Boy, did it prove popular. The pills flew off the shelves. Now it seems like half the world is giving birth to their own clones all at once.
You wonder if Kate is here somewhere. It has been 35 weeks and 1 day since she dumped you, following an abortion and a trip to the local pharmacy. It makes you sick to think there will soon be two of her in the world.
The stairwell leading down are dangerously and disgustingly slick with amniotic fluid, but eventually you leave the joyous sights, sounds, and stenches of birth behind you as you arrive in the lower basement. It is dark and cavernous, filled with old medical equipment, oxygen canisters and the barrels of ambrite stored on high shelves that line the walls. NHS Health and Safety guidelines dictate that the barrel be lifted only with thick cumbersome gloves, while wearing safety goggles that omit 90% of your vision, and only upon the successfully completion of the entire series of Lifting and Handing seminars and the attainment of an NVQ level 3 in Barrel Management. Donning the protective gear, you clamber onto the rickety step ladder provided, grip the barrel and pull.
The barrel slips from your mitted fingers. You lunge to grab it but unbalance yourself and fall from the ladder, landing hard on the concrete floor, the barrel smacking into the ground next to you and splitting open, divulging a torrent of treacle-like golden ambrite which rolls over you.
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