Greta holds a positive pregnancy test in her trembling hand.
She tries out a rocking recliner at a furniture store with Milo, rubbing the sore back that supports her six-month-pregnant stomach.
She bends over a newborn in a hospital room bassinet, the baby’s face puffy and flushed above a lilac swaddle.
As she nurses her daughter in the recliner, lit only by watery moonlight, she rubs her tired, hollow eyes against her shoulder.
At a campsite beside a lake, Greta runs out from the tent to watch Milo, ecstatic, steadying their daughter through one wobbly step.
She zips a Stegosaurus Halloween costume up the seven-year-old girl’s back, then claps as the child jumps up and down in glee.
She shows her daughter how to center a rough-molded pot on a wheel, then gives in and plays with the clay with her, both laughing and squishing the mud between their fingers.
She yells and yanks her daughter back from the car’s touchscreen before she can mess with the navbar, sighs as the girl erupts in furious tears.
She reads a temperature of 102 on her thirteen-year-old daughter’s smartwatch and presses a hand to her forehead.
She hugs her seventeen-year-old tightly, as tall now as Greta, on the portico outside a dormitory…
Greta stops the playback of the simulation on her computer. The highlight scenes are the same as ever, but something new in the corner of the slim pane of glass catches her. The margin of error on “Child1—Most Likely Outcome” has risen from 6 percent to 8 percent. Her heart quickens as her eyes clock the number, and she feels the gentle warning buzz of the device on her wrist before she senses her heartbeat. She swirls her green tea in its clay mug, letting the grassy aroma soothe her and even her pulse. She’s learned to take somatically corrective gestures according to her system’s prompts; she doesn’t have to think about it anymore. Her program is set to the In Good Hands setting, the maximum level of guidance and control. Greta and the system work in concert. She doesn’t even consciously register that it fractionally lowers the lamplight in her office and increases the red quotient and lowers the cyan, wrapping her in a soft sunset pink.
She clicks on the margin of error, and a pop-up opens. We recalculated the certainty of this projected outcome to account for changes in your age and menstrual cycle that impact your fertility index. But don’t worry! We still predict this as your most likely course of events.
